TinyGods

I don’t date men who believe that they’re men. I date men who think they’re tiny gods, little superheroes, mini royalty. “I’m Iron Man,” they say. “I’m Indiana Jones; I’m the next Charles Bukowski."

I date men with heartbeats like drumbeats, men who use my vital organs like voodoo dolls. They poke me with pins and light me on fire and grow angry when I bleed on their carpet. “Silly girl,” they sneer, eyebrows raised. “Who told you that I was your home?”

I date men who say they love my writing, like my words are sexier than my ribcage. "Write about me this time,” they plead with their clothes on my floor. “Promise me you’ll never write about that other guy again.” This lasts a month, usually, sometimes, maybe, two. Then it’s, “I hate that you said that I used to do coke, I hate the way you compared me to drowning.”  I don’t know how else to ask you to behave better, how to tell you that you never really loved me at all.

I date men who ask me to be their night sky, and then get mad when I swallow them whole. If they wanted to save a girl from her sadness, they shouldn’t have tried to save me. They should’ve picked someone who isn’t comfortable in her melancholy, someone who wants to be rescued. 

“I can’t do anything right,” they scream when I’m sulking. "The ceiling’s always falling with you.” 

Where I sit, darling, there is no ceiling. Only Jupiter and her 67 moons.

I date men who say things they don’t mean like, “The first time I saw you, I felt like how Alexander Fleming must have felt when he discovered penicillin.” Things like, “I want you to meet my mother, my sister, my high school English teacher.” Things like, “I wish I had known you when we were both kids, then maybe you’d have never been lonely.”

I date men who think I’m difficult to love. I date men who ignore me until it’s convenient, usually around 5am when they can’t sleep. I date men who make me feel like Kronos, like Frankenstein’s monster, like a cannibal.  I date men who compare me to a bottle of whiskey: “You were fun last night, honey baby, but I feel like shit this morning.”

But I’m not a cannibal, you know. I’m not a monster or a people-eater or even Johnny Walker Gold. I’m made of the same stuff that the universe is made out of; atoms and molecules and moonbeams and stardust. And you? You’re not a miracle or a saint or even Mick Jagger. 

You’re just a man. Someone should have told you that by now.

Toothpaste.

This morning, I woke up thinking that I was in London for a minute. I sometimes have this flashback fever dream where I’m in a twin-sized bed in my old dorm room at Victoria college, sick with the flu and delirious, clutching a giant quart of spicy chili ramen from Wagamama’s in my greedy, mittened, fists. I dream that I’m binge watching television alone, blanketed by the haze of a hangover and 100mg of Amitryptaline. That’s the happiest I’ve ever been.

When I realize that I’m actually cocooned in three blankets, a scarf wrapped around my feet, and my down overcoat splayed haphazardly on top of the whole mess, I want to die. My heater is broken. It is winter, which means that it’s approximately 13 degrees in New York, which means that it actually feels like it’s negative 37 degrees. I spend a few minutes wondering who would find me if I froze to death in my apartment, until I settle on the answer, “Probably Netflix, after they’ve realized that I haven’t watched an episode of Law & Order SVU in a few days.” I set a timer on my phone to go off in five minutes, a little less than the amount of time I’ll need to mentally prepare myself to brush my teeth; the actual amount of time being: forever.

I squeeze a tiny, baby-sized amount of toothpaste onto the bristles of my Sonicare. My hair is already up in a bun, tied squarely on the top of my head. I brace myself against the bathroom sink, waiting. Left bottom molars first, a quick sweep across my central and lateral incisors, right back molars. Top left molars second, and then I gag. I spit out my toothpaste, suck in a few deep breaths through my mouth, gag again. I hold my nose so that I can’t taste the peppermint. I pretend it’s a mouthful of a Starbucks holiday drink instead. Nothing works. I vomit a tiny splash into the sink, rinse, and re-brush my top and bottom teeth. I spit again, try to swish some water around, and repeat. It’s like my body is actively rebelling against any action, thought, or process that might make me smile more.

I used to think it was weird, that I puked every time I brushed my teeth. I thought I was allergic to toothpaste or something. I thought maybe I had ulcers. I thought I was having prolonged morning sickness, a la Kate Middleton, due to my propensity to eat tater tots at five in the morning, or whatever. Every conversation I had with a medical professional went exactly how you would imagine:  

Me: “Ummmm…so, I’ve been doing this really weird thing lately? Like, not on purpose?  I think I might be allergic to toothpaste or something, because I throw up every time I try to brush my teeth.”

Doctor: “Here are some pamphlets with more information about eating disorders.”

The conversations I had with my mom were even worse.

Me: “So, I kind of threw up this morning while I was brushing my teeth.”

Mom: “Oh my god, you’re definitely pregnant, you’re grounded, forever.”

I eventually accepted my fate: that no one I could tell would ever think that it was anything other than bulimia, or that I was somehow permanently with-child. Those seemed like more realistic options for a girl my age, at least compared to something like being allergic to Colgate. So I stopped seeking medical advice on the subject. I puked every morning post-dental hygiene routine, and I completely stopped worrying about it. I knew what to do. Hair up, tiniest amount of toothpaste possible, breathe in and out through my mouth, vanilla-flavored mouthwash to seal the deal. On the good days, I only gagged or dry-heaved, my stomach muscles contracting while I flung cool water in my mouth to try to make it stop. I’ve been told that after awhile, human beings can adapt to almost anything.

And then, something unexpected happened. Sophomore year of college, it started happening less and less. Eventually, it stopped happening at all. I convinced myself that I had found the miracle brand of toothpaste (Crest Cavity Protection, flavored “Regular Paste”), and moved on. I gained weight. Not a lot, but enough that the girls in my sorority stopped poking my ribcage and giggling that I should eat a sandwich. I didn’t mind. I went from a size 0 to a size 4, and never looked back. I threw away all of my old dresses and pants and got new ones. I ate pizzas and Chinese takeout and cookies and macaroni and cheese. I was fine, as long as I could keep my stomach down in the morning.

It happened periodically a few times over the next few years, but never on days when I felt happy and content and loved. I lived in Texas, and then Spain, and then the UK, and finally, New York. I was away from my family for the first time on an exciting, new, adventure. I had boyfriends and friends and new coworkers. I had a job that I loved, and a writing group that I trusted. Things were mostly pretty okay.

This summer, when it came back in full-swing, I noticed that it was worse on mornings after I had stayed awake too late, fighting with my ex-boyfriend and drinking whiskey after we hung up the phone to forget about it. I’m just a lazy, stupid drunk, I thought. I should probably take care of my body better.

A few months went by, and I gradually began to spend more and more time on my own, reading books and writing essays, even though it felt like being in solitary confinement. Every millisecond that passed when I wasn’t surrounded by friends or loved ones made me feel like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. The moment I met up with a buddy for a beer, or a dude for a date, I immediately relaxed. It felt like being freezing cold, and then stepping into the nicest, warmest bubble bath in the world. It felt like I was alone on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, casting a rope out repeatedly, only feeling remotely normal when a tugboat passed by.

One night, when I was so deep into a Tumblr void that I couldn’t possibly remember whose page I had started out on, I stumbled upon Twitter comedian Rob Delaney’s feed. And it was funny. It was dark, sometimes, too, and there was a lot of stuff on there about Robin Williams’ recent death; compassionate stuff, stuff that made you think about your relationships with the people in the world around you, and I got completely sucked up in reading all of his stories. I bought his book immediately, because hey, I had a Barnes & Noble gift card and nothing to lose. It was 4am on a Tuesday. I stayed up til 7, reading it, until I came across a chapter where Delaney described what it was like to have severe, suicidal depression.

If I were a cartoon, my jaw would have hit the floor. When Rob Delaney was depressed, he threw up when he brushed his teeth, too. There was a whole fucking chapter on it, 9 beautiful, wonderful, totally gross, graphic pages about how completely and utterly not-alone I was. For a brief, magical instant, I was elated. Finally! Someone cool and talented has the same weird thing going on! Someone who is living proof that you can be both funny and witty and abnormally sad, all at the same time! And then I was immediately swept up in thinking about my own reasons for hating to brush my stupid teeth.

The first stretch of time was when I was 15, after my very first boyfriend got kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to one of those wilderness rehab programs in Provo, Utah. I also developed severe insomnia, and completely stopped sleeping, except for twenty-minute micro-naps that my body would force upon me so that my brain wouldn’t completely shut down. I lived like Tyler Durden for almost 9 months, which feels like a lot longer than it actually is when you’re wide awake for a full 24 hours each day. I started fight clubs in every city across America, aka, I watched Bridget Jones’ Diary about 400 times and woke up in History class without remembering how I got there.

It got bad again when I was 17, involved in a super unhealthy relationship with a guy who once hit me over the head with a dissecting tool in the middle of anatomy class--one of his less-horrible offenses, actually. My response, at the time, was to stand on top of a lunch table in the cafeteria next period and scream obscenities at him. I, having a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, and him, being a total sociopathic misogynist, went to prom together a few weeks after that. It was stupid.

And now, here it was again. Maybe it was because the guy I was seeing for a few months broke it off with me to get back together with his ex-girlfriend. Maybe it was because, at the end of August, I got full-on hit by a semi –truck that ran a red light while I was crossing the street. Maybe it was because my ex-boyfriend told me that he had started sleeping with the girl who played lead opposite of him in a summer production of Odessa by the Sea while I thought we were still dating.  Maybe it was because my dog died. Maybe it was because my grandmother had a stroke. Maybe it was because I was broke and drinking too much. Maybe it was just because I was sad.

I went to the doctor a few weeks ago, and had a complete physical: blood work and urine tests, an EKG, and an impressively strong blood pressure cuff that squeezed my arm until it turned purple.

“Completely healthy,” my doctor grinned, showing too many teeth. “You’re the right weight for the right height, and your blood work looks perfect. You don’t need a follow-up appointment at all.”

I shouldn’t have been, but I felt disappointed. I was secretly praying for a dark mark to appear on the corner of one of the diagnostic reports, alerting some tech in a lab somewhere to how lonely and exhausted I felt. My doctor would see the inky stain slurring my EKG results and exclaim, “Oh my! We’ve never see anyone this miserable before! Your heart must be super, totally broken. Let’s fix you right away.”

I’d be rushed off in an ambulance to a room full of puppies and all of my friends. There would be pizza and root beer floats and those Daim candies from Ikea that my grandmother used to sneak to me when I was small. Stacks of Harry Potter books and copies of Star Wars on VHS would be displayed on a giant bookshelf in the center of the room. Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard by Paul Simon would be playing on an endless, magical loop. We would roast marshmallows, and someone would have remembered to bring my Timberwolf sweatshirt, the one I stole from my friend Ulyses, who stole it from his Eagle Scout leader. We would have a big party until I stopped being sad. That’s what I wanted. That isn’t what happened.

What happened, it turned out, is that I wrote this instead. Because we all do weird, horrible shit to ourselves when we’re feeling off-kilter. Because we’re all weird, horrible, beautiful people who deserve to exist in a room full of puppies and s ’mores if that’s what we want. Because I don’t ever want anyone to feel as alone as I did for years, having this bizarre superpower that ruined my mornings and put me off breakfast. Because it turned out that it wasn’t an allergy, or a virus, or an eating disorder at all.

It turns out that all I have to do is honor the agreement that I made with myself to wake up every morning and brush my teeth, even if I’d rather be anywhere besides my freezing, cold bed. Even if I hate New York in the winter. Even if I don’t have spicy noodle soup from Wagamama’s. Even if I’m nowhere near London at all. 

Hearthrobinson.

Billy Robinson will never break your heart. He’s a sweet kid. Lanky and boyish, with light eyes and long fingers. He has the world’s smallest puppy, and his mom thinks I’m cool. His car is always a mess. He keeps his wiry Harry Potter glasses in the corner, on the dashboard. He keeps his guitar case and a week’s worth of trash in the back. He used to use his ex-girlfriend’s old Beatles mug as an ashtray in the cup holder.

“Because she sucks,” he explained, but I saw those old photos of the two of them, smiling in superhero costumes, calling each other things like, “happy,” and “family.” He’s never been able to fool me.

He picks me up at my apartment on Daughtry, and we drive out to the Waco dam at midnight. We sing songs to keep ourselves awake, and we keep an eye out for fireflies. With him, I never sleep. We stay up all night ‘til sunrise, watching our friends fall in love. We drink Shiner Bock because it’s Texas, and we drink tequila because we’re lonely. One day, he tells me he loves me, and we kiss outside the bar. I’m a vampire in my blue dress, and he’s a zombie in his button-up. He plays Everlong by the Foo Fighters on guitar and in my head, I stay here forever in this dinky little town, wrapped up in the moonlight over the Brazos and the lights from the Alico building downtown.

***

I leave town in May. He helps me pack up my car, and we say goodbye. When I get back to Los Angeles, I smoke his brand of cigarettes for weeks because I miss him. He doesn’t text me again because his phone is always dead, but that’s okay. I knew that going into it.

When I move to New York, I listen to the mix tape he made me every single time I ride the subway. White Hinterland by Icarus. Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun. Fade into You by Mazzy Star. Something in the Air by Tom Petty. No One’s Gonna Love You by Band of Horses. Young Folks by Peter Bjorn & John. I listen to it underground for months until I have to go back to Texas to graduate college.

***

We arrive at Hemmingway’s Watering Hole and the lights are out. The bar is closed. Eric knocks four times and the door swings open and everyone’s inside; Billy & Renny & Chris & Benn and everyone I love. A dozen arms grab me and pull me in close; they already have shots waiting on the bar.

“To Whitney,” they say, and we drink. Billy’s in the corner, playing Alison by Elvis Costello on guitar. He asks me to take a walk around the block, and then he asks me to marry him. I could do that, I think. I could stay here forever. I could leave my job at Letterman, and we could eat grilled cheese sandwiches and listen to music on I-35.

“Have you ever heard about what crabs do when you put them in a barrel?” he asks me. I shake my head no.

 “Individually, they could easily escape. They could squeeze their little pinchers into the sides and pull themselves out. But then, the other crabs grab onto their legs and pull them back in. The group mentality is more important than the individual's freedom.”

He pauses, takes a sip of his beer, tucks my hair behind my ears.

“Darling,” he says, “That’s what Waco is like.”

***

The next time I find myself in the South, I don’t expect to see anyone. But like magic, Chris picks me up and we drive over to Renny’s. Renny opens the door, and they’re there, somehow: Eric and Billy with Lone Stars in their hands, squeezing me into the buttons on the fronts of their shirts. We ask Billy’s little brother to take a picture of the five of us, grinning like idiots.

“Smile on three,” he says, and Billy gently moves my head so that I’m looking right at him.

1…he tilts my chin up to look at him.

2…he closes his eyes.

3…we’re both home again, his lips on my mouth, and we’re both seeing stars.

The camera goes off. Everyone says, “Ewwwwwww.”

We climb in the car to go get more beer, and we scream out the lyrics to Cannibal Queen by Miniature Tigers. We hold hands in the back seat and sing the line from I Just Do by Dear & the Headlights that we both love. We drink more tequila and put on Katy Perry. We finish our Lone Stars, and we’re all over each other on the balcony. Our friends go inside. I’m stuck to him like glue, like I never even left.

“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” he asks, and I shake my head no.

We stay up all night talking. All of us. Eric tells us that his new girlfriend lives in Canada. Chris tells a story about his mom. Renny’s inside entertaining her co-workers. Billy makes us laugh with his stories from work.

“I think I’m gonna be a really great father,” he says, sober for a minute. And then Eric says something, and we’re back laughing again.

At two in the morning we run out of cigarettes, and Chris’s car gets towed from the parking lot.

“I’ll go,” I say, because I’m the least fucked up.

Eric and I get in the car and we drive. I pick up a pack of Marlboro Menthols and they only cost five dollars. I put Billy’s change in my purse.

We get back home, and Chris is beside himself. We start into the house, and he stops me before I go inside. We sit down on the stairs, and I smoke Billy’s cigarettes. Chris plays some depressing music on his iPhone and tells me that he’s broke, and he can’t pay for the tow, and that after I left to go to the store, Billy hooked up with a stranger, that he’s passed out in bed now.

I pull Chris up by his hands. I tell him that neither of us are allowed to start crying. I put on Love Fool by the Cardigans and we don’t know all the words, but we dance in the moonlight, scream the ones that we know.

When the music stops, we pick up his car and drive back to his house and I pack up my things and we head to the airport. I don’t see Billy again because he’s unconscious. I tell Renny that I’ll come visit soon.  I take pictures of Eric sleeping on the couch in Chris’s bright purple Dio shirt. I say goodbye to Texas and I drink one more Lone Star. I sleep on the plane the whole way back to New York.

***

I text Billy in the morning, “Thanks for saying goodbye.” His change is still in my wallet.

He doesn’t answer for awhile, but when he does, he says, “I really hate myself.”

I don’t need to ask why, but I do anyway. He tells me he’s sorry. He tells me he’s really dumb. He tells me that sometimes, when he reads my writing, I don’t use his name but he knows it’s about him. He says he can always tell. He says he knows for sure. I tell him it’s okay, and I mean it. I tell him I still think he’s cool.

I climb back into bed and I close my eyes and I tell myself again:

Billy Robinson will never break your heart. You’re never in town long enough to let him.

Self-ish.

When I hate my body the most, when I can’t stand the way my hips look in a tight skirt, or the way my thighs smush together when I sit at my desk, I try to take care of it. When it’s doing this thing that’s so foreign to me, ballooning and bulging and bloating, I give it as much love and attention as it can stand. I make healthy decisions. I go to yoga every day. I do sit ups and lunges and I run through the park. I eat salads—the pre-packaged, 300 calorie kind, from Trader Joe’s—and I go to bed early. I drink water before I fall asleep and when I wake up the next day. I always remember to take out my contacts and remove my make-up. I brush my hair, cut my nails, put lotion on my legs in the morning before work. I look at myself in the mirror and think, “Gross,” despite the fact that I've been exfoliating, and limiting my intake of fried foods and carbohydrates. I count steps and I count calories, trying to make them even each other out. I take the subway everywhere so that I can afford better food. I say no to that third beer, that fourth helping of nachos at the bar with my friends. I wake up with a clear head and an open heart and I hate my stupid legs, my chubby lower back, my jiggly upper arms.

But when I’m trying to remember how to love myself, that’s when I stop trying. I let myself have that third dollar slice of pizza with extra parmesan cheese. I consider it a miracle that my stomach is willing to accept food, what with pieces of my heart missing and all. I’m small, but I drink lots of whiskey. I go shot for shot with the guy next to me at the bar, with the bartender, with the girl who should have gone home hours ago. I smoke at least three cigarettes for breakfast, two for lunch, and the rest of the pack instead of dinner most days. I buy cheap food so I can afford to take taxis. I duck my head and pull down my hoodie whenever I pass my neglected yoga studio. I supplement Vicodin for Advil when my migraines won’t go away. I haven’t trimmed my nails in weeks; I keep scratching myself in my sleep. I don’t shave my legs because I just don’t care.

I’m putting all of my extra energy into remembering what kind of person I am. I’m spending all those nights alone so that I can really get to know myself again. And you can’t get to know a stranger without a drink or three to break the ice, right? You can always think more clearly when you’re punishing your lungs for reminding you to breathe. You can sleep late when you don’t care what your hair looks like, or whether your skin is smooth. You can go to bed early when you forget to make dinner. I look in the mirror, and my body looks okay, compared to my heart. At least it isn’t battered and bruised. At least it looks full, whole, and complete. I think to myself, “There are worse things in the world than that extra layer of marshmallow coating my abdomen. There are worse things than smeared mascara and a weak jawline. There are worse things than ratty hair and bad breath.”

I think to myself, “I don’t need to be pretty. I need to be okay.”

DFW

It was 102 degrees when I landed in Texas. I sprinted from the tarmac to gate C2 to catch my connecting flight, careful not to burn to a crisp. I sat down at a long bar. I had ten minutes. 

"What'll y'all be having?" The bartender asked. I wished he had been polishing a whiskey glass when he said it. It would have been more romantic. But this was a TGI Fridays at the DFW airport. It wasn't Hemingway's or SpiderHouse or even Sam's on the Square where you used to wait tables when we were in school. 

"Shiner Bock, please," I say, extending my credit card and drivers license. I've always looked too young. "Close me out, if you can."

He smiles and cracks open the top of a long necked, sweaty bottle and hands it to me. I take a picture quickly before opening my throat and downing the brown liquid, fast. 6 minutes left. 

I set down the empty bottle and rush over to my gate. I try calling you, but it goes straight to voicemail. You're at work. Or you're with your girl. Who cares? What do I expect anyway? 

I give myself one last fever dream to miss you. This is getting silly, after all. It's been three years. I close my eyes, let the Shiner cool my belly. I imagine that you get my stupid voicemail and race to the airport in your beat up green Volkswagen with all the windows rolled down. You screech up to the front of the terminal and forget to close your door when you leap out and run inside. I'm waiting on your side of the security line in a long, black dress. My hair is different than you remember. Your nose rings are still there, like a little semi colon on the side of your nostril. You grab me by my waist and you Carrie Fischer, like you did at that Margot & the Nuclear So & So's show so many years ago.

"I love you," you breathe, and I say, "I know, I know, I know." 

This time, when you ask me not to go, I stay. We race to your car and I abandon my luggage. All that's inside is a few bathing suits and some face cream anyways. We drive until we can't see Dallas anymore. We get a tiny apartment in Austin and adopt French bulldogs named Lacuna and Shark. You give me another chance and I'm not scared that you'll hurt me this time. We start over, and I grow out my hair and dye it dark brown and we forget that there were ever years and states and distance between us. There's nothing between us now, just skin and skin and fingerprints. 

I open my eyes, collect my things, and board my flight to Palm Springs. In an wordless glance at the shitty carpet in the waiting area, I say goodbye. I imagine that you can feel it, wherever you are. But I guess if you could still feel it, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Here's the honest truth about everything: I've never been lucky enough to deserve a second chance with you or anyone. I don't know how to make that sound beautiful. And I don't know how to stop looking for you in everyone I meet. 

Thanks.

I don’t normally write straight-up personal stuff on the Internet. I usually write personal stuff masked as a story, or an essay, or (gag), a listicle. But right now, I really feel compelled to break my pattern in order to express my deep gratitude for the people in my life who have been there for me, recently and always.

Something that I’ve learned during this particular rough patch is that unconditional love comes in all shapes and sizes. Like Mick Jagger says, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need.” And when what I wanted didn’t work out, I had so many humans near and far who stepped in to give me what I needed. I could just say an all-encompassing “thanks, guys,” to make this a quick and easy read, but I think these people deserve to be named and acknowledged, specifically and wholly, for their selfless contributions to my life.

Rachel, first and foremost. Thank you for letting me cry on your couch and watch Law & Order SVU for weeks until we could both robotically exclaim at the end of every episode, “EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF.” You let me sleep in your bed when I wasn’t really sleeping, and you ordered grilled cheese sandwiches for me when I wasn’t really eating.  You invited me out when I didn’t feel like going, walked me to work when I didn’t want to leave the apartment, and downloaded Tinder on my cell phone so that we could make fun of the guys who propositioned us for “sex & Seinfeld.” You got me a half-birthday card when I missed my grandparents and hung out with me when I was all woozy-weird from my migraine medicine. You stepped in as Florence Nightengale and as Detective Benson and most importantly, as my best friend. Eating nachos with you every night for two weeks probably saved my life.

Lindsey.  Thank you for sending pizza and coffee to my apartment when I didn’t want to get out of bed. You sat with me outside of my apartment and inside the bar below my apartment and told me your stories. They helped. You wiggled your shoulders and told me every single day that I was the best, best, best, even though I certainly didn’t feel like it. You let me order buffalo chicken nachos and picked around the chicken even though you’re a vegetarian. You bought jeans that one day so that you could sleep over at my apartment when I didn’t want to sleep alone. You got a wet napkin and mopped beer off that guy’s dog at the park, which wasn’t really a thing you did for me, specifically, but it just goes to show how incredibly kind you are to everyone around you.

Kati. Thank you for making me a collage of all my favorite foxes/Fawkes-es, and for making a list of questions that every new person who enters my life has to answer correctly before they’re allowed to love me. You’ve been rooting for me since I was a kid, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. You talked to me for four hours when I was sobbing on 8^th avenue alone, and reminded me that I have mystere. I had somehow forgotten, but that’s why you’re the best; you constantly remind me that I’m cooler than I think I am. I’m always kidding when I say that I hope I get famous, but you never are. You’ve told me since I was six years old that someday, everyone is going to see me the way that you do. I hope you know that I could always just have you, and that would be so much more than enough.

Jackie. Thank you for texting me 500 times until five in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. You always know just what to say. Probably because you’ve been dealing with the inside of my brain and my heart since 2^nd grade. You’ve dropped everything to be there on every single one of the best and worst days of my life. You were the first person I told when my parents got a divorce, when my grandfather died, when my heart got broken five million hundred times. You were there when my mom announced her engagement to Alan, when we brought Pooches Leia home for the first time, when I finally got boobs and had to buy bras at Limited Too. It means just as much that you’ve let me help you navigate the good and bad stuff in your life, too. I love your heart and your spirit and your never-ending desire to watch Ewan McGregor movies and talk about hobo sandwiches from summer camp.

Jessica. Thank you for driving all the way to Brooklyn just to eat pizza with me. I don’t know how we do it, but we come up with a new, gut-splitting inside joke every time we’re together. Reading the titles of all those landscape portraits at three in the morning with a Sean Connery accent was exactly the right proscription to get the healing process started. You and Tyler told me to go on a date with my writing, to fall in love with my writing, and to fuck the shit out of my writing, which made me giggle and feel a thousand times better. You checked up on me the entire drive home, and never let me forget for a minute how awesome a duo Rabbit & Rocketship can be.  You reminded me how good we both are at surviving. I wouldn’t have survived any of it without you.

The James. Thank you for calling me every single night on your drive home from work, even if I was busy and you knew it. The fact that I saw your name pop up on the screen, without fail, night after night, meant more than I can tell you. You sent me that IMDB page for the movie we watched in the hotel room at Disneyworld when we were kids—I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember the title for YEARS, and you did it.You reminded me that I’m more fun when I’m not attached to anyone or anything. You reminded me that I’m happier when I’m free. You bought a plane ticket to come see me the minute that I told you I was sad, and have been counting down the days with me ever since. I can’t wait to see you—nobody can set me up for jokes like you can.

John. Thank you for helping me process everything. You sat with me outside for two hours and let me show you all of my favorite songs. You flew all the way out to New York from Austin just to do yoga in Strawberry Fields with me and those two super friendly dudes for an hour, and kept your zen even when I got lost on the way over and showed up ten minutes late. You’re great for bouncing ideas off of, and instigating movement in the heart for change. I don’t need to tell you that you’re the best listener in the world, because everyone does, but you are.

Eric. Thank you for inviting me to The Pizza Underground show. You have no idea how badly I needed to get out of my apartment. Their incredibly “cheesy” performance reminded me that I have a hundred million pizza-and-music soulmates out there in the world. You bought me beer and waited in line with me for an hour just to get donuts. You shared your new friends and your new home and your new city with me. Everyone I met said, “We heard so many good things about you,” or introduced me to other people as, “basically Eric’s best friend.” I have no idea how you come up with cool things to tell your friends about me, but it made my heart melt. I could watch movies and say snarky things to the screen with you for hours. You always have the right amount of tequila.

Hannah. Thank you for sitting at the bar with me for two hours and letting me talk about myself nonstop. I think I asked a total of two questions about YOU, which must have been incredibly rude and annoying, but you were incredibly gracious and funny and amazing, as usual. You showed up for me even though I’ve been MIA for like, six months, which isn’t something that many people would do. As my first real best friend in New York, you never, ever fail to show me the best time in the world.

Taryn. Thank you for texting me and offering to eat Cinnabon ice cream and drink wine with me.  The snacks are on me as soon as you’re home from one of your many adventures out of town. I can’t wait to re-instate Whitney & Taryn weekends where we marathon hang out at the park and eat brunch and buy infinitely cool matching tank tops.

Dan. Thank you for being my Snack Spirit Guide. Even from halfway across the planet, everything you say makes me snort-laugh whatever I’m eating out my nose. Your List of Fun Things To Do (like watch Almost Famous and read The Princess Bride and eat Cool Ranch Doritos and look forward to watching the chronological edit of Back to the Future) saved me when I didn’t want to move from Rachel’s couch. I would have absolutely cried if I wasn’t laughing so hard picturing you at a Balinese silent-disco.

And to the innumerable amount of friends that I didn’t list by name because I’m approaching 4 pages and that’s just too much to read on the Internet, THANK YOU. Thank you for listening to me whine and telling me jokes and sending me music to listen to. Thank you for being encouraging and reminding me to focus on my work and making pizza topping recommendations based on my moods.

I know everybody says this, but I feel as though I truly have the best friends in the world. I have people in my life that are willing to commute across the country to visit me when I’m not feeling worth visiting. I have people in my life who tell me how great I am when I’m feeling like the biggest fucking loser on the planet. I have people in my life who love me just as much when I refuse to get out of my sweatpants, or eat anything other than whiskey, as they do when I’m functioning normally. And I have no idea why any of you people do it, but I am so very lucky that you do. I can’t repay any of you for the kindness and unconditional love that you’ve shown me. I can really only hope that you know that you all have made the largest possible contributions to the universe just by being the people you are.

There were a lot of times in the past few weeks when I wanted very, very badly to explode into sub-atomic particles and move to a different state and throw away my phone and my computer and live with the bears on the Pacific Crest Trail or in Alaska or somewhere that no one could find me. There were a lot of times where I wanted to rip out my stomach to keep it from hurting, where I wanted to hibernate in my shitty apartment and call the HR department at work and tell them I died. There were a lot of times when I wanted to just listen to Elliott Smith on a loop and try to find a way out of my sadness with more sadness, where I wanted to be somebody, anybody else for just five minutes so that I wouldn’t feel like this.

There were a lot of times when I wanted to just fucking fall apart.

And none of you let me.

WildThing.

This time, I say, I will let you go. Like the very last pages in my favorite childhood book, the one

with all the monsters. Wild Things, they’re called. You called me that once, too.  I will gnash my terrible teeth and roar my terrible roar and roll my terrible eyes, and you will get in your boat and wave goodbye.

That’s okay. I’ve got the whole world inside my body. My belly is the mountains that line the coast in California. My legs are the sections of I-35 freeway that try to run away to Austin or Dallas, but always stop in Waco to breathe. My hands are still wrapped around that mugger’s skinny elbow on the subway in Barcelona. I was so proud of myself that day. My lungs are the windowsill on the bar below my apartment where I suck down free cigarettes with a bouncer named Lenny. My lips are wrapped around endless ice cream cones in freezing London, sometimes kissing strangers in twin-sized beds.

The things I like best about myself are that I have my grandmother’s smile and I always survive.

I wish I could tell you that the girl ripping holes like mouse bites in the front of your t-shirt isn’t me. That the girl running hard on the burning asphalt under the summer moon isn’t me either. That the girl who makes sounds like a goose with broken vocal cords isn’t crying hard enough to illicit such a noise. That those scratch marks on your wrist when I wouldn’t let you go weren’t made accidentally by my manicure.

At least Bruce Banner had the sense to hide away where no one could find him. At least Bukowski kept himself locked in a post office for years. At least Carrie Fischer subjected her memories to ECT.

What do I have?

I have a shiny, fleeting thing, like Daisy Buchanan right before she hits Myrtle with her car. Like Holly Golightly after she applies a fresh coat of lipstick and before she throws Cat out of the taxi. Like Clementine Kruczynski with her Blue Ruin hair before she drinks all that whiskey.

I need to leave you because you don’t know how to stay.

At least, not with a girl like me, anyway.

Nerd.

I wish I could go back in time and tell 10-year-old-me that someday, she would be making a living by reading books all week so that she could buy more books to read on the weekends. I wish I could tell her that 13 years from the time she felt like a loser for coming in second-to-last-place during the mile run in PE, she'd be sitting in a cafe in New York reading and some dude would come up and say, un-sarcastically, "I really like your Han Solo shirt."

I wish I could tell her that she will never be cool, but that someday, it won't matter. That the world is full of nerds and geeks and dweebs and losers, only none of them are really losers at all. That Mia Thermopolis and Wilma Sturtz and Violet Baudelaire and Hermione Granger didn't get to where they are by being pretty or cool. That there are more important things than being pretty or cool, like being smart or interesting or funny or brave. That surviving a lot of years of being not-liked for arbitrary reasons gives you practice on how to treat others.

That one day, you will do things by yourself, like eat breakfast and read books and do yoga, because you want to, not because you have to. That you will tell people, "I LIKE STAR WARS AND I'VE READ THE FIRST HARRY POTTER BOOK 17 TIMES," and no one will laugh or trip you or try to kick the soccer ball into your stomach during recess. (Mostly because you don't have recess, the only real disappointment so far in growing up.)

That someone might even respond, “Me too,” a phrase you never knew existed until you got a little older. Me too. It will be the most beautiful phrase in the English language, because it will mean that you have friends.

You will have friends who like you whether or not you're wearing glasses, that will still invite you for sleepovers even though your teeth aren't straight. You will have friends that will not call you names, because people don’t call other people names when they get older. And if they do, they are not met with high-fives or invites to play on the Varsity volleyball team, I promise.

When you grow up, you will find out that people are mean for very different reasons. Kids are mean because they have so many feelings in their tiny little bodies that they don’t quite know how to express just yet. Adults are mean only when they are scared or hurting. You will learn this, and you will not judge so harshly the popular girls. You will make friends with the popular girls, and sometimes they will laugh at your jokes, and sometimes they will not, and that is okay.

You will date boys who are both popular and not popular and eventually there will be no difference. Eventually, you will not be able to tell if they were picked first or last in gym class, because eventually, that stuff won’t come up in conversation. Instead, you’ll talk about movies and books and artists and they will teach you things and you will teach them things and it won’t matter that you ate lunch alone every day back then. It really won’t.

One day, your heart will hurt because you have traveled and lived in so many different places, not because you feel the crushing weight of being the only 8-year-old with purple-and-steel headgear at a birthday party. You will love so many people in so many far away places, and they will love you back. You’ll meet other girls who are kind and funny and smart and interesting and you will miss them when you move to New York. You will meet boys who kiss your freckles and tell you that the scar on your leg from summer camp is cool. You will meet all kinds of people, and you will not be alone.

So keep reading those books, 10-year-old me. Keep memorizing Return of the Jedi, and practically move into Barnes & Noble. Keep reading books where the women are strong and brainy, and keep reading books that encourage you to solve mysteries and take train rides and explore other places. Keep reading books where people overdose on drugs, where people fall in love, where people hurt each other and where people listen to good music. Keep reading memoirs and sci-fi and fantasy and fiction and don’t pay attention to the kid pulling your pigtails or calling you, “weirdo.”

You will always do that nervous talking thing when you meet new people. You will always hate the gym. You will always love stories. You will always prefer the company of dogs over the company of actual people. You will still ruffle the back pages of your book before turning the page, and you will still eat a whole bag of Goldfish every 10 chapters. You will still be weird. You will still be kind of a nerd. You will never, ever, ever be cool. You will never be popular or "hot" or the life of the party. 

But someday, you will be me. And someday, you will really, really like that.

Tired.

I am tired of being the victim, and not the victim all at the same time. I’m tired of having “daddy issues” and not quite understanding what that means. I’m tired of being a writer who isn’t famous for my work. I’m tired of being a spoiled, bratty, white bitch. I’m tired of knowing and understanding and not knowing or understanding anything at the same time. 

I’m tired of men. I’m tired of men who say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not the girl I fell in love with.” I was never the girl you fell in love with. I have been the same person since I was thirteen years old, albeit a college degree and knowing how to pay my electricity bill, and I will not apologize for that. I am tired of men who say, “You’re crazy,” I’m tired of men who say, “Your body is mine, I own you.” I’m tired of knowing that nothing I say or do can explain myself. Because I’m just wrong. We all are.

I am twenty three years old. Do you know what that means? To a geriatric someone, that means that you have years and years of life ahead of you. To a real, true, twenty-something, that means that all of your friends are sending out wedding invites via some social media platform that you don’t quite understand, and you are powerless to stop it. It means drinking three beers and watching girls you went to pre-school with say, “I do.” It means being a failure, and I will not apologize for it.

I am tired of women. I’m tired of my mother saying that I don’t look good in glasses, or that I’m too fat. I’m tired of girls who undermine you at work, throw you under the bus during a group project, and make you feel dumb. I am tired of the Gatsby girls. You know the ones. The ones who are beautiful, little fools and know it. You know what the difference is? They convince people that they are not crazy, and then when the moment is right, they prove that they are. The truth is, that all women are crazy. All men are crazy. We’re all going crazy.

Because this thing, this life that we experience, is hard. And I’m not talking about AP Government during senior year of high school hard. I’m talking real, true-blue difficult. The kind of rough, rough, roughness that makes you listen to Poke by Frightened Rabbit on repeat four times in the shower and your roommate pretends not to notice.

Poke out my iris / Why can’t I cry about this?  / Maybe there is something that you know that I don’t.

There is something that you know that I don’t. There must be, or I wouldn’t feel this way. Tell me how you keep a boyfriend, a fiancé, a husband for five years without screaming “I HATE YOUR GUTS” on the streets of Manhattan, even once. Tell me how you get ahead in your career with your brown sugar and peaches. Tell me how you got through college without a panic attack. Tell me how you survived.

Because the truth is, I’m not sure that any of us survived, past tense. I think we’re all still surviving. We’re surviving parents from a generation where you were “special” if you went to college, when merely attending classes at a university earned you enough merit to get a job that would support your family. We’re surviving centuries of misogyny and misandry, decades of hating one another for our sexual orientations and genders and the colors of our skins and the sizes of our thigh gaps. We’re surviving laziness. We’re surviving the comment sections on blogs and Seamless coupons and 24 hours of Netflix a day. We’re surviving unemployment and underemployment and we’re all spoiled brats because of it. None of us are checking our privilege properly. None of us are addicted to the right things. None of us are the voices of our generation, because really, who has a true voice today? You? Because you write on the Internet and produce television shows and think that you’re special? No. Not you. And not me. And I won’t apologize for it.  

I’m tired of falling in love. I’m tired of love not being enough. I’m tired of girls talking behind my back because I’m a nerd. I’m tired of not being able to afford my rent. I’m tired of pizza making me fat. I’m tired of fighting and fighting and reading hundreds of articles that say the same thing, and I’m tired of nothing making a difference. I’m tired of Social Distortion being right.

Well, it’s been 10 years and a thousand tears / And look at the mess I’m in / A broken nose and a broken heart / An empty bottle of gin.

I’m tired of arguing with my boyfriend when we both know we love each other. I’m tired of going to yoga classes when I know they don’t calm me down. I’m tired of having a job when I just want to drink whiskey and be a writer. I’m tired of having a life when I just want to drink whiskey and be a bad person. I’m tired of software upgrades and Justin Beiber and having all the people that I love live too far away. I’m tired of missing my parents and my dogs. I’m tired of taking a Xanax at every family holiday, I’m tired of 80’s movies that promised us we would all be okay by now.

But if you’re tired like me, keep fighting. And please, don’t apologize for that. I’ve heard it gets better. Maybe.

Girls.

Men will always leave me

For simpler girls

Girls whose last names

They do not need to know.

Girls who are pretty and dumb

Girls from good families

That fuck

Like they’re not.

Girls with nice dresses

Girls who sleep through the night

And don’t ask you

For coffee.

You will leave me, you know.

And find a girl

Who doesn’t hate her mother

And doesn’t remind you of yours.

You’ll find a girl who drinks,

But not too much

Curses,

But not too much

Talks,

But not too much.

You’ll find a girl who

Eats better than I do

A girl who doesn’t think

Ice cream and whiskey

Or nothing at all

Is a meal.

But you won’t find a girl

As exciting

Or interesting

Because even when I’m dangerous,

It’s still an adventure.

At least
I have that going for me.

Disclaimer, Round 2

I feel as though I have to post this, in light of some recent conversations with the people in my life that I have written about.

Being a writer is a tough, tough thing. For starters, there are a million words and sentences bouncing around in my head. I speak too much. I don't speak in short enough sentences. Employers hate this, my parents hate it even more. Ex-boyfriends probably hate it the most. I talk too much, I write too much, I reveal too much. I am too much.

It is also difficult to navigate the grey areas: There's a fine line between writing about heartbreak and talking shit about your ex. It isn't easy to write about your family without revealing any skeletons in the closet. You can't possibly describe the worst, lowest moment of your career without making yourself look like a jackass.

If you want to write, and really, really write, you have to be honest. You don't have to be mean or purposefully negative, but you do have to be honest.

If every writer refused to tell a story because it would make another person look bad, or hurt that person, we wouldn't have stories. We wouldn't have A Million Little Pieces or Wild or Wishful Drinking. Without Darth Vader, there is no Star Wars. And that's something that I'm sure none of us could live without.

Therefore:

- I do not apologize for the things that I have written about. They are stories that are important to me. I would like to preserve my right to free speech.

- I do not aim to vilify ANYONE in any of these stories. I do not mean to martyr myself either. If those things happen, it is completely unintentional. I promise. I'm not here to out you as an asshole to your mom and our 3 mutual friends on Facebook.

- I have written stories about men that I have dated, former employers & coworkers, and my own family. I've also written shitty listicles that mean nothing to me, and those aren't the pieces that I'm proud of. I am proud of the pieces where I feel that I am being honest and intentional.

- I also recognize that I am no where near as popular, talented, or publicized as James Frey, and that it is a little pretentious to write my own Oprah interview (minus Oprah) about this. I am small time. I have 21 blog followers. I don't pretend for a minute that anything that I'm saying matters to anyone else in the grand scheme of things. If the world was going to explode and the public had to vote which important stories to bury in a steel time capsule for future generations, none of those picked would be links to my posts on Thought Catalog.

All of this being said, thank you for reading. Truly. It means the world to me.

Adiós

I don’t think its fair. You got to say goodbye once, 7 months ago. You packed up your stuff over the course of two days and drove until you got someplace where it was finally safe, a place where I wasn’t running down the street screaming and you weren’t convincing me to eat like a human and shave my legs.

It wasn’t like that for me. For me, there was that first night, where we sat next to each other at that bar on the Lower East Side and you drank pickle back whiskey shots and I picked at my salad and cried and the waiter looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care because I loved you and you were leaving me first thing in the morning. Then, there was the next day, when I thought that maybe if I walked you to the bus station, I could convince you not to go. I didn’t think about how it would feel to walk back to our half-empty apartment alone. I didn’t think about what would happen if you said no.

There was also the following week, when you came back to get the things you had forgotten, like your chef’s knife and your school books, and you took me to a Thai restaurant and said that you didn’t think that I was smart enough. I cried into my noodles and we went home together and I felt so far away from you in our bed, two inches apart.

And then there was the time that I texted you to see if you still had my beach towel and you told me, plainly, that you didn’t love me anymore and I went outside and smoked exactly three cigarettes and called Kati who called you a robot and deleted you on Facebook and told me that I was the one who had made you cool in the first place. I invited you to dinners and parties and suddenly, you were best friends with all of my friends and writing me poems in San Francisco.  I liked the version of you that wasn’t the one where I found you at your grandmother’s apartment and there were bottles on the coffee table and everything was sticky and the curtains were black.

I said goodbye to you again when I met someone else and asked him to stay far away from me and he responded, “Why? Are you going to explode into sub-atomic particles?” and told him I thought that I might.  We listened to folk music, the sad kind, and I thought about how you never let me do that, not even when we were young, driving across the country in a dusty Ford Explorer full of heartbreak and illegal New Mexican fireworks. Instead, we listened to the Clash and the Specials and now I can’t stop crying when I hear Israelites by Desmond Dekker.

I said goodbye to you again when I realized that you had never asked me to be your friend. I said goodbye when I told you that my new apartment was above Kalustyans, that spice shop where you used to buy me peri peri sauce, and you never responded. I said goodbye when I packed up all of my shit to move out of our old apartment, finally, and found a giant stack of your paystubs from when you were a chef at that Balinese restaurant in Greenpoint. Remember that? You would bring me home black rice ice cream that would half-melt on the G train and then you’d hug me for ten whole minutes when you walked in the doorway because I was the best part of your day, and we were in love. You’d get mad at me for cleaning the apartment because you wanted to lie in bed and watch How I Met Your Mother and I wanted the place to be nice for you when you got home. You didn’t care if your shirts were folded, or if the ring inside the tub had been scrubbed away. You wanted me. 

Me, even though I only made $200 a week wrangling tourists at a late night talk show, me, even though I couldn’t stop crying for months or get out of bed, me, even though I either ate ice cream sandwiches or absolutely nothing at all for days. Me.

I said goodbye to you last Sunday when I went back to the old apartment to clean before the inspection. I scrubbed the walls with shaving cream and a Magic Eraser and washed away the time you came home from that WWII re-enactment and left your boots leaning against the side of the wall for too long, and the time that you accidentally sprayed the kitchen with Sriracha, and the time when we had everyone over for Passover and you invited that girl that you met at the airport and I was so mad that I wanted to cry, but instead I spilled wine and it seeped into the floorboards. I scrubbed away the ashes from the cigarettes I smoked by the open window for weeks after you left, the tops of my shelves where your foreign spices and weird noodles sat, the inside of my heart, and the outside of my stomach lining. I cleaned and I scrubbed and I bleached and I scoured until I couldn’t find you in the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the air vents. I cleaned until I couldn’t feel you at all anymore.

And then I went and got a manicure. I picked out this gunmetal grey color that I thought would look nice with the pants I had to pick up from the dry cleaners. “Armed and Ready,” said the bottle, and I believed it. And then I said goodbye again, just for good measure, because one more time wouldn’t hurt.

At least not a lot, comparatively speaking.  

Sorry.

You told me not to apologize anymore, but I don’t know what else to say when our old apartment smells like Thai food and cigarettes and you’ve been gone for six months. I don’t know what else to say to make you like me. I want you to like me, maybe not in the Han and Leia kind of way, or in the Jay and Daisy kind of way, but in the Ted and Robin kind of way. You know, where we still care about each other, and you still answer my text messages, but we don’t kiss anymore or go to dinner alone. We could just go to the bar and you’ll buy the drinks because you have a better job, and I’ll talk about how I want to get married someday. Not to you, obviously, but to someone who makes me forget what it was like to wake up alone after you left.

Maybe I’ll snap out of it one day, and I won’t need your friendship to feel whole. I won’t feel like walking on egg shells when I text you, timidly, asking you how to turn on the food processor you left in my kitchen. Maybe I won’t want to cry in a restaurant on the Lower East Side when they play Israelites by Desmond Dekker.  Maybe I won’t need to apologize for wanting to be honest. Maybe I’ll figure out how to stop feeling like the villain and the victim all at once. Maybe I’ll forgive myself for the things that we did to each other without needing to hear you say, “It’s okay.”

The happy ending in all of this is that I’ve actually found someone who doesn’t mind when I want to listen to sad folk tunes and snuggle when it's snowing in Brooklyn. Someone who stays put when I’m crying and wiping snot on the bottom of my Rolling Stones shirt, and probably thinks it’s kind of funny because he hates the Rolling Stones. Someone who hates when I publish stories about ex boyfriends and hates when I compare him to other people like I’m doing right now, but loves going out with me on Fridays and loves the way my hair smells and loves my stupid laugh and loves when I don’t want to make dinner because we both love ordering pizza.

And these things take time, you know. But that is, at least, a start.