TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

This weekend I played the role of the badkhn—a sort of disgruntled court jester—at fake Jewish wedding. I basically read some real nasty and/or depressing shit about marriage and love and gay people and Jesus and made everyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to do it because I think marriage should be between one impotent man and one child bride, but it was fun and I’m glad to have been a part of a fake marriage between four girls. The local klezmer band Gmish played as I read, so imagine some melancholy Jew music in the background. Afterward, Gmish played some happy Jew music and all the fake Jews danced and were Jewy. What follows is my monologue. Mazeltov!

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Remember when the drummer from the lesbian punk band Broken Heart, Broken Hymen cave-manned you against the handicapped stall in the bathroom of a dive bar and then left before you could pay your tab or get her number? And remember that circle jerk in a hostel in Amsterdam, which isn’t something you would normally do, but it was Amsterdam and you were on drugs and you’d never been with a man before because you aren’t some kind of faggot but, shit, when in Amsterdam, do as the dutch: get high and circle jerk with four German tourists on a hostel carpet. And remember your freshman year when you thought you were taking her virginity and she was taking your virginity because she told you that she was a virgin and you believed her because you were a virgin, the last virgin on your hall or maybe even in your entire dorm, but it turns out that she wasn’t just not a virgin, she was on her period, and afterward it looked like you’d dipped your penis in a in a bucket of red paint, which would be okay except that it was also kind of clotted and distinctly not romantic. Remember that? And remember the time you fucked the Jehovah’s Witness, the two of you snorting coke off a hotel bedside table and bumping your vaginas together until your thighs were like suction cups and made embarrassing farting sounds that you pretended not to hear? Remember how she later asked if you thought Jesus was sad for what you had just done, to which you replied, You got off three times. Nobody’s sad.

These are the things you will think of as you lie in a hospital bed at the age of 90, passing urine through a tube, not even pushing it out but letting gravity and modern medicine drain your kidneys. You might think of today, your wedding day, and you might think of the day your daughter was born, but mostly you will think about the things that happened before today. The things that happened before you joined another family and then made another family, before the mass holiday cards and the family portraits and the all day swim meets that you were obligated to attend. You may think of how much you loved your son when he was so young that his Speedo wasn’t yet embarrassing or creepy, but also wished he were less into swimming and more into watching TV. You might also think about how that same son kind of turned into an asshole in his twenties and is still one today, on what may be the last day of your life before the darkness takes you even farther from your youth. You will think of the wedding and the kids and the grand kids, of course, but mostly you will think of the things that happened before today, the things that happened before you wed, the things that happened when you still had something to look forward too.

You never thought you’d be this person. You never thought you’d stand here before your friends and family and your parents’ friends, who you don’t even know but who you had to invite because your dad is paying for the wedding. You thought you were better than this. Different, radical, above convention and ceremony, not a lamb, an individual. When did you turn into your mother? Today, today you become your mother and your father and every one else who has done this before you and everyone else who will do this after you. And why? Because you are scared. Because you are a quarter of the way through your life and you don’t even know what you want to be when you grow up. Because you just realized that adults aren’t actually adults but are children who pay bills and you are one of these child grown-ups, not scared of the dark but scared of dying alone with no one to change your diapers or clip your toe nails or wipe the drool from your chin. You are here because you are looking for the person who will save you. You are here because this is what people do.

But she won’t save you and he will annoy you. Yes, you will have your moments. Sometimes you wag your tail when he comes home from work, sometimes you want to hibernate under a pile of warm laundry with her, but you will always wish for the past, the day before today, yesterday, when you were still excited to leave the house because who might you run into on a Thursday night? Because anything can happen on a Thursday night when you are young and alive. You could climb a parking deck with Helen Mirren. You could dance in a store window with your neighborhood mailman. You could meet the love of your life. But you’ve already met the love of your life and now nothing will happen on a Thursday night because you are tethered to the person beside you like a disease that isn’t terminal but is chronic. You will sit on your couch and watch movies for the rest of your life. That’s all there is left after today. Movies and couches and laundry to fold.

Crushes don’t stop when you get married. You will flirt with the girl with the toaster tattoo who makes your Americano. You go to the coffee shop instead of percolating at home even though you should be saving for your anniversary cruise, a trip you don’t even want to take because the only people who take cruises are those who convince themselves that cruises aren’t what they are, which is seeing the world from a mile’s remove, seeing the world from an endless buffet. You will think of someone else when you fuck your spouse, which isn’t all that often, which you are okay with because you can only fuck the same person so many times until it is like fucking yourself, which you can do without pretending to care if she gets off. You will think of someone who isn’t him, someone who doesn’t piss on his feet in the shower because he thinks it cures athletes foot. You will think of someone who isn’t her, someone who doesn’t talk about yeast infections and stretch marks and hasn’t sucked you off since she found the Nailin Palin porno on your computer. When she gets over the sexy Republican porn and you have your monthly fuck, you will think of the woman at the gym who wears her iPod attached to her biceps with a pink band, biceps that are so much better than your wife’s biceps, not too muscular, but lean and toned, not like a lesbian gym teacher but like a pilates instructor, which she is your fantasy: a pilates instructor and a massage therapist and a really good cook with an insatiable sex drive and a beautiful wine collection. You will turn to the Internet, to Big&Busty69@hotmail.com and fuck her through your finger tips and thank God that email doesn’t cost 99 cents a minute. You will fuck her in your mind. You’re wife will relieved that you’re not pressing your erection into her back every night when she wants to go to sleep and wake up and be 19 years old again, just like you do.

The gays are the worst. The gays, the bane of the good Lord’s existence, the people who beat Jesus with strap-ons and drowned him in a vat of lube, the people who will rot in a hell where everyone’s a bottom and they lie in bed for eternity waiting for someone else to make the first move, even they, born without a conscience but with a hungry prostate, desire to make the same mistake you are about to make. They get teary when they see two mommies; they framed the People magazine spread of Ellen D’Generis and Portia DaRossi sitting cross-legged on velvet pillows surrounded by friends, family, and vegan fare; they talk about “equal rights” and “marriage equality.” They are naive, these queers. They should thank the bigots for saving them from the misery that is marriage and run from the altar as fast as possible, Dykes on Bikes piggybacking fags and twinks. We should all be so lucky.

Romeo and Juliet are the most romantic couple in history. They married and then they died. They didn’t have to pay bills. They didn’t have to go to parent/teacher conferences. They didn’t take turns cleaning out the litter box. The honeymoon never ended because it never began. Real love is real death, side by side in a glass coffin, not talking for eternity.

But for now, at least for tonight, there is no disappointment, only possibility. You don’t yet know that he will get drunk at your office Christmas party and ask your boss when the baby’s due even though she’s just bloated. You don’t know that her mother will move in with you in just seven short years, bringing three cats and her collection of nutcrackers. What you know tonight is that the arch of her foot is the most beautiful geometry in the world; that the color of his eyes exists only in his eyes and nowhere else; that everyone else in this room is secondary; that all the love you’ve ever felt is nothing against this new love; that you will spend your last years together, too old and ugly and tired to change the channel or fold the laundry, but still glad that if the lives you’ve created have to dim, at least they will dim together.

After a mostly-perfect trip to San Francisco a few months ago—a trip complete with narrowly escaping white slavery, meeting my Virtual Girlfriend and her amazing rack, and hyena laughing with my dear long-distance palsie who left me with a four-postor bed and weighty heart at her departure last spring—I decided I would move there. I would sit in Golden Gate Park and go to actual museums in an actual city and eat ceviche on the street and meet people, new people, people who would make out with me and maybe fall in love with me after a courtship in which I would send her an envelope filled with ocean pebbles and lavender petals even though mailing rocks is kind of expensive and we will live in the same neighborhood. I thought I would move there and live under a coffee table or in a bunk bed with Small Fry, my other butt cheek, who would also move there and who is not just my other butt cheek but is also my Huck or my Tom depending on who’s in charge on any given afternoon, and whose naked ass I’ve seen more times than I’ve seen some girlfriends’. But I’m not going, at least not any time soon. It’s not that I don’t want to, but that I’m poor, so poor that if I had cable, I’d have to cancel it. This, Carrboro, North Carolina, is where I live. It just is, at least for now. But my other butt cheek is moving there, to San Francisco, to the land of the gays, the land of rainbows, the land of fog and parks, where it’s okay to touch your girlfriend’s cheek the way your parents did when you young and they were in love. Small Fry, the person who looks nothing like me but gets mistaken for me as I get mistaken for her, is leaving tomorrow. The person who wakes me up in the morning and dances with me before noon, the person who is the other half of our package deal, the buy-one-get-one-free, is flying away.

Because I am as unable to think of the future as I am to sit on the furniture at the bar across the street because I heard a tall guy with long hair and neck tattoos who thinks his band will change the world finger banged a goth girl on the couch in front of the stage, it’s happening tomorrow and I’m not ready, not ready at all. I’m as unprepared to say goodbye as I’ll be when Kirk Cameron leads all the good Christians to heaven and leaves us sinners and sodomites to rot in the Church of the Bloody Mary, which is a hell where the eggs Benedict are always over-cooked and when you order a mimosa, the zombie servers bring you skim milk instead. But it is happening now. She is packing up her life and I am here, avoiding the truthful truth, the real truth, that I will take her to the airport tomorrow, make sure she has her ID and her ticket, get her bags out of the trunk, drop her off at the curb, and say goodbye.

The first real goodbye I said was to my twin sister when we were sixteen and she went to boarding school. I don’t remember if we were particularly close as teenagers. I’m guessing we actually weren’t in the day-to-day sense. She was a good student, swam and played soccer, did her homework, looked normal, made good impressions, didn’t get in trouble. I spent most of my afternoons smoking weed out of tin cans or hollowed out apples with the seniors who adopted me because I would light their cigarettes and tell the cashier at Taco Bell that there was a hair in my burrito and give the free one to them. But even if Betsy and I weren’t all that close socially, didn’t have the same friends or do the same things, I was so very sad when she left.

There is a moment in twins’ lives when you separate, a necessary if unconscious thing so that you are not tethered together for the rest of your dual lives, unable to love anyone else as much as you love each other. Most twins do this, but there were two twins in my college who did not. They dressed alike every day. They took the same classes, lived in the same dorm room, were indistinguishable except for different colored glasses—one frame blue, the other red. They never made the cut from each other and will always be “the twins,” forever an egg that didn’t want to split. This was never going to be Betsy and I. We were always different, always individual, but her leaving was the first cut and it hurt all the same. Twins lives are parallel, separated by five minutes or eight minutes or an hour, but connected in time and genetics and sharing a body before you were even a body. And then, sixteen years after we slipped into the world, she was gone. When my parents and I drove away, separating us and I for the first time in our lives, I cried like I had never cried before, more even then five minutes ago when I had to clean out a litter box for the first time ever.

There have been others. The have been break up goodbyes, which aren’t necessarily even goodbyes but sad or angry see you laters because maybe you live in the same town and will see each other even when you don’t want to see each other, like when she is grocery shopping with her new girlfriend and you are buying single servings of mac ‘n cheese. And there are the goodbyes when you are the one leaving. When I moved to Portland, I cried all the way across the country. But as much as I hated to say goodbye to the people who had been my family for four years, I was glad to be the one leaving. My friends rolled spliffs and lined them in a tampon box for me while my girlfriend packed the car and I cried in the bathroom, sad but knowing that it is easier to leave than to stay.

But I am not the one leaving this time, Small Fry is. We have a friendship born not out of blood but out of who we are, because we are the same and because we are different, because we are good for each other and bad for each other, because we congratulate ourselves on staying young while everyone else gets old, all the while knowing that it cannot last for ever. This is the beginning of the severing, like it was when I was sixteen and Betsy walked to her dorm room and I drove away with my parents. She leaves not so much a hole in my heart as in my day. We are going our separate ways, Small Fry and I, approaching, perhaps, the thing that terrifies us most—adulthood, when friends are less important than jobs and partners, houses and families. We will do the things that people do, and wish sometimes that we are back in our living room fort, sitting back-to-back on our matching laptops, picking each other up and swinging each other around our shoulders, bumping chests until one of us falls onto her back, talking about girlfriends and non-girlfriends and the ones we wish would be our girlfriends and the ones we wish we’d never meet, talking about how this will never end, how we will always be Peter Pans in a grown-up world.

There was rain storm that day ten years ago when we drove my sister her to her new life, her boarding school life. We left the windows open and the back of the car was soaking wet, like buckets-of-water-on-the-seats-wet, so I folded the seats down and lay on the back of them and covered my faces with a sopping sweater and cried the five hours home, so sad and so embarrassed to be so sad. This will happen tomorrow when I drop my other butt cheek off at the airport, but I won’t be able to hold it in. I will sob on the curb and drive blindly home, back to Carrboro, back to the place and the life I have chosen, a place and a life that will be a little more empty.

Things have gotten pretty serious between my virtual girlfriend and I. We Gchat roughly forty hours a week and text on the weekends and she sent me an adorable drawing of the two of us with our three future children, Rocket and Panda, who she will gestate, and Sushi, who will adopted from a to-be-determined East Asian nation. I returned her romantical mailing with my own—a mixed CD and a love letter that went something along the lines of, I want to make out with you and buy you things with other peoples’ money. This is how serious it is: Virtual Girlfriend (VG) came out to her parents. Frank, Betty, she said, I’m gay on the Internet. Frank and Betty may have been a little confused because they are slightly older than average and may not be entirely sure what the Internet is, but I guess they got the point, which is basically, I like to put my head in other girls’ laps.

So, in honor of my dear sugar bitch VG, today’s episode is all about tearing down that closet door. I realized I’ve alluded to my own coming out in previous posts, but here’s the story, real talk style….

I had a friend growing up who was obviously a boy. I mean, she was a girl, but she looked like a boy. This didn’t really change as we got older. She always had really short hair and was built like a guy. Very handsome. I realized at some point that she was probably a dyke but we never talked about it. I also remember thinking that I was really glad that I wasn’t like her, that I wasn’t a dyke. Just like parents who think that their son’s life will be difficult because he likes to shop at Banana Republic and bend over for guys who shave their chests, I didn’t want my life to be difficult. My life was already difficult. I was sixteen. Life is difficult for everyone at sixteen, especially for androgynous boy/girls with dreadlocks in a school where the mascot is a confederate army general. I was glad the gay disease wasn’t something else I had to worry about catching. My butch friend didn’t come out until after high school, and approximately no one was surprised. What was surprising was that a lot of my other friends also came out after high school. We never talked about girls. We had crushes on boys and talked about them the same way any teenager would. But look at that—we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to get our gay on.

Anyway, I made out with boys for a while in college and anytime I found myself looking at the curve of some woman’s hip, I held my boyfriend’s hand tighter and told myself that I just really appreciated beauty. There was no way I was gay. I mean look, I’m touching a boy! But then I met Alice, and, along with making me crazy, she also made me gay.

My friends at school were completely unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally unsurprised. I was the only girl in Little League, for fuck’s sake. Of course I’m gay. I did not, however, want to tell my parents. This wasn’t because I thought they would be upset—my parents would be more upset if I married a Republican or became a youth pastor—but because telling your parents you’re gay means telling your parents that you aren’t just emotionally and mentally gay, you’re also gay with other gay girls. Like, naked gay. I didn’t even tell my parents when I got my period. I definitely didn’t want to tell them that I was a sexually active person. You know how weird and terrible it is to think about your parents having sex? Think about how much worse it is for them to think about you having sex. You’re their little girl. You sat on their lap and giggled when they tickled you and cried when they spanked you for starting a small and completely manageable fire in the neighbor’s yard. And now you’re telling them that your hobby is figuring out if diet influences the taste of your girlfriend’s reproductive organs? Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after Alice and I got together, we drove from Asheville to the Outer Banks for a romantical weekend. Before we could get there, however, we were rear-ended by a dump truck on I-40 and crashed into a construction barrier. The air bags popped. The windshield shattered. Traffic was stopped for hours. The car was totaled. We went to the hospital to get prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers. It was scary. We ended up staying at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowing her car so we could get to the beach and back home. While we were at the pharmacy collecting our completely unnecessary painkillers, my sister called. She happened to be visiting our parents that weekend and said that our mom knew I was homo and was really upset. Like tears upset. Like, what-if-you-had-died-before-we-talked-about-this-upset. I got that sinking stomach thing right away and probably started screaming that I was an orphan as of right now, this very second, no longer a member of my very own nuclear family just because I’m a big gay, forever banished from the annual Bash Bush Bashes my mom threw from 2000 until 2008.

It was a hard weekend. Alice and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. She would go to the bathroom and I would wait outside the door just in case she got sucked into the toilet. But it wasn’t just the whole near-death thing that freaked us out. It was the conversation I would have to have with my mom eventually, a conversation I never wanted to have, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I had to have that conversation. I avoided her pleading messages until we got back from the beach and popped a few of the completely unnecessary pain killers and drank a few completely necessary beers and sat on my porch with Alice, holding her hand like we were trying not to get torn apart by a tornado. The conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Who told you, my brother or my sister?

Mazog: No one. You’re father has gaydar.

And while I do think that my father’s gaydar is probably better than average because he kind of walks on his tiptoes, I suspect the big giveaway was less my hair cut and more the way Alice and I interacted with each other. I had taken Alice to my parents’ house one afternoon to borrow their canoe. I hadn’t done this with any of my other friends. All my parents knew about most of my friends was that they littered cigarette butts on my front porch and wiped with coffee filters because we never had any toilet paper at my house. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way we were with each other. Not touchy and not fawning and not overtly together, but still together, like there was a string that connected us and only us. The string, of course, broke. But I’m still gay. That’s not going to break.

And so, welcome to the family, VG. Frank and Betty will get over it when they meet me.

Following directions isn’t really my thing and I’m not about to share my bedroom with fifty other idiots, so, barring an uprising by the Federation for the Advancement of Gays and Gayelles (F.A.G.G.), me enlisting in the military is about as likely as that time five minutes ago when Sean Penn friended me on Facebook. Regardless, I accompanied my roommate Small Fry to the recruiting office in Durham recently. It was an exercise in cheek-biting for me: it’s hard not to laugh at military recruiters when you are so fundamentally opposed to what they stand for (e.g. obedience, nationalism, khaki) and what they do (e.g. kill, depose, Skype) and know you are wasting the time they could spend coercing other young people to sign over their autonomy. They likely had just as little hope of signing us based on appearance alone. It’s not that we’re obviously dykes, which we are (despite national policy, gayism is probably recognized as a benefit in the armed forces. Would you rather be defended by Bull Dyke Barbie or Malibu Barbie?), we just don’t look like the kind of people who would join the army. We look like the kind of people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn or the kind of people who talk shit about people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn but still kind of like it. But there we were.

The recruiters’ office itself isn’t what I expected. When you walk in, there’s no one to welcome you with stars and stripes and patriotic songs, ready to salute you in the right direction. Left for Marines, right for Army, around back for Blackwater. Instead, you just wander around until you find the branch you’re looking for. There were two recruiters in the Air Force office. They didn’t try to sell us. They didn’t talk about the army of one or the benefits or the camaraderie or the honor in fighting for your country after that big September thing. They just handed us forms to fill out and left us alone. Although I might have given them my sister’s social security number and an ex’s phone number, I was mostly honest on the paperwork. Have I been arrested? Yes, but it was just a misunderstanding. I wasn’t really trying to pass myself off as a forty-two-year-old Canadian woman with a taste for Bartles & James and the charges were dismissed after I gave the judge a mani/pedi. You’re also supposed to list all the drugs you’ve done and the number of times you’ve done them. If I actually wanted to earn my pilot’s wings, I would have lied, but because I was more interested on getting out before happy hour than being fitted for a uniform, I wrote the truth. It’s not like I’ve ever traded my body for a crack pebble or anything, but I went to college. I wore Birkenstocks and rolled one-handed joints on the way to school. And, besides being the inevitable gateway to excessive napping, weed was never really a problem for me. When I stopped smoking, I didn’t even really think about it. I just stopped. And that’s what I told the military recruiter. Look, brother, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a few trees. It’s Of The Earth, my friend. A gift from our planet to our minds. He looked at me like I’m John Waters trying to get into the police academy and said he didn’t think the Air Force was an appropriate fit.

When Small Fry first told me that she was thinking about joining the military, I changed the subject (Look! Boobs!) and waited for her to put this terrible idea to bed. But she didn’t put it to bed. She talked about detonating bombs and wearing a tailored uniform and never cooking again. She made her hands into guns and shot everyone who walked by the window. This is what I need to gain discipline, she said. This will make me grow up. Her thinking is stupid, like waiting for your power to get cut off because then you’ll be forced to start paying your bills on time, and yet, I kind of get it. There is no discipline in our home. The two of us live in a tree house world. We try to take the recycling out but only manage to get the cans out of the pantry and into the living room. We create imaginary futures for ourselves. We’re going to move to San Francisco and live in bunk beds and have a bunny that hops behind us everywhere we go or maybe a fairy who hovers by our shoulders. Or maybe someone will recognize the appeal of two nearing-thirty girls who sit around wearing eye patches and gypsy masks, getting up every once in a while to practice chest-bumping before resuming our Facebook sentry. Yes, that’s what we need: someone to find us and and love us and give us a reality TV show.

I left Small Fry with the recruiters and wandered around, thinking about what do to now that this option that was never really an option isn’t ever going to be an option. Med school? Americorps? Teaching English in Korea until the economy recovers and we can get back to the lives we think we deserve: comfortable lives, exciting lives, full lives, mornings that don’t start with trying to think of a reason to get out of bed, not finding one, and closing the blinds and dreaming for a few more hours. Being in that office, walking past rooms where people were signing the papers because they want to or because they have to, some excited, some scared, all making real decisions, big decisions, decisions that will influence the course of their lives now and forever—people who are, really, just like us—made me think there might be no fairy and no benefactor and no one else to make us grow up. Are we past the age when it’s acceptable to walk around town barefoot with our pants rolled up because we feel like playing Tom and Huck? This is the point—out of school, underemployed, desperate enough to consider the military—where you realize that you’re on your own. That’s where the military comes in. Sign here and stop thinking. Do their push-ups, make their beds, polish their door-knobs, call them sir and write your girl back home. Your inability to make decisions won’t matter anymore. It will, in fact, make you a better solider. There is some solace in being a robot. I understand this, and part of me wishes I could get over my ethical reservations and my unwillingness to take orders and my past life as a stoner and my unshakable belief that things will work out, maybe not for everyone, but for me. Because what if it doesn’t? What if this is all there is, looking for ways to adulthood, wishing you were one of the thousands of people who sign up, who put their fate in the hands of others, who follow orders. Maybe we all want to to sacrifice our autonomy, not to an organization run on obedience, but to a fate we think we deserve. We are no different than anyone else in that building. We just think we are.

When I was twenty years old and more in love than I have ever been in love and maybe even more in love than is possible for someone of my cardiac size to love more than once in life, my period turned into an acidic monster. I’d never been much of a light days kind of menstruator, but something happened that year to give me the bowel twisting cramps that make a hysterectomy minus epidural seem like a better option than dealing with that shit for another week. What happened? My size twelve pain may have had something to do with a change in lifestyle—I went from being a real serious athlete to being a real serious porch-sitter—but I suspect it had less to do with the sedentary lifestyle of the marijuana abuser and more to do with my gayness.

Any woman who has lived, worked, or changed a light bulb with another woman knows what I’m talking about—it’s something to do with the moon and wolves and tides or something—but when you spend a bunch of hand ticks with other ladies, your blood drip gets all wonky. In my case, six years ago I spent every waking and non-waking moment with my inaugural girlfriend. I was unbearably, unsustainably butterflied to be alive and to be gay because I woke up every morning on my Wal-Mart futon with a woman who looked like a half-Cuban Princess Di without the crazy eyes. Every morning I looked down on this woman—my girlfriend!—sleeping on her side and on my arm, which I couldn’t feel but didn’t mind because a numb arm was nothing when the rest of me was so golden, and reached over her with my living arm to get a joint off my Wal-Mart beside table, which I then lit and smoked with one hand, which later proved to be good practice for texting while driving. I was happy.

However, it only took a few weeks of bumping fussies for my XX chromosomes to get seriously out of good. My cramps had always been a bitch, but a dozen Alleve and a few bong hits for breakfast usually muted the screams long enough to shower and get dressed. But now my emotional state right before the blood clots flowed perched somewhere betwixt outpatient and padded walls. This was a problem. I depleted my monthly allocation of tears in three days, yet was completely unable to recognize why I wanted to take a long nap in my own grave. This lasted for the duration of our relationship—four years.

The strangest part of the girlfriend/girlfriend menstrual cycle when I was with Alice was that we never bled together. There is something wrong with this. I’ve cycled with housemates, friends, co-workers, bartenders. My roommate and I talk about alpha-ing each other every month. She blames me when her blood ocean is off calendar, I blame her when mine is. It’s a constant struggle for period dominance. With Alice and I, the struggle was never resolved. Four years and no cohesion. Two women PMSing at once is bad, girlfriends PMSing for literally half their relationship is really bad. As soon as I would calm down and get my head out of the oven, Alice would push me out of the way and stick hers in.

Also around the time we got together, I became a night bleeder. I had never been a blood squirter before. In the seven years previous to meeting Alice, I had bled through the sheets maybe once or twice and I haven’t at all since we gave up. But all of a sudden we were waking in the the morning in a sticky red sea, like Jack Woltz after his horse head slumber party. She was always patient, my girlfriend, always helped me wash the sheets and flip the mattress, and, like the mother of a six-year-old who may get exasperated that her kid keeps wetting the bed, she knew I wanted this to happen even less than she did and loved me despite the washing bill and the ruined sheets.

The period thing was, at times, touching. When a girl is in bed, cursing her ovaries and praying to wake up with a penis or a lobotomy, you bring her tea and a hot water bottle and massage her lower back and when her mood swings from crying to screaming to punching, you tell her you love her. Alice went to shower one morning while I was still in bed. I got up before she was clean and dry and walked naked and blind from our bedroom to the kitchen to make coffee. I am bat-like without my cornea shirkers so I didn’t notice the red drips on our kitchen floor until Alice got out of the shower and saw I had tracked my own blood across the kitchen and back again. We laughed and mopped the floor and forgot about it, unworried and uncaring.

When Alice and I broke up a few years later, she sent a box of relics to my new home across the country. Artifacts of when times were good—postcards, notes we left on each others’ pillows, letters we wrote when distance keep us apart. Among the refuse was something I hadn’t seen before—a poem she had written. I remember a line from the poem. Part of a line, actually just a fragment. Drops of blood from coffee pot to shower. It’s still in the box she sent. I could pull it out, read the rest, thumb through the past, happy that I knew electricity, sad that I may not again, but I’ll keep it there, at the bottom of its cardboard cage, full of blood and love and the memory of what was.

We are America’s smartest city, so says the Daily Beast. Precisely, this is a “university hub, including two of the nation’s elite schools (Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and those schools led to one of the nation’s great technology incubators (Research Triangle). On top of that, Raleigh, as the state’s capital, attracts engaged political minds, as well.”

In this not-so-scientastic study, the fifty-five largest metropolitan areas across this grey nation were assessed on the basis of education and intellectual climate, with factors like the number of non-fiction books read, the percentage of the population with iPhones, and rates of political engagement as gauged by Obama bumper stickers. It’s no surprise that we topped the list, what with being the home of two of the nation’s elite schools and all. I personally feel pretty good about failing out of an elite university, although the only reason I applied to the School of Information and Library Science at UNC was because the students in that program were always at the bar. It’s definitely better than being kicked out of the University of Phoenix, the first institute of higher learning to sever our relationship.

Here’s the thing about living in the smartest trifecta in the country: when you only buy the Times so the neighbors are impressed with your recycling and are constantly nodding through conversations about the progress of someone’s PhD, Minutes Sixty-Seven through Sixty-Nice in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but are really wondering if the bartender is gay, you feel decidedly medium. You’ve always considered yourself smarter than average, if only because you got your driver’s license on the first try, but you’re now realizing that you only got into AP Biology because your mom was the principal.

Still, I always wonder if these people really are smart. Their language is so dense that they could be full of shit and I’d have no idea. Use terms like, “po mo” and “meta” and I’ll assume you deserve as MacArthur Genius Grant, and so, when you live here, your ego suffers. The result of this is that you both consider everyone else an asshole and become one yourself. Carrboro is across the tracks (literally) from the University of North Carolina, and, while a large percentage of the population of Carrboro either attended UNC or moved here after grad school at Columbia to work at UNC, there is a decidedly town versus gown thing going on here. No, I don’t live in Chapel Hill, I live in Carrboro. I am an asshole about it. When I was in school, I constantly felt judged. I am obviously a proponent of bumping fussies, I have a dyke mullet and tattoos, and my backpack looks like what people in the ’70s thought the future was going to look like, which is actually very hip in parts of the country as well as Northern Europe, but makes people think I’m wearing a jet pack and flying between classrooms. Being on campus makes me feel like I’m at the nerdy table in the cafeteria again, and so I glare at everyone who tries to make eye contact with me. Fuck you. Fuck you and your ‘Carolina Girls Best in the World’ shorts.

It’s not just on campus either. I feel the same way when I’m anywhere in Chapel Hill. People think I’m stuck up because I am. I sit around with my friends and judge. “Look at that skinny bitch. Someone needs to eat a burger.” “Funny how that boy holding hands with his girlfriend has gay face. I wonder how many fingers fit in his ass.” Why invite this negativity into my life? Because I have class anxiety. When I worked at Whole Foods, I felt like everyone assumed I was some bottom-feeding townie, which I am, but one with a college degree from an accredited university, damn it.

Carrboro people don’t really have vacation homes, but we do have adorable mill houses on half-acre lots. We are an educated people, an upper-middle class people, a people with baby bjorns and co-op memberships and hipster dads, but we are not Chapel Hill people. We may root for the same basketball team and attend the same universities, but we are not Chapel Hill people. We may be a part of the smartest area in the country, but we are across the tracks. We are assholes, but we aren’t those assholes.

I live in Carrboro, North Carolina. There are 17,931 of us in this town, but it seems smaller. It seems like the size of a camera hidden in the light fixture of a seedy motel and monitored at home by a registered sex offender. That’s how living here feels sometimes as well—like people watch each other through windows and tell their friends whose beds have chains on the headboard and who sleeps with a teddy bear and who cries at Adam Sandler movies.

In a town where the co-op lawn is the hub of activity—the place where hula-hoopers in backless shirts and bare feet spin circles and beat the grass into dirty submission, where children run into your shins and then cry like babies when they fall on their diapered butts, where the rest of us grudgingly buy our carrot juice and hummus and talk about how coagulated the hot bar is—of course your neighbors’ behavior is public domain. There’s not much else to talk about. It’s like we’ve all given up on doing things and resigned ourselves to thinking about doing things. We all know each other, at least by terrible reputation, and we all talk. And I’m as guilty of stirring and spreading and meddling as anyone. More, even.

This didn’t bother me at first. I moved here from Portland, where I was completely anonymous. I was every other early 20s gayelle, holding hands and working at coffee shops and riding bikes and reading in bars. There was nothing about me that deserved attention, and I like attention, so, at first, Carrboro was a pleasant reprieve from anonymity. When I first came here, I planned on taking just a short break from the city, just enough time to recalibrate after some significant life changes (i.e. falling in maybe-love or at least pitter-patter-love with someone who was not my girlfriend; subsequent break-up with said girlfriend; subsequent week of homelessness without pillow, clean socks, phone charger, or wallet; subsequent final fuck you; subsequent teary goodbye.). I thought I’d be here for a few weeks, maybe a month, and go back to Portland and find the girl I had fallen in maybe-love with and deal with the strangers and the anonymity and be happy and changed. That was two and a half years ago.

I stayed in part because my sister lived here and it was nice to have a built-in friend, someone who had to go on walks and split meals with me, if for no other reason than DNA and guilt. I also stayed because of the people. I made more friends in the first weeks of being here than I did the whole time I was in Portland. My friends have become my family. We spend our days and nights together. We talk about how someday we’re going to have a house that’s actually a lot of houses, one for each of us, with a big courtyard and an outdoor kitchen in the middle and mango trees and family supper and a sun that shines when we want to surf, which we will be able to do because we will have a beach and because we will know how to surf, and rain that rains when we want to stay inside and watch movies. I like Carrboro. I like our fantasies and I like our fun and I like our nights that are like no other nights and even our nights that are like all other nights. Or, at least, I did.

But now I’m done. I have no job, no money, and absolutely, definitely, unequivocally, no chance at ever, like ever, finding a girlfriend. I have ruined my reputation to the point that some anonymous Craigslister wrote that I’m “shady and everywhere” for all of Missed Connections to see. I once met a girl at a bar and our conversation naturally deteriorated from books and politics to sex and love. We agreed that men are stupid and women are crazy. I said something about how this person I had slept with the night before talked about furniture all the time and then the blood rushed from her face to her heart and she jumped off her bar stool and ran out without paying her tab and, yes, the person from the night before was her person. And even though I didn’t know that person had a person and was so drunk that I can’t even remember if we had sex and or maybe if we ate popcorn and cuddled, this is the story of my life in this town.

We are full of boredom and drama and we let things that aren’t real become real. I recently learned that I fucked a homeless man in an alley while still with my ex. And while it’s not implausible and maybe is entirely true that I did cheat on my ex, I can’t even sit on other peoples’ furniture, much less fuck someone with scabies and a shopping cart. I accidentally touched a dreadlock a few nights ago and had to bust through a crowd of sweaty people to get to the nearest bathroom and scrub my hands so hard that I no longer have fingerprints. I’d wash my sheets twice even if someone in a full-body snowsuit slept on them, so even if I liked to sleep with men and even if I liked to get shoved against brick walls, my neuroses make this scenario impossible. It wasn’t reality, but now it is.

I’m at the point now where I can laugh at these rumors, be flattered, even, that I’m the subject of stories and gossip in this small town, but my friends are trickling away, to New York or LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or to husbands and wives and children. Why be here, in this place of so much comfort and so little potential, when my family is leaving? I’m ready to be anonymous again.

My life partner Small Fry and I will soon be taking leave from each other, not because we want to, but because she’s going to homestead up in San Francisco and get shit ready for the inevitable day in the near future when we’re selling our ovaries to rent bunk beds out there together. This is very, very bad. Even though I want Small Fry to spread her wings (legs) and make the West Coast her bitch, I’m a little concerned that the next person to domicile up in here might not be so in to watching BET through the neighbor’s window when our cable goes out.

I’m praying to Sapphos that I’ll find a new, more romantical life partner in the next month and we can just live together, but I put an ad on Craig’s List just in case. Shockingly, none of the responses have feel quite dreamy enough. Take, for instance, the following:

I’m going to study at unc and well I need a place to stay…
I’m a brazilian guy, i’ve 27 at this exactly moment (but everything will change next month anyway) and I’m going to study ethics and philosophy for my phd thesis in unc… well I’m not gay but I’ve already divided and have no problem (in fact we have good memories…)…
well I will receive a fellowship to my research so i will have money to pay you and well although theorically I will pass all 2010 year in unc I think that I liked your ad proposal of temporary sublet….
oh my name is Fernando like in the abba music (I didn’t like specially abba anyway but I have some hope with cat’s candle (sic??)…
I still in Brazil (i live in florianopolis in the south…) but i’m going in january 1st.

While I’m glad he’s divided that my gay face isn’t a problem, I’m a little turned off by his email address, brasillastud69@aol.com, so I’m going to keep looking. Know anyone who needs a place in or around Carrboro? I’m not nearly as terrible a housemate as you’d guess.

The listing:

Room for rent in two bedroom/one bath condo behind Johnny’s on Main.

Interested? Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Have any attractive, clean, and homeless friends? Pass it on!

krherzog @ gmail

My Virtual Girlfriend passed me an article in some Canadian weekly about the quarter-life crisis, a term you may not have heard before but a feeling you probably get every time you talk to your mom.

You: Great news! I found thirty dollars in a toilet at a bar!
Mom: You’re on birth control, right? God forbid there’s more than one of you in this family.
You: What? It was only pee. I washed it off.

The author basically summed up the last ten months of this blog in a couple of pages. I used to think the “theme” of this blog was, “I’m gay! And I drink.” But this piece lightbulbed that it’s less about climbing cranes and sleeping with your girlfriend and more about how I wish I could take back almost every decision I’ve ever made, like, for instance, putting my cameo on Jerry Springer on my resume.

You know how when you were a kid your teachers were like, “Katie Herzog. You are too smart to be sitting under your desk. And take that paper bag off your head. You could be anything you want to be.” When you heard this, you thought, “Hmm. She thinks I’m smart even though I just said that the capitol of New York is New Jersey. That’ll get me far in the world. Work? Shmurck. I’ll just coast by convincing people that my gray matter is above medium.” Maybe at some point a teacher/parent/parole officer told you that you needed to actually work for success, but by that point, you’d already decided that work is for dummies and poor people.

Remember that test you took in third grade that sent you to the smart person railway? The one that designated you “gifted”? How fucked is telling a bunch of premies that they are gifted, like your neurons were wrapped in Rudolph paper and dropped down the chimney? This is where is all started. You didn’t have to work very hard in school, so you didn’t. Who wouldn’t prefer to get stoned with other privileged slackers and fall asleep on the model mattresses at Bed, Bath, and Beyond rather than develop work ethic and/or life skills?

Everything in life can be attributed to some mistake your parents made (i.e. You have a drinking problem because your parents wouldn’t let you sip wine at dinner.), so you blame them for not making you prepare for adulthood, which is unfortunate because you actually are an adult, albeit one who uses up all the text messages on the family plan. Yes, it’s definitely their fault. You are in the midst of a quarter life crisis because your parents told you that you are smart. But it turns out you’re not. You belong in a trailer park, pit bulls chained to a stake in the ground, clocking third shift and spanking the kids. Your parents should have beat you instead.

But you’re not in a trailer park. You’re drinking an Americano at a coffee shop, standing at a counter instead of sitting down because you think that counts as exercise. You’re listening to the Birthday sex song on the Mac Book you’re grandparents bought you for barely graduating from college. You were born lucky, and yet, you are twenty-six years old and experiencing that kind of crisis who should really wait until your forties to have. It’s not the sports car that you want. Really, you don’t actually know what you want, just that you want something.

You do not know what to do with your life. It’s the paradox of choice: there are too many options and too many things to dismiss. You could have been an archeologist but you don’t look good in khaki. You could have been a doctor but latex gloves remind you of a dental dam. You could have been a child star but the Mickey Mouse Club isn’t interested in little girls with Umbros and a bowl cut who only liked Hansen when you thought they were girls.

Facebook makes it worse. You look at the profiles of friends and acquaintances from your past, back when you had potential, and you judge. Marriage? Babies? Jobs? What happened to you? When did you become your mother? When did you become my mother? They are still paying off the wedding that was mostly attended by their parents’ friends, sure to be divorced and alone and broke in ten years, just like the rest of us. At least, you tell yourself that.

But would it be nice to sleep beside someone you actually love, someone who isn’t grateful for the unspoken agreement that you pretend to be asleep when she leaves, someone you sleep with because you actually want to, not because of some idea that picking people up, getting what you want, if only after tequila shots, makes you somehow desirable, worthy of attention, possible to love?

Or maybe you aren’t like this. Maybe you cook dinner with your partner instead of binging on Velvetta and making elaborate plans to shoplift your way to a new life. Maybe you wake up in the morning and get out of bed because you want to, not because you thought of a clever Facebook status. You might be twenty-six years old and exactly where you should be, on the path luck set you on, content with the choices you’ve made, with the job you have, with the person beside you. Or maybe you are like me, twenty-six years old and still looking for the person or the job or the thing that will save you.

I wish I could say that I just rescued a puppy from a gun-wielding panther or found a large patch of marijuana while trail-skipping, but it’s been kind of slow around here lately. One medium funny thing did happen—I dropped out of grad school. This in itself is not really all that interesting as my life as an aspiring proletariat isn’t much different from my life as an aspiring master. When you own no textbooks, never attend class, and enrolled in school only to be able to say, “I’m in graduate school,” you don’t really feel like a student so much as a creep for only venturing to campus because there’s a lot of shade and the girls are cute. Here’s the medium funny part: you have to write your reason for leaving school on your withdrawal form, and as, in the words of my grandmother, “the dumbest smart person around,” I wrote, “I’m quitting because school makes me want to kill myself.” I turned in the form at five o’clock the Friday before Labor Day, when, presumably, everyone had left for the weekend. I’m guessing that someone glanced at my form on the secretary’s desk and made a phone call or two, because an hour later, the DEAN called me. It’s a strange experience to explain to a college administrator that if anything made you want to bake your brains in the nearest hotbox, it would have to be way more interesting than school.

Now that my formal education has come to an expensive and unsuccessful conclusion, I’m in the job market. I haven’t had much luck, which is surely more the symptom of North Carolina’s 11% unemployment rate than my absolute lack of experience and/or references. I’ve had to get a little creative with the job search, like sending, for instance, the following email to a local roasting house:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

I actually got a response to this, which went something like, You’re funny. Maybe we could talk. Send a resume.

My response:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

Shockingly, I didn’t get a response to this message, so yesterday, I sent the following:

Dear [Redacted]

Love, Katie

Again, no response, and the only person who fully appreciated this, er, cover letter, was my friend Melanie, but she walks her cat on a leash. In Harlem.