i had a dog that my mom loved a lot and considered it her child because it took her three years to have me. i know ralph hated me because i replaced him in my mom's heart and i remember the day i went up to my parents' room and saw him lying on the rug and knew that he was going to die that day and he sort of snarled at me even on his deathbed.

i had eight million lip glosses and had such an obsession with them that i even slept with my favourite one clutched in my little hand.

i never liked "charles in charge" but my babysitter, carrie, always made me watch that and really bad soap operas that were oddly on at night and i had a crush on this one darktallhandsome fella that talked really deep and slow so i would pretend i was sick almost every time that she babysitted me so that i could stay up late and watch the show with her.

i was always a smooth talker, a good liar, and i still am. i don't regret all of the lies i told to the stupid girls on the playground, the ones with really thick glasses and brightly colored rims or the ones with shiny hair and those little hair elastics with two balls that you had to twist around to make your hair stay in. i always got to ride the tire swing first.

i used to put sand in my hair and hang upside down on the swing set, methodically picking out each grain. i liked feeling my fingertips running over a foreign object and i think this was the first time that i realized how sensitive subtlety can be. to this day, i love the little things: teeth over hipbones, closed eyelids, that sensitive spot on the nape of the neck.

i have every single roald dahl book he ever wrote, even his dirty stories that were all about sex. my mom thought it was funny that i was reading about venerial diseases in prose but she never stopped me.

when i was ten, i heard "fuck" for the first time. my mom rented "my cousin vinny" and fell asleep fifteen minutes into the movie. i'm pretty sure they say "fuck" at least 42 times.

i drank pink lemonade like it was my job and had a best friend (every friend that you barely talked to was your best friend, but this one i actually played with afterschool) who was named hillary and she had bright red cowboy boots and whenever we listened to "les miserables" she always wanted to sing cosette's part in 'castle on a cloud.'

i went through an awkward stage, with flat hair and braces and a body that wasn't sure if it wanted to progress or shrivel up and die.

i loved my grandmother from vermont and stuffed animals and hated the color pink and picking out my own clothes and i listened to green day and i took too much for granted, always wanting to solve that piece of me that wasn't ready to be figured out.

i think it still isn't.

prove me wrong.