Honey

What did you want to be?" "What I am now. I just imagined it differently." "Different how?" "I imagined I would be happy.

I run and run and run, and the destination is his praise.

I think parents can affect us without intending to. By being bad examples, they end up helping us. They show us what not to do.

...I finally grasp it - I am inside of my life. This is not a costume I am trying on, this is the skin.

[…] she remains enigmatic, unbreachable; she unlocks herself only for certain people.

Sometimes a song sounds exactly the way you want your life to feel. Sometimes it makes you believe you can change it.

I wasn’t good enough—what a mortifying thing to discover about yourself.

It is the whispery part of a sleepover, when eyelids are heavy but we battle to hold them up, because this is when intimacy is really braided between girls.

Sometimes I want to reanimate my own life, but conversely, I also want to return to my mom’s womb, to grow fingers and toes all over again. To float in amniotic fluid and warmth. From the safety of this sac, I could decide when to finally emerge again.

Sometimes I feel like I walk around with this haze in front of my eyes. I keep waiting for the day when I’ll wake up and it’ll be clear, and I’ll know exactly what to do and what to say.

And maybe they can see the good sex on me, too. I don't mean the skin I'm displaying - good sex is far subtler. It screws a light bulb tight in your core.

But America has a way of making its own gods. It revels in it. It lights the bonfire and watches the flames lick the sacrifice.

I am twelve again. First time on a plane. My life a steady churn of firsts: period, kiss in a closet, this flight. When did I use up all my beginnings?

I remember how, when we first had sex, I was desperate to join myself with him. The lining between our bodies was too thick - I wanted it rubble. First love is ravenous in this way. It's starved. It's consuming the idea of someone until your teeth snap against an unexpected bone.

Total abandon. A basic, primal instinct: lose yourself, and you will be found again through release.

My memory is heavy or light, depending on the thickness of the paper. Sometimes ink can't leak through time. Sometimes everything is transparent, as if held up to sunlight.

My promise to Gwen to lie low, to be careful, was made by an idea of myself. How many of these do I have? Hundreds. They are stacked inside my head, these paper girls, all patient, selfless, capable of restraint.

She decanted her new life into an empty glass, let it breathe, swallowed it. Then poured again.

Her friendship was my skeleton - it held me up. It moved my limbs and gave me strength. I wonder if she's sagging with loss, too.

I was too young to perceive myself through the world yet, so I gave myself everything I lacked. I was not yet reframed, because I was the frame. I was not in their eyes, because I was the eye.

They held hands for the first time in open space, among the alien rocks, the strange scrub. Weaving their fingers together felt like an exhalation. Gwen turned to her, this person she had leaned on for years, this eye in a storm of press and judgment and endless traveling, this raft in a wide ocean of currents. Tammy said it was so painful being close to her. Gwen understood. She knows she is a hard person to love. She can be distant, ambitious, cold...

I turn away, because it feels like seeing a place you once lived in decorated differently, with furnishings and rooms that didn’t exist when you were there, everything that was once habitual now unfamiliar.

I thought you were drunk.” She smiles pleasantly. “I’m very philosophical when I’m drunk.

Gwen rests her palm on the surface of the pool. “I couldn’t say it back, so I just lay there as she cried. I just fucking lay there. And I do love her, that’s the thing. But I couldn’t say it, because to tell her would be to release it into the world. You’re the first person I’ve told besides myself.

People say you can’t die in your dreams, but I always do. I die and die and die.

I’m starting to think no unscathed kid has ever entered this industry. You have to have some emptiness, some cavity that needs filling.

In the club, the world is somehow still, and this moment is suspended. All the feeling inside Gwen is curious, sniffing the air and trembling now that it is allowed to wander. So, she takes Tammy’s face into her hands and pulls her close. They collide angrily. She drags her teeth along her jaw, she nips at her earlobes. She’s furious because she wants this night to stretch out endlessly, and she knows it will have to end.

When you are young, these comments stay with you, like footprints left in drying concrete.

Anyway, it’s fine. My face naturally repels people and it’s fine.” She sounds so sad as she says this. Her beauty is remote, something to observe from a safe distance, as if she’s surrounded by sensors and bulletproof glass.