“A guy chased me around with a knife
once,” a woman recently told me at a party.
The music video for the K.Flay song “Cops”
had just come on. In it, the artist
repeats the lyrics, “Even if the cops come calling, I’ll never talk.”
The song
may be about domestic violence, or it may be about a boyfriend who deals
drugs. Either way, it triggered a very personal conversation
with two women I’d only just met that night—about our own histories of
violence.
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Then He Hit Me
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A Brush with Bitterness
A Campari and soda after a hard day’s work is like a perfectly timed punch in the tongue. A not-so-subtle awakening of the senses, the beverage serves as a reminder that while you may spend half of your life embittered by the daily drudgery, there is still hope for the rest, if only in the form of a few effervescent happy-hour bubbles.
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A Woman, a Plan, an Outline of a Man
The solution came to me while watching the evening news: guns. I’d heard of people doing fire walks, beating pillows with baseball bats—even taking hallucinogens in the Peruvian rainforest. But I needed something more potent than an Amazonian shaman could provide.
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Born This Way: The Childfree Identity
When my 32-year-old husband got a vasectomy, I should have been overjoyed. We’d been married for three years, together for six, and both in agreement about at least one thing: no kids.
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Is It Cancer?
2015 Best American Essays Notable
I was sprawled out on a wicker couch, engaging in an activity known as sideways-lying-down-chip-eating, when my father staged an unlikely intervention. My family was holed up for the holidays in a Puerto Rican vacation rental, and my dad had interrupted not to offer my triangular friends and me some pico de gallo, as would be customary, but to announce that I most likely had cancer.
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Me v. Ikea: A Lawsuit
An open fracture is just what it sounds like: a broken bone exposed by torn flesh. I know this because the bottom of my foot split open when an eighty-pound box landed on it—the result of an otherwise uneventful trip to Ikea.
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I Had to Be High to Work at Hooters
There was actually nothing I feared more than wearing that getup, and not because I felt somehow above it. The white stretchy tank top and orange shorts would have fit right in with the hair-bleaching kits I shoplifted on my way to the tanning salon. My real fear was what it would reveal: everything I hated about myself.
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Via Milan
I met Manuel during the first week at our new school in Milan. He was tall, dark, and Paraguayan. A pinstriped hat rested slightly askew on his head, rocking back and forth as he doodled fashion garments in a black sketchbook.
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I Was a Rich Person Trapped in an Upper-Middle-Class Person’s Body
Growing up, I always felt different. I remember sitting in my mother’s Toyota Avalon and staring longingly into the window of a nearby Lexus. My seat-warming device did little to stem the tide of anxiety rising inside of me.
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I Look Like a German Man…And Other Pan-European Cross-Dressing Revelations
A general rule of thumb I picked up for a non-gender-bending dalliance in the wares of the opposite sex: avoid overtly feminine or masculine pieces. Opt instead for those that fall within a cultural frame of reference, and re-imagine them in a modern way.