At first, Grandpa thought a hawk had dropped a rabbit on Dad's head.

The drive to Connecticut was easy. There were hardly any other cars on the road. It was foggy and grey and the highway seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of me. The governor had warned against

Tell me the child remembers her mother.

I am always wearing one of Freddy’s shirts. They are worn in perfectly and covered with jazz players on the front or artists that older people always recognize—artists I don’t really know anything about.

i keep love around like a shirt i hope i’ll fit into again someday

“If you want, we can try to unlock the phone using your dad’s thumb.”

"Do it," I heard myself say.

I ignored it when he admitted he had cheated on all of his girlfriends, and I ignored it when he became quickly angry over something small. I ignored the red flags

Mostly we ordered in pizza and put on slow music that looped and stayed on your rug until our pleasures panged together.

and partly because she went to Yale and married the class president and blasts the socials with pics of their exotic vacations and announcements of their children’s accomplishments

This is what I was waiting for. I all but cry, but I don’t.

My sister once said that I was uninteresting because I lacked an original wound.

I should have asked John why he was so unhappy. I should have done more than write that stupid note that was all about me and nothing about him.

"The letters shake me up because they are written by regular, everyday teenage girls from across the nation," he said.

I pushed open the door and he was the only guy inside, about to unzip at the far urinal.

I had come out just a year or two prior, and anal sex was new. Nobody taught me anything.

I taste cigarette in her mouth.

When we met, I was dazzled by how easily she surrendered to her desire. She’d wake up late and order breakfast from the store down the street, roll in late to work and not think twice.

We had a shared Google Doc titled ‘Ground rules for this relationship’.

my first hospitalization was at 13 after swallowing a bottle of Tylenol.

8: Perhaps we’ve misheard. Perhaps our facility with language will lead to our downfall. Perhaps the public lauding of our own personas is parasitic and causes continuous displacement.

The idea that mental illness can be effectively managed with drugs is a relatively new one

[The names of certain parties have been changed. Other names were never known and are now lost in time.]

I get maudlin and nostalgic over the Christmas holidays, mostly for a past version of

It was day three of the Democratic National Convention and day 19 of my short tenure as a Chicago resident. I had the day off work, and nothing to do but get on my Hunter S. Thompson shit and poke my nose around the old DNC to do some gonzo journalism.

When I told one of my professors that in my lunch hour, I’d met with a writer named Elizabeth Wurtzel, the old man rolled his eyes:

“That book was such garbage. She tried to write a second book, and a third, but they flopped.”

Imagine what happens inside gated communities behind closed doors, even in homes owned by a retired cop and special education teacher! I had nothing but my body and when I used it, I was called a devious animal.