A short story about unrequited love, self-denial, and the influential power of coincidence.

I entered my first gay bar on the eve of my 21st birthday. I was in between apartments in New York and temporarily staying at my brother's. When I searched for the nearest LGBTQ+-friendly spaces in his Lower East Side neighborhood, a bar called Boiler Room popped up. My heart started pounding faster as I entered the venue, though I felt relieved by the lack of a doorman. The one time I tried entering a gay bar in the past was the only time my fake ID had ever failed. Still in the closet, I had

He invites you to come over but doesn’t know who you are. He likes the skin you’re wearing, the bone structure beneath it. Would revealing more than that even be to your benefit? His chest looks hard, but his eyes seem soft, like light blue almonds of kindness. The conversation’s promisingly flirtatious, you think, as much as two foreign bodies can when they are 1,479 feet away. “Now?” He says, sharing an address but not his name. Knocking shyly on the stranger’s door, he appears cuter in pers

Our lives began in the Colombian capital of Bogotá simultaneously, my heart beating to the same rhythm as three others. The media celebrated the birth of David, Pablo, Lorenzo, and me in 1994 as if it were a miracle. It's weird to receive praise for just being born, but newspapers and magazines printed the news as such: ​"The first quadruplets safely delivered in 30 years."

The city that never sleeps is snoozing indefinitely; however, with most of her inhabitants staying at home, her skyline shines brighter at night.

It’s been a hell of a couple of months for you. Counting down the days until the end of quarantine and considering quitting Zoloft, your depression will at least make the required social distancing more desirable. At the beginning of the era of Covid-19, so much was changing; every morning came with the possibility of a new “normal.” But now, the pandemic has lost its mystique.

It was infuriating waking up to someone else’s mistakes. The constant blame. The questions. Why? Why? Why. Eventually, everyone already knew the answer. It wasn’t him.