I wonder, though: if you don't remember me, do you at least remember the winter when we would spend long nights talking in your car with the seats leaned way back? I'd lock the doors at work, you'd pick me up in your station wagon, and we'd drive down back roads until the neighborhoods disappeared, drive until the trees hemmed us in, drive until we reached the clearing where we had the whole sky to ourselves. We'd bundle up under blankets and try to sift through all the sadness we felt, try to dig through the rubble of how it feels when someone you love dies, try to determine if that melancholy was something that would one day change or if that was just how we felt, always had, and always would. (Have you found Phoebe Bridgers as an adult? The first time I heard the song "Funeral," my breath hitched, and it always always always makes me think of that winter.)

Or if you don't remember that, do you remember the winter when we wrote each other long letters? You were dark blue, and I was light blue (okay, medium blue), and once or twice a week I'd wake up to your missives from one frozen town to another. Would you believe I saved them all, me, the Marie Kondo stan who saves nothing? I wish I could share them all with you now. In one, you said this thing I really love: "I wonder if something me or someone I know makes will ever get old enough to stop belonging to us and start belonging to everyone and anyone." Do these letters belong to me now, if I kept them and you've forgotten them? Do they belong to everyone?

There are no winters in my life anymore, not here in Texas, at least not the real kind, no hibernal season-of-the-sticks when the sun sets at 4:00 PM and you fumble anxiously in the dark for some source of warmth, a blanket or a bottle of bourbon or a stranger's warm body or maybe all three. You know that, of course; you had a turn with these mild southern Januarys and still chose to turn on your heel and head back North as soon as you could. Sometimes I think that was the final nail for us, the last time we spoke, when I said how much I love this place and you looked at me like I'd joined a cult. Tell me if I'm wrong, but in that moment, I could see, a little, that you'd never trust my judgment again. Old friend, I don't entirely blame you. This place is beautiful, but it's a fuckin' mess, too. I wish you'd gotten to see both sides of that coin.

Truthfully, though, I also mean it in a metaphorical sense, that I just don't have those kinds of emotional winters anymore. I think some of that is the extra hours of sunlight, although a larger part is probably age and maturity... and maybe the rest is just Lexapro. Have you ever taken an antidepressant? It's a sort of weird experience—first finding yourself in a world where things that had been crushing you feel so easy to lift, and then trying to find a level where the heaviest things don't crush you but the lightest things can still lift you off your feet. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could titrate it all, muffle all my feelings when it's late at night and they're trending anxious and lonely, and amplify them when I'm on the couch with a glass of red wine and a Taylor Swift album. (Would you believe I only cried once when I heard the last album? Did I even like Taylor Swift when you knew me?) Maybe that's just me on my own bullshit like always, wanting to choreograph every emotional moment for maximum poignancy and then turn on all the lights on set when things get too intense.

I know it's ridiculous, and a little self-centered, but sometimes I used to wonder if I lost you as a friend when I lost the ability to feel that kind of sadness, that deep blue ocean where your legs have been treading water for so long that they forget what it felt like to stand on dry land. On some level, choosing to fold it up and pack it away, to get some therapy and some coping skills, felt like a betrayal of our sacred bond, like a sledgehammer to the foundation on which you and I had built our houses. Am I crazy for thinking that? You once called me a used car salesman, back at a time when the idea of being happy felt like a hazy dream, and you were right—I was spending a lot of energy trying to fake it. These days, though, I don't do any faking. I guess I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

One last thought: I don't miss you anymore, old friend, but I do still think about you sometimes. I think about you and me on that dark hillside, linking arms, howling at the moon, and I wish I could send you every good vibration on this planet. I know that even if I saw you one day on this side of the fence, you might still turn your head away and keep walking... but I'd still love to catch a glimpse of you in the daylight.

Anyway, don't be a stranger, now.

With love,

even still,

even if only a little,

I've been reading about it again recently, and I guess the theory was that you have these different upswings and downswings in your life, and sometimes they all line up neatly in little peaks and valleys, but mostly they sort of swing back and forth across each other, one or two up, the other down, all three passing in the middle, back and forth in perpetuity. (Side note: what an unhinged way to teach children about trigonometry.) It sounds kind of plausible, until you learn that the whole theory was created by a German doctor in the 1800s who called the emotional cycle the "female" cycle and for some reason also advocated for a surgery to "sever the link between the nose and the genitals," and you're like, okay, I kind of get why some people don't believe in science.

Honestly, my Instagram explore page has been FULL of fake stuff like this lately: biorhythms, manifestation, weird bogus tweets from celebrities. It has kind of felt like my feed has been saying to me: I don't know, girl, you seem desperate and you've tapped on every therapy post I've shown you. Maybe this is what you need next? Maybe you'll find the answers you're looking for here? Sometimes I have half-expected to get one of those stock banners across my screen: Help is available. Speak with someone today. (In case it needs to be said, I'm okay, and I've got a therapist who has grown on me—I just wonder if my algorithms wonder otherwise.)

I think what I’m getting at is that I feel like if biorhythms were real, then I think I'd be at an inflection point on my chart, i.e., at the very tippy bottom of a short-term curve but towards the tippy top of a different, much longer-term curve. After nearly two years of life being so restricted (staying home entirely, refreshing the New York Times Covid-19 case counts every morning, skipping and cancelling plans and traditions, feeling anxious about every in-person interaction, feeling anxious about talking about every in-person interaction, having conversations about feeling anxious about every in-person interaction, blah blah, you get it, you were on this planet for it, too), 2022 has felt like such a gigantic upswing the likes of which I haven't seen for a long time. It feels a little like freshman year of college; everybody's been cramped for a while and is looking to do a big stretch to shake it off.

(I'm simplifying a lot here; if there were an "Economic" biorhythm for the past year or two I think mine might look a bit like something called Torsades de Pointes, and I think a "Professional" one might look more like this, but for whatever reason, Dr. Fliess didn't see fit to include those domains in the project. Maybe he got distracted chasing that nasogenital connection. Truly, we'll never know.)

So, like, have I cried probably 20 times in the past week? I mean, I haven't exactly been counting, but sure, that sounds like a reasonable estimate. But in between, I've also found a couple of moments of immense peace and gratitude, the kind of moments where it's so easy to lean back in my chair and laugh and think about the present and the future and think, fuck, I have so much to be grateful for. (I have also found a few of these moments through some grounding techniques [highly recommend for my anxious friends], but I swear sometimes they've come on their own.)

It’s possible I’m cracking a little (recent Google search: "hypomania self test"), but I think my brain is just doing its best to make sense of 200 different things at once and get me through a really difficult time. I also wonder if this might be what the very beginning of healing looks like. I also know I'm both too close to the circumstances and also too early into them to know if either of those things are true.

I feel like I’m just at the very tail end of something, and maybe I have been for a long time, and I’ve been so desperate to hold onto that tail end and not let go, to squeeze it longer and longer and narrower and narrower like a taffy puller, that I’ve been totally blind to the beginning of anything else that could have been right around the corner. Not necessarily something better, but, you know. Something else. A few years ago, my job felt very much on the chopping block, and I would always make this joke about just being a string quartet member on the Titanic, playing Nearer, My God, to Thee until the boat sank into the Atlantic Ocean. (You know what scene I mean; don't watch it if you're at the bottom of your emotional curve like me. Also, let's go ahead and update that estimate above to 21 times.) I've very often said I never know when is the right time to move on, and I think it's okay to forgive myself for being that way, but I also know that in the end, I still need to know how to set down that violin in time to make it to a lifeboat. (It's 2022; they have to be legally required to have room for men on one of them, right?)

Anyway, I think that's nearly enough about me, even on a blog that has nearly always and entirely been about me. Something I know is true (but have a very hard time adhering to) is the principle that the more I focus my energy and kindness outward, the more full of it I'll feel. There are so many places to aim this fire hose... just gotta figure out where.

(One last thing: I still think and know 100% that biorhythms are totally bunk and fake and meaningless. Just interesting to note mine today...)

···

With love, and gratitude, and a few good tools for managing anxiety,

I think about the first time I came back when I wasn’t used to not living here. I think about the second time when I wasn’t used to being used to it. I think of each successive time, a bit less a return home and a bit more a vacation. I try to count if this is the fifth, or sixth or seventh time, but the memories mix together and I lose track.

I think about how I used to take that bus to work, how I’d wait to step outside Dunkin until I saw it coming up the street. But where did it drop me off? Maybe I took the other one. All the double digit marquees and squares that aren’t square seem a little less distinct than they used to.

I think about how that bakery is now an urgent care center. I think about how that convenience store is also now an urgent care center. I wonder if care is now needed more urgently here.

I think about a boy I kissed who lived there. A man I kissed? A man now, at least; a boy then. Maybe always a man. I think about a time in my life when I was still young enough to un-self-consciously call them boys. I realize that, at 30, maybe I’m not young enough to call them boys anymore no matter what adverbs I attach to it.

I think about the nights I walked home from bad dates and listened to Dancing On My Own or King of Anything, or the nights I walked home from good dates and listened to Teenage Dream, or the nights we stayed in and danced to Phoenix, or the entire winter when it seemed all I ever did was get too drunk and listen to We Found Love. (I still get chills every time I hear that song, and never know whether they’re emotional chills or just a physical memory of that frigid Boston January.)

I think about The Outs, the wintry and sardonic series that appeared at a wintry and sardonic time in my life, and I wonder how much of the reason it matched my life is because my life started to mirror it. “I’m just going through a slutty phase.” “Don’t say charäde.” Life imitating art imitating life. I think about when I tried to watch the O.C. as an adult and realized how much of my teenage years were the same.

I think about how I used to think I was doomed to always be a sad person, when really all I needed was a little more self-esteem and a little more vitamin D.

I think about how so many of these things that I used to love now just give me (e)motion(al) sickness, and I feel the familiar Alice in Wonderland syndrome of my childhood, the sense that all these things are six inches from my face and thousands of miles away at the same time. It’s strange to have things in your past that you look back on so fondly, that you loved so much, that you missed dearly when they ended, and realize how little you now want those things back. I start to wonder how I ever wanted this stuff. I start to wonder if I ever wanted this stuff. I didn’t even choose a lot of it, not really – the college I went to, the city I called home, the places where I worked, all of those things mostly chose me. I wonder if life is really about figuring out what I want at all, or if it’s just about figuring out how to want what I have.

Then I think: nah, that’s reductive, man. I wanted these things while I had them, and I want different things now, and that’s just life. Or maybe it’s growth. I realize this isn’t exactly a novel concept, but I’ve only ever claimed to be a good writer, not an original one.

My vision re-focuses on what’s in front of me; I’ve reached my destination, or at least my destination for now. I’m rooted, physically and temporally, in the present – it seems the curtain between us was a bit thicker than I thought, or maybe (and far more likely) our timelines never loop back and allow us to jump back and forth. Anyway, it’s easier to only have one direction to worry about moving: forward.

Clear eyes, full heart, et al,

Some context: once, when I was probably 13 years old, I ran (unopposed) for the minimally prestigious (and minimally desirable) role of “historian” in my Boy Scout Troop. I have no idea why I did this – I didn’t even particularly like being a Boy Scout, and I certainly did not want to build or maintain a historical record of a bunch of camping trips that I mostly did not even want to be on in the first place. I’m sure it just seemed like the least amount of work, a selling point that led me to run a half-dozen more times in my youth for positions like “treasurer” and “publicist,” things that looked good on college applications but were typically pretty low-effort and low-glamour.

I kind of think there’s a sense of humor to the universe, though, because technology in the time since then has allowed me to become a historian of everything, without me really ever putting much thought to the decision. (Maybe this is true for everyone.) It seems like right as I hit an age where I felt like the things happening in my life were worth cataloguing, there were infinite new tools to help me do it: Xanga, Photobucket, Myspace, Gmail – not to mention bigger hard drives and a digital camera even a teenager making minimum wage could afford.

So I catalogued everything. (Or at least everything I thought might be important later, which was mostly the same thing.) At first, it was mostly privately – in folders of pictures on a desktop computer, or in a program that logged all my AIM conversations in case I needed to refer to them later, or on an online blog that only a couple dozen people ever really read. Increasingly, though, it turned public, and I was ever-ready to take advantage of Foursquare and Facebook check-ins and Instagram filters – and even this Tumblr. Keeping a record of good times became an unthinking, automatic part of having the good times.

And honestly, I sort of love having that record. I love checking Facebook’s On This Day feature every morning and reminiscing about good times gone by. I love the way a post from years ago can still make me smile and consider texting a long-lost friend to reminisce. I love how continuous it makes life feel, like this moment could be connected back to any other if only I had enough time to plot a map and string to make the connection. But as social media has fallen out of favor, and as more of my friends have deactivated or stopped logging in, it has increasingly felt silly keeping a public log for only me to see.

In retrospect (or something like it), I have a hard time articulating what the point was of all that semi-public tabulation. Was it to connect with close friends and feel connected with far ones? Was it to keep up with everyone else? Was it to attract new friends and lovers, to provide ample evidence that I was worthy of their time and attention and affection? (I think, for me at least, this last one is more true than I will ever want to admit.) Probably all of these things and more, but here’s something I keep returning to: so many things you think are going to matter turn out not to matter. As time passes, so many of the tiny notecards in the pile have lost the meaning I’m sure I thought they would forever keep. But how do you know which things will? How do you make sure you’ll save everything important if you don’t save absolutely everything?

The answer that has seemed increasingly appealing lately: maybe you just don’t. Maybe it’s okay to save some memories and lose others, for some photos to never find their way into an album. To wit: last summer, I lost my entire music library. I don’t even really know how. I just wasn’t paying attention, and I clicked in the wrong place a couple of times, and suddenly everything I had saved over most of a decade in Spotify had disappeared. All the saved songs, all the serendipitous songs discovered on long car rides and saved from long-forgotten playlists... is it any wonder I was so devastated at first? I frantically googled, I emailed customer service in desperation, and the sadness and nausea I felt stayed with me for days. Gradually, though, the panic subsided, and a few days later I felt way more at peace about it than I would have thought possible. Some songs I had no trouble finding, and some I’ve stumbled upon in the time since then – but lots more are probably gone forever, and that is just How Things Are Going To Be Now. I think maybe that’s how things were supposed to be.

I like to imagine that everyone who has stepped away from social media has spent this much time examining their choice, and that I’m just the only one pulling back the curtain. I know I’ve always sort of had more of a flair for the dramatic than most, but it’s hard to believe that people who have unplugged haven’t had some of these same thoughts and concerns. I don’t know.

There’s a song I love but whose advice I have always been too afraid to heed about spending more time enjoying moments and less time thinking about how to share those moments with others. I don’t always succeed, but I’ve working on doing that more... and I think getting rid of Facebook might be a good step, if I can muster the (incredible) courage to do it. I think some friends I’ll have no trouble staying in touch with, and some I’ll stumble back upon in time – but I know it means some others may be gone forever, and that is just How Things Are Going To Be Now too.

Here’s hoping, sincerely, that all of you are in that first group.

With love,

And before we know it, the walk is over, and then I blink and it’s time for lunch, and then I blink again and the day is ending, and Mondays blur so easily into Fridays, and Saturdays and Sundays fade more quickly than the taste of lime on your fingers after pressing the wedge into the neck of a beer bottle, and suddenly I’ve been in Austin three months and found footing and a routine here without even really trying very hard. Maybe it helps that I’ve spent four years thinking of Austin as a vacation city, a place where you go for a weekend to unwind – but life here so far has felt a little bit like a perpetual vacation, like there’s always an adventure to be had if only you’ll put on some sunscreen and head outside, and at the risk of driving this run-on sentence into a terrible cliché, time does fly when you’re having fun.

Sure, sometimes it can be a little lonely until you build up a bench of friends in a new city to fill the space of (although not replace) the established roster in your old city. And sure, living in the shadow of the Texas Capitol, I’m reminded more often than ever that this state is a constellation of blue cities floating in a deep, red sea, that Texas really does sometimes lean on the least in us all. But mostly, life here is pretty swell, and sometimes as I watch the sun set over downtown, or dip my feet into Barton Creek, I catch myself thinking: I could really build a life here. So far that mostly means setting up a daily Zillow alert email and groaning when I realize how unaffordable everything is, but hey, it’s a start.

Speaking of building a life, today is my fourth Texaversary – which makes this my fifth summer in Texas! – and I can’t help but notice how much this summer really feels like summer, not just in temperature but also in temperament. It’s the kind of season where you feel like the weather’s good mood syncs perfectly with your own, where the steady sine wave of the climate for a few blissful months peaks at the same time as the unpredictable wave of life. Maybe it has something to do with the adventure of a new city, since my first summer in Houston felt an awful lot like this; but so did my last summer in Pittsburgh, and a summer right in the middle of my time in Boston, so maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Anyway, I’ve been on this planet long enough to know that when you hit a summer like this, there’s really no use trying to understand or prolong it, that it comes without any explanation and leaves without any pageantry – that trying to pay too much attention to it just ruins the fun, like spending the longest day of the year thinking about how every day afterward is going to be shorter. So instead, I’ve just been keeping the fridge stocked with beer and a Spotify playlist ready with songs that make you want to roll down your windows even though you know the air temperature outside is in the triple digits. 

It’s nice to know that even as I approach the end of this decade of my life and the beginning of the next, I may still have seasons like this ahead of me.

Enjoying this one while it lasts,

I’m relaxing on a front porch with my friends on a Saturday night, enjoying the contented silences in between turns shooting the breeze, sneezing for the millionth time because I’m so freaking allergic to their dog, wondering how I still have not figured out that I need to take a Zyrtec before coming over, and anyway how has man not evolved by now to not be allergic to his supposed “best friend,” and I realize this is our last night like this for a while, and my throat starts to feel full, and I feel it coming.

I’m eating at Torchy’s for the 146th time (and that’s not a guess – that’s the exact count), trying but once again failing to avoid dripping queso on my shirt, enjoying the breezy afternoon with one of my first friends in Houston who will soon be one of my first friends in Austin, thinking about how we used to do the same thing three summers ago, and I know there’s not a damn thing about this moment that’s unique to this city, I’m sure we’ll be doing the exact same thing in Austin in a month’s time, sweating until (and probably after) the sun sets over South Congress, but I can’t help it: I still feel it coming.

After nearly four years in this city – almost twice as long as my original intended stay – I’m finally packing up and hitting the road in a few short days. One of my favorite narratives when I moved to Houston was how unexpected, how out of character it was for me; instead of moving back to Pittsburgh, spending a couple of years doing a residency, and settling back into the rhythms of my childhood city, I graduated with no job or plans, moved across the country on an impulsive (and maybe self-destructive?) whim, and found myself in Cut and Shoot, Texas, trying to learn how to say “insurance” in two syllables so people would understand me. 

It’s weird, though, moving this time on purpose and willingly instead of out of necessity. If you told me a few years before I moved to Houston that this is where I’d be, I’m not sure I would have believed it. If you told me a few years ago that in 2017 I’d be moving to Austin with my boyfriend, I probably would have been more like, “Yep. That sounds about right.” Honestly, over the past couple of years I have sometimes wondered if I should have moved sooner, especially as I’ve watched a lot of my first friends in Houston move or drift away. It’s hard to go too far down that rabbit hole, though... I would have missed out on a ton of my favorite moments and people and places in Houston if I had left sooner. (Especially the people. Some of my favorite ride-or-dies only showed up in the back nine.)

The weird thing is: even though I think I’ve been ready to leave Houston for a year or two now, and even though I’m so excited thinking about what life in Austin will be like, sometimes I get hit with these really strong waves of sadness when I think about leaving. Some of the reason is obvious: the good friends who aren’t coming with us (at least not yet), the bars and restaurants we’ll miss, the way the smog causes some of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen. But I think the rest of the reason is a little less intuitive... I’ve never been very good at sorting out my feelings about places and times and people in my life. Instead, I kind of mix them up into one big pot – when I used to say I missed Boston, what I really meant is that I missed college or being 21 or having all of my friends within a 10-minute walk from my front door.

I think it’s something similar here. What I’m really going to miss is not this city but this phase in my life: my extended adolescence; the feeling of being really on my own for the first time ever; discovering how Mexican food is supposed to taste; being drunk on a Tuesday night, knowing I could sleep it off and still make it into work on Wednesday afternoon; this period of my early- and mid-20s that seemed like it would last forever but feels like it passed by in no time at all. And honestly, in a lot of ways, those days would be gone even if I were to plant my feet in the ground here and never move again. So are Mam’s House of Ice, and Foreign Correspondents, and the Heights post office, and a hundred of my other favorite things about this city. Seems silly to stick around just in case Houston 2014 changes its mind and comes back one day.

Anyway, all this is to say... well, actually, I don’t know what all this is to say. Maybe nothing. I do know this: I still got some good friends that live down the street here in Houston – that street is just gonna be a little longer once I’m in Austin (okay, 150 miles longer... but who’s counting?). I have a feeling I’m still gonna see them pretty often, even if it’ll take a bit more planning than it used to. For those of you that live somewhere other than Texas: it is time for you to come visit. I live somewhere you have heard about now. Somewhere you have heard is cool. We have a “guest bedroom.” You have waited long enough.

And as for this blog? This Texan Life is dead; long live This Texan Life. Some things are changing, but I kind of think the name still works. After all, it’ll still be the highest zip code I’ve ever had. (Next stop: El Paso? Lubbock? Who’s to say?)

Thanks for reading this long, y’all – both in this long-winded post and for the past four years.

From Houston (for the last time) with love,

and then suddenly it’s been more than a year and everything is different and I don’t even know how to untangle the past twelve months to find the Family Circus path that brought me from then to now. I think part of the difficulty is how much my last entry seems to tie a neat little bow on my first two years in Texas, how prescient it seems in retrospect. Anything I can think of to say feels less like a continuation of the story and more like an epilogue, an author’s note, an addendum scribbled on an empty page at the back of the book.

I don’t even really know how to catch you up on what has changed, the adventures I’ve been having, the lows I’ve ridden out. I’ve got a new job (that I love), and a new neighborhood (that I love), and a new boyfriend (you get the picture), and I hit my deductible in record time this year, and yet all of these things feel inadequate in trying to describe the tectonic shifts that have happened. The past year has been incredible, and miserable, and most of the shades in between those two things, but really the only thing I can think of to say about it is that I was surprisingly right when I said last spring that I felt like I was right on the line between two chapters of my life. I don’t know who I am these days (does anyone really?), but it seems clear that I’m someone different than the wide-eyed kid that came to Houston with plans of banging out a novel and making it back to New England in two years or less. I kind of think this happens to lots of people, except that you don’t really notice it because you only meet the person they’ve become and not all the people they’ve been along the way.

It’s a little funny, thinking about how big the gap has grown between the person I thought I would be at 27 and the person I’ve instead become. I like to imagine there’s an alternate universe where that person exists and wonder what he’s doing now. What does the sunset look like from the townhouse he shares with a roommate in Outer Richmond? How early does he have to wake up to fit in a quick run and make it to the hospital for rounds at 7:30? What’s the title of the book he’s putting the finishing touches on? How long has he been composting his trash? Does he fall asleep next to someone when he collapses into bed after a night out with friends? I know one thing for sure: even though my resume might be shorter than his and my life might be lacking in wow factor, I don’t feel any less satisfied or accomplished. Even though I think I’m farther away than ever from the person I thought I would be at 27, I’m honestly pretty okay with that. I think if someone warned me three years ago that this was going to happen, I may have never moved to Texas; but I’m really glad nobody did.

(At any rate, I feel like there are more important pieces of advice that someone could have given 2013 me, namely: Quit moping all the time. Enjoy your time without a job while you still have it. Do not date that cashier from Target. Buy some Amazon stock. Download “Flappy Bird.” Et cetera.)

Anyway. This will be my fourth summer in Houston, and while the estival risks of heat stroke and mosquito bites are as real and present as ever, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to the traditions that Texas summer brings: floating the river, drinking a cold Shiner at Cottonwood, buying new tank tops for Pride, devouring baklava at Greek Fest, getting dressed up for White Linen Night. I’m even looking forward to the taste of salt in the extra evening showers I have to take to wash off all the sweat. 

And honestly, if that makes me wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Older than ever,

That’s not to say that my life now is any less of an adventure, because Texas continues to excite and surprise me almost two years after I came here. It’s just– I don’t know. It’s weird how you can move somewhere and not really plan on building a life there and then you build a life there without really trying. Somehow, I took the taco trucks and the Shiners and the traffic and the lake trips and the late nights and the early mornings and built something lasting out of them, a bricolage of little bits and pieces of Houston.

So, what now? I think it’s finally time to answer the question that I keep asking: what’s left to say after you’ve said everything? Do you stop performing before everybody gets sick of your songs, or do you take a break and create something new, something improved? I’ve been trying to pretend that this is all one cohesive section of my life, one digestible bite-sized unit of time, which is I think the reason I’ve been writing more and documenting less as time goes on. It’s still blurry where the line is between chapters, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the end of my first one in Texas is somewhere in my rear view mirror.

I wonder how you’re supposed to know when one chapter ends and the next one begins. Some of mine (a summer job, a high school crush) have faded so smoothly into another that it’s hard to figure out what separates them; others (a road trip, the Husky Hunt) have such sharp and delineated edges that they fill the rest of the page with empty space before the next starts around the corner. So where’s the end the first Texas chapter? Is it when I got my first apartment by myself? Is it when I found a group of friends here that really understood me? Or maybe when I packed up my flannel shirts and put them in the bottom drawer of my dresser for good?

The best answer I’ve come up with is this: if my last chapter in Boston ended in an empty kitchen in a vacated apartment with my (then) best friend, promising each other that we’d be back soon enough, that nothing was going to change, that this life away from Boston was just a temporary diversion, then I think the first chapter of life in Houston ended when I learned that none of those things were true. I used to get really blue thinking about how stubborn and naive and ignorant I was to the unavoidable passage of time; now I mostly laugh and think wistfully about those days, knowing full well that they’re gone for good. I miss them as much as ever, but I know that all the money in the world couldn’t buy back those days.

So it goes, though no one knows you like they used to do– and I think I’m kind of okay with that. Lots of things aren’t the way they used to be. I’m moving to a new neighborhood soon, and looking for a new job, and I’m sure that even more new things are waiting for me around the corner. So long, Texas I. Bring it on, Texas II.

Until I have something else to say, this has been fun. Thanks for reading, y’all.

I mean, we were all totally in the closet, but still. On its face (and in our minds, I think), it was a pretty movie-ready group of kids: an almost even split of guys and girls, a coupla minorities, and a pretty respectable cross-section of high school archetypes: the jock, the nerd, the goth, the actor, the teacher’s pet, the pot-smoker, et cetera. We had this thing we would say a lot, this defining aphorism, which was that it didn’t make sense that such a disparate group of people would form a clique.

Except that it actually sort of did make sense, because what we actually were was a couple of straight girls, a couple of switch hitters, and a bunch of gay dudes. (Okay, and one straight guy. Whatever.) Basically, we were that loud group you have to shout over at brunch because they’ve pushed three tables together and are having conversations across the grande table they’ve formed, except that we were teenagers and could not afford brunch and even if we could the only places to go were Dick’s Diner and Eat‘n Park and neither one of those places served bottomless mimosas at the time of this writing, so.

But it’s kind of crazy, right? Because high school was for me this time of totally repressing any thoughts I had about liking boys, totally rejecting the idea, to the point that I wouldn’t even make eye contact with the one openly gay guy at our high school – but here were a bunch of gay dudes right under my nose! I think we all kind of sensed it in each other on some level; the guys were always way closer to the girls than we were to each other. I think we saw in each other this huge thing that we didn’t really like about ourselves, and it became a huge roadblock on the path to close friendship. When we all went off to college, the guys were easily the first ones I lost touch with; it quickly became clear that most of our friendship was built on being friends with the same girls.

in retrospect, it sometimes seems totally stupid to me that none of us ever stood up and was just like, “y’all know we’re a bunch of queens, yeah?” I have some gay friends who did that in high school, and I can’t help but feel a little jealous that they figured it out so much sooner than me. I wonder how things would have turned out if we had figured it out and flipped the tables, if we had turned the girls from our beards into our hags. I wonder if we (I?) would have worked through all of the internalized homophobia as kids instead of carrying it over into early adulthood, if my college boyfriends wouldn’t have had quite as much to teach me.

BUT. 2005 was a totally different place than 2015, and I think going to high school on the border of Pittsburgh and Pennsyltucky might’ve been a lot harder for us if people knew we were gay instead of just heavily suspecting that we were.

At least, that’s the story I stick to.

Admitting that I always knew the lyrics to the Wicked sountrack,

I read somewhere that Leo Tolstoy said all great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. A year ago, my life was both of those things; now it’s arguably neither. Which is not to say that I’m unhappy– only that I sometimes feel a little bored and a little boring, a little aburrido on both counts. Now that I'm found, I miss bein' lost.

I used to see my reason for moving here as sort of destructive, that I couldn’t find a job and was feeling pretty down about myself and came down to Houston as a kind of punishment. Like, “fine, if you can’t get anyone to hire you, then you can take some time in Texas to think about what you’ve done.” But I’ve had some time to think about it, and in retrospect, I think it was one of the most constructive things I’ve done in a long time. It added a huge central conflict to my life and led to all of these interesting things happening.

But, like, now what? Do I pick up, move somewhere else, and start this process all over again just to feel the rush of the honeymoon, of the beginning? Or do I pause for a moment, look at all the great friends that I've made here and all of the things I love about this city, and decide that this is enough? What do I say to the nagging voice when it asks, "is that all there is?"

There's this burning, just like there's always been. But maybe that's part of the transition into adulthood. Maybe getting a stable job and buying a home and settling down means selling out on the wanderlust inside you, means letting down the voice that keeps telling you to pack everything up and hit the road again.

I'll let you know if I figure it out.

Well-rested but restless,

I think about the boy that was on the Harvard rowing team that met me at Cambridge Brewing Company for a couple of drinks; the way the corners of his mouth turned down after he made a joke, like he was embarrassed or afraid it wasn't as funny out loud as it had sounded in his head; the way I sweated through two shirts (as always) and tried not to let him notice.

I think about the boy who let me sleep at his place on Friday nights so I could sleep in late and walk to work on Saturday mornings; I think about how we ate Indian food off of aluminum trays, and when he kissed me later that night, it tasted like lamb saagwala; I think about the night we went to some dive bar with a bunch of lesbians, stumbled back to his apartment, stumbled into bed, how he held one of my wrists in either hand, leaned close, and whispered (in what he must have thought was a seductive fashion), "I could rape you right now if I wanted to."

I think about how little we spoke after that.

I think about the first boy I ever kissed; how he brought me home from his apartment to drink scotch and listen to Elton John records; how he kissed me quietly, deliberately, and how I tried so desperately not to let on that I had never even kissed a guy before; how he left me my first booty call voicemail, on a cold December night just after midnight: 

I think about the boy who ate vegan food with me on the grass in the Common, and the way his clear blue eyes lit up when he talked of exploring Phnom Penh, and Krung Thep, and other cities I'll never visit; I think about the way his sternum curved inward, just a little, and the way the late afternoon light filtered in through his bedroom window; I think about how it's a fraction of a whole, but it's hard to control.

I think about the boy who took me to sushi at a restaurant with a great pun for a name, and how he held my hand on the walk back, but he wouldn't kiss me; how he introduced me to all his friends on a chilly patio, and how hard we laughed about Heather Mills, but he wouldn't kiss me; how we would curl up on his couch under a blanket and watch movies, but he wouldn't kiss me; about how, when he stopped returning my texts, I wrote a long letter to him pouring out my heart, a silly thing I did when I was young and naive and fell in love with open doors.

I think about the boys whose stories are too boring, or too personal, or too embarrassing to share on a tumblr blog that nobody reads anyway.

If you had told me at the beginning that none of them would end up sticking around, that one of us would lose interest, or ruin things, or move away, would I still have gone on all of those dates? On one hand, it gave me lots of experience– some things are still nebulous as far as what I want, but I've got lots of ideas about what I don't want. On the other hand, I feel like I've got all this nostalgia for all of these people who ended up not mattering in the long run.

And it's not that I miss any of them, exactly– it's just that I miss that feeling before a first date, after a first date, where you wonder, like, is this somebody that's going to end up mattering? Is this somebody that's gonna be around in a few months, or a few years? Is this somebody I'm going to buy a brownstone in the South End with and walk our kids to school in the morning?

I think too much of my nostalgia is misdirected or misplaced, that I mix up my feelings for my youth and Boston and boys I dated during my youth in Boston. It still feels awfully real, though.

Whatever. I close the compendium, finish cleaning out my contacts, set it all back on a shelf for the next time I'm feeling reminiscent.

Facin' foward,

When I went back a year ago, these were rhetorical questions; the prodigal son had returned! I was back home! I was bumping into people I had bumped into dozens of times in college! It felt like Texas had been an extended vacation, but I was finally back where I belonged. This time? I don’t know. Restaurants have changed, buildings have gone down and come up… even squinting, it was hard to convince myself that nothing had changed.

When I started this chapter of my blog, I asked a question that has been really salient for me since then:

Where is home? Pennsylvania? Massachusetts? Or just a time in my life when I was surrounded by people I loved and I felt like I was behind the steering wheel of my own life?

After a weekend back in Boston, this is at least one question I have an answer to. I’m sort of paraphrasing Billy Joel here, but “home” is really just another word for y’all: the people who came along for the ride with me for a day, a week, a year, or a decade, and decided to stick around once our paths diverged. It's not the Hub of the Universe, and it's not the Paris of Appalachia; it’s a constellation of people I care about that stretches across America.

And if home isn't a place anymore, then why can't I make anywhere home? Why not choose a city where I can go for a swim in October, where I can walk to the grocery store, where I can drive to the beach in less than an hour, where I can look around the corner and find awesome shawarma, or bibimbap, or chicharrón, or chana masala, or a million other delicious foods?

So here’s the corny conclusion you probably saw coming from the beginning: I’m never moving back because I can’t. Of time and space, I can't move forward and back through the first one– and for the time being, I'm content not making any big moves through the second.

With feet firmly planted (for now),

My early teenage years were a period of instability in lots of ways, including the people I hung out with– which is likely how I ended up at a birthday party for a girl I didn't particularly like with people I didn't particularly know. The girl had this kind of weird obsession with George Carlin, and while George Carlin is certainly a funny guy, this birthday party was essentially just a couple dozen teenagers sitting on berber carpet watching his stand-up on old VHS cassettes. I don't think I even made it through the first tape before standing up and looking for something that would more reliably hold my interest.

In the laundry room next door, her family had collected a couple dozen board games and stacked them haphazardly on a bookshelf against one wall. Some (Monopoly, Parcheesi) had obviously seen more action than others, as the corners of the boxes had been worn away to reveal the whitish cardboard below. Others seemed to have never been touched, and one in particular caught my eye: a Ouija board. I brushed the dust off the top and called into the other room for a couple of volunteers. Flash forward a few minutes, and I'm sitting cross-legged with my back against the washing machine, flanked by two kids I sat behind in social studies and a girl I vaguely recognized from middle school.

Now, let me be clear: I am an adult, and one of the things that goes along with being an adult is the understanding that Ouija boards are not a legitimate means of communicating with the dead. But this was more than a decade ago, when we were somewhere near the cusp of figuring out how the world works. While we all agreed out loud that the whole thing was just a parlor game for kids, I think the belief was still unsteady enough that we were all prepared to unseat it with one convincing conversation with the beyond.

So, we conversed. Is there anyone there? The planchette hesitated, then stuttered over to the word "YES." Kate** giggled nervously. Someone gently accused someone else of being the mastermind, but no one took credit, so we continued. We asked if they would mind talking to us, and when the planchette made a small circle and settled back on "YES," we exchanged glances and then began to take the game more seriously. "He" told us his name was Kulvlalt, which seemed to us just consonant enough to be the name of someone slightly demonic. The conversation continued relatively smoothly, although when we asked how old he was or whether he was a "good spirit" (whatever that was supposed to mean) he stayed conspicuously silent.

Being, as we were, teenagers, the conversation naturally shifted toward gossip about the people at the party: does anyone here have a crush on Tom? How many people have lost their virginity? I'm not certain how we expected our spirit guide to know the answer to these questions (or how bored we must have made him), but at our age these were pertinent and pressing issues. We became more and more bold in our questions, until Sadie lowered her voice and asked, "how many people here are gay?"

Now here was a query we could get behind. Remember that this was 2003, still a few years before gay people were very widely considered cool or fashionable, and discovering that we had a homosexual in our midst would have been a minor scandal. I remember feeling the rumble of the planchette under my fingers as it scrolled uncertainly across the board, and I remember the rock that fell into my stomach when it settled on the numeral "4."

Our quartet fell silent. It seemed we were all confident enough in our counting skills to notice a relationship between the number of people in the room and the number indicated beneath the glass circle. 

After what felt like hours, Kate ventured, "maybe it means people at the whole party?" The rest of us exhaled; this was clearly the excuse we were all desperately searching for. There was no way any of us was... you know. Tom clarified: "how many people in this laundry room are gay?"

The planchette sat motionless, numeral directly in the center.

He repeated the question, and our spirit friend repeated his silent response.

As if on cue, the door to the laundry room swung open. The host's mom was ordering pizza, we were told, and did we want any and how many slices could we eat and was that a Ouija board? We were embarrassed to be caught with a kids' toy, and we quickly packed up the box. Sadie suggested that we should promise not to tell anyone else what had happened, and we all agreed, maybe with a bit too much enthusiasm.

And then we never really talked about it again. It had to be a mistake, or someone playing a practical joke, right? I had had girlfriends. Sadie had a boyfriend at the time. What did some stupid spirit know, anyway? So I forgot about it.

There's this weird thing, though: three years later, Sadie started telling people she was bisexual and holding hands with another girl at school. And then sophomore year of college, I had a drunken conversation with Kate where we confessed to each other that we were maybe gay, or something. And then two years after that, word got around that Tom had come out of the closet.

A couple of summers ago, someone mentioned Ouija boards in a conversation, and the memory flooded back to me. Armed with seven years' knowledge, I couldn't believe how correct the prediction had turned out to be. Had one of us been playing a practical joke after all? Was there really some spirit that was able to see something we weren't? Did we all already know deep down what the answer was and let our subconscious move the wooden block? I had to know if I was the only one who remembered it or had thought about it since that night.

Sadie claimed no recollection. She suggested that "it could very well have been a spirit that answered us, whether by whispering the answer into someone's mind, or the spirit could have moved the triangle itself," but this felt sort of hokey to me.

Kate remembered clearly, was firm that she had not moved the planchette on purpose, and offered me an anecdote: "One time, I was sitting in my room after that night. I thought, 'OH GOD, JUST SHOW ME A SIGN IF THERE ARE REALLY SPIRITS LIKE THAT'... and right after I said it, my Ouija board fell from my dresser onto the floor."

I asked Tom, but he never responded.

I guess I don't know what to make of all of it. I'm a pretty firm skeptic about this kind of thing, and if someone else told me this story, I'm sure I'd brush it aside as an anecdote with a secret explanation. But something about that night, the prediction, it feels a little electric in a way that I can't totally shake off. I don't know, man. Am I crazy for thinking that something supernatural might have happened?

Now I'm a believer (maybe),

I think one of the weirdest things about this first year of life after college (or grad school, or whatever) has been that there are no progress reports, no exams, no end-of-rotation feedback sessions. These regular reviews used to give me anxiety, but now that they're gone for good, I sort of miss them. At least they gave me some concrete sense of How I Was Doing, whether or not I always agreed with the results. And although I'm not really sure how to define and assess for success in adult life, I feel like it's important to give it a shot.

So, after twelve months in Houston, how well am I doing? I really wanted this post to be an itemized list of the incredible things I've done in the past year, and in some ways, I feel like I'm a million miles away from who I was a year ago:

I've made some friends, lost some friends, made some more;

I've bought a set of furniture, a nice TV, and maybe a couple of six-packs;

I can navigate the fourth-biggest city in America with my eyes closed;

I know the difference between Mexican and Tex-Mex, between UT and A&M, between Lone Star and Shiner;

I finally get the jokes when I watch King of the Hill; and 

I've added a few notches to my belt (at the tip of it, of course- Texas has definitely not been kind to my waistline).

In others, I feel like I've come through these twelve months without much to show for it:

I'm no closer to finding a job that brings me real satisfaction;

My novel still hasn't really gotten off the ground; 

I still wake up in a cold sweat when I dream I'm back in Boston; 

I still struggle with much the same insecurities, the same anxieties, the same flaws; and 

Some days I don't think I'm ever going to Figure It All Out, whatever that means.

I certainly say "y'all" a lot more, but I think I've always been wicked quick to pick up a new accent.

But I think that's life, right? People don't find all the answers to their life in their twenties – or if they do, they probably didn't have much to figure out. Most of us never really get a Moment of Truth, lots of days come and go without any real fanfare, and the only turning points we get are the ones we recognize in the rear view mirror. Some of This Texan Life has been striving to become the person I want to be – but lots more of it has been learning to live with the person I am. The knowledge that this is true for most people doesn't take away the struggle, but it certainly helps a bit.

So here's to at least one more year of this Texpedition, and to you, Houston. I could drink a case of you, darlin', and still I'd be on my feet.

#turndownforwhat,

Don’t get me wrong- the large majority of things that I say are unedited and true. But I say a ton of things, and that leaves room for a sizable minority of times when I’m maybe not totally faithful to the truth, especially after a couple of beers. But I think it’s only fair that I get a chance to explain myself.

So without further ado, I present to you a bullshitter’s defense:

1. I want to sound smart. When I was six years old, I was convinced I was the smartest person I knew. I think sometimes Americans place too much weight on arbitrary tests as a measure of kids’ intelligence, and my autistic-adjacent ability to memorize phone numbers or license plates or make shapes out of stupid geometric piece of plastic in early childhood meant I got a lot of messages from peers and adults about how smart I must be.

And, okay, in the time since then I have met thousands of people more intelligent and more educated and more thoughtful than me, (and I am so painfully aware of how little I actually know about anything,) but that kind of repetitive messaging has to have an effect on a kid, y’know? Like, I’m always down to get into a discussion with people more informed than me- but I’ll be damned if there isn’t a piece of me down deep that feels like I should always be the most learned, the most eloquent person in the room. So I pretend to have heard of things I haven’t, and pretend to know things I don’t, and even though I hate spinning the web there’s a little piece of me that won’t stop until it’s run out of thread.

2. I want to be liked. It’s not something I’ve talked about with enough people to draw any conclusions, but I imagine there are some people in this world who don’t take it personally when a conversation doesn’t go well. They attribute it to someone’s bad attitude, or to a lack of good discussion topics, or simple incompatibility with the other person. I say “I imagine,” because when I walk away from a bad conversation I instantly conclude that it must have been because I am uninteresting and/or unlikable. Any unsuccessful social interaction instantly turns into a critique of my choice of topic or of my awkwardness or of my inability to create a connection.

So, I embellish my stories a little bit. I fudge details to make the story a little more politically correct, or a little less politically correct. I pretend to have been to Oregon because I want to seem more interesting. I pretend to have read more than twenty pages of Infinite Jest so I seem well-rounded. In the time after the conversation, I beat myself up for straying from the truth- but in the adrenaline-rush-fight-or-flight moment of a conversation, all I can really focus on is getting the other person to like me, even if I have to play dirty to do it.

3. I get a little rush from it. Six weeks into my freshman year of college, I found myself stuck at Downtown Crossing with this guy I went to school with but had never spoken to before. We were talking about both heading home for the weekend, and when he asked if I grew up in Philadelphia I said “yes” before I really had time to process the question. I know I could have reversed and said, “wait, no,” but instead I continued the conversation for another thirty minutes on our way to our respective destinations because I refused to acknowledge my initial lie.

Like, this conversation went deep. I was racking my brain for Philly suburbs I had heard of and making up a life story as I went, and I was actually having a lot of fun realizing that he bought it all (or was too polite to call me on my shit). It’s like a sixteen year old talking his way out of an expired hall pass, or blowing through a stoplight a split-second after it turns red and sweet-talking your way out of a ticket- I get kind of a kick out of breaking a couple of rules and working my way out of the sticky situation.

4. I want my backstory to be something cooler than it is. I didn’t have many friends as a kid. I mostly grew up in the same town. I didn’t have any actual, official girlfriends in high school. The most I had smoked before college was a couple of clove cigarettes in the parking lot of a grocery store. I didn’t go to my first college party until I was 20. I didn’t kiss a guy until I was 21. I’m not actually from Boston.

I list these things because they’re all things I know I’ve lied about before- and I’m not listing a hundred pieces of my backstory that I’ve more subtly changed, or lied about through omission, or not corrected people when they guessed a different version of events. I won’t appeal to your sympathy in explaining why- all I can really say is that it’s fun to airbrush over the boring stuff. It’s cool to sound cool.

(I want to head off a potential complaint and point out that I know the difference between acknowledging a character flaw and working to fix one, and that baring my soul on a shitty blog doesn’t excuse my behavior. But it certainly counts for something- or at least, I think it does.)

A final thought: there’s this bit of a song that I really love that goes,

The whole world, it loves you if you’re a chic chameleon; Intersecting circles, she could hang with anyone. But when conducting business, she would lie ‘bout where she’s from Saying, ‘life is how it is, not how it was.’

I’m working on changing it- but I think a piece of me is always going to see the appeal in a life like that.

Sincerely (for now, at least),

Go back far enough, and it all feels that way, taking a few out of context comments and trying to reconstruct a life, filling in the large gaps of my memory with photo and video evidence and one-half of a conversation. It helps paint a more complete picture- but when I think I remember something, it's occasionally that I really just remember reading something about it on Facebook years later.

I just wonder sometimes if having all of this history at my fingertips is entirely a good thing. I wonder if maybe it skews my perspective and makes me remember the past as better than it actually was. You know? Because Facebook is full of all the fun, exciting things that people do, but it effortlessly glosses over all of the boring or sad or embarrassing parts. You never get an email that reminds you how three years ago, you sat in your apartment all weekend in sweatpants and played video games. Or how two years ago, you went home with someone because you had no self-esteem and you thought that would fix it. Or that four years ago, you walked into a party, didn't know anyone, had a panic attack in the bathroom, and snuck back out three minutes later.

All of these moments get airbrushed out, swept under the rug in favor of pithy jokes about DrawSomething or the one picture of the night where nobody looked too drunk.

I've never been very good at letting go of the past, be it a city or a bar or an album or a person. I'm usually okay with that- most of my life it's fallen to me to be the record keeper, the person my friends turn to when they can't remember a specific detail, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of being that person. But I think sometimes I romanticize the past too much, and when I compare the reality of now to my memories of way back when, I end up dissatisfied. I hold onto things that don't mean anything anymore because I've attached some great significance to their history. I've gotten better at moving forward in some ways, but I think I'll always struggle with forward motion.

("It's simple," so says the captain. "Face forward. Move slow. Forge ahead.")

Otherwise, life is good. Ridin' the highs and diggin' the lows,