The first time I smoked crack was an accident. I was 20 years old, living with my mom in an unremarkable eight-story building in the suburbs. We lived on the seventh floor, and Carmen lived on five. She had just turned 40, and she was short, energetic and sexy. At least, she was sexy to 20-year-old me. Today, I’d see her low-cut tops and long fingernails as tacky, but at the time, I couldn’t see past her big boobs. When […]
The furniture store is both overwhelming and fun. We’re walking around the perimeter, sitting on couches, and testing out dining chairs. We’ve moved into our fourth apartment together and it feels like we’ve arrived. Maybe it’s that we are officially out of the city. Evanston might only be a CTA ride away, but there is something distinctly suburban about it. He’s going to work from home. I have a new job at Northwestern. Our cats love to run up and down the […]
“You’re so cute! You’re like a baby seal covered in oil.” My roommate said this to me as I washed a zip lock bag in our sink and explained how we should reuse plastic products. His words shocked me. The image of an oil slick seal cub with my crying face came to mind. I liked being called cute, but I did not like being compared to a helpless baby animal. To my roommate, a seal and the word “cute” […]
I walked through the screen door and by instinct I searched for a copper basin of holy water to genuflect. My grandparents’ house can easily be mistaken for the gift shop at St. Peter’s pearly gates. Every space in the house was occupied by a ceramic replica of a saint or a life size crucifix. Jesus Christ, Mary, Joseph; all the angels and saints glared down at me as I walked through the holy halls. A Sunday morning after church […]
My college boyfriend still insists that the day he met me, I was wearing a pair of overalls. The fact that I have never actually owned any overalls does not make this an implausible memory. Truth is, I was exactly the kind of girl who would wear such a thing – if, that is, I wasn’t already wearing a burlap sack, a dropcloth, or a muumuu. What I had a hard time believing, as I stood just outside our Art […]
Moaning is your last resort. The trick with a good pay-per-minute phone sex call is not to make the caller cum, but to keep him on the phone for as long as possible. It’s what the dispatcher taught me during my only phone sex training session You moan and the call is as good as over: he’s going to cum. “Hi, this is Violet, who’s this?” “John.” “Where are you calling from, John?” The Johns would say, “My bedroom…in Arizona.” […]
When I was 28 years old, I had nine children: Geo, Raya, Percy, Lulu, Will, Ariana, Ty, Jase, Caleb. But, if I’m being honest, they weren’t children, or babies, or even fetuses. They were embryos, and they were frozen, but they already felt like our offspring. Have you ever wished for something so much, that the illusion in your mind becomes the truth? That was me—2012—wanting so badly to be pregnant, that I fell in love with our embryos. The […]
I awoke with Dena shaking me. “Kim! Kim! Get up! It’s our stop!” I was still half asleep on my bench seat on an overnight train. We had spent the day before in Frankfurt and then hopped on this overnight train to arrive in Prague the following morning. It was my first time in Europe—backpacking for two months with my friend Dena. I was 22 years old. Fresh out of college. Dena and I were taking this trip because we […]
“Why aren’t you married?” That’s the number one question on a single woman’s hit list. Running close, in second place is: “Why isn’t a woman like you married?” The latter moves to first place if any of the following adjectives modify woman: smart, pretty, and wonderful. “Why isn’t a wonderful woman like you married?” Those complimentary words only underscore the absurdity of your situation. You’re such a catch but still at sea. Over the course of my extensive singlehood—I dated […]
