Friends.

“Friends who I can talk to and hang out and have fun with, just like I’ve always dreamed, we could talk about books and politics and vandalize at night, want to? Love me, me, me, we could go on a trial basis, please I don’t care if it’s the out-of-the-crowd, I just need a crowd, a gang, a reason to smile.” –Kurt Cobain

 They smile—really smile, not just that fake kind of what-did-you-you-do-this-weekend-smile that you get from co-workers and therapists and librarians—and stand up to meet me when I walk in. I wrap my arms around Abby first. She is small, the tiniest girl I know. I remember the party we threw in our kitchen when she broke 100 lbs. for the first time after eating nothing but Bush’s chicken and microwave meals for three weeks. We start to let go and then change our minds, and I squeeze her tighter and she makes cat noises in my ear. John grabs me next. He’s nearly twice as tall as Abby, but with my heels on I can look him in the eye when he tells me how much they’ve missed me.

We sit down, and their macaroni and cheese is almost gone. A full plate is in front of me and I scarf it down in five minutes, trying to talk and chew and swallow at the same time. They ask me how work is, how I like living in New York, and I tell them it’s fine, it’s great, I love my job and the city. It’s so different from Waco. We used to live together in a concrete apartment with twenty-foot floor to ceiling windows and a shower that never worked and a cat that was always ruining the furniture. Now I live here, alone, in the city where people only go when there’s nothing left for them at home. Only the dreamers move to New York. Starry-eyed, fragile people dragging suitcases full of high heels and a passport or maybe a driver’s license as a constant reminder to everyone that they are still just tourists. Slowly, their promises turn to compromises, and they shuffle into place with everyone else.

We talk for awhile until it’s quiet, and I ask John how he’s been and he starts talking about some really heavy, serious stuff. The kind of things that you wait until you really know somebody to tell them. I don’t mind. I listen and I care and I empathize and I tell them that I’ve got some pretty serious shit going on with me too.

“Like what?” he says. And I tell them. How I’m barely making grades in my night classes and trying as hard as I can to rise above the pack of fifteen other hungry interns vying for the same exact jobs as me at work. How I’ve tried, really, really tried, to find friends and get to know people out here. But it hasn’t been working. There’s easily six million people on this small island called Manhattan, but they’re all strangers. I work ten hours a day and when I come home at night I do homework and then I drink Sailor Jerry’s and eat chocolate cake until I fall asleep. And the people I knew from the life I had before are starting to become strangers too. That’s how it always is when I move. We try to hold on and we promise each other that we’ll write, that we’ll visit, but all of that falls to the wayside in a matter of weeks. Hell, I hadn’t heard anything about John and Abby since May, besides the occasional text message or phone call. But even then we were always trying to make each other laugh. You don’t want to weigh someone down with the bad stuff when you only have three hours to see them.

And yet, that’s what we’re doing. Instead of spending those moments trying to fluff up all the good things, we’ve been talking about the real parts of our lives that are reserved only for your best friends to know. Abby is telling me about how she doesn’t know if she wants to study music education anymore, even though that’s been her life for three whole years. And I’m telling them that I don’t even know who I am anymore, because who I was in California was different from who I was in Texas, and who I was in Texas is nowhere near who I am in New York. And pretty soon John is covering my hands with his and Abby is telling me she loves me and we’re outside the restaurant shivering beneath the window lights of the Flat Iron District.

I tell them what I’ve been doing for the past three years; picking a location on the map and moving to that spot without hesitation. I had never even been to Waco before it became my home during college. I had never seen the Statue of Liberty or the Chrysler Building before I started applying for jobs in New York. Because that’s what I do. I just go. Even if it means living out of a suitcase on a stranger’s blow up mattress, I will always just move somewhere and see how it goes.

But the first six months in a new place are always the hardest. There’s still little pieces of you left over in the place where you lived before. And your heart knows it. Your soul knows when pieces of it are missing, scattered all over Los Angeles and Madrid and London and Austin. And when you try to move on and be something else, you can’t. Not when you aren’t fully there, when you aren’t fully committed to the thing or the idea or the person or the moment.

“You’re just not finished being Whitney yet,” John says simply. And Abby agrees. They tell me that I’m not all put together right now. That I’ll find it, eventually, but until I do, there’s a spot on their futon if I need to come back.

They climb into a taxi outside of the subway and disappear, and I realize that this is what my life has been missing. I haven’t been lacking in funny stories or good times or outrageous adventures. I’ve been completely devoid of sharing my life with other people. It’s great to have co-workers that you can laugh with over lunch, and it’s nice to have school friends to complain about studying for midterms with, but it’s absolutely necessary for my existence to have real friends.

Friends that will buy me macaroni and cheese and tell me that I’m not an awful person.  Friends that make me feel included in their everyday lives even though I’m half a continent away. Friends that think I’m cool because I have a Timber Wolf sweatshirt and don’t make fun of me when I talk to strangers’ puppies as though they belong to me. Friends that I can laugh with in the middle of a really serious moment. Friends who stuck by me even when I was at my most un-cool, like Abby did freshman year when these other girls told me that they didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because I talked too much.

Friends who lived with me for a year and never got mad at me for forgetting to take out the trash or for interrupting their Breaking Bad marathons by yelling the lines I knew through the wall separating our bedrooms. Friends who would stay up all night until I got home because they couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t there. Friends who would come home early if they knew I couldn’t sleep because they weren’t there. Friends who would go to my book readings and clap the loudest when I got up to the mic. Friends who would scream and cry with me after we accidentally drove the wrong way down 18^th street. Friends who would get in the car and drive two hours to a ska concert with me on a school night. Friends who would write me letters at my fake funeral to tell me that they wished they had gotten to know me better. Friends who would call me up and tell me, “I’m sad with you,” when I needed it.

I need friends like these two, because without them, I’m just another gypsy, another broken-hearted dreamer, another failed comedian, another wannabe New Yorker susceptible to compromise. And I don’t want to be those things. I want to be the kind of friend to them that they have been to me. Even if I never move back to Waco. Even if I never get famous. Even if they move to Costa Rica or Oklahoma or California or wherever. I want to be there so that they’ll always know that there’s someone out there in the universe who loves them as much as I do. 

Free.

The moon always looks closer in August. The outside of a bar and the inside of a swimming pool feel exactly the same; balmy and sticky and sour, in the way that only chlorine and whiskey can be. This summer will be my last. In a few months, I will join the drone of worker bees, shuffling our way from subway platform to concrete street on our way to work in the morning.

To be honest, I’m terrified. I’m scared I won’t be able to stay awake from 9 until 5. After about three hours in my black stilettos, I’m afraid I’ll start making that face I make after being in high heels for too long. My teeth will be ever-stained with lipstick. My pantyhose will always have a run. And I don’t know when it will ever be acceptable to wear American flag shorts with a bathing suit top again.

I want to remember these summer nights forever. Ideally, they should never end, but even if they continue, they won’t be the same. I want to remember the last summer I spent in Los Angeles, throwing parties at Oddfellows Museum of Artifacts and Oddities with Kati and James. We were inseparable that summer, always finding excuses to throw tea parties in the park or sip whiskey in Audrey Hepburn’s bathtub couch at the Museum. We would roast marshmallows indoors and James and I would sneak around back to make out by the pool. An old couple stopped us in the super market that August and told us, “It’s so nice to see young people truly in love.” I blushed.

I want to remember the following summer, where Jimmy and Matt and I packed up my car with dozens of fireworks and borrowed bottles of tequila and headed to Waco. We split the cost of gas and spent our nights getting drunk in seedy Southwestern motels. I was falling out of love, and so was Jimmy, and so was Matt. We had a 2002 Ford Explorer full of heartbreak and explosives. It’s a miracle we made it to Austin alive.

I want to remember South by Southwest in the Austin spring time. The Strokes were playing a free show, Juicebox blaring from the main stage set up at Zilker park. Security guards and police officers with riot shields closed the gates with nearly 300 of us still left outside. I didn’t think. I just ran. My bare feet passed over the grass and hooked easily into the chain link fence separating me from Julian Casablancas. All around me, dirty teenagers and wasted young folk were being thrown back over the fence by the Man. There was a cacophony of drums and bass and lead guitar, nearly drowning out the screams of our generation. But we prevailed. Somehow, we got over that fence, landing in the backstage area, no less.

I want to remember the nights I spent dancing in the kitchen with my best friends at Beatnix. Chris would turn on Lovefool by the Cardinals and we would scream it to each other while Billy rang up grilled cheese orders and Eric smoked cigarettes. We would race over there as soon as our day jobs cut us loose, the same place every night for weeks. It was better than therapy. Eric and I would talk about books we had read and places we’d been, and Billy would write songs about girls. Chris would need a ride there, of course, because his motorcycle was always breaking down, so we would speed down the highway listening to mix CDs and swearing to one another that we wouldn’t forget about each other when I moved away.

I want to remember watching the Olympics in Hyde Park in London. Duran Duran was blaring some old 80’s tune, and six thousand eyes were glued to the giant screen projecting the opening ceremonies. Even though we didn’t know the British national anthem, we sang along as best as we could. We bought icy beers even though it was raining and danced without umbrellas alongside people from Mumbai, Norway, Mongolia, Australia, and Brazil. We cheered for JK Rowling and booed when the sound cut out, briefly, during the Peter Pan part. For a few hours, we weren’t a group of mismatched transcontinental strangers. We were citizens of the world.

I want to bottle up these wild, wild nights so that I can take them out and savor them when I’m no longer young. I want to always remember what it feels like to be this free. 

Travel.

It’s the hopeless romantic in me that boards a one-way flight to London Heathrow, and it’s the cynic in me that refuses to believe in fairytales. The part of me that still believes in true love keeps renewing my passport, and the part of me that doesn’t makes absolutely sure that I take all of my adventures alone. Because, I rationalize with myself, isn’t that how J.K. Rowling got her start? Divorced and working downtown, riding by herself on trains and scribbling in the margins of the London Times? This morning, I have a first class ticket leaving from Paddington Station and a little booth all to myself in the first car.

I don’t want to get married. Not now, not in five years, not even in twenty. I want to keep exploring train stations on my own, sharing a blueberry muffin with no one but myself, and falling in love with the stranger who offered me his pen a minute ago. When else am I going to be this free? I don’t have a job or a husband or a kid or a dog. If I want to just pick up and live in a new city or on a new continent, I can. I can be in Venice or Amsterdam or Zurich whenever I wish. I have no obligations, no one waiting patiently for me to come home. It’s rather nice to be this alone, this unchained. This might be a ratty thing to say, but I imagine that there are married women out there who would kill to be me. Probably the same ones who pat my hands sympathetically at weddings and "reassure" me that I’ll be next.

There’s nothing quite like falling under the spell of a new city, a new time zone, a new set of street signs on the wrong side of the road. I’ve been in better relationships with Los Angeles and Barcelona than I ever have with a man. A man doesn’t know which streets in Munich would be best to get me lost on, or when to cue the London rain. Nor is there any matchmaker or wingman as successful as a late night subway ride, or a queue at a modern art museum. Nobody is as able to stimulate my creativity as much as a cab driver that doesn’t speak English, or a tube map that doesn’t make sense.

It’s true, what Tolkien says. “Not all who wander are lost.” Because no one is truly ever alone on an adventure. Not with the sparkling city lights that illuminate the coat buttons of a traveler, or the musical styling of an ambulance and an ice cream truck that make the sidewalk hum and purr like a concrete computer chip. There’s nothing like the true sense of community one feels when every single person on the sidewalk put their umbrellas up all at once.

So if you are able, go to Europe alone. Dance with yourself at a club in Spain, read a soggy newspaper solo in Denmark. Have a pint at a pub where nobody knows your name after a rich, fulfilling day. You deserve it. Slurp a single scoop of gelato on the cobblestone roads in Rome and lick the whipped cream off your plate of Bavarian crème pie. Pretend to fight dragons in a Swedish forest, or cast spells under your breath at the ruins in Scotland. Forget the name of your hotel and stay awake until the sun comes up.

At first, you’ll be paranoid that all the waiters and honeymooners and college students abroad will think that you’re strange. But soon you will realize that you’re not odd, or confused, or lost.

You are simply wandering, refusing to disembark from the train until it reaches the right station. 

Wack.

Dear Waco,

            

When we first met, I hated you. You were dripping wet, soggy, disgusting, a pathetic little excuse of a town. You were littered with strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and taco stands. I didn’t know what to make of you. I hated your flat, dusty landscape and your humid August skies. I hated your hailstones, your bicycle lanes, and your greasy fast food joints. I still don’t understand how most of you is still in business, what with the endless stretch of parking lots and high-rise garages that blanket the downtown area.

            

But I have to admit that when we met, I was in love with someone else. I had been in love with her for years, you understand, and it was nearly impossible for me to let go. And based on first impressions alone, she was winning. Los Angeles wore her midnight blue, sparkling evening gown and welcomed my red-eye flight home. She was dangerous and dirty, but she challenged me and helped me grow. She was everything I needed until I met you.

            

You proved to be worth far more than I could have possibly imagined. Slowly, so slowly that I almost didn’t notice, you seeped under my skin and rode the pipelines in my veins. For the past three years, you have been more than just my home. Waco, you were my first apartment and the first piece of furniture I ever bought. I wrote the check for my paint chipped, dusty, 1940’s bed with shaky hands, and moved into the first home that I could call all my own. You were the twenty-foot wall-to-ceiling windows in my bedroom and the rusty old pipes that hung above my head.

           

You were my lover when mine abandoned me. I was falling out of love and you were there in the moonlight, calling me back to bed. I never slept as well as I did when I moved back home to you. You were the bathtub fort that I built to watch Fight Club in when I thought I’d never fall in love again. I was wrong. I was falling in love with you. You were the kiss outside of the bar, the first story I ever published, the first friends I ever made. You were the late night rounds of Shiner with people I know I’ll never see again. You were my first job. My first unpaid, over-worked, un-organized job, the one that I never want to quit. Waco, you’re the place I come home to when Austin kicks me out and Dallas doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter if I drive north or south on I-35, I always have to come back to you.

            

You’re countless nights spent looking at the stars. Walking along the dam, sitting on the rooftop of my favorite coffeehouse, scaling the sides of buildings and waiting for the sun to come up. You’re a concert at Beatnix in the summer time, and a Cowboy coffee from Common Grounds when it gets cold. Waco, you’re Baylor, but you’re also downtown. You're David Koresh, but you're also Cafe Homestead. You’re the lights on top of the Alico building, better than the North Star when I get lost. You’re the derelict, the vagrant, the homeless, but you’re the downtown Farmer’s Market, too. You’re proof that life can grow and sustain even when the people here seem dead.

            

When I first began the process of moving, I felt alone, because I thought that I was leaving behind a set of friends in LA. I thought that I would have to make a new set of friends here that would ultimately just forget about me too, as soon as I was gone. I realized that none of this is true. I’m not leaving behind any people, I’m leaving behind a city that I have fallen in love with. Waco, you are my favorite roommates, and the crazy ones too. You’re my gay best friend who loves science fiction and Cupp’s cheeseburgers. You’re my big sister, with wild hair and funny stories. You’re the barista at the coffee shop, the cashier at my favorite place to get a grilled cheese. You’re my managing editor and every photographer and writer I’ve ever worked with. You’re the girl who makes me laugh when we’re putting away hundreds of boxes of non-profit shoes at my crappy day job. You’re even the punk who stole my bike and my digital camera.

Waco, you are the outside of a bar and the inside of a swimming pool in August. You’re the concerts that I went to last year instead of studying for finals. You’re the red hair dye washing down the sink from my roommate’s hair. You’re the nose ring I couldn’t keep, the tattoo I was too scared to get. You’re the yoga class I couldn’t find and had to teach myself. You’re the empty zoo on Dia del Oso, you’re the movie theatre on a Wednesday afternoon.

Dear Waco, I am terrified of leaving you. Dear Waco, I miss you already. Who will comfort me with sweet potato fries and sweet tea when I’m lonely? Los Angeles is beautiful, but she isn’t you. She knows me and she loves me, but she hasn’t seen me in years. Waco, I don’t know how to love her anymore. Right now, I only want to be with you. I want to stay in this dinky little town forever, wrapped up in the stars and the rivers and the sunrises and the parking lots.

            

Waco, I’ll never forget you. I’ll never let go of the people you brought me or the things that you’ve shown me. With any luck, you’ll grow and change and forget about me, but I won’t ever be able to do that. Not yet. Not while the taste of purple margaritas is still on my tongue, not when I still know the map of Valley Mills like the back of my hand.

           

Hey there, Los Angeles. I’m coming home. 

Paperback

I hate Kindles. I hate Nooks. And I really, really hate iPads. Don’t get me wrong. I truly admire our continuous advancement in innovative technology. But there’s something truly magical about opening a book, flipping through its pages, and being transported into a world that you never knew existed.

And that’s why, at 8:55 this morning, I stood outside of Barnes & Noble in the humid Texas heat, waiting for Gus to unlock the front door. When you walk into a bookstore, there is an unspoken expectation that your day, your week, and ultimately the rest of your life is going to change. Being the first person of the day in a bookstore is like opening the Wardrobe for the first time and stepping into Narnia, or solemnly swearing that you are up to no good before entering the Room of Requirements at Hogwarts. Anything and everything is possible, and each possibility is lined up in neat, little rows on sturdy, brown shelves, waiting for you to open them.

Here are the facts: When I was a kid, I was very unattractive, and completely uncoordinated. I had purple, wire-framed glasses, baggy overalls from the Gap, and more orthadonture in my mouth than I care to think about. I was picked last in P.E. every day—and not just second to last, or third to last, but very last. I was the least desirable choice for kickball, soccer, volleyball, and every other torturous sport that nerdy kids are forced to endure throughout grade school. Needless to say, having a swift kick or a strong arm was absolutely crucial throughout my elementary education. So what if I won first place in the Spelling Bee, or knew all 50 states and capitals? In order to be popular, you had to good at sports. I envied all the other girls with their 20/20 vision and neatly organized softball trophies. I was jealous of the boys, too, because even they got invited to our first co-ed birthday parties in the third grade. I was an outcast, and every single one of my imaginary friends was sick of hearing about it.

The problem was that I saw myself differently than all the other kids did. In my world, I was solving mysteries with the Boxcar Children, and fighting dragons alongside Harry Potter. I was strong and brave like Jessie Watson, and I was cunning and witty like Hermione Granger. My best friends were the Bailey School Kids, and I knew every single student at Wayside School. I understood Stanley Yelnats, Mia Thermopolis, and Wilma Sturtz. They were invisible, but they were powerful and smart. With every turn of a page, I drifted farther and farther away from my life as a third grade nobody. I could do something, be somebody, change the world. I wasn’t scraggly and scrawny with messy hair and crooked glasses, I was a wizard or a princess or a detective waiting to happen.

I had a ritual when reading these books. I would hide under my sheets with a flashlight, or prop up my copy of Just As Long As We’re Together inside my math book (because really, who needs fractions anyway?). As I would read, I would ruffle through the back pages over and over, watching them grow thinner and thinner as the hours went on. When I was finished, I would flip frantically through the whole book, searching for my favorite parts so that I could re-read them over again. I never wanted the story to end, until I found a new hero or heroine at the library the next day. I fell in love with the characters, the plot twists, and the dialogue in a way that made me believe that I could be just as amazing as the people I read stories about.

Which is why my heart sank into my stomach this morning when Gus shook his head and told me, “I don’t think we have that book released in paperback yet. Maybe you should try downloading it for you electronic reader.”

I can’t make the switch to e-books. I’m not sure if I ever will. Mostly because I’ll never grow out of being a scared, nine-year-old girl, seeking the comfort of the rustling pages and musty, old smells that come from years of re-reading your favorite chapters over again.

So thank you, J.K Rowling. Thank you, Gertrude Chandler Warner, Marcia Thornton Jones, and Debbie Dadey. Thank you Louis Sachar, Meg Cabot, and Gail Carson Levine. Thank you Judy Blume and Stephen Chbosky and Laurie Halse Anderson. I can never thank any of you enough for giving me super powers when I was invisible.