You: The two women from my past who I judged too quickly during a chance brunch encounter

Me: The dyke who apparently projected her own hangups about middle school onto you

“A cultural exchange from a person with a prostate to those without.”

I hid behind instruments, computers, Whitney’s voice, Prince’s guitar. I sat in front of my computer surrounded by cassettes, illegally downloading songs, awkwardly whispering “I love you more than I know how to explain and I’m scared so here’s a mixtape I made you.”

The first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients. I felt undeserving of human connection. I’d become a “dirty” nurse.

When it comes to Buddhism and cultural appropriation, I still sometimes worry that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that I’m angry for no good reason.

If you have ever met a mountain, you know that can’t nobody really own a mountain because they are too majestic, too strong, too beautiful to be tamed or owned. So I guess mountains are kinda like Black folk.

Tell yourself that you’re not like one of those chain smokers, that you can stop whenever you want. Start smoking American Spirits, so it’s like, not even that bad for you because it’s natural, or organic, or something. You forget.

“Do you have something to tell us?” my mom joked. It was a joke, because of course I didn’t. “No,” I said with a laugh. And I thought I was telling the truth.

Listening to a song your crush recommends is a low-stakes window into their identity. It’s a way to get closer to someone, away from them. And isn’t that what a crush is all about? A solitary experience that has everything to do with the other person and at the same time nothing at all?

“Towards the end of the night you fall and tear the skin on your knee. But you pop back up and keep skating. You’re relieved. Now that you’ve fallen once you know you’ll be okay.”

We published so much good work this year, and here is a fraction of it we think you will particularly enjoy reading back through!

In the pool hall, my sweetheart and a close friend tease me one night: “unimpressive,” “pure luck,” “you aren’t that good.” They were trying to get my ire up so that an hour later when I told them to stare into each other’s eyes as I fucked my sweetheart’s body, I would mean it with a snarky competitive vengeance, I would mean it with power and control, I would be pushed to take what I want.

I looked less and less like my mother— the image of womanhood I grew up with — and I was scared. Was she disappointed that I wasn’t like her? Did my femininity disappoint her? At the same time, I worried about being too masculine: people would know I wasn’t straight. I was angry: my mother taught me to be proud of who I was, but what if who I was becoming wasn’t good enough?

“I always went the extra mile for you and did so gladly because I loved being around you. You never returned these more concrete gestures, which should’ve been the first sign that things were not reciprocal between us, but I was oblivious and idealistic. I genuinely believed I had found love.”

The first time someone described Casey as having “stalkerish” tendencies, I defended her. For the most part though, I didn’t talk about it.

“I craved that isolation, that feeling of utter aching loneliness that I found inside houses where I did not belong.”

“We rarely left the bedroom and when we did, we quickly returned. We called in to work and on one occasion we both no showed. It was heavenly, but as the old adage says all good things must come to an end.”

“I watched her zip up her white dress in the mirror; I watched her cross and uncross her legs; I watched her, and my friends watched her, and in the movie we were watching the other characters, men and women, watched her. I hated her so much, and so purely, with such satisfaction. I couldn’t look away.”

“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”

“For me, as a Black Trans Woman, to find her body not only as something worthy and magnificent (as it is), but to find someone to share that magick with, may very well be one of the only moments she has to enjoy a trying and very taxing life — one that’s always trying to kill her.”