My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?

A dispatch from 2016 and now. 

My trip had begun in Seattle, where the past few years had served up one setback after the next. I had been cut loose by my latest not-quite-boyfriend.

Twenty seven notes Gabriel Smith took at Bethnal Bust Up, York Hall, London, March 7th

If boxing is a sport, then it is the most tragic of all sports because more than any human activity it

You don’t see her for several years after that, minus a brief and sweet span of days that following summer, in your usual place. You play Bob Dylan’s Mama, You Been on My Mind squeezed on a piano bench with her.

Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.

The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet

I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.

Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

I’d learned from Rock of Love that a diabetic’s rollercoaster blood sugar is a constant interruptor at best.

In the middle of the night in the second week after Dad’s passing, my phone lights up and it’s twin, it’s sister. 

“Hello?”

“I want to know what happened. Should I come there?”

“No. I don’t

I was the only person in my family this level of depravity happened to.

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

No cheating; you've got to keep your fingers touching my fingers. Good. Remember to keep your hands flat. Flat and steady and ready.

When I broke up with you, I thought you might kill me, and somehow, I was bored.

my mother once told me, grief gives your body the shakes.

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

You will read my restrained but subtly brutal birth story and finally recognize that we who give birth are dauntless soldiers returning to the fight and we are also the old men ignoring the bombs because we have animals at home we love too much to go on and we have never felt more alive than we do right now.

This new doctor smiles as he enters the room, as if we’re sharing a joke though we’ve never met before. “Tell me,” he says, “how many people get your name right on the first try?”

Like if I were at this apartment in 2009 I’d be talking to some guy with scraggly teeth and pockmarked skin and a hoodie but he’d also be like, unconventionally handsome, but you could tell the last time he talked to his mom he said some fucked up shit and probably beat up his siblings growing up, and I’d be thinking ‘this seems like…my only option…’ 

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

Being sleep deprived while in quarantine is like living in this dream I had a few days ago where I died but didn’t lose consciousness and for the rest of the dream I floated over a muddy creek with no ability to interact with the world in any way.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

This boy wants a cat for the idea of a cat. Real responsibility chokes him. This boy wants to embody the writer—navy sweater, gold chinos, salmon boat shoes, honey hair tousled, thick brown glasses,