Aleynah

We need to allow ourselves to be restless and bored, to be less preoccupied with the opinions of others, and to look honestly within ourselves. We need to get off of our phones and hear the gravel crunching under our feet. Our phones promise us something eternal and infinite, but we should be extremely skeptical of anything that claims it can go on... See more

the film’s body horror is an effective metaphor for the torture traps of contemporary feminism and beauty culture, where superficial body positive marketing doesn’t square with an ever-expanding suite of digital and surgical tools for beauty optimization and modification.

To tolerate life , as Gaitskill implores us to do, you first have to actually live in it — get up in the morning, take out the trash, eat breakfast, go to work, get on the train, try not to look too deeply into the faces of the people sitting across from you, walk home, call your parents, pay your rent — and you must do all of this amid immeasurabl... See more

Was I a good partner, or was I a bad partner? Did I hurt him, or did he hurt me? Was the great tragedy of our relationship that we’d been doomed from the start, or that we veered off track somewhere, quietly, imperceptibly, and were too far gone by the time we’d realized it? On some days, I was certain that he hadn’t loved me enough; on others, I w... See more

He said, it just seems like it doesn’t make sense to get rid of all of — he paused — this . He was gesturing vaguely to something like our love, or our history, or the life we had built together, and I’m not sure if even he knew exactly what he was talking about, but I knew what he meant. Some people spend their whole lives looking for a good story... See more

Our breakup was so protracted, in part, because our story was so, so good, and I wanted so badly for the story of our relationship to be the story of my life — doing the dishes in the nighttime, his hands over my eyes when we watched horror movies, the love songs I wrote him on our anniversary. A math prodigy and a writer. Our children would have m... See more

Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn. Why force yourself to daydream about the guy you’re seeing when you can easily look at dozens of photographs of him online? Why walk into a store in Soho and s... See more