Status Updates From Trash

I grew an ulcer in my belly once I was out in the world on my own. I think of it as an always-angry place inside me, a tyranny that takes good food and turns it like a blade scraping at the hard place where I try to hide my temper

I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy.

"People will hurt you more with pity than with hate," she'd always told me. "I can hate back, or laugh at them, but goddamn the son of a bitch that hands me pity."

Say anything but begin it with Jesus and end it with shit. And that laugh, the one that disguises your broken heart. Oh, never show your broken heart! Make them think you don't have one instead

Some days I think the way to make a storyteller is to refuse to tell her what happened—as my mama and aunts did with me