The Alone Time

by Elle Marr

but a little junk food makes me happy. Doesn’t everyone deserve a little happiness?

She’s pretty. Or maybe she’s pretty astute

There is so much I don’t understand about myself, even as a thirty-two-year-old woman.

I approach the screen door, wary of inviting her inside. Yet drawn like a fly to rancid meat.

maybe, at a certain point and intensity, love and hate in a relationship become blurred when extremes are at hand.

A fountain beside the entrance makes a gurgling sound like a waterfall or someone dying, choking on their own blood.

begging with the last representative of my immediate family to choose me instead of themselves—instead of anything that takes them away from me, even death. As illogical as that is.

This cherub with full cheeks and whose warm gaze could make a seasoned killer offer up his final meal on death row.

a nagging suspicion in me pokes its head up: school isn’t the answer. Not mine anyway. It was always someone else’s expectation that I’ve been trying to meet. Trying and failing.

family. And she didn’t walk out on her own two feet when two people, your parents, died.”

Bro you're such an asshole - they were TEN and SEVEN. if they had to do something truly awful out there as children in the woods for TWELVE WEEKS, leave them alone.

And now, now that the girl-survivors have pulled their support of my doc, those investors have withdrawn.”

Ohhhh right, traumatize the girls because YOU want the film and YOU want the story and YOUR money is on the line. Who cares about the children who were traumatized

and tried to care for your parents as they lay dying or injured, and then you managed to get out of the plane? FS: Yes.

Giving leading questions and then accusing her of being guilty ... huh typical man.

Because I didn’t misread anything back there. You’re just a liar.”

Bro HUH?????? YOU BIT HER DURING SEX AND SHE DIDNT LIKE IT???

We work our way through the thick tunnel of trees, leftover morning dew soaking the shoulders of my jacket, leaving sloppy, wet kisses on my neck beneath my ponytail.