Stephanie Georgopulos

I’ll accept that somewhere on earth, there’s a dyslexic, song writing (curious dynamic, there) Calvin Klein model who still shows up for school even though ~13 years passed before anyone noticed he couldn’t read.

Isolate yourself until you’re lonely and not just alone, until you can’t stand to stay away any longer, until you begin to wonder why you holed up in this jail cell in the first place. Everything, everywhere will feel like a jail cell.

Think back. Think back to your first crush, or the first person you liked, or your first relationship, or your first love, or any of the number of times you were let down by someone, rejected, broken up with. How it felt.

The moral of the story is this: The average American woman has enough strikes against her when it comes to our befuddling health care system. We sit in crowded waiting rooms for hours; we struggle with insurance providers (if we have insurance at all); we battle strangers and our own conscience just to get a goddamn cancer screening.

I won’t slam my office door; I want to but the last thing I need is you all gossiping about me in the company kitchen. I’m more than aware of what we collectively think about door slammers. I don’t need that strike against me, not today.

You can set an alarm, mark it on a calendar, tattoo it on your skin and still the last time doesn’t need your permission. What you count on is that you have the power to end things, to label people ‘never again,’ to say farewell forever and mean it.

Paige Michalchuk — You’ve been prescribed what people would deem “fun” pills but refuse to share them with friends because you “actually need them.”

People have very clear ideas on what abuse is. Abuse is physical, or abuse is between man and woman, or abuse is between parent and child; abuse is verbal, mental; abuse happens in romantic relationships and marriages and in between the walls of a house where no one can see in. But abuse is not just that.

And if you’re asking, “Am I eating that?” as in ‘the rest of that,’ I have to wonder if you’re inquiring because you think I’ve had enough already, or because I’m eating too slowly for your liking, or because you want what’s left of my dish.

You will ask me for a tour and I will take you room by room: the living room that seat isn’t yours, the kitchen ignore the photographs, the bedroom don’t open the closet, the bathroom stay out of that drawer.

Are you sad? Looking to be? A non-exhaustive list for your listening… pleasure.

Moving on is like this: one day you forget the taste. The next, you forget the smell. Then the touch. Then the laugh. Then the smile. Then the jokes. Then the eyes, the hair, the hands, the feet. You forget the socks. You forget the fingers, the toes, the sex.