Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

Like, girls are constantly getting approached by pushy guys who think they’re owed attention, and I’d be no exception.

He takes visible solace in academic talk, as it can be nuanced and factual without having anything to do with him.

Vanya went quiet as she worked toward inbox zero, leaving Will to quietly process the everyday aggressions of the word actually.

“If you’d ever talked to zim once, you might’ve known. Marginalized people need to empower and define their identities against their oppressors.” “The real ‘marginalized’ people don’t have access to these rarefied discourses of gender identity—which by the way come from the academic tradition you call bourgeois—”

Will queried his thesaurus for Australian slurs—dingo, boomerang, vegemite. Great Barrier Reef.

But there’s no communication without performance without artifice.

All love is projection. Stuffing your experiences and hopes into whatever objet petit a, then embracing it.

Cory brought out her special-occasion cry, the good silver and bone china.

A crib was a cage. Wombs, cribs, rooms, tombs.

Then again he could never tell if he was really thinking what he thought rather than what he was trying not to think.