Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

You don’t love me. You don’t even love yourself. You’re too busy editing to write; no wonder you didn’t finish a single page all summer. You’re obsessive about inconsequential things, like song lyrics, and dismissive of things that matter, like food and sleep and other people’s feelings. Who can live like that? And now this.

“Good for him,” she said, still concentrating on the dirt. “I do think these things are easier for men.” I stared at the back of her head. She was right, of course. “Boys are less afraid of being wrong,”

This was why men got to run the world, even as it became slowly obvious they were terrible at it. But who was molding all these chickenshit daughters?

Forgiveness, forgiveness: I hadn’t thought of it for myself. The idea seemed so insane I almost laughed. Forgive myself? That crazy bitch?

to show up late with unwashed hair, drink exactly two glasses of red wine, and talk only to women.

Everybody needs somebody to take dancing. Everybody needs somebody to hail a cab to Soul Night on a first Saturday in San Francisco. Everybody needs somebody to feel the bass in the walls with their palm, to let it shimmy through their limbs and into yours. Everybody needs somebody to tell a creeping bro to back off when you need some space, when music threatens to wield its power over our bodies too recklessly—to help you feel the beauty of what music can do, while protecting you from its danger. Everybody needs somebody to take ecstasy with you, then allow you to pet their beautiful face in line for the bathroom while Wilson Pickett wails the simplest, truest truth: “everybody needs somebody to love.” Queen said it too: “find me somebody to love.” Who else? More have whined about being loved, but these dudes understood it’s the giving—the love you make—that matters more. Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience. You take it out with the trash every day until it slowly stops regenerating inside you, and friends, let me tell you, that is no damn way to live.