I’m trying to lose my ego before Coachella.

And sure, not all moths were so blindly abiding, but that these grand ideas remained a possibility was often enough to console or comfort the moth. You see, the moth, culturally, was keenly aware of toxic attachments—meaning, they were rigidly open to all possibilities in an effort not to favor one delusion over another.

These words did not sound like her own. She’d either discussed with a friend her dilemma or searched words like “emotional betrayal husband,” or “texting another woman limitation,” or “phone cheating no sex no pictures” or both. It was both. I could sense her attempt at complete preparedness in the quality of her attention.

Sure, he’d miss chewing certain types of wood, the smell of garbage disposal, the indescribable pleasure of being shaded by a tree or large shrub. He could wait until spring, he supposed, to die among the scent of lilacs, one last taste of sweet pansy, a final sting of bee balm.

I didn’t hurt him, except maybe his feelings.

Coolness is an anchor, a fortress, a cold and remote puritanism.

I did purchase, last month, after receiving Gwyneth’s “Morning Routine” email, a whole line of Goop shit, which I can now say—because we can only say things in hindsight, right?—dried the shit out of my skin, so bad, frankly, that I’m happy, today, to be a close contact to a Covid case so I don’t have to leave the house and can just sit here asphyxiating in Aquaphor, occasionally parading around in my blue robe, DRIVEN TO MAKE ART(!!!)

Each day it paints the clearest possible picture of the gulch you’ve driven your life into.

Occasionally, now, you bring me a drill bit...

His second lover calls him Elias in a short story that approaches the erotic. They take too much molly in his Upper East Side apartment, but instead of euphoric sex with such a surplus of love their dicks stay semihard, they don leather jackets and wrestle on the bathroom tiles.

He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.

The weather is hot.  The air conditioning is broken.  Everyone’s body is aching.  “You’re old enough to know.”  Our parents, he says, agree: it is time for us to understand openings, to recognize that we are not pinatas.  We are not stuffed with sugary candies in tight plastic wrappers.  Streamers and noisemakers will not burst forth from our chests.  We should not go at one another with baseball bats.  Openings are not occasions for blindfolds.

The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.

You asked if I wanted to send you the latest version of my story as a Google doc so you could add comments. You offered to send me one of your stories in  return.

And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.

As a kid, you don’t really know how swings work. You just move your legs and you get higher and higher. You find out later, regarding the swing, it’s because you are using your momentum through gravity, generating centripetal force to be exact, which creates a back and forth motion. But, for now, on that playground, your sister is swinging next to you and she laughs and yells, Higher! Higher!

The plump pastor looks down at you and smiles. You are dead. You lay in your cream-colored casket, on a bed of scarlet silks and smile back, all satisfied like.

The Wilds named their only child Steak, not because they had any ties to the meat industry, but because they were cranks with no semblance of empathy in their hearts. 

I am trying to teach my brother Micah to write poetry.

So we bought a hearse.

She kicks him in the stomach and then runs at him, screaming, shoving him into a bookcase.

I get so bored sometimes that I think about getting sober. It never lasts that long; inevitably Charlie comes back again and I find myself with a cold nose and shaking hands just one more time. I

Snow is falling in Manhattan.

When I entered the shop, the cashier looked at me like someone holding a toilet seat.

The aliens were everywhere that summer.