eventually

Mr. Shafroth, my year eight history teacher, stands in the kitchen of his campus house with my field hockey coach. “Are you kidding me?” she shouts. He is lucky she doesn’t have her stick. “What could you possibly be thinking? Bringing her here?” I sit quietly in the spare room, on a mattress platformed by […]

the turn-around

On Thursday, one in a long string of my exes rang me up. He was in a bit of a state, wretchedly hung-over and piecing together some uncomfortable flashbacks of a failed threesome the night prior. Whoops. Did I just say that? “You won’t say anything to anyone?” he asked. “Who would I tell? Your […]

how to write a happy ending

[a follow-up to the previous post, with the legs, i hope, to stand on its own] Utter darkness. And a foreboding awareness. I stand and wait for his approach. I can sense his movements as if he were a twin I never had. And when he is in range, I thrust an invisible knee at […]

thirteen and the ways to know me

because. because. because. because the momentum was there. and so was the alcohol. and so was the sense of complete despair and the conviction that nothing made a wrench of a difference, anyway. i don’t remember those days much anymore. but when we first started hanging out again, it all came stampeding back to me […]

garboyle

It turns out that he is, authentically, a large man. This is validating, because for a while there I thought it was just my imagination that made him so. But no, he really is. I found this out because I gave him a shirt in size L and he said, “It won’t fit.” And I […]

dead bird

“I just need to be doing my own thing. I’m claustrophobic here,” is what he said, before he left. And I stood there with a beautiful baby on my hip and nodded and when he came back for his last bag he held my face between his hands and kissed me full on the mouth, […]

the debutante

One of my earliest memories is of being carted back to Kmart in a borrowed Cadillac and being hoisted up on the counter so that I could confess to the manager that I shoplifted a Bonne Bell Lip Smacker, in cotton candy flavor. Mum encourages me to wear a wonderful slip-lined tulle dress for the […]

electric blue running shoes

Seemingly out of nowhere, Electric Blue Running Shoes texts me, Hey do you remember kissing me what it was like?    It is tempting to text back, How about you refresh  my memory? But that would be a bad idea. Also a cliché. So instead I ignore him. For about two hours. (Electric Blue is not […]