January 2012
1 post
Broken Beginnings
A new year starts and I’m just as broken as I was when the last began. I’m tired of nursing my wounds. I want a truly new start. But I can’t leave this place. It’s where I always wanted to be. Now I’m stuck. I followed my dreams and now I have nowhere left to go.
September 2011
3 posts
Best Day
The best day of my life was my fifth birthday. I woke up and my parents weren’t in the house but I could hear the mower running. I stepped out my front door onto the front porch. Everything smelled of fresh-cut grass. A colorful donkey piñata was sitting on our door mat. I hugged the piñata and made my way around to the back yard. My mother was fixing streamers to our chain link fence and my...
Stuff Magazine
Mom has a brain tumor.
My 16 year-old brother had been tasked with breaking the news. I collapsed in on myself. That seems to be what I always do when being told horrifying, life-changing news. Mom and Dad were afraid of telling me themselves. They saw me as fragile, easily broken. My brother is my favorite person in the world and I’m sure they believed the news would be easiest to take...
Last Words
I think I might be bisexual. Does that change the way you feel about me?
I waited for his response. I had never told someone I knew that I was bisexual. I had said it in text to anonymous people on the internet but never to someone I had met. I felt like it was time I came out with it.
No. That doesn’t change how I feel about you.
“What does?” I replied. No answer.
I...
Red Sox vs. Yankees
My family have been Red Sox fans since 1919. That year my six year-old grandfather saw Babe Ruth play for the Red Sox in a game against the White Sox at the old Comiskey Park. Later that year Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees, cementing my family’s long standing antipathy for the team. Grandpa always blamed the Yankees for stealing Babe Ruth away.
The real details of why Babe Ruth was...
August 2011
16 posts
I could have had a different life.
My mom only turned away for a moment. She was pregnant with my brother and sister and we were crib-shopping in an Indianapolis department store. When she turned back I was gone.
A teenage store clerk saw the woman pick me up and begin to run. It happened so quickly that by the time my mother turned around the woman holding me and the clerk running after her were no longer visible. The sliding...
Fisticuffs
Face… Guard your face… Keep your arms up… You don’t need to protect your titties. You need to protect your face!
Today was my third boxing lesson. My trainer won’t let me get away with anything. I got hit upside the head with his punch mitt at least 10 times. The first time my glasses got knocked sideways. I tried in vain to readjust them using my boxing gloves...
My first kiss
“I’m sorry. You had three years to fall in love with me. Your time is up.”
Those were my words to the boy who forced my first kiss upon me. I was sitting on top on a jungle gym in his back yard. I didn’t want him anymore.
“Please let me kiss you. You don’t have to count it as your first. Just kiss me and I will let you go.”
He climbed up the metal...
Megalophobia
“Megalophobia is a fear of large or oversized objects. A person who is megalophobic can have their fear triggered by any number of things such as buildings, animals and even planes.”
I have a really lame phobia. Living in NYC has definitely cured me of most of my fear of tall buildings although I think that I would probably start crying if I saw the Burj Khalifa. And planes flying...
Watch I don’t enjoy flying but I can do it. What bothers me is being below a plane. I always imagine the sky is falling.
The plane was very low when it passed over us. I had never flown and it wasn’t until that moment I realized how truly massive planes are. It dwarfed the houses in our neighborhood. Nothing has ever seemed so big. Then it was gone, behind the trees. I was sitting in a...
I can't drive 55...
I have a terrible driving record. I have gotten 8 speeding tickets, 2 careless driving, and 1 reckless driving. The two careless driving tickets were also for speeding but I was going so much faster than the speed limit that a speeding ticket wouldn’t have been appropriate. The reckless driving was for 96 in a 55 (the fastest I was ever caught driving.) But that’s not the fastest...
Insomnia
I am a chronic insomniac. I have been all my life. For the first couple years I would fight my parents when they would try to put me in my crib. When my brother and sister were born I had to give up. I began to read around the time I turned 3 and found a way to pass the time.
I would only sleep from around 3am to 6am so I had a good 8 hours each night to lay in bed and read. The major problem...
Scream 2
On Halloween night, 1997, I went to the movies. A large group of us left a party to go see Scream 2. We all knew it would be terrible but in South Dakota there’s not much to do other than drinking, sex, and going to the movies. We were good kids so we chose the last option.
I intentionally sat between two boys who had I knew were interested in me. I wanted to see who would reach for my hand...
Subaru-icide
I’m always a little bit suicidal. I would be more so but I’ve become pretty talented with compartmentalization. I can almost always push the thoughts back into their little brain boxes. Driving is the only time I can’t distract myself from death daydreams. Every time I drive down a lonely stretch of highway I imagine accelerating then suddenly turning the wheel of my shitty old...
Celebrating like a lonely rapper
I spent last New Year’s Eve alone drinking expensive champagne out of the bottle and snorting lines of coke off of an old cd case. At the moment the clock struck midnight I stood outside in the snow, shoeless, smoking a cigarette, holding my bottle of champagne, watching the reflection of fireworks over the East River in the glass of the project building opposite my apartment.
My silly rapist.
Nothing beats getting raped by a Hasidic jew. Trust me. I know. His sidecurls brushed against my face every time he thrusted in. The experience taught me to not walk alone in Brooklyn at night and not to carry too many business cards. Some fell out of my bag and were left on the dirty floor of the room he dragged me in. I thought I remembered this when wading back into the memory the next day. It...
Keep reading?
I’ve been seeing a writer. Well, I had been but then he left town on Monday. I had been holding off on reading any of his books. I was worried that I would read something that I didn’t want to know. I wanted to learn who he was by talking to him. But I don’t think he was ever really too interested in talking. There wasn’t anywhere we could begin. So I bought one of his...
Huge tan boobs...
My mom didn’t want me to volunteer at Planned Parenthood. Not because she didn’t agree with the politics (I come from one of the only liberal families in SD,) she just didn’t want me to chance getting shot crossing the picket lines. But I was adamant and Planned Parenthood was desperate so I arranged a time to come in. That morning I parked my car in the supermarket parking lot...
You don't want to know what I have to say...
“L, hi… this is Crystal. From high school. I’m writing a book about Andy and interviewing the people that were closest to him. Everyone keeps telling me that I need to talk to you. They all want to know what you have to say.”
I only answered the call because I saw the South Dakota area code. I haven’t lived in South Dakota since 1999. No one knows me there...
Introduction
I’m a 30 year old South Dakotan living in Brooklyn, NY. I don’t know why I feel “South Dakotan” is so essential in describing myself. I guess it’s because I’m so thoroughly Midwestern. I’m painfully polite and perpetually apologetic. I’m always complimented with the word “genuine.” But I’m hiding more than you’d imagine.