I remember the first time I left town after having a boyfriend. I don’t know if he was really a boyfriend because he still had a wife.
Tag: loss
Drive
That night we fought about his wife. We were drunk. He had to buy the beers because I was only eighteen.
“The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion
The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal.
Anniversary.
Remember being seventeen in that coffee place across the street from the bookstore when he told you it couldn’t happen again, and you said if he changed his mind to let you know. How he went down on you in that cheap motel in Ensenada with your friend in the other bed and it felt…
The Soft Underbelly
Sex became my way of connecting with the world; of feeling human. At the same time, it also kept me safely insulated. I’m not sure why I liked it that way but I think it might be because too many men died and I didn’t want to feel that kind of pain anymore.
Allison McCabe 