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His letters pull me from the sea like a line from a fishing pole: there’s a wrenching, a pulling back, a removal from the comfortable, from home, from…
Joey Rubin
But the writer is also him, a him he did know, later; when you were 17, heading into the world, leaving for college, he had this writer inside of him…
Joey Rubin
1

January 2023

But it also eats away at a more core belief around who I am, and how this project negates or reaffirms my identity: if I truly were a writer, then I…
Joey Rubin
What matters is, I tucked them away; aware of their power but not of what they were. Honored, confused, horrified, excited.
Joey Rubin
#71. And in writing about this grief – grief for him, and grief for myself as an artist – I renovated my relationship to art.
Joey Rubin

September 2022

And at every juncture, each time I saw a doctor or a specialist or a nurse or a phlebotomist, they’d ask “And the pain?”
Joey Rubin
1

July 2022

“It is forgetfulness that is the fundamental problem, not memory.” — Patrick Modiano
Joey Rubin
2

June 2022

In a way, while the sale was open, while the cello remained unsold, part of my father remained alive. Far from view, over the crest of the horizon, but…
Joey Rubin
1

May 2022

“Hey boychik,” the refined voice on the other side of the world says. “How’s school? How’s soccer? How’s the cello?”
Joey Rubin
1
Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from…
Joey Rubin
1

April 2022

That was the drug, I think. That liminality, that escape, that floating, etherial disconnection — or re-connection. I wonder: how many lives did he live…
Joey Rubin
1
Tears, too, like any precipitation, find their way out of one sea and into another. It all gets washed away.
Joey Rubin
1
© 2023 Joey Rubin
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