TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Happy baker’s dozen birthday, blog!

If you’ve read since the beginning (Hey, Mazog! And Betsy.), you know that this all started because I decided to attempt the Master Cleanse—a ten day hell that includes consuming very little except for laxative tea and nightly cocktail of salt water in an effort to cleanse your body of impurities (i.e. shit out your colon). It seemed like the supposed spiritual clarity that comes with the cleanse would distract me from my stomach eating itself, but I mostly felt waterlogged and bitchy so I quit after thirty-six hours, at which point I drove to a twenty-four hour diner and ate mac ‘n cheese so fast that I burned my esophagus. I kept up the facade as if I were still practicing spiritual anorexia until I was busted with cheese fries and an Americano a few days later.

At that point, I could have ditched the blog, but writing gave me something to do during class and I figured that if I’m going to tell people I’m a writer, I might as well write, so I kept at it. After the aborted cleanse, I wrote mostly about stupid shit I’ve done. I had a lot of those stories to tell. I also started to write about the comings and goings of the neurotransmitters hanging in my gray matter, specifically, my couch-sitting adventures in therapy. A year later, I’m still spending a hour week discussing my problems with a problem expert—and at times, discussing other peoples’ problems because I’ve run out of my own. Therapy has gotten boring, but I’m still into the blog.

So what has changed in the past thirteen months of writing this very Googlable, very public, private diary? Well, I broke up with a job or two, divorced graduate school, spent six months living/drinking on the dole, got the world brunch tattooed on my arm in a failed attempt to permanently secure my place in the middle-class, moved into a new place but forgot to get the electricity hooked up and then sweltered in the dark for four days, danced in a horsehead and corduroy pasties whilst waving a machine gun around and being ridden by fifty-year-old seemingly homeless front man who is actually not homeless but sleeps on a velvet sofa in the basement of a bar called the Mansion. Also, a bunch of the gays moved away and now only a third of my friends are queer, which is weird because I have to explain things like how you can tell a dyke by the length of her fingernails. Also, my other butt cheek moved away, and I flew across the country to meet someone from the Internet (sort of). And that’s about all that’s happened.

Actually, there is one other thing… new pussy! Kidding. But I am now a person with a person—a person with a person I like more than the Monday crossword, which is the only one I can do, and more than my four-poster bed, which is a grown-up tree-house and my favorite place to sleep, and more even than my 1990 Don Mattingly baseball card with a stick of gum still in the pack. But being a person with a person really is different. I’m not so restless right now. I’m happy doing boring stuff with The Cutest Girl Ever even though her feet sometimes feel like she wears socks made of ice and also I sometimes have to roll her on her side because she snores way bigger than one would think possible for such a pretty young thing. This is a good thing and a different thing and maybe a thing I wasn’t ready for a baker’s dozen months ago. So that’s different.

Some highlights from the past year-ish of blogging:

Answering questions you didn’t actually ask

Analyzing your personality/fridge

Co-opting Facebook memes to make myself look smart/kill time while waiting for my unemployment check

Communicating with my family almost entirely through Gchat

Text Message From A Stranger

And, mostly, bitching about not knowing what I want to be when I grow up.

And now I’m going to say something serious. Ready? Thanks for reading this. Not to get all Christmas sweater and menorah, but I’m grateful for everyone who takes time to read my blog when you could be planting virtual trees on your Facebook farm or judging Tiger Woods or writing Twlight fan fiction. The blog has been good for me, if for no other reason than at least it’s not quite as big a lie when I tell people I’m a writer now. It’s sometimes been a pain in the ass, but it’s mostly been a good pain in the ass, like the kind you get from a dude named Hank at a truck stop. So thanks for reading this. It’s a thing.

This year, Thanksgiving is at your house. You thought that your first time hosting a holiday less drink-oriented than Halloween would feel momentous, like buying your first dishwasher or pledging to NPR, but you haven’t actually bought a dishwasher or donated to NPR. Rather, your parents are renovating their kitchen and your brother is with his wife’s family and your sister winters in Des Moines, so your parents come to you. They not only bring the entire contents of their refrigerator—including two heads of past-date lettuce and an unopened jar of mayonnaise—they also bring a full-size charcoal grill and several rolls of toilet paper in case you ran out and were planning on going through the coffee filters first.

Holidays are about getting drunk with people you love either because you want to or because you have to. Over-pouring the Pinot that your parents bought and confessing that it was you who broke the Victrola ten years ago, not the Guatemalan exchange student, is the highlight of any holiday. It is also something you don’t take part in because you don’t drink around your parents. The reason for your familial sobriety is because you made a grand mistake two years ago after your girlfriend found out you cheated on her more than once and more than twice and more even than three times. She was white-washed when she found out, shocked, like the person shared ice cream and washed the dishes with her was a mirage, a stranger, a non-person. You decided then that you are either a fundamentally bad person or an alcoholic. Alcoholism seemed easier to cure than a black soul, so you called your parents in the midst of a metaphysical hangover and told them that you are a drunk, and, not only that, you have been since you were eighteen or maybe twelve or maybe even when you were still a parasite in the mobile home of your mother’s womb.

There are a lot of things you can take back. I no longer love you, I want to move out, Give me back favorite hoodie—who hasn’t said or heard these words? But, I’m an alcoholic is the pinkie swear of confessions, the nickname you can’t seem to shake. And because you never actually stopped drinking, you pretend that you’re comfortably saddled to the wagon around your parents. Your dry liver is an obvious counterfeit when your parents look at your recycling bins when they come up for Thanksgiving, but you attribute the empties to your roommate and they believe you because they want to believe you. The only time your father overtly asks about your drinking is when you’re picking up last minute cranberry sauce at the grocery store and a bartender picking up last minute stuffing yells, Dude! You have to stop walking out on your tab! when he sees you. You tell your dad you drink soda water and eat bar nuts and sometimes forget to pay.

It’s a lie, those glasses of water and handfuls of nuts. You actually spend a lot of time at one bar, your neighborhood bar, an everybody-knows-your-name bar, a bar where wet hounds look up when the door opens, wondering who new people are. Is this sad? Sometimes. Sometimes not. You’ve had exceptionally fun nights at this bar: nights when the shots melt your faceplate and you dance around the pool table and pour beer your head and stumble home, a walk you won’t remember in the morning but you will still wake up happy to be a part of this drunken family. There are also touching moments, like when a rainbow arcs over the sky and everyone walks outside and stands and blinks at the colorful yawn above. Or maybe there’s a hail storm and everyone turns on their stools to look out the windows at the ice splitting windshield and pavement. Despite the occasional monkey barrel nights, however, bar culture is measles for certain aspects of you life, like, for instance, your bank account, which you’ve stopped paying attention to because the daily bar charges make you feel like what you’ve decided that you’re not: an alcoholic.

But can you decide you aren’t an alcoholic? Maybe not. Maybe as soon as those words exit your mouth, they are always and forever true. After your mistaken announcement to your parents, you started thinking about drinking all the time. That is the worst part of thinking you’re an addict: it’s boring. You are always aware of the hour when you would usually go to the bar but are not going to go to the bar, definitely not, unless this coin lands heads up, in which case you will take it as a sign that you should drink. You attended a couple of AA meetings after your mistaken announcement but hearing people talk about booze made you thirsty. Some people say that they aren’t into AA because of the Jesus thing and you agree that putting your problems and fate and your glass in the hands of an invisible man who lives on a cloud pillow makes no sense. Why make yourself feel powerless when getting sober takes power? But you mostly hated the meetings because you didn’t want to be one of the those people. You didn’t want to see yourself in their stories and their sadness and their sobriety. So you kept drinking and if you didn’t drink one night, you woke up elated, not because you were clear-headed and pain-free, but because a sober night deserved a party, and what better way to party than to party?

Recovery programs talk about addiction as a disease, but you know it’s less the flu and more your inability to recognize your own humanness, to recognize that you are a living being who will someday be a dying being and then someday be a non-being, just scattered cells and quiet atoms. This is what addicts don’t accept: their own unshakable death. This surprising considering that they see the symptoms of physical demise when they wake up cloudy and heavy. It’s not just their hands that shake, it’s their brains, a Parksonian tremor that slows after the first fifteen minutes of happy hour and stops when happy hour has past but they’re still at the bar. This is why you don’t drink in front of your parents. You don’t have that tremor but you can’t take it back.

Your Thanksgiving might have been small—just you and your parents, equal parts Perrier and Pinot—and the turkey might have been grilled, but you still said your blessings and recited your thanks. To good friends and good health and good luck. Afterward, you wonder if you will toast with sparkling grape juice at every Thanksgiving. Will you never again get drunk at a family reunion, one aunt passed out in a lawn chair, another dancing a little too sexy, a grandfather lost in his glass? Or will you someday know, really know, that is wasn’t true, that you were never an alcoholic, the tremors were imaginary, that it wasn’t a disease, it was a mistake. Maybe after you buy the dishwasher and donate to NPR, you will be able to tell your parents this, and maybe the next time Thanksgiving is at your house you will hold your glass in your hand, lift it to your mouth, and toast to friends and to health and to luck and to parents who bring their grill and their toilet paper and their belief in you.

I am not so many handticks from thirty years old and my hourly wage is only Canadian pennies more than it was when I worked at Taco Bell a decade ago. My current place of employment isn’t as pastel as the Gap or refried as Applebees or money as Wall Street and I have to wear a headset and pretend that Christmas carols don’t make my inner Jew bristle. It hasn’t actually been that bad so far, although I’ve only worked for five hours and that includes the nap I took during a PowerPoint on how to greet people today. This particular big box bookstore might actually be kind of fun—it’s quintessential stoner work, and even though I’m not a stoner, I like working with them because they make me look smart. Regardless, I’m still looking for someone to blame this employment situation on. I should be entering my last semester of graduate school, studying for comprehensive exams, working on my thesis, and wavering between spending my graduation money on a gold tooth or a power suit. But I’m not sending out CVs or introducing myself as Dr. Herzog in my bathroom mirror just to get used to the feel of the words on my tongue. Nope, instead of entering the professional world, I’m cashiering my way through seasonal employment and wondering if lo mein or pizza is more appropriate for Christmas take-out.

I suppose this job thing is another no-one-to-blame-but-yourself-situation, but I prefer to attribute my minimum wage earnings on my particular blend of nucleic acids. Some people are planners: some of us innately prefer to wait for situations to self-correct, like the rotting banana in your fruit bowl that will decompose and disappear in just seven short years, saving you a trip to the compost pile. As fundamentally as I’m not blond or diabetic or under four feet tall, I’m also not a five-year-plan-planner, or, for that matter, a five-minutes-from-now-planner. If you asked me if I’d like to get dinner at the end of this sentence, I’d be like, “Huh? Why don’t you ask me when I get to the period? I can’t think that far ahead.” This obviously flawed practice has infiltrated all parts of my decision-making process. You want to see if I can fit inside that mailbox even though I’m supposed to be on the bus in forty-five seconds? Sure! Forty-five seconds or an hour? It’s all the future!

There is one part of my life, however, that is immune from this type of juvenile thinking: I have been preparing for disaster my entire life, be it nuclear winter, vegan jihad, a neighborhood takeover by Steve the Mailman. I can barely get through the morning without peeing on myself because by the time I’ve realized that my bladder is full it’s already empty, but I am ready for far-reaching disasters, especially the ones that will probably never occur in my lifetime and/or zip code. When I’m in a particularly stressful yoga pose, for instance, I don’t try to achieve a state of meditation or mindfulness; I think about how much better shape I’ll be in than the other detainees at Gitmo. When I bathe, I ask whoever I’m living with to hold my head under water so I’ll be ready in case of a water-boarding party. No matter how much I struggle, I say, Don’t let me up. I need this. I know this is crazy. I’ve never thought that burning every employment bridge I’ve had might be problematic for my long term ability to have a cell phone and/or health insurance, and now I have all the earning power of a seven-year-old Cambodia with missing pinkies. And yet, I’ve been mentally preparing for disease and disaster since I was a child. As a five-year-old, when my twin sister asked for Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls for Christmas, I wanted a fire extinguisher and a hacksaw. Other kids wanted to swing, I wanted to learn CPR. While most of friends would rather watch indie films that not only challenge your cultural assumptions but also make you look intelligent, I prefer to watch Bruce Willis and take notes while he dismantles bombs.

I can’t plan a dinner party, but I have disaster contingency plans locked in a fireproof safe. I like to think this is the mark of the truly pragmatic, but it might be less about survival and more about anxiety. When I lived in Portland, what started as slight and totally reasonable fear that any bridge I was on was about to wave like a homecoming queen on the back of a convertible and flip my unprepared ass into the water below turned into full-blown panics attack anytime I saw an elevated roadway. If I spotted a ten-foot-high dam in the distance, I would pull the car over and stick my head between my knees and hyperventilate until my girlfriend agreed to switch seats with me so I’d stop getting snot on the upholstery. The bridge anxiety abated with cognitive behavioral therapy and a prescription for Valium, but when I stopped stressing about bridge collapse, I became paranoid about earthquakes and other natural disasters. Over dinner, I made my girlfriend recite our plan in case of the second coming. We’ll meet under the Burnside Bridge. But what if the river is flooding over the bridges? Shit. Once I realized that there was no way to plan a meeting spot without knowing what the nature of the disaster would be, I bought us matching Walkie Talkies, insisting that even if they seemed impractical, this simple technology would be our salvation when the phone lines went out.

This fear lives inside me like a blood-borne illness but the symptoms come and go in waves. Living in a small North Carolina town has greatly reduced my fear of terrorist attack, volcanic eruption, and killer bees. Because it’s almost impossible to be afraid when you live in a town where the most terrifying sight is a group of moms hula-hooping on the co-op lawn to a high school jam band, it’s cancer that has replaced natural disaster in the dark hole of my mind. I see it everywhere. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a healthy young woman who rarely gets sick even when those around cough and wheeze, I see disease. On nights when everyone else is playing bingo or working late, I put on the bald cap I bought for my Howie Mandel costume a few years ago and stare at myself in the mirror, preparing for the day when it’s not a five dollar piece of latex that I’ll see but my actual bald head, soft and vulnerable and slightly flat from not being held enough as a child. I cover my eyebrows in concealer and suck in my cheeks. Better get used to it, I think. I look at my face and wonder if my friends will buy Livestrong bracelets and wear pink ribbons, if anyone will offer to shave their head in solidarity, a gesture I will appreciate while insisting that there’s no reason to cut that beautiful hair. I think about the ways I’ll have to change my lifestyle. Might as well buy some heavy sweaters and take up a comforting hobby; give up coffee now so I don’t have to deal with caffeine headaches on top of chemo. There goes the occasional cigarette and hamburger.

Worrying about myself, about my own disease and dismemberment and death, is far easier than worrying about other peoples’. When you love someone, the world is beautiful and terrifying at once. This is the world that made the person you love, that brought her into your space and you into hers. But it is also that world that could swallow her as easily and thoughtlessly as a piece of dust floating in the wind. With enough preparation, I can survive it all—lymphoma, nuclear wind, meteors falling from space and crushing everything but my underground bunker. I will survive just fine, my concrete walls intact, my air filtered, my water supply clear, alive and glad to have spent the energy I could have used finishing school or finding work on more practical things like stockpiling food and Geiger counters. But if she doesn’t show up at our meeting place, if the Walk Talkie doesn’t beep, if I never know what happens, I will wish for the poison to drift through a crack in my bunker, causing my skin to slough off like sheets of filo dough and my eyes to turned upward and inward before falling out and rolling across the sterile floor. I will wish that I had let the cancer take me instead of fighting to survive because there is no survival without her, without you, without the people who will hold ice cubes to my lips when the radiation that will save me feels like it is killing me; the people who will say that I look better even though I will see their fear as clearly as the hair falling from my scalp; the people who make me want to live when breathing itself hurts. There is no contingency for this, no plan b, no mental preparation, just the hope that if it does happen, if she dies with the rest, I won’t be far behind, wishing that I hadn’t fought so hard, that I let the cancer take me when it could have, knowing that this final wish is the most selfish: that she, that all of you, would have outlasted me, that you would have to mourn my death so that I wouldn’t have to mourn yours; wishing that I had spent my time planning for the future that approaches rather than the one that ends it all.

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!

———-

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-poster 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, maybe even a new person to fall in love with after a courtship in which I would send her envelopes filled with ocean pebbles and lavender petals even though mailing rocks is kind of expensive. 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. 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. But my other butt cheek is moving there, to San Francisco, to the land of rainbows and rainbow flags, 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, ask if 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 at sixteen when my twin sister 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 make this cut, but not all. There were twins in my college who did not. They dressed alike. 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 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 goodbye 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 even were 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.

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 cans of tuna and 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 in the years before, 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 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, 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 met, 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. We left the windows open while we unpacked her bags and met her roommate, and the back of the car was soaking wet, buckets-of-water-on-the-seats-wet, when it was time to leave, so I folded the seats down and lay on the back of them and covered my face with a sopping sweater and cried the five hours home, so sad and so embarrassed to be so sad. This will happen again tomorrow when I drop my other butt cheek off at the airport. 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 we will adopt from an undecided 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 that their daughter likes to put her 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 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, but 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 may rarely have kissed boys, but we talked about them the same way all teenage girls do. Turns out we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to be who we are.

I made out with boys for a while in college, but 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 holding hands with a boy! But then I met A—, and, along with making me crazy, she made me gay.

My friends at school were unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally flapless. I was the only girl in Little League. 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 laps 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 you not only have sex, you have the kind of sex that won’t give them grandkids no matter how hard you try. Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after A— 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 and got prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers and stayed at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowed her car the next day 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 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, fated to a Christmas alone with afternoon movies and Chinese takeout.

It was a hard weekend. A— and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. When she was in bathroom I waited 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 soon have to have with my mom, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother, a conversation A— also hadn’t had with her mother yet, a conversation that would make everything real. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I at was also a conversation that had to happen. 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 A—, 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 A— and I interacted with each other. I had taken A— 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.), 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 numbed by bag of frozen peas 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 embracing 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 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 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 an forever nap in a refrigerator box. This lasted for the duration of our relationship.

The strangest part of the girlfriend/girlfriend menstrual cycle when I was with A— 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 A— 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, A— 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 A—, 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 to a change in anatomy, 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.

A— 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 A— 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 because their was nothing terrible about my her blood or mine.

When A— and I broke up a few years later, she sent a box of leftovers 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 kept us apart. Among the refuse was something I hadn’t seen before—a poem she had written. I remember a line from the poem, 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, “ontology” 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 here, but it seems smaller, 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 also how living here feels sometimes—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, Oregon, where I was completely anonymous. I was every other early twenties gayelle, holding hands and working at coffee shops and riding bikes and reading in bars when there was no one to talk to. 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 Portland, 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. So I like Carrboro. I like our fantasies and I like our fun and I like our nights that are like no other nights and 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 jobs 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.