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.

I’ve been on a lot of dates. I don’t consider myself an expert, but I can tell you how to get asked on a second: be as mysterious as possible, ask as many questions about the person as you can, let

I had been seeing this girl, Shelby, for about a month when I got married. To someone else.

The summer after graduating college sank me into a deep depression. Most of my friends moved out of

I stare into the drive-thru order box, the cars behind me now three deep.

Decision fatigue. That’s what my therapist calls it. Decision fatigue must be what renders me silent in the Taco Bell

“We’re watching Bluey,” I say. “And we’re starving,”

I sit in my flat and stare at my phone and try to weigh up the risks of calling, weigh up my own exhaustion with life

I am always wearing one of Freddy’s shirts. They are worn in perfectly and covered with jazz players on the front or artists that older people always recognize—artists I don’t really know anything about.

Foreshadowing!

I paid that dollar, mostly because I wanted an excuse to talk to him.

I could hear the Essex lads cooing and whispering to her, telling her that it would be okay

The second time I gave him head he couldn’t get hard. He said this never happens.

Not all her parties were sex parties and she didn’t always call me her girlfriend, but we rode that late summer into an Autumn of mostly lesbian orgies. Sabine driving the car, everyone else an

I should have called out, “Marry me,” followed by your name, in that quarter-second of dead air.
Nothing too prosaic, nothing too provocative, just four beats, a stunted swirl of “M”s and “R”s.
My

Chronic illness already made dating hard. And then the pandemic arrived.

“I almost forgot—” my childhood friend interjected as we were wrapping up a phone call on a blustery September day. “I

When reciting the Ten Plagues in Hebrew, we customarily dip our knives into our wine glass for each plague and set a drop of wine on our dinner plate.

Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets 
amongst ourselves?

I

am the only man to come to Las Vegas w/an ex-gf and not fuck her—arriving two nights early on my own to hike up in

One night—which was, as it turned out, my last night camming

But her coup de grace was when she started bringing a white boyfriend to our parties. He was a real champion. His name was John.

We started as open, NOT poly. This was a very important distinction to us, despite not having a working definition of either types of relationships. It was, we both agreed, substantially less cringe

I was still pouting over hometown boy, and neck-deep in an article about foiled wallpaper when I got a Facebook message from Preston. Could we get together? 

Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.

Do I break up with my Venezuelan surfer and move back to Alaska? I debated. Or bring him to the U.S. and marry him?

he flashed a toothless grin, all James Dean California Cool, a tan blonde blue-eyed surfer type. I imagined him as the boys Lana sang about.