I get sent all sorts of stories, some long, some short, some that I do a brutal edit on. Asides from correcting two spellings, I left this story as it is. I love the sad, short simplicity of it. It doesn’t go into detail. It doesn’t need to. In just one paragraph, the writer paints a picture so much bigger than the 210 words it is built from.
'Me and my best friend were the funny, likable, frumpy girls in high school. Popular but not sexy like the dancers, we made friends of boys rather than lovers. We lived in a small town about an hour away from the city. When we were 16, we jumped on the bus one monday night and head to the city. We had to do something for ourselves. It turned into a sad night. I think we thought it would be exiting and full of passionate embraces but by the time we found ourselves out the front of a hostel in the dawn, my friend drugged by the man she just shared a bunk with, and me with the taste of someone foreign and ugly in my mouth, it lost its charm. He was french looked ok on the dance floor of a backpackers pub. He did me briefly in the bathtub. There was a moment on that curb when the morning birds were waking, when i noticed i was bleeding slightly, that it was the first time. My friend held me tenderly in her groggy arms and the ride home was strange and silent. We are still close to this day. And i still havent had a proper first time yet. '
Samantha 23yrs
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