yeah, that’s like exactly it?
like, i give you permission to make me blush in public
go nuts
but you really, really really really, have to be one of those people

hahahaha
yes!
like someone was playing with me about this essentially and just like embaraaasing me and he was like THIS IS SO FUN
and i was like i will not admit this is fun.
no.
screw you.
(not screw you o_o)

hahahaha

but yeah i think honestly that bdsm is infectious

OH SHIT YEAH
like
ok
well this is kind of creepy BUT
i had… i had a favorite college roommate
sophomores, shared room, dormitory

ooh boy here we go
hahaha

no! this isn’t remotely sexy!

ok ok
lol

ok
so
college dorm
so i’m this royal mess
i’m 18, 19
just
brass
bombastic
disorganized
loud
you know, me
and i … ok, a word about the dorm
it was a “residential college”

sure

during year one

same as my school
everyone d0rmed

freshmen stock up on “points”

like
hogwarts

and sophomore year you get first thwack at prime rooms

ohh
word

depending on your points
so first of all
i had hella points
i’d chaired as a freshman
on the uh the philanthropy committee
which totally doesn’t happen
like, freshmen don’t get to do that

haha whaat

oh, someone bowed out
and i jumped all over it
so i had more points than *anyone*
but!
as a single person
obviously, if people pair up together and go after a room
their combined point total outdoes a single person’s

oh nice

so i kind of over-waited finding a roommate
because my goal was to go after a single room
like, use serious points on this single room

yeah

no backup plan
two other girls were also gunning for that room
i’d say we were the three with the most points, okay
so we’re basically looking at a lottery for that room

okay

so me, C, and A are all gunning for this single room
oh god, A
this very nice girl, okay
but beyond bizarre
sheltered
a lisp
a little stinky
worst thing:
HER PARENTS
EVERY WEEKEND, HER PARENTS
IN THE DORM

oh no.

WITH A

hell no
hellno
run away

yeah
so C approaches me
C
pragmatic
not really shy, just dry
wears l.l. bean
a little prim
very polished, very cultured individual

seems better

very organized
even a strange fit for the humanities dorm
she seemed very much like a scientist
introverted, rational.
(i’m ENFP, if we’re keeping notes here)
so she approaches me

ok

a little bit out of desperation
she has a proposal
a rational proposal, but she’s also appealing to my heart
“DON’T MAKE ME ROOM WITH A”
“YOU ARE GOING TO WIN THE HELL OUT OF THAT SINGLE, AND I WILL BE TRAPPED WITH A”
“also, i understand you don’t have a roommate.”
just, very pragmatic.
and she laid it out: that there was the grim possibility *she’d* edge me out
and *i’d* room with A
which is essentially rooming with A’s parents
i mean, really

oh god
i mean

now, C was not threatening me directly

i understand

and i had to appreciate that she would do everything in her power, in home stretch, to get that single from me
because, A
so! she said
in the interest of being kind to all humanity
let A have the single
in the meantime, we WORK TOGETHER
and have ourselves the best fucking room in the whole dormitory

yes

on the whole i am a real illogical person
governed by moods instead of data
however!
this appeal to my logic
i just, i was wowed
i was like, she has considered this, she has outlined an argument for rooming together, i’m just very impressed

yes

and, again, A
oh, A.
like i think i might’ve handled it?

i can’t even imagine

but
i have a high threshhold?
but i had to agree that A really ought to live alone
so i agreed.
NOW HERE IS WHERE MY STORY BEGINS

hahhahahhhaha
that was like

hahahahahahaha

the beginning of fresh prince

omfg
i’m so sorry

no its ok
it was funny

right, and C was so clear and succinct
so i’m readying to move in with C
she appealed to every part of my person that can be appealed to
my reason, my emotions, my philanthropy, and the tiny part of me that didn’t want to live with A either

yes

the dorm learns that C — petite, prim, soft-spoken, slightly harsh C — and *i*
again, loudmouth, very often “stepping in it,” disorganized, blaring computer games jenn
are going to room together
somebody pulls me aside
and is very “oh my fucking god, what is the matter with you”

uhoh

yeah, i’m like “what”
and this person is like “uh, match made in hell?”
and i’m like, what are you even talking about
and this person is like, you aren’t friends, you have zip in common, and! also! you are going to drive each other CRAZY

see that last part worries me

i played it cool
i think, aloud, i disagreed,
said something very terse about the points system
and our great room
which outweighs all
and conspicuously left out the part where A lives alone, to everyone’s joy
but inside
i was anxious
and it mounted
to neurotic
to full-fledged panic
because i HAD agreed to live with C
and people were right!
what had i done!
depending on the individual’s temperament
i think other people had approached C and said the same
which is quite irritating

oh god

that people were really inserting themselves in our decision

i hate group dynamics like that

very iago, you know?
yeah!
so let me again stress my admiration for C
if it isn’t totally apparent
i was both panicked AND IRKED
because of what other people were saying
so i pledged to myself that, not only would i SHOW THEM
by being the best fucking roommate who ever lived
i’d SHOW C
this is where my tale launches into my first flirtation with masochism
i:
never left a dirty dish in the sink
in the communal kitchen
because i knew how C hated it
if i smoked
i’d SHOWER BEFORE ENTERING THE ROOM

oh my goodness

if i came in and C was studying, i’d park my ass and study

#effort

we decorated the room together
nothing would go on a wall without us saying “is this ok”
i kept the room tidy
and!

i mean

if someone came in

this seems pretty great

and moved to sit on C’s bed
i’d shout NO
SIT ON MINE
because C hated dirty butts on her bed
again, someone must’ve planted the same neuroticism in C:
if she were listening to music when i walked in
she’d move to get her headphones
and i’d say “no, please” and listen with her

dude that’s insane
re: dirty butts

we deferred each to the other INCREDIBLY
well, i mean
she has her things, i have mine

haha i know but
idk

what no one, not even us, expected or anticipated
was that, no matter how diametrically opposed C and i were
we are both polite to a fault, and adaptable
our shared, neurotic politeness morphed
into a really deep friendship that i cannot explain

huh

she and i have discussed this

that is awesome

and in the years since
we have each described the other as “my best roommate”
without really having words
but it was such a mutual respect where
we both really put ourselves out
to keep our own neuroses in check but respect the other person’s
no anger, no ire, no fights
every decision, collaborative

that is a great lesson
of humanity

where we both were just unbelievably yielding
because we made this choice and there was going to be NO CLASH.
and i tie this into a bigger remark about “infectious bdsm” because
i mean
our nosy dorm-mates *had* noticed
and they were real pesky about bugging me about it

it sounds a lot just like
respect

like, “oh my god, does C really make you shower before coming in”
uh, no bro
she doesn’t
i just know that she can smell a ciggy from miles away

lol but imagine

“oh my god does C make you guard her bed”
uh, no bro

imagine if she did

i’m just beyond reproach
i’m not going to be irritating in a single way
because i love C, i love her for setting this up with me,
and this is how i show her i respect her
by going out of *my* way, and this is really for me, to yield to her
and she does the absolute same for me
and i make my bed every morning now, for *her* for ME
we both got so much out of it, too
here’s the amazing thing
she and i were both in sync
one night, i sat straight up in bed, in the dark
just wide awake
and my eyes adjusted, and i looked over toward her bed
(our room was large enough to unbunk, thank you)
and i saw her sitting straight up in bed, in the dark
looking back at me
we had awakened at the same instant

oh my god
haha

and she switched her reading lamp on
and we stared at each other
for like a real long time

lol also if you’re having bad dorm problems i feel bad for you son i had 99 college problems but i always had a single with a full kitchen in my dorm

and finally she goes,
“are you awake?”
hahahaha
but serious as a stroke i’m like “yeah”

omg

and we had this moment of mind-reading
where we both were upset about different things, and that was why we were both awake
and she pauses for like three years
and she says, and all of this is very quiet and measured
“would you like some gelato?”

:D

AND I DID
I HAD NEVER HEARD SUCH A GOOD IDEA IN MY LIFE
and i said yes!
and she smiled and got out of bed and padded out to the shared kitchen
and came back with gelato and bowls
CLEAN bowls
oh, C!
and it’s so easy to forget she was 19

hahaha
the bowls were clean

and we still really, really prize all of that.

:)

just the whole thing

my college roommate
is my maid of honor

see!
if i ever get married (sigh)
holy shit
not only do i SUPER need to get in touch with C
but yeah i would put her in the bridal party
i’m… ugh
i’m trying to be a better friend
in general
i fall out of touch ’cause i’m a twit
but
this woman is one of the most valuable people to me
actually
her letter she sent
it’s to my left
i hate to look at the date
i think years, literally two years? have gone by
and i haven’t written her
and that’s because i cried
i just cried so hard when i read this letter
i have it sitting to my immediate left
and i can’t even look at it

:(((
i fall out of touch a lot too
it happens

i mean, it “does”
but it shouldn’t

yeah

i ought to …
if people are valuable to me
and people *are*
i ought to share that with them
i keep trying to remind myself
that i owe it to some very important people
to tell them so! just, how important they are!
oh i’d better contact C
now i *won’t* be able to sleep

Neither haunt could see the other — because they were from two different time scenarios — and often they were both talking at the same time, which made me feel crazy. I also felt like a liar and a cheat, in my dream, because I was holding the hand of one person while the other person was touching my forearm.

Sometimes I said something out loud, and both men would respond, so our conversations were turning into these farcical comedies of errors. (I can’t remember how these conversations went.) But eventually both people discovered there was another invisible person in the same bed, some invisible person I was concurrently addressing. The real ex-boyfriend realized I was talking to someone from my future, and the person from my future realized I was sometimes talking to a person from the past. They realized this simultaneously, even though neither had ever seen the other ghost.

Both ghosts, furious and shouting at me, left the bed, and now in my waking life I really sat straight up in bed, right in its middle, looking from one empty side to the other.

***

I fell back asleep, finally, and I dreamt I and a ragtag band had escaped the zombie apocalypse at last. I had hidden under a car for a long time, and then I’d climbed onto a rooftop. I survived with the others, and I’d barred us into some type of large poolhouse (this is a recurring dream, with the poolhouse), when suddenly a thin mist sprayed us from overhead. I realized too late that I was being misted with some horrible chemical and started running, but my limbs slowed and my heart went slow until it stopped, and now I was moving slowly and jerkily and then a little more jerkily, and my eyes were bloodshot and I was newly dead and getting slower and slower. Most of us were.

I felt good and braindead. I looked at my ragtag gang, and most of us survivors had all been misted-dead, and now I felt a surge of emotion for my fellow dead people. I was suddenly really hungry, and my gaggle moved toward where we knew living people were. I tried to look alive by walking sort of normally and smiling — because I was not so far gone and greenish that I didn’t still pass as a human female — and when I thought no one was looking, I might wait for a human to talk to me so I could eat his face.

“I think I am a little bit more bruised than I realized before,” I suggested to Conci.

“I think so,” she said.

“I won’t be ready,” I said.

“You need to be ready,” she said.

“That’s great, but I won’t be ready.”

“I’m ready,” she said. “You be ready.”

My mother has been working on her death for years. Not the actual dying part, but everything that will come after, so that all those parts, all the legalistic things, will just work and work without my intervention. It will be an entire impartial machine, with me either standing outside it or caught inside it, I won’t know until then. I still need to get some things notarized, though.

We talked about the things I need to do on Monday.

Later the nurse told me how, when they were speeding to the ER, she looked over at my mom. My mom was in the passenger’s seat, trembling. Just, only trembling.

Then, when she was in the hospital bed, my mother whispered to the nurse, in little gasps, “I think I’m going! I saw a bright light!” all damp-eyed and sweaty. The nurse told me this, and we both smirked. Someone, somewhere down the line, had fucked up my mother’s bloodwork. She didn’t need to go to the ER at all. She is not dead yet.

“You be ready,” my mother was telling me now, though.

The real reason for our ‘conversation’ was the dumb thing I’d done with a hundred dollar bill the night before. She was horrified.

“Can’t you see I’m scared?” I asked her. I stretched both arms toward her, palms-up.

She was quiet for a long time.

“I…” she said.

“I thought you would have found a new family by now.

“You know, a husband, you’d be married, and he would have a kind family, and maybe they would all go to church –”

I made a sound.

“I know, ‘ugh,’” she repeated after me.

I made the ‘hngh’ sound a second time and doubled over. And I wailed. I wailed and I put both arms around me and hugged myself, because there was no one else to hug me.

“Well, Jenny!” she said indignantly, as if I had suddenly thrown a plate or done something else unexpected and brash.

There were complicated feelings like, I missed D so so much, but maybe I didn’t really at all, and had I really only stuck to him like glue like some pitiful orphan from a Dickens story, and was this what I was really doing all along, and was he onto my ruse and he up-and-left? And I was crying and picturing his mother and father. And when I was 11 and finally adopted I thought everything was so permanent now! but 18 years later I would no longer have a father and soon I would not have a mother, and my mother had always expected to pass her daughter from one hand to another until she could finally pass this child to some other mother. And all along maybe my mother had never expected me to succeed; she only wanted me to infiltrate some other unsuspecting family like an impostor — in German-language idiom, it is kind of like the concept of a “cuckoo’s egg.”

And I am a grown woman, nearly 30, as frightened and unsuccessful and awkward and uncertain as an 11-year-old girl, and I hugged myself and cried and cried.

And I was still crying while I explained that Jane was locked out of her own car, and her children are grown and she isn’t even really from here, but here she is, all alone, and when I visit my hometown there is only my mom and Cassie and Jane, the old woman in the corner store, and how there is no feeling more helpless than locking your own keys in your own fucking car, and I stood there for an hour helplessly, watching Jane trying to get into her own car, and finally I thought “Why am I standing here, when only a phone call and a little bit of money can fix this.” And no one had taken advantage of me; I made the phone call at home so no one would be around to stop me.

I stopped crying and I said, “I haven’t forgotten your iced tea,” and I went to the kitchen.

I fell asleep real early on the couch.

I had a weird nightmare.

In my nightmare I was waiting for someone to meet me somewhere in public, and when I saw him walk in, I was so excited I dropped to my knees. And he walked up to me, and I put my arms around his legs and put my face against his thigh, and I hugged him by the legs, I hugged him and hugged him so that he could not ever leave me again.

And then I laughed and apologized to him and finally stood up, in my dream.

And when I stood up and smiled at him, the person in the dream was who I — the version of me in the dream — had expected, but it was not who the person asleep on the couch expected. And in this awful dream I hugged him, and I was tall enough to be able to hug him correctly, which is to say, I must have been someone else entirely, in my dream.

That is when I woke up.

The story is on Tumblr, though. I think Tumblr is sort of stupid and self-aggrandizing, but I also need a place to put all my photos of Ryan Gosling or whatever. I am embarrassed if other people who like to read look at my Tumblr, because I am only using it as a pinboard. So I can’t understand when people publish any gut-wrenching writing there. I realize it is so that writing can be not-invisible, or maybe even “go viral” and enjoy a life of its own, but I think that’s generally very terrible, and that is why my diary is not indexed by Google. Please leave me out of your terrible thing; I will try to leave you out of my terrible thing; leave me here in peace.

Still, I’m not sure why readers are so upset. A lot of the dialogue is two people just trying to get comfortable with the idea of two people sleeping together, which was their plan all along.

I guess the writing really is glib, but what it for-real reminds me of is Girl by Blake Nelson, or any of those early-90s books about someone going out into the world to learn things the hard way.

Reading this just made me feel sort of dead, though.

In the final third of the story, the girl can’t understand why she isn’t hungry, and the older writer explains it has to do with the Adderall she just ingested. And this is when it might finally dawn on you that the girl in this story has never recreationally taken Adderall. Then she says she is “surprised to learn that you could order juice at a bar.” She has all this sex constantly, she tells the older writer and her boyfriend Patrick and us, as if this makes her world-wise, but she is also astonished by orange juice.

I feel awful for her.

She doesn’t seem to lack self-awareness, though — I think she knows how awful this is. She doesn’t try to make herself seem nice. I’m not sure why everyone is so convinced this is not fictional. The writing is a lot less mean if it is also fictional, right?

Also, she sounds a lot like me at 21. Here I only mean that I had a lot of the same interests, or would have had the same interests, that she has now (like any interest in Momus whatsoever). I would want to know about other people’s interests and then intersect our interests into little friendships. That sort of thing is so stupid.

In my last relationship, when I was 28/29, I happily repeated to him “I’m so happy you aren’t a hipster,” which is hipster-shorthand for “I’m so happy you aren’t dumb.” I was dating my first not-a-hipster, who was so blissfully out-of-touch with everything in my world that is stupid and doesn’t matter, and so we got to talk about or do other things. Even as an unlovable old woman, I can almost understand why a 21-year-old girl is out there looking for a nice, out-of-touch dad.

When I was 21 I wrote a writer I knew, asked him about this thing I had seen somewhere. He wrote back, asked if I were in NY now, would I want to get a drink. I didn’t take it “that” way, and I simply wrote back and said “I am not in NY anymore but I’ll tell you if I ever am again.” I don’t think we emailed after that. I still don’t believe this is what my writer-pen-pal was getting at, honestly, but when I was 21 I had a lot of glass walls around me and I would not have been interested in that type of thing anyway, even though as a teenager I had been one of those girls who left a webcam on in her bedroom — the Internet was new and small then, though, so I don’t think I really meant it that way, either. But I used to not mind being looked at; now I even mind being looked at.

(ETA: The author of “Marie Calloway” gets at this idea, too; elsewhere she says this outright.)

Later I did fly to NYC, once, to do the type-thing this “fictional” account describes, and it was horrible. I even did the thing this girl did: I promised myself I was going to that city for something else. I told myself all sorts of lies. I was also a lot dopier than she is, even at my advanced age — I was following through on some all-or-nothing bid for maybe-love! — and once I got there I realized I looked so stupid. We hopefully are able to write fiction so that we never have to talk about this sort of thing directly.

Then there is this exchange,

“Do you want to go have sex?”

There was a three second pause.

“…we could do that.”

and I like that you can’t quite make out who said what. As literature this is OK.

There are other parts of her story that rang painfully true, too.

I did follow someone back to his apartment once, and when I was in the bathroom I noticed all these girl things — not many girl things, but the kinds of things a girl will leave in your bathroom. And I walked out and asked him if he could tell me about his girlfriend, and for a second you could see his panic, like maybe he had mentioned her by accident and had forgotten? But I waited, and he started to describe her to me, and finally I asked him if he were angry at her about something, and he looked really scared then.

Finally the “Marie Calloway” thing turns into pornography, which is so uncomfortable for me to read, but before that it touched on some other things that were even more uncomfortable for me. My uncomfortableness levels varied enough, and often enough, so that I was able to keep reading.

After sex the older writer describes some of the things that scare him, and you start to realize that if he is not being disingenuous, the thing that scares him most is people like this girl. At times she is inauthentic, shallow, and a man-eater. She is a 21-year-old girl.

I shouldn’t feel so bad for the older man in the story, except that he is fucked-up, too, and I can identify with that. Maybe he was never this child’s friend, and he never wanted anything more than a string of hook-ups he could feel blameless about. Maybe he would lie to himself and say “no, that is not who I am,” and he isn’t, because — we discover this! — for a man his age, he hardly has had sex ever.

Yet this time there is so much sex. Sex constantly! Sex for everyone! Most of “Marie Calloway” is salacious — or else you wouldn’t keep reading it, would you — but a lot of it just seems like this girl needed to hash out some stuff this grown-up said to her, by typing them all out. What this child wrote is exactly the type of all-on-the-line thing you write after you haven’t heard from someone in months and you finally resolve for yourself that it’s going to be over. To make sure it’s over, you start describing it in public. There: you are in charge of your own life again, because you are the one with the pen.

Until my most recent breakup (which sponsored endless lists and romantic inventories and panic and hair-tearing and all types of unfairness), I think I had always tried hard to not transcribe things that involved identifiable people.

But every once in a great while something becomes terribly wrong with you, and you have to put it all down someplace, and maybe part of the reason you go ahead and kind of identify someone is because you have felt wronged, which probably makes you a bad person. Only fiction writers can be good people.

I am beginning to regret my having turned into a 21-year-old girl during my breakup, except that all the feelings I was feeling, I hadn’t felt since I was 21.

Here is an indictment of the savagery of putting your “confessional” onto the Internet, which I hadn’t read until after I’d written all this. It says all the same things, and it’s much better than the dumb livejournal entry I just wrote.