Mila Jaroniec

The first thing I thought of was this bear attack video we watched in middle school, what you should do when you’re about to be eaten. It was a dumb impulse but it was all I had to work with so I slowed my breathing and played dead. Curiously, it worked.

This is a woman who was a single mother in a time when being one was sacrilegious, a blue-eyed blonde who spoke enough flirty German to rescue her father from the march to Majdanek, who sawed her own stilettos in half because her daughter wanted a pair of heels and who risked falling out of trees because she wanted to hang birdhouses.

Watching you do these things to someone else will feel like a weird replay of my own past, only with someone else cast as me and I’ll just be watching it, confused and displaced and feeling too big for my chair.

It’s a specific kind of loneliness that hits you like a wave of nausea. When the two of you are having a beer and you realize that you have both been staring out the same window for twenty minutes, nothing to say, the opposite of a comfortable silence.

Relationships are overrated. Commitment is overrated. Romance is overrated. Wine and chocolate are overrated. Here’s how to rock it out on Valentine’s Day for those of us who are single and DGAF.

You’re beautiful because you take risks. You substituted “who cares” for “what if” and stopped talking into your beer about how you were going to do it and actually did it.

Maybe. It all kind of depends on who you’re with. If you’re totally in love with someone, you’ll do it with them in a walk-in freezer if that’s what they want. On the other hand, if you’re banging someone you don’t like quite as much, and you’re any kind of self-aware, hooking up in a bathroom is pretty awful.

I like you but under no circumstances will I be known as your girlfriend. I’m just not ready for that type of commitment. I still expect you to hang out with me/ text me/ hold my hand/ buy me shots, though.

The first word that came to mind was definitely “graveyard.” Not cemetery. Cemeteries have personality. Some are showcases of the art of dying, piling on the style with cracking marble tombs, muscular, lush-leaved trees and heavy stone angels.

Truth be told, the breakup was your fault. You’re the one who impulsively broke it off; you’re the one who had a case of cold feet/commitment issues/other “plans” for your life that didn’t include them. But now you’re regretting the moves you made and genuinely want your ex back.

When this happens, you can be doing anything at all: waiting in line for a latte, jamming your feet into office-appropriate pumps, waking up still hazy-drunk next to your one night stand. Literally anything. You can be doing whatever normal, everyday thing you’re doing, and suddenly you realize, with an urgent nervousness, you haven’t thought about your ex in days…

He was ten years older, a self-taught philosopher and everything I was physically into at the moment: tall and sinewy, with deep-set eyes and killer bone structure. Imagine Jack Skellington with thick dark hair and sweaters…