I am talking to someone I haven’t spoken to in a very long time.
It feels like a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream after weeks of a torturous dried fig and muesli diet.
It is also making me cry, the relief of not having lost, and the image of her scrambling up a snowy tree [...]

There will always be inside me an unquenchable, unkillable, irrepressable, eternally prevailing sparkle of niceness. I know. I have tried and failed so many times to kill it.
This is why I will never be that serious chain smoker I might possibly become if I didn’t encounter with every lighting up the gaping jaws of those [...]

A crisp white cloud, when we breathe out. Winter is here. No one says it quite like that, so bluntly. No one wants to admit we haven’t had a summer, here. I know only because my brother asks for my scarf. How do I look? Do I look okay? He tugs nervously at the zip [...]

I have nerves gnawing at my fingertips, and a pit lying heavy in my stomach. It is there, a pendulous black cloud on the periphery of vision. It is there, but hard to pinpoint.
Always when it gets to the day before, my pendulum mind swings between two extremes, the one ending with a white meringue [...]

Goddamn Thursdays.
Goddamn rain pounding onto attic window at 4AM.
Goddamn couples kissing in glass corridors, snaked around each other, faces frantically meshed together.
Goddamn insufferably immaculate red-haired witches with perfect round breasts, ringlets, answers to all asked questions. The unasked ones also.
Goddamn hunger and body and goddamn not just BEING.

I am named after both a German beer and a German pornstar. The empty bottle stands dusty on the shelf above the washing machine, which is now finely splattered with marble cake mix, the cake I made just so I could lick the spoon. The porn star, Kari by first name, visits the gym every [...]

I have tripped over a piece of information I NEVER EVER meant to find out. I do not want to know it, nor do I ever intend to use it. I found it completely by accident, and now it rattles around my brain like a small hard thing in a large metal safe.
How do I [...]

In the darkest corners of my mind, hanging upside down from money trees, hissed miniature meercats. An elephant flew past at high speed, and executed a crash-landing into the parched, dusty soil. A heatwave struck with timely precision, and at that same precise time little flakey flocks of snow drifted skyward.
A grouchy leprechaun crouched on [...]

I have been poisoned.
By my very own father, my flesh and blood!
It was a cauliflour cheese bake that did it.

This time last year…
College was new and exciting, and every face was that of a possible friend. The ex-boyfriend was there to walk me back to my house in the afternoons. We hung out at our bench in the quad, with the greenhouse behind us and vines creeping over the wooden structure to the right. [...]