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At the door to the house, I think again about how I could just say, ‘I’m not feeling this, sorry,’ but the more I rehearse the phrase the harder it becomes to squeeze it out. It’s like I have hot mashed potato in my mouth. In bed, he swipes past my clit like he’s scanning items on the Sainsbury’s s…

I get the ick – that sudden, slightly sick feeling where you find someone you previously thought attractive all at once extremely unattractive and everything they do is infuriating. Not because this guy got something wrong, but because he looked so pathetic when he realised.

He’s not the only on…

We go to a bar and at first I don’t know how I’m supposed to be. I’ve never really dated before. There were just bathrooms at house parties and then there was Joe. I tell him I’ve just come out of a five-year relationship and his lips tighten shut and he says, ‘Must have been a real captivating guy…

‘I guess you can tell how I feel about you at this point.’

Somehow it was you that said this and not me. It was a strange feeling, realising I was inside the moment I had been waiting for forever. Nothing could be as perfect as the way I scripted it in my mind, but it took on a more beautiful fo…

In ‘The Glass Essay’, Anne Carson goes back to her mother’s house on a moor in the North to try to repair her broken heart. In the poem, Carson remembers a conversation she has with her mum in the kitchen:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? An…