You carried me for eight years, and now I am going to carry myself — I’m sorry I brought you to the city. I’m sorry we ever left the mountain, I’m sorry the last four years of your life were attached to the end of a leash, and I’m sorry I didn’t take you swimming enough when we came here. I’m sorry for that time…

The easiest part is falling backwards and knowing already what the impact feels like, counting the moments suspended in air and bracing for the pavement because you know exactly where your ribs will crack. And eventually you stop explaining the velocity. Your secrets are small music box movements. Winding. Slowing. Stopping. And…

I need to believe you are good, in case this never gets better. In case there is never a resolution, in case all that is left here is silence, the kind that is thick, palpable. In case it is just ghosts. In case it someday feels like that town in…

You are still entirely whole, made of all the parts of what you have loved even on the drive back alone in the car, even with your pockets full of lists of what you have lost, even helpless, you are still intact Sometimes there is just a series of hallways and burned…

We were not dating, you were not my boyfriend, we were beyond those sorts of commitments, we were so woke, we could transcend all those prickly, binding words. Our generation does not like definitions, we do not like to be restrained, you were not my boyfriend. We were not dating. …

I am harboring pieces of him like fugitives, stuck here, a cluster of cells and soul, and this ghost does not want to go. Inside my body it is a collection of memories, too. We made this in the dark or in the morning, he and I, each time with…

Rock bottom for a woman is sobbing in your friend’s arms, asking How did I get like this? I am so smart, I am so smart, how did I get like this when I am so smart? and no amount of reckoning can make you think it was not your fault because you are smart You were supposed to be better by now…