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I’ve always been a forearm girl—a man rolling his shirt to the elbows is basically foreplay for me—and it’s a crime that such nice ones are wasted on him.
“Make people cry, and then make them laugh,” my dad would say. “But most of all, make sure you’re telling a good story.”
Being the fifth wheel is only slightly crushing when I realize I’m not anyone’s person.
Sometimes I wonder if content is really just a synonym for complacent.
Every time I imagined adulthood, it looked different from this reality. All the important people in my life have their person. I have an empty house and my supposed dream job that doesn’t always love me back.
“A dating show hosted by exes,” I say, half as a joke. The room goes silent.
“What would a mediocre white man do?” she asks. Ameena and I started saying this years ago, after she had a seminar about diversity in the workplace. Ameena is Indian, and she relayed that women, especially women of color, are statistically less likely to ask for things men don’t think twice about. WWAMWMD, one of us will text the other when we need support.
“Cool,”
Cool is the Kevin Jonas of compliments. It’s like saying your favorite color is beige.
“It was a pleasure breaking up with you.”
“Do I call you Dom?” I ask. His face darkens. “No. Never Dom.”
i could make a joke here
So often, I’m trapped between the pain of remembering and the fear of forgetting.
“You just climbed a fucking mountain. You’re beautiful, Shay. At work or in pajamas or at the top of a mountain.”
“How fucking perfect you are right now.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I just—can’t.”
bitch
“Yeah. You.”
“I’m not fucking fragile, and you can take your coded sexist language all the way to hell.”
you go bestie
happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.
