FUNemployment

"Are you almost ready to go?"

“Well,” I replied, jamming my laptop into its case along with the little owl-shaped dish where I kept my keys on  my desk. “I just got fired. So we can go NOW.”

“Are you serious? Why?” Hannah asked.

I shrugged. “Let’s get out of here.”

We went to a restaurant, and then a bar, and then another bar where I proceeded to spend the rest of my last week’s pay on Fireball Bombs and shots of Patrón XO Café.

“Unbelievable.”

“That’s retarded.”

“You’re gonna find something better, don’t worry about it.”

I called my parents. They didn’t believe me. My mom cried and my step-dad tried to console both of us with his British accent. 

"Don't worry," he said. "It'll all turn out right in the end." For a second, I wanted to believe him.

I started to dial my ex-boyfriend’s number and changed my mind.

He would only be relieved that his timing was perfect. Who would want to date an unemployed loser like me?

I woke up early on Monday even though I had nowhere to go. I reached for the phone and dialed the number for the New York State Unemployment Department in my pajamas. I fiddled with my hair until Tammy, the operator, picked up.

“I got fired,” I blurted out.

She didn’t care.

“What’s your social? Where were your last five places of employment? Do you know the consequences of a fraudulent report?”

Tammy had Hurricane Sandy victims to worry about. She probably had five mouths to feed at home. She probably hated her job as much as I hated not having a job.

She signed off on a check for $175 every two weeks. It was less than I made working retail three days a week. My stomach flipped over at the thought of hanging my head and asking for my job back as a cashier at Urban Outfitters.

Over the next few weeks, I would wake up and text Hannah and make her perform subtle acts of guerrilla terrorism at the office.

Steal all the string cheese. Hide the mouse pads. Eat all the gluten-free crackers. Take home  the padded manila mailing envelopes. Send.

I had spent the past year trying to figure things out. Trying to plan everything, trying to micromanage, trying to be better than what I thought I could be. I juggled school and an internship and my impending graduation. I got a job that paid nothing, so I got a second job on top of that. I paid my dues. I started at the bottom. I worked 13-hour days and I gave up eating food and sleeping and seeing my boyfriend. And then, my boyfriend left me. And my boss let me go. And for the first time in thirteen months, I had no idea what the next move was.

I watched Mulan one night as a part of one of my Netflix binges. 

"Be a man," they told her, and she climbed to the top of that wooden post with weights around her wrists faster than anybody else. Hadn't I tried that? Hadn't I?

I applied for ten jobs a day, everyday, but nobody bit.

“I’ll pass your resume around at work to see if anybody is hiring,” my friend Rachel offered over our sixth grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-Intervention-marathon date that week.

I networked with everyone I wasn’t too embarrassed to tell what happened. I was terrified to see half of the people I was friends with, because I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want to hear them say, “I told you that you weren’t cut out for this.” I didn’t want to not-hear the things they would say when I left the room.

I stopped calling my parents and my friends from back home because I didn’t want to have to lie to them and tell them I was okay. I was only okay when I was distracting myself long enough to forget about my dwindling bank account. I was forced to grit my teeth and withdraw from my savings when I hit $64 after buying a bagel for breakfast at the deli counter below my $2400-a-month apartment. I felt like there were hundreds of people rooting for me to become a comedienne or a writer or SOMETHING back in Texas and California, and I had failed all of them. 

I wanted to call my University and tell them that with all of their tests and pop quizzes and attendance policies, they didn't prepare me for this. I wanted to blame my parents for giving me everything and not teaching me how to live without a paycheck. I wanted to get in everyone's face who had ever believed in me and say, "YOU WERE WRONG. I'M NOT ANY OF THOSE THINGS. WHY DIDN'T YOU SUPPORT ME LESS SO THAT IF I FAILED IT WOULDN'T BE A BIG DEALl?!" But I didn't. 

Instead, I let Eric come down from Philadelphia and buy me drinks. I helped Rachel move into her new apartment. I started taking up Clay and Hannah's invitations to re-join the living. I listened to my step-dad, and I tried to breathe a little deeper every time I inhaled. It wasn't always perfect, but I tried. 

And then Max started taking me on adventures, each one grander and crazier than the next. He described himself as an imaginary friend, and he was. He had a personality like Iron Man on sixteen cups of coffee, which he always drank black.

“Maybe I could be a janitor?” I asked him half-heartedly in line at Shake Shack for the fifth time that week. “Or a stripper. Or a bartender. Or one of those sex-hotline operators.”

“You’re a terrible dancer,” he said. “And you’re being ridiculous anyway. Stop being so cranky.”

We went to the Natural History Museum and climbed inside a giant replica of a whale’s heart. I folded my legs Indian style like I did when I was small, and listened to the rhythmic thud of the blue whale’s heartbeat until a guard asked us to leave. We sprinted home to grab blankets and snacks and stretched out in Central Park to watch the Shining with five hundred other New Yorkers in the summer heat. We devoured hot dogs and walked around the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center. He kissed me on 72^nd Street and Columbus Avenue with a mouthful of Grey’s Papaya, surrounded by rats.

He took me to bars and parties and museums where we drank too much and stayed out too late. We bought finger puppets at the Chelsea Market and sang the White Stripes at karaoke. We wrote postcards to our parents from Jupiter and Pluto at a physics conference led by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s students at a bar in Brooklyn. I sloshed my way back to his apartment, babbling about molecules and atom expansion and dwarf stars and Mercury in Retrograde, and he laughed and helped me order a pizza on Seamless. 

We ate coffee ice cream and watched documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle and meth addiction in Wyoming and whether or not Stanley Kubric directed the moon landing. He introduced me to the film Road House with Patrick Swayze and I think I found god. We bought coloring books with his discount at the MoMA after giving more creative titles to all the paintings in the newly-opened Magritte exhibit. We spent hours walking up and down the length of Manhattan, making fun of tourists and joking about Paul Shaffer’s sunglasses.

I still had tiny explosions of panic, usually when I was alone. I saw my bank account drop again, this time to 58 cents, and I cried in the Staples Print / Copy Center where I had ironically just spent my last pennies printing copies of my resume that I was sure no one would ever see. I ate leftover Thai take out and watched Eternal Sunshine on repeat. I read every Clementine von Radics poem I could find and had to physically restrain myself from copy & pasting each and every one of them into an email to every guy who had broken my heart in the past five years. I would forget to eat, and then I would eat five cupcakes in a row from Sprinkles to counter-balance it. I tried to hide the crazy from Max and all of the people I interacted with by telling really bad I-just-got-fired jokes. I dubbed this period in my life “FUN-employment” and pretended to be having the time of my life running around New York City, watching the Statue of Liberty light her torch from a mini-golf course in Battery Park, or scoring free-tickets to see the xx play at Radio City Music Hall without any means of supporting myself. I loved every single minute of free time, but I was also completely frozen with panic.

One night, Max and I ventured down to Williamsburg to watch Goldfinger with a live band playing the James Bond intro music along with the film. We ate hipster food sold in tiny carts along the outskirts of the industrial park, like Honey Buttermilk Biscuit ice cream and popcorn drizzled with lime and cotija cheese. I stuck a temporary tattoo to my upper arm and drank Brooklyn Summer Lager beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in the moonlight. Afterward, we walked around until we found a bar that served garlic mashed potatoes and Shiner Bock in cans so that I could show off the Russian fur trader cape I had purchased last year at the Brooklyn Flea.

Somewhere between the strung up Christmas lights that read “Save Domino” on the side of the old sugar factory building and the Bedford L train, I started freaking out. My heart rate increased to fifty times the BPM of the blue whale’s heart at the museum. I couldn’t breathe. My fingernails were digging into the palms of my hands and I wanted my black flats from Target to hold me to the sidewalk, but I didn’t know if they could.  

“I’m a mess,” I said simply.

“I know,” he replied.

But then, something really rare and really beautiful happened. Something that hardly ever happens on the subway in Manhattan or in Brooklyn or in Queens. A tiny miracle that only graces the broken New Yorker in their hour of need; the New Yorker who moved from another city to follow their dreams, only to end up dejected and heartbroken, the New Yorker who was born here and waited for decades to find out if this is where they’re meant to be, the New Yorker who visits and falls in love with the place and is searching for a sign that they should stay.

We descended into the nearly deserted subway, and suddenly I felt the roof open up and the floor fall away and a guy in a beat-up American Apparel sweatshirt began playing the first few chords of Blackbird by the Beatles, my absolute favorite song.

And that’s when I fell in love with New York City for the very first time, amongst the giant subway rats on the tracks, and the homeless people sleeping on the stairs, and the dirty air rushing past us in the wake of a Brooklyn-bound train, and a skinny little hipster singing the only words that my heart needed to hear: 

All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Takeout

We used to get in these fights.

“I cooked,” you’d say.

“So you have to clean.”

I never saw that as fair.

You got to have all the fun,

Spraying the kitchen with Rooster Sauce

And I got the clean up.

Which is why it makes sense that you left.

“Leave me alone,” you say.

“I’m studying.”

You got to sleep in my bed

And forgo paying rent

And take bites of my heart

And I got the clean up.

Now, I order men like take out

And when I’m finished, it’s easy;

There’s no clean up at all.

You just toss out the empty containers.

There’s no dishes to wash 

Or pans to scour

Just his pants on my kitchen floor.

Home

Dear California,

    Whenever I miss you, I pray and I bargain with your gods; John Muir and Bethany Cosentino and Malibu Barbie and the ghost of Bradley Nowell and Brian Wilson and Flea and Mickey Mouse and the 405 freeway. I swear to them that if they can find a way to bring me back to you, I'll never ever complain about the Santa Ana winds in October ever again for the rest of my life. I'll never smack my dashboard and swear loudly in traffic on the 118. I'll never say I've eaten too much In N Out to fit into a bikini to wear on Free Zuma. 

I'll never miss a Laker game again. I'll root for Kobe even though I know he's going to miss his free throw. I'll go hiking every sunset with my dogs, all the way to the beach, even if I'm tired. I'll always eat mangoes when they're in season at the Farmer's Market. I'll never say the soot from the wildfires is ruining my throat. I'll inhale that stale cigarette and smog smoke outside of LAX as deeply as my lungs will allow me. I'll stand in line for hours outside of the Roxy to see a shitty band. I'll listen to the Chili Peppers and Best Coast and Sublime and the Beach Boys and I'll renounce my love for Sinatra.

 I'll go to the Ronald Reagan library twice a year like I did when I was in grade school. I'll use those surfboards strapped to the rafters in my garage and I won't wuss out when my wet suit fills with the freezing Pacific at 5am in March. I'll dust off my roller blades and skate the boardwalk in San Diego with my old Sublime CD from 1996 playing on my Discman. I'll go Turtle Racing every Thursday at Brennan's Pub in Venice and always bet on the underdog. I'll get a hair wrap. I won't argue with my mom or act like a brat when she wants to get fish at Brophy Brothers for the fifteenth time in three weeks. I won't be a snob when someone shows up at a party with an indica instead of a sativa. I'll try really hard to go to yoga everyday, even when I don't feel like it.

 I'll renew my Disneyland Season Pass and upgrade to free parking. I'll go on Soaring Over California five hundred times just to smell the orange groves. I'll never complain about how boring Newbury Park is again. My heart will do little flips every time I exit Ventu Park road. I won't make fun of the stupid teenagers littering the Oaks Mall (okay, maybe I will.) I'll go to Paradise Cove even if there's a three hour wait and stick my toes in the sand just like my grandmother did the week before she passed away. I'll drink wine in Santa Barbara and I'll ride those dorky 6-person bikes with the canopies on top past the zoo with my brothers. I won't roll my eyes at the tourists taking pictures of the giant King Kong at City Walk. I'll never cheat on the hairdresser I've had since I was 2 with another chic New York stylist ever again. I'll actually wear the bathing suit I bought in June and never even donned on the East Coast.

 I'll take the PCH every time I go to Santa Monica or Leo Carillo so that I can watch the sun rise on the ocean. The price of gas is worth it to never have to watch someone shoot heroin and puke on the L train at 4am ever again. I'll forget about all the hipster shit I worshiped while I lived in Texas. I'll date some tech nerd from Silicone Valley who won't break my heart. I'll try my best not to look bored at another album release party on Sunset. I'll wear heels every single day because I won't have to walk two miles to a bar on the Lower East Side. I'll never say the LA River is disgusting again. I'll bleach my hair like Gwen Stefani and become a vegan. I'll donate to LACMA and the aquarium in Marina del Rey. I'll visit the little elephant stuck at the La Brea Tar Pits. I'll squint my eyes when I drive down Kanan and try to make out the Channel Islands on every clear day from here on out.

I'll scribble with crayon on every single tablecloth at Cheebo's. I'll apologize to all of my teachers for being so obnoxious in Jr. High and High School--I was going through some stuff. I'll never bite a kid or eat raisins in class again. On Halloween, I'll wear the skimpiest costume possible because it won't be 30 degrees out in the middle of a hurricane. If there's ever a storm, at least it will be tropical. I'll go to Catalina Island to kayak like I did in 6th grade and this time I won't get sea sick. I'll embrace the choppy waters as a part of my home. I'll adore the fault lines that cause earthquakes scattered in secret places up and down the coast and buried in the desert. I won't cry when I see the red cursive California adorning the top of every license plate like I did in the south and in the east. 

Did I mention I'll get better at surfing? I will. If only to catch a wave with Anthony Kiedis in Ventura. I'll eat Yang Chow seven nights a week with my grandmother. I'll keep that little place in business so they never have to close. I'll eat so much orange chicken and mushu pork that they'll have to put my picture up next to Shaquille O'Neal's in the waiting area.

I'll spend every morning having breakfast on the patio furniture that used to belong to my grandparents, watching hummingbirds in the backyard. I'll go swimming. I'll bring baloney and mustard sandwiches to my old theater director like I used to when I was 10. I'll make a concentrated effort to get famous like I always said I would. I'll get rejected at auditions and I'll develop thicker skin. I'll get lost in the woods in Mammoth just like I'll get lost going to the Staples Center downtown. I'll drive past the Daily News and try not to sob hysterically and drip snot on my seat belt. I'll go skiing every Christmas with my parents even if there's a blizzard. I'll go backpacking with my mom and conquer my namesake, Mt. Whitney, with that photo of my grandfather wearing lederhosen and holding an ice pick at the top of the Matterhorn tucked into my pocket.  

I'll write about every climate, every type of topography. I'll write about the palm trees downtown and Red Rock Canyon in the desert and the waves on the shore and the moon in the sky. I'll write about my mother and my father because they raised me there. I'll write about my dogs and my best friends, the ones who still care about me even though I've been gone all these years. I'll write about the city humming like a glowing computer chip at night, and I'll write about the phosphorescent sea creatures glowing in the tide.

I swear, I won't ever fall in love with anyone other than Los Angeles again. I promise, okay? Please, California, you have to believe me. Just let me come home.

Letters

A Love Letter, to All of You:

Maybe the problem with you and I is that we were both born in California; we have fault lines from earthquakes etched into our bones. Maybe that’s why we’ll never be whole. You’ll keep going to parties and meeting those plain girls in dresses that you love to take home. The ones who reassure you that you never need to settle down. You can keep bouncing around like a pinball with a passport, never returning to the same place twice. I was silly to think we’d move back there together some day.

I bought a sugar skull necklace today at a flea market. I’m never going to take it off. Not because it’s too pretty, but because I like the warning it gives. Danger. Poison. It matches the Mexican wedding dress that I bought to remind me of Olivera Street with my father when I was small. I should have run away fast when I learned you were like him, with powder in your nose and gin and tonic on your teeth. Instead, I was curious. I used to love the way you drove fast on the freeway.

I fell in love with you when I thought I’d never love anything ever again for the rest of my life. Forget about having a love like my grandparents’--I was drowning myself in cheap Coronas with lime and clogging my arteries with macaroni and cheese in your bathtub. I stopped believing in god. And I never looked back. I exhausted myself trying to come up with alternate versions of the word “nothing”.

I remember when you were too embarrassed to kiss me because you thought I was too pretty. I remember how you’d lie to my mother so that you could keep me out late. I used to love telling people how smart you were.

You can’t force someone into being your friend. I want to smash your fingers between mine and make you spend a weekend with me when I’m home for Christmas. I want to shake you and make you accept my thousand apologies, but you’re too busy studying. For what, I don’t know. Something more important than me. I want to be the yellow bird outside your window, but I don’t know how to drown and fly at the same time.

I don’t want to feel like I owe you for putting my heart back together with your fingertips tattooing prints on my rib cage. I don’t want to think about your body when I’m trying to fall asleep. I don’t want to miss tickling you and sleeping in your car with your jacket on my knees. I don’t want you to watch Star Wars, or eat grilled cheese sandwiches ever again. I don’t want you to listen to music or drink whiskey.

I don’t want you to forgive me.

But you will.

I hate that you forgot that night on the couch, your hands on the zipper of my blue sparkle dress, your mouth in my hair, your laugh mixing with mine. I hate that I’ll never bake cupcakes with your mother again, or look at the pictures on your refrigerator. I hate your sister. I hate the words, “I’m scared,” the words, “this isn’t going to work.”

I remember being a girl that was much stronger than the pathetic, smeared mascara version of myself that crawls out of bed, jams her toothbrush between her teeth, and dreads going to work in the morning. But right now, the thought of going on an adventure sounds exhausting. I forgot how to fall asleep at night without listening to Harry Potter audio books. I think the sound of Jim Dale’s voice flowing and changing pitch over the speakers of my crappy karaoke machine makes me feel like I’m not sleeping alone.

I wish I were braver. I’m still trying to figure out how to buy my own groceries and go to bed before 2 a.m. I don’t want to drive the 118 freeway and think about your car weaving in and out of traffic when you’d kiss me in the passenger seat on the way home from Disneyland. We would listen to these crappy songs on my beat-up iPod and read autobiographies in traffic and make up stories to tell our kids someday. You were every plan I made aloud in your bedroom and every secret one I kept inside my head for someday. I promise that I’ve moved on. I just haven’t forgotten. Perhaps it’s unhealthier than the double-double from In-N-Out you used to bring with you to pick me up from the airport, but I can’t just stop being your friend.

It would be all together too difficult to seek the names of the animals that the Box has unleashed, to count them, to sort them, to know them by touch. It’s easier for you to stay asleep.

I ask too much of you, and you give me the moon every time. I’m still ungrateful. I know that.

Can we please just get Chinese food and forget this ever happened?

-W.

*A Note to the Reader:

I started this project after reading “Ten Love Notes” by Clementine von Radics. If you haven’t read this truly beautiful piece of writing, do so by clicking right here. http://whiskeypaper.com/ten-love-letters-by-clementine-von-radics/

In her “Love Notes,” Clementine combines ten different love letters (written to, presumably, a number of different dudes), into one absolutely smashing anthology of poetry.

My piece is based on the inspiration I garnered after reading her work. I’d love to say that it was my idea to push a bunch of sappy, pathetic love notes into one place and make them sound semi-fluid, but alas, it was not. I aspire to be as lovely and well spoken as Clementine someday, but for now, I have my own crappy version of what it feels like to write a love letter to someone who is never going to read it. I’ve spent far too long with a bunch of random scraps of paper and untitled word documents floating around in my archives, and I wanted to share them.

All creative, inspirational credit goes to Clementine von Radics and her life-changing book of poetry, “As Often as Miracles.” Thanks, Clem, for being my muse.

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.