It’s August in Manhattan when we both decide to leave. You accept a job in LA and my boyfriend packs my life in a U-Haul and drives it to our new apartment together in Pittsburgh. 

When I toss

The funeral home gave me a special calendar to keep track of the Yahrzeit until 2034, but after that I will be on my own.

It is a miraculous thing, this audible sun.

Something about a synaptic neurotransmitter. You won’t really understand. 

But to write We thought is a fiction.
We always felt that…the moment you write this phrase, you have lied.

Our hypothetical date tomorrow is at a show for the band Tennis. I have never heard of them, but I trust him. I say I will work my magic to get us in.

The Barrington, CT Boston Market offers the creamy richness of all Boston Market feeding centers.

It was then that they strode past me. Mid-thought, my attention snagged on the powerful wisp of her. She wore a spandex outfit—itty bitty sports bra and bicycle shorts, her lean legs sprouting from chunky Filas.

Cam asks when I am going to change my pants just to prove to his pierced girlfriend that he doesn't like me all that much. I tell him I wash them daily, but he says that doesn’t mean it’s not weird.

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.

LaJoie dropped to their knees and shouted out the phrase "Oh dear god!"

He works out of that clinic on the corner of Sydney Road, opposite the 7-Eleven. After I visit him I often walk up the road and get an okay bánh mì from the closest vietnamese bakery.

Like Richie’s “Hello,” Adele’s “Hello” is also an ode to longing.

Under the pretense of repairing things, I go to prove I am not broken.

I will never read this essay out loud, so let me take some risks:

Almond, salmon, Episcopal, peony, Adidas, melancholy, mischievous.

In my head: Owl-mund, sal-MON, epic-SKO-poll.

I add force

Still though, that’s fucked up.

I agree, I say. It is fucked up.

I stand in front of this body-length mirror. The compression vest is gone, the drains are removed, and all the cushioning gauze has been peeled away; I’ve watched video after video of other

I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.

The last time I dream of him, my dead ex-boyfriend asks me to stop bringing him back.

Usually, when I dreamt him alive, he didn’t speak. I’d sit next to him while he sorted mail. I’d watch him turn

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

Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?

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?