Do I break up with my Venezuelan surfer and move back to Alaska? I debated. Or bring him to the U.S. and marry him?

he flashed a toothless grin, all James Dean California Cool, a tan blonde blue-eyed surfer type. I imagined him as the boys Lana sang about.

Sex would remain forever yoked to this school shooting, grief combined with an uncanny moment of clarity: life won’t be the same after this, regardless.

At night, we lay on unmoored mattresses, pressing hands over our eyes to block out spears of light from the street. We cursed our naked windows.

In the anatomy lab, we are peeing into cups to check for any abnormalities within the urine

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

S and I were together nearly a year before the band really got back on the road. Their six-week tour started in Minneapolis.

I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.

> One of my favorite reading experiences was a book called "The Silent
> Woman" by the journalist Janet Malcolm; it was about the biographical
> treatments of Sylvia Plath and the impossibility of biography in general.

The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.

As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.

I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.

1. There is a protective radius of ten feet on all sides of me.
2. I only know the name of one person in this room.
3. My body hair was groomed solely for this moment.

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

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.

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

At three months shy of 36—one year past my baby deadline—I was nowhere near finding someone lasting

Dear Jane,

The TikTok girls are mad at you.

The first time I went to Paris, I was seventeen and stayed with a man who was thirty-three, Sylvain.

It sat in my wallet while I made out with a guy during the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie

Before Hannah can protest, I get out of bed, put on gray and pink checkered pants and a black top. Having romantic feelings for a woman is new territory; her laugh is all I can think about.

When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.

“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. 

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.

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