If I was a dog, I wouldn't be responsible for my own life.

I see them right there plain as day, two-dimensional prints, sacred geometry, my life is full of meaning.

I was convinced I would die. A lone cig, maybe three gin spritzes, benzodiazepining into extinction. Ativan.

It is only for an hour or two that I get to panic about pregnancy before the blood starts.

At Bryn Mawr I was taught never to use CAPS / I dawn my lips / and paint my toes / red as a manifestos

I like crazy. I like the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, the deranged Humbert Humbert, the murderous Raskolnikov, the obsessed Heathcliff, the serial killers Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley, the psychopath

I wake up the next morning with the sensation that my lips weigh ten pounds and are about to drop off my face. I’m too scared to look in the mirror,

Before the internet had all the answers,
before Siri, before Alexa,
before TikTok teens with ring lights
explained the universe in under thirty seconds—
I had my dad.

Dad was my Wikipedia.
Dad

In those days, it was popular to ask, What would Jesus do? I crucified myself for days.

One time years ago, a friend threw herself a birthday party and bought her own birthday cake, which I found surprising. She said, of course I bought my own cake. Who else was going to do it? I think it’s the same with book promotion. You have to buy your own cake, and make an event of it.

I mean,
it’s only love.

My dad described heaven as a sports bar.

It was the summer of 2018, and I had just returned home to California from Italy, where my relationship exploded after we had lived together for only four months.

Perhaps this is why trans people crave romantic love with a curdling, obscure undercurrent of self-doubt, of rage.

“Are you being held against your will?”

“I think so? There’s kind of an implication.”

“An implication?”

Please dont forget to play. Can you remember 
the last time you danced?

Wind in the ears like / Water ungathering / In and out of baskets.

When his heart is an ashtray—cigarette butts put out on a surface that will not flinch

why does it feel so much harder to see something happen to someone else than have it happen to you?

What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational? 
Maybe Joan Didion, the super thin wrists, the iconic image on a tote bag. I just want to keep on writing books.