And now I am left wondering how The End of the Story might have been different, what more we might have found out, had ‘Vincent’ not been a presence in that flowered armchair, had Lydia not been conscious of him invoking rules: there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes.

I am mauled by the gladness of it all.

Your Uber arrives and now you remember you’re not wearing any underwear.

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.

“Girls like porn too,” she said. “Don’t be sexist.”

I go into parties wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt that says Bonjour on the front and Au
Revoir on the back, eating candy cigarettes.

That comment got 55 upvotes. I downvoted it. I don’t have friends anymore

I found a wallet today that contained $200, some credit cards, and some family pictures—my family now.

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.

I tell her this is all I’m getting, because this is all I deserve.

Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.

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

all these changes in my life were made without my consent

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

Normalcy has no moment to collapse because it is absent from the start.

Blood dots my eyelids as the

pewter waves drag you under.

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

We only know how to give
ourselves to each other when
we're anyone other than ourselves

I stopped taking the Wellbutrin cold turkey during the 2020 lockdown... All was well until one day when an ex that I had a tumultuous history with demanded I undo the hex I placed on his dick. The accusation sent me spiraling.

My manhood could now hinge on giving her rides.

Your wrist veins distinct next to your wedding band.

I was in an S &M relationship with myself.

It isn't until you pass under a lamp post or are mercifully illuminated by the brakelights of a car that you spring back to life.

This place looks haunted as shit.