Luster

by Raven Leilani

My salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk.

so true

For a moment, I’m sure I’m going to cry, which is not unusual, because I cry often and everywhere, and most especially because of this one Olive Garden commercial.

Lol

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

By date seven there is still no sex, which is getting insulting,

she is real for this

I smile at her and try to pretend that she is not pro-life.

insert crying emoji

and in the grand scheme of things this is not even close to the worst thing I’ve done for money,

so true

Because she is thirteen, and I remember how it felt from the inside. I remember what I thought I knew about people, and the pride I took in being alone. But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.

We can’t let her do whatever she wants just because she’s Black, Rebecca says. That isn’t intersectional feminism, it’s bad parenting.

shut up

If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.