1. Some men kiss like a promise and then break it later; others keep it and return the favor a second time.
2. Your mother told you that before her first time, her stomach felt like someone had shot a gun loaded with butterflies into it, but that afterward, they all bled out.
3. When they kneel between your legs, let them write a poem on the insides of your thighs instead of a hate letter.
4. In Ancient Egypt, the custom was for women to commit ritual suicide by drinking hemlock after a man had left bruises on their collarbone like a purple necklace. You are not responsible for any hate crimes a jilted lover perpetrates against you.
5. There is no “kiss and make it better.” There is only “kiss and do not hurt anyone in the first place.”
6. Your body is not a funeral home. Stop loading bodies into it out of a desire to feel understood. Understanding comes from maps, from atlases, not from wandering hands. Make the men trace the countries of your brain first instead.
7. Your grandmother memorized the stain on her bedsheets after the first time with your grandfather, and has never forgotten its outline since.
8. You never have to hold back your tongue if you need to say no.
9. The ones that make you hold your breath when they look at you could just as easily be the ones that dunk your head under water the next time. Drowning is only good if it ends in some kind of surfacing.
10. Remember, your body is not a curfew. You don’t have to keep trying to break it.