Being A Girl is Hard
For me, the label of girl was almost threatening—something forced on me that I could never escape. I know every woman could, to some degree, feel threatened by their status as a woman, with sexual assault, harassment, and overall danger and misogyny following them everywhere they turn—those things followed me, too. But the threat I felt went beyond that: I wasn’t the girl my birth certificate said I was.
The Lilac and The Housefly: A Tale of Tortured Romanticism
The lilac was unimpressive. Nothing more than a stick jabbed into soil with a price tag tied around the base of its stem, like some sort of prank on a naive consumer. And it worked. I saw the dingy branch and fell in love, sharing the same compassion as Charlie Brown when he bought that pathetic little Christmas Tree. I liked the idea of improving something.
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes, “It doesn’t matter what you do … so long as you change
Making Friends
He called 911 because he was lonely.
“I don’t have anyone else to talk to,” he said.
The voice on the other end said, “If you call back, you’re going to jail.”
I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard
My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve
never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed
at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in
winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the
ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front
