If god is real, she put all of herself into this girl. She vowed to unleash a woman so violently herself, the sky would collapse every time she came to orgasm.

— Taylor Rhodes

I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories.

— Taylor Rhodes

Instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, Islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?be kinder. Be a little gentler, with yourself and others. Take more pictures. Tell more jokes. Be a better human. Today is a lot more than a tragedy. Today is a birthday. A day of suicide awareness. A wedding. A birth. A new job. Today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.be kind. Just be kind. It's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. No more mourning. Let it just be a Sunday.

— Taylor Rhodes

Is it bad to like the way the scars look on my skin? Oh, the way they feel under my hands. My body’s protecting itself, saying, “No, this barrier of scar tissue is to keep you out.

— Taylor Rhodes

I’ve never been with a boy who hasn’t seen me naked. It’s always the squeaky futon, bear-it-all, turn-off-the-lights quickstep. Don’t chalk it up to “daddy issues.” Maybe I’m sick of keeping private parts private. I don’t want rainwater secrets on my lips, tasting of “don’t make too much noise”. October’s dust in my lungs, maybe I don’t want bits of four AM lingering in my subconscious. Smokers breathe in fire, coat their insides in ash. Is that suicide or arson? Listen to me, listen to me. I’m alive. I’M ALIVE. I’m naked and bruised, but I’m alive. Furthermore, I’m not a piece of fruit. Don’t press into my flesh, looking for soft spots. My whole body is tender and rotten, but I’m alive. I’m alive and just because you can see it all, doesn’t mean you know it all

— Taylor Rhodes

Moving on should be a required high school class because Lynchburg is determined to make me forget.

— Taylor Rhodes

No one can recover if they won’t admit the wrongdoings. I won’t recover if I pretend it was all sunshine. I have to remember his vindictive temper and realize that sheltering the house from the storm wasn’t actually going to make a difference if I still got damaged in the process. Because then it’s just another broken house with no one to tell its story.

— Taylor Rhodes

Purple threaded evening. A torn goddess laying on the roof. Milk sky. Lavender hued moan against hot asphalt. The thickness of evening presses into your throat. Polaroids taped to the ceiling. Ivy pouring out of the cracks in the wall. I found my courage buried beneath molding books and forgot to lock the door behind me. The old house never forgets. Opened my mouth and a dandelion fell out. Reached behind my wisdom teeth and found sopping wet seeds. Pulled all of my teeth out just to say I could. He drowned himself in a pill bottle and the orange really brought out his demise. Lay me down on a bed of ground spices. There’s a song there, I know it. Amethyst geode eyes. Cracked open. No one saw it coming. October never loved you. The moon still doesn’t understand that.

— Taylor Rhodes

Reining yourself in because why ruin a good thing? Why make it weird? And then you say goodbye, with a hug, with a snarky remark, and head home. You climb into bed and imagine them with you. You think about how their hair falls in their face, about how they breathe when they sleep. You think about them waking up and nudging you into consciousness with soft kisses down your torso. You sit in bed and think of all the ways you could make their soul dance. How you know their quirks, and it all feels so right, but why? Why is this happening? Why can’t you just be content with what you have now? Except even now you have to control the urge to kiss them, even though it is in your nature, even just on the cheek, because what if it breaks the relationship apart at the seams? You may not even mean it sexually or romantically, but what if? And there’s always the chance they have felt this way too. But it’s only a chance. And why risk it? So you lay there in bed and twist the sheets around your legs and text them back about another person they have feelings toward and coax them into something healthy. You put their happiness before your own. You watch as they stumble and help them rise mightily. You gush over them and try to snuff out the selfishness that builds whenever you see them with someone else. It wouldn’t be fair to them to impose your own wants on them and take away a good friendship. It isn’t always about you. And yet here you are, writing this. Writing this and thinking of someone specific the entire time.

— Taylor Rhodes

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often, a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;chose “Angel Band” by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar, ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks. We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea. No one asked why he was so solemn today. It was warm. It was relatively quiet. To anyone else, this place could feel sinister. But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place. No one was ever here long enough to know us. And we liked it that way.

— Taylor Rhodes