Cult Classic

by Sloane Crosley

Who, in the history of the world, has ever had any double-sided tape?

Probably nothing bad will happen to you immediately but probably something bad will happen to you eventually.

But we had low health insurance deductibles and we could stand the sight of one another.

I don’t know why he ordered it. He was in a self-flagellating relationship with dairy.

Larger forces had protected us from seeing each other, but larger forces had done all they could.

Resiliency is overrated. To get hit by a truck and ride the subway the next morning is not commendable, it’s insane.

This included the musty sofa on which he explained that monogamy was a vestigial construct gifted to us by the Puritans. It wasn’t me, I had to understand. Except that it was me because there was only one of me.

My fiancé to whom I was engaged to be married, a person I’d swindled into a lifetime of mutual tolerance.

May our gaslights illuminate the bridges we burn!

Because here was a man who did not think of himself as woefully untapped by the world, who was not driven to an existential crisis by an unread literary journal.

not to mention the ones that came to life in the night like haunted toaster ovens: You up?

I’d begun to suspect that my search for an inciting incident was the inciting incident.

hugging him to buy myself time away from his face.

But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.

I wanted to know why some grown men wear backpacks. At their best, they suggest an insolent outdoorsiness; at their worst, a lifetime of student loans.

Opinionated and indecisive is lethal.

He’d gotten used to being outnumbered by finicky females who functioned on their own terms, who couldn’t help but capitalize on his stoicism.

One shudders to imagine the collection of statement mugs in that house.

You get older, you want the people you’re with to know just as much about the world as you do so that you can make your jokes and send your links.

But whenever I walked in on just the two of them talking, it was like watching a daisy and a stapler trying to hold down a conversation.

“Welp, you’re either in a cult or you’re a creative director,” I said, handing her back the card. “I’m not sure which is worse.”

Or the men I dated as if they were lab rats, the way married people do, as if their life is the control and yours is the experiment. Indulgence disguised as empathy, judgment disguised as friendship.

What do you have against starting a podcast empire like a normal person?”

A hero without a damsel is a mere man.

I was a sane person imitating a broken person imitating a sane person, which did not feel sane, not at all.

This is how addiction works, I thought. Like a houseguest. It does not break in; it is invited. There is no announcement of when your old impulses roll over to form new ones. Suitcases are exploded, toilet paper rolls denuded. One day your spatula is put back in the wrong drawer and you think “that’s weird” and the next all the paint has been stripped from the walls and you think absolutely nothing at all.

I needed to see these men because I’d kept the evidence and I’d kept the evidence because I needed to see these men.

Your hang-ups aren’t in your system, they are your system.