Essays

It was a foreign concept to me, this idea that the religious commitment of people I barely knew would impact my life choices.

Her bony embrace was a fiction.

At age 15, I couldn’t lose my innocence fast enough.

The last vacation happened during the summer when it all fell apart—the summer when I had sex with someone else for the first time in ten years.

I sometimes wonder how nice it must be to be Her.

The girls retreat into a cocoon of self-consciousness, each adjusting to the shifting dynamics of adolescence, feeling more like prey than peers.

The clanging of the landline jolted us awake.

“Do you want to know what it is?” he asks, excitedly. “Do you really want to know?”

It tasted bitter. It tasted like growing up.

I had to face the unsettling fact that my phone seemed capable of handling certain aspects of my life better than I could myself.