Like A Kid on Christmas Eve

The Anticipation is Killing Me

 

My brother is twenty-one years old. He’s the youngest. And he was always the one to wake up first on Christmas morning. Six or seven a.m, our mom having been up until maybe only four hours prior playing Santa. The rule was no opening presents until the coffee was ready.

Of course I was always thrilled when Fletcher, my brother, would pad into the room my sister and I shared, launching the conspiracy of how best to rouse Mom and start the festivities. I myself had probably barely slept, so rapt with excitement about the day to come. I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, I never have. The only times I can’t sleep are when I’m a) sick or b) sick with anticipation.

December always felt like the longest month of the year. I remember counting down the weeks, days, hours, being so keyed up on Christmas Eve that I would have to calm myself with assurances about the inevitability of the passage of time. “Even if you just sat here and did nothing, eventually tomorrow would come.” And every year, the clock would turn, I would eventually shut my eyes, and like hitting fast forward, when I opened them it would be Christmas, and Fletcher would be bopping around trying to get us to come peek at the tree.

For my mother I realize now, it was the opposite. It takes a lot of work to give your three kids the most special day of the year. For her, Christmas morning probably felt like a deadline approaching with meteoric velocity.

Let me just say that, for our family, Christmas was huge. The traditions stretched out over a four-day period. Christmas Day was a three-venue affair. Each detail had been honed into a ritual to be followed with near-spiritual devotion.

Plus, it’s my birthday. 12/25/87, 5:32 p.m. They gave me a red and green striped hat at the hospital.

That might be why I couldn’t sleep the night before: this was it. My day. My one day. For the whole year. Jesus Christ, it had better be good.

Last year was the first time Fletcher didn’t wake up first. I think my sister and I actually had to drag him out of bed. Everyone was equally enthusiastic about coffee, not just Mom. Fletcher’s in college, perhaps exhaustion outweighs anticipation. Maybe things just aren’t quite as exciting anymore.

Or at least, maybe Christmas isn’t. I’ve started to feel the same pressure my mother does, the preparatory scrambling. Like most adults, I no longer will the hours to fly by as I count down to being a year older. December twenty-fifth just isn’t that thing that I want to fast forward to anymore.

But the fast-forward impulse is still very much there. I constantly yearn to up the pace on every aspect of my life. Waiting to move forward with a project has become one of the more excruciating experiences I know. I meet someone I like and want to know every single thing about them, instantly. When I’m at rehearsal for a play, I’m thinking about band practice. When I’m at band practice, my mind is on going out after. When we’re out, I’m back to thinking about texting some boy, probably so that I can find out everything about him faster.

Is it an attention-span thing? It’s true, I get sick of the projects, often before they can progress to their truest form. I send off scripts before they’re ready. I play people demos of tracks before they even sound like music. I get bored with the guys, maybe because I didn’t actually want to know as much about them as I thought I did. 

It’s no coincidence that I work in restaurants— if nothing is happening on one table, I go check on another, and then another, in a constant rotation of activity.  

Someone who knows me pretty well told me my main problem is that I’m impatient. That I just need to stay out of my own way while things develop. But I think it’s more than that— if something is interesting to me, I want all of it at once.  

It’s sort of a binge thing. I’ll listen to the same song on repeat for an hour, every day for weeks. Then I’ll never listen to it again. Wouldn’t it be better to maybe let a little anticipation build? To continue to enjoy the song at a more moderate level for months or perhaps even years? Is it possible that I would actually come to love the song more, under such circumstances?

But my brain is always always always always going. It’s like a little kid that I need to keep constantly entertained. Otherwise these weird little fingers of doubt with long dirty fingernails creep up around the back and start to pick apart everything I’ve ever said or done or made or dreamed. So if what I want to hear is that song, I won't stop thinking about it. I'll just put it on repeat until I've gotten my fix.

I’ve started having mini panic attacks when the subway stops moving between stations. I freak out when people don’t walk on escalators. Recently I had an acting gig where all I had to do was lie there— literally, just lie there, for hours. It was the most challenging role of my life.    

Thich Nhat Hanh writes about the man who peels and eats a whole orange without realizing what it tastes like. His mind is working, but he’s not thinking about what he’s doing. I have really not been tasting the oranges lately.

The thing about Christmas is that once it’s over, it’s over. And then you have to wait a whole year to get so excited you can’t sleep again. At a certain point I realized that those hours I was wishing away were actually pretty sweet. The anticipation— that was the good part. Same thing goes for the time between an audition and when the casting is announced. Those are the days when you actually get to picture yourself in the role. Or when you start seeing someone you like, and you’re half daydreaming about them but half agonizing over whether or not you’re actually going to go out with them again. The “if” that accompanies the “when” is what makes it so sparkly.

And what wouldn’t you do to return to those days when you weren’t sure whether or not Jimmy even liked you back? Especially given that, after it turned out that Jimmy definitely did like you back, it also turned out that he was kind of a jerk who would break your heart six months later and who never did the dishes. You’d give anything to go back to the sweetness of waiting for the phone to ring.

So what I’d like to do is learn to appreciate the fun parts more. I want to slow my brain enough that I can get stoked on the early phases. The possibility. The unopened presents. And maybe take a little more time with my creative processes. Perhaps take the time to get to know people as part of an organic process, as opposed to binge-dating and burning out. Maybe not beat myself up too much for still having a service industry job as I embark on my twenty-sixth year.

Because this is the fun part. Being a kid on Christmas Eve is the best! Maybe we can get up early bop around with excitement, like Fletcher used to, and actually just have a good time doing it. This year I’m infusing olive oil as a Christmas gift for my family. It’s taking weeks, but it’s totally going to be worth the wait.

Narrative Structure

Confessions of a Compulsive Chronicler

 

For my fifth birthday, my parents gave me a puppet theater. Before ceding the stage to my malleable marionettes, I was compelled to step between the curtains myself. A home movie shows gap-toothed me posing for the camera, framed by yellow fabric and a sign reading "Theatre".

I've always kept records. A recent excavation of my room from high school (which also contained box upon box of unexplored relics from middle, even elementary school) uncovered countless notebooks, binders, and photo albums.

Some were diaries, others were academic, but clearly preserved less for their educational content than the epic exchanges of gossip and confessions in the margins-- some in my hand, some not. One contained no writing directly on the page, but instead served as a sort of covered corkboard onto which I had pinned dozens of letters. What's more, this notebook featured an index cataloging the dates, players, even providing context. A black nylon trapper keeper labeled in blue white-out pen turned out to be a treasure trove of meticulously printed and three-hole-punched AOL Instant Messenger conversations, alternating red and blue text, rife with exclamation points. Again, I found a preface complete with dramatis personae, dates, and a summary to set the scene.

I can't have been older than twelve when I assembled these.

Some conversations were printed more than once-- I found them in the binder, then again tucked into a stray global studies notebook. I must have copy and pasted them into emails and saved them. Probably so that I could read them over and over again, even thirteen years later. Indeed, I found myself not needing to read more than a few lines into some of the most coveted chats and letters, because I remember. I remember the accusation of too quick a turn-around after a "breakup", or the cold sweat of hearing some rumor about myself, recounted by a "friend" over the internet.

I especially remember the tactics: walking the line of true and inflammatory, looking for a rise, backing off full of defenses and apologies once the desired reaction and slew of exclamations points ensued. Picking fights. Fights I could win. Asking questions I already knew the answers to.

Maybe it was less that I didn't need to read the conversations, and more that I didn't want to. Maybe twelve-year-old me was more familiar than twenty-five year old me would like her to be.

I'm still pulling the same shit. Sure, I'm better at it, but it's the same. The same hard-to- detect manipulative tendencies. The same admissions of "wrong" that are part and parcel to an absolute need to be right. The same regard for drama as sustenance. For me, upheaval has always been a life force.

Talking to my roommate (and best friend of eight years) about some fall-out from a recent break-up, he looked me in the eye and said, "You know sometimes I can't tell if you hate this stuff, or if you live for it."

But the question remains-- did I chronicle all of those letters and conversations in anticipation of the nostalgia that would agitate my future soul? Or was it for someone else? If I was going to look back on these things (not-so) fondly, couldn't I have just put them in a shoebox, like so many ticket stubs from Paris? These documents bear the distinct trace of an archivist's hand. I doubt that I would have been so naive as to assume it would be for posterity. After all, I always wanted to be the architect of the story. Let us not forget, it was a puppet theater my parents gave me. One in which I was to be both co-performer and director. And of course, story-teller. I preserved these pages for myself-- I was offering future me material.

Let's take a minute to acknowledge that this is posted on a blog that I keep about my own life. Moving on....

Little did I know how pertinent the exploits of yester-me would remain. The pages I found from high school are works of fiction, mainly short stories and plays, some poetry, a couple of short films. The script for one particularly embarrassing video-art project involves a girl and her (shaking, hollow) animated alter-ego. The girl keeps talking about how OK everything is in the wake of some unspecified event, and how it's "sucks" but she's "fine". The animated alter-ego interjects with quickly cut-off emotional outbursts about being not fine.

My senior year of high school, we were assigned the task of writing a letter to our future selves, with the promise that our teachers would mail the letter to us in four years’ time. Amongst the love notes from middle school, the letters tucked into yearbooks, and the angsty short stories was this letter from my 2005 self. “Things are going swimmingly,” she says, “they’d be better if…” a slew of revisions to my then-life ensued. “I have no idea where you’ll be later,” former me says in closing. “In the city maybe. Writing, hopefully, or doing something at which you excel and basically I just want you to be happy. Assignment complete.”

The letter is awash in cynicism, tempered by a lot of forcedly-optimistic back pedaling: “You have more work than you should and less free time than you need but summer holds a lot of promise. Graduation is exciting and prom is even better.” I seemed to have a deep aversion to admitting that I was any less than in control, at least emotionally.

The most recent script I've written is about a young woman on the day her boyfriend breaks up with her. Most of the scenes end with her friends saying things like "You'll be fine. You're always fine." The end is someone telling her "You know it's OK that you're not OK, right?" A script I wrote last year ends with a character (based on my roommate) solving months worth of failure to communicate with the line "You know what? I'm not fine. I'm angry. And I'm really fucking sad."

And I thought I was creative.

Evidently there is nothing new under my sun. Not even the notion that I would be trading in memoir. Maybe I needed to keep track of all of these documents so that I could come to understand the only character I seem capable of writing: myself.

It’s like the recently-viral website that generates facebook statuses based on things you’ve already written. Everybody likes to see an analysis of who they’ve been. It’s almost like someone is paying enough attention to offer insight, even if it’s just a robot.

But can that sort of self-indulgent excavation help us become better people? I thought that I had grown in so many ways. I've been patting myself on the back for all of these steps in the last few years: Becoming less judgmental, less uptight, getting out of a toxic relationship, taking charge of my career. Cleaning out my bedroom from high school. And then I realize that I'm still up to my old tricks. Maybe what the robot does is force us to confront our habits. You are what you habitually post on the internet?

Recently a gig took me to LA for one night. They needed to make a life-cast of my body for special effects on a TV show that I'll be shooting this month. There is now a silicon mold of my entire body and head. There will soon be another me. A replicant. Twelve year old me would have had it made purely as a reference.

Anyway I called J, my boyfriend from high school, you can read about him in "We Go Way Back". He lives in LA, and who can resist the "I'm in town for one night" card? So as my fifth grade crush, my prom date, who I reunited with nine months ago after eight years apart, stood next to me on a mountaintop overlooking LA and the dying sunset, he said "at least this makes a good story, right?". And I thought quite simply, don't fucking tempt me.

That night we had dinner with J’s roommate, who described the arc of our friendship as an hourglass. I couldn’t help but appreciate the metaphor.

I care about J. I always have. What our relationship will be, I don't know. What I do know is that some sort of life-long overwhelming devotion to the narrative could in this case prove blinding. If J and me are going to be part of each others’ lives, we have to just be us. It's not some fairy tale. It's not that simple.

This poor guy has already been subjected to me writing an epic essay about him. I also vaguely based a short film on our interaction last January. When you see someone sporadically, it’s easy for them to become more myth than muse, and perhaps more muse than man. Or at least, things get blurry.

Driving down from the mountain, J and I talked about lessons. We talked about learning and changing and growing. We talked about how you can say the things you need to say because you know you're supposed to say them, and how it can mean nothing, it's just going through the motions. It's rote. It's sex with someone you don't care about. Maybe if in my letter, I convinced future me how excited past me had been about prom and graduation, then I would somehow be insuring my future happiness.

We also talked about not buying into your own bullshit. How humans have issues and that's not an excuse. We discussed processes for dealing with our own faults, even if they don’t work a hundred percent of the time. It's progress. It's learning, kid, we're all just learning.

What I am learning is that nostalgia has its place—in this case, a trip down memory lane showed me just how far I have to go. If I’ve been frustrated by the same things since I was a teenager, maybe it’s time to let those things go. And if the characters I write when I’m in my twenties continue to have so much in common with the characters I created when I was in high school… well, that would make me a pretty boring writer.

I'm always going to want there to be a story, and I'm always going to appreciate that the role J has played in my story. But I have to cut the impulse to act in the interest of serving the narrative. It’s hard for me, because this is who I’ve always been: a compulsive chronicler. It turns out that my identity is wrapped up in… well, my identity. And believe me, the snake-eating-its-tail nature of writing about this at all is in no way lost on me. But I think it’s about time I learned that, while life events can lead to movies, one cannot live a movie.

I've Heard So Much About You

Muskit

We all know what it’s like to smell our best. Not to smell the best, but to smell our best. Our own, personal best. Like our true selves.

It’s not when you get out of the shower, where you’ve been using overpowering tea-tree oil shampoo, chemicals to burn the bacteria from your face, and Dr. Bronner’s that leaves you smelling, well, like everyone else who uses Dr. Bronner’s.

You smell your best when you smell like you. Maybe that’s when you get up in the morning. Maybe you were out drinking the night before. After you got off your shift in a restaurant with a wood-burning oven. Maybe you smoked some cigarettes. Maybe you then went and got tacos at a place that also serves fried food. Maybe that’s a little salsa roja in your hair. Maybe you then broke a sweat biking home. Maybe this is the third day in row that you’ve executed those exact same activities, without showering.

And that’s it. You are what you do. And you should smell like who you are.

But we all know those days, those days when your natural state just isn’t going to be appropriate. Maybe you have a job interview for a position with a salary… oh wait, those are extinct. It’s a freelance gig. But still, you might want to wash your hair, and un-wrinkle your slacks by hanging them in the bathroom while you run the shower on hot with the door closed.

Perhaps you have a date with that babe you met at your favorite late-night ramen joint, and you’re worried that if she runs her fingers through your hair and it looks like she manhandled the scallion pancakes, she might not wind up back at your place.

So you shower. And now you smell like Dr. Bronner’s and your roommate’s conditioner. How are you going to show your prospective employer or your foxy date who you really are? How are they going to smell it?

Never fear-- now there’s Muskit: For when you just can’t not shower.

Muskit is a highly un-scientific formula of all of the things that make sexy, cool, unclean humans smell just that: unclean, yet somehow sexy and cool. Each scent is based on our own trademarked “musk” scent… we can’t tell you what’s in it, but we’ll give you one clue: beard.

Start with basic Muskit, or try one of our unique blends:

• Tobacco and Cholula

• Flannel, whisky, and salt

• Garlic and yoga mat

• Umami Margarita

• Vodka, cherry chapstick, and mascara

• Sweaty sheets, bonfire and… is that urine? Probably not….

And be sure to check out our seasonal blend, temporally titled “Last Night”.

With Muskit, smell like the you that you’re supposed to be. Or at least the you that you were yesterday.

Alterations

It’s hard to find a cute bag that you can bike with. One that can hold the innumerable items that you require for your day, stay on while you ride, plus an accessible pocket for you bike lock (the frame attachment for my kryptonite lock remains on a Schwinn that was stolen from me years ago, goddammit). You need a bag that can still look reasonable when you go into a bar and have to stand without access to below-bar hooks. Or not take up a ton of space when you’re squeezed into that middle two-top on a date. One that can fit neatly under your seat at an off-off-off show down-down-downtown where your knees are already up against the back of someone else’s seat (OK, let’s admit it, you’re still in a bar, they’re just doing theater there that night).

But I found one! It’s perfect. It’s this weird faded black leather that still goes with gray or brown. The strap has a zipper down the middle so it can be worn across the shoulder, or as a backpack, or as a more traditional purse. The main pocket has zippers on either side, plus two smaller pockets, and then a large pocket on the back that is perfect to slide my lock into. I can fit my wallet, my makeup bag, the other little bag that I use for lipstick/makeup removing wipes/jewelry, my pencil case, my notebook, plus maybe a dress and some bike shorts, my bike lights, and my keys!

I got it for $15 at pretty good vintage store. When I bought it, one of the hooks that clipped a strap to a metal fastening was not entirely functional, but I quickly repaired that with a small key ring from the hardware store. It doesn’t even look weird.

So my bag and I biked, dined, and drank in perfect harmony for several months. I realized that the interior cavity was not actually separated from the two smaller pockets inside (which were also not separated from each other), but I turned the whole thing inside out and stitched that right up. My attempts at organization would not be thwarted!

Unfortunately I think maybe the makeup bag, other bag that I use for my lipstick/makeup removing wipes/jewelry, pencil case, notebook, dress, shorts, bike lights, and keys were maybe a little too much for the little bag. I mean, they all fit in there, no problem, but if I happened to carelessly put a too-bulky lip balm in the front pocket, the zipper would split open. Same for the secondary pocket. I could get the zipper back together after much back-and-forthing, but the fact is, without a more robust closure, this bag was just not going to hold what I wanted it to.

I had even made the mistake of putting a few items into one of the smaller pockets willy-nilly, i.e. not just putting them into one of my other little bags that I keep in my bag. Sure enough I got to work, the exterior zipper had split, and my favorite necklace was nowhere to be found. Catastrophe.

But I loved the bag! So I decided to see what could be done. I took it to a shoe/bag/leather repair guy. I asked him to please replace the zippers, repair the strap that was threatening to break (probably because of the weight of my bike lock…), and to also please sew up the interior pocket that I had neglected.

He looked over the bag. Turned it inside out. Looked at my seam work on the other two pockets. Said I had done a pretty god job. Checked out the zippers. Said no problem, $65. I said what if we leave off the interior seam? He said sure, no problem, you can take care of that yourself. $50.

I know this seems like a lot for repairs— $50 to replace two zippers and repair one strap.

But honestly, this bag had already proved itself as ideal. It was just a little wanting in the mechanics department. And I’d only paid $15 for it in the first place—for a leather, lined bag. So is $65 worth the bag that you really want, that you already know perfectly suits your lifestyle?

I said yes.

A few weeks later, boyfriend and I had a wedding on the books. It was going to be a bunch of his old friends. Some I’d met, some I hadn’t, but I wanted to make a good impression. Plus my wedding-attending days are just beginning, so each one is basically a very exciting chance for me to get dressed up (read: play grown-up).

It was going to be a pretty casual wedding, from what I understood. Additionally, I was going to be arriving directly from a trip to France. So if whatever I wore to the wedding were be something I could already justify having in my suitcase because I would wear it elsewhere on my trip… well, that would just be awesome. I was imagining a glorified sundress.

So the search began. I tried to borrow things from friends… there were options, but nothing quite right. Many sundresses felt too flimsy, many things that were too formal felt… well, too formal. Finally three days before I was set to leave for my trip I stopped into a vintage store across from where I do my laundry.

I’ve gotten some other great things from this store—the woman who runs it does an amazing job with selecting what she puts on her racks, I’m pretty sure she hand repairs everything herself. When something has a tag that says “as is”, usually I won’t even notice the issue, and she’ll just say “Oh yeah, there’s this stain here that I couldn’t get out all way…”. She knows. Because she handles every single piece herself.

So I tried on a dress at her shop because it was this amazing print—floral, I love boldly colored florals, this one was almost fauve-esque— and sort of water-color in style. I of course got the zipper stuck part way up because obviously I don’t have a way with delicate zippers, and rather than make it worse I figured I’d just come out of the dressing room and have her fix it.

She got the zipper unstuck—“Don’t worry, I’m pretty good with these things”—and then immediately said “That would be great on you, you’d have to get it altered.”

This woman didn’t try to sell me on anything, she acknowledged right away that the dress would need some work if it was going to “work” for me. And I loved that. She recognized a fixer-upper. She proceeded to show me how, because it’s a well-made dress from the sixties, there were several seams that could be taken in in order to achieve a precise fit. Fortunately the dress was too big, so we had material to work with.

I brought it to a tailor closer to my apartment who had done another (much simpler) job for me on short notice a few months prior. I showed him all the seams I wanted to have taken in, and eventually decided to have the whole thing made a little shorter as well.

I wore the dress out to drinks and dinner in France. Annika! Where did you get that dress?

At the wedding, Boyfriend’s very style-conscious friend told me that it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and that it looked like it was made for me. “Well, I had it altered,” I said. “Ah, you had it joojed,” she said. “Very good.”

Sometimes, the perfect thing isn’t perfect when we meet it. I’m not saying that every challenging item is worth our investment and sacrifice, but not everything worth caring about is going to be ideal on first sight.

That’s not to say that our vision for something, or rather, the alterations that we would prescribe, are correct. It has to be a balance, honoring the original integrity of the piece. I mean, that’s why you liked it in the first place.

But sometimes it’s worth the time. Not just throwing out those pants because you’ve stepped on the hem too many times or worn a hole in the crotch. Not saying no to a second date just because he wore ugly shoes the first time you went out. Not deleting the entire draft of the play you’ve been writing for months because you can’t fix that one scene in the third act.

I guess the point is, if you really care about something, it probably merits some effort. And if “growing up” means thinking about things like… you know, the future, then maybe it’s time to acknowledge that some things are worth keeping around.

This is My Girlfriend and I'm Completely in Love With Her

When Hipsters Fall in Love 

 

A few months ago I was in a loud, crowded bar with some friends from college. One of these guys, D, could probably be considered a hipster by most standards. He has a cool haircut and like, a mustache. So I guess that counts. He was with his girlfriend, who has enough 90’s style going on to also come off as pretty hip. They sat close to each other at the bar as we all caught up with our friend who was in from out of town.

It’s worth noting that the venue was sort of a hipster watering hole. I can’t for the life of me figure out if the signature frozen cocktails thing is supposed to be ironic or not, and that stresses me out a little. Choosing not to advertise that the burger is grass fed definitely feels like “the next thing” to me.

We were all shouting over the music, I was characteristically flirting with the bartender. Now, as someone who works in the service industry, when the bar is three deep, I never ask for anything with more than two ingredients. Three, if you count ice. And definitely nothing that requires stirring or muddling or blending. My usual shift drink is “bourbon in a cup”. I’m in the know.

Of course, D’s girlfriend ordered a piña colada. I was mortified. The bartender didn’t miss a beat, retreating to his post at the blender. I wasn’t sure if she had ordered it ironically or not, either option was sort of embarrassing. Because piña coladas aren’t just a pain in the ass to make, they’re also inherently lame. After a few moments and a lot of noise, she had a giant tulip glass with a cherry on top. I looked down at my whisky soda and felt like a pro.

“I don’t care, I love piña coladas,” she shouted at the top of her lungs, “I think they’re amazing!” I was shocked by her enthusiasm. Next, D turned toward me and yelled “This is my girlfriend, and I’m completely in love with her.”

It felt like it had been a lifetime since I’d heard anybody say anything so… straightforward. This is my girlfriend. This woman. This woman is my girlfriend. Not “this girl I’m hooking up with” or “someone I’m seeing” or “my… friend”. My girlfriend.

My last boyfriend probably referred to me as his girlfriend… once. In a year and a half. I think we’d been seeing each other for about three months when I told him I loved him. He didn’t tell me he loved me until about six months after that. And he hated PDA. We’d walk down the street and I would fantasize about him reaching out and taking my hand, or putting his arm around me. It never happened.

So the words “This is my girlfriend and I’m completely in love with her”… yeah, that was a lot.  But it wasn’t just about my ex. All of that distance, the not talking about feelings and not holding hands and not embracing titles… it somehow felt normal to me. Or like something that should be normal. We were the hipsters. We had a hipster relationship. And as a recent transplant, I’m sure on some level the whole thing felt very “Brooklyn” to me.

It also felt “adult”. Oh, we don’t need titles, we know how we feel about each other (of course, we didn’t). And “girlfriend”… what a juvenile term. No no, we’re just two humans floating along here, if our courses happen to run parallel for awhile, so be it. After all, “girlfriends” become fiancées, and fiancées become wives. And really, who does that? Marriage? Children? Plans? How passé."Yeah... I'll just text you later."

I didn’t think that we were inventing this model of relationship. After all, in college it seemed like everyone was just sort of “hooking up”. And isn’t life in Brooklyn just like college, minus the books?

The thing is, I wanted to be a girlfriend. And I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to call him my boyfriend so badly. In acting classes you talk about your “cap”—how your character knows she’s gotten what she wants. My cap would have been him looking me in the eye and saying: “Annika, you’re my girl, and I love you.”

How could I possibly admit that? That’s so uncool. I can’t be one of those “girls” that “wants” a “boyfriend”. It’s undignified. It’s old fashioned. So direct. So romantic. So lame.

And after all, the crux of the hipster identity is an eschewal of all things direct. Nothing too one-on, always through a haze of smoke and in quotes. You can’t actually just like a piña colada. They have to be funny. You can’t simply think they’re “amazing” and enjoy them. And you can’t just go around telling people that you love your girlfriend! Am I right?

But I thought it was… beautiful. Am I allowed to use that word? It was beautiful. I was… moved. Yikes. Feeling… feelings…. Not cool. Suddenly I wanted to go to the beach and drink piña coladas and fall in love and listen to the Beatles. All the things that normal people do. Obvious things. This is my life and I enjoy it. This is my family and they are important to me. This is my girlfriend and I am completely in love with her.

As the weeks went by I felt a cynicism that had become embedded in my psyche start to work its way out. D and his girlfriend are younger than I am, but I felt no obligation to discount their love, in spite of my own recent relationship difficulties. I adored seeing them together. And not like they were pets, or something. Not because it was cute. On the contrary, it was inspirational. The springtime PDA on the streets of Brooklyn started to feel like an array of exotic birds. I saw these souls as brave, their birdsong ringing something like “It can be cool to be in love. Or maybe it’s not cool, we actually couldn’t care less.” The oppression of winter had lifted, and people could help but celebrate by touching each other.

Love isn’t needing to be touched. It’s not a girlish fantasy about someone holding your hand. It’s a force that courses through you so vigorously, you can’t help but extend to other people.

A week later I sat in the living room of that bartender’s apartment, the one who had so chipperly made D’s girlfriend a piña colada. He played me a song on the acoustic guitar and he sang. He told me he was a hopeless romantic. I know that you’re rolling your eyes. Six months ago, I too would have cringed at the concept of the whole scene. You know what? It was fine. It was fun. And that’s OK.

Because I don’t need to be cool. And I don’t need to “act” “grownup”. You know what’s grown up? Neither do I, obviously. But I have an inkling that it might have something to do with acknowledging what you want, and being realistic in how you go about making yourself happy.

Last week it was late and I was sitting at the bar at the hipster watering hole, waiting for that same bartender to finish his shift so that we could leave together. He was engaged in a conversation with some guys who were pretty certain they were right about whatever it was they were saying. I sat there idly playing with a cherry, eventually tying the knot in a stem in my mouth. I handed my bartender friend the fruits of my labor, and he laughed.

“Can I just interrupt you guys for one second?” He cut off their discussion, holding up the knotted cherry stem. “Do you guys see this? This woman is my girlfriend, and I am completely in love with her.”

POTENTIALISM: A Warning

This notice is a warning about POTENTIALISM, a dangerous affliction that may affect you or someone you know.

Potentialism can be defined as the compulsion to mentally carrying out small opportunities—or “seeds”— to a farfetched and perhaps illogical conclusion. Those afflicted by potentialism, or POTENTIALISTS as we will call them, have an acute tendency to imagine the most extreme results of all experiences in life.

To the potentialist, business cards become careers. Dresses in catalogs become killer, attention-garnering outfits. Coffee shop flirtations become dates, dates become boyfriends, and boyfriends become husbands. Auditions become Oscar nominations (and obviously, Oscar nominations become Oscar awards, though this would not be considered symptomatic of potentialism because naturally, anybody nominated for an Oscar would entertain the possibility that they might win).

What characterizes the mental condition of the potentialist is an overdeveloped capacity to form thought-bridges between seemingly improbable events. They are frogs who, given one lily pad, imagine themselves in a whole sea of lily pads, and with the stamina to leap to each and every one, until they find themselves on the ultimate, most extreme and covetable lily pad.

These are sick frogs.

In colloquial terms, potentialists are sometimes referred to as “dreamers” or “idealists”. These individuals are prone to long hours of daydreaming, doodling, and intense late night conversations. Earbuds in, they may become so engrossed in imagining themselves as the star of the music video that is their life that they miss their subway stop. As teenagers, they probably enjoyed playing the game MASH. A little too much.

While potentialism may seem a low-risk condition, initially serving as a buffer against the harsh realities of the world, it is indeed a dangerous ailment. Potentialists sometimes exhibit high levels of optimism, the ability to see the best in everyone, and a generally sunny disposition. However, they are at risk for heartbreak, extreme disappointment, and a newfound lack of motivation when their expectations are not met. Studies have shown that in 98% of potentialism cases, the dreams of the potentialist are not in fact realized.

The good news is that most cases of potentialism resolve themselves. Some potentialists will gradually outgrow their dreamy habits. In most instances, the potentialist will experience a gradual but steadily increasing number of defeats that serve to slowly beat down their idealistic tendencies. Sometimes it only takes one event to break the spell of potentialism. These occurrences are technically referred to as SOUL CRUSHERS.

If you or someone you know suffers from potentialism, the best thing you can do for them is to gently remind them of the confines of reality. Do your best to discourage them from entertaining or even expressing their fantasies. Consider the following useful phrases:

“Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of yourself?”

“Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch.”

“Get your head out of the clouds.”

“Well, don’t put all your emotional eggs in one basket…”.

“You’re crazy.”

While this may seem harsh at the time, remember, the potentialist is predisposed to optimism, and will need a firm hand to guide them to a more measured world view. Indeed, while there is much more research to be done on the subject, many cases of potentialism have already been linked to extreme levels of encouragement early in life. This results in high levels of self-confidence and awareness of POTENTIAL. Keep in mind that the childhood onset of potentialism is still a developing field of research, and due to a lack of conclusive findings at this time, we cannot definitively link any parental influence to this most abhorrent affliction.

We hope that this will serve to heighten awareness of potentialism in our society. Should you know someone affected by potentialism, keep in mind that it is not their fault, they merely suffer from an illness. But it is an illness, a serious one, and make no mistake, potentialism must be beaten. Therapy has also been found to be an effective treatment in some cases.

The most important thing to keep in mind regarding potentialism and potentialists is, quite simply: Stop Dreaming.

But These Are All Golden Dreams

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A Monologue About the Things We Carry Around

OK so I just wanted to show you this, because I think it will help you understand what I’m getting at here. It’s right… hold on just one second. [She rummages in her purse.] OK, how many server notebooks could I possibly have in this bag. Ha. OK. Maybe in this pocket. Oh. Here’s my other wine key. And my other, other wine key. Awesome. Nice, pictures from the photo booth at that bar… ha, we almost look like normal humans who enjoy each other’s company here. That’s cute. So it’s probably somewhere at the bottom… oh this is funny. Do you know what this is? It’s called a “wobble wedge”. It’s for sliding under table legs so that the whole thing doesn’t move. I have, like, thirty of them in here. Wow. So many pens. None of these are mine. I mean, all of them are mine, now, but I didn’t actually purchase a single one of them…. Oh, and that one exploded. Nice. Fuck. This purse was new nine months ago. I bought it when I got some windfall from that gig… sort of a big girl present to myself. My first real grown-up lady bag. I guess it’s not so new anymore. [Pulls out a flask]. That’s not mine. [Opens it, looks to see if there is anything left, drinks.] [Pulls out a black thong]. Hey, you never know. [Pulls out a handful of tiny enevelopes.] Oh, these are what we get our tips in. See, you write the date and then the credit card tips here and the cash tips here. Except whoever does the money is usually wasted at the end of the night so it’s pretty much illegible… do any of these have cash left in them? Nope. Nope. Nope. Ah! Sweet. Twenty-three dollars. That’s totally a night a union pool, minus tacos. OK so what I wanted to show you, is…. Oops, that is definitely my passport, I was looking for that. Um… lipstick. Lipstick. More lipstick, mmm! [Reapplies]. Oh! Yeah. Here. Notes From Underground. Anyway I guess I just wanted to show you this [reads from page 19 of Notes from Underground] :

“Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I’d respect myself then. Respect myself precisely because I’d at least be capable of having laziness in me; there would be in me at least one, as it were positive quality, which I myself could be sure of. Question: who is he? Answer: a lazybones. Now, it would be most agreeable to hear that about myself. It means I’m positively defined; it means there’s something to say about me. “Lazybones!” –now, that is a title and a mission, it’s a career, sirs. No joking, it really is. I would be a lazybones and a glutton, and not just an ordinary one, but, for example, one sympathizing with everything beautiful and lofty. How do you like that? I’ve long been fancying it. This “beautiful and lofty” has indeed weighed heavy on my head…. Oh! Then it would be different! I would at once find an appropriate activity for myself— namely, drinking the health of all that is beautiful and lofty. I would seize every occasion, first to shed a tear into my glass, and then to drink it for all that is beautiful and lofty. I would then turn everything in the world into the beautiful and lofty; in the vilest, most unquestionable trash I would discover the beautiful and lofty…. But these are all golden dreams.”

Annika's Guide to Breaking Up

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Breaking up sucks. There’s no way around it. I am currently experiencing my first non-circumstantial break-up, by which I mean, we both still live here. We could make out right now, if we wanted. But one of us doesn’t. And that’s the point. 

 

In all of my infinite wisdom that I am rapidly gaining, I thought I’d put a little advice out there. Because let’s face it, we aren’t all as gifted at negotiating these life turns as yours truly. So here you go:

The first step is deciding that you want to break up. You should probably decide this while you’re complaining to one of your co-workers during your shift. Then you should tell said co-worker, yeah, you know what, I’m gonna do it. He will ask you if you’re going to do it before or after your big audition tomorrow.

Obviously you’re going to do it after, right? That’s what you tell him.

Have two glasses of wine. Before your shift is over. Then have another.

Go to your still-boyfriend’s apartment and try to just go to bed like a normal human. Of course you’re terrible at hiding your feelings, you always have been, and he’ll inevitably do something that irritates you because let’s face it, that’s why you’re breaking up.

At this point, you should probably just spill the beans and then leave his apartment in the middle of the night and did I mention it’s pouring rain? How poetic.

He’s going to be pretty mad because he didn’t see it coming. He’ll call you a bunch the next day. You’re busy prepping for your big audition and not thinking about it no seriously don’t think about you can’t afford to think about it right now you are “Prostitute Number One”, not “break-up girl”, seriously get your shit together.

Go to your audition. Go to an event with your roommate, which you haven’t done in months, because you’ve been too busy being in your relationship. Go out with friends after the event. Tell them you broke up. “Again?”, they will ask. Tell them yes. But for realz this time guys.

Your now-ex will still be texting you. He wants to talk about it. He doesn’t believe it really happened. Go over the next morning, but tell him you can’t cry because you have a photo shoot in a few hours and you can’t have puffy eyes.

Try to state your case and feelings articulately and sympathetically. No crying. Seriously. Don’t cry.

He will cry. You will cry. Fuck.

Get stuck in traffic on your way to your photo shoot. Get irrationally angry. Flip off those guys in that truck. Classy.

Try not to look like a basket case in the photos. The proof will be in the pudding on this one.

Have your girlfriends over. Drink wine. Promise you’re not going to dominate the conversation with tales of your break-up and your feelings. Do it anyway.

Indulge yourself in a wildly-unrealistic crush on someone who lives on the other side of the country. Go ahead, open the can of worms. Confess to him that you are “feeling feelings”. Pine away.

Go to a work party. Keep in mind that at these sort of events, as long as you don’t black out, you’re ahead of the game.

Two words: red lipstick.

Dance your face off. Run around like a fucking menace. Let some really important guy who totally controls whether or not you are employed buy you a drink. Try not to give your phone number to more than two co-workers.

Two words: photo booth.

Go have another conversation with your ex. Just keep talking. That always makes things better. Be sure to cover the same ground as many times as possible. Just really dredge it all up.

Go to work. Try to make sure that someone else behaved more embarrassingly than you did at that party. Ask subtle questions to figure out whether or not anyone noticed your behavior.

Make way too much eye contact with that attractive Brooklyn celebrity sitting on table twelve. Notice his wedding ring. Stop eye fucking. Try not to spill his beer when you bring it to the table. Blush when he tells you you’re the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. Then remember that that’s the kind of shit people say after seven pints of beer. Feel cheap.

Have dinner with your ex. Let him touch your knee under the table.

Make a mental list of the men you’ve already slept with that you could, conceivably, sleep with again.

It’s someone’s birthday! Birthday parties!

Two words: more dancing.

Be sure to invite a date. Ideal candidates: guys you’ve had on the back burner for years, people you always assumed would remain “just friends”, and people from the list mentioned above.

Remember, every song that the deejay plays is about you and your situation, directly. No exceptions. And definitely tell everyone this.

Watch Blue Valentine with your roommate. Take it way too personally. Sob uncontrollably.

Sit on your couch. Listen to the Amelie soundtrack and think about what you’ve done.

Go to yoga. Every day. So much fucking yoga.

Juice. You should probably go on a juice cleanse, right? Yeah. Juice will make it all better.

And kombucha. You should start brewing kombucha again. Let’s resume all of the activities that we’ve lost track of in the past year and a half. Let’s get back on our “path”.

While you’re busy trying to be productive, your ex will show up at your apartment unsolicited with food he has cooked for you. Tell him that he can’t just show up like this. Feel incredibly guilty.

Talk to your boyfriend from high school on the phone. Use spotify to find every single band you liked in 2005. New playlist.

Cultivate a crush on that guy you always see around. Drink whisky with him until really late at night. Find out he has a girlfriend. Bang your head against the wall.

Listen to the XX and think about what you’ve done.

Your ex leaves a croissant outside your door for you. Eat it.

Don’t think about Valentines Day. Actually go ahead. Think about it. Because fuck Valentines Day anyway.

Pick up a shift so that you’re working on Valentines Day.

Slowly but surely let your life stretch out into a new thing. Develop a routine. Spend time with friends. Make things. Work too much. Sing along to “We Are Never Getting Back Together” like it’s some sort of mantra.

Go on some dates. Feel revitalized by the “getting to know you” nature of those first deep conversations you have with someone. Then think about what truly getting to know someone feels like, and realize that you can’t do that again. Not for awhile.

Acknowledge the fact that your ex is still there. He still lives two miles away. He will keep finding reasons to text you. And you’ll text him back. Because he was a big deal, and he’s not going anywhere. The best you can do is try to reconfigure the space he occupies in your brain. But you can’t close your eyes and pretend he doesn’t exist. Realize that this is just how these things go.

Yeah, that’s all I’ve got. Breaking up sucks. Hopefully you’ve found this guide helpful. Just follow the simple steps outlined above, and you’ll probably be fine. Everything will probably be fine, always. Right?

Never Gonna Happen

So, this is not going to work. First of all, I like you. Which means I want you to like me. That's deadly.

I behave like an idiot around you. I say all sorts of witty things in an effort to impress you, which is a bogus thing to do to someone. I mean, who wants to be impressed, really. Suddenly I remember every leitmotif from every obscure film I've ever seen that relates to the theme that we're talking about and all of the projects I'm working on are super interesting and I know everyone and I know about everything and it's just a mess.

I bring up a book I'm reading in an effort to talk about an idea but suddenly it's like, oh, by the way, did you know that I read? Ugh. So pretentious. Or I share some anecdote about when I was in Tokyo and it turns into, Oh, wow, you lived in Tokyo? Unbearably tacky. And you're there being all cool and indulgent and thinking that I sound like an intelligent human when really I just sound like an asshole. Yeah, we can't talk anymore. I'm fairly certain that the more we talk, the less you will like me.

I feel really great when I'm around you. I smile uncontrollably and giggle. Sometimes I even giggle when you're not around. It's undignified. And sloppy.

Plus you obviously know that I like you, so that's embarrassing. How will I hold your interest if I do not maintain some degree of aloofness? Who wants to be with someone who so obviously wants to be with them? This level of vulnerability is just crass on my part. Mortifying. It's inappropriate.

You're confident. Too confident. It makes me nervous. Like maybe you actually know who you are and where you're going in life. So, that's a shame. Definitely not something we have in common.

And sometimes I know that you're looking at me from across the room and maybe I look back at you and maybe we make eye contact and then I'm worried that I'll walk into something. If we don't stop doing that, it's gonna happen. I will walk into something. Guaranteed.

Also you have way too many friends. You're friends with everyone. Everyone likes you. Everyone wants to talk to you all the time. I would say that, as a general note, you are just far too well liked. Probably something you should work on. Plus what if you decided that you liked me and then all your friends liked me but then you decided you didn't like me anymore. No one would like me. Possibly ever again. I'd probably have to move to an entirely different city or something.

You're very handsome. It's off-putting. Lots of people probably think so. That you're handsome. Because you are. Women probably think that. Women that are not me. For probably like, fifteen years, people have been telling you how handsome you are. And who knows what kind of toll that can take on a person.

Plus there's the whole issue of how cool you are. Like, you have a cool job. Two cool jobs. You have probably the two coolest jobs a person can have. It's disgusting.

And you're nice. You smile a lot at a lot of people and people think you're nice. Even my bitchy friend thinks you're nice. People who generally don't like other people seem to like you. You're nice to me. You return my text messages and ask me questions about my life and pay me compliments.

It's an embarrassment of riches, really. Being nice and cool and handsome. Quite frankly it's a bit obscene. You don't need all three. You can be cool and handsome, but then you don't have to be nice. You can be cool and nice, but not handsome. You can be handsome and nice, but not cool. However, all three? I mean, seriously dude, it's overkill. And kind of awkward for everyone around you.

You show up places that I am, maybe even because you know I'm there. You make plans with me. And what if, one of these days, you make plans with me, and then can't follow through? Better to not make plans at all, I think.

It would even seem that, against all odds, you like me. You stay up late with me and spontaneously kiss me on street corners. I have a bruise on my knee from when you lifted me up while we were making out in the bathroom of that bar that neither of us should have been at. I banged my knee on the sink. I kind of like it, this bruise, because it's tangible proof that it happened. Like a photo or a text message.

Yeah, that was fun. Too fun. It can't ever happen again. All signs point to the fact that we would have really good sex and that would obviously just be a travesty.

Plus there's the fact that if we keep hanging out, you will inevitably discover what a disaster of a human I am. Like how I'm messy and narcissistic and immature. And I could never let someone as cool and smart and handsome as you, someone who everyone likes and is really nice and generally just pleasant to be around, yeah, I couldn't let you find out all that stuff about me. You'd tell everyone. Or, worse, you'd be disappointed.

And there's the chance that I would learn you're not as cool and handsome and nice as I currently think. Probably not a risk you want to take, seeing as you're an intelligent human.

I mean, I'm sure we've both been down this road before. It doesn't typically end well. The better people make each other feel, the worse they're capable of making each other feel. And you make me feel pretty great. So yeah, this should never happen. Let's cut it out before we have too much fun and somebody gets hurt.

We Go Way Back

When I think back on all the people who have made my heart totally freak out in one way or another, the childhood crushes stand out in a pretty special way. Like a fierce band of tiny, iridescent guardian angels watching over my romantic exploits for all time.

I got started early, to be sure. Ashley O’Bryan (my bff before we’d heard of the term “bff”) and I tragically discovered that we harbored romantic feelings for the same nine-year-old boy (I think she and I were still eight, we were two of the youngest in our grade). But rather than let our friendship unravel because of this unforeseen rivalry, it became something over which we bonded. We made little hope boxes and "invented" a highly sophisticated alpha-numeric code to talk about him: 31 was his name.

Of course we were filling our hope boxes with wishes for the same thing, wishes that were mutually exclusive, but for some reason that didn’t bother us. Probably because at that age, friendship was already a familiar concept, whereas love was not. The original bros before hos. Plus what did having a boyfriend in the 4th grade mean? That you would perhaps clandestinely hold hands at some point? In retrospect even that sounds pretty risqué. But a friend was someone you ate lunch with and had sleepovers with. Ashley was my first friend who had nail polish.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. My tiny heart was ready to burst. I wrote 31 a note, and slipped it into his locker. I told him that I wanted to reveal my true feelings, but wouldn’t write who I was. I would meet him by the bio-dome (our name for the metal structure that served as a jungle gym, set apart from the true “big toy” in the main playground area… this was a place for outsiders) on top of the hill during recess. I would be wearing a headband (I wore headbands everyday, it was a point of pride) and a “squiggly mouth smiley-face necklace” (oh! the irony. Even my eight-year old self couldn’t wear a true smiley face necklace! Especially not on today of all days!).

The jig was up before I had my chance to climb the hill. Lauren Denbaum confronted me. 31 had shown her the note. She knew it was me, I was wearing the headband. “Yes, but what about…” I began, knowing that my squiggly mouth smiley-face necklace was securely tucked under my turtleneck. Just then, Lauren’s hand darted towards my throat. Before I could do anything, she had pulled the necklace out, revealing me to be the note-writer. “This, you mean?” she laughed triumphantly. I had been foiled.

31 emerged from the playground shadows to stand behind Lauren. His henchgirl had done her work, now it was time for him to handle the situation. “I thought it might be you,” he said. I reached behind me for support. Ashley was of course there to back me up. “The thing is…” 31 began.

Just then Lauren interjected. “He likes her!” she shouted, as children on playgrounds are wont to do. Her finger was pointing in my direction. But quickly I realized it wasn’t me she was leering at. Of course, just over my shoulder, holding my hand, was Ashley O’Bryan. My bff. My co-conspirator. 31 was hers.

I let go of Ashley’s hand and ran off up the hill, to resume my outsider position on the bio-dome. Maybe no one would see me cry up there. But I heard a voice behind me, “Ani!”. It was Ashley. She followed me up the hill. I climbed the metal bars as fast as I could, but she was right behind me. She sat down next to me at the top. The highest point on the playground.

“I told him I don’t like him,” she said.
“What? But you do. It’s 31!”
“I don’t care. I like being your best friend better.”


My next really serious childhood crush came in Miss Patterson’s fifth grade class. Our desks were arranged in groups of four. Mine was next to a boy named J. We made little creatures out of paper clips and erasers and created an epic world that existed between our desks. J and I both liked fantasy novels and wiled away field trip bus rides discussing elves and the like.

Ashley O’Bryan had moved away, and the group of girls I’d been friends with since first grade had ditched me because I still wanted to play pretend, whereas they wanted to talk about the Spice Girls and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I was the only one who didn’t have bell bottoms from Limited Too. So I began spending more time with two girls named Katie. On weekends I would go to Katie S.’s house and find J there with his family. We’d run through the woods to the lake, he was tall and faster than I was. I would tease him about being a giraffe… he didn’t like that.

The entire fifth grade took a trip to Cape Cod to go whale watching. On the boat J and I stood next to each other, leaning slightly over the edge. The ocean spray got in our eyes and mouths and we loved every second of it—there’s a photo of us looking like the two happiest kids who ever lived. I can’t help but think our grins were inspired by something slightly more than the thrill of the sea.

As the summer neared my grandpa took the cover off the pool. Now, the Katonah public pool was one thing, but having access to a private swimming pool was something else entirely. My mom said I could invite J to come swimming.

So I called… I can’t remember if I left a voicemail or spoke to J’s mom. Either way the reply came, a message on the answering machine at my mom’s house. “Hi Annika, this is J… uh, you called my house… I don’t really know why you called… anyway… yeah. See you at school.”

Ugh. Well, that was that, I thought. At least I had gotten out before another 31-style embarrassment struck. I was ten now, and much older and wiser.

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Time went on, as it does. And we got older, as kids do. A year later J invited me to his birthday party. By this time Sam M. and I were as boyfriend-girlfriend as sixth graders can be. During the game of flashlight tag, Sam pulled me around the side of J’s house and dared me to kiss him. I did. I don’t think J ever truly got over the fact that my “first kiss” was at his house, on his birthday, and not with him.

Middle school saw a lot of changes for me. Sam led me into the world of bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and by seventh grade all the eighth grade “punks” were totally into me and I was going to Less Than Jake and Catch 22 concerts in the city. Trust me, this made me very grown up. In eighth grade I dated a high school freshman. We would spend weekend afternoons making out in his basement. But that Valentines day, J showed up to school with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates for me. “J, you know I have a boyfriend,” I told him. “Yeah, I know, I just wanted you to have that. Happy Valentines Day, Annika.”

The first three years of high school were not pretty. Freshman year I was confused enough to befriend a man who turned out to have a history of molesting girls my age. He drove me home most days and at one point managed to get me behind a door I didn’t know was locked. Thank God my mom caught onto that one before its inevitable conclusion. Sophomore year I started dating a guy who went to another high school and was three years older than I was. He would (inevitably) go off to college, start dating another girl without telling me, and break my heart. Junior year was basically a haze of eating disorders and vile rumors. And then senior year, all of the older kids had gone off to college, and I was left with my old Katonah crew.

These kids had actually become pretty neat while my back was turned. It was a tight-knit group of budding musicians, poets, artists, actors. Perhaps a little self-consciously hip, but not self-consciously “outsider”. For the most part, these guys were socially adept and also self-confident.

I forget how, but J and I had become pretty good pals over the summer. Maybe it was because we were both in the pilot year of our school’s Peer Group Leadership program. Anyway I seem to recall driving around in his teal station wagon, getting coffee after hours at various local hot-spots, or climbing onto the roof of the shed at the house my family was going to move into come fall. We reminisced about our childhood crushes on each other, how I figured it was all over when he left that message on my answering machine. “It came out like that because I was nervous!” he insisted. “I always liked you. I was sad you didn’t call me back.”

“And in middle school, when you gave me chocolates on Valentines day?”
“Yeah, I liked you then too.”

We decided that if we were both still single come spring, we would go to prom together.

Speaking of relationships… well I of course unloaded on him a bit about my heartbreaks up until that point. J was sort of intimidated by my experience with matters of the heart—
he was always the friend, never the boyfriend. “Why do you think that is?” he asked me. “And what about us?”

“Oh, us? Like you and me? Honestly, J… I just don’t see you that way.”

I was far too world-weary to date such an innocent, I thought. It would never work. J was a boy, I needed a man. Plus his eternal positivity, his sunny disposition… where was his dark side? Did he even have one? Because I was basically one big dark side. How would he ever understand me? Happily I can say that I was far more cynical (and dramatic) at seventeen than I am today.

A week or two after this conversation, J and I were sitting in the parking lot of the Jacob Burns Film Center after seeing some cool new indie flick. He was playing the game where he counts the freckles on my face. I told him my favorite was on my mouth. He kissed me. I pulled away, saying I wasn’t expecting that. He gave me a look like “Are you fucking kidding me?” and there it was, the slightest glimmer of a cynical edge. That was all I needed.

Are you ready to puke yet?

What ensues is more or less the montage you’d expect. Rides home steeped in The Shins, fighting over who would hang up first, illicit make-out sessions before our parents got home from work. Every holiday we had some sort of surprise for each other. More inside jokes than I can possibly recall. Notes in lockers. Nicknames galore. He was the director of his a cappella group, I was speaker of the Campus Congress.

J’s best pal was E, and they shared a glorious and profound brotherhood, the depths of which I could never fully comprehend, probably because I didn’t have an equivalent childhood best friend. Like I said, my girlfriends since first grade ditched me in late elementary school, and Ashley O’Bryan moved away. J and I would double date with E and his girlfriend, who was unbelievably gorgeous and, for whatever it was worth, “popular”.

On a peer group leadership retreat, E played banjo while J and I sang back-up harmonies on a cover of Such Great Heights. Keep in mind, this was the year Garden State came out.

OK, now you’re ready to puke.

We had our share of problems, too. J was always so on the bright side and I was always so on the dark side. I think it was exhausting for both of us at times. This was J’s first relationship and he was maybe not ready to hit the ground running as hard as I was. He directed a one act and didn’t cast me because he was afraid it would look like he was favoring me and like I didn’t earn it. Plus there was his relationship with E— neither E nor I were used to sharing J. And sometimes J’s life-plans seemed to include E in a way that they didn’t include me.

J’s friends teased him for spending too much time with me. I was a part of the greater “group”, but once the group divided into girls and guys, I was left out in the cold, because I wasn’t truly close enough with the girls to be in their inner circle, and obviously couldn’t hang with the dudes. This left me feeling excluded and vulnerable.

I even remember feeling a certain dissatisfaction with how “perfect” my life was at that time. Afternoons I worked in a third-generation family-owned department store in pretty much the quaintest hamlet you can imagine. I was held in high esteem by the administration of my high school and held multiple leadership positions. My mom was engaged, so maybe we were even going to have a new “normal” family. And I had just about the best boyfriend a girl could ask for. Even I was ready to puke.

Because I had pretty much defined myself as an outsider ever since my parents were, as far as I knew, the first to get divorced. I was the youngest in my grade. I had a weird name. My birthday was on Christmas. I was the girl who hung out on the bio-dome, remember? So what was I doing behaving so goddamned normally all of sudden?

But, and maybe this is hindsight speaking, I think our relationship came down to more than the montage. In the spring it became apparent that, against all odds, I had actually only gotten into my safety schools. One of which, after a second visit, I had decided I didn’t like. It looked like it was Oberlin or bust. Ohio? My plan had been California. Was I really going to Ohio? After a hysterical phone call prompted by yet another rejection letter, J showed up at my house with applications to every top school that offered rolling admissions. He was determined to help me see the bright side. And in the long run, I really think he did.

We kept our prom promise, obviously. He wore Converse sneakers. We danced our faces off. Afterwards, instead of going into the city as planned, our whole crew decided to go back to Katonah and play flashlight tag. It was genuinely exhilarating. At the end of the night, J and I had sex in his car before crashing on a pile of comforters on his living room floor.

Of course summer came to an end. We were very practical children, we knew it would. And we knew that he was off to Bates, and I was off to Oberlin, so there it was. As a going away present, I gave him stationary I had designed for him, along with envelopes that were pre-addressed to my college mailbox. And that was that. Neither of us wanted to get each other’s way.

By October I was up to my old tricks. I had a boyfriend who was a fifth year, and five years older than I was.

In February J and I were both home on break. “I wanted to give you a sort of Valentines Day Present,” he said.
“But J, you know I have a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, I know. I just wanted you to have this.”

He proceeded to play me two songs on guitar, songs that we had listened to together a lot. “Happy Valentines Day, Annika.” I was simultaneously touched, sad, guilty, and embarrassed.

That summer J and I saw each other again. I told him how the college boyfriend had graduated and was leaving the country at the end of the summer, and I had become involved in an affair with a man who was twice my age and lived upstate. J and I didn’t talk much after that.

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It's been nearly seven years since then. Recently I was performing a workshop version of a one-woman play I had written at a festival in Tribeca, and Katie S. showed up. She filled me in on our old friends, including the fact that J was going to be in town soon. Things had been kind of hard for him lately, she said. There had been some life altering events to bang up against.

A few days later I typed a facebook message to J. Facebook because I didn’t even have his current email or phone number. I told him how I know it had been forever, but if he wanted to hang with someone in New York, I was around. And if he didn’t answer not to worry, because who really checks facebook anyway. He did answer. We agreed to meet the next day, his last day in town, for coffee.

J looked tired, and had come from the hospital. He was wearing a hat and I could tell it was more to hide his unwashed hair than for warmth or fashion. He wore a small Buddha necklace, a vestige of who he was already starting to become that last summer we were together. Something about him spending time in India during college nagged at the back of my mind. It was all so long ago….

We talked about what was going on at the hospital. We talked about J’s brother, how J believed that the cosmic reason he had moved to L.A. was to save him. We talked about New York (where he had lived while I was in Boston). “Do you want to get a drink?” I asked him. “Do you even drink? Last we talked, you didn’t drink.” “Ha, yeah, that’s probably true,” he chuckled. “I drink.”

Around the corner I downed a Manhattan on the rocks while he drank something that involved gin and lavender. “Sorry I drink faster than you do, too much time in nightlife.” He laughed and assured me he would catch up. “Oh, I love this song,” he said, before he had fully recognized what was playing. It was the Shins. We blushed when we realized why he loved it. Next up was Modest Mouse. “Did they steal my ipod from 2005?” I joked. We only touched on high school for perhaps five minutes before he realized he had to go back to the hospital. “I have to get back up there because I have to be back in Westchester tonight so my dad can drive me to the airport early in the morning.”
“Oh, you’re flying out of Westchester?”
“No, JFK.”
“Well, why don’t you stay at my place and I’ll drive you to JFK? That makes way more sense geographically.”

It was a plan. “Is bourbon OK?” I asked.

He got to my place a little before midnight, where I introduced him to Ian, my roommate and best friend. Ian and I met during maybe our second week of college, at a time when J and I would have still been talking on the phone every few days. In a way they represented a sort of changing of the guard in my life.

For some reason I started telling the story of Sarah K., Ian’s childhood love. The conversation turned to mutual friends we didn’t know we had. We discovered that Sarah K., the Sarah K., had been in acting classes with J in New York. My childhood love was in acting studio with Ian’s childhood love. “There are like, six people in the world,” J declared.

When we were (more than…) half way through the bottle of bourbon, J and I tumbled down the slope of childhood memories. It was just as he recounted the tale of “my favorite freckle is on my lip” that Ian declared he was going to bed. “You know what’s funny about that?,” I mentioned as Ian sleepily roused himself from our cozy carpet, “I don’t have a freckle on my lip.” “Of course you don’t,” J was staring straight at me. “Alright, you two, I’m going to bed.” Ian stumbled into his room, closing the door rather finitely.

I couldn’t really tell you what it was. Maybe it was spending two years in a city like New York, getting beat up by the real world a little bit. Maybe it was because he was now essentially the vice-principal of a high school and had learned to exude authority. Maybe because of what was going on at the hospital. Maybe because he weighed probably twenty pounds more than when I had known him, and no longer had his Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo haircut. But this was not the boy I dated in high school. I mean, it was, but he had somehow grown into the best version of himself I could have imagined. And somehow, I sensed he felt the same way about me. He made me feel better about myself in six hours than the Chef had made me feel in a year and a half.

Now, this had very little to do with anything he said. He was not lathering me up with compliments, be they based in the past or the present. It was something far more fundamental. His blatant positivity was now tempered with an edge of “I know what it’s like, and I still mean it.” And I remembered that night he had shown up at my house, showing me all the schools I could still apply to. And I realized that J had always been the MVP on Team Annika. I was essentially warming the bench, and for all I know, Chef was on an opposing team.

This is not to say that I blame Chef. I may not have been ready to let him on my team. Because on some level he came to represent all that is rough and harsh about this city to me. And J comes from a place that, even though I wasn’t always happy there, is part of me. It’s safe there.

When I look back on high school, I see a series of frustrations and embarrassments. The stupid things I said and my weird outfits and really crappy decision-making, the overwhelming disappointments, the personal and academic failures, the drama. If you asked to see a photo of me from high school, I probably wouldn’t show it to you. But J saw all that, and somehow still thought I was coolest girl in school.

When I look back on my first year-or-so in New York, I see… well I see pretty much the same things. But I think I’m a little better at hiding it. Taking things in stride. The fact remains, however, that Chef has seen all that. The late nights and the professional rejections. The bad days. But if he thought I was the coolest girl in school, he never let me know.

Cosmically speaking, J moved to L.A. to save his brother. Maybe he came to New York that week to get me off the bench and back in the field, playing on my own team. For a long time my embarrassment around who I used to be made me glad to have few ties to my pre-college self. But those hours we spent together changed my mind: I hadn't felt that OK in a long time.

Ian sees Sarah K. around Brooklyn, I see her too. I don’t know if he experiences the same overwhelming comfort in her presence. Their love was unrequited, so perhaps not. I’m not sure if there’s an objectively heartwarming experience about reconnecting with your high school sweetheart– if it’s all just a societally constructed load of whatever, or if maybe J and I genuinely had something kind of neat and special. Maybe we’re buying into some idea that has no bearing on reality. Maybe I’m so fucked up about the end of my relationship with Chef, and he’s so fucked up about the things that are going on his life, that we’re just begging for some sort of emotional cluster fuck.

That said, it is important to bear in mind that J is perhaps the only boy I ever loved who was really, truly my friend first. Ashley O’Bryan and I had prioritized friendship over our mutual crush 31 because friendship was a more familiar sensation. And when J and I had these fifth grade crushes on each other, what did that really mean? Friendship was still the more comfortable territory. And even when we initially agreed to go to prom together, it was as friends. Maybe what this means is that it felt really nice to have my old friend back. Someone who can know all that crap about me and see it, judge it, not as a boyfriend or a lover, but as a friend.

I have friends from college, I live with one of them. I also have a lot of new friends, New York friends. They’re great, and I love them. But they come and go. And there’s a lot about me they don’t know, things that they probably don’t actually care to know. Maybe what I needed was someone who had known me for just that long. Who knows my mom and remembers what my brother looked like before he got so tall and had facial hair and tattoos. It’s sort of like if Alice had found her best friend down there in Wonderland. Wouldn’t that have been even nicer than a Cheshire Cat?

Now whether or not he could stomach all of the new baggage I’ve accumulated in the last seven years remains to be seen. Something tells me he could handle it, it’s no worse than the old stuff. But I’m not sure he’ll get the chance. And as we were very practical children, we remain practical adults. No emotional spears have been lanced. Nobody’s getting on any planes. But one thing I do know: just like the summer of 2005, I did not want him to leave.