Here We Go Again

by Alison Cochrun

“Look, I made it clear that this was casual from the beginning,” she says, “and it’s not my fault if you fell tit-over-clit in love with me.”

“Are you firing me because I’m gay?” She’s death-gripping the pen again. “Because I swear, I’ll have the ACLU up your ass so fast—” Miller makes a consternated face as he stares down at her manicured pink fingernails. “Wait, you’re gay?” She can see his brain trying to puzzle through how she fits into his stereotype of what a lesbian can be.

Competency is the perfect antidote to anxiety.

Did he expect her to recall some excursion where she sat by a pool sipping an umbrella-garnished cocktail? Ridiculous. She doesn’t own a swimsuit, and she hates open-toed shoes and unnecessary sun exposure. Besides, she doesn’t drink, and she doesn’t do idle time, but she can’t explain any of this to a man who currently has BBQ sauce on his chin.

So, before her next date, she listened to “Bitch” on repeat for thirty minutes, screaming the lyrics to herself. Incidentally, she never developed a second-date routine.

Still, she listens to “Bitch” whenever she feels the intense need to rage, because raging is so much safer than the alternative: the untethered spiral of anxiety that spools out whenever she loses control.

I think she made everyone on the Speech and Debate team cry at least once. She was a little despot in Mary Janes.”

I’m too weak for more chemo, and apparently, you can’t survive with cancer in every damn part of your body.” “I mean, not with that attitude,”

“That’s right. The only difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy,” he continues in his resonant lecture voice, “is that one ends with marriage and the other ends with death.” “That’s somewhat of an oversimplification of Frye’s genre classifications—” “We’re not in a Shakespearean play,” Logan cuts in.

“I’m pretty sure this entire state is just Nazis and ski resorts, and this place sure as shit ain’t a ski resort.”

“I-I’m not… still in love with him.” “Oscar fucking Wilde, then what was that entire Nora Ephron bullshit you just spewed at us?”

“I don’t want to celebrate the Fourth of July.” Logan shudders. “America is being a shady bitch, and I’m not going to her birthday party.”