YOU KNOW YOU WANNA----SECOND PERSON EXAMPLES

“The Cheater’s Guide to Love” 

Junot Diaz
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/the-cheaters-guide-to-love 

YEAR 0

Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she’s your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won’t matter.) She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you’re a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn!Maybe if you’d been engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita you could have survived it—but you’re not engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad-ass salcedense who doesn’t believe in open anything; in fact, the one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating. I’ll put a machete in you, she promised. And, of course, you swore you wouldn’t do it. You swore you wouldn’t. You swore you wouldn’t.

And you did.

…

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes, like you always swore you would, so that the two of you can dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak. And every hour, like clockwork, you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she simply sits up in bed and says, No more, and, Ya, and asks you to move from the Harlem apartment that you two share when you’re not teaching in Boston. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say you won’t go. But, in the end, you do.

For a while you haunt the city, like a two-bit ballplayer dreaming of a call-up. You phone her every day and leave messages that she doesn’t answer. You write her long sensitive letters, which she returns unopened. You even show up at her apartment at odd hours, and at her job downtown, until finally her little sister calls you, the one who was always on your side, and she makes it plain: If you try to contact my sister again, she’s going to put a restraining order on you.

For some Negroes that wouldn’t mean shit.

But you ain’t that kind of Negro.

You stop. You move back to Boston. You never see her again.

If on a winter's night a traveler (Section I—excerpt)

Italo Calvino

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone. Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed.You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

…

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

“How to Become a Writer”
by Lorrie Moore

http://www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdf


Stolen by Lucy Christopher

“You saw me before I saw you. In the airport, the day in August, you had that look in your eyes, as though you wanted something from me, as though you wanted it for a long time. No one had ever looked at me like that before, with that kind of intensity. It unsettled me, surprised me, I guess. Those blue, blue eyes, icy blue, looking back at me as if I could warm them up.”

…

“There is a thing murderers always do in horror films: take their victims out on a long drive to a stunning location before they creatively pull them apart. It’s in all the famous films, all the ones with murders in the middle of nowhere anyway. When you woke me up that morning, the day after you’d nearly hit me, I thought about that.

“We’re going on a drive,” you said. “To catch a camel.”

It was very early. I could tell by the pale pinkish-white light and the cool in the air. I got dressed and put the knife into the pocket of my shorts. I could hear you moving and creaking around the house. Then you went outside and started the car. You were surrounding me with noise. I wasn’t used to it. I took my time getting ready. I knew two things: On the one hand, a trip like this could mean a greater opportunity for escape. On the other, it might mean I’d never return.”

“Leopard”

By Wells Tower

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/10/leopard

Good morning.

You have not slept well. Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the night.

No luck. Still there, rough to the tongue, and though it’s very small, not even the diameter of a pencil eraser, it feels much larger. Your mother says it’s a harmless fungal infection, and she pities you less for it than she should.

A tiny hamburger is what the fungus resembles, cracked and brown and perfectly centered in the little fluted area between your septum and upper lip. Yesterday, in the cafeteria, Josh Mohorn pointed out the similarity before a table of your friends. A painful thing, considering how much you would like to be Josh Mohorn. He turned to you and said, “Hey, Yancy, do me a favor.”

“What’s up?” you said, excited by the rare pleasure of Josh’s attention.

“Could you take that seat down there?” he said, gesturing toward the far end of the table. “I can’t eat my lunch with your fucking burger in my face.”

Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line, which launched an instant craze of everyone jeering and calling you Burger King, or Patty, or All Beef, the name that stuck for the rest of the day and that will surely greet you this morning at school. You are eleven years old, the age that our essences begin revealing themselves, irremediably, to us and to the world. Just as Josh Mohorn is irremediably a soccer ace and a clothes ace, with feathered hair and white bucks, you are irremediably a fungus man.

Don’t go to school today. Play sick.

Your mother comes in to wake you. Around the house, she wears paint-spattered jeans and old T-shirts, through whose slack sleeves you often catch sight of her underarm hair. But this morning she is dressed for work in a blue sateen blouse and tight white slacks, clothes that speak of a secret life. “I don’t feel good,” you tell your mother.

“Where? In your stomach?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“Oh, God,” she says. “I hope it’s not that thing that’s been going around.”

“I don’t know what it is,” you say, panting shallowly. “It just really hurts.”

…

“What, you want to stay home?”

Swallow again. Close your eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.”

“O.K.”