“Today I am 28. It is 2023. In Nigeria, it is illegal to do the things I did freely at the beaches in Toronto; watch my queer friends kiss under the eyes of a cloudy sun, hold hands with a woman on a rain-less night intoxicated by wine and wishfulness. I lie to a taxi driver, tell him that I have a fiancé. I show him a picture, a man. My cousin doesn’t know how often his image has saved me from lecherous men. Here, fiction can be a raft in a sea…”

“I identified as a heterosexually-inclined bisexual when I started giving hand jobs for money, and I left more or less a lesbian. It wasn’t the only factor in that transformation, but boy was it a major one.”

“I could start a Youtube channel or a blog about disability rights and monetize it. FUCK. I don’t know how to turn it off.”

“The other partners I had throughout much of my time in sex work were uncomfortable at best and shaming at worst. They were jealous and confused. ‘How can you interact with men like this?'”

“Thank you for pushing me down a ramp so quickly that I slammed into a wall.”

“Legislators pass laws enabling families to control children and defund social services that support them, all in the name of protecting the wealthy, white, girl body. These policies, which are part of the theater of stranger danger discourse, endanger children by isolating them in their homes, where Lego fortresses can become wine cellars, tombs. JonBenét as a symbol becomes the sacrifice used to sustain this system. Her story becomes a dark illustration of the consumption of the violence and abuse inflicted on girls and women.”

“I wanted to have nightmares about monsters or mass shootings. It was too embarrassing — in the midst of global catastrophe — to be concerned with something as frivolous as high school.”

On family, memory, scar tissue, a 1999 Red Sox game, unreliable narrators, and setting the story straight.

“My wife and son didn’t know; no one knew. The guilt crept up when I unloaded the groceries in the kitchen, stolen and paid-for alike.”

For a split second, I thought about her racial calculations, not because I felt I needed to know, but because maybe, finally, someone might be like me. I knew our skin colors carried the weight of the same questions.

“I was guilty and heartbroken and I wasn’t ready to let go of her: my first kiss, my first time, my first girlfriend, my first love, my first everything and before that, my best friend.”

Or, the queer urge to almost form a cult with a straight woman.

“You’re at a party; you’re on vacation; it’s your lunch break. You feel good, or maybe just bored, or maybe a little reckless, and you scan the room, the beach, the restaurant. You stop scanning. And she winks, or he grins, or they realize you caught them staring and blush awkwardly at their own feet for a thousand years, and when they finally look back up, that’s it.”

Was it a nightmare and you just thought you were waking up? It lasted for two hours, you could’ve been dreaming. But you were awake.

The entire story of our entire trip from California to Michigan and also all the bigger stories and the smaller ones, too.

“The threat to move to Michigan was always made in a specific context: some element of my life fell apart and I didn’t know how to fix it or myself.”

The absolutely true autobiography of a liar.

A girl spends 19 days in rural Tennessee with her girlfriend and her family, takes a million pictures, then tells her whole life story in just under 4,000 words. What’s not to love?