Everyone is always telling my generation that we aren’t going to know how to engage with people. We’re all going to end up with computer chips implanted in our brains and screens stuck in our eyes like contact lenses. But no one gives us any solutions, so I decided to find my own.
It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply.
But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart.
I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life.
She looks away and I wonderif it’s because I’m telling her things she can’t relate to. Maybe she thinks I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.
When you live in LA and work in the movies, you experience the collapse of some of that fantasy. You know that the eyes glow like that because of lights placed at a specific angle, and you see the actresses up close and, yes, they are beautiful, but they are human size and imperfect like the rest of us.
I’m glad we didn’t know better.
We’d all be leaving one another, going to other places in the fall; and now that the season was changing, rushing towards graduation, everything we did felt like a long good-bye or a premature reunion. We were nostalgic for a time that wasn’t yet over.
I think I’ll close my eyes, too, try to sleep away the sick feeling, the whisper that I am a waste of her time, her money, her effort.
I always felt kind of guilty that I didn’t feel as sad as she did, but now, watching Dylan, I think that’s probably a good thing. I mean, you see a million terrible things every day, on the news and in the paper, and in real life. I’m not saying that it’s stupid to feel sad, just that it would be impossible to let everything get to you and still get some sleep at night.
It’s a dark place, not knowing.
You can let them wreck you and allow the wrecking to feel good.
Fame by association is the emptiest kind.
I am nowhere close to finished but I’m the kind of busy that feels eternal, the kind where you can’t say I’ll be done in a few hours because the truth is you will never, ever, be done.
But it feels different because wanting someone is not the same as loving her, and now I understand that Morgan does not love me.
We all get so afraid. We need to be brave.
And I think of how time passes so differently for different people. Mabel and Jacob, their months in Los Angeles, months full of doing and seeing and going. Road trips, the ocean. So much living crammed into every day. And then me in my room. Watering my plant. Making ramen. Cleaning my yellow bowls night after night after night. “It’s.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.
When you’re friends with someone for such a long time, it’s easy to feel like she belongs to you, like the version of the person you became friends with is the only real version. If she hated peas when she was a kid then she will always hate peas, and if she starts to eat them and declare them delicious, really she is deluding herself, masking her hatred of them, trying to pretend she’s someone she’s not.
In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They’re talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don’t mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable.