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You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.

Aileen Weintraub is one of those incredibly funny writers who also has that superpower to make you cry against your will. You may have read her pieces about pregnancy, motherhood, aging, and more –

mom says I smell like smoke
I say she smells someone else

On the first day of my streaming career, I asked Gabe to come over to adjust the lighting design of my “set.”

In the summer of 2017, my wife and I drove from Philadelphia to New York City for a weekend family reunion. She was seven months’ pregnant with our first child—in the third trimester but still far

In the middle of
the street is everyone
you know.

Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.

through the years when what I needed most 
was to hold my father’s hand.

She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to

I often sign handwritten letters with the infinity sign and the words “Stay Positive” like lead singer Craig Finn does. I’ve used “Constructive Summer” as a mantra for years. My husband and I often

I hadn’t notified Interview magazine abt it
I hadn’t tweeted abt it either
I wasn’t post alt lit
Or a genius

When you died in March, five months before I bought my first plant, I learned what sobbing is.

All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost. 

She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it, starts to laugh. ‘I guess we're both freaks.’

I.

In third grade, we spend every lunch writing comic books together. We invent a cinematic universe of imagined worlds to rival Marvel's. I've known her since I was six, and I've known my sister

The United States government has an official pen. A pen whose standards were outlined in a 16-page document from 1965. 

Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil

Now, I have a death machine.

My six-year-old son stretches his arms to their limit as he describes his latest nightmare.

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
 

Charming shyness paired with a love of dancing the Charleston in heels in the street past midnight. I kissed her bloodied knees.

There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit

Mom calls at nine, eleven her time.
She can't sleep, asks me to tell her a story

Hi, me again