Tammy Kaye

“When I still lived in Arizona, I sat down on a tattered futon at the house party and my blond friend handed me a bottle of blue Gatorade. There's vodka in it, she said. She was the kind of woman that served drinks at other people's parties. The vodka gave strength to my desires. Everyone watched.

I was the last person to leave the party. As I buttoned my coat, the host of the party touched his beard, laughed, and said, No no no. I wrapped my scarf around my neck, picked up my bike leaning against the living room wall and walked toward the door. Stay, he said, and he wasn't asking.

...Though he did force himself on me, the truth is I stayed at the party waiting for something to happen. Everyone at the party left, and still, nothing had happened. He wasn't a stranger―I knew he was a bad man, I'd known that for a long time. That's why I stayed.

I spent so much of my youth waiting for something to happen. Unsupervised, I had my choice of dark rooms. I knew which rooms were bad and I entered then anyway. It was a sort of power.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal

“I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children; I’ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me..”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“What's the end of longing? More longing.

What's the point of longing? To continue.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I'd been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn't sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers, I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive--to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays