I checked the rest of the house, but everyone was asleep. I had a brief moment of nothingness, of emptiness, and then terror bloomed.

The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.

“Maybe your ears are broken,” my husband mused to me one night at dinner.

I was wearing headphones, eyes trained to study my plate, the sight of chewing as triggering as the audible noises. 

They liked to brag. Who had the highest dose of anti-psychotic medication? Who had gone the furthest off the rails during a manic episode? And they loved to boast about their suicide attempts. Whose was the most gruesome?

When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.

I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.

The only reason I’ve seen Space Jam: A New Legacy so much recently is because I wanted to avoid talking to my wife.

A ferry will capsize with 476 people on board.

Spring was months away; I could pretend peril didn’t exist.

“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.

Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?

n the car, on the way to the hospital, I put my head in my lap and my hands over my ears, willing the city to disappear.

Marriage is often thought of as having little to do with eroticism.1

I met my husband while bartending in Oakland. He applied to be the new chef. Tattooed knuckles. Chubby cheeks. Full beard.

That summer held the moment, in real time and in my memory for several years, of something he said that I didn’t hear.

The mushrooms I bought yesterday are moldy; the lines around my mouth have deepened. Tomorrow I am a mother for the first time.

In his hospital room, he handed over his phone and I called his family.

We’ve sat in pot smoke-filled basements, watching boys play video games, and I’ve sipped wine with my parents on special occasions, but neither of us have been to an actual party before.

We long to see the world from her point of view, the worker. But do not ever long to be the worker.

My mother had been on a rampage to find me a husband since I started college.

I’m good at getting fucked up. I’m good at having fun. Go go go. I’m best at forgetting.

If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost. 

Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.

The whole first week after moving into his Brooklyn apartment – our apartment he keeps correcting me – I’m horribly constipated.

I’ll dig a pit where it can roam, feed off the aporia of my lust, wash its hooves in semen, soak in pools of piss.

Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.