Charlotte Green

Throw yourself into the degree, the promotion, the internship, or the backpacking tour of Asia that you have always dreamed of doing but knew that you couldn’t do if anyone else was depending on you.

It’s like being a child again, except instead of going to the carnival and loading up on cotton candy and sno cones, you stay in your apartment and order non-stop takeout Chinese.

I would lay down in the crook of your arm and feel like I was finally somewhere that wanted to have me. I never felt more beautiful, more desired, more comfortable in my environment.

The ceremony was lovely. It was one of those events you can describe as having nothing wrong with it, but it’s more of a compliment than it sounds like. Everything went well.

My apartment had never seemed more cold. It had never felt less like the place I actually lived, or more like a vague insult to my current state of aloneness.

I want to be in love. I want to get it over with so that I can move along to all of the other parts of life that seem so easy to achieve when someone at home cares about you.

Maybe she’ll be hungry in the morning, can she ask for breakfast? All of it is a dance that she hasn’t learned the steps to, and she’s the new person in the group class who keeps stepping on her partner’s foot.

You have absolutely no energy to start getting to know someone all over again, you just want to be with someone you already know perfectly well.

You become part of a team and can understand disagreeing about something even though, at the end of the day, you both just want what the other one wants.

Maybe they don’t even realize it. They have grown up for so long in the cage of their beauty and have come to imagine that everyone is afforded their treatment.

Answering a phone call while still in their bed and telling your friend “I can’t talk right now, I’ll tell you about it later.”

There’s nothing dirty about it, no, but there is something complicated. There is something which demands more of you, which implicates you, which makes extricating yourself a more involved ordeal than slipping on your tennis shoes and catching the train.

Things didn’t work out a first time, why in the world would they work out a second? You both say that you are different, but do we ever really have enough perspective to say such a thing about ourselves?

The idea is that, whether or not you want to be in a couple, everyone around you is going to be increasingly centered around their partnered status.

Ignore friends when they tell you, with varying degrees of tact, that this person is not good for you. Get visibly angry at the ones who tiptoe into implications that what they are doing could really be described as “emotional abuse.”

It has been so long since you last had sex that neither of you are really willing to bring up the subject because you both know the discussion is going to be extremely embarrassing and awkward.

Because an orgasm is rarely cute and contained. There are the wilting Victorian climaxes, and they can be lovely, but many more are loud, proud, and kind of awkward-looking.

Our friends say that you’re into me, that you’re too shy, that you don’t know how to make the first move. They say I should just “go for it.”