Chapters

On Tuesday, you learn that there is nothing holding you down. At first you grieve. Grieve the loss of an opportunity you didn't really want. Cancel your dinner plans. Stay home and allow yourself about 15 minutes to cry. Then you watch Alias, decide you should get something sweet. Send messages out into the ether and go meet friends for gelato down the street. It's been raining and the air is sticky with your favorite smell. You learn of a company that places teachers at private schools. You go home after laughing with your friends for two hours and spend another two checking boxes on the company's website. You rank every major metropolitan area in the country and every state based on whether you would live there. The only boxes you check with "Will Not Consider" are Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona. You have your reasons.

On Wednesday, you go to an interview for a temporary tutoring job. Ace it. You're not going to make a lot of money, but you'll have a solid part-time distraction for three weeks. Thursday you get up and make yourself an over-large pot of coffee. You scour the internet, open your Word doc that now has 27 pages of job descriptions. Over the course of six hours, you apply for four. Cut the jobs and paste them into your "applied to" file. You try to temper your enthusiasm, the part of you that is picturing yourself somewhere else. Swallow it down. Friday you go back to the tutoring job to have a last interview with the woman who runs it. Her name is Elizabeth. She has an MFA in poetry from Virginia. You go to your physical therapy appointment where your favorite, Jane, works your neck over. It's been searing lately from all your computer time and you're glad to have someone pull you apart.

At 5, you head to one of your favorite restaurants for your friend's birthday. You're feeling dangerous and a little giddy, so you put on a dress you've never worn before. It's a halter number, the color of your skin, with gold trim and pink petals blowing across the fabric. You bought it 6 or 7 years ago and never felt confident enough to wear it. Until now. They put you in one of the curtained, reservation-only booths and you order your favorite glass of wine, only $4. After a few hours, you go with your friends to a pub. Your friend wants to get cigarettes, so you stop at a bodega next door. You decide to buy yourself some dark chocolate: hazelnut with currant.

On the patio, you and your friends meet up with the PhD students. Everyone presses together on the bench and pulls the chairs closer. You sit on the end and watch your friend arm wrestle with another girl. Everyone laughs. You feel happy and join the conversation. A guy you've never really hung out with starts talking to you. Though you're not really interested, you're feeling sassy, so you flirt back. You stay out later than your usual self, talking with all these people you haven't befriended in the last two years. It is often this way. As you leave, a girl touches your arm and says how nice it was to hang out with you. She presses your forearm and looks forcefully into your eyes and you realize she's coming on to you. As you're walking down the street to your car, you pause a moment to let traffic pass before getting inside. A truck drives by and through the window, a guy shouts "You are goddamn beautiful." It happens fast and they don't slow down. You don't even turn your head. Instead you hit the unlock button and open the car door, pull out into the street and turn around. You feel seen.

A few hours earlier in an email to you, your mentor said he was proud of your fierce ebullience and tenacity. You're starting to feel proud too.