There is an attitude in the liberated fetal detachment

My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.

Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad.

Pontypridd

When I was born, they thought I was dead. My grandmother, who could neither read nor write, plunged me into a tub of cold water. I got started after that.

My father was a coal miner

My sister is more of a person than I am. She works at a bookshop and wears visually interesting outfits, ties up her blonde ringlets in a tall bun and ambles around our town in clogs. We hear her

A tired black horse lies down in a field, and doesn’t get up again.

MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002

I also have a white t-shirt I like a lot that says JOHN PRINE IS PRETTY GOOD, but I don't actually wear it because it comes down to my knees.

If the Internet doesn't drain all the money soon I will kool myself )for real 

It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.

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.