L. was a secret. You can’t know anything about him, except maybe that he stole a lot of coffee from Pret A Manger.

Soon today will be absorbed into all of those other days. And these words into oblivion.

I told her how a coconut will sit patiently, waiting for the summer rains to soak the ground beneath it so that it can begin life again. Some of them will shrivel up in the absence of water, their insides hollow as a drum.

Queerness is longing to be connected to history, community, culture. Seeing ourselves in the past is how we imagine ourselves in the future.

Violence, though, is accurate—referring to actual behavior, actual force.

How we know our bodies comes from the way we are handled, from the way your parents held you to the press of sexual partners. We become ourselves through the experience of skin against other skin.