Nonfiction

While I was flippantly making a teenage judgment about bodies and youth with a larger acknowledgement of mortality and the inability to stop time, I was also expressing a palpable loneliness.

I believed in god until I stopped believing in heaven. I believed in heaven until I stopped believing in hell. I stopped believing in hell when I was seven, because I knew there could be no such place unless it was made up to scare me.

I first found Rachel Attias while Googling myself, which is an embarrassing but common habit I entertain. I have another habit—which I believe is also common, though many of us might not like to cop to it—of deriving morbid pleasure from imagining worst case scenarios that are not actually happening.

I’m trying to say, sometimes loving oneself is not reciprocal.

1. Start out going west toward N Academy St. You do not have a GPS or a smartphone. You do have these printed Rand-McNally directions and a compass shining red on the rear-view mirror: E, S, W, N. You know you are going north. Follow the N on the mirror and you’ll be fine. 2. […]

In summer ‘05, I made the Creamery my haunt and put a dent in the menu. Ice cream had always been a particular joy in my life, and not being from New Orleans meant no one knew I had diabetes. No one would lecture me about proper eating based on ignorant rumors, characters from the Baby-Sitters Club, or apocryphal tales of amputations. I became great at subtly injecting in booths, even with strangers everywhere. I had it down to a science.

I still think most of my sexual encounters were healthy ones. I’m one of the lucky few who has had the good fortune to escape any situation in which I might have lost all power. Maybe the unremarkable nature of my time in Newhookupland is why I rarely slowed down to think about what was being said versus what wasn’t being said. Mindlessly going through the mechanics gave me the false sense that I was the protagonist of my own narrative. Somehow, I’m not sure I ever truly learned how to be my own subject.

Since the second strike, he walks with a limp, talks a little to himself. Several mornings I have had to stop for him entering the school parking lot. Me, in a car; he, slowly stumbling across the street—stooped with a cane—a grim recognition of pain with each breath—a twinge that tucks the corner of his mouth in and under instead of up. We are the same age, but his aches are different from mine—visible in the ways nature marks us each differently.