The Rituals of Love in Everyday Life
Having settled into sweet solitary contentment, I wasn’t looking for love. It found me anyway. Meeting an old friend, I was struck by Cupid’s arrow when I realized she was single.
Having settled into sweet solitary contentment, I wasn’t looking for love. It found me anyway. Meeting an old friend, I was struck by Cupid’s arrow when I realized she was single.
“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.
You have to know when to end things, and you have to follow through with it.
Watching them sweat from my spa on the sidelines, I’d thank my body. On the one hand, so humiliating; on the other, its own defense mechanism against the wretchedness of exercise.
The more I allowed myself to want, the more I realized I wanted. The more I leaned in to my desires, the clearer they became.
I got sober alone, in a village about an hour north of Kampala, Uganda. I had moved there for a job opportunity, naively confident I, as an openly queer person with a mental illness, could flit across the globe like a moth. By the time I quit my job and scheduled an emergency move back to the United States, my drinking was threatening my life.
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?
When everything starts moving too fast, I like to walk on bridges.
I didn’t know then that Devon would become one of those women in my life who’s there for good, who I could not text for months and then suddenly dive right back in with. One of those friends who would show up, who would stay.
In the mirror, I saw a scrawny, hollow-eyed girl dressed in ill-fitting boys’ clothes, a parody of a parody of masculinity. But in the screen, I saw myself made strong, confident, fearless, perfect.
“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.”
For when wiping the slate completely clean isn’t really an option.
This cold-pressed, organic, lacto-fermented, natural, biodynamic, raw juice is the answer to all my problems, surely.
17 years of birthday diary entries.
It’s like bullet journaling except not at all!
In times like these, when people don’t understand us and decide that this means we shouldn’t live at all, we need to connect with the people that do understand, even if just a little bit, even if peripherally.
“Maybe I could teach you how to do that and you could teach me a couple of things I’ve been wonderin’,” I told her. She shook my hand. It was a deal.
Transitioning is stigmatized as betraying our assigned gender. Sometimes, though, it takes two betrayals to get where we need to be.
While recovering from being cheated on, you’re honestly best off bingeing unscripted cooking series or documentaries about serial killers or just not watching TV at all and instead playing The Sims, where you can create your own fantastical world where nobody cheats and where if they do there are immediate consequences.
I was only pregnant for seven and a half weeks before my miscarriage. There was no body, no breath; there was no measurable part of a lifetime spent together. I’d only known there was life inside my body for three and half weeks, and yet the experience seems to still have a heartbeat.