Nonfiction

They had cool girl names like Caitlin and Caroline and wore cool girl things like tank tops and stretchy chokers. “Do you want to play ‘Stranded Helpless in the Woods’ with us?” Caitlin asked.

How fickle is fire, the element of transformation. In a single moment it transmutes joy into terror.

I was having lunch at my coworker’s house in Fort Worth, and the last thing I expected was slow-cooked, gooey okra, looking uncomfortably similar to the ones my mother used to make when I was a child.

from twenty feet away you’ll feel tethered to yourself like the pink balloon tied around your wrist when you were four

While I was flippantly making a teenage judgment about bodies and youth with a larger acknowledgement of mortality and the inability to stop time, I was also expressing a palpable loneliness.

I believed in god until I stopped believing in heaven. I believed in heaven until I stopped believing in hell. I stopped believing in hell when I was seven, because I knew there could be no such place unless it was made up to scare me.

I first found Rachel Attias while Googling myself, which is an embarrassing but common habit I entertain. I have another habit—which I believe is also common, though many of us might not like to cop to it—of deriving morbid pleasure from imagining worst case scenarios that are not actually happening.

I’m trying to say, sometimes loving oneself is not reciprocal.