Look Alive Out There

My roommate came running out of the closet and did not stop until he reached Los Angeles. I knew this day would come. Sometimes it's easier to be your actual self where nothing of your alleged self exists. Sometimes that's how you find out who you are in the first place.

I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like "Bring a cardigan.

But sometimes, when I'm alone, I run my fingers over the photo, even though it doesn't feel like anything. I focus on one egg at random, imagining this will be the one my body uses to make a person, a person that grows up and reads this, and I think - Oh girl, I hope you set the world on fire.

Everyone knows WebMD is a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which all roads lead to death.

To live alone can be a glorious thing. Between jags of crippling loneliness and wretched TV, it’s an education in self-sufficiency, self-actualization, and self-tanner. But it is possible to have too many rooms of one’s own.

It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I.

He’s wearing fancy spandex and leaning on a sleek bicycle that looks like a paper clip that fell from heaven.

Never has my brain been host to the thought: It’s just the one planet. How hard could this be?

From my febrile imagination, I conjure a time capsule of the seventies—faux wood paneling, disco records, memorabilia and awards. Maybe a sunken living room. Maybe a sex swing. Maybe a wicker sex swing.

There are few things sadder than an off-duty earlobe that’s been trained to accommodate a human fist

[...] Death is pretty New York-specific." [...] "I mean the way New Yorkers handle death," he clarified. "They don't know how to mourn for people they only sort-of know. It's too abstract for such an opinionated culture. That's why 9/11 was such a mess.

He had Jared's surface-level deference that passed for manners, the sort of verbal salve that kept you from ever calling him an asshole because he did things like pick you up at your door.