Sometimes, one missing person makes the whole world feel depopulated.

I place my cell phone against me so that if he does call, I can be closer to him.

"Where does all the Goddam time go?" I asked like there was somewhere it got lost to. The Florida timeshare we had when I was a kid. My high school drama teacher's office. Some cardboard box with "Old Jeans + Lipstick You Lost" scribbled on it.

You wonder about creation until you realize you're created.
...

I admired him when I was a girl, almost a woman. He was older, sophisticated, talented. On my seventeenth birthday I ate dinner with my father, bored, lonely, and I pictured us slow-dancing. We were movie-lovers and in my mind, we remained so as time passed.

"You were the type of man I wanted to marry," I told him last night as a consolation.

"You were just so young, before."

This felt different, before.

"Those thoughts never crossed my mind then," he told me.

 I was confused because he knew I had nothing to give him. I'd sold my love to the missing man. He bought it off me so quick, I had no idea the bargain I gave him.

"This makes me feel sad to be a grown-up," I said to him. Maybe all these walls were never really there, nor the ceiling, nor the chair.

"The girl I first met, you're not the same person anymore," he told me. "You are an adult now. Things are more complicated."

I nodded. There were now two layers of deception between us. He didn't recognize how desperately I wanted things to remain untouched and until that moment, I didn't know how much I'd changed.

"I was Snow White but I drifted," I joked. I felt like crying and I couldn't explain why.

I wanted to have dinner with my father.

I have so many lives. I wish I could live them all concurrently, selecting the most beautiful pieces, instead of one by one. The comfort with Mike, the laughter with my brother, my mother’s necklace, my father, my father, my father. Oh, my father.

I hate watching things flicker, then extinguish.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

We are put on this earth, as best I can discern, to multiply.

Everyone inherits twenty-three matched chromosomes from their parents, forty-six all together. One set determines sex, matched X chromosomes if you’re a girl. The X a baby girl gets from their mother is a random mix of her genes, like overlapped pasts. However, the X she inherits from her father is his one and only. Complete. Undiluted. This means the father is twice as closely related to his daughter via X chromosome as her mother.

When I read this, I realized I didn’t have a fighting chance.

I married a man when I was twenty-one and we split up a year ago. The divorce won’t be official for another month. Of course, I didn’t realize we were strangers until it was too late. My whims are difficult to pin down. Like amoeba, they’ve got no bones.

“You were married?” people scream. Clearly, I don’t seem like the committed type. I get my loose view of forever from my father. He was married twice before he was twenty-five, three times all together.

“No, really, it was just for fun.”

The kind of fun that remains devastating when it ends. Sometimes, out of nowhere, there comes a feeling I thought I’d forgotten. My innards are a tangled mess of things I’ve fucked up, of people I’ve left behind.

I guess nothing bonds two humans like being on the run.

“Do you think we were too comfortable too quickly?” my husband asked.

We moved together like water from the sky, without parachute, without wings, and fatefully, without a safety net.

He broke up with me because I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. I broke up with him because he didn’t understand that everything’s true, it’s just a matter of when. Since my separation, I’ve found my belief system: You Never Have Any Fucking Idea What’s Going To Happen Next.

People ask how I could have missed that my husband was a Jesus freak. I want to ask those same people how I spent nineteen years being head over heels in love with my father. I want to ask those people if they’re really standing on such solid ground.

I am some strange cosmic sacrifice.

If something can get fucked up, it will, in the most meaningful way. Everyone’s life has a tone. I am an ironic comedy, the unfortunate part being that I have no sense of humor.

“It’s best just to accept that you can simply never overcome most points of your personality,” my father always said.

It’s true that only a person’s DNA survives after their death.

I Have The Heart Of A Small Boy

I lay against him in the cab.

I am so happy.

I moved towards brightness, the screaming levity. Orange had been thrown across the night sky and it was bleeding down on me. Everything had quieted. I held him and for the first time, I wasn't thinking about when I would let go.

"It doesn't matter about tomorrow," I told myself. "It doesn't matter what happens."

In that moment, we were fused, glowing, incandescent.

I knew that this would later expand and become something else. I knew we were living on borrowed time, but who cared?

In that moment, I was infinite.