Monday Required Reading. This piece is like someone peeked inside my crazybrain and wrote down some of the things floating around up there. I love the style, the almost stream-of-consciousness, run-on, fragmented style. Seriously. If you ever wonder what it's like being in my crazybrain (not that you probably ever do, I mean, it's a scary place so why would you want to hang out there?), then this should give you a good idea. Here's Strawberry Saroyan's "She Shouldn't Call Him":

She shouldn't call him. She shouldn't call him because she wasn't in love with him. She shouldn't call him because she might fall in love with him. She shouldn't call him because they had nothing in common. She shouldn't call him because he was twenty years older than she was. She shouldn't call him because she didn't want to lead him on. She shouldn't call him because that last night, after she'd said you're going to make me hate you, he'd stopped suddenly and said, I fucking love you okay? (It was the first time anyone had ever said that to her, except for family and friends.) She shouldn't call him because he made her want cookies for dinner, and she was going to get fat if they kept dating. She shouldn't call him because he probably wasn't cute enough for her, and her friend had once said, "What do you see in him?" (Her friend had been kidding but she'd thought maybe she was right.) She shouldn't call him because she kept remembering the first night they'd made out and he'd said, "This is what I like" about her neck, how it was soft like a baby's. She shouldn't call him because maybe he was crazy. And because maybe he wasn't. She shouldn't call him because you can never walk across the room for a man. Rielle Hunter said that. And Rielle, she and her friend KT joked, was always right. (But they weren't really kidding.) 

She shouldn't call him because she HAD called him, many times before, and it never helped. She shouldn't call him because she was too busy eating these cookies and they tasted wonderful, and so what was the point she'd be in a sugar coma in an hour anyway. She shouldn't call him because she didn't want to tell her friends, "Yeah, I broke down and called him." She shouldn't call him because she needed the power. She shouldn't call him because she didn't really like him (if you got right down to it). She shouldn't call him because it would look pathetic and desperate and when you were pathetic ad desperate you had to pretend you were confident and totally "fuck you." She shouldn't call him because she was a feminist and a grownup and the kind of person who could eat cookies for dinner and feel okay about it because she also accepted that she was a human being with needs, but that she didn't have to act on every single one of them. (But fuck, these chocolate chips were AWESOME.) She shouldn't call him because she had to make a list. She shouldn't call him because the dishes were extremely dirty and there were a shit-load of them and she really had to get her life together before she could think about anything else. 

[KEEP READING]