Would You Rather » Bridge Eight Press

WYR see a giant spider that spun a web next to the headboard of your bed

or notice when it’s gone?

If you can see it, you know where it is. You know it’s there.

If you can’t see it, it could be under your sheets, crawling up your chest. On average, people eat eight spiders a year in their sleep.

I know my bf thinks we aren’t having enough sex because he has an almost empty bottle of baby oil in the corner of his shower. I’m pretty sure he isn’t cheating, at least, because baby oil doesn’t work very well as a lubricant for girls and usually gives us yeast infections. So, even if he was cheating, he wouldn’t be anymore. That bitch couldn’t have sex with a yeast infection.

WYR break up with your bf because he cheats on you over and over

or because he doesn’t love you anymore?

Trick question.

(The spider question was just a warm up. This is the real shit.)

Sometimes I get this frantic feeling when I think of all the music I have access to on my unlimited Spotify, but that feeling gets suppressed by my thumb pressing down on the repeat button of the song I’ve already listened to thirteen times since I woke up an hour and a half ago.

Am I missing out on things

if I don’t even know those things exist?

When Erin told me she had sex with her bf because he really wanted to, even though she didn’t, I added compliance to the list of words people confuse love with.

Cosmopolitan Magazine has a WYR section online that “will probably ruin your life.” An example:

WYR find out someone you like hates dogs, but loves cats (when you are totally a dog person)

or find out that this person cheated on their last girlfriend?

Life ruined yet?

There’s a moment right when you wake up where you can’t remember anything. What’s the first thing that hits your mind when the moment is over?

I forgot that me and Maggie had kissed until I saw her singing

hymns at her father’s funeral.

and far be it from me to not

believe even when my eyes can’t see

I was crying. She wasn’t.

She said it was expected.

I said it’s still sad.

WYR hear the good news

or the bad news first?

If you pick bad news first, then the good news is the last thing you get to hear.

If you pick good news first, then it’s like the bad news doesn’t have to exist for a few seconds.

When I was younger and told my brother I was afraid to sleep because there might be a monster under my bed, he always checked. I’m not sure if that’s because he knew monsters weren’t real or because he loved me that much.

My brother is about to ask a girl to marry him. This girl eats seafood and peanut butter ice cream on their dates. My brother is allergic to seafood and peanut butter. This says something about love to me.

I never offered to run to the store for milk after dinner until the one summer before college when I needed to buy my first pregnancy test. This selfishness showed me I was not ready to be a mother. The test showed me I was not ready to be a mother.

My mother always tells me I’ll change my mind about wanting to have kids when I get older. She says she did not want to have kids before she started to date my father, but my father changed her mind.

Sometimes when I think about this,

it makes me feel like love is the strongest thing.

Sometimes when I think about this,

it makes me feel like love is the stronger thing.

When Kaley told me she blew her bf six hours after she had her wisdom teeth removed because he told her she was the best at it, I added manipulation to the list of words people confuse love with.

My bf puts headphones on when he sits in the passenger seat of my car, so that he doesn’t hear my music in the old c.d. player. This says something about love to me.

I know he doesn’t think I love him as much as he loves me because after I say it, he’ll ask “you sure?” I always am until he asks that.

It’s easier to believe love doesn’t exist because if it didn’t exist, then it couldn’t be something I don’t have.

WYR have lost in love

or never have loved at all?

I don’t know. Ask Alfred Lord Tennyson or Annie Lennox.

I can still see my mother singing those Eurythmics lyrics in the driver’s seat…

and if this empty building starts

to get to me please remember

that it just might be your fault…

as if singing to a future version of her daughter, as if we need somewhere to set down our blame when we feel the loneliest.

When I asked Kristen why she married John so early, she told me nineteen isn’t that young, that you’re only getting older, sweetie. I added fear to the list of words people confuse love with.

WYR be with someone you weren’t in love with for the rest of your life

or be lonely for the rest of your life?

Trick question.

My bf is in bed next to me reading that Stephen King novel Netflix made a movie out of. I’m reading an essay collection by a woman I feel a deep connection with because her mistakes sound like mine.

He asks why I only read short stories.

I joke that I’m afraid of commitment.

It’s just that marriage only ever ends in divorce or forever, right?

Though, people getting divorced never seem to care about the love they’re losing, but the money they’re losing. Maybe there was never any love to lose.

Can you miss something you’ve never had?

That clearance shirt from Target you wanted because it was four dollars and in your size and that felt like fate, but you reminded yourself you were only there to buy tampons and yogurt.

The part in the musical Junior year of high school that you totally deserved because you were a better dancer and a natural blonde, so the theater department could have saved money on a wig, but whatever.

The drummer in the band at the corner bar in downtown Orlando that kept making eye contact with you while you sipped an Angry Orchard like a little bitch.

I pass the XXX Movie Theater on my way to the gym. I think of the sticky shoes and loneliness inside the walls. There was once a woman standing on the corner, excited by my headlights, but I didn’t stop for her. Just for the red light a few feet down the road.

I added attention to the list of words people confuse love with.

lust to the list of words people confuse love with.

desperation to the list of words people confuse love with.

There was a girl in a writing course I took in college who told the class she has only ever seen her father with a beard and a mustache, that she’s never seen his full face. I tell this to my bf. I tell him I don’t know what he really looks like. I tell him to shave his beard. I say it with a giggle at the end, so he thinks I’m kidding.

He says no.

I get in the shower later and shave my vagina and we have sex and his scruff rubs on my bare skin when he goes down on me.

Maggie would tell her father that she loved him every time she saw him, but he was too sick to say it back. This says something about love to me.

WYR tell someone you loved them when you knew they wouldn’t say it back

or tell someone you didn’t love that you did just because you knew you’d hear it back?

It depends whose heart you want to break first.

Yours will break either way. It’s just a matter of now or later.

When I broke up with the first boy I fell in love with, he told me that we couldn’t break up, that I had said forever. I added obligation to the list of words people confuse love with.

When you fall on the sidewalk

WYR stand up and fall down again and again until you have no skin left to scrape

or stay down? You already know what the ground feels like.

HALEY WARD is a new resident of Phoenix, Arizona. She moved to The Valley from Florida to teach High School English during the week and climb as many mountains as she can on the weekends.