I didn’t want to write this essay, but I know somebody will publish it and feel good about themselves for platforming a disabled voice.

Shit, is this what the Zoom room people mean when they say fantasy addict?

I am just a village idiot.

“You’re dirty,” you said to me, “I don’t kiss you because I think about how many dicks must’ve been in your mouth."

I was sobbing too loud for the men’s room and I was in no shape to explain myself so I settled on the supply closet next to it. After a couple minutes of moping I got a BBM (we had to have Blackberries then, for whatever reason) from Jarrett. “Were fuck are you bro?”

To begin abruptly: I’ve been some degree of suicidal since I was fourteen. I don’t think this makes me special. In fact, I think I’d be more of an individual if I’d always wanted to live.

A year wrapped in a day, a teardrop at the climax of every way that wounded, furthering the wounds.

That was the world then…

That was the world then….bawdy cars and tawdry thoughts and rundown wannabe skyscrapers brownie baked by the sun that just looked cheap against the horizon and everybody

The day I stopped being a woman was a hard-boiled egg kind of day. 

I hold myself in the plank position. The little dog sits on the rug watching. It’s a very expensive rug. She’s not supposed to be here. He’s up on the purple couch and I do not know what he is

I was zipped up to my nose in a sleeping bag, inhaling moist breath mingled with olfactory ghosts of campfires and wild sex past.

We paid the cover charge and stood among the young homosexuals of Columbus.

Becca, Ernie’s wife, estranged wife most of the novel until finally she is his ex-wife at the end, based on the author’s, based on Aaron’s, ex-wife, Elizabeth Ellen, who is, oddly, metally, writing these words, typing them into a Word doc at nine in the morning

I wake up glad to not be strung out.

I wonder how my drug dealers are doing.

-Editor at a literary journal attempting to be good, moral ppl (see: 1990s Christian Right)

I never wanted to run this ship. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time writing.

Now I bake bread to stay busy, to not think about dying.

He tells me he bought an ex girlfriend a $500 original copy of The Bell Jar. I say oh wow.

Hello,

the worst thing about stopping Ambien was that I never did it with anybody else.

I did it alone in my bathtub.

I did it alone, smoking in the water, & when it kicked in I’d let the

As soon as I looked into the faces of my fellow classmates, I realized that we all arrived here by the same road. The most enthusiastic people had their cameras turned off.

1.

Remember when you would sit on the floor of my lavender painted room when I was 15 and you were 21? You’d twirl a dreadlock around your finger looking up at the wall of Teen People Magazine

The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...

a monstera I brought as a housewarming gift; bookcases betraying a brilliant, associative mind—the LOTR trilogy, a chess board, tomes on capitalism and ecology, The Power Broker, an anthology of gay poetry, more Caro books on LBJ, a poetry book I’d gifted atop the dusty shelves

It’s 2018 and my husband and I are on the couch, watching what will end up being the longest World Series game in history— 18 innings, seven hours and twenty minutes. The Los Angeles Dodgers are

Maybe it won’t work for you. Maybe you are too smart, or too cemented in your physicality. Or you’ve run your brain through more powerful substances than I have. But if you want to try to leave your