So many of the fears about desire seem to be things we should have overcome years ago. We can say we want to fuck indiscriminately, but we cannot exactly say that we expect to be happy.

Indeed it is the same world that wants to keep lauding only those who have already been lauded, those who have, throughout history, been accepted.

There should be a stronger word than regret.

Men did not merely want. Men needed. The man who followed my mother to and from work every day needed to do so. Presidents forfeit glory for blow jobs. Everything a man takes a lifetime to build he may gamble for a moment.

Like many girls her age, Maggie is laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city.

She felt it in the way she’d been raised, as though two separate lines streamed into her, never having crossed, so that she herself was two unmixed people.

deputized

The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders. He

Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.