i lied. put your clothes back on. i’m afraid of intimacy. i know you’ll dislike what you see, so stop trying to convince me otherwise. wait, i lied again. i crave human connection. tell me you love me. actually, i lied again. i don’t know who i am or what i want. no one can love someone who doesn’t exist. stop, i lied. please don’t leave me. who am i if i’m not perceived?

My dog Otis has developed a system where he steals exactly one shoe from every pair by the door, hides it somewhere unfindable for days, then returns it, unprompted, precisely when I'm about to leave the house without it. "That's not a coincidence anymore," my roommate said, watching him drop a missing sneaker directly at my feet the morning of a job interview I'd been stressing about for a week. "He's timing this." I tested the theory, deliberately, hiding my own shoe first just to see if he'd notice a fake version of his own bit. He found it within an hour, dragged it to his usual hiding spot behind the water heater, and returned it that evening, entirely unbothered by my attempt to test him. "He's not hiding them randomly," my roommate said. "He's holding them hostage until you actually need them. It's a whole racket." I mentioned this to my vet, half joking, expecting her to dismiss it as coincidence. "Some dogs do form specific games around departure anxiety," she said. "If leaving upsets him, delaying you, even slightly, then being the one who resolves the delay, gives him a sense of control over something he otherwise can't control at all." I started leaving five minutes earlier for everything after that, giving him his ritual on purpose instead of resenting it. He still steals a shoe every morning, still makes me hunt slightly, still returns it right on cue like he's rescuing me from a crisis he manufactured himself. I've stopped trying to break the pattern. It's cheaper than therapy for both of us.

i lied. put your clothes back on. i’m afraid of intimacy. i know you’ll dislike what you see, so stop trying to convince me otherwise. wait, i lied again. i crave human connection. tell me you love me. actually, i lied again. i don’t know who i am or what i want. no one can love someone who doesn’t exist. stop, i lied. please don’t leave me. who am i if i’m not perceived?

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t. “are you two… together?” this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. “there are children here, you know.” in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with. even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

While paying for groceries, the cashier looked at the jar of baby food in front of me and said, "Congratulations." Without thinking, I said, "Thanks." There is no baby. The baby food was pumpkin purée for a recipe because the normal canned pumpkin shelf was empty. Could have explained. Instead I packed it and escaped. Outside, realized I'd forgotten milk and had to go straight back through her checkout. She smiled. "Pregnancy brain?" Again, for reasons beyond science: "Yeah." Now there was a fictional pregnancy with continuity. Then she asked when I was due. At that exact moment, my actual sister appeared behind me, heavily pregnant. The cashier looked between us. Sister heard just enough to ask, "You too?" "No." Cashier: "Wait." Sister: "What did you tell her?" "Nothing." The cashier folded her arms. "You said October." I hadn't even said October. She stared at me for two seconds, then started laughing. "Sorry. I wanted to see if you'd agree." I absolutely would have.

A newly wed husband decided to ask his wife about her past relationships. He nervously asked how many men she had been with, but she just stared silently at the ceiling. He tried again, reassuring her that he wasn’t judging and simply wanted them to be honest with each other. Still nothing. Feeling guilty, he apologized and told her he never meant to upset her. He tried comforting her with affection, but she remained completely silent. Finally, she turned to him and said: “Seriously? You’ve made me lose count!” 😭😂

I was in a Call of Duty party chat with a bunch of guys I went to the same college with. I didn’t know everyone that well. One of them starts talking about a girl he hooked up with that weekend. I was out of town. He says her name and describes her, and that’s how I found out. 🤣🤣 I wish I made that up. I’ll never forget that shit.