We Had to Remove This Post

by Hanna Bervoets

People act like it’s a perfectly normal question, but how normal is a question when you’re expecting the answer to be gruesome?

maybe questions don’t stem from interest in the other person so much as curiosity about the lives we might have led

The platform doesn’t allow people to post things like “All Muslims are terrorists,” because Muslims are a PC, a “protected category,” just like women, gay people, and, believe it or not, Mr. Stitic, heterosexuals. “All terrorists are Muslims,” on the other hand, is allowed, because terrorists are not a PC and besides, Muslim isn’t an offensive term.

We cleaved apart cleanly like two halves of a cake, the knife separating us with careful precision so that none of the marzipan roses were damaged.

Maybe falling in love isn’t filling up a loyalty card with feelings and actions so much as just adding two things together: desire plus fear.

The fear, on the other hand, grew gradually: fear that she wouldn’t be coming to the sports bar that night, fear that we wouldn’t end up kissing, fear that she’d change her mind. Those were pretty much the stages of falling in love for me.

we’d have the kinds of long conversations that reveal that the amount of love you feel for each other isn’t exactly commensurate with the amount of information you have about each other:

Yes, I think I felt like her words would leave dark streaks on the tiled walls, send raw sewage flowing back up the shower drain; something I’d been afraid of for weeks, a looming disaster that had been lurking in acai berries and meditation apps all this time, but that I’d managed to keep at bay with feigned indifference: Baby, stop, I thought now that the two of us were sitting on the cold bathroom floor. Just stop, please.

“The more you get to know each other, the more awkward the sex becomes,”