Essays

You keep your mouth shut. You swallow the words you want to say. They taste like soap going down.

Boys were how I defined myself, how I found my contours, how I gave myself shape.

I find the idea of living forever exhausting, so I decide I will die at the age of eighty-seven.

I came to professional wrestling because of men.

My mother was dead. I had a dentist appointment in ten minutes.

I wanted my own capability to be that beautiful. To be that subtle in its forcefulness.

When we didn’t carry phones, when we printed directions from the internet, kept fold-out maps in the glovebox, and slept in the rest stop lot...

He waits until everyone is asleep. Only, I am awake, sleepless in the middle of the night.

Perhaps the moment was sacred, not to be tainted, and Kyle was a gentleman. Or maybe I had it all wrong.

I was conscious that the Spanish we were using was Hemingway’s Spanish, that we reduced the animal to dialectical terms of good or bad depending on how it met the people’s ideal, and I partook of this with great enthusiasm.