Marissa Leigh Ericson

The sun set on the day and she watched the wind move the leaves past her nose. She closed her eyes, trying to feel what it would be like to believe.
What an interesting measure of courage it could be, to only be accountable to oneself. She had thought about that assertion for months, while she slept, while she pretended to pray to appease her mother, and everywhere in between.
But, her veteran man persisted, the space coyote sat proudly on her pillow, and she knew she was crazy. Her particular reality was consumed by madness. Her particular combination of nature and nurture had apparently led her to doubt a G-d, to doubt whether there was goodness within the human heart, to doubt the meaning of words, and to doubt the legitimacy of consciousness itself.
Her particular amalgamation led her to realize that hope and denial were one and the same.
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In 2004 I graduated from Cornell University in BioPsychology and Italian Lit and am currently a doctoral candidate at the Univ of Southern California in the Clinical Neuroscience PhD program.