Month: November 2013

Exit Strategies for the Perpetually Lost and Lonely:

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Move to Boston. Date a Patriots fan and work in a Chilean restaurant. Don’t be offended when the wait staff speaks to you in Spanish; they’re teasing, and don’t know you wasted four years of high school doodling in your French notebook. Pretend you’re a med student and wander the Harvard campus, find anatomy books left behind on study tables and try to find the place for pain, the impossible cracks that hurt can fill. Your Pats fan will break up with you when they lose to the Bills, and you will laugh and toast to him as he storms out, the dumb fuck.

Move to San Francisco. Become a flight attendant and live in the Tenderloin. Have a boyfriend who writes freelance and buys cheap wine on Thursdays from your neighbor, who gets it off a truck from a friend of a friend near a vineyard. Your calves will look great, but the steep constant walk won’t get rid of that muffin top, or the loneliness. When your boyfriend leaves you for a drag queen, throw his laptop off the roof and relish in the sound it makes when it finally hits the ground.

Move to Miami. Swim with dolphins and make fun of the tourists and flirt openly with the waiters in the Greek restaurant you go to with your grandmother every Monday afternoon. She will want you to take diet pills, the hag, and you will lie face-down on the shag carpet afterwards with a mimosa hangover, tongue sticking to your teeth and wishing for death to just come and claim you, already. Get up and shower. Go to Disney World. I hear that in all the Magic Kingdom, Captain Hook gives out the best hugs.

Move to Austin. Wear cowboy boots unironically and hide in the public library, the movie house with a bar in the lobby. Listen to Dolly Parton and let your heart break all over again. Drive to the Gulf and wade in the water – let this be your belated baptism, your last-ditch strike at holiness. Sink. It is too shallow to drown you, and you won’t die in Texas.

Keep losing yourself in distance, in lines on maps – there are thousands of roads, here, and your story has no fixed end point.

Remember: if all else fails, you could always try to swallow yourself whole.

my mother, she killed me; my father, he ate me

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Everything started because Dad loved his brother.

Aunt Helen ran off with the gardener and Uncle M went off the deep end, just a little bit, because it turned out Paris Whatshisface wasn’t just a gardener, but some long-lost son of Troy Industries, old Priam’s kid slumming it in a post-college haze of indecision and adultery. Paris was young, younger than Uncle M, and he had money and looks and Aunt Helen didn’t need the family anymore, just left Hermione with her dad and packed up the Jag and didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Uncle M drank a lot, after that. Dad helped.

Mom stayed in the background during all of this, helping with this charity and that auxiliary function and generally ignoring Dad’s drunken call for war in the kitchen, sitting at the center island with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows while they drank whiskey out of heavy-bottomed glasses. They were going to steal Troy Industries’ best people, their best clients, all as payback for what Paris did to my uncle. “Sparta won’t take this shit,” Dad slurred, “Sparta – Sparta’s made of fucking warriors. Troy won’t even see it coming.”

Mom brushed past him on her way out the door and didn’t object when he rested his hand on her hip. She was wearing lipstick again, dressing nice, wearing heels. We thought our parents were working things out; we didn’t know that our father’s ridiculous plans for a hostile takeover would actually be put to use, we didn’t know how our mother would react to any of what was to come. We didn’t know she was already drifting away.

 

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somebody loves you, rosie schulman

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It’s Day 98 and Rosie wakes up to the sound of her phone buzzing on her nightstand. She rolls over, pulling at the covers, and buries her head beneath her pillow, trying to block out the noise. She shifts her hips and her shoulders at opposite angles so that her spine cracks, letting the popping of her stiff joints join in with the ceaseless vibration against the tabletop, and doesn’t move to shut off the alarm, letting it turn off by itself a minute later.

She stretches and dreads the inevitable moment where she will have to get up and shower, get up and eat breakfast, get up and drive to school. It’s a Friday: she has two classes in the morning and needs to buy groceries, she has to duck into work to pick up her schedule and at some point she needs to stop by the post office. Molly’s birthday thing is tonight and she’s meeting her for lunch around one. Sean is going to come by while she’s gone and pick up the rest of his stuff: the last of his books, the clothes he forgot to take with him, the stupid Bob Marley poster he insisted on hanging over the TV. Everything he left behind is packed and waiting for him in the living room, the last bits of his life with Rosie crammed up in cardboard boxes she got from the liquor store down the block.

Rosie takes a deep breath and emerges from her warm blanket cocoon like a dazed, blinking moth, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress. The bed feels so much bigger when she’s the only one in it.

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