In winter, a year and a half ago, a patrol car escorted me to a shelter. I had just begun processing the dissolution of a ten-year relationship when I found myself unhoused. After my first night in the shelter, I woke to a text from my ex-girlfriend: you’ll thank me one day.

“Björk.”

“That explains it.”

I hadn’t written a line of prose in years. I was a corporate machine running on fumes, yet this girl in a G-string was playing the oracle.

Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder instructs you to maintain boundaries

“We should be making deals,” Chloe said.

“Healthy competition,” I said.

“I don’t have any Twitter followers,” I said

Tara and I were impressed by the Goth subculture Goth Ryan and Tara’s boyfriend took part in not just because of the black strappy clothes, black fingernails, and heavy eye makeup (which we immediately began imitating), but also their directness and openness about feelings of sadness and rottenness. 

One day we were instructed to pair up for a meditation.  Our mats were side by side

The nineteen year olds in the grocery section who tell me I look like Wednesday are yelling into their walkie talkies. 

I didn’t want anyone else’s cynicism rubbing off on me and diminishing the essences’ effects. I knew, I had to believe.

Some spit clogged in my hair and snot dripped down to my mouth.

The official San Francisco LESBIAN GAY BISEXUAL TRANSGENDER PRIDE parade was the social highlight of our year.

Every morning I’d wake up, walk to Target and take a hangover dump in their nice clean bathroom

Dash wore a jean jacket. He’s been wearing the same one for 15 years. The one in his Tinder picture. Dash, 29, one mile away. He sent me a screenshot of that, even though I had gone off online dating.

I give them all a careful look and say things like, “Oooh, this is an extra special egg.”

Rehab was called Willow Springs

Now when I see someone hurting, from the loss of a lover, I never say, “You’ll get over it.”

The sensation of my stomach eating itself into a lovely inward slope sustains me. Keep smiling.

Charlie would never have to be persuaded to eat pussy, I thought to myself as my date’s tongue fumbled with the flaps around my clit.

She had sent me a video of herself in the bath listening to Elvis, and I watched that over and over.

You harness the light like the love of a good horse, your word is law among the stars and the sand, patron saint of all things misunderstood in the daytime.

The gigolos texted me back while my mom and I watched Zootopia 2

Sitting in his gold Toyota listening to old metal. He turned down The Accused to tell me about his diagnosis.

“The Upper East Side. For uncreative rich people who don't know the first thing about being happy,” Mom said, and I believed her.

I met the man who would become my Uncle through an insane-clown-posse-adjacent dishwasher coworker who wanted us to star in his uncomfortably misogynistic Instagram horror movie.

I had just moved

His dismissal to reduce me to my womanhood and paycheck fucked me.