The Girls

All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you — the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

Sasha was quiet. Her silence seemed like a kind of love.

My grandmother had told me about getting movie roles — how quickly she was plucked from a group. “That’s the difference,” she’d told me. “All the other girls thought the director was making the choice. But it was really me telling the di

Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose?

I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they’d understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.

I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. My own feelings forming the definition.

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped.

The freedom of being so young that no one expected anything from me.

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love.