I tore the skin on my knees. Not enough to gush, but enough to flood to the surface, and I scraped my hands too. How do we learn to catch ourselves when we fall? Why do our hands automatically outstretch, bear our weight, stop our motion? Why do we want to fly? Falling is the…
He wasn’t a reader, but he promised to read my favorite book, knowing how desperately I wanted him to love words the way I do. He started reading in June. Two months later I boarded the plane to New York with a memory on replay: running to his car in the rain the night before, only to hear…
When your ex-boyfriend gets a new house, a new car, and a new phone, you’ll find yourself trying to count the things that haven’t changed—his incredible memory, his playfulness, his eyebrow raise, his gentle hands, and his voice—and end up holding out one hand and one fist. When he shuffles you out the door before 11…
Wedding photographers have a way of emphasizing hands: the left ring finger, the fist around the bouquet, the gentle clutch of two people who’ve promised to never let go. “Let go!” He shouted, and his entire team released their white-knuckled grips on the spiky rope. The other kids grunted and toppled to the ground, and…
When I tell her, “Friend, I can’t call you that anymore. You’re toxic and I’m drowning in open water,” I imagine her toes disappearing into her fuzzy bath mat, her fingers curled around a razor, cursing how they’re both disposable. I imagine her blood sticking to her forearms, a welcoming sign of life, a guarantee…
You’re toxic, I’m slipping under. She sent me 21 snippets of paper with one word on each and said, “Here. Make a poem out of these.” The idea excited me, the poet in me, until I finally told her I couldn’t be her friend any longer. A week later I opened the slips and saw the…
I love when a film is tragic and moves everyone in the theater to tears, and then ends abruptly, leaving nothing but the slow scrolling white text of the credits and the sounds of sniffling, soft comforting whispers, and the rustling of jackets. People will linger a few moments longer than necessary, because the theater is heavy with…
And suddenly I was bombarded by a tiny alien they called sister. She came home from the hospital and shook my expectations from their pedestal of joy down down down to the disillusionment of sisterhood. Her eyes sparkled in the sunshine, as they say, but I shielded my own, longing to escape back into a…
I grip my sudsy scalp, trying to wash out every whisper of his skin, his breath, his convincing words and broken promises. This isn’t the usual small circles, a gentle lather. It’s jolted and furious and directionless, how I felt when I first found myself falling in love with him. I told him no and…
I only have five rules. The rule of thumb: I refuse to be diminished, destroyed, or derailed by men. The rule of forefinger: I am my own number one. The rule of middle finger: fuck apologizing for things I’m not sorry for. The rule of ring finger: I am more than the ring that may…
Victim to Charm 