The Ex Talk

The thing about losing someone is that it doesn’t happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.

So often, I'm trapped between the pain of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

What would a mediocre white man do?” she asks.

But maybe that’s what we all are—halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.

You don't have to explain,' I say, though all I want is a detailed explanation with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation.

Make people cry, and then make them laugh,” my dad would say. “But most of all, make sure you’re telling a good story.

I used to think that without my dad, I'd never be whole again. But maybe that's what we all are --- halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.

Sometimes I feel like I'm playing at being an adult, like I'm constantly looking around, waiting for a real adult to tell me what to do if my garbage disposal starts making a weird sound or if I should be putting more money in my Roth IRA. I am just...I feel like a complete mess.

I guess I just thought I'd have everything figured out by now. I'm almost thirty, and I don't know if I feel any closer than when I was twenty-one or even twenty-five. There's so much pressure to have all of this shit figured out, and I don't have a clue what I'm doing.

Every time I imagined adulthood, it looked different from this reality.

Cool is the Kevin Jonas of compliments. It’s like saying your favorite color is beige.

Sometimes I wonder if content is really just a synonym for complacent.

He’s watching me with an expression of clear amusement. Instead of going in for a hug, I stick out my hand. ‘ i’m going to hold you to that.’ His hand is large, slender fingers fitting between mine and warming my skin. ‘it was a pleasure breaking up with you.

I'm a solid second, but I'm no one's first.

Talking about him was hard, but not talking was worse. So often, I'm trapped between the pain of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

The thing about losing someone is that it doesn't happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you're stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.

I didn't want to go off the rails, but I wanted to get close enough to see what was on the other side of them.

Short people are nothing if not skilled counter climbers.

People say they want something serious, but as soon as it starts heading that way, they bolt. Either they’re lying or they realise they don’t want something serious with me.

You can take away my EKTORP and my MALM, but you can't take away my VITTSJÖ,' Dominic says, wrapping a protective arm around the bookshelf in his living room.

You let it fuel you. You do even better because you know there are people out there who are waiting for you to fail.

When someone dies, you don’t only remember their good parts. You remember the difficult parts, too,

If I kissed you again, it wouldn’t be for the show, or for research, or for any reason other than that I wanted to. I’d want to remember every detail. The way you taste. The way you smell. The sounds you’d make.

But you go into parenting hoping, maybe selfishly, that your kid will love the thing you love, and you can share that with them.

It’s impossible to get a hosting gig without experience, but you can’t get that experience unless you already have some experience under your belt. The joys of job hunting as a millennial.

His eyes scan my face and travel down my torso. His cheeks redden. It gives me a bit of a rush, knowing he’s very obviously assessing me. You’re a catch. You’re a ten. I wait for a complement from this person who’s only ever been vile to me. He clears his throat. ‘Cool,’ he finally says. Excuse me while I walk right into downtown rush-hour traffic.

And just like that, he brushes past me with his thermos of coffee, already inducted into this club it took me years to join. I hope the coffee burns his tongue.

Breaking News: Texas is hot. Texas in June deserves its own circle of hell.

The deceased don’t immediately become flawless human beings and it wouldn’t be right to turn him into one. We loved him, faults and all.