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.