One: Divorce the thing from its history, as best you can.

Two: You won’t be able to. Cry. A wooden ball (and her history) rolls in your mouth.

Three: When the wooden ball was sixteen, her stepfather called her a cunt. The wooden ball has nerve damage, herniated discs, and several mental health diagnoses, all of which the wooden ball discards in a bin.

Four: The wooden ball rolls to the edge of the bin and peers in. Feel her rolling, from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue, mouth open.

Five: When the wooden ball cries, a red laser comes from her center. It extends from your inner ear to the nearest door hinge it can find.

Six: When you see the laser, move your wrists around a certain way. The door hinges will love this, as it helps to un-rust them. They will send thank you letters. You will love getting the mail.

Seven: When you are angry, remember Diane, how she told you to pretend you are an objective researcher. The object of your stress is just an object. Only that.

Eight: For example, a wooden ball is just a wooden ball. Until.

Nine: There should be fairies looking for you. Tie a red ribbon to your bed when you are ready to talk to them.

Ten: When your date pushes his fingers down your throat without asking, somersault backwards into a mine.

Eleven: At the bottom of the mine, more fairies. They don’t pity you. They watch you and say nothing (you have not yet tied the ribbon).

Twelve: The fairies have the look of irises that have forgotten their stamens and so fold inward, toward a map of god.

Thirteen: When he says I can’t control myself around you, do not develop a death wish.

Fourteen: When you say god, think of math. How almost everybody hates it.

Fifteen: When you say god, define what you mean. Tie a red ribbon between two tin cans and kick them around. When the wooden ball’s mother was young, she liked to play a game like that, one called Kick-the-Can.

Sixteen: Do one kind thing a day. Before you do it, forget that you are supposed to do it.

Seventeen: It should be simple to only love others who are very kind and good to you, and to let them love you back.

Eighteen: Historically, it’s not.

Nineteen: When the wooden ball was ten, she won Author-of-the-Month at her elementary school. The wooden ball’s friend asked the wooden ball to write a poem and put the friend’s name on it, so that she could win, too. The wooden ball did.

Twenty: Ask yourself: Is it strange that the wooden ball felt genuinely proud of her friend when she won the prize with the wooden ball’s plagiarized poem? Is it strange that the wooden ball put an orange frame around her copy of the poem and hung it on her bedroom wall?

Twenty-one: You still haven’t tied the ribbon. It’s not that the fairies creep you out. It’s just that you don’t know what you are supposed to talk about.

Twenty-two: Historically, you tend to get very nervous about the things you are supposed to do.

Twenty-three: The wooden ball has a lot of self doubt, too. Sometimes, she will Google simple words and concepts like, "tennis shoes," or "mashed potatoes," to make sure that they are in fact real before Tweeting about them.

Twenty-four: The wooden ball would barely be surprised if one day all of her memories turned out to be false.

Twenty-five: The secret is this: the fairies know how to extricate you from the wooden ball.

Twenty-six: On the days when you most want to live, look, but you will have misplaced the ribbon.