Emmy stands in front of the bathroom mirror of her parent’s house, a white hair pinched between the fingers of her right hand. It is wiry and thick, and planted firmly in the front of her hairline. She hesitates, and for a moment, she is back in middle school, holding a razor nervously against a leg covered in dampened peach fuzz, as her mother warns her that for every hair removed, two will grow back. But this hair is no longer the golden down of youth beckoning her to the cult of womanhood, but a pert, solitary rebel, a white flag amongst a sea of dark brown, daring her to surrender to middl ..read more

"The placenta is the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both." - National Institute of Child Health and Human Development     Before swallowing liters and liters of white from my breasts all you saw was red.   The walls of my placenta, stretched growing with and for you state of the (he)art tissue to enwrap you in prenatal embrace.   In the beginning, it led me to new depths of exhaustion as I created this original organ a humble home for y ..read more

1.     I feel it in the calcified spaces between my ankles and my ribs, underneath the porcelain of my cheeks. Can you tell me what lightning it is that lives beneath my skin? Can you tell me how to keep myself from burning?   2.     When I was five I got lost in the grocery store and every mother was wearing the same floral leggings, and icicles started running down my cheeks, and my own mom finally found me in the condom aisle. Can you tell me why this happened?   3.     Who else should have been there?   4. &nbs ..read more

Growing up I craved community. I was social and tried to fit in with my peer groups. At summer camp, I found short-term connections with other kids and globbed onto them for those 7 days but long-standing friendships alluded me. My school identified me as “gifted” at a young age, around 3rd grade, meaning I had an above average IQ. I sat for several hours at a desk with a bubble answer sheet and a #2 pencil. The test was full of pattern recognition questions. Each question would show a progression of shapes with a prompt to predict the next object in the series. I grew my innate pattern m ..read more

My palm screams as I bash my right hand against the steering wheel, over and over. Heavy bass hammers through my car, rattling the empty plastic water bottle in the side door I keep forgetting to throw away and now cannot reach. I futilely try anyway. Screw it. Boom, boom, rattle.   Sounds that alarmingly remind me of coyotes making a kill in the night pour from my mouth and with every slam of my hand I question what this is; something I have never felt or maybe just never allowed myself to feel to this extent. As if I’ve been microdosing my whole life and then suddenly doused myself in t ..read more

This is the winning selection from the Sad Girl Diaries Winter 2024 Fiction & Nonfiction Contest. trigger warning: self-harm, disordered eating I’ve never understood love until I studied a fruit bowl. We roll the garishly red grocery carts down the aisles of Ranch 99 and inspect each piece carefully - Puo Puo thumbs a pomelo examining it for bruises and settles on a green-tinged one. The grocery store is where I go to find solace. Everything I love is wrapped in styrofoam fishnets, tacked with a sale sticker, and cradled in their plastic crates. I watch as Puo Puo rinses the fruit, the w ..read more

“You will find every day, that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting.”  Herman Hesse’s 1905 essay “On Little Joys” in My Belief: Essays on Life and Art       “ ...,the principal thing is the beginning, the opening of the eyes.”   When small things do not matter to me, it is a forgettable day I can put in my gray drawer.  A drawer too full.  A drawer which slides into a turn of the century dresser with a beveled front. Under the drawer is ancient dirt and injuries to the wood.  My gray drawer stuffed with winter gl ..read more

“Folks, this is the captain speaking.  We are beginning our descent into the Warsaw Frederic Chopin Airport.  Please return tray tables and seats to their upright positions and fasten your seat belts.  We will be landing shortly.”   I awoke to that announcement after a long transatlantic sleep.  Instantly there was turbulence in my gut, consisting of excitement, trepidation, and nausea.   Was this trip, planned over three years, really a good idea?  It was Poland, for God’s sake, was I really prepared for Auschwitz and the camps and the history and ..read more

I remember the exact moment she asked me like it was yesterday: the white button down shirt and red lipstick and the velvety texture of chocolat viennois being poured into a porcelain cup. We had chosen to eat at Les Deux Magots, of course. Neither one of us cared for Hemingway, but it was the place where all great writers used to rendezvous. She was passing through the city, and I had only been there a week. She talked about the grad school application cycle and how she hoped by this time next year she’d be enrolled in an MFA program. I tugged at the loose thread on my tights and we held back ..read more

By noon I am done. I take the picture to her, up the stairs, past the living room, through the sleeping alligators, and she shakes her head again. “Not yet,” she says, “not quite.”   Undone, I come back to the studio, to the dark womb it is. I smash the palette against the wall, dim the lights. I fetch new oil paints, eat most of the green until I realize it’s not red, and squeeze the paints onto a bone palette until the metal tubes slice my fingers.   I paint.   I paint.   I paint over the piece of canvas that was, for a few minutes, exactly what I wanted. I coat over it ..read more