Maybe I didn’t believe you the first time or the second time or the third. Believed you found me beautiful at rest, slack faced and slouched belly. Preferred it to the fire-breathing, trapeze flying, sold-out carnival. You thumbed through me as unfinished drafts, a clumsy caterpillar still prickling my ego. I wanted to believe you’d fidget during my backstage days, too tired to ta-da, but too guilty to draw the curtains.

Held onto the bumper, just to inhale the exhaust of us. Gorging memories, gagging, try and swallow them again. (So good.) Fold myself in time machines, Fall in love on feedback loop. (loop loop…) Finger fucked by skeleton, I resurrect your touch (Oh, yes.) Wringing dopamine from — text threads, back when you said, all the gorgeous things, one last overdose before I’m clean. Infected hippocampus, cauterizing dreams of you.

This birthday felt peculiar. I’m never particularly excited for any birthday, but this year I found myself trying to telepathically slow the reins of 33 galloping toward me. I felt some grief about the delicate laugh lines starting to form on my face. …

Recently, a friend made an interesting distinction about the ways some people bring out the best in you. “You know how around certain people you just light up and are able to be your best, funniest, most effervescent self?” she’d said. “You know, like when I’m around you!” Initially, I…

What is ambition when not braided with capitalist output? And what does it look like to quench our aspirations in collective ways? Ambition in the pursuit of knowledge, in seeking creative climax, in being better parents and partners and organizers, and friends. In setting insurmountable goals and a grasp at greatness that has nothing to do with chasing capital. If “laziness” only exists when (profitable) production hiccups for human need, then to weaponize laziness is perhaps the most ambitious thing we can do.

In order to memorialize you, I couldn’t start from the beginning. Or the middle, even. I’d have to start somewhere around the later years, the fateful points where you and I intersect. The Third Act; when your hair had greyed, and your face was already engraved with lines of a…

No one has heard from Auntie Eve in about a month, so one night I decide to go looking for her. I drive for six hours, into the belly of a tiny beach town that only thaws back to life in the mouth of summer. Where strange pale faces roll…

Trauma came for my memories one day and held them hostage. A chunk of my life bound and gagged, surreptitiously plotting an escape it isn’t brave enough to go through with. I thought they’d be back by now. I miss them, wherever they’ve gone. Lord knows I’ve tried to find…

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Something was wrong, out of place, naggingly odd. But what was it? Hadn’t I wanted all of this? This party? I had certainly planned it, agonized over every last detail down to the tall stem flutes…