If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.

A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.

I love the smell of a mans skin.

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.