Mila Jaroniec

I’m not here calling for some kind of lofty publication standards. Basic humanity is not an arbitrary “standard.”

My then-boyfriend used to say there was something gross about strip clubs. “Strippers just pretend to like you,” he said while smoking outside a strip club where we were buying a cheap dinner. “Who wants to pay someone to pretend to like you?

So I’ve found myself in a long distance relationship, again. Again! I never learn.

“I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.”

“I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.”

Two weeks ago my house was broken into and my laptop got stolen, along with my roommate’s laptop and a bone-dry tube of toothpaste.

This is black lipstick for people who don’t want to wear black lipstick.

The first time I understood this was a thing that happened was on a day trip to Romania, when I was nine.

The window glass is cold against my forehead, uncomfortable and refreshing, the freezing outside air filtering through the skin to the subcutaneous layer to the bone to the frontal lobe, the chill twisting all the way through to the core.…

A deliberate notch in the timeline that makes you immune to forgetting

You have to start thinking she’s average.

I don’t love you anymore because I’m not important to you and you give me nothing. Maybe saying that makes me a selfish person but I no longer care.

None of the words are as good as yours.

Your 30-something is probably going through way more than they will ever tell you about, for a number of reasons.

Like dipping your heart in liquid nitrogen, the paralyzing chill of an unsaid name that used to make you feel warm.

I run my thumb lightly under her shirt, over her hipbone the way she likes it. It’s an odd thing to like but I don’t ask questions. It’s the sharp intake of breath that makes me keep going, even though she gives me a Look, eyebrow angled up, to remind me we’re in a bar.

I’m trying to come up with normal things to text you.

Someone will always look better and someone is always in more pain.