Nonfiction

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.

I. From above There’s a car in the river, the boy repeats, pointing.  I stand beside B at the window opposite, clutching the sleeve of his denim jacket and gazing out at the county suburbs that sprawl westward six hundred feet below, the houses like spilled pills. It’s my first time inside the Gateway Arch, […]

I think I opted for the theatrics of bulimia over the melancholy of anorexia out of anger­—toward myself and toward all the Courtney Bakers who had practiced girlhood more comprehensibly.

To say one has experienced both rape and kindness from men is a paradox not of the sex but of humanity: sometimes I think my only acceptance with women would be to offer myself as the victim I was but no longer am, for then they might see me as someone, anyone.