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.

This sense judders through you when you collide with the snowplow truck.

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.

On our third date, we went shopping for funeral outfits.

The following text was stripped, edited, and reassembled from the thousands of comments on a potentially illegal YouTube upload of ‘Song on the Beach’ from the movie Her in an attempt to render the

The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.

When you run out of tiles, start counting the specks on the ceiling; form constellations out of them because you’d rather be looking at the night sky anyway.

I                vomit till I’m              hollow.

I tell my mother I don’t know why his death cracked me open. She says the small parts of your life seem bigger when they’re gone.

Freddie had a bomber jacket for almost every day of the week. William wore one too. Kenyatta had one, but he only wore his when it was cold. I don’t remember Xavier having one; in fact, I’m pretty sure he wore the same gray sweatpants all year.

“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. 

She’ll be 92 this year and her memory’s shot; she called me three times this year to wish me a happy birthday and didn’t even get the month right. She hasn’t forgotten her car, though.

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?

When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.

I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.

The only reason I’ve seen Space Jam: A New Legacy so much recently is because I wanted to avoid talking to my wife.

A ferry will capsize with 476 people on board.

Spring was months away; I could pretend peril didn’t exist.

“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.

I didn’t want the water badly enough to die for it.