She's Not Sorry

by Mary Kubica

attachment, they say, leads to burnout,

On the days that I work, I hardly ever get to see the sun. It’s dark when I leave for work in the morning and it’s dark when I go home.

So how is it possible that it’s never happened to anyone I know? It makes me feel like some kind of anomaly.

I have great friends who are incredibly sympathetic, but I’ve felt myself pull away from them over the last few months.

being alone and lonely was better than feeling neglected and ignored.

The reason I finally did wasn’t for me but for Sienna, because I didn’t want ours to be the model of a marriage she saw. I wanted her to know that a marriage could be full of love, happiness and mutual respect too.

I didn’t want to contribute to the conversation, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to listen,

The truth is that anyone can take or attempt to take their own life.

The truth is that social media is an optical illusion. It’s an unreality, it’s the very deliberate version of people’s lives that they want you to see.

Most of the time, I’m a stickler for rules. I don’t like to break them but,

I’m terrible at keeping up with people.”

They think he’s the perfect guy, as if there is such a thing.

women don’t whistle when they walk alone at night. We do everything we can to be inconspicuous.

A woman would know better than to follow another woman this closely at night.

There is no end to the number of rules women are supposed to follow at night regarding their safety—be observant, stay off your phone, adjust your routine so you don’t always take the same route, wear comfortable shoes that you can run in and carry mace or a Swiss army knife. Or better yet, don’t walk alone at night, especially if you’ve been drinking, because alcohol lowers your awareness and your reaction time and makes you an easy target—and yet men can do any damn thing they’d like and it’s fine.

First impressions aren’t everything, but my gut tells me there’s something about him not to like.

My mind is elsewhere. I’m not thinking about where I’m going. I’m not paying attention to where I’m walking. My eyes are unfocused, looking where I’m going but not ingesting what I see.

It’s not as though I haven’t heard words spoken in this city like that before, but the coldness of strangers, the way people speak to and treat one another, stuns me.

People looked up to her. Now she seems practically meek and I hate that a man did this to her, that he changed her very essence.

“We can only know so much about the people in our lives.”

Emily and I weren’t great friends in school, but we didn’t dislike each other. We just didn’t know each other well.