MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002

I have a question for you. How did you bear it? That creeping loneliness, the way it whispers in the darkness. Sometimes, lying there at night after my own domestic and industrious day, I wonder how much longer I can bear it. Do you know what I mean?

I lie into the stone wall above the spa and flip open my copy of Less Than Zero to the corner I folded on 69. A passage on Christmas in Palm Springs.

I get in bed, move my mouth over her nipple.

“Do you mind if I moan?” she says.

The cooks told me jokes with no punchline and sang popular Chinese songs while I chucked grasshoppers in the garbage.

In terms of a break-up, gonorrhea is a god-send.

I wanted you to count on me—if not as a lover, then at least as an object for your using.

Sometimes he’ll cum on my face, and I’ll have to hear about it in one of his poems.

Picture me, splayed on the bed on top of Liz. I’m wearing a pink thong, she’s still in her jeans. She spanks me; I deserve it. She spanks me again. My breath flees my lungs, a flock of geese taking

He was only Jack. Never daddy.

We found ourselves in Kohl’s a few months later. I was home for the holidays, and Mom and I were standing in the women’s department, staring at shelves of bargain business casual.

your uncle has a whiteboard on his wall and on it it says TO DO: TELL TERRY YOU LOVE HER. he wrote that you don’t know how many years ago. terry was his girlfriend but she’s dead now

I swore off intimacy for a long time and tried to replicate the feeling with a heating pad, a body pillow, and a vibrator but ended up most nights just crying in bed with a bottle of vodka.

I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head.

The seductress in my head smiled and said “What else am I not allowed to talk about, Avery?”

But we were just going to be friends.

When reciting the Ten Plagues in Hebrew, we customarily dip our knives into our wine glass for each plague and set a drop of wine on our dinner plate.

Showboat said he'd like to take me out sometime. I asked why.

“Because I think you’re attractive, and so we can hang out somewhere other than the coffee trailer,” he said.

It was October, ten

One morning on McSweeney’s there was an announcement about a new literary festival in Philadelphia organized by Neal Pollack. It was going to be called the 215 Festival (named after the city’s area code) and would feature readings by Dave and Zadie and Matthew Klam and Neal, as well as other young, McSweeney’s type writers.

Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets 
amongst ourselves?

I stand just a couple inches from the mirror in my grandma’s guest bathroom at her house in New Mexico, my breath fogging up the glass. As I brush my teeth, I give myself the once over and tug at the

For, indeed, posole shows you he can cook. He fancies an air of the quixotic.

He must be a feminist.

This isn’t the first time someone I considered a friend has confessed their love for me.

I am supposed to call myself a survivor, but honestly I don’t think surviving is what I’ve been doing.

Okay guys today I'm going to be making you one of my favorite dishes from childhood with a couple of my own little twists. My mom used to make this all the time and I just love it. It's suuuper

While I sucked my husband’s penis he gaped at the sky, to which he exclaimed, “That’s the most orange orange I have ever seen!”