I’m 23 and 1/2 , or at least I will be in two days, and I’m learning how to dress myself.  Okay, let’s rewind. To be clear, my mother has not picked out my outfits in many years and while I have solicited feedback from friends and family on important outfits (we’re all doing jeans…

You say my name  and it makes me think of the first day of summer,  that old, new warmth,   slept in sheets nostalgic about the night before.  Walking in time to a song,  its beat swinging through my pelvis.    You say my name,  and it’s like I am finally myself,  years spent bending flesh…

It’s November, so unless some really dramatic stuff goes down in the next two months, I think it’s safe to recap everything I’ve learned about loving and being loved in 2019.  In 2019, a friendship that was a major part of my life for the past 4 years ended. It’s been one of the more…

I am usually the first person to text after a first date. I’ve always applied to jobs I am underqualified for. I raise my hand for opportunities at work that I will probably fail at. When I was 15, I called my crush and asked him out via VOICEMAIL. This is all to say, I…

It’s raining and I’m longing for someone who hasn’t thought about me in weeks. This is where I’m comfortable. In the tolerable melancholy, that sweet familiar ache. I don’t want everything because half the fun is in that wanting. Yearning is a fading art. Why flesh our dramatic scenes with them in your mind, first…

I. I was Bambi for Halloween freshman year. Simple costume, elaborate face makeup gleaned from Halloween makeup tutorials that 18 year old boys still somehow found a way to sexualize. Sexy cartoon characters exist (hello Danny Phantom) but Bambi is not one of them. There’s a feminist analysis here about the infantilization of women but…

Despite the fact that there’s a high of 92 today in DC, it is the first day of fall. And with the crunchy leaves and pumpkin spice lattes comes another important marker of the changing weather: cuffing season. For those of you who aren’t familiar with cuffing season (aka the above 30s and the happily…

I don’t know if you’ll read this, and I hope you don’t. Just know that this isn’t for you, none of these words ever are. It’s not about the last pair of hands that spelled safety. Or how grateful I was for the dark, even the moon dimmed, when the truth came. Maybe this will…

There is the bittersweet milky blue skin of your neck,  Flesh and stone at the same time.  The dark hair curling its fingers down the nape of your neck, the corners of your body.    I always thought of you as more beautiful than I.  My graceless form, a resting place, a stopover,  A tangent…

Need becomes a dirty word when you grow up.  Edged in knives and desperation, it tastes of everything “woman”.  It is the unsightly mess you should have shoved underneath your bed.    Were you born like this or were you taught to be incomplete,  Apologizing for a phantom absence, a make-believe missing.  But now here…