Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or...
Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept wh...
Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future that is required at this exact moment in history. We need to know wh...
I realized that most times it’s not the big things along my spiritual journey that tempt me to get off track. It’s a culmination of small daily aggravations I know God could fix but doesn’t. But what if instead of seeing these aggravations as i...
Oil and Water, Daddy calls us. At four years younger than me, Katie is only fourteen and she already has half the boys in town eating from her pretty little hand. She tells me I am too tall and too wicked looking to capture the heart of any sensible ...
A glance would not be enough to tell you this was the daughter of Katherine Raquel Demure. Even a lingering gaze would not suffice. No. Only careful study of the original and a comparative inspection of her only child would even hint at a relation be...
Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say ‘I love you’ a thousand ways bu...
Two spacemen touching in anti-gravity is like a kiss. But then, there is nothing like a kiss. A kiss is a rare bird. The first sip of champagne. The fleeting glimpse of a shooting star. The kiss is uniquely human. We exchange bodily fluids with a kis...
Too many of us live with an uncontrolled thought life. It is possible to learn to identify destructive thoughts and make wiser choices. Instead of letting those thoughts rumble freely about in my mind, I make the choice to harness them and direct the...
I don’t know how long we stand there holding each other. It could be ten minutes, an hour, or a day. All I know is that when I finally let go, I can breathe. I can rest. I can live knowing that my baby girl is happy. Knowing that she felt my love.
This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by ...
That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to Ja...
The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, on day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that reali...
I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family's world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then o...
What's a slut?" I ask him. "A girl who puts out too easily." "Puts out what?" I imagine Greer putting out dinner and don't understand what Iwan wouldn't like about that. "Puts out, you know..." His face, already beet red from our run, turns a darker ...
Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have v...
There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, bet...
Oh, you know. Jace reminds me of an old boyfriend. Some guys look at you like they want sex. Jace looks at you like you've already sex, it was great, and now you're just friends--even though you want more. Drives girls crazy. You know what I mean?" C...
It’s one thing to protect yourself,” Dad yelled at me during our very next lunch. “That I get. Have I ever told you not to defend yourself? No. But did you have to permanently maim him? I spent all that money on that on that fancy school for gi...
It doesn't take two minutes on an examining table for a girl to know that abortion is painful and destructive and it'll have far-reaching effects on her life. Besides the emotional trauma of going through something so violent, there are the physical ...
It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our wors...
