History.

It’s always that first walk back home from the bar when you’re single that reminds you why you had a boyfriend in the first place. A little tipsy, you slosh and trip your way down the sidewalk past Port Authority on 42^nd street and realize how mean and cold everyone looks at three a.m., even when it's eighty degrees outside and you’re trying to keep your bra straps from sliding off. Your friends all went home hours ago. There’s nobody there to hold your hand or call you to make sure you got back to your apartment okay.  

And maybe when you get home there are a couple of his things still lying around the apartment; the books he accidentally stockpiled on your shelf, or the bottle of wine you bought together and forgot to open. Maybe he was kind enough to do the dishes before he left for California, and maybe you notice that absence too. Maybe you get a little angry, like, Why did he do that? Is he trying to make me feel guilty? But then you realize that maybe you’re just a little sad that the only dishes you’ll be washing from now on are the empty ones you'll use as buffers between your Lean Cuisine tray and your stomach when you’re watching Netflix in bed for six straight hours.

 I’ve never had this kind of empty heartbreak before; the kind you read about occasionally, but never believe actually exists. The kind where you sit next to each other, going tequila-shot-for-whiskey-shot until you can finally, honestly, say, “I love you, but this isn’t going to work.” The kind where you try really hard not to kiss each other or hold hands when you’re walking down a chilly Lower East Side Street, but you can’t help it, so you do anyways, because you aren’t really falling out of love. The kind where you get back to your apartment and lay in bed all night crying and cuddling and knowing that when the sun comes up, its over.

And maybe he rides the bus with you on your way to work in the morning, and you call him as he’s arriving at the airport and beg him not to get on the plane. Like, maybe if you can just pretend that last night’s conversation never happened, he’ll make the big gesture and get off the plane like Rachel in the finale of FRIENDS. Why not? It’s New York, after all. This is the city where these things happen.

It’s a long time before I really start crying. In the beginning, I’m diplomatic and charming, factual and breezy.

“It’s not that you don’t love me,” I offer him. “It’s just that you love history more.”

“I know,” he says. “I just always thought that you would be it.”

We talk about his move to Boston for grad school. How it’s only 3 hours and $35 dollars away by bus or train, but it isn’t the distance. It’s the fact that he’ll be gone for seven years doing something that he has a passion for, something that he loves more than anything. More than me. I am always going to come second. And he knows that.

He never says, “Maybe we could try to make it work.” He knows we can’t. And I do too. I’ve known from the beginning that I would always be the mistress in his love affair with memorizing names, dates, fallen countries, conquered battles, and heroic strangers that have built everything around our modern age.

He’s been my best friend for eight years. We met outside of a Barnes & Noble where he was working when I was fourteen. He says he’s been in love with me ever since. He was a little older, so he’d pick me up in his car and take me to parties with older kids, parties where he’d bring the drinks and always wear a tie. Parties that started out in someone’s parents’ living room and graduated to back yards and front porches in the California summer air.

Sometimes, we’d drive out to Los Angeles at night in search of some adventure. We always found one. He’d take me to these terrible, hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants that he loved, the kind that had walls lined with gumball machines and gave you a stomach ache just looking at the menu. It’s funny to me that he became a cook. For the past year, he’s only made me the most delicious five-star dishes in our tiny apartment.

When I had my heart broken before my sophomore year of college, he helped me load up my white Ford Explorer with everything I owned and drove with me to Texas. We made stops on the way—of course, at those shitty little Mexican restaurants—to eat and buy fireworks and tequila. We slept in seedy, Southwestern motels and listened to the Clash and the Specials all the way through Arizona and New Mexico and El Paso.

“You listen to such sad music,” he’d say, and force me to turn off whatever Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s song was playing on repeat.

Every time I came home to California, he was there, waiting, always holding aside a weekend or an evening to spend with me. Last time I was there, a year ago, we had one night of overlap on our visits, so we spent it at a mutual friend’s birthday party. He brought a girl. A pretty, plain, tall, doll-like girl who dressed as I always imagined a girl he was with would dress in vintage clothes and Mary Jane shoes. After seven peanut butter and jelly shots, I grabbed him by his tie while my brother was singing karaoke and kissed him anyway.

He took me out to breakfast to this little diner in the Valley, the first place he had brought me to eat that didn’t make my stomach turn. We snuck in a bottle of white wine and tipped it into our carafe of orange juice when no one was looking. It was probably the worst hangover of both of our lives, but he looked so incredibly handsome in his tie and suit jacket, sitting across the table from me with an omelet in front of him. Our waitress brought out my French Toast and sang us a little song. For a year, I’ve wanted to go back to that diner and thank her for singing that song. It was the moment I evolved into the happiest version of myself that I had ever been.  He kissed me goodbye in his doorway, and promised to visit me in New York.

The next year of my life passed by in a blur, the kind of haze that settled over the Jazz Age and made it romantic. He would take the train into the city and I’d meet him at the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel.

“You’re dressed to the nines,” he would tell me, and I’d blush. I always dressed up extra for him. We’d slide into the back of a taxi, the polka dots on my dress clashing with the striped button-ups he always wore, and make our way into Manhattan.

I spent Thanksgiving at his tiny, A-frame apartment in Vermont. We stayed in bed while it was snowing and I baked s’mores in the oven. For Thanksgiving Dinner we drove an hour to a restaurant that his friend worked at and cooked in their kitchen. I sipped champagne and never wanted to stop being the family he chose to spend holidays with.

We shopped for apartments in January, and built IKEA furniture together for the next week. I was wary, but I broke all my rules for him. We spent every moment that he wasn’t at work ordering take out from Grand Szechwan and watching all eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother. We got in fights sometimes. The beautiful kind of little fights where I’d pick on him for not doing the dishes and he’d get passive aggressive when I’d leave my clothes on the floor in the bathroom. I thought to myself, this is what it’s like to be in love. It was never anything we couldn’t solve. I’d look at him, reading a menu online or slicing cucumbers twenty minutes later and realize that I could never really be mad at him.

He got accepted to grad school, and I was elated. His father came into town to celebrate and we drank too much Saki and laughed and stumbled home at midnight. I knew for sure now that I only had a few months left of being someone's first choice. And then, suddenly, I wouldn’t be anymore. I was no longer the greatest adventure of his life.

I loved Matt in the way that made me never want him to see me in sweatpants because pretending to be Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby was far too much fun. But he loved me just as much in pajamas as he loved me in vintage dresses, and that’s more than I could ever ask for of anyone. I loved folding his button-ups and meeting his friends. I loved staying in when he cooked me dinner as much as I loved sitting across from him at our favorite restaurant. I loved warming up his freezing hands when we got back inside from carrying shopping bags from Whole Foods all the way from Columbus Circle in the dead of winter. I loved worrying when he would cut his fingers at work in the kitchen, and I loved when he would come home unscathed. I loved telling him stories about David Letterman, and listening to him describe the proper way to smoke meat for Delaney Barbecue. I loved being proud of him for presenting his paper before the Spanish and Portuguese Historical Society in New Mexico, and I loved when he complimented me on my hard work in late night television. I loved singing Sir Psycho Sexy with him at Sing Sing Karaoke in St. Marks. I loved that I never had to ask him twice to dress up with me; regardless of the theme, he would transform himself into James Bond or a Charles Dickens hobo or a Bill Murray character, even if it wasn't even close to Halloween. I loved that he always kissed me goodnight, even when I was mad at him, that he never let me go to bed without knowing I was adored. I loved his optimism, his curiosity, and the way he always had to be right. I loved his jaw line and his Bob Dylan hair first thing in the morning. I loved kissing him even before we had both brushed our teeth.

I don’t know what to do. Taylor Swift and Mick Jagger and Dear & the Headlights never write songs about this. How do you fall out of love with your best friend when neither of you did anything to warrant a break up? We were happy. We still are. 

He never lied, and I never cheated. We didn’t yell or scream or threaten to throw each other’s belongings out of the window of my high-rise apartment. We didn't listen to Elliott Smith on a loop and try to find a way out of our sadness. We didn't say the words, I hate you, or this wasn't meant to be. 

Instead, we held on to each other and cried and tried to fall asleep, and for the first time in a year he didn’t kiss me goodnight.

Risk.

“What is the biggest risk you’ve ever taken in your life?” he asks me, and I don’t know what to say. The question is posed in the style of a mock job interview, as my friend Clay tries to prepare for an upcoming inquisition from the hiring manager of a television company all the twenty-somethings in New York are holding their breath to be contacted by. We’re sitting in a fancy cheese restaurant that neither of us can afford, chewing our sandwiches and trying not to dribble tomato soup on our laminated menus.

I stare at him blankly for a few seconds before I say, “I don’t know. Moving to Waco, I guess.” And that’s a boring answer, so we move on, but several nights later I’m still thinking about how, absolutely, that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, and I don’t know how to convey that to a future employer, or anybody, for that matter.

I moved to Texas in the summer of 2010, still reeling from a colossal break up and the deaths of my grandparents. I was nineteen, and an idiot. I packed up all my shit in my Ford Explorer and drove the 1,500 miles to Waco, my hands on fire, gripping the 112-degree leather steering wheel. I cut off all my hair and I drank tequila and I tried to forget that I ever had a life in Los Angeles, because it just didn’t feel like home to me anymore. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was being extremely honest with myself for the first time in my whole existence. I reached Austin and collapsed in a booth at Kirby Lane with the few friends I knew and my older brother to eat apple whole-wheat pancakes and talk about anything, anything else.

I complained a lot, at first. It was always too hot, and Whataburger never quite measured up to In N Out. Even though Shiner Bock was only seven dollars on draft, I stubbornly drank Corona with chunks of lime stuffed down their glass bottlenecks. I talked about Los Angeles like I was better than everyone else, even though I lied and used words to describe Waco like “quaint” and “sweeter than Southern sweet tea,” instead of telling everyone how incredibly bored I was all the time. Because even though I was doing my best to suffocate the part of my brain that had memorized the endless topography of southbound freeway exits, I still really missed it. I was homesick for the fireworks at Disneyland every Christmastime. I woke up in the morning with the sun streaming in my twenty-foot wall-to-ceiling windows, and for a second, I always believed that I was waking up at the beach. I wanted to go hiking and fishing and surfing and rollerblading down the boardwalk at Venice Beach, but I forced myself into some cowboy boots and ate more fried meat than I would ever admit to anyone on the West Coast.

And then, without meaning to, I fell in love, really in love--the kind of love that knocks the wind out of you and makes you feel God--with a boy named Lucas who had two nose rings and the best taste in music I had ever heard. He would mess up my hair and didn’t mind that I gained fifteen pounds from eating too much macaroni and cheese and would watch Star Wars with me until the sun came up. More than that, he was the coolest person I had ever met, even though his friends hated me for breaking his heart. I couldn’t help it. I was a mess. The kind of mess that knocks the wind out of you and makes you stop believing in God.

I started writing for a magazine called Bohemia, and it saved my life. I had a job washing dishes at a restaurant after school, and I was up to my elbows in dirty dishwater when I met Eric. He was tall, taller than the boy who broke my heart and made me move to that waste of a city, and he laughed at my jokes and made me want to make friends again. He told me about a little start-up project he was working on with a lady called Amanda, and how it was going to be this badass, underground publication for the art community in Waco. I felt hungry again for the first time in months. I begged him to let me on staff and he simply said, “Trust me, you don’t want to get involved in this.” But I did. I e-mailed him story edit after story edit until we had perfected all the grammar in my run-on sentences. And somehow, he managed to convince Amanda to take me on as a freelance writer for a few months after I got back from my study abroad trip to Spain.

I poured everything that was left of my soul into those quarterly publications. I somehow tricked the Communications Department at Baylor into letting me work there full-time in exchange for school credit. I earned the title of Lead Writer when some of the higher-ups moved on to more lucrative positions elsewhere. Eric was my managing editor and we would log in the hours required for my three class credits by holding “writers meetings” at the bar and liquefying ourselves with ice, a blender, some tequila, and triple sec. I reasoned with myself that it was cheaper than all the therapy I probably needed.

It wasn’t perfect. We were renting space in the loft above an art gallery, and we could barely afford the cost of printing those 45 glossy pages each month. We compensated our models, photographers, writers, and artists with article space. We convinced our advertisers to take a chance on us, even though we weren’t absolutely sure what would happen. And we grew from three out-of-state subscribers (my mom, my grandma, and my Aunt Patti) to being distributed all across Central Texas. When there was a problem, I was the peace keeper, mollifying stressed out artist-types with grilled cheese sandwiches and invitations to our late-night “writers meetings.” And then something really, really great happened. Somewhere between red pen marked fourth drafts and chips and salsa at Crickets, Eric and I became friends.

I was working at a small clothing boutique off campus with a girl named Priyanka. She was actually sweeter than Southern sweet tea, and she made the hours upon hours of unpacking boxes of Toms shoes and rolling up “Hero Bear” t-shirts fly by. I cannot believe I actually received a paycheck for hanging out with her eight hours a week. She had invited me to a murder mystery dinner party in the back of the local pizza joint, Poppa Rollos. We ate spaghetti and watched amateur actors fake their own deaths and laughed hysterically until it was time to leave. I checked my phone and got a text from Eric inviting us to open mic poetry at the Legacy Café. Priyanka drove us to downtown Waco, with me scribbling down some indecipherable hieroglyphics on napkins I had stolen from the movie theater earlier that day.

After several glasses of wine donated by the Klassy Glass next door, I was red-faced and brave enough to recite a few lines.

“…he has a pedophile mustache,

And spends more money on pot than rent.

‘I’m just trying to be free,’ he says.

And you want to smash his free-range eggs

On his stupid little bike

But

He would only think that the paint chips were artsy and cool…”

I heard a few laughs, but I had an audience of one that night. At least that’s what Billy told me a few nights later when we were playing guitar on the cigarette-burnt couch at Beatnix. Billy was Eric’s friend, and he e-mailed me out of the blue (in this day and age, what’s more romantic than that?) to tell me that he was the guy who played a few songs at the silent auction Bohemia had held at the Croft Art Gallery, and that he was the one cracking up during my ridiculously terrible poetry reading. Only he didn’t use the words “ridiculously terrible.” He kissed me outside of the bar, even though I told him I had a rule against that, and sang me Alison and Everlong and Cannibal Queen like I was the most important person in that room full of undiscovered musicians and comedians and artists.

One night, Eric and I made the mistake of bringing marshmallows and graham crackers to the sketchiest going away party on the planet. We arrived at this junkyard filled with broken-down cars and punk rockers and a few people we knew. The "door" into the back yard was made up of a few white garbage bags taped together, and shaking someone's hand ran you the risk of catching hepatitis. 

“Let’s get out of here as soon as we can,” I hissed, and Eric nodded. We sat down and tried to make small talk with the semi-conscious humans that slumped around a fire pit that one of the punks had started with his barbeque lighter.

“Doctor Eric Doyle,” said a voice, and I looked up to see one of the punks mashing Eric into a giant hug against his sweater, even though it was a million degrees out.

“Whitney, this is Chris,” Eric said, and I immediately liked him. He had black framed glasses and looked like a somewhat more put together version of Seth Rogan (please don’t kill me for saying that.)

“Dude, this place reminds me of where the Boxcar Children lived before Grandfather Alden adopted them,” he said, laughing with his whole body.

“Yeah, this place is Classic Benny,” I joked, and we became instant friends.

Over the next few weeks, we spent every minute together. Billy and I would wait for Eric to get off work at the library, and we would drive his beat up piece of motorized metal to pick up Chris from wherever his motorcycle had broken down. We would drive the wrong way down one-way streets, and I would close my eyes, screaming, while they laughed and righted the steering wheel. Billy would crank up the radio until the whole car was filled with the opening beat from Winter Hinderland by Icarus, and it became the kind of song for me that Charlie described as infinite in the Perks of Being a Wallfower. If Beatnix Burger Barn was the Pittsburg Tunnel, the Alico Building sufficed as all the downtown lights we needed to make us wonder.

Chris would turn on Lovefool by the Cardinals in the kitchen and spin me around until I collapsed, dizzy, into the front of his sweater that smelled like tobacco and pot. Billy would drink too much whiskey and sing a song he had written, and Eric and I would begin plotting different ways to make the girl that he liked fall in love with him. And as hard as I tried to remind myself not to get too attached, because I was moving away again in two weeks, I didn’t care. Instead of tip-toeing cautiously, I let myself jump and dance and fall and fall and fall.

Everyone asked me if I was scared to move to the East Coast, but I knew that moving to New York wasn’t half as brave as what I had already done. I knew that I had a job lined up, and I knew that I would somehow make friends. I knew that growing up and going to work and moving to the city was something I had to do, something I was being pulled into by the forces in the Universe that shape you into an adult.

And yet, I think I left a little part of myself back there; somewhere in the loft in my old apartment and in the dents in Eric’s wheel axel from where we got stuck on the railroad tracks that one time, and in the swimming pool behind the RiverCrest apartments and in the front seat of Lucas’s car and in the bottoms of the bottles that I used to try to forget about what a complete and utter wreck my life was. And as nice as it would be, I don’t really want to try to get it back.

Because taking a chance on myself, and only myself--even when I wasn’t sure that I would be enough--is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken in my life.  

22

Being twenty-two is hard. And not like the Taylor-Swift-I-want-to-dress-up-like-hipsters-and-make-fun-of-my-exes kind of hard. But the real kind of hard. The kind of hard that leaves you alone in your shoebox apartment eating a tub of Häagen-Dazs on a Wednesday night. The kind of hard that gets you thinking about how you got fired from that ice cream shop when you were sixteen for giving out too many free samples (and really, your career path hasn’t improved much since.)

Every time I call my mom and complain about being broke, I can hear her shrug her shoulders over the phone and say to me, “Well, if you can’t make it in New York, you can always become a stewardess, or apply for a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep.” As if working an outdated, faux-feminist job from the seventies is a suitable option. As if I didn’t get a degree from a major university in half the time it took most kids to get through community college. As if I should just give up on my dreams of being a writer and settle for peddling Viagra like Heather Locklear in that one episode of Scrubs, or become Zooey Deschanel's character in Almost Famous. 

Because the truth is, that picture of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler that went around Facebook and Pinterest a few months ago doesn’t relate to me in the slightest. “They didn’t have things figured out at 22 either.”  What if I do have everything in my life figured out, and that’s the problem? What if I have such specific, unrealistic goals for myself that I’m actually holding myself back? 

Let’s look at the facts: I am more concerned that I don’t have a stable career underway than I am about the fact that I’ve gained 20 lbs. since junior year  (see: Häagen-Dazs.) It scares me more that I’m not already Sylvia Plath or Téa Obreht than it does that 12 people from my graduating class are already married. (Actually, that is terrifying. Stop getting married. Stop making babies. We are too young.)

I hate that I know exactly what I want to do, and that I haven’t done it yet. I hate that I’m holding myself back by putting too many expectations on myself. And at the same time, I’m secretly frustrated that nobody has wanted to give me a chance yet. I keep telling myself, “You’re twenty-two, you have your whole life ahead of you to establish yourself in the world of gainful employment,” but do I?

Tyra Banks was booking runway shows in Milan when she was fifteen years old; when I was fifteen, I was still getting taken home in the back of Officer Jenkin’s squad car for running away from home with my Tweety Bird sleeping bag. Gwen Stefani was mending broken hearts and revitalizing the ska movement when she was nineteen; at nineteen, I was dating a guy that I didn’t know was gay and memorizing all the Harry Potter books on tape. Lena Dunham was twenty-two when she started writing screenplays and memoirs; I’m literally up to my neck in Sour Patch Kids wrappers and watching all fourteen seasons of Law & Order: SVU on Netflix for the third time since 2011. What the hell is wrong with me?

The problem isn’t that I don’t know what I want. The problem is that I need to start being the best possible version of myself so that I can finally reach self-actualization. I need to stop comparing myself to people that are clearly the anomaly. I need to stop eating ice cream and start networking within my industry. I need to go out after work, even if I’m really, really tired, and pound the pavement until I find something that I can try to be the best at. I need to find someone willing to take a chance on a twenty-two year-old nobody.

But let’s be real. Right now, this Rocky Road is too delicious. Maybe just for a minute I should crank up the T-Swift and try to relax.

After all, I’m only twenty-two. 

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.