Daily Prompt: Are you seeking security or adventure? I thought I was seeking security. Like any sensible person drowning in uncertainty, I chased the traditional markers: a home and money.As Gibran might say, I was building my house of tomorrow upon yesterday’s sorrow, except I was using bricks made of anxiety and mortar mixed with…
Category: phaedrasfables.com
Chapter 9: The Smorfia of Truth
I found Ciro at dawn, sitting by the Fontana delle Zizze with his sketchbook, drawing the same Siren over and over as if trying to capture something that kept escaping. “I’m sorry,” I said, settling beside him on the stone steps. “For what? Being right?” “For being cruel about it.” He closed the sketchbook and…
“The Mathematics of Belonging (and One Stubborn Dachshund)”
It was the summer of 1984, hot, rainy, and thick with the scent of possibility and wet socks. Recently, the opposite sex had discovered me as the season’s unlikely hit. From misfit to Miss Fabulous, a transformation so abrupt it could have been orchestrated by Kafka or a particularly Shakespearian guardian angel. I found myself…
“The Geography of Grief”
Once, wherever I laid my head was my home. This October marks twenty years since I moved into this house. Twenty years of watching seasons change through the same windows, of learning neighbours’ names and stories, of putting down roots in what I thought would simply be my address for a short period. What I…
Capital Sins & Justice
“A Mediterranean Meditation” Dear Dante, If you ever get the urge to update your Inferno for the streaming age, let me offer you some field notes from the Mediterranean’s less-than-divine comedy. I write as a lifelong outsider, although related through my children, still Dutch, and a perennial observer of the curious ways people cling to,…
A Toast for the Unapologetically Strong
“Owning My Choices: The Cost of Giving Roots—And the Art of Moving On” Today, my daughter is out on a boat, surrounded by friends who will never see the raw edges of her soul, captained by a father who has always been more concerned with appearances than connection. He’s the type who’ll invite me to…
“Royalty & Trumpeteers”
No Crowns, No Kings, Just New Disguises for the Old Game Dear Dante, You know how people born into royalty love to drone on about their “noble bloodlines” and “ancient heritage”? What a load of rubbish. Their ancestors were the biggest thugs in the neighbourhood—the ones who figured out that if you’re mean enough and…
“Saints & Syndicates”
Green Knights, Shady Cows, and the Comedy of Modern Virtue Dear Dante, It was something I read this morning that set this whole train of thought in motion. You’d appreciate this, I think: I was catching up on the news—no, not from a town crier or gossip in the piazza, but from that digital oracle…
“True Villainy: On Disgust, Betrayal & Display”
From parchment to pixel. Dear Dante, Forgive my prolonged silence—four years consumed by the theatre of survival, deadlines, and the daily farce we call progress. I return to you, not with a confession, but with a restless mind freshly agitated by an experience you would find both foreign and, I suspect, oddly familiar. Last night,…
“Stepping of Stage; Changing Venue”
The beauty of being both the researcher and the subject – doing the kind of participant observation that only comes from living the question. Life, for many of us, unfolds as a kind of theatre. We step onto the stage as children, inheriting roles from our families, our cultures, and the silent expectations that drift…
The C.O.M.C. Files 