Witches Mag, Issue #4: Relationships

WITCHES MAG SEPTEMBER 2020 ISSUE #4

ISSUE #4: RELATIONSHIPS

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CONTENTS 3 Manifesta 5 Rhode Island School for Progressive Education

135 for more information 136 contributors 137 it should be illegal//the end

PART ONE

PART TWO

PAGE 6

PAGE 44

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PAGE 68

PAGE 118 2

Icons designed by Alyssa Dill

MANIFESTA Witches Mag began as a handwritten idea in the back of an old notebook in October of 2018. It was born after 2 am, when my cup of tea had gone cold, my graduate school assignments had been pushed to the far side of my desk, and my thoughts were racing like I was living through a fever dream. I’d spent the week keeping up with the U.S. senate hearing during which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford bravely shared the story of her sexual assault, and then watching Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in spite of Blasey Ford’s testimony. Sick of sulking in my growing disappointment and anger, I felt compelled to do something, to make something that was overtly political and overtly feminist. The results of Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony had proven to me that women’s stories were not valued like men’s were, even in 2018, and I wanted to work to change this. I decided that night that I would begin a publication that centered girls’ and women’s voices.

I scribbled down that Witches Mag would try to create a space for girls and women to discuss sexism and feminism honestly, to write with nuance, to critique our culture, to mess up and teach each other, to admit our hypocrisy, and ultimately, to have our voices, artwork, opinions, stories, and experiences centered, acknowledged, validated, and listened to. With these goals in mind, for each issue of Witches, girls and women are asked to contribute work related to that issue’s theme.

The Witches you’re about to meet understand that feminism is messy, uncomfortable, and difficult. It is both personal and political. It’s about challenging a sexist culture, not just making individual, empowered choices. It recognizes the downfalls of the gender binary. It knows that men are negatively affected by patriarchy as well. It requires an intersectional approach to be effective. It is often exhausting and disheartening, but it is ultimately rooted in optimism. Our work in Witches is meant to reflect these values.

This publication does not claim to be representative of what misogyny feels or looks like to every woman and girl. As a young woman who is very white, mostly straight, and relatively middle class, I recognize that mainstream feminist movements have historically marginalized women of color, working-class women, queer women, and transgender women and that I have a responsibility to make space in these pages for girls and women who are different than me. This is an essential element of my understanding of feminism and it consistently shapes the manifestation of my values in the personal, professional, and academic areas of my life. Witches centers the artwork and experiences of girls and women with the goal of challenging existing systems from angles that are actively anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-classist. The girls 3

and women in this issue are committed to these ethics, and we are aware of our responsibility to continue learning, challenging, advocating, and growing with each issue.

That being said, anyone who identifies as a girl or woman and is interested in sharing work that reflects her experiences within a sexist culture is invited and encouraged to join us.

My greatest hope is that Witches has formed a community in which girls and women share their stories, discover commonalities, and learn from the ways their experiences contradict each other. I hope it’s satisfying its contributors and entertaining its readers. I hope men are reading it, too. I hope it’s teaching someone something along the way. I hope it’s making my parents proud. If nothing else, I know that beginning Witches made the anger I began harboring after the senate hearing feel purposeful and proactive as my fellow Witches and I took concrete action to build a culture that values girls’ and women’s stories more, even on this small scale.

Relationships, the theme of this issue, was chosen during a global pandemic requiring us to remain physically distant from our loved ones, and the effects of this devastation are evident throughout these pages. In this issue, we’ve shared stories about the inimitable relationship between a New Yorker and her hometown, about missing the safety of a partner’s embrace, and about moving back home to quarantine with your father, whose lifestyle you simultaneously reject and envy. But amidst the devastation, there are also moments of joy—like two best friends sharing a perfect moment, a woman eating ramen noodles while her boyfriend does the dishes, and friendships that fit inside tubes of red lipstick. Of course, much of our joy comes from love—from a man who writes letters with his left hand, from someone who nurtures his girlfriend as our country castigates her existence, and from a queer couple that sparks a mini revolution twenty-five times a day. Just as I originally dreamed Witches would, this issue also contains reflections on the complications that come with being a feminist trying to apply her political views to her personal life. This struggle arises when we forget ourselves in our longing for someone else, when we give in to our desire to bake bread and play music on a front porch, and when we miss someone who would love Punk’d with German subtitles.

Kaley, one of our contributors, called this issue an “anthology of love and heartbreak in 2020,” and I can think of no better way to describe it. Due to our growing number of Witches, this issue is organized into four parts embodying different relationship experiences. Though this publication never claims to speak for all girls and women, we are thrilled to speak for ourselves. We hope you will listen, and we hope you will find yourself reflected in these pages, too.

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Witches Mag has always been and will always be an anti-racist publication. For this issue, in an effort to further support the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, Witches Mag has partnered with the Rhode Island School for Progressive Education (RISPE).

RISPE is a Providence-based nonprofit organization working to establish the state’s first and only residency-style graduate school of education. RISPE is specifically committed to transforming teacher education in RI through highquality, culturally-competent, anti-racist teacher training and an explicit focus on instilling a pipeline of teachers of color for the state’s urban public schools.

Research has demonstrated that white students and students of color benefit academically from having teachers of color in the classroom. Nationally, 40% of schools don’t have a single teacher of color. Only 18% of teachers nationwide are people of color. In Rhode Island, the problem is even worse: less than 5% of teachers are people of color and only 2% are Latinx, in a state where students of color make up 40% of the overall student population and 80% in urban schools. RISPE aims to correct this inequity by providing scholarships, stipends, and other support systems for anti-racist educators of color, allowing these teachers to help dismantle structural racism in RI schools, and creating a model for other graduate education programs across the country.

Injustices related to gender, race, social class, and sex intertwine and overlap, and the diverse group of girls and women who make up Witches Mag recognize their responsibilty to girls and women of color, particularly Black girls and women in our local community, to support anti-racist organizations. At the time of publication, the Witches who contributed to this issue donated nearly $200 to support RISPE. Donations went directly toward the cost of tuition or a living stipend for a future RISPE graduate student.

As you read this issue of Witches Mag, we ask that you donate whatever amount you can to support RISPE’s anti-racist work and/or spread word of RISPE to your networks. To donate, learn more about RISPE, and connect with the organization’s directors (Christine, Melanie, and Tori are fierce social justice advocates and contributing Witches themselves), visit rhodeislandspe.com.

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PART ONE 7 Quarantine Cry 15 The Other Girl 18 What Good Is A Promise?

29 A Man Is Not A Plan

19 Take Care

31 Emancipation Thread

20 A Significant Relationship

32 I Shaved My Legs 33 I’m Not Missing Anything

22 What’s In A Name?

23 Biking Abroad

38 Self Love, A Playlist, and the Power to Manifest

24 Hierarchy of Young Women

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Quarantine Cry

By Annie Kemper I’m on the verge of tears when my father asks me to give him a haircut. We walk out to the backyard and the South Carolina sunshine immediately silences us into submission. My dad slides a soft, fading t-shirt around his neck. The kitchen scissors stick together and my left handedness fumbles with a comfortable position. My dad can’t see this, he just sits patiently waiting.

It’s a strange moment, marked by an air of unfamiliarity and a surprising intimacy. Admittedly, I like this new role for myself. I am the one to give my dad this much-needed trim, as I am the woman of the house. I’m also the only other human around.

We’ve formed a sort of alliance since I moved back in. It’s just the two of us as my mother is away for work to pursue her independent dreams right as I decided to flee mine. I feel like his roommate this time around, the first time in five years I’ve lived under his roof for an extended period of time. We are not in my childhood home anymore. It belongs to another family now, and they painted the front door baby blue. They also leave their cars parked in the middle of the front yard, which my mother finds to be incredibly tacky.

My dad’s and my newly defined roles seem to be working for us.

We are becoming the type of roommates who live so seamlessly together it’s like breathing. I do the dishes. He takes out the trash.

Neither of us cook. We text throughout the day about the dog. Has he been walked? Did he eat his breakfast this morning? Is he having diarrhea again?

I have this newfound appreciation for my parents’ kitchen. The chrome oven, the flawless tile countertops, the Mrs. Meyers’ products under the sink. I feel so giddy walking into this foreign space 7

equipped with all the proper, shiny gadgets. Who have I become?

Perhaps the novelty just hasn't worn off, and I prefer to do the dishes in a clean house with fresh sponges and a spotless sink. My sink, the one I fled weeks ago, was constantly littered with the remnants of jarred tomato sauce and dead cockroaches.

Coming home has done something sinister to me. The lure of domestication is around every corner. For the first time I understand the appeal of these lives I observe from afar on my daily strolls.

I woke up crying today, which hasn’t happened to me in months.

Alligators were chasing me in my dreams. They had TV remotes attached to their collars, like a dog’s name tag. The very same remote that’s been glued to the palm of my hand these last weeks. I won’t let myself think about how many weeks, exactly. Too many. However, it was the end of my dream that caused the waterworks, not the Rokusponsored reptiles.

I was back in Austin and speaking to my old boss from the cafe.

He was dressed in a suit and tie, so my guess is we were at a funeral.

I’m a dark person, okay?

Wrapping my arms around him in an unwarranted hug, I folded myself into his middle while I started to cry. Another definitive check mark that this was, indeed, a dream. I attempted to hug him only once before in real life. I was going back to the East Coast for Christmas.

He is unfortunately one of those people who says things like, “I am deeply uncomfortable right now,” mid hug.

Then I woke up. I felt an actual swell of emotion climb up my throat, itching for escape. I thought this occurrence was a mere expression, but turns out it’s an actual physical feeling that can occur from some twisted nostalgia dream.

I texted him later that morning. I teased him for his most recent Instagram post, which was obviously really me wanting to tell him about my dream. Kind of like when you text a guy about the TV show 8

you aren’t really watching with hopes to activate his brain into thinking about you. Ah, yes! This girl! She’s been here all along! I will now love and adore her.

(This is how the male mind works, yes?)

At the cafe, the entire staff would constantly zip into and out of his tiny office where we kept boxes upon boxes of oat milk. The only way to get to the employee bathroom was to squeeze back and forth behind his chair all day. He never brushed the back of his hair.

The lack of male attention brought on by an international crisis resulting in mass isolation isn’t affecting me at all by the way, thanks for asking. And it’s most certainly not causing me to reach out to men from my past.

“Can I tell you something embarrassing? It’s about you.”

He immediately replied, “Sure.”

I relayed my dream to him.

“That’s not embarrassing. It’s just really sad.”

I think about him as I look down at the perfectly round bald spot on the crown of my father’s head. I begin to slice and chop in a professional manner that shocks me, like the ability to cut hair is somehow in my DNA. “I’m pretty good at this.”

“Well, it’s not rocket science,” he replies.

Below our feet are a few stray cigarette butts, the evidence of my nightly pandemic cigarette. (If you know, you know.) If my dad notices them, he chooses not to say anything. As every father would disapprove of his daughter smoking, he does as well. But, him being him, it’s easier to pretend like it’s not happening than to confront me.

It must be strange for him to have his twenty-five-year-old child living in his house again. The few times I do venture out to see an old friend in an attempt to briefly forget the precarious state of things using alcohol, there is no text at midnight asking me where I am.

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There is no dad asleep on the couch with the TV left blaring, waiting for me to come home. From the age of fifteen on, he would send me the same text every time I went out. “No drinkin and drivin.” I miss those texts.

When I was in middle school, my older, much cooler cousins would come stay with me when my parents were out of town. I worshipped them and their oversized, buttery soft sorority t-shirts.

They always seemed to be cold. They gave me brief glimpses into what it was to be a proper woman to my very young eyes. In reality, they were like nineteen and perpetually hungover. After slamming into these precarious years, treading water there, and quite anxious to leave them, I don’t think this age should be considered adulthood at all.

These cousins were once reprimanded for smoking cigarettes while standing up at a fraternity mixer. Their character was questioned and they received arbitrary warnings because they had broken the rules. What rules, you might ask? You know, the rules.

Women must smoke cigarettes sitting down, preferably with their legs crossed. To smoke standing up is common, tacky, and masculine.

The land I come from! The land I find myself inhabiting once again. The land where the door is opened for me wherever I go.

Chairs are pulled out for me at restaurants. Men of a certain age stand up when I leave the table, or even the room. I return home, and I leave my suitcase in the car because I know my dad or my brothers will bring it in for me. The land of “Yes, mams” and “No mams.”

Besides the blatantly sexist cigarette etiquette, I could argue some of these things are good old fashioned manners, and manners are charming and never hurt anyone. They even get you laid sometimes. I could also argue these things are a direct offense to women, and these practices predate us back to the days where our sole purpose was to bear children and make sweet tea.

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To be perfectly honest, I lean towards the first. What kind of feminist does that make me? I love it when a guy opens the door for me, bonus points if they are my age. Sure, go ahead and stand there while I walk through this door before you.

One of my favorite days at the cafe was when I drove to work with a flat tire, of which I was completely unaware. My boss, with his unkempt hair and all, told me to clock out and follow him. He showed me how to change a tire as I attempted to navigate my body in a way that would allow me to sit criss cross applesauce on the scorching black asphalt in a denim skirt. He pulled out the spare wheel from the bowels of my CRV. “I will remember this forever,” I said. He told me to pay attention.

Not even a month later, I actually noticed my flat tire before I got into the car. Progress! My hair was still damp from the shower, and I called the boy I was currently kissing because I knew he would come.

I watched him as he changed it in less than five minutes, a cigarette dangling from his lips the entire time. It was fucking hot. What kind of feminist does this make me?

My therapist and I stare at each other through our screens. Well, she stares at me as I focus on adjusting my computer just right so she won’t have to endure the steep downward slope of my tits. She really is quite good at just sitting in silence, soaking up my discomfort, harnessing it for her life’s energy. Maybe this is why her skin is always glowing.

“Is it strange we don’t talk about it?” I asked.

“You mean the virus?”

“Why am I so concerned about this bullshit thing that happened with a guy a year ago? Shouldn’t I be hysterical about what’s happening? Shouldn’t I be afraid of getting my parents sick?

Shouldn’t I be mourning the loss of my grandfather?”

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“Our brains won’t allow us to process trauma while it’s happening. It’s a form of protection.”

“So no one in your sessions is talking about it?”

She smiles the way she always does when she knows that I know she can’t answer my question.

I allow my hair to settle into a constant state of greasiness. The attempt to run a comb through it every few days leaves me irritated and exhausted, like when I finish yet another Zoom yoga class that paused and glitched for 50 minutes.

This is not so much a “too depressed to lift my arms in the shower” kind of greasy, but more of a “back to basics” greasiness.

Curiosity is just another thing to feel during this time. A brief respite from the heavy cocktail of anxiety, boredom, and horniness that seems to have burrowed and nestled into my body.

When I do wash my hair, I savor the clean smell of the dripping wet ends. I leave the conditioner in for the full five minutes, and allow my hair to soak up the moisture. It always seems to want more. I take the time to do this, but I still can’t seem to take the time to shave my legs. Perhaps this is a tiny form of rebellion to battle the luring influence of my hometown. I order a pair of black denim shorts that look real nice on the size two model online. They like to get lost in between my thighs, and I’ve found myself reaching for them before the impromptu dog walks and coffee runs that now fill my days.

My legs are merely a micro attack, aimed at anyone and everyone who has wronged me in the past. I dare them to look at these legs. And then, to maybe look even closer at these wispy strawberry blonde hairs that whisper fuck off. I think I’ll stretch these long, pale things out on my black metal patio table for all to see. I’ll keep them there until the diamond design indents my skin, until I’m ready to move them. Also, that giant chip on my shoulder is probably preventing me from getting up.

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What’s this type of feminist called? The type who doesn’t think twice about the hair on her legs, but draws the line for herself at armpit hair? The type who can write an empowering paragraph but also be self-aware enough to know it might be bullshit? I don’t subscribe to the notion that my legs have to be immaculately shaved at all times to illustrate my beauty, grace, and overall “togetherness.”

However, I also have an actual subscription to that instagrammy razor brand.

The haircut is finished.

“All done. Do you want me to take a picture of the back?” I ask as my dad stands up and winces, patting his bad hip.

“Nope. I trust you. Dad has a tee time.”

He walks back into the house as I flap the t-shirt against the breeze, releasing my father’s gray hairs.

“Okay. What do you want to do for dinner?”

Another quarantine dream: I’m at the same beach where I spent my childhood summers. The houses are connected by slim and winding docks, sagging with age and rot. I swim under these wooden planks in dirty brown water, right up to the edge of the porches. I observe the different stages of familiar gatherings playing out before me. I look up and these huge red blimps are covering the sky, bathing this world in an eerie, orangey glow. The blimps tower over me, their size increasing as they get closer, falling slowly towards the water, eager to trap me beneath their weight. I dive under and watch through the moving surface as they finally land and settle.

I manage to save myself and my phone. Even in my dreams, my beloved smartphone is by my side, like the cute capitalist that I am.

Only the iPhone can Inception its way into my dreams with the ease of Leo hand picking his next 22-year-old girlfriend.

It’s no surprise I’m dreaming about being stuck in my home state 13

forever. Some days this truly is a nightmare. Some days it's not. There is an innate comfort in family being a stone’s throw away. I used to think it was a sign of weakness to remain close to the ones who love you the most. What kind of woman silently judges others because they have made different choices than she has? Eh, a real one. We all do it.

This setting destroys me. It destroys me while maintaining its shell of beauty and calm, mixed with sweetness and grease. Unless this place chooses to catch up in all things, I can never return for more than a few days at a time. Even in a national emergency, the status quo remains, stubborn as ever, just like its people.

How can I feel this, but at the same time come to better understand this life my father has chosen? This battle in my head scares me more than a virus. My brain can no longer protect itself from these potentially life altering thoughts due to the sheer amount of time presented before me with no end in sight. These driftless and leisurely walks reflect the days playing out before me. What I want is changing and morphing.

In high school, I remember wishing and longing for my twenties to resemble, at the very least, a middling episode of a half hour dramedy on HBO. I simply could not wait to live in a city with a terrible public transportation system. I was so excited to agonize over vague texts from boys. As it turns out, both of these things can make you cry.

What is the word that means to actively long for male attention and comfort, but at the same time reject every perceived notion of what a woman “should” want? How does one describe feeling both innate comfort and imposter syndrome in the comfort of home? What kind of feminist loves it when a guy holds a door open for her, but not in an annoying Boomer kind of way?

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The Other Girl

By H.S.

Never in my life did I think that I would be The Other Girl. After all, The Other Girl was a title reserved for the kind of person that winds up on Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. How could someone like me—a straight-A student whose worst offense growing up was skipping school the day the bus never showed up due to a blizzard—ever allow myself to be someone’s side chick?

How could I, a feminist attending a women’s college, ever succumb to being The Other Girl? And yet, I’ll always be thankful for that time. Allow me to back up here for a minute.

Spain, 2008. I am living and studying abroad in Spain, alongside twentyfive or so other students from my university, a handful of whom I’m already friends with prior to leaving. As was our usual weekend routine, we all got dressed up in our most club-ready attire (read: not much left to the imagination) and headed out to the local bar/club hosting an Erasmus night, AKA a dance party where every other study abroad student would be, along with locals looking to get in on the action.

In week three of my program, that’s where I met Boyfriend. He was not a Spaniard, but had been living there for the last five years after fleeing from his native Venezuela. The attraction was instant; the chemistry palpable. He didn’t speak any English and my Spanish was barely at a conversational level, but body language did all the talking for us. Before I knew it, we began dating and I became That Girl. You know, the girl with a study abroad boyfriend.

My friends and I had talked about it prior to leaving for Spain. What if we meet someone there? What if we fall in love while we are abroad? What if we fall so deeply in love that we stay abroad and get married? (As if that is the only thing to look forward to when being abroad!)

Other girls in my program fawned over our relationship. I would be lying if I said a part of me didn’t feed off of that jealousy. Out of all the girls in the program, I was That Girl. I was the girl who was being wined and dined at all the best local restaurants, NOT the ones listed in touristy guidebooks. I was the girl being whisked away on the weekend for brief-yet-romantic getaways to beautiful beach-front locales. I was the only girl whom a local thought worthy enough to date versus just use for a one-night stand. As someone who dealt with major insecurity for much of her life up until that point, this was a huge boost to my confidence.

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That is, until it all came crashing down.

I remember the evening Boyfriend sat me down to talk to me about a female friend who was coming to visit him from Finland. She thinks you’re my English tutor, he said. Confused, I asked, Why would you tell her that? He continued, Well, amor, she is my girlfriend. She wants to meet you. I need you to please go along with it. She’s only here for a few days and then when she leaves we can continue.

And so I did. Admittedly, I was so blinded by Boyfriend’s affection for me that I did not even think twice about what he was telling me. When Girlfriend came, not only did I meet her, but I actually extended an invitation for us to hang out together without Boyfriend’s company, to which she cheerfully agreed (and yes, Boyfriend nearly shit a brick about the invite). I needed to see who she was. I needed to see how she was better than me. What were her weaknesses and how could I use those to my advantage? I desperately needed Boyfriend to see that I was clearly the better pick so that he could break it off with her and we could live happily ever after.

Jeezus. How fucked up is that?!

Looking back at the situation, it’s easy to see that I had let my insecurity get the best of me. Not only was I entering slight sociopathic territory, but I was losing myself in the process. On the surface I despised Girlfriend. How could I not?! She was in the way of my own relationship with Boyfriend, and thus she was in the way of my happiness. Deep down, however, I started to understand why Boyfriend was in a relationship with her. She was smart, kind, and beautiful.

And wouldn’t you know it, she was also the bigger and better person.

Inevitably, the secret got out about Boyfriend’s and my romantic affair. After days of non-stop nasty calls to each other, she finally texts me: I’m getting really tired of all this. What Boyfriend did was super hurtful to me. I don’t deserve that. What she said next made me burst out into tears. You don’t deserve that either. I’m taking a break from Boyfriend to really process things. I realize that you may continue with him romantically, but please think about what he has done to you, too.

Wait, what?

I had to read it a few times to make sure I was reading it right. Holy shit.

Girlfriend was absolutely right.

The following weeks sent me down a deep spiral. I thought about the 16

night that Boyfriend took me out dancing and whispered in my ear, te amo— the deepest kind of love you can express in Spanish. But did Boyfriend ever even love me? Our whole relationship felt like a sham. I needed closure so badly, but I realized I wasn’t going to get it in this case. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was Girlfriend’s message: think about what he has done to you, too.

It hit me hard when I took a step back and saw that Girlfriend made a conscious decision to stop hating me and instead chose to treat me with compassion and kindness. Yes, I did some really messed up things and yes, I said words to her that I can never take back…but I was in pain and lashing out the only way I knew how to at the time.

In order to make sure that I would never fall into this position again, I had to learn how to put myself first. This meant learning how to gain confidence in myself and know my worth. I had to respect myself enough to know that a Real Boyfriend would never put you in this situation. A Real Boyfriend wouldn’t ask you to play along as just a friend while his Real Girlfriend is in town. No sir, fuck that.

Fortunately for me, the strength and example of Girlfriend choosing to not only lift herself up and out of a toxic relationship, but to have the grace and kindness to nudge me along the same path, was a deeply profound moment for me.

Somehow, throughout that entirely shitty ordeal, Girlfriend had enough compassion to think of me as a whole person, and not just The Other Girl. She was leaving me the blueprint to treat myself with compassion, kindness, and respect.

And for that, I’m forever Photo contributed by thankful.

Naomi Pajarillo

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WHAT GOOD IS A PROMISE?

by Mel Andrel

This illustration is an ode to the promises we make with ourselves—an ode to loving ourselves + self-care 18

TAKE CARE caring is weakness. it smells like schoolyard gravel stirred up into dust as the bell sounds, carrying indentations—recess leftovers— home on your hands & knees and in your backpack on the bus back the caring is weakness. following morning as it’s a personal shortcoming, I’ve been occasion-less gifts of friendship. told—the Cool Girl’s antithesis; a feeding thrown to the wolves; emotional taxidermy that can’t be sold because who would buy what they can get for free? there is no market for this, caring is weakness.

caring is weakness, especially when it’s on display in all of its grandeur, sung out at high volumes and danced through the streets with extensive choreographed costume changes to give away your heart in public, but it is who I am to give leaving one’s own mangled body without expecting in return collapsed to bleed out after the act. and that is strength—leather hide stuffed with softness, the endless well sculpted and watered by how I am compelled towards my same, fulfilling more than any projection of reciprocal burden; taken, internalized; breath/less breath.

By Megan LaPierre 19

A Significant Relationship

by Morgan I was chopping vegetables for dinner when my father s phone went off. I am a snoop by nature, so I glanced over without a second thought. It was a daily reminder for him and my Mom to pray for me. Under the reminder was a phrase: Pray for Morgan to have a significant relationship in her lifetime. My knife froze midair. I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to 3 as if I was looking at an optical illusion and could look again and see two rabbits instead of a vase. I peeked again and there it was. Pray for Morgan to have a significant relationship in her lifetime. A peach pit lump formed in my throat and I immediately resumed chopping, the words significant relationship bouncing around in my head.

I m not surprised that my parents are going to Jesus on my behalf. Part of growing up in a religious, southern family is that they pray for you.

More specifically, they pray for things on your behalf, things they want for you or things they think you re lacking. I am 28 years old and I have never been in any sort of serious, romantic relationship. In religious, southern culture that makes me an old maid.

It s not that I ve never had romantic feelings for anyone. In high school I liked a boy who sent me Smiths lyrics and kissed me on the roof of a parking garage. Later he would tell me he saw us together long term but not right now. At the time, I found it tragic; looking back it makes me laugh. In college I liked a man who loved to hold me while he slept and told me I changed the way he viewed women but didn t want to date me. My 20s have been a handful of first dates. Some have been great (making out at a wine bar until my legs trembled), some have been terrible (I ve blocked his phone number 4 times), but most have been exceedingly mediocre.

I guess it doesn t help that my younger sister got married last year. I was thrilled for her and will forever treasure the memory of her walking down the aisle toward her husband, who was sobbing at the sight of her, exactly as she d always dreamt he would when we were girls. I also carry 20

some less treasured memories of well-meaning church ladies patting my arm at the reception and saying, Your time will come.

Will it? Will my time come? For a long time, that question was a heartbeat right under the surface of my skin.

Once I read a cheesy romance novel where someone told the beautiful, doe-eyed heroine that some people are single for a season and some people are single for a reason. As if some people have a fatal flaw that makes them inherently harder to love. I spent a lot of time (and still do, if I m going to be brutally honest) contemplating which flaw is my fatal flaw.

I texted my best friend to tell her about the significant relationship discovery. Kel is one of my favorite people on the planet, and my complete opposite in most ways. She is self-assured, confident, and unafraid. When we were younger, Kel thought every boy she met had a crush on her (she was usually right̶she s a fucking babe). Her response, in typical Kel fashion, grounded me and made me laugh: significant relationship? She wrote, What am I, chopped liver?!?

Unsurprisingly, she s right. I have significant relationships. I have friends who see me and know me and love me. Friends who make me laugh and challenge me. Friends who send me little gifts in the mail cause they saw something and thought of me. Friends who trust me and feed me and worry about my credit score.

I also have myself, someone I am prone to overlook. I take care of me. I comfort me when I cry. I give me mind blowing orgasms. I work hard to support my dreams. I assemble my own Ikea couch even when the instructions clearly state that two people are required.

So. To go back to the church ladies: will my time come? I don t know. But I do know that my parents prayers have been answered.

I am the significant relationship of my lifetime.

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What’s In A Name?

By Sam Supsky In high school sports they yell, “Supsky, get down the field!” Every roster from kindergarten through college reads Supsky, Samantha J. I remove “Supsky” from my Facebook profile in hopes potential employers don’t find my albums filled with Picnic-edited photos from 7th grade. Samantha Julia could be anyone, but there’s literally only one Samantha Supsky. Go ahead, check.

A unique and, in my case, downright silly last name rarely goes unnoticed. It’s the root of all your best nicknames, when people hear it for the first time they chuckle, and no one can ever tell if you’re Russian or Polish. And people remember it forever.

But then I meet a boy. The best boy I’ve ever met. And he’s kind and he’s brilliant and he’s often a better feminist than me. OH! And he’s hot. Like, very good looking. Tinder miracles happen!

Just when I think life can’t get any better, he wants to marry me. I say yes of course and accept the pretty ring and then people ask me, “Are you going to change your name?”

I knew this day would come and yet I don’t have an answer, just a lot more questions. Does 25 years of fun nicknames and strangers’ pleasant commentary justify not having my last name match my partner’s? Will my commitment to him be questioned if I don’t take his name? Do these well-meaning people kind of suck for even mentioning it? Should my partner take my name because it’s infinitely cooler than his? Am I putting too much pressure on my last name by using it as representation for my overall identity? Am I overthinking this?

Yes. I could end this by saying, “Who cares what other people think! I’m 22

going to keep my name because I want to and fuck the patriarchal society that asks me to change in the first place!” But the truth is that I care SO MUCH what other people think—a fact about me worth exploring in a different issue of Witches. However, it is always worth mentioning that our patriarchal society sucks.

Ultimately, I’m going to be a good wife. I’m already a good person, mostly. Finding and nurturing true, requited love is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Can I maintain this accomplishment regardless of the name that's written on a roster? Yes. Will I ever make a decision? I have to at some point, right?

My time living abroad has often been lonesome. But it’s also been a time of self-discovery. My bike was my first real companion navigating my new place, considering my new life, and discovering my new self within that wicked mix.

By Cara Donovan

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Hierarchy

of Young Women

I will turn 27 in just a few weeks. That means I’ve had deliberate practice of being a Twenty-Something™ for more than 60,000 hours. Based on Malcolm Gladwell’s definition, that means I am an expert. As an expert Twenty-Something™, I certainly have not discovered the key to life (what even is that?), but I have discovered some not-so-secret truths that have significantly changed my life: drink water, moisturize, move your body, and meal prep, to name a few. I also learned some heartbreaking ways of the world: not all friends are forever, hardships are inevitable, and boundaries are hard to set and even harder to enforce.

Of course, those things are not exclusive to the Twenty-Something™ woman.

However, there is a heartbreaking way of the world that is exclusive to the Twenty-Something™. It is a secret structure that is so ingrained into our minds as young girls, but you don’t realize it until you are in the thick of it: The Hierarchy of Young Women. It goes as follows: 1. Women in committed relationships with children 2. Women in non-committed relationships with children 3. Pregnant women 4. Engaged women 5. Women in committed relationships 6. .

7. .

8. .

9. .

10. .

11. .

12. …….

10,000. financially stable, independent women, who own their own homes and have no relationship prospects

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I think it is VERY important that I preface the rest of this by saying I KNOW that I come from a particular place of cis white privilege and this hierarchy is far more nuanced than I’ve simplified, but I can only speak my own truth.

Somewhere along the way, in my experience, I learned that it does not matter what you accomplish, the true marker of success is a relationship and better yet, a family. The devastating part is that it does not matter how much I know in my heart and in my soul that this is untrue, it still feels so true by the way it manifests in most aspects of my life.

Where did this idea come from and how did it become so evident in my Twenty-Something™ life? Yeesh. You don’t have enough time or the appropriate credentials to hear me talk about my life. The short version: I grew up like most middle-class suburban white girls. Therefore, it was inevitable that along the way I would learn to idolize a relationship. This is problematic, clearly. Even more problematic, I didn’t notice it was a problem because it felt so normal. I love watching chick flicks and reading Nicholas Sparks and dreamed of the most perfect meet-cute I would have with my future husband on a beach in North Carolina. In high school most of my friend group didn’t date. In college, my roommates and I spent Friday and Saturday nights in our PJs watching A Cinderella Story, Pitch Perfect, and 27 Dresses. Then I moved away for grad school and didn’t have any friends to compare myself to. All of a sudden, within the year I left for grad school, everyone was dating and in serious relationships. Flash forward to today, five years later, THREE (out of about twenty) of my closest friends from high school and college are NOT in serious relationships. Many are married or engaged, the rest live with their boyfriends, and several have kids. As my friendships grew beyond college, this tier of relationship-having women continued to grow as well.

I am so happy for them. I love my friends with my whole heart and seeing them so happy warms me to my core. But that doesn’t take away the feeling of “What about me?”

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This doesn’t come from a place of bitterness. (Ok, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was sometimes bitter when my friends complain about living with their S/O while I have to literally do every single chore in my house.) But mostly the feeling is, when did I miss the boat? How did everyone end up in a relationship while I’m sitting on my couch watching New Girl alone on a Friday night? Even worse, why does it bother me so much?

This is something I went to therapy for last year. My therapist’s advice: “Well, just go on a date.” I stopped going to therapy because that’s not the point. I don’t want to fill this imaginary void in my life. My life is already so full of wonderful things that bring me joy. I have a job I am passionate about, I take dance classes, I teach fitness classes, I am an active member of my church, and I’m training for a half marathon. I am thriving. I love my life. I love that I can make plans without saying, “I need to check with my boyfriend.” But…

By now you are probably thinking, “iS tHIS gIRL rEALLY cOMPLAING aBOUT bEING sINGLE iN hER 20’S aND aLSO bRAGGING aBOUT tHE sTUFF sHE’S dOING?!?” Dude, that’s the point. My life is so full, and I am achieving so many amazing things. But I am ashamed to share that with others. I am ashamed to share because of what that implies to the people around me and how my life feels overlooked and invalid because I am single.

Nothing else matters. I am incomplete without another person. Remember the hierarchy?

Suppose we are setting our schedule for fitness classes or volunteering at church. I am almost always the one who has to take undesired times because I have no obligations. I have zero input into family holiday gatherings because “it’s just me.” I bought a home when I was 25 and friends still haven’t come to visit, even though I flipped my whole schedule around to attend their weddings. Just last week, I had a contractor come to give an estimate on a project, and he made three comments about the family he thought I should have. Don’t even get me started on the echoes of my 26

therapist that I’ve received from friends and family: why don’t you just date?

You’re sOooOOoOO lucky to be single and do whatever you want.

The hierarchy is not malicious on purpose, or is it? This devaluing of otherwise successful single women of all ages is not an accident. It’s patriarchy trying to keep us in place as mothers/caretakers rather than agents and active members of society. And it surely tricked me for a good part of my Twenty-Something™ years to believe I needed to live in limbo while I floundered in pursuing my dreams. I hit so many milestones and marks but the thought of “you are nothing until you are at the top of THIS list” perpetuated in my life. It doesn’t matter how much I know it to be true that my worth is not tied to a relationship. How much I know that my life is not on hold while I wait around for marriage. The pedestal of the end game of marriage and children has been built so sturdily in my foundation. To further twist my struggle, I was taught to be independent, to not rely on anyone, and that a career with stable finances or achieving new personal records are important markers of success. These philosophies are in clear, constant opposition. Guilt and shame sneak in as I fantasize about how my life will look when I am a mother. Bitterness sinks into the pit of my stomach when I feel unappreciated and undervalued despite my contributions. It all mixes together and boils over into a life of avoidance without roots.

There is no resolve here. As a Twenty-Something™ expert, I know there is no magic cure to balancing being content in your independence while simultaneously desiring a healthy relationship. There is nothing that heals the feeling of being patronized, pitied, and praised, all at the same time, while never quite passing the imaginary line of where I think I should be.

What I can advise is singing anything by Hilary Duff at full volume is a good bandaid.

By KMV

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Photo contributed by Pheebz

Photo contributed by Fallon Wilson 28

A MAN IS NOT A PLAN I grew up with a bold sticker on my fridge that became an infamous quote among my high school girlfriends. It read, “A MAN IS NOT A PLAN.” After my parents’ divorce in 2003, my mother taught my sister and me that our futures shouldn’t be dependent on men.

A feminist sticker. A sticker with good intentions. However, it wouldn’t be very feminist for me not to challenge this message.

When I graduated from college, I wanted to move in with my boyfriend of roughly 3.5 years. I was 22. Not only did I want to move in with him, I also wanted to live with him across the country in a city I’d never lived in before.

The message I was taught resulted in my believing I couldn’t take that step in my relationship because I had to be an “independent woman.” It was exhausting and stressful that my beliefs didn’t line up with what I wanted. I received the same notion of judgment from family. “You need to live on your own, first,” they said.

They had a point. I will never be able to go back in time and have the experience of living on my own at 22. They will also never have the experience I did when I moved to Los Angeles from New York at 22 with my boyfriend and $3,000.

The idea that I almost didn’t have that experience because I was told what to do in order to be an independent woman under the idea of what other people believed an independent woman is devastates me. This framework is just another way to monitor, groom, and mold women.

Who says I can’t be independent, responsible, and in a relationship?

Why was my judgment on a situation completely dismissed because of others’ negative relationship experiences? Because if I live with a 29

man I can’t possibly be taking care of myself or learning, right? I would only be serving him?

I moved in with my boyfriend of 3.5 years to a small studio apartment at 22. I don’t have a single regret about it and we still live together now, 3 years later after many different living situations since then. Not to say that if we broke up it wouldn’t have been worth it, because it still would have been. Maybe it’s because I believe everything happens for a reason.

The message became convoluted along the way to mean “be an independent woman but only on my terms” instead of “be your own person no matter what.” I agree depending on a partner or finding a man shouldn’t be my full life plan, but who am I to say that’s not for somebody else? I also believe everybody’s interpretation of being an independent woman is entirely up to them, and I don’t think being in a relationship minimizes a woman’s ability to be her own person. Not to mention the immense amount of heteronormativity the message projects, but I’m not the right person to speak to that topic in my personal experience.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about eloping recently. It’s exhausting trying to live up to other people’s expectations and the idea that a day that’s supposed to be dedicated to celebrating the love between two people ends up being a day catering to the expectations of others is even more fucking exhausting to think about, and I’m not even engaged or getting married soon.

TL;DR—Don’t let other people tell you how to live. This life is 100% yours, and only you get to decide how you live it.

Anonymous

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Emancipation Thread

By Sonja Czekalski Emancipation Thread depicts the relationship between a woman’s body, craft, and story.

The quilt illustrates the complex narrative of a woman’s life, paying homage to the traditionally feminine craft and nude female poses while liberating the nude from the male gaze and the threads from their expected borders. The women in the prints are taken from their objectified portraits, the images of “woman” on the internet that dominate the mainstream media and are embedded back into the fabric of their traditional ancestry. The women are then liberated through unconventional ways of quilting, embroidery, and collage.

Free from a stereotype, from a tradition, and from the male gaze. Reclaimed in their own body, craft, voices, choices, and stories, the figures are able to unapologetically tell their authentic narrative inscribed in the back of the quilt.

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The poem inscribed in the Emancipation Thread reads as follows:

I Shaved My Legs When I was 10 I shaved my legs. I wanted to shave off all the skin.

The skin from that day.

The way he looked at me.

I was 5 when he asked me to marry him.

When I was 15 I slit my wrists. I wanted to release all the body inside me.

Free what was innocent from his touch.

Release it from my poisoned shell.

When I was 20 I wore a belly shirt. A mini skirt. I wanted him to look at me.

Look at what I could be.

Convince me that I am worthy.

When I was 25 I shaved my legs.

I wore glitter on my dress.

Thorns around my neck.

And dirt under my nails.

SONJA CZEKALSKI

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I’m Not Missing Anything

By Elsa Wilson-Cruz Once I was at a party and a woman I barely knew came up to me and asked “How are you?” and then in the same breath said, “You’re missing one of these!”

She held up her baby, Simba-style.

What was I supposed to do? Bow down in worship like a zebra from The Lion King? Thank her for the observation? Agree with her out of politeness? Say, “Oh, you’re right, I am missing a baby!”

She smiled as she nodded to my empty body—to my womb that wasn’t growing another human. To my arms that weren’t holding a child, just the food I grabbed to nourish (only) myself. I ended up just staring at her, holding my plate of food with both hands until she moved on to another guest.

Here’s what I wish I had said: I’m not missing anything. I am complete.

She was equating my “status” as a mother or non-mother with my completeness as a woman, maybe even as a human. She acted as if not being a mother was an “anti,” a “non,” a lack, an inferior role that needed a promotion. And that made me angry and confused. Not because I think no one should have babies, but because having babies isn’t connected to our completeness as women.

I believe women can be complete in whatever relationships they are in —whether it’s a relationship with a partner, or with a child, or another kind of relationship. And women can be complete because of— not in spite of—the relationships that they do not choose. As a feminist, I don’t believe there is a “level” we need to reach to be a complete woman.

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I have experienced several similar situations where almost the exact same phrasing was used by different people—and the word “missing” was always the most hurtful and aggravating part.

I am married—not because I need a man but because I happen to really want one of the men I found. It’s become normal for people (usually parents themselves) to imply or just outright say that my husband and I “need” children. I get frustrated when people use (or imply) the word “need,” but “missing” stings even deeper. “Missing” seems to conjure up images of gaping empty spots—puzzles whose solutions got lost under the couch. Or an amputated limb. Or a glaring error in a book where pages containing the best part of the story never got printed.

“Need” is easier to forgive somehow. I tell people they “need” to see this movie or they “need” to visit this place. It seems more apt to describe something that would benefit your life. Like, “Oh, you love art? You need to see this exhibition.”

Of course, I don’t need children. But I can almost understand why people who like having children would think I needed them too.

Almost.

But missing? Rather than a proposed addition, “missing” feels like condemned negative space.

In addition to the glaring word choice of “missing,” the other thing that struck me about my experience at this party was the way she nodded towards my stomach—as if noting the lack of something she thought should be there. It’s funny how no one is ever happy with your body. If you’re not pregnant, people say, “You will look so cute with a baby bump” (has that only happened to me?). If you’re not pregnant and you have stomach fat then you have “no excuse.” If you’re big you should be small. If you’re flat you should be round. If you’re “empty” you should be filled. There’s no way to win. And as my friends who are parents note, if you have one kid people say you should have more.

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“Missing something” implies being unfinished, like when you taste a dish that still needs to be seasoned. Hollow. Passive. Inactive. “Need” at least feels like momentum, activity, movement. Missing is just stagnant.

You could argue that the words mean almost the same thing. But to me, need implies an addition and missing an absence. At least that’s how I feel when the words are thrown at me. I don’t like either, but somehow missing is worse.

My dog is missing. The missing piece. I missed my flight. A missed connection. You missed your chance.

But language aside, I don’t need a child and I’m not missing a child.

I am whole.

That’s what I wish I could have said.

As I thought about this event and practiced the tension of trying to validate the woman while also thinking about how I would like to have been validated, I realized I was thinking about feminism. I wasn’t just thinking about validation for her or me, but for all women.

This is not about not having kids. It’s about having kids because you want to or not having them because you don’t want to. Feminism is the freedom to choose. Being a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t be happy in a relationship with a man or shouldn’t desire children. For me, feminism means that there aren’t prewritten relationship goals and checkboxes that make women mean something or worth something.

Feminism means women get to choose which relationships they will dedicate their lives to. And which they will not. Women don’t exist to make men happy or make babies or make dinner. Women can choose the relationships they desire. And in addition to not being required to 35

have babies or husbands, women aren’t required to be a certain kind of person in any kind of relationship. If a woman chooses a marriage with a man, she isn’t required to be obedient or submissive or the one who does the dishes. If she chooses a friendship, she doesn’t have to be a certain type of friend, like the sensitive one or the one who feeds people. Feminism means that women can choose to be happy and fulfilled as moms or not as moms. As wives or not as wives. As people who like cooking or people who never learned and don’t care. You get the point.

I want to be seen as whole for who I am choosing to be right now. I’m not missing anything.

I am not waiting for my life to be complete. I am not waiting to become a meaningful woman. I am not missing anything. I am everything.

There is no hole in my life. I am whole.

I still remember how the injustice burned in me like the contractions I had never experienced. How dare anyone say I need something else to make me me?

But I also felt an injustice for every woman who has been told she needs to be in certain relationships to be “enough.”

I don’t want kids, and I felt my worth was missed as the woman at the party looked right through my “empty” womb.

Imagine a woman who wanted what was lost! Imagine her being told she was not whole—when she already must feel a hole. Imagine if I couldn’t have kids—how much harder it would be to hear I was missing something. Instead, it’s by my choice that I don’t fill someone else’s definition of my worth. On the other side, imagine if I told a mother who was happy and fulfilled in her relationships with her children that she was missing something? Imagine if I said, “You’re 36

missing out on not having kids!” How invalidating would that be? How naive to think I knew what made her worthy. When what makes her worthy is her—it’s the life she is making and choosing and fighting for.

The opposite of missing something is having it all, being complete. As women, we can choose our relationships in life and no choice is inferior or ideal. That’s what feminism means to me. We don’t have to birth children to be “real” women and we don’t have to judge the real women who are mothers for doing something women have done for eons. We are just free to be the women we want to be.

We are free to be mothers, but that is not a role we have to fill to have a meaningful life. And those of us without kids are not “non-mothers.”

We have a complete identity apart from what other people might think we are “missing.”

Here’s what I say: Take me as I am.

I am me.

I am not you.

I am not who you want me to be.

Don’t tell me that I’m wanting Because of what I do not want.

Your worth is not my worth.

Your whole is not my whole.

Don’t forget how some want And some want for nothing.

I’m not missing anything.

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SELF LOVE, A PLAYLIST, AND THE POWER TO MANIFEST

By Claire Christine Sargenti I’m sitting in a small room, a deep purple curtain is drawn across the entrance, and the smell of palo santo is wafting in the air. There is a woman sitting in front of me; her eyes are sparkling and I can hear her breath momentarily stop as I pull the next card. Normally I’d be working from home—preparing to give a Reiki or Crystal Therapy session, my hands hovering over a client’s body, assessing their chakras and seeking out any other physical ailments that manifest themselves through the energetic mind-body-spirit connection. But today is an honor.

I’m working as a psychic reader at Earth Odyssey in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Among the traditional offerings of palm and tarot readings, I’m offering a special service: a Crystal Chakra reading, and that’s the style of reading that I’m giving right now.

Before I reveal the card that I’ve pulled, I explain that the sacral chakra—currently represented by the card in my hand—is the ruler of our sexuality and our creativity. The woman’s eyes shift slightly, a sign of curiosity, and I smile. Going into detail on this chakra is my sweet spot. Sex and creativity are two of my favorite things to talk about.

I explain that sacral chakra is located in the lower abdomen region, right below the naval, where the uterus is found in female-bodied people and the seminal vesicle and ejaculatory duct are found in male-bodied people. It’s where we get that warm, tingly feeling when we’re turned on, and the location of a lot of our reproductive hardware. Sexual energy is creative energy. Its most basic and instinctual use is for creating babies, but if you’re like me, you’re not trying to create a human baby 38

anytime soon. Sexual energy is a very physical, tangible energy that we naturally have access to inside of our bodies, whether or not we’re trying to have kids. Even if certain body parts don’t work the way they used to or have been altogether removed, the energy is still there for us to use. We as humans are always creating; you don’t have to consider yourself an artistic person to take part in that creativity. Whether you’re creating who you are as an everchanging and growing unique individual, working on your college thesis, creating a master work of art, or just rearranging your room, you’re using your creativity, and your sexual energy is the force that’s fueling the fire of your creation.

A few hours earlier, before I found myself sitting in this mystical room in front of a row of cards telling me about a stranger’s chakras, I was getting ready for work jamming out to a playlist I had made with songs all about self love, including one of my absolute faves, “Soulmate” by Lizzo. This is where sex and creativity goes one step farther. This is where it gets really interesting (and fun!)—and the part that I don’t usually get to talk about with my clients during readings. It’s the part where, just like Lizzo says, you get to be your own lover—then magick starts to happen…specifically sex magick. The best part is, you don’t need a partner for this. It’s all about being in cosmic relationship with yourself.

Have you ever heard of that study that says if you write your goals down you’re more likely to succeed? It was done by Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University in California, and it found that participants were 43% more likely to achieve their goals when they were written down, with even higher success rates if you made a plan of action and told an accountability friend about your process. There are several reasons for this, including the act of writing serving as an opportunity for goal clarification while involving both sides of the brain in the goal-achieving process. In my experience, there’s a little bit more magick to it than what the scientists are willing to write about. The act of writing your goals or speaking them out loud is essentially putting an energetic force behind your goals. It’s telling the universe that this is something that is important to you, something that you’re willing to put an investment of energy into, and when you show the universe you’re invested in something, the universe gets behind it in a big way. Rhonda Byrne writes of the law of attraction in her best-selling book The Secret, “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source—you.” Your thoughts get supercharged when you add energy behind them. There are lots of ways to add energy—writing them down is one way, but so is creating a 39

vision board, making a collage, prayer, vision work, candle magick, ritual and spell work, and one of my favorites, orgasms.

If you’ve experienced an orgasm, then you’ve felt that rush of energy flow throughout your body. I like to think of that energy like the energy from the sun—it’s warm and bright and has lots of positive benefits. Adding a focus for your orgasm is like sliding a solar panel underneath that sunlight: you’re still getting all of the original benefits while harnessing even more energy to be used however you wish. And if you haven’t experienced an orgasm yet, that's okay too. It took a lot of mental and physical patience and practice before I figured it out for myself, and I’m still teaching myself how to find climax in different parts of my body—check out Lucy-Anne Holmes’ article, “A Guide To The 14 Types Of Orgasm You Can Have (Yes, We Said 14),” and how to make them more repetitive and last longer. Of course orgasm is great, both for yourself and for manifesting, but it’s not essential to practice sex magick. The important part is to feel good, get your sexy/creative juices flowing and celebrate the magickal manifesting power that is already inside of you.

Different witches like to practice sex magick in different ways, and I encourage you to try out a few different types to find what works best for you.

I prefer to perform sex magick when I’m by myself—for a few different reasons. The first reason is intention. When I’m with my partner(s) I want my focus to be on them, not on how I’m going to manifest my next career move. I also don’t want their energies and intentions intermingling with mine. If I’m trying to manifest more joy in my life and my partner is thinking about an argument they just had, it can muddy the clarity of your energetic intention. If you do choose to work sex magick with a partner, I recommend communicating your intentions before hand, so everyone is clear on the objective and no one feels like they are being used. If you are with a trusted partner, mutual focus on a sole intention can be extra powerful. The second reason I like to work by myself is that I’m always available when I’m ready to manifest, while a partner might not be. And thirdly—to be blunt—because I’m better at it by myself. To quote the artist Boyfriend, “Because you didn’t make me cum like my hand did.” (Yep, that song is on my self love playlist, too.)

Whenever I’m performing a ritual of any kind, sex magick or otherwise, I like to prepare my surroundings to remind myself that what I am doing is sacred and powerful, that this is separate from the mindless routine actions that we all take part in from day to day. I like to involve all of my senses, soft candle light for my eyes, incense and essential oils for my nose, soft music in the background for my ears (or a hella dope self love playlist!), a glass of wine or sweet nectar for my tongue, a vegan silk ritual robe that’s soft on my skin...(ok 40

real talk, I don’t have a vegan silk ritual robe—or any kind of robe—but a girl can dream!). Once the scene is set, I like to get very clear on what it is I want to manifest. Try to keep your manifestations focused on you. It can be tempting to try to manifest your crush falling in love with you or for your mom to stop hating your most recent tattoo, but manifestations concentrated on other people strips them of their willpower, and willpower is something that needs to be respected. Instead, try focusing on manifesting a loving relationship where you are completely fulfilled in every good way, or feeling confident and proud of your choices regardless of what others may think or say. Sometimes I like to visualize my intentions, and sometimes I like to put them into words. If you’re working with words, be sure to use positive speech only. (“I want to be healthy” instead of “I don’t want to be sick.” Or even better “I am healthy” or “Thank you that I am healthy!”) Keep your focus on what you want and off of what you don’t want. I also like to add an emotion onto my intention. We’ve all heard about that person who got everything they ever asked for, all the money in the world, yet they are completely miserable. Usually the reason why we want things—money, jobs, relationships, whatever—is so we can feel these few desired emotions: happy, loved, safe, peaceful, connected. Focus on the feeling behind the desire. Right now I’m focusing on the feelings of joy and gratitude as I gain a larger clientele base for my psychic readings and intuitive healing sessions, which leads to more financial income (meaning I’ll have an easier time paying my rent), which leads to feelings of safety and peace. Extra bonus points if you speak your desires in the present tense as if you already have them, and even more bonus points if you express gratitude for your desires in advance!

Keep your visual, your words, and most importantly your feelings in mind as you begin to touch yourself and ride the waves of pleasure. If you feel comfortable, open up your mouth and make some sounds! You can moan the words you picked for your intention like the name of a lover, but a good old fashioned “Ahhh!” is powerful too. The sound of “ah”—the sound of ecstatic pleasure—is also the first sound in the sacred vibration of “om,” and it represents the sound of creation. 300-Hour yoga teacher and mindfulness instructor Zoe Shipley describes it as “the sound vibration that represents a calling out to creation…[a] calling out to this Supreme Being—this Great Spirit —to manifest and create!” And since what we’re doing in sex magick is using the power of our own “Supreme Being” inside of us by pairing our sexuality with our creativity, letting out a sexy scream is right in line with the manifestation process. If you’ve got the time (I recommend setting aside a good chunk of time for yourself), play with delaying your climax to increase the power of your orgasm and your intention. When you reach orgasm, enjoy the physical sensations running through your body as well as the feeling of 41

your dreams coming into reality. Take your time to bask in the afterglow of the power you possess to make yourself feel good and to manifest your desires— which also makes you feel good!

Circling back to Dr. Gail Matthews’ study, let’s take another look at writing down your goals as a practice of magick. Many witches practice the sacred art of creating a sigil, which incorporates writing down your goals. Once you’ve gotten really clear on what it is you want to manifest, how you want to feel, and how to express it in positive, present tense and gratitude-filled language, write it out in your journal or book of shadows.

Cross out all of the vowels and repeating consonants until you’ve got something looking like this:

Take all of your remaining letters and line them up so you can see them clearly.

Then begin to arrange each letter as if you were creating a design or logo with their shapes. What you are doing is creating a magickal image that holds the vibrational frequency of your intention.

Once you’ve got your sigil, you can draw it on the hand that you use to masturbate or draw it on your body over your sacral chakra. If you’re worried about somebody seeing your sigil, draw it on with eyeliner and use some eye makeup remover to take it off, but if you’re comfortable wearing your sigil for a few days, it can be a great reminder of the intention that you set and the goal you are now actively working towards. If you practice candle magick, you can safely carve your sigil with your athame into your candle and have it lit while you perform your sex magick ritual and gaze into the bright energy of the 42

flame as you climax.

As with any form of magick, belief in the natural power that you possess as your birthright is key. Any self-doubt can turn into self-sabotage if you let it.

If you notice self-doubt popping up, that’s okay. Forgive yourself for saying a nasty little lie about yourself, and then replace that little lie with something true and awesome about yourself. If something like “I’m a badass powerful witch” feels like an inauthentic stretch right now, start with something small that you can easily wrap your head around; something like “I am really good at making tacos” or “I am a loyal friend” can work just fine. Repeat your phrase over and over until a feeling of empowerment and well deserved selfcelebration starts to take over your feeling of self-doubt. Then get to work.

Magick opens doorways, but it’s up to you to walk through them.

As for me, practicing sex magick has opened lots of doors, including the door that brought me to this small but magickal room where I’m about to pull another card for the woman in front of me. Ultimately, sex magick has taught me a lot about my own internal power and has deepened the closest and most meaningful relationship in my life—the relationship with myself. Blessed be, witches!

Oh, and if you’re wondering...yes, I did masturbate while writing this article.

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And yes, here’s a link to my playlist: https://rb.gy/vekjyl

PART TWO 45 the beginnings 47 Great Expectations 50 loving her is the most natural thing ive ever felt 58 Like Satin 51 So I Chose 59 Reckonings 52 Louie Love 62 Lepidoptera 53 Indefinitely 63 Safe Orgasms Only 55 Queer Love 64 What Is Love?

56 when possibilities were possible 57 BLM 44

65 Silver Jubilee

the beginnings The beginning looks like fluorescent swipes. It sounds like a chorus of “Should we split the bill?” and tastes like house red. It feels like a neverending sprint towards some warm, promised unknown, and, more than once, it echoes like silence.

The beginning beats with questions. Unanswered, reverberating. Too many questions.

Until that pivotal night: the one where the beginning smiles. Beneath bistro lights, it softens. Hurried fluorescence fades, and a slow table-fortwo at dusk takes its place. That night feels like best-friendship. It tastes like a margarita (at a wine bar! appalling!). Beginning still reigns, but after that night, it echoes like laughter.

We leave with more questions than we had the night before, but it doesn’t feel like too many anymore. We fall asleep inside them, warm.

And then beginning becomes new eyes in the morning. Blue and vast and the kind my mom used to tell me she pictured me with. (“They’ll have that spark. You’ll know when you see it.”) I’m not sure when beginning spins into middle, but it’s around the time those eyes stop feeling foreign.

Around the moment I bite my lip and tell him I feel safe in his love. Not just with him, but in the world in general. Around the time he nods and whispers, “I get it.” Somewhere between car rides up the California coast and realizing we make each other better and packing his room for a crosscountry move, middle arrives.

Middle looks like filling up photo albums with 2-month-old disposable pictures. It sounds like a routinely ringing cell phone at 6 pm PT, 9 pm ET. Middle tastes familiar, like the restaurant orders we can recite for each other, and feels every bit like the promised known.

But middle, it turns out, is a myth. We arrive in it ready to abandon the beginning, in all its uncertain glory. For a moment, as he kisses my hand 45

and I finish his joke, we think we’ve succeeded. But between pop-punk singalongs and the joint playlist we created, an old beat reemerges.

Questions. Unanswered, ringing. Questions that are more crucial than “Should we split the bill?” but just as daunting. Questions like, “Will we make it through long-distance?” and “Do you like New York?” and “Should we move in together?” Questions like, “Where would we put the couch if we got apartment 2?”

So many questions, even now. And so many beginnings, marked by the way they reverb between us.

May they all feel like bistro lights and best-friendship, and sound like the way you laugh.

by kaley roberts

46

Great Expectations

By Monica Mulhall Expectation is the mother of disappointment. My mother disappointed me when she said, “Love someone who loves you a little more than you love them.”

Even at the age of 12 I was acutely aware of my predisposition to love more, so this felt like an impossible feat. Nine years later, on the night I began my first real relationship, I was so elated that minutes later he was holding back my hair as I threw up. I loved so abundantly that my dinner simply had to go to make room.

I hope I never forget the moments of being so young and in love for the first time—the countless nights of Two Buck Chuck and Chinese food, kissing on every corner, feather-light touches at museums, getting so, so stoned that vanilla Haagen-Dazs was revelatory. I want to remember what it felt like to be supported and seen through the first ever tumults of job-hunts, graduation, moving. I want to crystallize and frame the naivete of wandering around Pottery Barn, ignoring the inevitability of outgrowing each other long before that furniture would be in my price range. I would inscribe on the back the wideeyed wish that we’d found a way because I didn’t know if anyone would take out my earrings one by one when I fell asleep watching a movie or fit so well with my favorite people.

I loved that boy so much, but now I love that girl for loving more more. I marvel at her bravery, the way she fell and persisted and clung so fiercely trying to make the pieces fit. I don’t know if I’ll love so uninhibited again. In the period after, it was a thing of beauty much like the sun—if I stared at it for too long, it became something painful.

Expectation is the mother of disappointment. The magazines and movies disappointed me when they said, “Love will find you when you stop looking.”

Even at the age of 22 I knew I would never be one to stop looking. Resolved and a little jaded after lending my heart so readily, I embarked on a wild two years looking to be adored wholly and refusing to be the one who tipped the scales. Buckling into the modern dating roller coaster was an act of retaliation.

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White knuckling through the ride has been a thrill a minute, with highs and lows that have dropped my stomach and left me breathless. I’ve hooked up in a Bushwick bar bathroom and seen the first rays of sunlight in a Cornelia Street studio on New Year’s Day. I’ve dressed for a date in the freezer-basement of a Morton Williams and wandered the Guggenheim aimlessly talking in highfalutin circles about poetry and art. I’ve had a picnic on the East River only to be caught in the rain, soaked and kissing in squishing shoes under the awning of a doorman building while the storm passed. I’ve tossed back beers at the White Horse Tavern and meandered around the West Village for hours on a summer night, feeling the electricity of being young and vibrant in the thick city heat.

Somehow though, I felt empty at even the sweetest of prospects and most cinematic moments. I couldn’t bring myself to tenderness. My exits were quiet and frequent—I drifted into these guys’ lives like an apparition and realized they didn’t hold the eternity I’d been looking for, rendering me a little ghostly blip in their love stories. My resolution not to be the one that gives too much was at constant odds with the feverish quest for an instant, overwhelming love.

There were affairs I let drag out for too long, assuming love might strike me more subtly this time around. Perhaps I could get comfortable eventually with one of these boys after looking and looking and looking. In a recent lengthy something where I tried to do just that, I became a person I didn’t recognize: playing coy to the point of evasiveness, excusing myself from plans, leaving texts on read because I couldn’t bear to show up half-heartedly—the ride screeched to a slow and agonizing halt. I dropped the Sarah, Plain and Tall bullshit. I unbuckled the strap tight around my belly and breathed in full what I already knew: this wasn’t some frontier where I would be lucky to find a man to dote on me regardless of my feelings. This was Brooklyn in (early, god help us) 2020. I deserved attention and affection, yes, but I also deserved to love back wholeheartedly and sincerely. These things were not mutually exclusive. These things were worth continuing to look for.

Some fits and starts were fleeting and others were overstayed. Love evaded me in each venture those two years, but god do I love myself for looking.

Expectation is the mother of disappointment. There are few things more deeply disappointing than a global pandemic.

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Even at 24, there are moments I wish deeply that I was going through this with a partner who knows how to soothe my nerves and make me feel safe in their embrace. More often than not, though, I’ve found comfort in myself, reflection, and independent acts. Sometimes surviving isolation means remembering not the times spent wrapped up in another person’s arms, but the nights that I danced on a table with such clarity, confidence, and sway in my hips that I’m sure I would have looked at myself from afar and said, who is that girl having the time of her life? It’s relishing in the moments that I make myself a beautiful meal or run 5k in the park, saying, I’ve learned to do these things because they feel good in my bones. It’s laughing hysterically at accidentally sending a vibrator out with the laundry to wash and fold, knowing that’s the only way I’m getting any these days. It’s tearing through a 400-page book in a single weekend and realizing that I’ve never felt more like myself. Clearing the datebook has led to a recalibration after trying so hard to align myself with inflexible expectations; locating the silvery lessons and dappy charms alike on the ride I’ve taken, and holding space to move forward with this intimate sense of grace.

This self-soothing in solitude has become an art form of self-acceptance and ritual. Naturally, one of these weekly rituals honors that romantic self who has fought hard against platitudes for more than a decade. On Friday nights, I read “Wedding Files” on The Cut with a glass of red religiously, coming face to face with precisely who I am: a woman who is simply inclined to love more, and, despite the many disappointments, is looking for—and expecting—love with open arms.

Photo contributed by Claudia Sousa 49

loving her is the most natural thing ive ever felt un poema dedicado a mi novia her skin is brown honey and golden sun melting beneath my blessed fingertips engulfed in sweet sin glowing like summertime she is light herself, with a radiance so bold

in my grateful arms

she nurtures and warms

feeling her skin’s heat

even the coldest parts of me

against my bare chest no clouds, no fear, just bliss.

she smells of cocoa butter and slow sunday rain

to love her is

and late night drives

to breathe

to absolutely

to blink

nowhere

to exist: involuntary yet essential;

euphoria on my tongue

not something i have to think about.

as I taste her love pouring out

because to not love her

dancing across

is to not be

my eager lips

alive.

i want to savor her essence forever. by omi

a moment longer i pray we get to stay here holding her slender back

50

So I Chose I never used to believe in soulmates. I consider myself to be a relatively logical person and always had a hard time wrapping my head around there only being one person for me out of more than 7 billion. I had convinced myself that under the right circumstances and with a few non-negotiables out of the way, I could be happy with any partner. I told myself it was a choice: you can wake up and choose to commit to that person and choose to be happy and choose to love them. But those were lies I told myself to justify staying in an 10-year-long, unhappy relationship. So I chose to walk away. And then I chose to strengthen relationships with my girlfriends and chose to decorate an apartment just for me and chose to date (and then chose not to date) and chose to buy a new car and chose to take care of my mind and body in ways I never had before. I chose to develop a relationship with myself.

All of those choices led me to April 2020. One month into quarantine and working from home, I decided to create a Hinge profile. I figured with all my newfound free time, I might as well meet and chat with some new people.

And then, on April 16th, I matched with Kyle. We talked nearly every day for the next two months, bonding over our mutual love of Harry Potter and the mutual loss of our dads. We talked and listened to audiobooks and watched movies and laughed, all without having met. Hesitant to meet any sooner because of social distancing, we agreed to grab dinner on June 4th, once restaurants opened up with outdoor seating. The minute we hugged hello, I knew this was going to be something special. Never in my life had I felt so at ease with someone or like someone got me the way he did—we just clicked.

My Hinge profile stated that a good first date ended in a kiss, and ours did.

Countless kisses and dates and belly laughs later, I’ve had to reassess my belief in soulmates. I have never felt so confident in my love for someone or their love for me. I can say without a doubt, Kyle is my other half. He’s my soulmate.

By Pheebz 51

Louie Love

You taught me some things— Like how to shake it off

You captured my heart

When I taught you other things—

When I didn’t want it opened.

Like how to shake.

You stayed by my side When I wanted to walk alone.

You support all of my crazy ideas

You came into my life

With tacit acceptance and slight head tilts.

When the world was chaos.

When I bought you a car, you smiled at my idea

And for all of that,

Of driving across the country

that love and affection,

Just the two of us.

You accept the barter of my time and some food.

So now, the only words I can find to say When I want to share it all with you:

When I was unsure of where I stood,

“Arrroooo uuu roo”

You met me exactly where I was.

(I ruff you, too.)

By Carolyn Hagerty 52

Indefinitely “Taylor, I have to tell you something,” said the doe-eyed boy.

“Nah, man, we’re good, we’re casual. You don’t have to tell me anything,” I replied coolly.

In July 2017, I was very cool. Returning to Philadelphia from a year of living, loving, and learning Portuguese in Brazil, my skill set as an online English language coach was surely elevating my new career as a Lyft driver. If only my Anthropology professors could see me now.

Jay was cool, too. This Caribbean man from the island of Saint Martin had made it all the way to The Wharton School and was reveling in his own esteem. We had been getting into all sorts of shenanigans together for about a month when he earnestly said, “No, I have to tell you this.”

“Okay, you can tell me anything,” I assured him. *** “Ruhan!! It’s 8 o’clock!!”

Out of the encrusted corners of my sleepy eyes, I see Jay jump up out of bed as if the building is on fire, going from completely horizontal to vertical in the two seconds it took him to shout, “Oh God!!” His summoner was his Nani, a petite Indian woman with a chic gray bob who had already disappeared into the kitchen with a subtly satisfied grin.

Naked, I lay under the covers, unbothered by Nani’s sudden entry, clutching the Swarovski crystal necklace she gifted me the day before. Jay was still recovering from his startle and his Deepa Bua would arrive much later than expected to take us from Mumbai to Lonavala for the weekend. On the road, I relished in her rhapsodizing about the elegance of the place being a premiere film location spot for classic Bollywood cinema— all the while, my own love story blossoming shyly and sweetly as a lotus on a stage. *** “I’m not 21, I’m 19,” he says.

My mouth drops open, eyes lit up shocked and amused, “Oh shit.”

I had never been one to do mental math for no reason. It did not occur to me to question whether or not a junior in college could be twenty-one. After all, we’d met in a bar called Lucha Cartel, swiped right on an app called Tinder. When he approached me that night, I was oddly flustered as if he’d been a hot girl. In reality, I was a seasoned twenty-four years old and he was a tall drink of somethin’ else.

53

*** In time, I agree to be his—the opportunist in me.

We travel. We smoke. We trip.

Lisbon. Barcelona. Rome.

I try to catch him up, to explain, to expose; to impart any and all wisdom so that he can meet me where I’m at.

He teaches me too but I comfort him, holding steadfast while he grows into his ability to comfort me and pleasure me. I enroll to earn my Master’s.

He finishes his Bachelor’s degree.

We fly to Saint Martin, Jay’s magical island. He shows me his home and shares with me his family. I eat French food and dance to Popcaan. We climb a mountain of jungle, meet lizards and monkeys. I bathe in the sweet-salty ocean and breathe in the pink-purple skies. Nirvana.

In Philadelphia, we make a home.

Every Sunday, he makes me brunch.

In the mornings, he puts on a suit.

He goes to work at his ‘big man’ job.

He blooms while parts of me wither, exhausted but not in vain; like the lotus on a stage.

I refuse to see myself without him, the little girl with lesbian moms, queer out of the womb.

She wants him so badly, more than she wants to remember herself.

Unable to dream up a scenario, a whole universe where I can really be me and also have you, 2020 came and cut the invisible electric cord.

Immigration politics force us to be separate; separate but equal in our longing, in our capacity to love.

Yet one of us is unable to sleep.

One of us toils over a free and feminist narrative, a woman of 28 (now, a school teacher in a pandemic) in love with a man of 22 who is living and working in Ireland indefinitely. ia 54

by Taylor Stabler @boi_magia

Queer Love I tell my partner I love them upwards of 25 times a day (probably more). Every so often I apologize for being repetitive and tell them, “I hope you know I really really mean it when I say it, I don’t say it just to say it.” She smiles every time and always says it back no matter what.

Maybe I say this so much so that we never forget. In a world that often ignores or forgets us, we live by love. Every day.

25 times a day (probably more). We are our own mini revolution.

By Angela Ramos

55

when possibilities were possible In the nineties or early 2000s sometime before when possibilities were possible when the delight of a relationship could at any time lead me home to my apartment—

His warmth too close

blue tapestry, dense futon,

but only because I had found my perfect space

apricots withering on the kitchen counter—

An anonymous kiss

and become a poem

that never happened.

A relationship so temporary, so anonymous that it wasn’t real.

I had squeezed into what any New Yorker –or perhaps any commuter knows was a train too tight to squeeze into.

Today as I hiked through the reservoir

I found a space that didn’t fit me

my meditation practice invited me

and into which, also, I fit perfectly.

to lean against, to touch, to sit under the trees, to connect

The intimacy of breathing together

to networks rising up

Brown hair grazing his eyes

and entangling underground

sweet saucy pizza on

and I thought about this man,

his tongue.

this living collection

What words could turn the smell

of bodies swaying together

on my neck, in my face,

at the whim of the tracks

what should be the narrative of a commuter’s

the curves

nightmare,

the driver’s weighted foot.

into the momentary love I experienced

How it felt to be rooted with,

for this nameless partner

lean against, to touch, to sit under

this city

to thank for oxygen.

the tenderness of packed bodies on this train This is what it meant to be on the cusp

this ability to find joy?

Every relationship a possibility When possibilities were possible. by emilie zaslow

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I would be lying if I said that the things that are going on right now haven’t affected my relationship with my boyfriend. I never acknowledged the fact that Owen and I are an interracial couple. I didn’t want the colors of our skin to be the only thing that people see in our relationship. We’ve talked about race but we’ve never had to acknowledge our adversities until now.

For the past couple of weeks Owen has seen my mental health go downhill.

Owen created a space for me to talk about being a Black woman in America.

Owen has listened to me cry, and he has also listened to me be silent. I never had to explain something to him because he did his research. It can be exhausting to have to educate white allies about your own oppression, and Owen acknowledged that. Owen made me comfortable even when he was uncomfortable.

Owen and I went to a BLM protest in Lancaster together. After, we had a picnic and watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. I see so many people who aren’t Black wanting to help. The first thing you can do is NURTURE Black people. Honor them and listen. If I didn’t have Owen in my life right now I think that I would have had so many breakdowns. Black people are seeing each other die on the news. We are not okay. We need to be checked on. We need spaces like the one Owen has created for me. Please create those spaces. We can only be strong for so long.

Black Lives Matter.

By Illiana Maria 57

By Zoë Rose 58

Reckonings

By Rachel Dean Love made loud in dusky rooms. That’s what I’m led to believe.

That’s what the film actors do. That’s in the romance novels, too, the ones whose characters never speak to the ugliness of sex. What’s in the body? What makes it move? Bones, muscles, blood like a rushing summer river. A man I once loved admits that I’m the least emotional person he’s ever met, and I fall and keep falling, and the landing is soft because it’s an ending I understand.

Sadness is dulling—in those middle-months of winter, before I had forgiven myself, I couldn’t notice anything. It was as if someone had blindfolded me and led me into a blooming space, and then asked me to describe its beauty. I would fall asleep at night to the terrible thumping of my heart, to shortened breath, to sweat that soaked my sheets. I wrote over and over again in my journal—These are the worst days of my life. The trouble with the end of love is that even when you see it coming, even when you believe you are prepared, it shapeshifts into a creature of impossible proportion.

I shouldn’t use the word healing—it’s mired in cliche, it’s performative, it’s the kind of word that indicates I’ve reached a conclusion. What can I use instead? Synonyms for healing include: alleviate, assuage, palliative, salve, soften. So this is a softening process.

This is an alleviating salve. Winter moves into spring, and the light stays longer, and I go outside just to stare at the trees. Nothing feels permanent anymore—the good or the bad. I meet a man who writes me letters with his left hand. Devotion appears like something conjured, a rabbit from a hat, the woman’s body made whole again after the saw halves her into doubles. Circus performer, magician, god—I can believe in what transforms.

The sun lazes over the trees, almost-down and out. Us on a blanket in a small field. Wine in cups. Bats flitting across the darkening sky. He sends me a video on Optimistic Nihilism after I admit I’m terrified of mortality—that none of our choices really matter, or they matter only tangentially, because in the end I’m dead and unremembered or misremembered—and even if I’m remembered I’m still dead. I watch the video. It doesn’t really make me feel better.

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Growing up clinging to the backbone of Catholicism’s after-death doctrines can make a person feel uneasy once they’ve abandoned those prescriptions. He’s calm. I feel calm in his hands. I am not so cynical as to believe those aren’t related. A few nights later, while lying in bed, I ask him: If I pierced my tongue, would you still like me? He says yes. If I covered myself in tattoos, would you still like me? I am often posing these ridiculous questions. They aren’t tests, nor are they leading questions. I just like to hear him talk. More specifically, I like it when he talks to me. It’s dark, so I can’t see him. He says, Nothing you could do to your body would make me like you any less.

On July 4th, I take too many edibles and stare blankly at my computer screen. As the sky darkens, I hear the pop and crackle of distant fireworks, the corresponding shouts of gathered people. It seems as if everything is happening at an impossible distance. I fall asleep, wake up, eat a bowl of cereal, try again to write. I finish reading Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds, which has been lent to me by a friend. Hours later, I write a structureless essay about my boyfriend.

In it, I write the longlist of things I’ve noticed—his half-smile, how he likes to go barefoot, how he keeps a hand on me whenever we’re in close proximity. Weeks later, after spending a Sunday with him in upstate New York, sitting on warm rocks and walking along trails dappled with late afternoon light, I call my mother and say: I like him so much I don’t even know what to do.

I have written many versions of this story, and each one ends without the comfort of a learned lesson. When I think about why I write, I realize that it has always been an attempt at exerting control and understanding—I will work through this question on the page, and suddenly everything will be clearer. Like the biblical parables I read as a child: each served its unique lesson, each was meant to proffer a moralistic takeaway. I am maybe still searching for the comfort of that blueprint. Ironically, my writing resists this. Maybe all true writing does. So the story here is not that I was hurt and I am better now, nor is it that this new relationship has restored me.

Maybe, like the essay I wrote on July 4th, this is just another longlist in which I reckon with love.

Another night on the blanket in the field. I lay on my stomach. He is propped up on his elbows in the opposite direction when a fox 60

appears before us, stops, hovers feet away. This one is the color of turning-trees in October. It stares at us for a few seconds, sniffing the air, and then returns to the trees. Some nights when I leave his place, the fox darts out from some shadowed spot, or bounds down the concrete steps, like it’s trying to prove something with its daring. I’ve stopped feeling startled by it. I tell everyone I know—There’s a fox that lives around my boyfriend’s place, and I keep seeing it everywhere, and it’s kind of fucking insane. No one seems to understand the gravity—that every time the fox appears, I feel like the universe is confirming my existence. This story has no neat end, but it can have a symbol, at least. The fox is discovery, or the fox is devotion, or the fox is the courage to begin again.

Photo contributed by Fallon Wilson 61

Lepidoptera when I was young I heard an old wives’ tale that I took as fact. it said that if you touch a butterfly’s wings, you’ll kill it. not a sudden, violent death that the butterfly never sees coming, but a slow, agonizing loss of independence and eventual defeat. you may admire the butterfly, proclaim your love for her. she might even land on you, a brief, sweet kiss on your shoulder. but if you try to catch her, if you brush her wings with your fingers, you damage her; you rob her of flight, of freedom, of herself.

I believed the butterfly’s welfare was secured by the aloof beating of wings, safely away from grasping, confining fingers that would still her.

I didn’t know there was safety and joy to be found in being caught, in wings stroked and settled, in boundaries crossed and redrawn.

I think that maybe we believe in the stories we need when we need them, until we can shed the scales of self-preservation, and find comfort in the very conditions we thought would kill us.

By Tori Thomson

62

63

What Is Love?

Love is a grin that travels to your vagina a couple of hearts playing double dutch an expanding purple ball in the stomach a mesmerizing blue flame that’s too hot to hold stolen breath you would’ve given anyway Love is getting smacked in the face by a tall sunflower air in your throat that’s too intense for your lungs your hand slapping your forehead being little again, with a broken nightlight that moment before jumping Love is falling your tears ignoring the ‘closed’ sign on your eyelids a stubborn sentence surrounded by pink eraser shavings believing hands will catch you hitting the ground, even if his palms tried

By Choya Randolph

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Silver Jubilee

By Megan Vignola 4 years: The stinging cold on the backs of my little thighs from the metal railing I was perched on in Rockefeller Center, juxtaposed with the warm holiday magic radiating from the Christmas tree lights looming in front of us 6 years: The repetitive sound of twenty four pairs of sneakers uncomfortably flopping against the downward spiral of the Hayden Planetarium, students obediently following the buddy system working to keep up with Mrs. McGuiness on our first school trip 7 years: The gentle vibration beneath my palms holding the subway pole, swinging around it with my best friend, as if the R train barreling through the East River crossing was our own traveling playground 9 years: The buzzing anticipation boiling in my belly as 9 am mass dragged on, a necessary hour-long chore to be completed before the promise of a trip to “The City� that commenced after the closing hymn 10 years: The heavy knit of my black snowflake sweater weighing on my shoulders as I coasted in a clockwise circle around Wollman Rink, holding hands with my brother, celebrating my first double digit birthday 13 years: The tourist-filled dining room at Planet Hollywood Times Square where it seemed as if two worlds were colliding, but it was really just one ending and another beginning; my middle school and high school friends together for the first and last time, smiling on as I blew out a cake with thirteen candles

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15 years: The frantic beating of my heart beneath my jacket sitting on a Manhattan-bound E express train for the umpteenth time in my life, but the first without an adult; a first taste of freedom brought with it fears I hadn’t carried before, like missing my stop or being unable to push through a swarm of immovable commuters on my own 16 years: The roar of a sparkly Taylor Swift crowd in Madison Square Garden on a Monday night where I controversially chose to spend my 16th birthday, instead of an ugly catering hall in Queens with mediocre buffet food and a half-hearted guest list 17 years: The smell of Chipotle wafting out of air vents onto the corner of Fulton & Williams Street, standing with my college roommate on our first night in our own corner of the world— alone, but together, and so the possibilities were infinite 19 years: The puffy cherry blossoms lining West Broadway on a sunny weekday in early Spring, as I walked on cobblestones from Tribeca to Soho, wearing a two-tone leather jacket, white Converse sneakers, and a newfound confidence that could only be the result of true contentment 20 years: The deafening silence of November 9, 2016, echoing from the 6-train platform at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, to my campus stairwells, to my 9 am business class, bringing a crushing disruption to the contentment established 21 years: The soft thud of my enormous tote bag on the rubbery floor of the uptown 2 express train, a hurried moment between my too-many commitments; a thud I hear again hours later, this time on the downtown line, and then, long after sunset, once more for good measure (uptown) 23 years: The messy cling of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven glasses cheersing in a dive bar in the West Village; I am smothered with the unconditional love of friends, feeling like the luckiest and happiest girl in New York 66

24 years: The moral conflict arising attending my own corporate dinner at the very same Midtown East establishment where three years earlier, I’d stand in the teeny coat check closet wishing for at least a $2 tip and mocking the black American Express cards strewn on tables by men wearing ties 25 years: The heart wrenching loneliness of every corner of my city, plagued by a global pandemic. My deactivated MetroCard, my sleep disrupted by midnight sirens, my favorite coffee shop shuttered, the half empty water bottle left on my office desk abandoned in March. Yet I wonder why people are leaving, fleeing the city. How could one ever leave New York? My longest, my best relationship—how could I leave in her time of need?

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PART THREE 69 An Invoice to My Ex 72 Pothos Plant 75 Codependent 77 little decent things // dead birds

101 Manic Pixie Dream Girl 102 Movie for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

80 Purgatory 103 The Day I Broke Up With Silence 88 Riffs on Healing, Circular, but Approaching Resolution 107 Exposé on developing masc & femme 92 Your Tattoos Are My Emotional Scars

108 My Own 109 Take Me to the Place I Love

93 Lessons Learned 112 Hopscotch 97 Gift 113 Sex and Me 98 forgotten things 117 The House that Jack Built 99 In July, It’s Easier to Dream 68

An Invoice to My Ex

By S.A. For Nneka M. Okona, who first sent invoices to her exes and inspired me to do the same.

To: <myexboyfriend@gmail.com> From: <movedonandup@gmail.com> Subject: What I’m Worth

Dear [redacted], For the better part of the last year I have only been able to remember all the bad things about our relationship, a relationship that before its unexpected ending, I thought about with warmth. But as the days turned into weeks, after you broke up with me without ever using the words “I am breaking up with you,” I could not help but fixate on all the signs that I should have known this relationship was ending. On how I should have walked away before the pain you inflicted turned into scars.

In the months that followed our break up, I was filling my time with more rounds of drinks than I care to admit, one night stands, and expensive workout classes so that I could physicalize my suppressed emotional pain. And what I came to realize—once I finally allowed myself to unpack all the feelings that I had so readily pushed aside— was how much you wasted my time, and how much I would like that time back. The line that you used frequently, “I will break up with you before I cheat on you,” a lie.

The excuses to not see my family or come home for the holidays with me that left me making excuses to not only myself but also to my family when really you never had the intention of doing so. The unequal emotional labor because I was always the one that needed to work on myself and on our relationship. You wasted my time, a valuable asset that I will never recover. And since my time is priceless, I have created an itemized invoice of all the resources that you wasted over the course of our two-year relationship.

It has taken more than a year to be able to articulate what I am worth as a human being and as a partner. You took and took from me, and I should have established a 69

sense of accountability in our relationship, but I was blinded by the passion that is a first love, and I so desperately wanted to make us work.

Please note that this list is not exhaustive and a great number of the items on the list were only an estimation. My preferred method of payment is Paypal or Vemno as I would be able to receive the money instantly. However, I understand that the below total is quite a large sum so we can create a payment plan that best suits your financial needs. Thoughts and prayers.

I look forward to hearing from you, Doing better without you

ITEM

QT Y PRICE TOTAL

Ubers from your place because you moved farther away from me and I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to take the subway alone at night*

35

$15

$525

Actively having to avoid bars I like after we broke up for fear youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be there

450

$10

$4,500

The STD test I took after you cheated on me (copay + lab costs)

1

$60

$60

Money I spent on your anniversary gift**

1

$200

$200

Money I spent on your birthday gift***

1

$150

$150

Time spent unfriending and unfollowing all of your friends on social media

15

$10

$150

Time spent deleting all of our photos together****

25

$10

$250

Your emotional baggage*****

9

$1,000

$9,000

50

$40

$900

1,000

$25

$25,000

Therapy to process your toxic behavior (copay) All the times I put you and your needs first 70

ITEM

QT Y PRICE TOTAL

The pregnancy test I never told you about

1

$25

$25

Uber cleaning fee when you vomited after drinking too much

1

$200

$200

Loss of sleep due to your inability to know your own limits with alcohol

25

$100

$2,500

Always ordering the most expensive thing on the menu, especially when I was picking up the tab******

200

$25

$5,000

Always being “5 minutes” late

1,000

$10

$10,000

All the food of mine you ate when I wasn’t done eating

500

$10

$5,000

Never quite getting my order right

250

$10

$2,500

Minutes that turned into hours on the phone to help you feel less alone*******

10,118

$0.45

$4,553.10

Downplaying my problems because my life “has never been as hard as yours”

50

$100

$5,000

$75,513.10 *I valued each ride from my place to yours at $15 on average. **I had a great 2-year anniversary planned...and then you broke up with me a week before it. ***I had already bought your birthday gift when you broke up with me, no you cannot have it now. ****Ultimately this will not matter because you blocked me on all socials because “it was hard to see me happy.” *****Calculated based on the number of your ex-partners. ******Just because the menu has lobster on it doesn’t mean you should order it you bougie b*tch. *******I consulted my phone log to make this calculation. Please let me know if your log differs and the total cost can be recalculated.

AGREED AND ACCEPTED: _ _ NAME

_

TITLE

_ NAME

_

_ DATE

_ TITLE

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_ DATE

Pothos Plant

By K. Griffith

FEBRUARY 2019 He left in February 2019. He told me he wasn’t physically attracted to me anymore. Five years together, four vacations together, three cars together, two leases together, one dog together. He told me he just didn’t “feel the spark anymore,” so I handed him the suitcases from the closet and told him to pack up his things, leave the dog, and get out of the apartment we both called home just moments before. He stood at the top of the stairs, two half-empty suitcases at his ankles, and told me he would always be there for me whenever I needed him. I stared at him. His blue eyes seemed pale and his knees seemed to tremble. I told him, “I only ever needed you to clean the toilets and, unfortunately, I can do that on my own.” He left and never came back.

In June 2019, I moved out of that apartment in Matawan, New Jersey. Three of my friends volunteered to help me move. (If you are ever curious about who your best friends are, move and see who comes to help you.) I moved back to Staten Island, back to the neighborhood where my small, liberal arts university still stood, a beacon of hope for a new tomorrow and a reminder of a promise fulfilled yesterday. My friend Sam said to me, “Hey, you should get a pothos plant. Pothos plants grow long, and strong, and full, and if you water it regularly, it’ll be perfect for the top of that bookshelf. It’ll grow over the edge.” Sam teaches in Spanish, just like I do. She is the one who will dance to Latin pop with me and send Spanish memes to me that only two bilingual gringas would laugh at. I bought a pothos plant the next day.

SEPTEMBER 2019

By September 2019, I was walking around the neighborhood I had once admired as an undergraduate student but now loved as an adult. Freshly 28-years-old, I shoved my headphones into my ears, grabbed my dog’s leash, and called my best friend.

“Morgan, I am only going to say this to you, but, I think I love this guy.” He was kind and smart and humble and interesting and funny and charming and a magnificent listener and a horrible dancer. She took a shallow gasp of air, exhaled, and told me to trust myself. I met Morgan when I was a naive college freshman, with a heart full of dreams and a pretty empty head. She saw me for everything I ever was and everything I would ever be and she loved me. “I trust you, Kel, and I trust your heart. Don’t hold back,” she said.

I came home from the walk hot, swept the beads of sweat from my forehead and wiped them on my denim shorts. My teacher clothes stared at me from my dirty laundry basket, and my dog slurped at her water bowl. I poured tap water into my pothos plant, not yet noticing the few new leaves that had sprouted in the last couple of weeks. I untangled my headphones and took a shower.

FEBRUARY 2020 “Just be careful! There is that crazy new virus. It’s spreading to Europe!” my boyfriend’s mom warned us. A trip to Portugal and Spain was not the smartest idea, she 72

was right. We ran the numbers, talked her off the ledge, and got on a plane on a chilly Friday night. It was Valentine’s Day. He gave me my present in the airport, a sweatshirt with AOC’s face on it. I gave him his favorite candy.

Our first night in Portugal, I got food poisoning. He rubbed my head, offered to take me to the ER, bought me all the medicine from the pharmacy, made me chicken soup, stayed inside with me all day, opened the windows when the Airbnb smelt like puke, tickled my back, and cleaned the shit out of my pajama shorts. The next morning, when I had enough energy, I texted my friend Izzy: I shit myself when I was sick last night.

He cleaned it all up. I have to marry him, don’t I??? She told me the LEAST I could do was take the leap of faith and borough-hop. Move from Staten Island to Queens and live with him. I mean, I was considering it before the trip, why not trust my heart?

I sat in the airport in Portugal on our way to Spain. I paid the extra $50 for my overweight luggage and wondered if my pothos plant would survive. I knew I would survive, food poisoning and that crazy new virus didn’t scare me. But my pothos plant?

The branches were just starting to inch over the edge of my bookshelf. Would she be okay when I got home? Would her leaves turn brown, hard, crunchy, and fall off ? I crossed my fingers for her. It was easier to worry about my pothos plant than where I should live next school year. She would be okay, I told myself, unsure of which she I was referring to.

MARCH 2020 Two studio apartments between the two of us didn’t leave many options. So we chose the spot where my dog was most comfortable, in my place with my pothos plant. I knew we’d be squished, but at least my plants would get watered, I figured. I listened to “Medialuna” by Camilo on repeat. It only took about three weeks for my boyfriend’s heavy breathing to start bothering me. When he worked out, for some reason, the sound of his heavy breaths, in and out like my parents’ old dishwasher, would drive me nuts.

One night, I shoved my headphones into my ears, thankful for the warm spring night, grabbed my dog and called my friends Phoebs and Chagz. We have a group message that we often refer to as our diary. We write to each other without reservation, without hesitation. And we are honest with each other even in our most vulnerable moments. So when I call them, they answer right away. With tears in my eyes I told them, “I know it’s not a character flaw, but his breathing is bothering me so much. What am I supposed to do?” I walked and walked and we talked and talked. They told me I wasn’t crazy and that it was just Quarantimes catching up with me. That was all I needed to hear.

With my girls’ voices in my head I finally walked home, washed my hands, dried my tears, and watered my pothos plant.

JULY 2020 It’s almost been a year. I count my lucky stars every day. That kind, smart, humble, interesting, funny, charming, magnificent listener, horrible dancer still tells me I’m beautiful when I wake up in the morning and still makes me feel like the smartest woman in the room. (He also still breathes pretty loudly when he works out but, hey, nobody is perfect.) We’ve grown together and we’ve grown separately. We’ve learned 73

about each other: I’m really bad at washing silverware, and he’s really great at folding laundry. We’ve spent hours on video chats with each other’s friends and family. We’ve cooked together and drank together and played games together. We’ve walked the dog together and slept together and woke together and laughed together. We’ve cried together and read books together and watched Netflix together. We’ve sung together and danced together and cleaned together and talked and talked and talked.

In July, we spent a week at my parents house. We watered the plants, floated in the pool, and sunk our toes in the Peconic Bay. I called my sisters one night, when the sunburn on my skin felt warm and the cherry tomatoes were red and ripe in my parents’ backyard. My sisters are my constants, the most reliable people I have in my life. They know me better than I know myself, and I often find myself standing in the warmth of their sunlight. “He asked Mommy and Daddy if he can marry me,” I gushed. My sisters squealed in excitement, spilling their celebratory drinks, tears on the verge of bubbling over.

When we finally came back to my small studio apartment, the first thing I did was water my pothos plant. It is now pouring out of its original pot; its long branches are almost unrecognizable as they sweep the floor from atop the bookshelf. A new leaf appears almost every morning.

I think of Sam. I think of Morgan and Izzy and Phoebs and Chagz and my sisters.

I think of him. These are the relationships that have built me and changed me and saved me. These are the relationships that have made me feel whole when I didn’t think I deserved to feel that way. These are the relationships that nurtured me, that watched me grow, careful to take note of the new branches, the tender leaves, the sweet arms sweeping the floor. These are what make me, me.

“Tú llegaste No estaba oscuro Pero me alumbraste No estaba vacío Pero me llenaste No estaba herido Pero me curaste Me miraste, me mataste Volví a la vida Cuando me besaste” - Camilo Echeverry

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little decent things // dead birds by alexa mauzy-lewis it’s you & me & them & all of our tote bags on the morning train. a dirty toy left on the subway platform makes me cry. you don’t ask me why. you just hold my coffee, while I fumble for my metrocard. beginnings are so soft, like how we actually lived inside days when you didn’t know me well enough to hate me yet. all we had of each other were the little decent things, favorite scarves & dogeared papers. the tiny pieces are the first we lose. & sure, it’s very easy for me to fall madly in love with the nuances of being. like the way a person finds the buttons on their shirt in the morning, with clumsy drowsy fingers. the lovely small things. you learn these first. these are what come before the shit that fucking sucks. stupid fucking jobs, reoccuring night terrors, credit card debt, lost mothers, the thousands of times your heart must have broken, & trembling restlessness. when the lights come on, we change colors. i want to stay as soft as my favorite shade of yellow, & as nice as the first stories i told you about saving sparrows’ nests. but i am not soft & i am not nice. i am a dead pigeon on the sidewalk. i told you about how there was the summer that birds were constantly flying into my roof. i would often find their bodies on the fire escapes, sometimes even on the walkways to our front door. much later, i googled what this could mean. after the first time you left, i was especially on the lookout for omens, a rationale for the emptiness. on the web, i learned that some say dead birds on the ground can tell you of another death, which seems obvious, but anything can die, really: a summer crush, a favorite earring, or maybe a period of suffering, depending on how you look through the prism of ‘in existence to me now.’ i developed a heightened knack for spotting dead birds. i had also learned on the web that dead birds do not linger for very long. they rarely enshrine in fossil, decomposing faster than most, those last moments erase quickly & absorb themselves back. yet, they seem to always fly straight into my path to whisper me jolting truths, forewarnings of endings, preambles to the ‘nexts,’ i’ve written close to a hundred pages about my dead birds. you used to find this charming, a little thing of mine. now i think you think it’s fucked up. i told you once how walking back to my apartment, i saw a perfectly preserved bird fetus right on the concrete. completely intact. somehow not a single scrap of eggshell in sight, delicately coiled in the position of life, on a precipice of beginning. stunted in a preamble, it looked as though it could remain there in immortalized rest forever, if not for the impending trail of ants. god, how you hate me so much now. i tell all my friends how much i hate you. i don’t. but, i would love to hate you. i just hate that you hate me. i would love to set every postcard, every saved seashell, 77

every borrowed t-shirt on fire & every tiny part of you would be destroyed until you were all gone. instead i put these little decent things in a box & i don’t look at them, but i know they are there. last night, i wrote the best poem i had ever written in my head, i didn’t want to wake you with the light of the notes app on my phone, so i let the brilliance waltz around my brain as i drifted, sure it would be there tomorrow. i ripped the pillow case in my sleep, waking up to feathers in my hair, the words gone, you also gone. for no reason, i remembered recently that my mom used to keep birds. among many creatures—the old mean cat, a herd of guinea pigs, hamsters on occasion & always the shaking chihuahua by her side. maybe there were like three or four small yellow & green birds i christened after my favorite pokemon. i am not able to think about the regularity that used to exist between her & i often. that time is largely drowned out by a baleful hum. we don’t always talk about the inbetweens that occur in those long periods of life that you quickly label overarchingly to others as traumatic, disquieting. through the fog, air drenched in the thick stench of morning mildew, i can faintly sniff the tv dinners & cards dripping with glue. small wonderful things. one time i had fallen asleep while stroking a parakeet with a tiny index finger. i woke up, stomach pitted with panic at my empty hands, my mind instantly jumping to the conclusion of killing it in my neglectful sleep. but she had soundlessly returned the poor thing to the cage for me. in her absence, i try to hold onto the nice things i once knew about her. & you know my dad is an expert at imitating the mourning dove’s coo. he tried to teach me, you take two clasped fists to your mouth, like you’re playing a tiny trumpet. i could never quite capture the muted cry, distinct & subtly beautiful. these little decent things kill me man. then it’s me + them & all of our tote bags on a morning train. i am going to amsterdam. last night, i missed my connecting flight. i stayed in a strange hotel in Munich, watching reruns of punk’D with german subtitles, clutching a bottle of mini-bar wine so tight as if i would dissolve into the white sheets if i let it go. you would fucking love punk’D with german subtitles. when i finally made it to holland, a lady was laid up in the hostel room, glazed eyes fixed on a documentary about marilyn monroe, full-volume out loud from an ipad at her feet. when she stood, she coughed, & she was much shorter than me. she limped, from the bathroom to her bed, back & forth, speckling phone flashlight lighting in the night. i don’t think she left the room once in the entirety of my four-day stay. she surrounded herself with small things: a little hairbrush, a rhinestone spattered cup, a stuffed dirty bear, each filling me with despair. maybe it wasn’t a bear, maybe a dog. a little detail my mind could have fabricated. i fought the urge to text you about her. sick, sick empathy, brutally disconnected, disoriented. desperate to extend any small kindnesses, but my tongue, paralyzed in discomfort. even knowing i would myself have evaporated by now without the anchoring of little kindnesses.

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we made a pinky promise. the correct way to make a pinky promise is with the smallest fingers interlocked, you give your thumb a tiny kiss & press it against the other person’s thumb to seal your devotion. this is the way my mother taught me how to make a pinky promise. years ago and drunk, you promised we would never not know each other & you kissed your thumb. & thinking back i don’t remember if it was my mom or someone else who taught me that way. a little detail my mind could have fabricated. in amsterdam, i went to a museum. i looked at van gogh’s kingfisher, in its stationary movement. it’s funny how they tell you in school he cut off his little ear for love. for mania, in romance, is easier to rationalize & idealize than mania for mania’s sake. i walked & sat by a fountain, feet in the water, lonely, stabbing away at time. a little girl fed pigeons from a bag of uncooked rice, grain by grain, as her father took pictures. i watched for hours. she left & so did the birds, except for one who sat next to me, a pigeon with one leg. it stayed very still & stared at me, like it was posing. so i drew its portrait on a ripped piece of paper, loose and stray in my bag. i showed it to the pigeon when I was done, pleased with my work, & then, startled by a bike, it flew off. later, i met up with another american woman from tinder passing through, she told me she was studying suicide. she also told me a story about how earlier she watched a little boy kick pigeons in the square. unprompted. mortified, we both laughed and laughed, stomach-aching laughter laced with an unhinged lunacy. we laughed so much that night, mostly at our own hearts, broken, stupid cliches of ourselves. i showed her my pigeon portrait, maybe i should have been more embarrassed. i told her about all my dead birds, & she kissed me on the cheek before leaving. she gave me a tiny cup of her favorite coffee beans. i still have them in a little jar. i know i will never grind them to make coffee. i said to her, birds are everywhere to me & she said maybe birds are just everywhere.

Photo contributed by Alexa Mauzy-Lewis 79

Purgatory

By Jaclyn Griffith The morning after we break things off, I hear my alarm blare and immediately walk to my bathroom, sit down on the toilet, and begin to cry for the first time in four months. There is nothing glamorous about it, or even endearing. There is only me, my unwashed hair, 1970s bathroom decor, and a small handful of deep sobs that feel like medicine.

Eventually I will insist that my sadness isn’t really about him, but about losing another opportunity to fall in love with someone. I’m not there yet, though, so in the first few hours of radio silence between us, it is entirely about him. I am indulging in sweet, scattered memories: a cardboard sleeve around a cup of earl grey, a nervous hand on the small of my back, a suit jacket, a whispered apology when he went to kiss my neck and knocked my earring out of the way. I grab my phone and look at the photo of him that I sent to Valerie, our mutual friend who set us up. I zoom in on his nose, remember it pressed up against mine. I think of his right hand brushing my hair out of my eyes, inching up my leg, and let myself long for his chin, for the creases beside his eyes. He is wearing a tie and a simple smile, the ideal attire for a wedding on the east side of Providence.

But we only went out once. The whole thing lasted a month, give or take. So when six weeks have passed and I am still talking about him in therapy, I feel stupid for being so hung up on a man I barely know. My therapist, a woman named Camille who is only a handful of years older than me, is running out of platitudes.

Self-conscious about my schoolgirl sadness, I try to convince Camille and myself that I am not heartbroken because of this man in particular. I am sad because I want to be in love with someone for the first time, and losing him means having to start all over again. I am now 23 years old and have never had a boyfriend, and my lack of companionship is a void I keep trying in vain to fill. It’s not really about him—he is only a symbol of what could have been, my therapist and I decide. As I repeat these sentiments each week, the silver rock and band on Camille’s left hand glare up at me, and it feels like she’s giving me the finger. This is one of several things I will never admit to her. *** The wedding is in a house museum, a regal brick building named after an old white guy. I arrive late, since I wasn’t invited until an hour earlier, when he sent me a text reading: I’m at a wedding in Providence and I don’t know a soul. You could be my plus one? We meet for the first time on the grandiose staircase leading up to the house, and his voice sounds different than I’ve imagined—softer, more benign than most men’s. We live in different states, so we’ve only learned about each other through Valerie and through our previous month of exchanging wistful written messages over the internet. We spend an hour walking around the afternoon reception, a semiformal party a few months after the couple’s more intimate wedding ceremony. He gives me a tour of the house as if it were his own, and I try to keep my smiles coy.

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“Out there’s my garden, where I was standing awkwardly by myself hoping you would answer my text and come rescue me,” he says. He points to a framed piece of art on the wall above my head. “This,” he announces with faux confidence, glancing back and forth between the portrait and me, “is actually a painting of my greatgreat-grandparents, who built this house by hand.”

I can tell he is nervous and feels responsible for continuing the conversation. He doesn’t seem to believe he’s entitled to my affection, which is a stark difference from the few other men I’ve been on dates with this year. As we walk around the ceremony, he catches me off guard with questions to fill every silence.

“Do you sit in cafés and read poetry a lot?” he asks, and I hesitate to confirm or deny.

“Do I seem like the type to do that?” I say, wondering the value judgement of each choice. He says I do. “I mean, if I had a book of poetry I wanted to read, and I happened to be going to a café, I would like to do that.”

He nods, listens like he’s studying for an exam.

He buys me two glasses of wine from the cash bar as we learn each other among passed hors d’oeuvres and two brides and no dancing. We walk past a grand piano, and I say that I’ve always wanted to learn to play but have never gotten around to it.

“Someone was playing ‘Valerie’ before, which made me think of Valerie, of course,” he explains, his syllables lingering long and careful as he continues. “Which then made me think of you, and then I wished you were here with me.” Val has been trying to set us up all year, and she is ecstatic when I text her confirming that her two best friends are finally in the same small city and hitting it off. Val will feel bad later. *** Why am I crying in my bathroom, you’re wondering? When I am feeling pithy I tell my sisters, “Because I’m waiting for my boyfriend to get out of rehab!” This makes them laugh because it is entirely false but feels entirely true. He wasn’t my boyfriend, but I think he could have been, and he isn’t in rehab, but he works in one, four hours away from me in bumblefuck Vermont, where he lives on-site with his clients and no cell service. At the wedding, he tells me about what his new job entails and how it’s taking a toll on him. He says the work is difficult and depressing, and that the brand-new bags under his eyes are only a small symbol of how heavy he’s felt lately. He mentions overnight shifts, morning meetings, group therapy, the opioid epidemic. I retain only bits and pieces of the details he provides. Selective memory on my part. *** After the wedding, we walk to a coffee shop where neither of us drinks coffee.

He orders a sandwich (something with tofu), and I order a tea (earl grey with lemon, my usual). I slip into the bathroom while he waits for our order, and I text Valerie again, telling her that she was right to rave about how wonderful he is, and she tries to FaceTime me as I’m pulling up my tights. By the time I step out of the bathroom, he has paid for my tea, and it is sitting on the counter in front of the cash register. I

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thank him for paying and reach for the cup, but he stops me, putting his hand between my hand and the tea.

“Wait, it’s way too hot,” he says. “Let me get you one of those cardboard things to hold it.”

I sneak a text to Val: oh fuck I love him.

We sit outside the coffee shop on Thayer Street and talk for hours as the early October sun sets. I wear his suit jacket and cross an item off my bucket list. As I revel in the mix of nerves and thrill, I’m both intellectually stimulated and sexually attracted to him—a winning lottery ticket, a home run in the bottom of the ninth.

We have the kind of rapport that reminds me why it’s worth getting out of bed in the morning. He asks me questions about myself as we effortlessly wander into conversations about politics, about addiction, about getting older, about Valerie.

When I tell him that I have a crush on my dentist, Dr. Ochoa, he asks me why.

“He’s just, like, kinda cute and nice to me.”

“Is that all it takes? Kind of cute and nice?” he asks.

“The bar is so low for men these days,” I joke.

“I actually have a crush on my dentist, too,” he says. “But my mom is my dentist.”

When he makes a joke he keeps a straight face, fully committing to the bit, risking the possibility that it will fall flat on the wrong audience. I do not know if his mom is really a dentist, and perhaps I never will.

“You know, I’m actually a really good person to have a crush on,” I tell him. I notice that when I catch him off guard with something charming, his smile consumes his normally stoic face without his permission, like an uninvited guest arriving at a dinner party. *** “He’s so pure,” I tell Camille, “that I had to be honest with him. Talking to him feels like talking to a priest.” I lean forward on her couch, talking with my hands, and feel the band of my skinny jeans tightening around my waist.

Camille reminds me that I don’t really know he’s pure, since I’ve only met him once. “But I do know, because of Valerie,” I bite back, getting defensive. “She’s known him for years, and he’s her boyfriend’s best friend, and she agrees with me.”

Camille stays silent and lets me fill the air, the way therapists do in movies.

“I have a secret fear,” I finally spit out, and Camille picks up her pen on cue, “that the shortcut to filling this void in my life is to just get a boyfriend. What if I never really figure out how to stop feeling this way because I just meet someone and then all my longing goes away? Wouldn’t that be easier than trying to work through all this baggage of feeling like my life is missing something?”

“That probably would be an effective shortcut,” she says. “And I can’t wait for the day you walk into this office and tell me you’ve met someone wonderful!”

“Didn’t I do that six weeks ago?” I challenge her, resisting an eye roll.

“Yes, but I mean someone wonderful who wants you back.” *** 82

When my sisters and I were growing up and starting to crave romantic relationships, our mother would tell us, “He is only the gravy in your life. You are already the turkey and the mashed potatoes all on your own.”

This is a healthy lesson—a truly feminist moment in my mom’s parenting—and I still believe it to be true. In college, I felt completely whole without ever going on a date. I lived a wildly romantic life, coming of age in New York City, taking classes that challenged me, writing in every café from Harlem to the Financial District, loving my friends fiercely and loyally, and wearing a lot of winged eyeliner. I reaped all the benefits of long-term independence, of learning yourself on your own terms, by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree.

Then I turned 22, and graduated from college, and moved away from all of my friends in New York, and had a dream in which I met a man for a date in the neighborhood I grew up in. The man, a faceless figure, lived in the green saltbox house a block away from my parents’ house on Long Island, where my childhood friend Amy lived. In the dream, I lay on Amy’s couch with the man on top of me, fully clothed and fully silent. His body pressed mine into the couch cushions, our noses touching, chests melding into one. When I woke up, I could feel the physical weight of the dream man on top of me, and it set off a timer. My mother would call this timer my biological clock. From that moment forward, I have tried to return to that pressure, that enveloping feeling of physical intimacy.

My first attempt to fill this void came a few weeks later in the form of a coworker with a sweet demeanor and rich parents and poor judgment. He had a girlfriend, and I knew that from the beginning, but it didn’t stop me from taking the bait each time he offered it. On a frigid Friday night in February, he gave me a ride to New York to visit my college friends, since he was driving there anyway to see his girlfriend. I accepted the offer; he didn’t tell his girlfriend. We spent four hours on I-95 telling each other all the things we couldn’t discuss during the workday—how lonely I was in my office, how annoying our other coworkers were, how I’d never had a boyfriend before, how unhappy he was with his girlfriend, how they’d cheated on each other in the past. When he dropped me off at my friend’s apartment in Park Slope, I collapsed on her couch while she stared at me, blinking performatively, begging for details. I was so overwhelmed with the promise of what could be, of the space he could fill in my life, that I was silent, crushed on her couch under the weight of all my hope.

It would be wrong to say I don’t feel whole on my own. I am sure that I am complete as an individual, and the void I keep talking about in therapy refers to something that is missing from my life, not from my own sense of self. I know this distinction matters, but sometimes I can’t remember why. On the days I can’t, I think of the men in Christmas movies who work too much but realize in the end that family is what matters most, that life isn’t complete without a loving wife. Each year in December, I watch It’s a Wonderful Life with my family, in black and white and all its glory. We take turns reciting the film’s lines from memory, and every year, we cry when George Bailey kisses the staircase railing. Mary! Let me touch you! Are you real, Mary? *** 83

“I’m feeling really vulnerable right now,” he tells me, blushing in the passenger seat of my car, after talking about falling in love with the lyrics of an album. We are parked illegally behind his Prius, so I put my hazard lights on, and the clicking sounds like a countdown. It is the last conversation we have before I kiss him. I don’t remember the name of the album.

I drive toward the water and we spend a couple hours kissing in my car like teenagers. Around midnight, while sitting with my head on his shoulder, I feel a paralyzing insecurity creep in. I start to speak but stop myself as soon as I begin. He catches my first syllable and asks me what I’m holding back.

I shoot my eyes up and ask him, incredulous, “You like me?”

He is confused. He says he does.

“I’m surprised you like me,” I say. “I’m surprised you don’t think I’m too loud or too much.” First date. Poor guy.

“I didn’t think you were too loud or too much at all tonight.” He kisses my forehead, handles it well.

With my head still on his shoulder, I tilt my chin up to kiss his neck, just once, in the small amount of space between the top of his suit collar and his jaw, then face forward again.

I make a mental note for myself: this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

He takes my left hand, presses my fingers between his, and rubs my palm.

Secretly, I wish he’d loosen his tie, let me unbutton his shirt a little bit and run my fingers along his chest. I can feel my desire growing, and I can feel the void filling. I am falling for him and for the moment, and I am too in my head—this is always true. To compensate, I get flippant and sarcastic and pull my hands away from his.

“What are you trying to do, read my palm?” I joke. Soft-spoken and sweet, he gently says no and continues to lace his fingers in mine.

I am an asshole. He is a vegetarian. And I think he would be intimidated by how demonstrative my mother is. There are so many reasons I should not feel so hopeful, but I am drunk on the promise of what could be. I should remind you again that this is not really about him. He is only a symbol of what could be.

My phone plays Lorde’s Pure Heroine, an album about suburban teenagehood, from the cupholder of my Toyota Corolla as he tells me about his college girlfriend, and I try to figure out if he has a void he wants to fill, too. “We were living together, and we were way too young for that kind of commitment,” he says. “Being in a serious relationship with someone now, at 26, would be completely different.”

I’m distracted by Lorde, singing a line that will ring in my head for weeks: We’re biting our nails, you’re biting my lip. I’m biting my tongue.

“Seeing my sister get married,” I say, cautiously, “and seeing how feminist her relationship is has made me really want to, like, come home to someone at night,” I reveal. Maybe the internet raised us, or maybe people are jerks. But not you.

“I feel the same way,” he says. “I’m not afraid of settling down anymore like I used to be. I never imagined I’d get to this point.”

In this moment I decide that if I have a son, I will name him George Bailey. *** 84

I am okay with being a woman who cries over a man on the toilet on a Wednesday morning. I have never been naïve enough to judge heartbreak, even before I had experienced it myself. But on the days when the pain isn’t sharp, and it’s the dull underlying void wreaking havoc, I condemn myself for my desires. Am I getting worse at feminism as I get older? Why can’t I return to the satisfaction I felt as a single college student? Who wants a dry turkey breast without gravy on it? *** “Do you feel like you’re in high school again, kissing in a car like this?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I kind of do,” he says, and I go on to ask a question I already know the answer to.

“Did you do this a lot in high school?”

He laughs quickly. “Definitely not. Did you?”

Parked in front of a big house somewhere off Blackstone Boulevard, there is a comfort that comes with this subtle reassurance that the moment is rare for both of us, and asking the right questions because we want to communicate this to each other. It fills the car.

“No, never.”

Gently, he follows up, “What about in college?”

I put my guard back up, because answering a question about how often I kissed in cars during college feels much more revealing. “I went to college in New York City, so no one had a car,” I tell him, pleased with myself for concealing my inexperience and coming across as clever all at once.

“Right, so you just made out on the subway instead?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I say with a laugh, and he knows I am kidding but he cannot know to what extent.

I make a mental note for myself: it has never felt like this before. *** “You have a real connection with somebody, which is more than I can say,” one of my single girlfriends tells me the weekend after we break things off, trying to cheer me up. “It might lead to something one day.”

In the week after the wedding, his messages get shorter and increasingly inconsistent. Each time I turn off my phone to teach a class, I hope that I will turn it back on and see his name appear, but I don’t. He is kind to me even as he ends things. He blames his job, how the work is making him depressed, and the distance between us, but he swears that it’s nothing personal. You are so open and engaging and I love talking to you, he writes. I just wish we lived closer to each other. We leave things open for the future—maybe in five years, or when he’s back in town for the holidays, or when he just has decent cell service again.

This feels like the sad part of a romantic comedy, he writes. I really want to spend time with you again when the circumstances are different. I am forgiving, and not completely surprised, given the distance between us.

It’s definitely still a rom com, I write back. This is all rising action.

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We’re not even 30 minutes in, he insists, and in doing so, he makes it nearly impossible for me to move on. He has given me hope, which in the midst of a breakup, is the cruelest thing you can give to someone. *** I sit in this purgatory for nine months, while we each go on to date other people, and our communication fades in and out as the seasons pass—even after he moves home to Providence, into an apartment a few blocks away from the staircase where we met. My feelings for him come and go like a dull, lingering headache that’s not quite bad enough to urge you off the couch to take Tylenol.

The following autumn, a year almost to the day after the wedding, I meet the man who will become my boyfriend for the next ten months. This relationship is easy to settle into. He is starkly different from the man who invited me to the wedding— stubbornly logical while the last was more sensitive, predictable instead of erratic, always hedging where he was reckless. I compare them, unfairly, for longer than I want to, and longer than I care to admit to my boyfriend (though I don’t think he’s blind to it). Four months of our relationship are spent in quarantine, which is its own kind of purgatory—a suspended reality socially distant not just from other people, but from our real lives, from our responsibilities and obligations. I spend most of my time in his bedroom, where all we do is eat and drink and talk and fuck.

One morning in April, I wake up in my boyfriend’s bed at 6 am, and I am so happy to be next to him that I can’t fall back asleep. I lie there with his arm under my neck, watching him sleep. This is the moment I finally stop comparing these two men, and more importantly, the moment the void gets so full it renders itself invisible, the way a hunger pang only goes away once you fill your stomach.

Eventually he wakes to my face right next to his, and I am wearing a big, goofy smile. This is the moment when I know without a doubt that I am in love with him.

In some ways, finally meeting someone wonderful who wants me back confirms my greatest fear: that life is better when you are in love with someone. I FaceTime my sister one night in May, and when she sees how happy I am, how uncharacteristically giggly, sitting at my boyfriend’s kitchen table eating ramen noodles while he does the dishes, she assumes I must be drunk. I feel like a happier, more grounded version of my usual self when I am with him. More full.

He breaks up with me in the summer because he is moving across the country to begin a six-year PhD program and he is unwilling to be in a long-distance relationship, despite promising the opposite all year. After the initial pain of the heartbreak, I am left with the seemingly plain fact that my life is objectively worse without him in it. There is less laughing, less kissing, less emotional support, less to look forward to. When I tell my friends, and my mom, and my therapist this, they remind me that I deserve to be with someone who is willing to prioritize me and our relationship despite any amount of distance. The person I’m meant to be with longterm, they insist, won’t be able to fathom living his life without me, and think about how that kind of love will be even better than all the fragments of romantic love I’ve experienced in my 25 years.

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I am hesitant to accept this narrative, though, because it requires me to admit what I’ve been suspecting since age 22—that turkey and potatoes do indeed fall flat without the gravy. That we get over a breakup by believing the encouraging promise that doing so will make room for another, better relationship. That twice now, men have chosen their careers and convenience over companionship with me—a choice I envy their willingness to make as I sit alone in my bedroom, missing them from a distance. That I am somehow still in purgatory, treading water all throughout my twenties, until this major puzzle piece of my adult life finally shows up and buys me a ring.

In one of my graduate school classes, I learned about what communication scholars call “speech acts,” which are statements that perform an action. For example, “I’m sorry” is both a sentence and a reparation of harm done. In The Hunger Games, the townspeople know “I volunteer as tribute” is more than just a sentence (it’s practically a death sentence, if you will). Saying “I do,” under certain circumstances, can legally bind two people, can fill a void, can rescue a woman from a decade of treading water. Of course, people get divorced all the time—hell, people get widowed—and why am I so dedicated to these heteronormative, patriarchal standards of legally tying someone down, anyway? Maybe it’s because I am out of fucking breath.

When my boyfriend and I officially define our relationship, and when he officially ends it, both events feel artificial. I text my friends in November, I am officially someone’s girlfriend now, and I am underwhelmed by their responses. Can’t they see that everything is different now? It’s a simple text message, but my life has changed, don’t they know? And then, on the flip side of the relationship, he says he wants to have kids with me on a Sunday, but on Monday morning he says, “I don’t think long distance is even worth trying,” and suddenly everything has come undone.

Where does that love go? Where can I put it? Nothing has changed and yet with just a handful of words, the void starts creeping back, begging to be filled again.

The day before he moves to Michigan, the day before my feelings remain but his label goes from my boyfriend to my ex-boyfriend, he holds me tight while we sit on the brown leather couch in his living room. I put my face in his chest, sobbing, unable to catch my breath, like I’m a kid at the ocean on Long Island again, getting wiped out right where the waves crash, all that salt water thrashing in my lungs.

Before I pack up the last of my things and leave, I ask him to lie on top of me on the couch for a little while, just so I can soak up the last of his weight.

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Riffs on Healing, Circular, but Approaching Resolution

By Stephanie Meuse I remember, though you probably don’t. I remember, though you probably wish I didn’t—the night I spent sweeping up broken glass from the picture frames you broke behind my overturned couch. I cried and swept. This mess was important. I mean, it was not important then, but it still feels important, sometimes, now.

The tiny shards, buried in the carpet. The broom, the dustpan. The impossible task of extracting all of those tiny glass pieces, but working diligently anyway, because it was my house and my carpet, and I wanted to walk barefoot on my floors without being reminded of this night, this mess, this version of myself again.

I cried and swept, I think. It is hard to remember. Or maybe I swept, but didn’t cry, a calculated choice. Always doing the math, choosing between your rage at having to watch me clean up the mess and your rage at having to deal with the mess yourself. (What was it that bothered you? The guilt or the fact that it was all so easily cleaned up, wasn’t a big enough show of your anger at all? What was it you thought, I still wonder, while I sat on my knees, broom and dustpan in hand, under your thumb and your gaze.)

It was always something like that. Always some mess, and then eventually I was the mess, and by then I was done hoping you’d ever help clean up any of it, by then I was used to doing the clean up by myself.

Yes. Now I am the mess. It is not just broken picture frame mess anymore.

And me mess is impossibly hard. Those broken pieces, the me broken pieces? I cannot sweep up and discard and just pretend like it all never happened until it happens again. How could I? How do you clean up and discard the pieces when a large part of you just wants to keep the pieces forever, because you don’t even have a plan to replace them yet, so let’s hold out hope that there is enough scotch tape and super glue in the world. Keep the pieces forever, just in case. Keep them on display maybe.

Look at these pieces. These pieces were me once, these pieces used to 88

make sense, these pieces were one once, I wasn’t always having to think of a way to keep them all together. (Witness this thing, this not okay thing that happened to me.) But that doesn’t seem ok? No one seems to think that’s an ok thing for me. But. I am not ready to be done cleaning up yet.

Here I am, down to the last few shards, the last little bit of mess left, and it is all I can do to not go picking the pieces I’ve already cleaned back up out of the garbage. I just cannot be done cleaning yet.

You’d think I’d be so eager to get rid of this mess. But this mess is just so big, I’m not sure anyone can understand that I don’t feel like I will ever be done cleaning it, and also that I am scared of the chores that come next.

There are so many tiny pieces of glass that the carpet is ripped. And the carpet is so ripped that other messes have since rotted the floor underneath away, messes the carpet was put down to protect the floor from. And the floor underneath is so rotted that other messes have since eroded the foundation of the house, messes that the floor and the carpet should have protected it from. I mean, do you understand that? Is anyone able to follow this metaphor?

I am down to the last few shards, and I just cannot part because at least while I am still cleaning up this mess, it makes sense that the carpet is ripped and the foundation is rotten. Because of course the carpet is ripped, it’s covered in glass shards. Of course the foundation is rotten, this house has clearly been destroyed.

And at least while I am still cleaning up this mess, you’re not making another mess yet. I was strongest and safest while cleaning up the mess.

Strongest and safest while surrounded by the fallout. *** How did I start pressing the bruises on my arms to keep them forever?

Pressing on the bruises and saying to myself, next time…Saying to myself, well that isn’t okay. When was it exactly that I started pressing on bruises as a way to pass the time between them?

You say now, in public and to me, “Oh, I would have never laid a hand on 89

you,” and I think you really, honestly believe that about yourself. And I also knew this day would come, when I stopped pressing the bruises to keep them forever and you started to pretend they never happened.

So one day, I pressed on the bruise so I could keep it, so I could have proof. You were so betrayed I kept the bruise. You are so betrayed this bruise exists. It is so unfair that this bruise exists when you didn’t even mean to give it to me anymore. You are so mad and it is so unfair that now I have two bruises and I am going to keep them both forever and then eventually I’ll have so many bruises that it will be too many bruises to keep them all, and I am tired of a life that is mostly pressing bruises and I don’t deserve these bruises and I am not going to press on them anymore.

And then how did it feel when I realized I might need these bruises? That I needed those bruises like my first graders needed visual reminders attached to verbal rules. I pressed those bruises for strength, when I thought I might forgive you, or make you feel like what you did was okay. I would press the bruise and immediately remember the rage and emptiness and betrayal that comes when the person who is supposed to love and protect you is the person you need protecting from.

That’s why I pressed the bruises to keep them forever. The bruises you gave me protected me. So I became a girl that could not heal because while I was bruised I was safer and stronger than when I was not. And that’s how I went from being happy to deepening shades of purple on my arms. *** Do you or I or anyone even understand that healing from any of this is not just a matter of being able to forgive you, it’s also being able to forgive myself. For staying. For pressing the bruises. For being so committed to cleaning the messes and so incapable of addressing the underlying unnatural disaster creating them. For not being able to let myself heal. For undoing the scabs as soon as they started to cover the wound too well.

I believe I used to be different than this, but some days it is hard to be sure. I have a lot of trouble remembering the order in which things happened. Was I broken, so you were always so mad? Or was I broken 90

because you were always so mad? I do not understand, cannot remember, cannot sort or compute, cannot forgive—even for my own peace, even for my own sake—I cannot stop pressing that bruise. First I was the one who thought the bruises needed pressing and now I am the one who needs to press the bruises. You inflicted them and now I am someone who can’t let them heal.

Harms done and done and done, and I am the only one around to beat up for it anymore. That’s why, when you ask, that it was not ever just easier to leave, that it was not over when left, and that it goes on and on and on.

Photo contributed by Alexis Schutz

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YOUR TATTOOS ARE MY EMOTIONAL SCARS Triple 3, you’re the devil in me.

When my mind goes to a dark place, I see your face.

I replay that night where your hand was on my neck so tight.

A noose would’ve hurt less, A knife would’ve been best.

To protect me from my future distress, Angry that I wouldn’t undress.

I struggled to breathe while you screamed at me.

I wish I could fully understand what made you be but instead I let it repeat in my head, Hoping it’ll soon end.

I forgive you even though I’m still traumatized.

I can accept my pain and realize That it’s not my fault.

You have your own issues that you misuse.

You project your pain onto walls and your work.

I just happened to be the closest outlet you felt the need to fight and it’s okay.

I understand but I hope you’ve grown as a man and don’t treat your girlfriend this way.

I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I found out one day she was the star of the same play.

Where you attach and attack and manipulate your path into someone’s soul.

Only to leave them all alone and afraid.

And confused how they’re still loving you post abuse.

BY KRYSTAL OLSEN 92

Lessons Learned

By S.P.

She and I were at war. And for what?

I was young but he was the love of my life. And everyone told me, while every bone in my body shrieked from the pain of my heartbreak, that I would find other loves.

Impossible. No love could’ve compared to that one.

In hindsight, the relationship was one-sided. Dealing with the fact that he never really loved me in the first place, and that that’s normal for most high school boys was way too hard. Way too messy.

And if I’m honest, it’s still hard. And it’s been over ten years.

I haven’t spoken to my therapist about it because I know a wound is still a wound. And a scar can still be ripped opened. I will, just not yet.

I think I’m embarrassed that it still hurts. That I can still cry on a dime about it.

But if you know me you know I love hard and I love for a long time. I learned to love with forever in mind. Somehow. Because I didn’t learn that from my parents. Or my siblings.

Somewhere along the line I learned that I wanted to dive head first into something that you continue to learn about for the rest of your life. So you can imagine how much I knew about it at 15.

He was my coward in black matte armor. My very own Judas.

I’m happy for him now. And for her.

They’re still together after all this time. After he betrayed me to be with her all those years ago. After she comforted me on the floor 93

of the school orchestra closet the first time our relationship was on the brink of broken.

I didn’t know she was the reason why I was shattering before everyone’s eyes.

The other woman. That afternoon in the orchestra closet was part of the reason something inside my brain just... snapped.

I lost everything about me. I no longer knew who I was without him and I didn’t want to know that person. I wanted to be with him forever and I was going to try my hardest to get him back.

I intimidated her, and I liked that I did. I loved the feeling of being feared.

I destroyed so many friendships over him. Over her. So many that I wish I could get back, but I understand why I can’t.

Hell, I wish I could be friends with her AND him still. That’s what we all started out as anyways, right? But that’s just my it’s-waytoo-hard-making-new-friends-in-adulthood talking. Or maybe my self-destructive tendencies talking.

She and I were at war for so long, at least in my brain. Or maybe I was just at war with myself the whole time. That relationship taught me so much. So much about myself. About the world.

About what I wanted out of the rest of my life. About love.

Like how if another girl wants to take your boyfriend, and he wants that too? You should just let them be happy together.

I also learned that no matter how bad you’re hurting, some people don’t understand the power of “I’m sorry.” Or closure. In the long run you won’t really NEED it. Not to survive, anyhow.

I think about that a lot, how neither one of them has ever apologized to me for keeping me up late at night with just me, my thoughts, and a pen and paper. The never ending “why’s,” “what did I do wrong’s,” and “what’s wrong with me’s.” For the 94

mornings when I could barely open my swollen eyes from crying so hard I thought I’d suffocate.

Oh, the things I wrote with the pain. Some of my best writing to date.

I learned that the thing worth fighting for is yourself. After all of this was over, I went to college. I had flings and one-night-stands and mini love stories that novelists would love to get their hands on.

I grew into my body. My hips are perfectly proportioned now. My hair stayed red. I’m a petite bombshell, if I may say so.

I grew into my independent thinking, which threw my conservative, rightist, manipulative family for a real fucking loop.

I did find another love of my life, and I married him.

I finally found a career choice that fits ME. And let me tell you, that “find a job you’re passionate about and you’ll never work a day in your life” doesn’t work the way they tell you it does. I think they should tell students, especially young women, to find what makes them feel strong. Find the job that makes you happy, yes, but don’t make your passion your work. Just keep that your passion.

Find a job that gives you the means to travel the world and to order takeout from that hole-in-the-wall Chinese place down the street. The means to buy the cheapest wine and drink it with the most expensive, priceless people.

I suppose I should thank him for breaking me. Because look what came of it.

If she and I ever spoke again, I would thank her too.

Both of them helped me find my husband. I found the people who will be my life-long friends. The ones who saw me when I was broken and picked up the needles and thread and started to work 95

on stitching me back up and still do.

I’ve been working my way through a world that was not ready for a woman like me. Both of them started the fire in my belly to be successful, and to one day soon have everyone call me “Doctor.”

(The spiteful me hopes someday I get to live out that movie-esque scene and correct both of them with that new title. “It’s Doctor, not Mrs.”) Anyways, I digress.

All of this to say: Love hurts.

No man is ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever worth a war with another woman.

Empower each other. Push each other to the top of this really fucking hard, beautiful life.

Photo contributed by Hadley Dion 96

GIFT

by Mel Andrel

This piece represents a great deal of abusive relationships I’ve been in + my inability to stand up for myself effectively. Much of my work is inspired by trauma and personal growth from that trauma. This symbolizes apologizing when you’re not sorry, forgiving others when you aren’t ready to forgive + settling for any less than you deserve.

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forgotten things there’s an impulse to get rid of everything at the end of a relationship things of theirs or things you shared half finished books and half used pencils an expensive sweatshirt the extra toothbrush in the vanity tv shows and songs and cities and inside jokes and hopes and fantasies how quickly these things accumulate yet how instantly you want to let them go how long it takes to forget them or to wish you never knew them at all years later maybe you’ll be struck with the thought of them walking down the street or shuffling through a playlist and you’ll lose your breath at the suddenness of the memory and the memory of the sudden loss and finally, one day you’ll realize you let a lot go some material, some not but the things you kept, you kept close to your chest and you lumped them in with the rest of you (maybe without even realizing) and molded the clay and smoothed the cracks and it’s a good thing you didn’t get rid of everything, after all after all, you wouldn’t be you if you had would you?

By Madison Sylvester @madisonmusing 98

In July, It’s Easier to Dream If I tell them this thing about myself, I call down the judgements of those for and those against, barring me from their respective assemblies which I imagine to be bright, righteous, and filled with snapping emblems unfit for me, or rather me for them. And yet I tell it anyway, in orange light and unsteady hand, betraying myself with this wish that is also a secret contradiction. I am telling it now, though my double-dealing spirit is perhaps a disappointment to the young girl in purple pajamas, who eats cinnamon toast with her chocolate milk and dreams to be a Sir. You will be disappointed, too?

Wait, dearest me. The wish below wishes, the thing to tell, it didn’t come true. Hasn’t. Yet? God please, let it be yet. Because I’m growing wrinkles, sitting here, waiting for the porch and the sourmash and the tender hand to brush my hair. I hear the footfalls of my grandparents in my brain, and come as close to myself as I ever get when their feet-music plays. Is it possible to exit a life that’s been stacking up, scatter the pieces and begin again? It could come with that porch. Could come with bare feet or slightly sagging breasts, inheritances from my immigrant, pioneering grandmothers of each great-great variety.

I would have baked you bread, didn’t you know? I would have studied long hours and argued deft points and advocated for equal rights and blistered myself for career’s sake…and most of all, would have turned sourdough in my hands for you. Can’t imagine? Surely you would delight in saucy little me, all books and philosophy, turning domestic housecat for an evening.

You would be the only one to see my secret transfiguration, the just right spirit to cast wall shadows, work quickly, get my body magic to happen.

I would hum to myself—Gran’s songs, what else?—and pound my strong arms into that lump of dough. They are so strong, people are sometimes surprised. But not you. You see my unrelenting self, so far in my years, understand the loads these arms have borne. And now in this imagining, I’m smiling to realize this is a Gran-gift, compounded by my mother’s blue apron. Would you have kept bees like my father did? This baking comes nearest felicity with fresh honey on it. And this would be my greatest 99

gifting to you: fresh bread, made by unashamed hands, standing in a kitchen like all the before-women in my family with whom I did or didn’t feel akin.

And what would have been so bad about plucking your banjo on the front porch? Eating my loaves and playing your music and smoking that determined pipe? We would have made many lives in all-over places, but do you believe how sincerely I say the bread life is my favorite one?

Perhaps you would have told me I have the violet confidence of lupine standing in a mountain meadow. I disappoint myself wanting to hear this thing from you—it sounds small I guess, but to me it still feels large. My family says I bring the brightness, also I’m a sad thing when happy times come. I can’t seem to allow delight-moments without reminding us that we’re all due to die. Soon or not, but it happens just the same. If you’d chosen so, you could have known these things.

But there now, my bread betrayals are known. Maybe the purple girl will forgive me and even kiss my cheek. Tonight, I’m holding myself to me.

And stroking my own hair. And longing for my cat whiskers to sprout.

By Lydia Renfro

Photo contributed by Megan Vignola 100

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

By Illiana Maria

In this movie I wasn’t playing the main character.

I wasn’t even human.

Only bringing happiness into his life.

They never showed the scenes where I would cry at night.

Perceiving me as this wild maniac.

I had no real human characteristics.

Sure, I was funny.

Sure, I showed him new things.

But it was always about him.

I was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

But he wasn’t Prince Charming.

There will be a sequel, I won’t be in it.

He will treat another girl better than he ever treated me.

Showing her the things that I showed him .

Never telling her why I left.

Every movie has a climax.

Theirs will be him getting over me and falling for her.

Will I ever get a happy ending?

Or did my happiness end when I met him? continued…

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Movie for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

By Illiana Maria

I’m happy!

I didn’t need him!

My existence wasn’t solely based on his lust.

My femininity is no longer objectified!

I am free!

The idea of liberation has liberated me, not a man.

I do not need him.

I do not need them.

I will and am creating my own movie.

In this movie I will be the main character.

I am human.

I bring happiness into my life.

I no longer cry at night.

In someone’s mind I will forever be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

He will always be the Prince Charming.

The sequel will always portray it in that way.

Directors project their patriarchal beliefs into stories like mine, but I no longer have to enable this narrative.

Every movie has a climax.

This movie will show my vagina climaxing to myself.

My happy ending happened when I left him.

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The Day I Broke Up With Silence

By H.L. Clover

I don’t remember when I first started my relationship with Silence, but it was quick, all-consuming and heavy-handed.

I’m age 7 and I am talking to my dad’s new girlfriend, Elle. I explain how we brought mom flowers earlier that day at the cemetery.

“She loves roses!” I giggle. Her face is a hard line, and I can’t understand why. My father stands behind her, shakes his head vigorously, while making a gesture with his hands that means, “be quiet.”

Hm…that’s strange, I think.

This is the first time I felt being silent was expected. And just like that, me and Silence were bonded.

I am age 8 now and I can’t escape the screaming voices and smashing porcelain coming from the living room. I hear each of my mother’s heirlooms smash on the floor.

Chowder bowl? Reduced to dust.

Teacups and saucers? Gone.

Old framed photos? Shattered.

Me and my siblings huddle together upstairs, heads pressed between the rails of the banister, squeezing our eyes shut. How much more can be broken, anyway?

The next morning, when the eerie calm settles across weathered wooden floors, Elle says, “What happens in this house stays between us. No one needs to know our business.” Silence grabs my hand and holds it tight.

9 years old. Chores are my enemy. My sister Ruby and I have a list of tasks to complete every week. Clean the bathrooms. Mop the floors. Help with the laundry.

Clean your rooms. Do the dishes. Dust the furniture. We are upset because we’ve 103

begun to notice that our brother’s list of chores is blank. We both say, “This isn’t fair! Why do we do all the work while he sits and plays video games or spends time with his friends?!”

They say, “That’s just the way it is. Girls’ responsibilities always outweigh the boys’. That’s life.” Silence pats my back assuredly.

I am 10 years old when my brother pushes me off a porch. This is around the same time where my brother found an affinity for punching me repeatedly. “Dead leg!” he screams each time. “Dead leg, dead leg, dead leg!” he taunts, while laughing maniacally. I tell my parents, family, friends, anyone who will listen.

Clicking their tongues: “Tsk tsk… what a shame,” they say, “Older brothers just do that kinda stuff.” I’m incensed, but Silence holds me steady.

I am age 11 and at my best friend’s summer house. She’s snoring on the side of me. It’s after midnight and I can’t fall asleep. My face is pale blue from the light of my Game Boy. Most of the drunk adults have stumbled to their beds and fallen asleep. My best friend’s uncle comes and sits beside me, asking me questions.

He is too close for comfort now. He reaches over and tickles my arm with a grin on his face to match the Cheshire Cat’s. Why won’t he move away? Can’t he see I’m uncomfortable? Why can’t I just say something? I laugh it off and tell him I’m going to sleep. A sobered look darkens his face and he simply gets up and walks away. Silence prevails once again.

I am 12 years old. I am standing across from my teacher after failing a math exam.

I know numbers aren’t my strong point. I stay quiet anyway, arms placed behind my back, head pointed sheepishly to the floor.

“You know,” she starts. I look up. She looks straight into the depth of my eyes and I hear an almost-imperceptible desperation as she says, “You need to speak up more. No one is going to do it for you.”

Full stop. “Okay,” I muster.

I’m age 16, and I’ve become a Grade A magician. As a good girl, I’ve gone and suppressed the fiery trauma of childhood. I’m obedient. I keep to myself. I share only what I want people to know, which isn’t a lot. Silence has become a 104

comfortable friend, albeit woefully unproductive.

The day I broke up with Silence remains like a vivid film reel playing out in my mind. I’m 18 years old. The catalyst for the script of this life scene was nothing I hadn’t seen before, but the air felt different. I felt different. Changed. Tired, maybe. The bond I held with Silence was stretching thin, the fibrous threads fraying.

I hear Ruby crying as she pleads with her mother. “Get away, Mom,” she cries.

“Please just leave me alone.” I walk into the room and slow motion takes over.

Elle, nearly foaming at the mouth, turns and shoves Ruby into the wall. My sister crumples over, choked with stinging cries of pain. I check on her, but when I look up, Elle is already gone.

I run down the stairs so quickly it feels like I’m floating. When I get into the kitchen something comes over me. The buzzing air feels electric. I walk over to the basement door, grab the handle, pull back and slam the door shut with so much force I can hear the tinkling of the floral sugar bowl in the cabinet.

SLAAAAM! Pause for four beats.

“What was THAT?!” I hear Elle scream from the other room.

“I slammed the door,” I say calmly. “WHY?” she continues. I walk into the living room to see her standing by now, fuming with rage. I square off, face-to-face.

“Because,” I say matter-of-factly. “What you did was wrong and I have something to say about it.”

That was it, the day I officially broke it off with Silence. In the years since (and there have been many), I’ve learned that Silence is a creeping friend, one that hangs around and threatens to take over when you get too comfy. Complacent.

Scared. And for every looming silence that exists, there is one small voice (or indignant door slam) that can make a difference.

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Photos contributed by Hadley Dion

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Exposé on developing masc & femme

Forget him. Never be without him.

Afraid of control Lack of control Wanting unreceptivity and hating distance Forget him. Never be without him.

Being relatable is garbage.

Reeks of swipe culture.

Two second glance Yes or no

Angry cuz he don’t even know Our potentiality.

Would if, he should.

No response He says come over Thirty mins.

Notice she frowns.

Used to being beautiful To be touched lightly. Not him, this middle school titty tapper.

Pout inducing— he tells her to use her words!

Ain’t gonna treat her to breakfast. < she’s hurt bout it > Afraid of control Lack of control

Senses dulled Would he know a real one, If she hit him in the face.

She makes her face To stand tall.

Middle—Uneasy when she plays with extremes.

Contradiction of softening strength < she’s pleased bout it> Way of friction Him and her.

Heat of a catalytic nature.

Love cuz of this boy.

Found the woman Tapped inside.

To be activated Again into her own.

by Joy

Wanting intimacy and hating closeness 107

My Own My skin is meant to keep me Safe, protected, secure.

Why then Does it show me All the hardships I’ve endured

By Caterina Is a reminder Of all the pain That couldn’t be concealed

These blemishes are sometimes Bruises A fault of my own from accidents But other times Or from hands touching It’s from greedy people Without permission Who treat my body Then they disappear Like their throne Until the next time my body Would give into submission These marks are a relic Of behavior I no longer condone Scars And they will push me If you look closely To grow Can show pain that’s healed Until my body However with them Is once again My own

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Take Me to the Place I Love It’s raining in the Rockaways, it’s August 2020, and I’m running along the boardwalk, the waves against the sand like claws down a surface, desperate for something it can’t grasp. It is so unlike the city here that I could be anywhere, even another time; it could be ten or even seventeen years ago during another crisis when the lights turned out all across the city, and my best friend and I were in a park with two boys we thought we could love forever, when forever was just a three syllable word and not an infinity that we tried and failed to wrap our fingers around. The city had gone dark in a more literal way than it has now; the lights had shut off and our parents had come to collect us, we said goodbye like we’d forgotten what it meant. At home, my family ate hotdogs in the candlelight, the flame against the dark like one pointed finger signaling to hold on, wait a minute, this darkness wasn’t total. I had lain in my bed, the dark made thicker by the heat and sleeping streetlights, my Walkman playing the same CD on repeat. Blame it on, blame it on, a song refrained, and I wanted someone to blame for making the city sleep when its existence depended on staying awake, keeping watch, protecting me from the darkness that lived outside my window and inside of me. Now they were all jumbled together—the darkness inside and out—and I tossed and turned like I might wring it all out of me, and I realized my existence also depended on those forever shining lights, each one like an eye on the lookout. In the Rockaways, the lights are on but the darkness has moved to our faces, all of us masked, all of us erased by something we can’t control. *** Grand Central is beautiful. I am sitting on the ground so my legs form pyramids, I am folded up like a chair or a table collapsed after an event ends, when there is some festivity decidedly over; I am the proof. And though right now I am twenty-two years old, it feels like I am twelve, when boys asked me out only to embarrass me, to remind me that my weight, my gummy teeth, my awkwardness were punchlines. In other words, they wanted me to know I was ugly, they didn’t count on this perception trailing me into adulthood, to ask myself even now if this has factored into why I’m here. It’ll be a miracle that as an adult I’ll ever want to love a boy, and yet here I am. People are rushing to trains, buying last minute coffees and magazines so they can ignore the scenery that will rush past them. It is all I can do to notice everything happening in 109

order to stay whole—this person dragging their rolling suitcase almost as if they’ve forgotten they have it, this person pulling the hand of their child in a similar fashion, this couple taking selfies and blocking the rush of commuters rushing home. I have just sent off the first and only person I’ve ever come to love, back to his girlfriend whom he’ll someday marry then divorce. I am trying to remind myself that I had known what I’d signed up for, and that lying in the park, holding hands, sharing secrets and late night phone calls would still lead me to this moment: that he would board a train, that he would move far away from me and it would be me left among the chandeliers and Tiffany clock of this majestic place, waiting to be transported somewhere a train could never take me. But it’s all these people insistently pushing life forward in this beautiful station in the way this city does it best that keeps me from dissolving, that promises the festivities I contain will someday resume. In the commotion of the station I close my eyes, I feel everything that’s cracked inside of me stretch like each fracture might grow hands and reach to grasp each drifting part. I hear an announcement for a train and it’s like a spell that completes the healing. I don’t want to be anywhere else. *** It could’ve been the sort of love I’d felt exactly once—not the kind that is folded within you, pre-set for the family you come from, for the eyes, noses, traumas that resemble yours. And it was not the off-shoot of family love you develop for friends, that grows like a new bud from the same plant and takes on its own life. This was the kind of love that develops outside of you, the roots grown from nothing and nowhere, which makes it kind of magic. With you, I had spotted the seed, the magic. You, like me, had grown up in an out-of-the-way outer-borough, the kind other people don’t spend their Saturdays in, the kind people laugh at over their Midtown mimosas and Brooklyn microbrews, as if where we come from wasn’t connected to the places they moved to. We met among a swell of music because we played music together, and this, combined with our outer-borough tendencies, our love of travel and this city and a million other same things, made me think I could love you. On a dimly lit street corner, the mist of a humid drizzle re-positioning our individual curls like wire sculptures at the hand of an invisible artist, we talked about our dreams. How we wanted to travel, how we wanted to live somewhere else but that here, in New York, was where we wanted to settle down. You understood how absurd it would be to call anywhere else home. On my desk, in my office, at the holiday 110

party you’d agreed to attend, Christmas lights shining and music—not ours— playing, I asked you the next place you wanted to go. Fiji, you said, and suddenly I was there, the teal water and sandy sanctuary, palm trees waving lazily like streamers on a child’s bike. And then suddenly, the image was crumpled up, you said abruptly you had to go, and you took with you that almost-love that hadn’t yet sprouted. Had I thought I could love you because you had loved this city, our city, exactly as I had, drawn your heart around it and into the same shape as mine? The only answer that came was when our city went quiet, in the mid-pandemic months when I listened for the nightly cheers in my Brooklyn neighborhood, took walks as soon as the pots and pans banged, the car horns erupted, the voices whooped, so I might be immersed in it, a different kind of music for a different kind of awakening: a resuscitation of the city’s heart and mine. *** In June, a friend of mine who used to live here asks me in a text if I’m surviving the quarantine in my small apartment. She has moved to a city—which could be any city—I’m relieved to leave every time I visit. Sometimes I wonder if half the reason I ever leave home is to feel the restrained euphoria of returning. But I know this friend, like most friends who have left, is wondering if I wish I could be anywhere but here. I don’t know how to tell her that leaving now would be leaving a loved one on their deathbed, burying them inside of you, and letting the goodbye you never said haunt you forever. I don’t know how to tell her that I think you relinquish the right to complain about a place once you’ve decided to leave it, that your new city should have plenty of things to complain about. I don’t know how to tell her that this city, even steeped in death, has kept me from oblivion, that I am here to field this text message because it’s breathed its energy into me for every heartbreak and disappointment that made breathing a chore. I don’t know how to tell her that this city knows my name and has let me superimpose it over a million views of the skyline, over the parks and bars and streets I frequent. I don’t know how to tell her I’d rather go down with my city—even at its ugliest—than die pretty in hers.

By Stacey Kahn 111

Hopscotch b y S t ep h a n y B r a v o he awaited by the kitchen table and took his interrogating position by the couch at six

one two three hours

seven eight nine

stored plates away by the fourth hour

hopscotch he chalked down trails

hid the jewel box by the fifth hour

made them curve and divide made you jump for the win

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SEX AND ME My relationship with sex has been at best complicated and at worst traumatic. My relationship with sex is also not uncommon. It is the relationship that so many women my age, raised under the guise of girl power and 90s feminism, re-runs of Sex and the City and unrealistic 90s and early 2000s Cosmpolitan magazines, hold. I am the byproduct of a mother who did not want to shame me about sex but also didn’t know how to talk about it with me. I am from a culture that was (and still is) more concerned with if what I wore in the 5th grade was deemed “appropriate” for a young girl to wear, rather than with teaching young boys that my body did not belong to them. This tumultuous relationship with sex is the product of the way I was spoken to in high school by boys who thought they knew more about my body than I did. By boys who knew they could say crude things to me and make fun of my sexual life with no accountability.

The patriarchy I live under continually reminds me that my body is not my own. Through the government, and the man who cat-calls me on the street, and the boy who gets mad at me when I tell him “not tonight,” and by the middle-aged woman telling me to wear something more appropriate. My ownership of my own body is limited to the ideas and laws set by this society. Even though women’s studies classes, my maternal family, and my best friends tell me that I am in charge of my body, my agency is limited. I am not a straight white man and therefore I will not be granted access to full control of my body. I am a straight, white, middle-class woman so I am granted abundantly more ownership than most womxn. But full ownership and control over my own body is still not for me. And if all that does not impact your relationship with sex, well, I am not sure what will.

Now I know, due to the aforementioned women’s studies classes that my relationship with sex started far before I am about to say it did. From an early age I was sexualized via school dress codes and young boys who were not taught how to control their urges. But for me, my relationship with sex, my active relationship with sex, starts at 14, when I first started fooling around with boys. Before long, jokes about my hookups circled around school. I cared a lot about making it seem like I didn’t care. I did not lose my virginity until I was 18, but I 113

was slut-shamed for years before I even made that choice. The casual way in which I was oversexualized and my sexual life was put on full display at the lunch table continues to impact the ways I can truly be intimate with someone. It closes me off and makes casual one-night stands deeply uncomfortable and at times physically painful. And yet I have had plenty.

I have these one-night stands not because of the boys who teased me in high school, but because of the culture around me. This culture that teaches me that casual sex is cool and that I am a prude if I do not enjoy it whole-heartedly. The idea that seeps into every movie, TV show, and genre of music is that my role as a straight woman is to enjoy sex for men, not for me. My role in the relationship is to give pleasure first, and to get it in return only when it is convenient for my partner. He is in control and I am there for the ride.

I am a feminist. I have studied feminism through an academic lens, discussed it with friends, use it daily at work, and still I have not learned how to fix this about myself. I have not learned how to break the cycle of “sex is for men” and I am just there to please. Now this does not mean that I have never had an orgasm or gotten good head.

It means for me that I have let terrible head slide, faked an orgasm for it to be over, and pushed my needs and comfort aside to make sure that my partner finishes.

On the surface it seems manageable, but when I dig deeper, it’s traumatic. All the “bad” sex I’ve had has actually been sex that I deeply regret as soon as it is over. I have had painful sex more times than I can count. All the “bad” sex I’ve had, I’ve had because I have felt like I was supposed to. I felt that if I cut things off, even when I was in physical pain, that I would be breaking the rules. This notion that I am there to serve him means that while I have never been raped or sexually assaulted, I have suffered through sex more times than I can count. Even though I wanted to stop, I couldn’t bring myself to say so.

These are all reflections that I have had on the back burner of my mind throughout my early 20s that boiled over and forced me to deal with them after the ending of my latest and longest relationship. A relationship that I feared I would miss deeply and worried I was making a huge mistake when ending. A relationship that I now see was stifling and taught me more about what I cannot accept in a partner than I thought one relationship could.

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Before him, I had failed miserably at relationships and making them stick. So when this one continued to work out, I looked past all the things I didn’t love and turned blinders on to avoid seeing anything I didn’t want to see. Finally, I felt someone saw me and was going to love me for me.

What I see now is someone who loved my body and found my personality amusing and a challenge. When he told me that he loved a challenge, I should have run in the other direction. I am no one’s challenge to conquer. In the past 5 months, as I unpack all that came from this relationship, I find myself increasingly frustrated with all that I let slide. And the number one thing on that laundry list is the way I allowed him to dictate our sex life and continually sexualize me.

He needed to have sex with me every time we were together and would have preferred to have it every day if he could’ve. I could not get ready in the morning without an ass grab or a “God—you’re so sexy.” Something I don’t need to hear every day, particularly when I have not heard in weeks, if ever, how thoughtful I am or how caring I can be. He needed constant physical attention and it seemed that he felt that this meant he did not need to negotiate with me on what I needed in those terms. We struggled with sex from day one. I can count on one hand how many times we had sex that was entirely comfortable for me throughout. When we had to stop, he always said he wanted to make it better.

I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice that while he said “it’s okay” he was frustrated that we had to stop. Immediately the conversation would become about how we could fix it. Read: how I could fix it. Because it was obviously me who was broken. What I have since learned is it was not me who was broken. My vagina is just fine and quite capable of good sex. What was broken was us, and when I told him that over the phone miles away during a global pandemic, it was still me in his mind who was broken. I was walking away. I wasn’t giving enough. I didn’t want to try. But the thing is, I had tried. I, like every other straight woman, had given more and used more emotional energy than my male partner, and yet it was never enough. Two months into our relationship I flew three hours to watch his friends, whom I had met twice, get engaged. And the chorus I heard from him over and over throughout our relationship was that “if I could just let him in,” we could make it work. And that’s just one example, on a list of 115

about a million that I have compiled since I woke up and realized I lost myself in a relationship that didn’t even fulfill me.

I was mesmerized by the fact that a relationship was finally “working.” That he wasn’t running away and that finally I had fulfilled my womanly duties of making a relationship function. So much so that I let so much go. So much so that I kept the conversation around politics and feminism PG. So much so that I never pushed the issue that we were barely hanging out with my friends. So much so that I took deep breaths and thought about countless other things while he fucked me. I didn’t talk about my trauma or about the mornings I had woken up wishing it would all just stop. Not until the end. When it all blew up and I couldn’t keep it in anymore. When the over-sexualizing me and the talking down to me and him “knowing better” and the lack of depth throughout our entire relationship became too much and pushed me right off the edge. I jumped right off and my feminist self, who had spent almost a year crushed by my desire to be loved, screamed with joy.

And you can say that I should have done more to make things better. That I should have spoken up more or that what I went through isn’t all that bad. You can say those things because I’ve said all of that about a 1,000 times to myself. The reality is, though, when you are raised in the toxic rape culture of America, you learn that sex is for men’s pleasure, that you are there to please, that being quiet and doing what is expected of you is always the correct choice. If you do speak up, you are lucky if you are heard and even luckier if someone cares. It takes years to unlearn all of those things that this culture teaches young girls and women to be true, and even though they are not right, they are the way the world works. I know it takes years because I am still trying to unlearn it all. Every. Damn. Day.

By A.S.

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The house that Jack built I wonder who came up with the idea to paint over red bricks with red paint And why we agreed to follow it And when you lost some of our bricks Why didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t I notice And who put up new brick in the foundation we worked on Why didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t i notice our house was changing Or maybe i was just evicted

By Bray 117

PART FOUR 119 sometimes it turns out you have to lie 120 When I Grow Up 123 The March Sisters 131 Dead in Translation 124 Guava Dream 132 Photostrips 125 but I only just met you 133 To You, My Soulmate 126 Perfect Day 134 we each have our own plans

128 Mothering 129 Self Portrait Diana & Self Portrait Sehkmet

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sometimes it turns out you have to lie

Friendships are often as complicated and nuanced as romantic relationships: the work for them is just as arduous, the loss of them brings grief, and the reward from them is mammoth. This piece is the first in a 3-part series I made in 2019 as I navigated the shifting tides in my relationship with my best friend. She was avoiding me and keeping things from me for months, and admittedly, I stopped trying.

When we finally communicated again, it was like we had become strangers, pulling ourselves in opposite directions, and holding onto each other for dear life, all at the same time.

By Caitlin Peck 1 of 3

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When I Grow Up

“I want to be you when I grow up.”

Mom used to say this to me all the time, usually in the car on our way to run errands.

by fallon wilson

I would crack a joke or belt out a line in a song with distinct confidence, and she’d laugh, “I want to be you when I grow up.”

Some would argue that forty-nine is grown— that there is no “growing up” left to do— but I liked that she always phrased it that way.

Like there was always time to grow and change.

I’d giggle and carry on whatever bit I’d started, even more confident than before, and she’d sit back bewildered.

“Sometimes I just don’t know where you came from,” she’d say.

The funny part, looking back now, is that I do.

I was raised by a mother that taught me to be exactly myself.

A mother that would dance around the living room in faded overalls, singing “Beautiful” by Carole King, no matter how out of tune.

A mother that lost one of her breasts to cancer and could joke about her fake boob slipping out at dinner.

A mother that loved the term “laugh lines” because if wrinkles were the cost of laughing more, she thought it was a fair trade.

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She was naturally lighthearted, warm, and funny, yet somehow wished she could be me when she grew up.

Some would argue that forty-nine is grown— that there is no “growing up” left to do— but most would agree that forty-nine is too young to die, especially as a mother of four.

I’ve spent the past ten years navigating life without my best friend, learning to grow and change and evolve with only memories of her.

I will never be able to ask her thoughts on folklore, or find out the secret to her stuffed pepper recipe.

I’ll never know what mannerisms of hers I inherited, or what she is like as a grandmother.

I’ll never know if the girl that she “wanted to be when she grew up” is still the girl I am now.

But I do know that the lessons I learned in our short fifteen years together— lessons I learned by just spending time with her—those are a handbook to live by.

I had a mother that woke up every day one summer to paint the outside of our house herself, scaffolding & all.

I had a mother that had four children and never missed a single school concert, baseball game, swim meet, or dance recital.

A mother that told us that she would love us unconditionally, whether we liked boys or girls, because love was love.

I had a mother that made Sunday dinners feel like holidays and family traditions like a religion.

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I had a mother that protected me from the darker parts of life, letting me be a kid while I could, not knowing Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be forced into adulthood at fifteen & a half.

I had a mother that loved her children with every ounce of her being, and I would be more than lucky to be her when I grow up.

By Fallon Wilson

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The March Sistersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;through illness, death, love, joy, jealousy, stupidity, foot molds, burned books, and horrific haircuts, they are always there for each other. Familial relationship goals.

By Summer Rae 123

Guava Dream Guava dream is watching Abuelo’s large hands with the fat gold ring snug on his finger as he slices thick yellow cheese and guayaba paste on crackers for us to share. He hands me a plate full of the sticky sweet treasure and my eyes gobble it up before it’s even in my mouth.

Abuelo’s glasses sit on the edge of his nose and his tongue slightly sticks out the side of his mouth as he carefully repeats the ritual so we can eat seconds, since one is never enough. It tastes like home.

Guava dream is now taking a bite of paste de guayaba and suddenly I’ve materialized in my grandparent’s old kitchen where Abuelo eats dinner across from me, with the biggest spoon I’ve ever seen. I can see the glint around his neck of the gold chain with a saint on it.

It’s flying above the tree branches into a clear blue sky on the swing he built in their green backyard. It’s chasing the ice cream truck down the street with Abuela, eating melting paletas, then laughing as we stick our tongues out, to see whose tongue is more orange.

Food transports you to the voices of people that you miss and to the places you thought you’d forgotten. When you’re afraid you can’t remember, the flavors stubbornly tell you that they won’t let you lose the feelings you had when you first tasted guayaba con queso.

Don’t let yourself forget what your favorite food tastes like because you want to look a certain way or because you think you have to diet. Or because of the million other ways people have told you that you need to lose weight. That you’d be “so pretty” if you just lost a few pounds.

Don’t let yourself forget what it’s like to have a guava dream.

By Marisol Diaz 124

but I only just met you

By Caitlin Peck 2 of 3

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Perfect Day

By Zoe Z-B, age 12 Two best friends Two best friends sharing a perfect moment Two best friends sharing a perfect moment: laughing about nothing in particular Two best friends sharing a perfect moment: laughing about nothing in particular; sucking on ice-pops Two best friends sharing a perfect moment: laughing about nothing in particular; sucking on ice-pops; looking at the sun Two best friends sharing a perfect moment: laughing about nothing in particular; sucking on ice-pops; looking at the sun; getting soaked by a nearby sprinkler Two best friends sharing a perfect moment: laughing about nothing in particular; sucking on ice-pops; looking at the sun; getting soaked by a nearby sprinkler; HAVING A PERFECT DAY. 126

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Mothering

Before Tuesday rolls into Thursday, I am all kinds of weather, mostly drizzle.

Mornings have a way of sneaking upon, burnt toast and sticky jam, milk on tiles.

By noon, love comes in Tupperware boxes, more fits and starts. Headaches flutter like broken-winged butterflies, worn body eager to crawl back into pupa at nightfall. Behind closed eyes, I dream of lavish maunderings, bold, scissor-cut poems at every street corner.

By Clara Burghelea

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Self Portrait Diana & Self Portrait Sehkmet

By Sonja Czekalski  The following two pieces (pg. 130) are a cloak and corset as part of a self-portrait series. The series visually describes the relationship between myself and my body and the relationship between myself and the mothers who raised me. The self-portraits in this series embody not only me, but the women who made me, how I wear their stories on my skin, and how I carry myself with them. This lineage includes my ancient ancestry, my past lives, the Goddess Sehkmet, and the Goddess Diana.

Their stories make up my social DNA, and my ancestry holds their biological DNA. I created a cloak as a metaphor of the mothering energy I carry with me. The cloak is made from gampi fibers, yarn, and embroidery thread, weaving together the bodies, stories, and Songlines of the women who raised me. The cloak is the body of a mother, a metaphor for the Goddess Sehkmet. She is warm and inviting, but she can quickly smother. The cloak is the heavy burden on a hot summer day and the warm comfort of a blanket on a cold winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s night. In Self Portrait Sehkmet the cloak is designed to be shrugged on or off, allowing me to decide when I need her warmth and comfort and when I need to be free from her grasp.

I created the corset as a metaphor for the relationship between the over-sexualization of my female figure and my authentic sexuality. Self Portrait Diana stands as a powerful bodice embracing her raw sexuality.

Made from steel wire, gampi fiber, flax fiber, and yarn, she holds her own weight and form, illuding to the strength and fragility of raw skin and bone. She embodies the Greek Goddess Diana. Diana is the goddess of the hunt, wild animals, trees, and fertility. She is the killer and the protector of animals. In all of her myths, she is free from a man and at one with her sexual being. She is her own embodiment and her own choices in her sexuality, motherhood, and spirit.

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Self Portrait Diana

Self Portrait Sehkmet

By Sonja Czekalski

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Dead in Translation

By Michelle Bermudez The Spanish word for bloom is floracion, but if you ask my madre she’ll tell you that she doesn’t know and “ask Google” and when exactly did we start asking permission to speak with the tongue we were given?

But if you reverse the search then floracion actually translates to “flowering” and that isn’t so surprising because when has translation ever told the whole truth?

If you change it to say “the flower is blooming,” then yes, floracion will become “blooming” because again, translation into English can become anything that the English wants it to be so that somehow, limpiar and cocinar become labels for brown women and “Dee-os mee-o” becomes a funny American phrase of amazement.

You will always hear only what you want to hear and if you don’t like what we say, well, you can always fall back on “No hablo español.”

Funny thing is, I’ve been on this land for veintisiete años and even my abuela will do you the courtesy of telling you she doesn’t speak English in English, not Spanish.

She spends 10 minutes painfully forcing numbers through her lips to play her lottery, uses gestures to try and ask for what she wants, never forgets to say “thank you” in your language and always always says please.

We believe language is the body and if that’s the truth than what have you done to my abuela’s body that spent a lifetime of growing up in an island that’s not afraid to hurt you to remind you that it’s in charge.

A body that birthed three generations and raised them all with the same language of the mountains that birthed her.

My abuela’s body is still both soft and hard, but her tongue is cut from English without curves, too many sharp corners without vowels and every day she speaks new blood if only for you to hear what she says.

Do you think the mountains will forgive us if we don’t speak?

Will they take us back after what you’ve had us become?

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To You, My Soulmate

By Claudia Sousa

I know I said my favorite place is my bed.

It’s really in a beach chair an hour too pink In a park long after the moon has come out On a loveseat after midnight with puffy eyes and chocolate chips At the bottom of a bottle after a dinner we can’t afford Inside a red lipstick tube Wrapped in CTRL with a tiny city skyline sprinting by.

It’s always with you.

With a romance unparalleled With unconditional permanence You’ve given me a “drop-everything” kind of love I am not me without you To my friendship with women To you, my soulmate

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we each have our own plans

By Caitlin Peck 3 of 3 134

The fourth issue of Witches is dedicated to the girls and women who shared their work for the first time in these pages.

*** Follow @witches_mag on Instagram and Twitter for future themes, submission deadlines, release dates and more. To contact us directly, write to witchesmag@gmail.com.

To subscribe and find more information about Witches Mag, visit www.witchesmag.com.

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CONTRIBUTORS sending gratitude & praise to all of these Witches

cover & icon designs by editing & layout by

founder of Witches Mag 136

By Claudia Sousa

THE END. OR NOT.

WITCHES MAG ISSUE #4: RELATIONSHIPS SEPTEMBER 2020 137