giving thanks

The first time I went to Clara’s house was after I found a cockroach.  

I was living in a studio apartment that was less than 300 sq ft. It was the summer in between my first and second (final) year of my second degree, and I wasn’t doing much so I went a bit unhinged.  I took one of those intensive courses that was full time for a couple of weeks, had to write a paper, but then that was it and I was just left to my own devices.

Some people use periods of extended free time to work on projects, but I crumble when I don’t have structure in my day.  I hadn’t fully figured out how to feed myself and was living on microwave popcorn and rum & Cokes.The humidity was brutal, and though I had a free standing air conditioning unit that attached by a tube to the outside, my place was oppressively hot all the time.  My days and nights were backwards, so I would stay up until 4 am, sleep until noon. By the time I was coherent enough to leave the house, it was getting on seven p.m. and the city had started to shut down. I felt like not only was I abandoned in the world, I was out of sync with it.  Karen was in Switzerland, Casey was back on the West Coast for the summer, any friends I had made at University were gone or working or both. I had lived in the City for a year, and it’d felt like I had settled in okay, but I hadn’t.

I tried to go places by myself, and for a while I managed one outing a day - the St. Lawrence Market, AGO, a walk around Queen’s Park.  When I still had the paper to finish, I tried to go to different coffee shops to work on it.  But going places alone is still being alone, and mostly I just sat all day long on my loveseat and rewatched the entire series of Grey’s Anatomy.

One day when I was on the computer, a bug walked across my hand.  I started and shook it off, and couldn’t find it again after that.  I didn’t think anything of it until I told someone about it and they suggested it might have been a cockroach.

Now I feel like: cockroaches, whatever. Bedbugs are where true fear lives.  But at the time, my only idea of cockroaches were the New York City cockroaches, which are half a foot long and will survive a nuclear holocaust. It was time to clean my apartment.

I want to say my place was a disaster because it was so small that there was nowhere to keep things, but the apartment I live in now is nearly three times larger and it’s still a pigsty.  I’m messy.  I’m always trying to get better, but my natural instinct when something falls to the floor is not to pick it up, it’s to step over it until the end of time.

That day I started to tidy up some of the clutter. Did the dishes. Took out the recycling. Went to clean the bathroom.  There were two open bandaid boxes, so I tried to dump the remaining bandaids from one box into the other. Consolidate.  Instead I dumped the cockroach onto the counter.

It’s something that doesn’t sound scary in the retelling, but it was the most primal fear I’ve ever felt.  There was a cockroach in the box of bandaids. Why was it there? I hadn’t expected it to be there. I hadn’t for a second thought that it would fall out when I tipped the box.

I left the box where it fell and ran downstairs to tell the building super.

They didn’t believe me that there was a cockroach, but one of the girls came up with me with a can of bug spray, and searched through my bathroom until she found the bug.  We both screamed as she sprayed it and sprayed it, and when it died we put it in one of my little bowls, covered in plastic wrap, to bring down to show the other people.

“Fine,” the manager said. “It’s a cockroach.”

They were going to spray my apartment, but first I had to take every single thing out of the kitchen and out of the bathroom.  Since it was a studio apartment, the kitchen was also my bedroom.  I didn’t have a car then, so I had to walk to Staples and then carry all the boxes back so I would have something to put all my stuff in. I remember how brutally hot it was, how at odds with the city I already felt. If I could have lit a match and burned my apartment to the ground instead of dealing with it, I would have.

I packed up everything in my kitchen and everything in my bathroom and piled it onto the table and loveseat and bed - which were technically in the kitchen.  Everything was technically in the kitchen. Everything was technically in the bedroom. I got so sweaty that I felt gritty with it.  Every time I pulled out a dish, I was scared a cockroach would fly at me. If they were in the bandaid box, they could be anywhere.  There was no longer anywhere to sit in my apartment.  Sweat ran down my back and I thought it was another bug.

I had complained online about the cockroaches, and Clara asked if I needed to sleep over at her place.  At the time, we had gone to a couple of concerts together with other people, but had never hung out one on one. I had never been to her house.

Growing up, my mother’s number one mantra was, “You can’t trust anyone but yourself.” We didn’t have family friends and had no relatives that lived in the same city.  Our house was insular and my friendships were often a source of conflict.  I didn’t know what it felt like to be part of a community. I had no idea how to ask for help from friends.

But Clara was nice, and, if you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I was subterranean.  All of my stuff was in boxes. I was constantly terrified that I would find another cockroach.  I didn’t trust anyone else - yet - but  I also didn’t trust myself.  I told Clara that if it was alright with her, I would love to stay over.

Clara and her husband owned a house in the east end.   I’d never been to that end of town, but she came to meet me at the subway station for the two block walk to her house.  It was 10 pm by the time I got there because I’d spent all day packing, and I was a gritty, sweaty, panicked mess.   She lived in an established neighbourhood, on a tree lined street, in a semi-detached house.  I’d been downtown exclusively for the previous year, and I had forgotten what a neighbourhood felt like.   It felt like walking through Eden.

The entirety of my apartment consisted of a desk, desk chair, love seat, small table with two chairs, single bed, and bedside table.  Clara’s home had a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room that all separated by doors. She had an entire second floor with three bedrooms. She had a backyard and a basement.

I went for a shower first off.  One of the things they tell you online is that cockroaches can lay eggs everywhere, so I was a little bit worried that my clothes would be covered in cockroach eggs and that I would infect Clara’s beautiful home.  I felt like a leper, but if she was worried about me bringing cockroaches, she never showed it - even though she didn’t know me very well at the time, even though I was a mess.  All summer  I felt like I had been living on another plane, entirely disconnected from the rest of the world, but that mustn’t have been true because I was sitting with her in her living room.

The next day I headed out first thing in the morning because I was worried about imposing. She and her husband were going away overnight but said I could stay in their house, so I waited until the evening to come back. I checked in on my apartment. They put pink gel in lines in my cupboards and dumped a load of dust all over the floors - including all over the power cables for my computer. My apartment had a slightly sweet smell that was a bit medical. It made me want to throw up.  

I bought dinner and took it back to Clara’s house in the evening.  I watched The Proposal, which she had recorded, and felt better than I had all summer.  Not just after finding the cockroach, but the whole lead up to it.   That summer wasn’t the saddest I had ever been in my entire life, and it maybe wasn’t even the loneliest, but it was the closest I got to the abyss.  I always feel like I’m at the edge of a cliff, looking out into this vast nothingness.  Sometimes I’m on the cliff but there’s a guard rail and I’m wearing a parachute and tethered with cables,  so it doesn’t actually feel like I’m going to fall. But that summer I felt like I was right at the edge where the rocks were small and loose.

They say you’ll never find only one cockroach, but I never found another one.  Eventually I vacuumed up the dust, but even though I kept waiting to find carcasses of the bugs that the dust had killed, I never did.  I slept for the rest of the month with the light on by my bed, because I had read that cockroaches didn’t like light. I didn’t want them crawling on me when I slept.

--

My family wanted me to come back to the West Coast for Thanksgiving this year, but in the time leading up to it I had to work evenings and weekends and I was too tired to make the trip. Clara asked me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her, her husband, and her parents.  I went, and only the smallest part of me felt like I shouldn’t be intruding on someone else’s family dinner.   I thought about that first time as I walked over from the subway.  It still feels like I’m walking to the safest place in the city.

okay, cupid.

Over the summer I had decided to try online dating. “Decided” = Casey sat me down in front of a computer one night after we had been drinking and talked me through writing a profile (“You have to say at least one nice thing about yourself. Laura. A nice thing. You’ve already talked about how messy your apartment is, you have to take that out.”) and then took over the computer and picked photos from my facebook to upload.

I texted Karen the next day and told her that a bunch of spambots were messaging me.

“Those are real people,” she said. “Jesus, Laura.”  But then she told me to add a code word to my profile and ask people to say it so that I’d know they had actually read it.

So I did, and there were still a bunch of messages except now they also had my codeword.

“They aren’t spambots,” I said.

“I TOLD YOU.”

“It’s really weird.”

--

Casey said that I should find people I liked to message, but I felt really weird looking at other people because it reminded me that other people could look at me.

--

I went on one date.

It was fine except that he was so! upset! that the last girl he’d been on a date with had had an abortion at 28 (but he was pro choice) and he had a shit job that he hated and angst angst angst until he drank himself horny and wanted to sit beside me and put his hand on my leg and make out in public a lot.

I told Casey about it the next weekend while we were making nachos with sweet potato, black beans and corn.

“It was like his mouth was a beak and he opened it really wide and inside there was another beak that was his tongue.  I think I got one of his boogers in my mouth.  It was the worst kiss I’ve ever had.”

“It’s funny that your worst kiss was now, and not like when you were a teenager.”

“He was thirty,” I said unhappily.   I didn’t have any terrible kisses when I was a teenager, not even when I was nineteen and newly single and made out with more people than I can count now.  All week long I kept accidentally remembering what it felt like to kiss him and grossing myself out.

--

On Friday I went to Marshall’s over lunch. A man was standing in the line up area, but further back from the cashiers. I waited behind him, but he said to go ahead.

Shortly after that, he came up behind me, so before it was my turn to go to a cashier, I said, “You were here before me, do you want to go?”

He said, “No, no, you go.”

“I’m just returning one thing. I’ll be quick.”

I returned the blazer (which I liked, but felt slightly tight in the forearms of all places) and headed to my car.  He must have been quick too, because he followed me out of the store and called for me.

I was stuck with one foot in my car when I realized he was talking to me, so I got out again.

“You were so nice,” he said.

“I felt bad, I didn’t mean to budge.”

“Are you taken?” he asked, but I didn’t know what he was asking at first.  “Are you taken?”

“Haha, I’m just heading back to work,” I said.  When I don’t know what someone is saying, I usually just say what I’m planning on doing next, because it’s a reasonably safe bet.

“Are you taken?  Can I call you?”

I gave him my number, but when he texted on Friday night, I didn’t text back. And when he called on Saturday night, I ignored it.

I was skyping with my little brother G, and he said that I needed to text back and say I wasn’t interested, but I just didn’t want to.

Over brunch on Saturday, I asked Casey.  She said, “If you’d sounded at all interested when you told me this story, I would have said to go for it. But you were just like, ‘He followed me into the parking lot. He was wearing sweatpants.’”

“There wasn’t anything to be excited about,” I said.  “We didn’t even talk about anything.  When I was in the steam room at the pool last week, this buck naked woman started talking to me.  I know more about her than I do about him.”

She harsh tanlines from a very small bathing suit, and said that it was so good to be sweating out the sins of the prosecco last night.  We talked about the buildings we lived in and the area and the gym.  I finally left the steam room when she put on gloves and started exfoliating herself.  

“You don’t owe strangers kindness,” Casey said.   “You just have to be polite, and even then -- not always.”

“Yeah, politeness, not kindness.  Though I think I had to be kind to that woman in the steam room.  That was an intimate situation.”

Casey gave me a look.

“I guess she might have made some people uncomfortable,” I allowed.

--

That evening I went to Sunday dinner at Karen’s house, and polled her as well.

“No,” she said.  “You’re fine to ignore him.”

“It’s funny because it happened like 12 hours after you and I had the conversation about how I thought I wanted to start dating again.”

“You’re psychic,” she said. “But you don’t have to date a guy wearing sweatpants.”

“I love how everyone how knows me is like, ‘You’re not going to be into someone wearing sweatpants.”  I laughed.

“You would be like, ‘What’s happening? Why is this soft cotton talking to me?’”

“The soft cotton is talking to me!”

--

When I was driving to work today, Creep came on the radio.  I remembered being seventeen, driving back from the potholes at six in the morning with Andre, who was my first boyfriend and longest relationship. He was delivering pizza that summer, and he had worked the late shift. He came to my house once he was done, at four am, and woke me up so that we could go skinny dipping in the potholes before the sun rose.   The water was too cold, so we just went in and out, then had sex on a towel by the shore. On the way back to the car, I was still naked and wrapped in that towel.  We passed a man who was out for a jog, and he looked at us in a way that made me think it wasn’t the first time he had seen us that morning.

I remember sitting next to Andre in the car and listening to him sing, You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special.  The year we graduated high school. Andre had won the award for music theatre, and I had won the award for band. My hair was short then, and his was long - almost down to his shoulders: longer than mine.

I could still hear his voice this morning, even though I was half a country away, driving alone in my own car.  He lives in Japan now and I never think about him anymore but sometimes I miss how it felt to be attracted to someone.

i've got a mental image of the way you used to look at me

Over the August long weekend, I went back to the West Coast.  I’ve got two brothers: G (25) who lives in Vancouver, and J (23) who lives in Seattle.  I stayed in G’s appartment in Vancouver for the first weekend, and J came up as well.

I nearly passed out waiting for J’s train from Seattle to get in the first night, because it was past 3:30 am my time.  When he finally got in, he said hello and then almost immediately got into a long discussion with G about whether or not The Castle, by Kafka, was a “big spray of words.” And something or another about a waterfall of language.

It’s weird to be related to people, because theoretically that means for sure that they’re not space aliens. I went to bed.

"I got a roomba," J said they next morning: finally common ground.

"I lost my roomba," I said.

"Oh my god, Laura, what?"

"It went out on it's scheduled clean and it never came back."

They both stared at me, baffled.

"I really thought I would happen upon it, but I haven't."

"Did you leave the door open?"

"No, it was while I was at work."

"How could it be lost?  It has to be on the floor somewhere."

"I really don't know. I spent like five days squirming around on my belly like a snake trying to find it."

When I got home after the trip, I went hunting for it again.  It turned out it was behind the clothing storage boxes under my bed, strangled in a yellow and white belt and choked by fake green grass from the terrarium crafting.

That afternoon, G pulled out his guitar and the two of them started doing a Waxahatchee cover jam session.

The deck door was open and I was there in the room listening to the song but I could also imagine being on a neighbhour's deck and hearing the strains of it, or walking on the sidewalk in front of the building and hearing it from fourteen storeys up.

After they finished, I said, "When I was listening to it, it was like we were in a movie and -- "

"The ugly girl takes off her glasses and she's pretty," J said.

G laughed.

"Oh my god," I said.  "Never mind, I didn't like the song anyway."

"G has trouble with compliments," J said.  "I just have to help him sometimes."

"No, you have a problem with G getting complimented.  He loves them."

"Anyway there was one part of the song that you did wrong,"  J said and then starts giving G pointers.

Eventually they switched over to Modest Mouse. This will never end this will never end this will never end.

 

--

I went back to Victoria, spent a few days with my parents, and then all of us went in to Seattle.

I had no picture in my head of what Seattle would look like, which is kind of random. When I want to New York, it felt so familiar because the places have been in so many movies and TV shows.  Seattle is gorgeous, though. I’ve been polling everyone to see if they had a mental picture of Seattle, and no one had much to say except rainy, but when I was there it was perfect and sunny.

--

I saw no one but family when I went back to the west coast.  I hung out with my married friends, who also grew up on the Island, on the weekend after I got back.

 

“Did you hear about John and Jane?” Elizabeth asked.

I was friends with John from junior high onward, and sort of peripherally friends with Jane (who I’d also gone to Jr. High with), because she was also friends with John. She always seemed to be upset about something, whined a lot but was also One Of The Guys and went camping and followed… some sport, I had so little interest, I can’t even remember now. Maybe basketball. Probably hockey as well.

John said that I was like the good parts of having a girlfriend and she was like the bad parts, and I thought maybe that meant one day he was going to want to date me, but actually it meant that after five years of swearing up and down that he didn’t like Jane and would never like her and would never date her, he did.

“Are they engaged?” I asked.  John had texted me after he realized I was on the Island from my Instagram pictures, but I was already back in Toronto.

“Yeah,” Elizabeth said.

“Of course,” I said. When I saw them at Christmas, Jane had been going on and on about how everyone expected John to propose over the holidays but he had said he was going to get new tires for his Jeep instead of buying a ring.

“It’s for safety,” he had said.  They were living together, and I was sitting inside their living room for the first time.

“His mom wants him to propose,” Jane had said. “His aunt said, ‘It’s time to shit or get off the pot.’”

“I don’t know why you like that,” John had said. “It’s implying that you’re crap.”

I texted John the next day, after Jane put the announcement of the engagement up on Facebook: I saw Jane’s status on Facebook. Congrats!

He said: Thanks Laura - it’s so people know were in a serious relationship now.

I wrote back: Lol.  As if they didn’t already know.

Got a west coast heart and an east coast mentality.  Baby, let's push our limits.

my friend telling me about a shop that we need to check out...

"What's a lifestyle store? Like kitchen stuff and dildos?"

"No.  Shoes. And couches."

vig·i·lance

“You saw that, right?” Casey asked when we’d got to the platform for the train we were transferring to. It was Saturday night and we were going to go see a play.

“No, what?”  I asked.

There had been a guy standing beside the pole. I’d walked behind it to avoid passing by him.  I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe he’d looked our way. If Casey had asked me to guess, that’s what I would have said.

But Casey said, “On the escalator.  You were standing on the right and a guy came up and literally stopped on the same step you were standing on and just stood there smiling at you for the entire rest of the ride up.”

“What?” I said. “No.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He was standing beside you!  He was staring at you and smiling!”

I shook my head. I had been trying to remember if the southbound train was on the right or the left side and was sort of reading the posters on the wall. I genuinely had no idea that there was even someone standing beside me, beyond the usual awareness that I was in public and there were a lot of people around.

“I thought maybe you were ignoring him on purpose,” Casey said. She kept staring at me, dumfounded. I noticed her looking at least.

The play was called All The Sex I Ever Had, which was not as amazing as the title would lead you to believe.  It was a bunch of seniors talking about their actual lives: a little bit about the sex that they’d had and a lot about random other things.  It felt self indulgent. That’s such a great premise though. Imagine telling a whole story of a person’s life just by describing the different times they’d had sex.

After the play we went out for a drink.  She asked if I wanted to leave it up to chance to decide where we went by taking whichever was there first, the streetcar or the bus.  “Let’s do it. Jesus, take the wheel,” I said, probably too loudly.  It was the streetcar.

Casey’s a really slow drinker. Almost everyone drinks slower than me (I wait until something is the perfect temperature and then basically finish it all in one gulp so it doesn’t have time to get warmer/colder/ruined), but Casey really drinks slowly.

Tonight, she finished her first drink before me.  

“When the pod people take you over, I’m going to know immediately,” I said when she pointed out her empty glass.  “But I’m not going to make the mistake that everyone does on tv and in movies. They’re always like, ‘oh, no, you’re a pod person, bla bla, what’s happened?’  I’ll know, but I’ll pretend that everything is fine so no one will know I know. I’ll get away.”

“Because I’ll finish my drink before you?”

“Dead give away.”

Casey’s boyfriend showed up. We told him that we’d left which bar we went to up to chance.  She said that she was happy we’d gone to this one, because she didn’t like the vibe of the other one as much.  “Too many douchebros.”

I shrugged.

“You’d be like, ‘Oh, some douchebros,’” she said. “But then if they looked at you, you’d be like, ‘oh, a wall.’”

“Is Laura blind to love?” her boyfriend asked.

“She’s blind to anything that involves her,” Casey said.

“It’s not love,” I said.

“They don’t know if it’s love yet,” Casey said.

“I’m going to get better at noticing,” I said, but I’ve been saying that for years.

Once my boss was talking about someone we’d met at a work event, and I couldn’t remember meeting him.  “He was staring at you all afternoon,” she said.  Sometimes I think my friends might be making things up a little to try to boost my confidence, but there was no reason for my boss to make up a creepy middle-aged man.  

“The man in the suit standing by the door?” I had asked her.

“The man standing by you. All afternoon long. He was undressing you with his eyes.”

I had shaken my head. She had looked at me the same way Casey did, like I was either crazy or lying.

“It’s like Sliding Doors,” I said to Casey and her boyfriend, going back to our choice to let transit decide the destination. And then I thought for a minute.  “No, it would have been exactly the same no matter which bar we went to.”  A little too dark, a little too loud, one craft beer or another, the same animated conversations about nothing. 

 

“I finished my first beer before Laura did,” Casey said to her boyfriend on the way home.

“In fairness,” I said, “your first beer was actually my fourth one.”

“True, but you sobered up during the play, so it didn’t count.”

“When you do turn into a pod person, I’m going to be ready,” I said.

“But what are you going to do if someone tries to make you into a pod person?”

“I’d pretend they succeeded and continue on. They’re never going to get me.”

Casey laughed.

“You forget that I work in Corporate Land,” I said.  “Every single day.”

“So you’re already used to staying strong behind enemy lines?”

“Constant vigilance.” I said.

Montreal

baby I'm a pro at letting go

I went with Karen to Montreal over the May long weekend.  It was perfectly parallel because we became friends five years ago when we went to Montreal for a class trip in the first month of the university program we were both in. Back then I was a stressy wreck from moving across the country and living on my own for the first time, and what? They wanted me to go to another province - an entire different province than the one I was in now, which was already an unfamiliar place - and learn some shit about community gardens? As if!

But Karen said I should take kava and I did and it helped. When graduated, she moved to Montreal for a couple of years to work, before moving back to Toronto last year. And we were going to go back to visit. My friend J’s boyfriend was turning his apartment into an Airbnb, and he let us stay there for free over the weekend.  I’d been to Montreal once before the class trip, so this was my third time, but every single time I’m awed by the buildings, how they’re all the same perfect height and have the cutest staircases, and are all designed a little bit differently but still fit together seamlessly. Everywhere you walk it feels like the streets are exactly as they should be, no empty gaps or ugly sections. Just parkettes and street art and local shops and trees.

We got there on Saturday, wandered, went out with a bunch of people, ate. One of the women’s boyfriends was from France, and I asked if they spoke French at home.

“Yes,” he said. “We try to at dinner, while we are enjoying the pleasures of the table.”

Jesus, everyone said, because there’s French and then there’s Paris French.

The woman went out with us after, once everyone had left, and said that her boyfriend had once got upset with her and said, “Do you know it’s been five days since we made love and three days since we have kissed?”

She said no, she didn’t keep track. Maybe romance is best saved for the dinner table.

--

On Sunday, we met up with some women and went to Bota Bota, which is a spa right on the harbour looking out over old Montreal. It’s got huge outdoor hot tubs, indoor steam rooms and saunas, and ice baths in wood barrels to dunk in between each station. I thought it was going to be bored (you just wander from station to station for hours), but by the time we were done, I was more related than I’ve ever been before. 

No one else would go in the ice baths, but those were my favorite. If you get past the shock, there are a few moments before the cold starts grating on your bones where your whole body wakes up. I was so warm when I got out afterward, but not warm like the claustrophobic cave of a steam room, warm like it was coming from inside me.  It would almost be worth the drive just to go there again. And again. Just to go there every weekend. I want to live there now.

That evening, we met up with J and some other people at Dieu du Ciel. I asked Karen what it meant. She learned Swiss German after working in Switzerland as an au pair 15 years ago, but she never learned Montreal French. She said she thought it meant two sons, but it turns out it means something about the sky being god.  Good beer and bad food that was trying to be good food.

I was exhausted after a full weekend of meeting new people. I’m basically a black belt at small talk, but newness drains me like a sieve.  I was at a table with Karen, J and another guy that I’d met a few times, but I was just too tired to talk. I always wonder if it’s the same way for shy people who don’t generally talk a lot, but when I’m not talking, I’m not engaged. I especially notice it all the times that I have gotten laryngitis and been literally unable to speak - without a voice I feel like I’m standing on the other side of a river with no bridge between me and everyone else. Do quiet people feel that way constantly, or are they just better able to feel connected without actively contributing to the conversation?

I showed everyone the OKCupid message I’d just got (basically “you seem cool, we should meet in person so you can prove you’re not a dude pretending to be a woman.”)  and laughed about it. J asked what I was looking for and I didn’t know how to answer. Nothing, really. I like being around people who are in relationships but I don’t know that I actually want to be in one myself.

Eventually more people showed up until there were more people that I didn’t know than people I did.   J texted me from across the table and asked if I wanted to go somewhere else. I did, and the two of us left the group and went to a queer karaoke bar. It was bigger than it looked from the front window and had a bowling alley that was used for the stage.

J’s the perfect person to go to karaoke with because she wanted to sing even less than I did, and let me tell you - I did not want to sing in front of anyone. Instead we held up the wall and made fun of everyone from the corner of the room.

A woman with long, curly curly black hair sang Piece of My Heart and rocked it. Like, maybe she hadn’t just swallowed a fistful of nails so she wasn’t full on Joplin, but she was incredible.

An overeager ginger kid went up after her. It seemed like Baby’s First Trip to a Gay Bar and he was giddy with excitement.  He sang All By Myself terribly, like even at top volume he couldn’t fully express his level of exhilaration. Everyone still applauded wildly while he walked around with diva hips, squawking.  I could imagine him imagining what the night would be like. How he’d be free and open and out. He’d come with an older woman, who I imagined was straight but had been in love with a gay man when she was young, and knew the right place to take the kid.  He probably thought it was going to be like on Glee, him getting on the stage, blowing everyone away with his voice. Attracting the attention of someone in the crowd. He bounced from table to table after he finished singing, and eventually his friend gathered him up and took him home. I think he’ll remember the way people clapped for him.

Two women tried and failed to rap The Real Slim Shady. The host of the bar butchered Scream and Shout, but he stripped down to only his underwear (his jeans caught around his ankles, where he was still wearing shoes) and had a surprisingly good body.  The amazing woman came back absolutely destroy None of Your Business. She even did the outro like exactly how it sounds on the CD.  J and I stopped making fun of the group of guys who were obnoxiously standing right in front of us to sing along with her.  It was a good night, it was really, really good.

J’s boyfriend worked as a bartender at a lesbian bar, and that Sunday night they were having a private event.  By the time we wandered by, ready to meet up with Karen again, it was 2 am. Most of the people from the event were gone but there was still $1,000 on the tab, so he invited us in to drink for free. 

I was already a little tipsy, and I knew I had to drive 6+ hours the next day so I took it easy, but “easy” was still shots and drinks and sangria and more shots.  At one point we got Amaretto Sours that had cherries with stems and I asked if anyone knew how to tie them into a knot in their mouths.

“No,” J and Karen said.  “Can you?”

“Yeah.”  I showed them and tried to teach them how to do it themselves, but they couldn’t.  I kept added knotted cherry stems to the pile in front of me.

“Laura,” J said when I pulled another knot out of my mouth. “You’re in marketing, you should be marketing yourself much better.”

“Just go around with a jar of cherries at all times, like, hey, look at what I can do,” Karen said. 

It’s just about getting the little knob at the end of the stem between your teeth.  Me and the ginger kid are lucky to have friends who want the world to see how awesome we are, even if maybe we’re not actually as awesome as our friends think.

--

Karen was probably still drunk when we drove back home on Monday.

At one point she mumbled, “Stinging Nettle.”

I looked at her.

“Oh,” she said.  “I was trying to see what plants I could identify in that field. I accidentally said that outloud.” She stuffed a handful of Nibs in her mouth. “Do you want me to take over driving for a bit?”

“I’m good,” I said.

i love it when they come and go