The day she left us, I laid in the backyard listening to Elvis, identifying shapes in the clouds like we used to. The smell of jasmine I’d planted the day before wafted over on a breeze. Birds chirped above me.

As a cloud that looked like a beagle drifted by and Bridge Over Troubled Water played, I thought: How do you sum up a person? More pertinently, how do you sum up a person like Nana?

Nana loved jumping in the pool with her clothes on. It was an action that signified the start of summer — Nana would come running out of the house, fully dressed, and cannonball into the pool. “Pool’s open,” my mom would call, as Nana splashed around in her heavy, soggy clothes.

She did it to make us laugh. But when I reflect on it now, I see something else there, too. It’s quintessential Nana: she never preached, but she taught you so much through her actions. When she jumped in the pool with her clothes on, she was being a goof, yes, but she was also demonstrating a Core Nana Principle: Loving people big is always worth the inconvenience. For Nana, it was worth the heaviness and the soggy clothes and the wet underwear to put a smile on one face. It was worth being uncomfortable.

The other night, we jumped in the pool with our clothes on in her honor. She wasn’t conscious anymore at the time, but my mom played the video in her ear and I choose to believe she heard it.

Who was Nana?

Nana grew up in Southie, communing with Whitey Bulger in convenience stores and on park benches. Her cousins were leg-breakers with hearts of gold. She was tough as nails but was known to carry around tissues because of how easily she cried. She smoked a pack (or more) a day until she didn’t, just stopped one day because my grandpa got sick and that was that.

She loved deeply but didn’t go easy on the people she loved. She’d never let you win a game of cards — her way of loving was one that didn’t patronize but instead knew you could do better and invited you to1. She loved the Patriots2 and was famous for yelling at them when they were being schmucks and cheering (loudly, with much vigor) for them when they weren’t. Her love was free but it was never cheap.

To be loved by Nana was to know she was always thinking about you, seeing you wherever she went. It was to have a house filled with trinkets that had reminded her of you3 — and in doing so, she was constantly reminding YOU of you. In that way, she was like a salve for existential angst and loneliness. Nana didn’t forget anything; if you’d ever liked something for even just a moment in time, it was permanently logged in the spreadsheet of her mind.

Nana didn’t just run on Dunkin’, she ran to Dunkin’. After my PopPop died, she lived with us for a while. When she and my mom would have a spat, she’d storm out the door, yelling “I’m going to Dunkin’!” and get in the car, returning only after she’d cooled down over a hot coffee.

She called the show This Is Us “So This Is Us Now,” which wasn’t intentional and doesn’t really tell you much about her but is something that always makes me laugh. She also often said Seth’s name with a Z at the front, so it sounded like ZZZZZeth.

When you told her you loved her, she would respond saying that she loved you “morer and mostest,” and she meant it.

She never wanted the party to end. She’d fall snoring-asleep on the couch, but when you’d poke her on the shoulder and tell her to go to bed, she’d say “I’m only resting my eyes!” and get a second wind. She often exclaimed “I’ll drink to that!” in spite of the fact that she never drank — except for “one sip of a banana daiquiri a long time ago.” Even near the end, when the cancer had fractured vertebrae in her spine and filled her with pain the medication could barely touch, she outlasted all of us — staying up until 1AM playing cards and laughing and telling stories.

In writing these things down, I’ve realized three hundred times over what everyone who has ever wrestled with grief knows all too well:

To attempt to describe what she meant, who she was, would be to reduce her into pieces and parts that would never add up to the whole of her.

Yes, she loved Elvis like he was a personal friend, but who didn’t? She loved coffee and lighthouses, but who doesn’t? Who, after all, doesn’t love a sunny day with a breeze and birdsong in the air?

These things will never communicate the depth of her. And even if I could properly articulate the fullness of who she was to me, that would only barely scratch the surface. My perception of her was isolated to my relationship with her — she was always relegated to the role of “grandmother.” To others she was a mother, a sister, a wife, a friend, a daughter. She was someone’s granddaughter, too — a someone who’s name I now realize I don’t even know. She had a full inner life of thoughts and fears and desires and dreams that I will never know about.

She was my Nana and I loved her so much. Sail on, silvergirl.

A far-from-exhaustive list of things Nana taught me that I’ll take with me everywhere I go

• Jump in the pool with your clothes on, and do other ridiculous and uncomfortable things for the people you love.

• No matter how popular he was/is, Elvis is underrated. Truly. If you don’t believe this one, just put Elvis on shuffle right now. Have you ever listened to Elvis as an adult? Have you ever watched him perform? If you haven’t, do so and then talk to me. We really don’t talk about Elvis enough, if you can believe it.

• Always take the train, if you can.

• Let people know you’re thinking about them — with a text, a trinket, or any other way you can.

• Never be afraid to be the one to love morer and mostest.

• Have seconds.

• If you’re going to drink Coke, have some milk with it.

• Always keep them guessing. Nana lived this one out to the very end — her favorite number was 143 (I Love You), and she left us at 3:14 on 4/13, which I find very cheeky and very Nana.

• Don’t take yourself — or life — too seriously.

• Never go easy on ‘em. Love deep, not cheap.

• Always make your mac & cheese with both yellow and white cheeses, laid out in a checkerboard pattern. It will just taste better that way.

• Don’t let the bed bugs bite — but if they do, bite back.

• You’ll rarely regret staying up an hour later. (She’d probably also say you’ll never regret waking up an hour earlier, but I’m choosing to ignore that one for now. Maybe one day, Nana.)

3

I have amassed a very impressive collection of giraffe and Scooby Doo-related items over the years. After Seth and I went on our honeymoon to Maui, Nana found a shirt in a Goodwill that she thought said “Wild About Maui” on it, and picked it up for me. When she gave it to me, I was extremely confused, because it actually read “Wild About MAIL” and featured a bunch of zoo animals dressed up like postal workers. It’s my favorite sleep shirt to this day.

A quick scan of Watts’ Wikipedia page will tell you that, for all his talk about finding Zen and giving up control and capital-A Acceptance, he was a raging alcoholic when he died. He’d also been married and divorced three times. No judgment—it just begs the question of whether this is really someone I want to take existential advice from.

Did Alan Watts really find his Zen?

Has anyone, ever?

What is a cynic, really?

This is where another part of me would chime in to remind this skeptical, cynical, Watts-disparaging part that all humans are inherently flawed1, and that this fact doesn’t make their teachings any less helpful or true.

If we decide we cannot apply life tips without vetting the source and determining whether they’re trustworthy, this part of me says, the sad reality is that no one, when it really comes down to it, will be trustworthy enough to pass that test.

Who, then, can a skeptic trust? Where can they go for advice?

How hopeless is it to close yourself off to insight, which is powerful enough to channel through even imperfect vessels?

Humans are walking paradoxes2, and we’ll never know everything there is to know. Even those who espouse wisdom and grace and goodness may have secret inner lives that would make you recoil. If you keep digging for flaws, you’re likely to find them. Two totally opposing qualities can exist within the same person. And neither invalidates the other, their coexistence just makes things more…interesting3.

This gray area, Schrödinger’s flipped coin, can feel like a warzone, an inhospitable place where hopes get too high, dreams get shattered, and horrible things happen without you expecting them. By spending your time preparing for the inevitable worst case scenario(s), you’re pre-grieving shitty things. And given how often shitty things happen, it can sometimes be hard to convince yourself that all your practice isn’t worth it.

Basically, if you believe everyone is pretty terrible4 and will probably let you down, you save yourself from the sting of being taken by surprise. You’re never the fool, the one who elevated a man to a god only to be humbled when they were. Your heart can never be broken, because your heart was never really in it.

But here’s the rub:

When your so-called cynicism is merely a defense mechanism5, while it’s true that you may be “protecting” yourself6, you’re also existing in a form of emotional agoraphobia, trapped inside while the rest of the world is happening Out There. Are you really living? After all, you’ve already written the ending—why bother going through the motions?

The man, the myth, the Handsome Hawke

I’m a self-professed Ethan Hawke Lover7.

In a world of fakes and Hollywood try-hards, Ethan Hawke has spirit. He cares for the artform, he has conviction. He’s not a sell-out. He wore old-timey Western shirts and bolo ties unironically before they were en vogue. He’s self-aware and self-deprecating. He’s maintained both his head and his heart in an industry—nay, a world!—that desperately wants to funnel you into one camp or the other, while we all existentially spiral into a dystopian reality in which neither exist.

Ethan Hawke is wise! He’s a poet! He’s a lover!

…He also [allegedly8] cheated on THE Uma Thurman—which, if true, is neither wise nor loving.

In the viral hurricane of Hawke’s red carpet interview with Amelia Dimoldenberg, which I saw shared on no less than six friends’ Instagram stories (my own share not included in that tally), I’ve seen lots of fans raving over his off-the-cuff poetry.

…But I’ve seen an equal number of takes suggesting this wisdom is bunk because Ethan Hawke maybe cheated on his wife in 2003. And there’s part of me that ascribes to that mentality, too. Am I willing to make allowances for Ethan Hawke just because I’ve already decided I like him, because I’ve already deemed him respectable9? If someone else, someone I respected less—who I knew for a fact was a serial cheater—spouted off the same quote-unquote wisdom, would I respect the wisdom itself less? Would I invalidate the sentiment on the grounds of who was delivering it?

Maybe!

But here’s the thing: Ethan Hawke is not a hero or a villain. He’s not an idol, or a god. He is just a guy. A guy who maybe did or maybe didn’t cheat on his wife, but has certainly lived an imperfect life. A guy who has made mistakes and hurt people and been selfish or mean or vindictive or cruel. A guy who happens to be famous, and walk red carpets, and be interviewed, and say profound and beautiful things.

A guy who, within the span of a day, probably has some really lovely thoughts and some really terrible ones. Just like every other human person who has ever lived.

If we say only perfectly good people can say good, wise things, we create a very difficult model for coexistence and collaboration. Not just because the word “good” itself is so subjective10, but because this belief feels inherently anti-social. It leads us to become more skeptical of ourselves and others. It makes us less likely to peek our heads outside. It makes us (in both the individual and collective sense) less likely to grow, and change, and evolve.

So: do any of the things that Ethan Hawke has or hasn’t done in his past change the value of the words that leave his mouth? I don’t know the answer to this question! It’s one that really fascinates me! I could make a case in either direction, depending on the circumstances11!

But given the fact that the circumstances in question involve 1) Ethan Hawke and 2) those specific words, I am willing to say:

I like those words a whole lot. If they came from the mouth of a slug I think I’d still love them.

Hope is back (maybe?)

For a long time, cynicism has been en vogue, and for good reason. To be hopeful at all, in times like these, could seem naive.

But in distancing ourselves from hope, we’ve distanced ourselves from each other.

In wrapping ourselves in bubble wrap, we’ve kept our hearts from breaking, yes—but we’ve also never felt the wind in our hair, the sun on our skin. The brushing of one knuckle against the other as you walk, the awkward Tetris-ing of knees under a table. We’ve never felt the comforting discomfort of a hug that goes on the teensiest bit too long, bones poking into soft spaces. We’ve become too self conscious to stick our heads out the window like dogs, too afraid of what else might fly into the car while we do.

But.

Lately, the tide seems to be shifting. I’m seeing more incidents of joy-as-a-form-of-resistance à la the Bad Bunny halftime show and the Project Hail Mary12 opening weekend and Ethan Hawke waxing poetic on the red carpet. To name a few.

Many of us were raised in the Shakespeare School of “If It’s Not Tragic, It’s Not Special.13” And as such, Love itself has become perverted into something complicated.

And that’s not entirely untrue. Most love stories—with romantic partners, with friends, with our families—will be complex in their own ways. The merging of lives, the overlapping of identities, Venn diagrams infringing upon each other—these things are inherently complicated.

Not to mention the fact that, by choosing to love, you are signing yourself up for inevitable pain: You will die, and so will those who you love. Hopefully not until you’ve all lived long, beautiful, mostly-happy lives. But it’s going to happen. Rest assured, Juliet: Your romantic, tragic ending will come! We all become tragic figures in the end. So why rush it?

Ethan Hawke’s red carpet soapbox moment is a reminder to me that fixating on the tragedy inherent to putting your heart out there—to feeling, to living—is missing the point. It’s not stupid or trite or silly to LOVE, as big as you can, as often as you can. It’s the only thing that matters, and is worth any risk. The tragedy only exists because there was something worth suffering for. Avoiding pain isn’t the answer to a happy existence, and it doesn’t even guarantee you’ll stay safe.

The world can be a scary, devastating place…and most of us have very little control over that reality. It can feel so hopeless. Love is the only thing we have, the only thing we can keep, the only thing we could never have too much of. It’s the simplest thing and also the most critical.

So leave some for the taking—whenever you’re able, wherever you can. It’ll always come back to you, and probably in ways you never could’ve expected.

We flew out to Utah on Wednesday night, landed and picked up our ski rentals, and then were on the first lift up the mountain on Thursday morning. We zipped around for four insanely fun hours, and then began making our way down the mountain to grab the smooshed PB&Js that were jammed into a backpack that was jammed into a locker.

We got separated on the way down the mountain, and at the stopping point where we were supposed to meet up, I arrived before Seth, which never happens. A few minutes later, I received a call from him, letting me know he needed ski patrol to come rescue him and bring him down the mountain. He’d fallen and suspected his leg may be fractured2.

Long story short: He was taken to a clinic where they confirmed the fracture3, and with four hours on the slopes to our name(s), our long-awaited ski trip was officially over. We decided to cut our losses and head home early, trying to recoup some money on rentals, lodging, etc.

Upon landing home at 9:30PM, after a long travel day with Seth on crutches and me, a Certified Klutz, in charge of all of our bags, we went straight to grab tacos.

When I ran in to pick them up, I saw two paper bags sitting in the holding area.

One was labeled “Seth W.” This was our bag. Seth placed the order.

The bag next to it was labeled “Lexi.”4

As soon as my eyes locked in on that pair of bags, they got a bit misty5.

I grabbed my bag (Seth W.), separating it from its bag lover (Lexi).

I have the tendency to catastrophize, am prone to thinking that a Big Bad Thing that will separate me from all of the Good Things in my life.

It’s impossible for me to hold something in my hands without being afraid I’ll either squish it so hard that its guts come spilling out through the spaces between my fingers or that a pelican will swoop down and snatch it away from me.

It’s ironic that in this case, I was the Big Bad taking the Good Thing away from Bag Lexi.

It’s also ironic that, as soon as my fingers touched Seth W’s papery skin, the 2002 Jason Mraz song6 The Remedy (I Won’t Worry) started playing over the restaurant’s speakers. When I say that this was ironic, I mean it purely in an Alanis Morissette kind of way, which is to say that it was just barely ironic and moreso just kind of funny/vaguely poetic.

Things are very bad, and…

My weird brain took this occurrence7 to mean that it was a good thing that I had been forced to come home early (and, by the transitive property, that Seth had fractured his tibia).

If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen Bag Seth & Lexi sitting next to each other. In fact, poor Bag Lexi would have been sitting alone, feeling like she’d been stood up for the prom when Bag Seth never showed.

I wouldn’t have heard the dulcet tones of Jason Mraz going “Well, I saw fireworks from the freeway, and behind closed eyes I couldn’t make ‘em go away.”

I wouldn’t have been capital-M Moved. Because, as prone as I am to catastrophizing, I am equally so to romanticizing.

Are things like this8 The Remedy for suffering? For pain? For dashed dreams or unrealized expectations or hope left on read9?

I’m not sure.

Does a good thing happening cancel out all of the bad that preceded it, or coexists with it? No. Is there always a cure or a remedy or a salve for every wound? No. Tibias get fractured. Horrible things happen. Atrocities and accidents occur. Irrevocable mistakes get made. Disaster strikes. There are some medicines so bitter than no amount of sugar can make it easier to go down. I don’t want to exist in a world in which the only way to accept these things as fact is to spin them into a tale that somehow tries to convince me that these things are okay. They’re not.

But is it delusional or naive to cling to any tiny shred of beauty or love or hope or joy even while acknowledging the existence of objective suffering?

Following Bad Bunny’s truly lovely halftime performance, I saw a lot of conversation around the concept of joy as a form of resistance. I think that’s a phrase that can easily be taken as trite until you see it in action and feel the truth in it. In these moments, you may notice the mistiness in your eyes before you can even register what brought it there. We’re all so hardened, so cynical10, that sometimes these pockets of joy — and the power they carry — have to catch us by surprise in order for us to accept them.

When I saw those two paper bags sitting next to each other, I didn’t feel like they had been placed there for my eyes to see them. I didn’t feel like I was in a simulation.

I felt reminded of the fact that, for how much absolute horror and terror and madness and badness and sadness there is in the world, there are also very small but meaningful examples of wonder and beauty and romance and love all around us.

Catastrophe and romance, somehow coexisting in the grand scale just like they do in my tiny little pea brain. Imagine that.

Everything is romantic

Here’s something I never thought I’d write — and that you probably never thought you’d read:

This is a meet-cute about two paper bags:

There was a time when I was empty.

There was a time before that, too, when I was something else entirely. I can’t remember that time perfectly, but sometimes it comes to me in flashes. Ambient noise. A memory with blurred edges. A picture just out of focus.

Then I arrived here. In this place with its smells of onion and spice.

For a long while, I laid in wait. During this time, I listened.

I listened to the loud noises in the form of sizzling stovetops and shouts of “Corner!” I listened to the chatter. I listened to relationships beginning. I listened to friends giggling and families arguing and then laughing over how ridiculous their argument was. I listened to pep talks and proclamations. I listened to the occasional complaint, the requests for more silverware or less tomato.

I heard everything, but I was part of nothing. I was one of many in a stack.

I’d overheard someone say, once, through a mouthful of guacamole, that you shouldn’t be a passenger in your own life. That if you wanted to amount to something, you had to take accountability — acknowledge your agency and do something, for the love of God.

I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. I was a bag, after all. A bag in a stack, creased and folded and waiting my turn. I didn’t choose to be a bag. I didn’t choose to be this far down in this particular stack.

I wondered if any of my fellow stack members felt this same sense of existential confusion — the tension between wanting to make something of themselves but not knowing where to start.

I measured the passing of time by the lightening of the load above me. With each bag that was removed, the world became a little brighter. It became a bit easier to imagine that my turn was coming.

When the day finally came — when I was pulled free and opened up, air filling my up and the wind in my creases — I felt joy and fear in equal measure.

After all of that waiting, my moment was finally here. But what if I wasn’t good enough? What if I didn’t know what to do?

As item after item was added to my center, I felt my confidence ebb and flow. Imposter syndrome threatened to overtake me. But I was a bag, I reminded myself. I was made for times like these. I was finally getting to live my purpose. I was finally doing the thing I was made for.

When I was full, my top was curled over — I wished there was a mirror for me to see how I looked — and a name was scribbled on my chest. Lexi, it read. I’d spent so much of my life without a name — just one of many in a stack, nameless and nondescript. Now I had an identity, a purpose.

I was placed on a shelf, where I would wait yet again. For what, this time I had no clue. There had been rumors of where bags went once they were filled — some that bordered on fantasy and others that sounded more like nightmares — but no one really knew for sure.

Next to me, on the shelf, there was another bag. This one was named Seth W. I glanced over at him, taking in his sharply-creased edges, the tight curl at his top, the modest receipt that billowed from his neck. He was familiar to me, although we'd never met.

Hello, I said.

Oh, hi.

You come here often?

He snorted. First time. Does it show?

I made a show of looking him up and down, sussing him out. You reek of it.

Well, you reek of chicken tinga and barbacoa.

I laughed. Another bag was added to the shelf, pushing me a bit closer to Seth W. I didn’t mind.

Where do you think we’re going from here? I asked.

Somewhere where they’ll be excited for us to arrive, he said.

I liked that answer. My receipt billowed a bit in the breeze as the door opened. In the background, the noises coming from the sound-making-machine changed. I liked these particular noises. They made me happy. I looked over to Seth W, and he seemed happy, too.

I like this song, he said.

Song? I asked.

The music, he explained. That’s what they call the noises that come from the sound-making-machine. The ones that feel like they are just floating on the air and coming from nowhere? Music is like a language, and songs are like words. Or maybe more like sentences. I don’t know, I don’t fully understand the nuances of human language.

And why would you? I asked. We’re bags.

He laughed.

“Can I help you?” a familiar voice asked from above us. An unfamiliar voice said, “Yeah, just picking up for Seth.”

That’s you, I said to Seth W, admittedly a bit sad to see him go so soon. It was nice knowing you.

Same, he called, as he was pulled up and off of the shelf, placed in the hands of the holder of the unfamiliar voice, and carried away from me. I hope I see you again out there.

I hoped the same.

Moments later, my own time came. I was carried out and into the night. I was placed on a soft shelf in a room that moved. I heard more music, more songs. I heard the unfamiliar voice singing along very badly to these songs. I liked it. I sang along, too, even though I didn’t know the words.

I was carried into a new room. When the unfamiliar voice called out, “Food’s here!” a flurry of others came to join. I was passed from hand to hand, my insides being emptied. I listened to giggling and arguing and chewing and chatter.

After some time, I was crumpled up. It didn’t hurt. It felt kind of nice, actually, to not be flat or to be open. To be a new shape entirely.

I was placed in a holding bin of sorts, surrounded by unfamiliar shapes. This wasn’t like my stack. There were colors here that I had never seen before.

Hello, I said to these new friends.

Oh, hello, they said in response. Welcome.

Some time later, I was taken into another room that moved, which transported me to a much larger room that was very loud.

I was crushed again, this time much more aggressively than before, and I was flattened, but in a way that was different from my Stack days. I heard someone saying that I was going to be stripped down into fibers, and at first that sounded scary, but once it actually started to happen it wasn’t that bad. Parts of me were scattered all over the place, which was actually kind of cool, because now I got to see and hear so much more. Where my scope had been limited before, it had now widened.

I wondered what I’d become next. I could sense that I was no longer a bag, at least not in the traditional sense.

Hi, a familiar voice came from somewhere nearby, so close that it felt like it was part of me, or that we were somehow connected. Maybe we were?

Seth W, I exclaimed. It’s you!

It’s me, he said, a smile in his voice. First time getting flattened into fibers?

I laughed. If either of us had arms, I’d punch him playfully in the shoulder.

Okay, that’s the end of that nonsense. Now go out and listen to The Remedy and have a very good & dichotomous day!!!!!!!!!!!

1. I love you.

2. I’m suffering.

3. I’m suffering because I love you.

And in everything we create — every poem we write, every film we shoot, every photo we take or song we sing or picture we paint — we’re all just trying to find a new & clever way to say one of those three things.

Many times, these attempts feel cliche, overwrought, or just plain unnecessary. Sometimes there is no better way to say something than to simply cut to the chase, to stamp out the human pride that tells us we must attempt to turn something that is at its best when it is ubiquitous into something unique, the pride that tells us this experience only means something if it is one of a kind.

But sometimes, someone truly does find a way to say one of those three things in a way that feels novel but not contrived. And I like those times!!!

Lately, I’ve been thinking about them and attempting to catalogue them — my own examples, those from friends, and those I see/hear in art & media.

For today, I’m thinking specifically of ways to say “I love you” that are not those three words. Here are a few, broken out into categories.

“I remember”

In many ways, remembering feels like the ultimate love language.

To commandeer a piece of someone’s memory? To be woven into their neurons, passing forever through the webs and pathways that connect them?? To be folded into a corner of their mind and remain tucked away there, a version of you safe and protected, in some sense, from the passage of time??? Sigh.

I love when art speaks to memory — how subjective and malleable our memories are, how but also how the memories we keep and the memories we share become the most important part of us. We’re all collecting mental souvenirs of each other, and using them to help us better tell the stories of our own lives. What could be more romantic than that?

Interpersonally, there are few things that feel more sacred and special to receive than someone remembering something about you — something you may have even forgotten yourself.

Some of my favorite examples of “I remember” being used in place of “I love you”

• “This made me think of you”

  • Giving gifts because you feel like you have to (on birthdays, on Christmas, etc.) is OUT. Giving (or making!) gifts because you saw something and it made you think of someone is IN.

• “Do you think I have forgotten about you?” from About You by The 1975

  • What a way to say I love you!!! To be incredulous over the fact that you could think they had forgotten!!! For it to be stated as obvious: Of course I remember. Did you really think I could ever forget?

• “I remember everything” from People We Meet on Vacation (the book, not the movie — and don’t even get me started on how PO’ed I am that this line didn’t make the cut in the adaptation) by Emily Henry

  • Throughout the book version of PWMOV, present-day Poppy brings up several memories she has from vacations she and Alex have taken throughout the years. Alex always acts like he doesn’t really remember. Later, he reveals that he remembers everything — from what she was wearing the first time he saw her, to what she ordered once at a McDonald’s in Tennessee.

• “I’ll keep what I can of you” from New Order T-Shirt by The National

  • I am going to reference The National way too many times on this list, because I’m That Girl but also because I really feel like Matt Berninger is the king of touching on something universal by using specificity. New Order T-Shirt is full of examples like this. It’s a song about extremely specific memories — but in the listing of these specifics, your own specifics are called to mind.

    I keep what I can of you

    Split-second glimpses and snapshots and sounds

    You in my New Order T-shirt

    Holding a cat and a glass of beer

    I flicker through

    I carry them with me like drugs in a pocket

    You in a Kentucky aquarium

    Talking to a shark in a corner
    
    You may not have a memory of someone standing in a t-shirt with a cat and a glass of beer. But you have the equivalent of that memory. And you know what it is like to steward those mental snapshots, those moments. To carry them with you everywhere you go. To be reminded — sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally.

Note: a related category (or maybe a subcategory) to “I remember” is “I think about you when you’re not around.” I couldn’t decide if this should be its own thing or not. Some examples of this are the song Always On My Mind (I like the Pet Shop Boys version, but my grandma really loves the Elvis version — either way, the message is the same), the song Downtown by Majical Cloudz (which I find to be one of the most romantic songs ever), She Lit a Fire by Lord Huron, You’re in My Veins by Andrew Belle, etc. etc. etc. etc. …Hmm, typing these out, I’m thinking maybe this IS a separate category? You tell me. We make the rules here.

“Still”

This one is a bit of an “I love you” and a bit of an “I’m suffering because I love you (but it’s worth it).”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it a thousand times — watching the movie Before Sunrise was, for me, a spiritual experience. One of those line-in-the-sand moments where you know, as you’re watching it, Oh, this is going to change me a little. This is going to leave a mark.

Then, when I watched Before Sunset (the nine-years-later sequel) and finally got to see what happened to my beloved Jesse and Celine, it was even better. Even more romantic in some ways. When Celine told Jesse, “Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane,” and Jesse responded “I know,” it felt like the perfect ending to their love story.

And then Before Midnight came along, nine years after that. And it was so brutal. It took the love story that felt so romantic and special and magical and made it painfully real. It showed what happens after the Happily Ever After. When monotony and resentment creep in. When you know someone well enough to destroy them, know exactly where to place the knife, exactly how to twist it. The movie takes you to the most brutal and devastating places and has you wondering if love is actually real or just some fantasy we’ve all collectively bought in on…

…And then it ends on a weirdly hopeful note. One that feels like a truce and also an acknowledgement of “for all of our shit, I still can’t imagine sitting next to anyone else.” I’m dropping the scene (which makes me cry every time LOL) in here, but you really shouldn’t watch it unless you’ve watched the entire trilogy. Which you should do immediately.

The facts are these:

Life is hard. Suffering is inevitable. The shine wears off of most things. We are messy humans who are both annoying and easily annoyed.

And still…

I think about “still” as “I love you” when I think about friends who have seen us go through all sorts of phases and changes and are still along for the ride. The family members who we have driven up walls and who still want to eat dinner with us every Sunday. The romantic partners who we have screamed at and sobbed to.

The ones we have been too close to for too long to go without occasionally subjecting the worst of ourselves to.

The rose-colored glasses are long gone, but they’re still here.

They have seen us at our worst and our lowest and our messiest, and they are still here. Tell me: is there anything more beautiful and romantic and hopeful than that???

A few other examples of “still” as “I love you”:

• Wellness by Nathan Hill

  • This was one of my favorite reads of 2025. If you liked the Before trilogy, I highly recommend it. The ending scene of this one made me cry in the same kind of way. I don’t want to say any more than that!!!

• “There’s a million little battles that I’m never gonna win, anyway. I’m still waiting for you every night with ticker tape” from I Am Easy To Find by The National

  • Okay, first of all, I told you The National was going to be on this list a lot!! Did I not give fair warning?!?! Second of all, this line makes me tear up every time. It’s a very good shower song. Because it sounds good in the shower, but also because of the aforementioned crying.

“Only you see this side of me”

Okay, I know I said earlier that love is universal and that trying to make it unique and special is just some weird, annoying human ego thing that we do to try to trick ourselves into believing we’re somehow special.

But I also do think there’s something really special about love being displayed through the act of giving/receiving access. This feels like a cousin of “still.” It’s like saying:

“I feel safe when I’m with you, and therefore I can let my guard down and maybe even reach out and pull the rose-colored glasses off of your face, because I want you to see me as I really am. I want you to have access to all of these little idiosyncrasies, not because I want to be some Manic Pixie Dream Girl who is quirky and silly and ethereal, but because I want to be my most human self.”

On this note, when I first heard the song Slow Show by The National (surprised? You really shouldn’t be), I thought it was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.

In it, Matt Berninger sings about being at a party, one in which he feels out of place and awkward1. In the chorus, he sings: “I wanna hurry home to you and put on a slow, dumb show for you, and crack you up.” And it’s so simple and stupid and also the most beautiful thing!!! I can think of few bits of higher praise than that. If I received a text to that effect, I would absolutely be in a puddle on the floor before I had my fingers had a chance to type any sort of meaningful response. Which is for the best, because nothing I could type back would be able to rise to the precedent established by that initial message.

Note: that part of the song is very romantic and a great example of this particular category of “I love you” replacements. But the song ends with another, entirely separate example of an “I love you” replacement! That’s right: someone call Publix, because this is a true BOGO. A two-for-one the likes of which we’ve never seen before or since.

This particular “I love you” comes in the form of “I missed you before I even met you.” More specifically:

“You know I dreamed about you. I missed you for, for twenty-nine years, before I saw you.”

And I’m sorry, but if you don’t see why/how that literally changed the brain chemistry of 20-year-old me upon first listen, I don’t know what to say to you.

That gets me into a closely related, maybe-separate, maybe-not category2, which is:

“I can’t believe you’re real”

This one is tricky because it can veer very easily (and sneakily) into manic-pixie-ism or idealism or idolization or a whole list of other bad things that tend to be harbingers of doom for those who seek a relationship in which they are free to be a real human with flaws, not an Impressionist portrait rendered in short brush strokes.

However, when this form of I love you is genuine — a simple marveling at the fact that, Holy shit, of all of the eons of time and across all of the stretches of space and within all of the other pockets of the space-time continuum, the particles that are Me and the particles that are You somehow ended up existing, in this form, at the very right time. Whether the stars or the fates or God or gravity brought us together, somehow, you found me and I found you. How unbelievable is that? How lucky are we? — it can be really beautiful. Because at it’s core, this kind of “I love you” is both an expression of the mystery of life and the mystery of knowing. We’re capable of feeling this type of love for any one or any thing, if we really focus on it.

What I mean is — at the risk of sounding too earnest3 — I think if you walked outside and stared at a flower for long enough, you could feel at least a hint of this form of “I love you.” You can feel it when you look at a Georgia O’Keefe painting. You can feel it when you sit down at happy hour with a friend, the 6PM light streaming in through the window and hitting your dirty martini just right. You can feel it when you hear the ocean or when you receive a really good hug.

I think this kind of “I love you” is a muscle that can be trained and it’s one I want to spend more of my own time developing. I want to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger of this kind of “I love you,” except turning into into a competition is probably kind of missing the point, so really I just want to be good enough at it that there’s no doubt at all that the people around me know that I know how lucky I am to know them.

Some examples of “I can’t believe you’re real” as “I love you”:

• Some songs:

  • You’re Still a Mystery by Bleachers

  • They’ll Never Get You Right by Brandon Flowers

  • You Caught the Light by CHVRCHES

• "When I watch you sleep, I feel overwhelmed that you exist” from Beach Read by Emily Henry

“I love you”

Sometimes those three words really do get the job done. I’m a sucker for songs that just admit that sometimes, nothing else really works.

Some great examples of people throwing in the towel and just saying, y’know what, what the hell, I love you:

• “But everything is fine / Don’t give into despair / ‘Cause I love you, honeybear” from I Love You, Honeybear by Father John Misty

• “It’s simple and it goes like this: I’m in love with you” from I’m in Love With You by The 1975

• “Can I say something crazy? I love you” from May I Have This Dance? by Francis and the Lights

There are so many ways to say I love you — so why aren’t we saying it all the time?

I am considering this exploration into “I love you”s Very Serious Anthropological Work and will be adding it to my LinkedIn profile expeditiously4. If you’d like me to endorse you in the same category, I need to hear some of your own personal favorite “I love you”s.

Long story short?

However you say it — in whatever words or phrases or sounds or glances across crowded rooms or actions you choose — just do it more often. There’s plenty to go around and plenty of ways to give it. Don’t be stingy with it. We need it more than ever.

Rounding us out with some other ways to say “I love you” that were harder to categorize:

• “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible” from When Harry Met Sally5

  • Also, watching a movie separately-but-together

• “You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on” from Pride & Prejudice

  • Also, the hand flex

• The entire song Sleeping to Dream by Jason Mraz

  • When I was in college I used to listen to the live version of this song over and over and over again as I walked around campus. Don’t judge me, it was 2011.

• The entire song God Only Knows by the Beach Boys

  • No one does Clinical Depression as I Love You better than Brian Wilson. “The world could show nothing to me, so what good would living do me?” RIP.

• “I’ll feed your horses”

  • This one comes from a Gregory Alan Isakov song, and was actually the line that kicked off this entire train of thought around other ways to say “I love you.” I went to his concert and he had a little Oxford Pennant with that phrase written on it, and I really liked it. I feel like there could be a whole category of “I’ll wait for you” as “I love you” but I’ll save that for another day.

If you’ve got any examples you’d like to add to the list, I’d love to hear them!!!

Frances wanted to be just famous enough that her height was google-able.

No fans commenting on her Instagram posts, asking her to weigh in the latest horrors.

No paparazzi waiting outside of her door to catch an unflattering shot.

Just a sparsely populated Wikipedia and some dimensions. That felt like the right amount of fame.

She wasn’t vain, necessarily. Because vanity was something to avoid at all costs, she believed. To be vain was a punishable offense.

No one liked a vain woman, Frances knew. But she also knew no one liked an ugly woman. Was there any kind of woman, Frances wondered, that anyone liked?

Vanity also implied that you thought you were beautiful, something worth looking at.

Frances did not believe she was worth looking at—but she desired, deeply, for someone to prove her wrong.

Her vanity was the kind of desperation.

She hoped that, with any one accidental glance in the reflective window of a Chipotle, or with any candid photo taken, she may finally receive evidence that she was, at least somewhat, slightly, maybe a tiny bit beautiful in one way or another.

Frances desperately wanted her photo to be taken but would be mortified if that factoid were ever to become public knowledge. That was a Secret Fact, the kind that would never make its way onto a Wikipedia page.

She walked through life in a constant state of pose. Ready and waiting for The Photo to be taken.

But once the camera was, in fact, turned on her, she was instantly struck with a self-consciousness so acute, so direct, that it seemed as if it must be beaming into her soul from the lens itself.

She didn’t know what to do with herself. Her hands. Her face. Her feet. Apparently Instagram models were pointing their feet in a very specific way, these days, to make their legs look longer.

She could never remember though—was it a knee-facing-outward point? Or a knee-turned-ever-so-slightly-inward point? And actually, her legs were a bit ugly and stumpy and scarred and bruised, anyway. Did she really want to accentuate them? Call even an iota more attention to them than was absolutely necessary?

She was desperate for That Photo to be taken. The one that would give her the peace she so desired, that would mean the pursuit would be over and she’d finally be satisfied, evidence collected.

Then, she believed, she could give up the ghost. This temporary vanity would depart from her body like a soldier called home from war.

Of course, this belief did not account for beauty’s subjectivity or its ephemeral nature—the fact that beauty captured in one moment could just as quickly be gone in the next.

Frances knew this—knew that she was a prisoner of time and its passing, that her body and face and hair would all change.

Knew that, inevitably, a new insecurity she hadn’t yet even considered would reveal itself to her—whether by divine intervention or a look in the mirror or a scroll on her phone.

Did she have strawberry legs? American Girl doll legs? Septum arms? Hip dips? Did she need to purchase a specialty shampoo for her 2B wavy hair? A special lip liner for her double-lined-lips? Was she actually a Cool Summer? Should she throw away all of her jewel-toned clothing and gold jewelry?

The world and her brain would both continue to invent creative new ways for her to hate herself, Frances knew.

But she would cross that bridge, she thought, when she came to it.

That being said. I have some quick meet-cute-adjacent thoughts to share.

I finally watched The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 film that You’ve Got Mail was based on, and ummmmmmm…

If you call yourself a lover of romcoms, please drop whatever undoubtedly-less-important thing you’re doing and watch it immediately.

The problem(s) with You’ve Got Mail

Now, listen. I still love the Nora Ephron classic. She can do very little wrong, in my book. I love the idea of re-imagining the premise (which actually comes from a play) for the e-mail era. I love the nostalgic dial-up sounds. I love the oft-winning pairing of Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan.

But I’ve always had the same gripes with You’ve Got Mail that many do — most notably, the way the ending expects us to just be okay with Tom Hanks’ big box store squashing Meg Ryan’s small family business.

The way we’re apparently supposed to not care about any of the larger themes/messages the story brushes up against because Love Is All That Matters.

The way we’re supposed to just accept the fact that, conveniently, maybe she didn’t actually want to own that bookstore at all. Maybe she wanted to write children’s books this whole time! Maybe this whole My Boyfriend Jeff Bezos Pushed My Business Out of Town situation is actually an Opportunity for her!!!

Watching this film in the modern day feels like opening a time capsule to a pre-9/11 world, and one where there was ostensibly less cynicism, fear, and bitterness toward Big Business and the capitalist machine. At times, YGM borders on pushing some kind of mutated, fantastical version of the American Dream — one in which you really can have your cake and eat it, too. After all: Tom Hanks wins in both business and love. He’s able to push her out of business and still get the girl — because there’s more to him than meets the eye. Y’know, he’s actually kind of nice, underneath all of that greediness and gentrification!!!

All of that to say:

For all of the film’s charm, even a starry-eyed 12-year-old version of me was a bit unsatisfied with that ending. And also with the film’s treatment of Greg Kinnear, but that’s a separate point for another day1.

Another day, another pengo

The Shop Around the Corner has 1000x the charm (no offense to Tom Hanks but you will NEVER be Jimmy Stewart) and less ickiness than You’ve Got Mail. It also feels like way less of a time capsule, which is kind of crazy given the fact that it was made 50 years earlier.

Despite the lack of technology present in the film, its black-and-whitedness & weird aspect ratio, and the fact that it is, inexplicably, set in Budapest2, it still feels more like it could’ve been made today than You’ve Got Mail.

In The Shop Around the Corner, our two love interests work in the same shop (it’s the one around the corner. Like, from the title!). Jimmy Stewart’s character, Kralik, has worked at the shop for nine years, takes his job as the lead clerk very seriously, and seemingly has ambitions to one day day run the shop himself. Margaret Sullavan’s Klara Novak works under him as another clerk, and over the course of six months they develop a workplace rivalry — all while falling in love via letters neither of them know come from the other.

Amidst all of the enemies-to-lovers shenanigans, there’s also a side-plot about the owner of the store. When we meet him, he seems like your average money-grabber who cares about nothing more than the bottom line. But throughout the story, we start to learn a bit more about him — his loneliness, his relationships, and the fact that he does genuinely care about his employees — and become more sympathetic toward him.

So, basically: in every version of this story, there is bound to be some form of big-business propaganda. But this version feels much more palatable, especially because our lead is not the Big Business itself. He’s just a cog in a machine, a man trying to make an honest pengo3 in the middle of tough economic times. He’s not some hotshot with a silver spoon in his mouth; contrarily, he’s quite insecure about his ability to provide for a wife, a family. That insecurity is what drives a lot of his dumb-guy behavior. When Klara calls him an “insignificant little clerk,” in the cafe scene (we’ll get to that in a minute) comparing him to her dream man (AKA the version of him that’s writing the letters LOL), it stings, because he’s already deeply afraid he’s a disappointment.

The Jimmy Stewart of it all

I have a genuine question: Is there a single working actor today who has half the charisma, on-screen presence, range, charm, and general likability that Jimmy Stewart had4?

Tom Hanks’ version of the love interest in this concept is not nearly as likable, even with the fact of his avarice aside. He’s annoying in that middle-school-boy kind of way throughout pretty much the entire movie (perhaps this is heightened due to his proximity to the always-more-likable Greg Kinnear), and his emails are basically the only time he’s kind of okay to be around.

Jimmy Stewart, on the other hand, somehow manages to display Kralik’s self-importance, insecurity, and tendency toward condescension without ever being annoying or losing his likability factor. Is this the writing? The setting? Jimmy Stewart himself5?

Trying to find a scene that exemplifies “romantic comedy” more than Jimmy Stewart slyly watching Margaret Sullavan giggle and blush over the letter HE wrote (unbeknownst to her) would be a fool’s errand. I myself was giggling and blushing, 85 years after the fact.

And trying to find an ending scene more romantic than Jimmy Stewart finally pulling out THE red carnation and placing it on his lapel, then pulling up his trousers to reveal his potential bowleggedness? Please, stop. Don’t even bother. You’re going to pull a muscle.

“Psychologically, I’m very confused… But personally, I don’t feel bad at all.”

The cafe scene

One scene the two films have basically exactly in common is the cafe scene.

I’ve always loved You’ve Got Mail’s cafe scene — the one in which our male lead discovers the true identity of his pen pal — but now it will forever pale in comparison to the OG version.

From the moment Kralik and his buddy Pirovich stand outside the window, Pirovich peeking in to get a look at Kralik’s mystery woman, everyone is firing on all cylinders.

Just like Tom Hanks’ version of the character, Stewart’s Kralik can’t help but go into the cafe after his buddy has left.

In both versions of this scene, some excellent enemies-to-lovers bickering, name-calling, and general antagonism ensues.

But the 1940 version just does it SO. MUCH. BETTER. The digs are diggier. The banter is banterier. The chemistry is more…chemical.

“Well I really wouldn’t care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I’d find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter...which doesn’t work.”

“Well, that’s very nicely put. Yes, comparing my intellect with a cigarette lighter that doesn’t work. That’s a very interesting mixture of...poetry and meanness.”

And when Klara finally levels Kralik with that “insignificant little clerk” insult (she really went for the jugular there), you really feel the sadness & embarrassment & existential pain Kralik is feeling in that moment: both as a human being, a coworker, and as the man who has been writing those letters.

You believe, in that moment, that he really thinks he’ll never be important enough or special enough for the woman he’s been communicating with. And you really believe that Klara feels terrible for taking it too far — for letting her own insecurity & fear & embarrassment bring out the worst in her.

You just never get that same level of emotional depth in the scene with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks — or in the 1998 version as a whole, for that matter.

Perhaps because Meg Ryan’s leveling of Tom Hanks actually feels kind of accurate rather than purely driven by her own insecurity — and you’re kind of glad someone in this movie had the nerve to call him out (although she’ll later walk all of it back when he actually does kill her business rather than just talking about it), whereas Klara’s leveling of Kralik feels genuinely kinda cruel and like something she doesn’t really mean.

Perhaps because the only things Tom Hanks gets called out for are things he should actually feel bad about (i.e. destroying her family business and the very fabric of the neighborhood at large, severing her connection with her dead mother, etc. etc. etc.), so you really can’t feel as bad for him as you do Jimmy Stewart. Even Hanks’ “That’s my cue,” when he leaves the cafe feels like he’s unfairly playing the victim in order to let himself off the hook, suddenly blaming Ryan for playing the game he started — and now she’s the one who has to feel bad about it.

Or maybe because of, again, the very fact of Jimmy Stewart himself (Okay, maybe I actually do feel bad for Tom Hanks, as I would for anyone who had the misfortune of being compared to Jimmy Stewart).

I’m not sure. In the words of Pepi (a bizarre but hilarious side character in the 1940 film): “Draw your own conclusions.”

And by that, I mean: PLEASE go watch this movie and then call me so we can giggle and kick our feet and quote it back and forth to each other. Thanks!

When she was twelve years old, Amy’s parents threw her a surprise birthday party — and she’d lived in fear ever since.

When she’d walked through the front door and entered the dark living room, a switch being flipped and light suddenly illuminating the faces of dozens of her classmates and teammates and family members, Amy froze. Not knowing what else to do, she’d simply said “Oh.”

This reaction was, obviously, unsatisfactory. Amy’s mom, who had been very proud of her efforts in orchestrating this surprise, was supremely disappointed and had moped around for weeks after, calling Amy a spoilsport.

Amy had never really known how to communicate her emotions, especially not in real-time. If some people wore their hearts on their sleeves, Amy wore hers on the bottom of her socks, right beneath the Hanes logo. Or perhaps on the laundry instructions tag stitched to the inner hem of her jeans.

Now, she walked through life worrying whether she was accidentally offending someone everywhere she went. She hated receiving gifts or letters or compliments because she didn’t know how to make the right faces or say the right words that would somehow convey the depth of her feelings or gratitude or care. It had probably begun before then, but certainly since that party, the defining emotion of Amy’s life had been guilt. It was the only thing she could be sure she was feeling at any given time.

In the evenings, while her dinner was heating up in the stove, she’d practice her facial expressions in the mirror. She acted out scenes from infomercials and soap operas, copying the exaggerated expressions associated with each emotion and creating a catalogue of them in her mind. She wanted to be ready to use them when needed — an elated smile when a coworker announced a pregnancy, a believable look of concern when a friend told her about something that was troubling them. But when the moments came to put her practice to good use, she was always struck by such a crippling sense of self-consciousness that she was incapable. As such, her expression was likely blank and everyone probably hated her. Or, if they were being generous in their view of her, found her to be very cold and strange.

One day, on the bulletin board in her local coffee shop, Amy saw an ad for an Introduction to Improv class at a nearby comedy club. “WE’LL PRY YOU OUT OF YOUR SHELL,” the flyer promised. “BY THE TIME YOU’VE GRADUATED, SOCIAL ANXIETY WILL FEAR YOU.”

It was surprisingly enticing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been excited about something, and was a bit surprised to register the feeling now. But she knew she wanted to follow it, even if she didn’t understand it. She scanned the QR code on the flyer and reserved a spot in an intro class before she could think better of it.

Which was how Amy found herself, the following Tuesday evening, sweating bullets in a poorly-ventilated and dimly-lit room, surrounded by twelve strangers. Several of them looked like they were equally regretful of their past self’s decision to sign up for this class.

They all sat in a circle, on aluminum chairs with worn padding, the yellow foam insides spilling out. The configuration felt much more sterile and formal than she’d imagined, calling to mind scenes from AA meetings she’d seen on television.

A man of about forty-five walked into the center of the circle. This communicated a level of authority, so Amy assumed he was the instructor. There was also the fact that he was wearing both a tie-dyed shirt and a fedora, which was pretty much exactly what Amy had imagined an improv instructor would wear.

“I’m Jed,” the man said, clapping his hands together. “And I’m going to be your leader on this journey.”

He moved constantly while talking, spinning around slowly to be sure to make direct eye contact with every member of the circle.

“In this room, there is one rule, and only one rule,” Jed said, his tone extremely serious for a man wearing a tie-dyed shirt. “And that is you must not, under any circumstances, deny the improv.” He stopped in front of Amy, his eyes locked on her, and asked “Capeesh?”

Amy felt called out. “Capeesh,” she repeated, timidly, although she had no idea what the hell he was talking about, and, therefore, what she was agreeing to.

“Good,” Jed said, his tone softening and a wide smile spreading across his face. “So, has anyone ever done improv before?”

Only one person raised their hand, a young man on the opposite side of the circle from Amy. Jed pointed at him, indicating he should share.

The young man cleared his throat, looking less sure of himself than he had when he’d first raised his hand. “Well, not exactly improv, maybe,” he said. “But when I was in high school, my friends and I would have competitions to see who could come up with the best variation of two in the pink, one in the stink.”

“That’s abhorrent,” a red-haired woman a few seats down from him said, scrunching up her nose in disgust. “And immature.”

“Yeah, well, so were we,” the man replied, looking a bit embarrassed. “We were 13-year-old boys.”

“What was your best one?” Jed asked, throwing him a bone.

“Two in the Sigmund Freud, one in the sigmoid,” the man offered, his ears burning red.

While Amy agreed with the red-haired woman, she had to admit that was pretty clever. Jed snorted.

“The reality,” Jed said, looking like he thought what he was about to say was also rather clever, “is that you’ve all done improv before. Because life itself is merely one big game of improvisation.”

Amy found that sentiment to be a bit trite, but she figured if she was going to make an honest attempt at taking this seriously, she’d probably need to drop some of the cynicism. She tried to expel it, drawing in a deep breath and imagining it was openmindedness itself filling her lungs and not the stale air of what appeared to be the basement of a former police station that had been converted into a comedy club.

“Regardless of your experience,” Jed continued, with an air of bravado, “you’re all likely here for different reasons. Maybe you recently watched a late-night marathon of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, or went to a comedy show and felt inspired. Maybe you’ve got a big speaking engagement coming up and feel unprepared. Maybe you’re just dealing with some social anxiety and want to feel more well-equipped to roll with the punches. Maybe a friend told you improv changed their life. Or maybe you simply saw a flyer in a coffee shop and your interest was piqued.”

There were nods and murmurs of acknowledgement from around the circle.

Jed closed out his monologue. “I can promise you this: whatever your reasons for being here, in ten weeks time you will feel like a new person. One who is ready to embrace life’s inherent absurdity and uncertainty, whatever it may bring.”

With that, he introduced the group to their first exercise. It was, he explained, a simple mirroring exercise. They’d all pair up — given the odd number of the group, Jed claimed the red-haired woman as his partner — and stand a foot apart. From there, they’d simply mirror each other’s movements.

“Who is the leader?” asked an elderly man wearing a stiff short-sleeved button down tucked into some equally stiff trousers.

“You’re both the leader,” Jed said, with a wink.

“I don’t understand,” the elderly man responded, wearing his confusion on his face.

“You will,” Jed said, with another wink. He was a bit annoying, Amy thought. She suspected the elderly man agreed.

Aside from the mystery of who would be each duo’s leader, this being deemed a “simple” exercise was absolutely insane to Amy. A ruler’s distance apart was nothing. She was expected to stand that close to a stranger, look into their eyes, and do strange little hand motions and facial expressions for God knew how long? She could feel herself panicking, fight or flight kicking in.

Jed paired Amy with the elderly man, and that, at least, was a relief. Amy had always been able to relate much better to people who were not her peers. Babies and old people were her favorite humans to be stuck next to at a dinner party.

From a foot apart, Amy could smell the Werther’s candy on her partner’s breath. His name was Gene, he told her. He’d recently lost his wife to lung cancer and his children had suggested he try something new to keep himself out of the house. “Doing new things is good for your brain,” he told her. “It fights off dementia and all order of other Big Bads, or so they tell me. Though at my age I think that ship has sailed.”

Jed told them to all be quiet, to fight the tendency to fill the awkward silence with words and instead lean into it. “Pay attention to the subtle signals your partner is sending you,” he said. “A dance will form, one that you will sometimes be leading and at others be following. In the moment, you may not know which is which. That’s a good thing; don’t try too hard to make sense of it.”

For the first ten or so minutes, this exercise was the most uncomfortable thing Amy had ever done. It was dead silent in the room, aside from the occasional awkward chuckle or snort and the sound of breathing. Amy found herself maxxing out on eye contact every twenty or so seconds — after that, she had to blink away, to look up or to the side for a moment, wiping the vulnerability slate clean before starting the clock again. She found herself extremely self conscious of her every movement: the way she was pressing her lips together, how often she blinked, whether her nostrils were flared.

But at a certain point, something shifted. Whether it was an acceptance of the situation she was in or simply getting comfortable with the task at hand, she felt some of the self-consciousness fade away. In its absence, she felt herself slowly start to truly take in the fullness of the man in front of her: the sadness in his eyes, the scar above his left eyebrow, the laugh lines that formed parentheses on either side of his mouth. She experienced him as not just a side character in her own story but a real human with a rich inner life, someone with a lifetime full of stories and experiences and joys and heartbreaks. She felt that she wanted to validate him and these experiences, and, in the moment, she believed that she could do so through this exercise, through simply waving her arms up and down in unison — and perhaps solidarity — with his. It felt like with every motion, she was saying I see you; I am here, and I see you, and she felt like he was saying it back to her.

By the time Jed told them they were finished, Amy had tears streaming down her face and was shocked to discover that over thirty minutes had passed.

Class was over for the day, Jed told them. Their homework was to simply reflect on the experience and hold on to what they’d learned until next week. “Pursue that vulnerability,” he told them. “Don’t run away from it, and don’t let it run away from you. And until I see you again, don’t you dare deny the improv.” He winked, then retreated from whence he came, which Amy imagined was some kind of mystical lair of sorts. Somewhere where there was definitely fog. And harp music.

As quickly as the self-consciousness had left her, it returned. The lights had been flipped on, and she was back in her body. She felt embarrassed for having been so overcome, and now felt silly for making something so simple into something so deep. It was only the first class, for Christ’s sake. She’d probably made poor, sweet Gene uncomfortable. He’d probably go home and tell his kids that his attempt at trying something new was a bust; that there’d been a rather unhinged young woman in his class and he didn’t feel safe returning. The guilt, her only lifelong friend, tugged at her.

As he collected his things, his movements slow and stiff, Amy cautiously approached him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, to his back.

Gene turned around, and she saw this his eyes were wet and rimmed in red. Oh god, she thought. You’ve really done it. You can never come back here.

“For what?” he asked, a hint of laughter in his voice.

“For…being so strange,” Amy said, trying to find the real words she was looking for. As per usual, she felt incapable of adequately or accurately expressing herself. “For getting so emotional? I don’t usually do that. I can’t remember the last time I cried. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Nonsense,” Gene said, waving his hand at her. “It seems like you needed to get that out of your system, and so did I.” He tapped his cane on the ground. “Now, feel free to say no, because I’m sure someone your age has far better things to do than hang around with a lonely old man like me: but I’m going to grab a coffee from the shop next door and process whatever the hell just happened, if you’d like to join me.”

A huge part of Amy wanted to say no, wanted to just go home and hole up in her apartment and pretend this entire day had never happened — or at the very least to process it on her own, in her own way.

But here was a human being, reaching out a hand to her. She didn’t know if it was an act of pity or of vulnerability or simply of friendship — but either way, she heard Jed’s command ringing through her ears: Don’t deny the improv.

“I’d like that,” Amy said, smiling softly at Gene. It wasn’t an exaggerated soap opera smile or a satisfied infomercial-user smile. It was a simple smile, an honest one that felt real and true.

I just got back from a trip to Sicily (amazing!) where I got Covid on Day 2 (less amazing!). I was sick in bed for four days, with the kind of fever that makes it hard to do anything other than lay there with your eyes closed. Too sick to sleep, yet also too sick to do anything but sleep.

The upside? I was also too sick to even grieve all of the planned hiking, climbing, eating, and miscellaneous adventure-ing I’d traveled 15+ hours for. What little strength I had was reserved for things such as "watching Survivor” and “crawling to the bathroom” and “crouching in the shower like Gollum or that girl from The Grudge.”

By the time I was un-sick enough to re-enter society, we only had a few days left on the trip — but we made the most of them by laying on the beach, reading a ton of books (my husband — who reads maybe one book every two years — read Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend and People We Meet on Vacation and he loved both), and eating our weight in cannoli.

I also witnessed several real-life meet-cutes that I wanted to share.

Something about traveling gives you a more keen eye for noticing the little things — the things that are likely happening all the time, everywhere you go, but you’re just not paying attention. I’d like to find a way to bring this hyper-awareness and gratitude into my everyday life, so that it’s not something I’m only so acutely aware of when I’m on vacation. Why can’t I experience this same level of awe while at my local grocery store? There are love stories everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Anyway. Here are some of the little love stories I observed while on vacation.

• In the Newark airport: There’s a very overpowering scent of a very floral perfume floating through the air while I consume a mediocre airport sandwich. I’m not the only one who notices. A young woman working on her laptop turns to a very stylish young man at the table behind her and asks if he’s the one who smells so good (I did not personally find the scent very appealing but that’s irrelevant to the story, and also scent is a highly subjective thing and I’m glad that there are people out there who love the smells that give me, personally, a headache!!!). He says yes, and a conversation about fragrances ensues. It turns out that she used to work for a perfume company, and he is an amateur fragrance connoisseur. They discuss several very fancy-sounding fragrances, saying things like “I’m sure you’ve heard of [INSERT FANCY-PANTS, FRENCH-SOUNDING EAU-DE-WHATEVER NAME HERE],” and so on. The conversation ends with them both wishing each other well on their respective journeys. It was the kind of hyper-specific IRL bonding moment that always fills me with joy. I was so happy I got to witness it, and it made my mediocre airport sandwich taste just a tiny bit better. That’s the beauty and power of a meet-cute.

• In our Palermo hotel: When I come down with Covid, I message the host of our BNB/hotel situation alerting her and inquiring about nearby pharmacies. I don’t know if this is a result of being chronically ill or if everyone feels this way, but my first response to being sick is to feel really guilty and ashamed about it. Even if I did everything “right.” Getting sick feels like a moral failing and I expect everyone to be mad at me. Instead, my host was so kind. “Everything will be okay,” she told me. “Well done,” she said, when I told her my fever had broken. “You will keep getting better.” And in both a “right now” kind of way and in a “big picture” kind of way, I think I really needed to hear that.

  

• At the beach: Not a meet-cute, but there’s an old couple kissing each other in the water. They seem like they’re really living the life. There are two Italian kids playing Monkey in the Middle with their dad. I didn’t know Italians played Monkey in the Middle (scimmia nel mezzo?), but why wouldn’t they? There is a young boy slathering his pregnant mom’s belly with sunscreen. There are two women lounging on a sunbed under an umbrella who fall asleep in an embrace, their open books discarded on the sand beneath them. There is granita. Lots and lots of granita. The spot where the watermelon and the lemon meet — tartness and sweetness somehow mellowing and enhancing each other at the same time – could inspire love songs.

• All throughout Sicily: The first bite of a good cannolo is truly a meet-cute. The woman filling one layers it with so much ricotta that there are no empty spaces or air bubbles. Each bite contains the perfect amount of mini chocolate chips, and ricotta, and the faintest hint of citrus and nutmeg. The crunch of the shell is perfect, cracking under the weight of your bite but maintaining its shape just the right amount. It’s a short-lived love story, but a love story all the same. And there are so many cannoli spots that you can make a true crawl of it, comparing each against the one before it, but finding this to be a nearly impossible task, because each one is so so good in its own unique way. (Except for the ones that are pre-filled. We don’t talk about those.)

  

• In a town square: Two little kids are sitting on the steps of a small church that is probably hundreds of years old, their backs leaning against the wooden doors. They sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking at an iPad or some other doodad while their friends all play a very lively game of tag. Eventually, when we walk by again later (after that night’s Cannoli Crawl), all of their friends have left and it’s just the two of them who remain. He’s still sitting at the steps of the church, iPad long forgotten, and she’s attempting (very unsuccessfully, but it’s the effort that counts) handstands for her audience of one.

At face value, these love stories are not remarkable. They’re totally normal, the kinds of things you can see every day, if you just look. I usually don’t, though. I’m usually too busy, or too sad, or too distracted.

But in a world that feels increasingly negative, scary, and borderline-dystopian by the day, I am committing to looking. To keeping an eye out. To attuning myself to the unremarkable love stories that make it worth going outside, that balance out all of the Bad Stuff (of which there is plenty). To attempting to develop the kind of 20/20 vision that can easily spot the love, even without vacation’s rose-colored glasses doing the heavy lifting.

1. If you liked Palm Springs, you should read…

0 Stars, Do Not Recommend by M. J. Wassmer

I absolutely loved this book, and the entire time I was reading it I was thinking about Palm Springs – which is, to me, a basically perfect film in every sense of the word. It might as well have been bioengineered in a lab just for me.

The basic premise of 0 Stars is that a man and his girlfriend go on a tropical vacation, and while there, the sun explodes. As you’d expect, both chaos and existentialism ensue. It’s a bit Lord of the Flies but also one of the most heartwarming things I’ve read all year?

2. If you liked Miss Congeniality, you should read…

The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

This is a couch book. This is a pint of ice cream book. This is a just-did-an-everything-shower book. It’s so comforting and nostalgic and feels like watching a classic romcom for the first time. I have re-read this book so many times when I just need to turn my brain off and feel something warm & fuzzy.

3. If you liked Uncut Gems, you should read…

The Guest by Emma Cline

I love media that makes me uncomfortable. Not sure if this is an OCD thing, but there’s something strangely comforting about having an actual reason or source behind my discomfort? Like it’s just kinda nice for the feeling to make sense and have a clear inciting reason as opposed to my brain having to come up with one on its own. Anyway, if you are also the type of person who likes to read/watch things that make your skin crawl and that operate in a currency of slow-building dread, Emma Cline is for you. I read this in one night because I simply could not put it down.

4. If you liked Girls, you should read…

You, Again by Kate Goldbeck

When I first read this book, it was being positioned as a “modern re-telling of When Harry Met Sally.” I see why, but I resent that (and there’s another book that feels wayyyy more deserving of that title, which we’ll get to momentarily). That said: I still loved this book! I just felt like it was way more dark, gritty, and uncomfortable than our dearly beloved Nora Ephron classic. It reminded me more of the weird, sometimes-disturbing, often-frustrating, but strangely optimistic world of Lena Dunham’s Girls. These characters are deeply flawed and unlikeable, yet still manage to be root-for-able(ish). The experience of reading this book feels like the experience of hate-watching-but-actually-loving Girls. It’s complicated, and messy, and holds a mirror up to the very worst parts of us — and it’s fun.

5. If you liked Josie & The Pussycats, you should read…

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

Okay, I know this is a deep cut. I haven’t seen this movie in a decade, so maybe I shouldn’t even be recommending it. But reading this book made me want to revisit it! I just finished reading Girl on Girl and I absolutely loved it. My jaw dropped countless times, and I read with my phone nearby so I could take pictures of pages. Now basically my entire camera roll is shots from this book. Read it if you’re interested in how the media/pop culture have impacted the way women are viewed by society at large.

Also, it has a very cool and fun cover!!! I read all of my nonfiction in hardcover books (my Kindle is exclusively for fiction!), and this one was a fun one to get to admire every time I picked it up.

6. If you liked When Harry Met Sally, you should read…

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

You, Again is way too dark to be a WHMS substitute. It’s also not really a friends-to-lovers story. PWMOV balances being earnest and practical in a way that feels similar to WHMS, without being a blatant copy. On the PWMOV/WHMS Venn diagram, we’ve got the iconic “getting to know each other via a roadtrip” overlap and the opposites-attract overlap and the slow-burn friends-to-lovers overlap. And these are three overlap slivers that MEAN SO MUCH TO ME. I know a lot of people rank this as one of their least favorite EmHen novels, but for me it’s near the top of the list. I revisit this one just as often as I do The Bodyguard, for the same reason — it feels like laying under a weighted blanket, with freshly shaved legs that have been adequately lotioned but are not at all sticky. Everything about it is comfortable and comforting.

7. If you liked About Time, you should read…

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens

At this point, anything Sophie Cousens writes is an instant "add to cart” for me. Her books just give you those “lucky to be alive” feelings. They make you feel grateful for the people in your life. They’re simple, sometimes involve some element of magical realism (which I’m a sucker for, when done well) and just make you feel warm and hopeful and happy to be here. They remind you not to take the good things (as tiny or simple as they may be) for granted.

This one involves a bit of time travel-y stuff with a family component, so I’m lumping it in the same universe as About Time, which is another good thing to watch when you need to be reminded of how rich love (of all kinds!) can make you.

8. If you like The Summer I Turned Pretty, you should read…

Teen Idol by Meg Cabot

This book was my entire personality in 9th grade. If you were looking for me, I was probably shut away in my closet after lights out, reading a Meg Cabot book. Teen Idol is about a girl-next-door type who gets caught up in a (kinda) love triangle. There’s yearning. There are misunderstandings. There’s no Cousins Beach, but there is a campfire confession. There is no Conrad Fisher, but there is also no Jeremiah Fisher.

One thing that’s fun about this book is it flips the “celeb falls for the small town girl who doesn’t even know who he is” trope on its head a bit, which, as a 13-year-old reader, was very, very cool to me.

9. If you liked Her, you should read…

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by BJ Novak

There’s a short story in here, called Sophia, about a man who tries to return his artificially intelligent sex robot when she claims to have fallen in love with him. I’m just suchhhhh a sucker for robot love stories — or any story that tries to explain what love is (or isn’t). If you like those kinds of stories, too, you will like this one. The entire collection of stories is worth reading, with a variety of subject matter covered, but Sophia was one of my favorites (and the one that has probably stuck with me the most since reading).

Okay, that’s all for this round-up! I’ll probably do another one of these soon because I have a longggg list of “If you like this, read this” recommendations.

One day, while taking the train into the city for a meeting, she caught the eye of a man whose name she would later learn was Brian. He was reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which had long been on her own TBR list. His copy looked worn and well-loved, which made her happy. She struck up a conversation with him, and in doing so, noticed that he possessed an earnestness, a transparency, that instantly endeared her to him.

When he asked for her number, it was the first time she could remember feeling genuinely hopeful in at least a year. Here was one of the near-mythical organic meetings she’d fantasized about! A true in-real-life meet-cute. A story they could be genuinely excited to tell their grandchildren one day. Her decision to delete the apps from her phone was being instantly validated.

She was also an excellent texter, and this gave her the opportunity to show her chops.

Her meeting — a presentation on trends in green bonds, ESG-linked loans, and investor priorities — went perfectly. She treated herself, afterwards, with a chocolate muffin and cinnamon latte from her favorite bakery near the office. On the train home, she was riding a high the likes of which she imagined rivaled those of skydivers or free solo-ers or any other adrenaline junkies who could come to mind.

As she neared her stop, a text from B-Train Brian (as he’d cutely entered his name in her phone earlier) popped up on her screen.

When he asked for her shoe size, she wasn’t overly concerned. Perhaps it was just a cheeky little line? An ironic bit of commentary on the surface-level nature of smalltalk? The setup for a joke she couldn’t possibly yet know the punchline for? Or perhaps he was a shoe magnate, a footwear nepo baby, the heir apparent to a luxury sneaker line, and — noticing her very practical loafers — wanted to gift her a pair.

She answered with an — in her view — hilarious: “Seven-and-a-half, flaccid” then added a winky-face for good measure, so he’d know she was kidding.

Ten minutes later, he responded. The “ha ha” reaction he gave to her message was an instant boost, a shot of espresso the the veins. The text that followed had the opposite result, the iPhone equivalent of a vat of ice water being splashed in her face.

It was a request for photos. Of her feet.

She promptly blocked his number.

But a few days later, after a night out with friends, she found herself walking home alone and feeling exceptionally lonely. As it had on nights like these since the breakup, her mind instantly wandered back to Sean: what he was doing, where he was, who he was with. Rather than pull up Instagram to frantically search through all of his most recent activity and tagged posts, she impulsively unblocked Brian’s number and shot him a text, claiming that she’d been having technological issues and that’s why it’d taken her so long to get back to him.

He was understanding and kind. Made a joke about the fact that it gave him time to finish the Frankl book, and no mention of the earlier foot message. Claire took this as a positive sign — perhaps she’d overreacted. She’d started the joking, after all, with her text. He was probably only kidding as well. They made plans to go to dinner the following night. She decided to pair her sundress with a pair of full-coverage Vans, just to play it safe.

It was a genuinely good time. They laughed. They drank Jungle Birds at a bar called Tiki No. They talked about his job (software engineering for a tech startup) and hers (financial analyst at an environmental law firm). They shared the random lines they each always quoted from movies (his: “Well, she turned me into a newt!” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail; hers: “Flam-flames, flames, on the side of my face…” from Clue.)

They ended the night with a sweet, brief kiss, and went their separate ways. Claire practically skipped home, the entire Feet Pics Debacle long forgotten. When she did remember, later that night, she barely cared. So, what? She thought. We all have our weird little things we’re into. There’s no shame in that. She was simply grateful she hadn’t had the chance to mention that whole situation to her friends — she was already imagining introducing them to him, and she didn’t want to have them mentally refer to him as Foot Pic Brian. He would be B-Train Brian, of the non-fiction books and the funny quotes and the tiki drinks.

The next morning, she was putting on mascara and getting ready to head to work when her phone pinged with a text from him.

B-Train Brian: Hey, last night was amazing—let’s do it again soon, please?

She smiled and did a little spin in the bathroom, cradling her phone like a precious gem. Her fingers were poised to start responding when the telltale ellipsis bubble alerted her that he was still typing.

When the message came through, it was an attachment, with a message above it.

The attachment was a $100 gift certificate for a pedicure at a nail salon on her side of town. The message read: “Use this before we meet again, and then maybe you won’t be so afraid to show off those cute little toes :D”

She slammed her phone down, her heart twisting a bit in my chest. The dull ache was back, or maybe it had never really left. Maybe she’d just forgotten to notice it. Hands leaning on the countertop, she stared at herself in the mirror.

In the grand scheme of things, she could recognize there were far more dangerous vices than feet. It was moreso Brain’s openness to revealing his hand so soon that was off-putting, especially to someone who was hellbent on keeping everything she viewed as less-than-desirable about herself stuffed deep within, never to see the light of day. Brian’s apparent lack of shame about his borderline-deviant interests was the perfect foil to Claire’s own inherent shame about…well, her entire being. It made her deeply uncomfortable, and vaguely sad in some distant kind of way.

She picked up the phone to begin typing.

Claire: Brian, thank you for the lovely time last night. However, I fear if we spend any more time together, I may turn you into a newt. Save this gift card for someone who will truly appreciate it. Wishing you well.

It was her fourth date this month, her sixteenth of the year. All with a different someone. Tonight’s someone was Dylan K. First round is on me, his profile read, if you can beat me at darts.

Time is the most valuable thing we have — and, tonight, she was spending it with Dylan K. from Hinge. Perhaps Dylan K. would be an absolute gem of a human, but she couldn’t help but already feel like she was wasting her time. As was becoming tradition in the hour before most dates, she wondered now if she should cancel. Fake a sickness. Work emergency. Skydiving accident.

She was expected, she knew, to somehow go into each of these dates with the same sense of bright-eyed optimism as the first. She knew that her cynicism and pessimism and other brands of negativity would likely contaminate her ability to enjoy this date — or maybe they’d have the opposite effect and cause her to settle for something less than desirable just because she was too keenly aware of just how much worse it could be. Both options seemed like something to be wary of, but she was too tired to be wary.

She’s gone through the cycle. Deleting the apps. Redownloading the apps. Wondering why you’d even bothered. Deleting the apps again. Getting invited to another wedding. Drinking too much wine. Getting encouraged by friends to put herself out there. Downloading the apps again.

She’s had the dates that made you say “Hmm, maybe this one could actually go somewhere,” only to be ghosted the next day.

As she dried her hair, Hannah wondered if she’d made a mistake leaving Randall, after all. If maybe she’d been delusional or naive to think there was something better out there. Maybe she’d been brainwashed by all of the romance films she’d watched in her formative years, programmed to think love should be consuming rather than comfortable.

She’d met Randall in a Laws of Mass Communication class. Her, on her way to becoming a journalist (or, more likely, a marketer with a journalism degree); him, on his way to becoming a defamation lawyer. They spent countless office hours poring over famous libel cases, like the one in which Keira Knightley sued the Daily Mail for implying she was responsible for the death of a 19-year-old girl with anorexia. The story was entitled If Pictures Like This One of Keira Carried a Health Warning, My Darling Daughter Might Have Lived, and featured a paparazzi photo of Keira on the beach in a bikini. (The case ended with Keira accepting a $6,500 settlement from the tabloid.)

Tabloid journalism was obviously a drain on the entire field — and, arguably, society as a whole — but these cases always fascinated Hannah. The line between bold claims and dangerous, sue-able ones was at times extremely clear and at others largely nebulous, and whether or not the plaintiff would win the case often seemed arbitrary. Or, more likely, based on how expensive their lawyer was.

Randall and Hannah didn’t hit it off instantly; rather, they slowly found themselves leaning closer and closer with every new shared data point between them. They didn’t become a couple so much as realize they were a couple.

That’s not to say that she didn’t fall in love with Randall; she did. It just wasn’t the stuff of movies or romance novels or twirling around in your room, giddy off of sidelong glances or stolen kisses. It was a collection of shared interests, seventy-to-seventy-five-percent compatibility, and lives that fit together nicely from a practical standpoint. It was liking the same coffee shop, and both preferring to work in silence rather than with music playing, and after-dinner walks to aid with digestion. It was sharing a pint of Van Leeuwen's pistachio ice cream in celebration anytime a story was published or an exam was passed, and sitting hand-in-hand watching The Wire until someone’s palm got too sweaty. They shared the belief that Bruce Springsteen, for all of his fame and sold-out arena shows, was still underrated as a serious artist. They both had names that looked better in cursive. Their parents got along. They looked good together.

It was practical, yes. But it was still love.

Hannah had liked what she and Randall had as it was. She could have existed in the liminal space of their relationship forever — watching The Wire and going on walks and eating ice cream. She didn’t want it to change. Randall, on the other hand, had aspirations for them, as a couple. He wanted to take their relationship to “the next level.” He wanted to commit, in front of God and the government and whoever else. And for some reason, Hannah couldn’t do it. The thought of signing a paper declaring she’d love him forever made her realize she wasn’t sure she would; if either of them were to change even a tiny bit, she worried the entire house of cards may collapse.

In a relationship, Hannah knew now, once one person wants things to change, it will happen, in one direction or another, whether the other party wants it to or not. There’s no escaping change once it’s entered the equation; there’s only prolonging the inevitable.

She still missed him, she could admit to herself in her loneliest hours. When she saw photos of him with his new girlfriend in her Instagram feed (one of the downsides of remaining friendly), she didn’t feel jealous, per se, but she did feel sad, in a way that could sometimes surprise her with its intensity.

It was strange to think that, in an instant, Randall went from being the person she knew the most about — the highest of his peaks and lowest of his valleys — to someone she only experiences through a highlight reel. Now, there was someone who knew him better than Hannah did, someone he shared all of the mundane details of his day with, who he cooks his chicken tikka masala for, who he lets see him cry at the end of Mystic River.

Does he braid her hair like he used to do mine, Hannah wondered, sometimes, before bed? Do they go for long walks after dinner and watch The Wire and eat pistachio ice cream together — or do they have their own things, new things Hannah can’t even imagine?

Sometimes, especially after a string of especially depressing dates like the ones of late, Hannah wondered if she should’ve just agreed to marry Randall. She wonders why she didn’t, why she couldn’t.

Applying her mascara, Hannah thought about endings. How the way things end becomes the totality of the thing itself, defining our assessment of the it way more than the beginning or any of the moments in between those two points in time.

She wondered if there was a way for her to retain all of the goodness, the fondness for her relationship with Randall, without regretting the way things ended or wondering whether they should have at all.

She wondered if there was a way to look back on those four years together and not feel like they were wasted, plopped into an objective category of sunk cost as soon as they went their separate ways.

She wondered if she’d ever be able to eat pistachio ice cream again and smile, thinking about how much things had changed but how everything was always changing, all the time, and that maybe that wasn’t a terrible thing. Maybe that was just the way things were, not good or bad or anything but true.

Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. She forced a smile. She forced herself to believe it. Then she turned away, grabbing her keys and her purse, slipping on her shoes and out the door.

Dylan K. — and her future, whatever it held — were waiting.

I finally watched Materialists, and I think I have more thoughts about the discourse surrounding the movie than the movie itself.

Was this movie as good as Past Lives? No. But I still had a lot of fun watching it. And it is still proof of the fact that, when Celine Song is firing on all cylinders (Celinders?) ((No.)), she is so damn good at showcasing the nuance inherent to loving and being loved — and how that experience will always be inextricable from regret, or our fear of it.

She understands how the desire to be known and the need to be secure can often feel diametrically opposed — and she uses her art to show what that tension looks like in practice, without needing to create contrived or ridiculous scenarios in order to do so. Her characters feel grounded in reality in a way I really appreciate — and that feels free from a lot of the traditional romance-in-media conventions I take issue with1.

Lucy (who I will probably sometimes accidentally refer to as Dakota Johnson), the main character in Materialists, is a professional matchmaker who we are told is very good at her job. She builds matrices and vetting systems to help her clients (all referred to in FirstName LastInitial format) find “the one.”

I’m not going to provide commentary on how this calculated approach to finding a partner spotlights the far-reaching impacts of swipe culture (is that a thing or did I just make it up), or on the sexual assault plotline, or on Pedro Pascal’s legs2.

But I do want to talk about love, and the way we talk about it, and this movie’s take on it.

Do actual cynics exist or are they the real unicorns?

Our protagonist, Lucy, would probably call herself a cynic. Or perhaps she’d opt for the term “realist.” Either way, she tells her clients she believes a great match is out there, and that they will marry the loves of their lives — but then we see her having negative, borderline-nihilistic conversations with coworkers and taking an extremely pragmatic take on love.

But LOL. Lucy’s cynicism is so thinly-veiled I find it hard to believe that she’s convincing anyone, let alone herself3.

She acts like she’s being hopeful on behalf of her clients, or for their sakes — but at her center, there is a hopeless romantic who has been forced to exist within the bounds of A Society, and is struggling to reconcile 1) her desire to have someone deeply know and love her with 2) her desire to be secure, and ultimately 3) her fear of being rejected for the worst parts of her.

At one point in the movie, Lucy is having a hard time due to a situation that has unfolded at work, and John (her broke ex, played by Chris Evans4) notices, asking her what’s wrong. She tells him she’s worried she’s not good at her job anymore, and he — attempting to comfort her — tells her she’s too hard on herself, that she’s not building bombs, it’s “just dating.” His attempt at comforting her instead pisses her off — and Lucy storms out after laying into John for minimizing her job and treating dating like it’s “girl shit.”

But the irony is that Lucy’s ~whole thing~ is doing exactly that. She views her own desire for something deeper than a simple series of checked boxes as impractical and trite. She resents John for calling dating unserious because it mirrors how she views her own longing: embarrassing, trivial, and maybe even inherently unsafe.

Lucy’s so-called “cynicism” is actually just a fear response to the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and an act of self-protection (and self-deception). Her way of coping with her confusion about her own seemingly conflicting desires (i.e. Does she want to be rich or does she want to be loved? Can those two things happen simultaneously? Is it selfish to want both?) is to strip love of its mystery and reduce it to a series of boxes to be checked. But she doesn’t really believe in that system, either, when it comes down to it.

Her narration at the wedding she and John crash reveals a lot. She doesn’t doubt the fact that the couple loves each other right now — she just can see, too clearly, how easily that love can dry up.

“One day for no reason in particular, you two will start to hate each other. You’ll resent each other. Take each other for granted. Stop having sex. Manage to make a couple of kids. Get sick of each other. One of you will cheat. You’ll fight. Not in front of the kids, but then in front of the kids. Then you file for divorce. And then you fight about who gets what. Until it's all over.”

Lucy doesn’t not believe in love. She just views it as a fleeting thing, something you can have in one moment but that can disappear just as quickly. “It just walks into our lives,” she tells Pedro Pascal (I forget his character’s name and tbh I prefer to just refer to him as Pedro Pascal anyway), which implies that it can just walk right out, too.

So instead, she makes it a non-starter: I’m not good enough for you. You hate me. I’m too selfish to be with you. The math doesn’t add up. Blah blah blah.

I’ll speak from my own experience and say it’s so much easier to pretend to be a cynic than it is to actually be one.

“Broke Boy Propaganda” and the false choice between intimacy and agency

Question: Who do we hate more, a rich man or a poor man?5

I’m kind of surprised that so much of the Materialists criticism I’ve seen has centered around the film being Broke Boy Propaganda (BBP) rather than around the ridiculous final-moments-of-the-film decision to have Lucy consider quitting her job to “marry someone poor.6”

Not to be that guy at a party who takes things overly seriously, but I take issue with this criticism and find it unnecessarily reductive. More than that, it’s an indicator of the fact that we still have specific rules for how we want women to use their agency.

In much of the modern world, marriage is no longer a necessity or a livelihood. It’s not something we’re forced into or something someone else chooses for us. So why are we still operating out of an outdated playbook that says if a woman chooses a partner based on emotional fulfillment rather than economic stability, she must be dumb, naive, delusional, or short-sighted?

Putting feminism aside for a moment (which is very on trend rn) — this mentality is also not very helpful, given how much the gendered professional landscape has shifted. Women are earning degrees at significantly higher rates than men. In cities like New York, college-educated women far outnumber college-educated men — 2 to 1 among singles over 30.

If we’re looking at the math (a la Lucy), there’s a clear trend forming. If women are looking for male partners who are their equals in education, income, and ambition, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so7.

So…does that mean women have to “settle”?

First we have to ask: What does “settling” even mean? I think our definition of this needs a bit more nuance, too.

True agency means having the freedom of choice. And with every door you open, you’re choosing to keep ten others closed, whether you’re conscious of that decision or not.

Maybe in an ideal world you wouldn’t have to choose — you’d be able to construct the perfect partner who was emotionally stimulating and financially impressive and whatever else you want/value. But life is full of tradeoffs; every adult decision is just a question of which ones you’re willing to live with.

The movie circles back, quite often, to the theme of relationships being a proxy for value:

• The woman who marries the man because he makes her sister jealous — which makes her feel valuable.

• Sophie asking Lucy if she thinks she’s worthless, because why else would she set her up with a horrible man.

• John asking Lucy if she thinks he’s worthless, because she keeps using him.

• Lucy commenting to Pedro Pascal that he’s investing a lot in her, and him telling her he wouldn’t do so if he didn’t see her value. “I don’t like you because you’re rich,” Lucy says. “Then why do you like me?” Pedro Pascal asks. “Because you make me feel valuable,” Lucy answers.

• Pedro Pascal commenting on his leg-lengthening surgery, says “you’re just worth more” when you’re taller, having seen for himself the results and the comparison of the attention and affection he received when he was short versus now.

The question becomes — what is value? Is it subjective? Is it defined by the individual, or by society as a whole? How flexible is value? How susceptible are we, as individuals, to confusing society’s values with our own?

One thing becomes clear: We still believe our worth is defined by who we can attract — and who chooses us (or doesn’t).

But we’re basing these value assessments on out-of-date data.

That’s why I find the idea that Lucy “settled” because she chose intimacy over security to be reductive.

I think you could choose either of these things with good reason, and I think Lucy’s decision to be with John instead of Pedro Pascal makes logical sense based on the data she has available to her.

It was, ironically, still the pragmatic choice — because once Lucy saw herself8 for who she truly was (a romantic) she realized she couldn’t be with someone she didn’t truly love. If she didn’t value romance as much as she seems to, she would’ve been able to stay with PP without it being “settling.” It’s only because she values what she has with John that she can’t “settle” for something different.

That value assessment will be different for each of us and based on our own respective levels of self awareness, our values, where we fall on the spectrum of pragmatism vs. romanticism, and our circumstances9.

Terms, conditions, and stockings

We’ve (I’ve) talked a lot about the subjectivity surrounding certain terminology — “value,” “settling,” “chemistry,” etc.

These things are difficult to define and usually look different for everyone, yet we treat them as if they’re objective — even without being able to actually articulate what they are. They’re the types of things that when you feel them, you just feel them. Which makes them hard to explain, articulate, and compare.

This same level of subjectivity comes into play when we talk about love in general10. You know when it’s there or when it isn’t in a way that feels more instinctual than logical. The same way you know if you like mangoes or don’t; you experience it and then know, without thinking, what is true.

I know I love my husband. But if you asked me to explain the reasons why I love my husband, or how I know I love him, it would end up sounding so surface-level or trite you’d likely walk away depressed and wondering if I even love him at all. “He’s funny. I think he’s hot. We have fun together. He challenges me.” All of these things are true, but they’re not the capital-A Answer for “why” I love him. Because I just do.

Nisbett and Wilson's 1977 study on introspective confabulation (which is very fun to say btw — few things roll off the tongue like introspective confabulation. Seriously, just say it right now, out loud) comes to mind. This experiment has become a cornerstone in social psychology — because it demonstrated how people often don’t know the true causes of their behavior, but will confidently provide explanations anyway.

In the experiment, participants were shown four pairs of nylon stockings and asked to choose which pair was the best quality. The catch? Each of the four pairs were exactly the same. Despite this fact, participants tended to prefer the pair on the rightmost side. The fact that they picked the stockings to the right wasn’t the surprising part — in fact, Nisbett and Wilson were expecting this, because of a known cognitive bias known as the “position effect,” which basically says that people often show a preference to items presented later in a sequence.

The most interesting part of this experiment was the fact that, when asked why they chose that particular pair, participants provided a litany of reasons — inclusive of texture, color, elasticity, and beyond — none of which could actually explain the preference, since the stockings were, again, ALL IDENTICAL.

What does this study have to do with love, and Materialists, or anything else? It shows that humans are often unaware of the true factors influencing their decisions — but when asked to explain, they will generate plausible (but inaccurate or incomplete) justifications.

When Lucy asks John how he could still love her in spite of her flaws, he doesn’t have a good answer — certainly not one that will satisfy her or make her believe she deserves it. He just does, “simple as that.” In spite of just as much as because of. And largely for reasons and factors completely outside of his control.

Laundry, taxes, and the meme-ification of marriage

This movie brought up bigger questions for me about our relationship with cynicism, our expectations for romantic partnership, and how the media we consume interacts with these two things.

For most of modern history, media representation of marriage has been steeped in a level of cynicism — or has treated it like a punchline. The best love stories end before a marriage begins11. Once two people who love each other get married, the “ball and chain” jokes begin, the characters flatten out into the sitcom tropes of the bumbling husband and the overbearing wife, and “real life” begins.

We don’t know how to talk about marriage. We’re told it’s “hard work” and also that it should feel easy. We’re told we shouldn’t want it and also that we can’t survive without it. We’re told that it will strip us of our agency and also that it will complete us. It's practical but it’s romantic. It’s a thing you do out of deep love for another person but it’s also the thing that will lead to you resenting them in the future.

It’s a business decision, “but love has to be on the table,” Lucy says to Pedro Pascal. But what does that even mean?

Materialists, in many ways, reminded me of Evelyn and Waymond’s arc in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

In the movie’s main timeline, Evelyn resents her husband Waymond’s lack of ambition and projects her disappointment with her own life onto him. She thinks that if she were richer, she’d be happier (and maybe that’s true!). But in an alternate timeline where they’re both rich but not together (and not totally fulfilled/happy), Cool Waymond says that, in another life, he would’ve loved just doing laundry and taxes with Evelyn.

Is that what settling is (or isn’t) about? Making peace with all the other ways your life could’ve turned out — and realizing that you probably wouldn’t be much happier in most of them? Maybe there are a few outlier timelines where you truly get everything you want with no tradeoffs, but most versions of your life fall within the standard deviation of satisfaction: different flavors of laundry and taxes, different shades of joy and disappointment. Is it just a matter of finding the beauty in what’s in front of you and trying to avoid bitterness, resentment, and other forms of emotional poison12?

In conclusion, Haddaway

We still, collectively, have not been able to decide what “love” really is — especially persistent, committed love — and therefore we will constantly be unsatisfied by the way it is portrayed in media. Either too trite or too dramatic, too cynical or too naive, too pragmatic or too romantic. Is love a binary? Is there an ON/OFF switch? Is it a feeling or a choice? Something we have control over or something we’re subjected to?

Until we know for sure, I’ll respect and appreciate any piece of art — imperfect and flawed as it may be — that bravely attempts to consider a new angle as we all persist in the Sisyphean task of answering Haddaway's 1993 question.

Another person who seems to be the muse for many a writer is Adam Driver. What is it about these two men, specifically, that has made them prime fanfic inspo? I could theorize, but these two seem like fundamental opposites to me, so any theory I could make about one would likely be rendered invalid by the argument I’d make for the other. This fascinates me, though, so if you have any theories, please send them my way.

Anyway, posting this bad boy because I just saw Materialists (finally). I’ll be sharing some more thoughts on the film in non-meet-cute form later this week. Until then, enjoy! (Ironically.) ((-ish.))

Even with the number of celebrities who LAX-based flight attendants encounter with surprising regularity, there are still those who have zero chill.

We’re trained to treat every passenger the same, to be professional at all times. But I’ve seen grown men and women lose complete control of their ability to function — even risk their jobs — just because someone who once had a few lines in a movie is aboard the aircraft.

When I was younger, I assumed all celebrities had private jets and never flew commercial. Now, though, I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen at LAX — everyone from TikTok influencers to actual A-listers.

I’ve since learned: private jets are expensive. Not to mention the carbon emissions, which, in the year of our Lord 2025, can burn a hole in the ozone and your reputation in one fell swoop.

Our airline is generally considered one of the more luxury options. We were one of the first to equip First Class with sleeper pods, which instantly boosted our star appeal.

So when I heard that Chris Evans — Captain America (and the OG Human Torch, lest we forget) — would be on a flight I was working, I was extremely chill about it. These things happen.

What doesn’t normally happen, though, is me getting caught off guard by how damn charming a celebrity is. I was entirely unprepared for how normal Chris Evans would be.

“Hi there,” he said as he boarded, flashing a genuine smile that went all the way up to his eyes — eyes that were the clearest, most vivid blue, even in the shadow of a ratty Red Sox cap.

“Hi, yourself,” I smiled back, raising my eyebrows just slightly. My way of letting him know I was in on the joke so to speak — that I knew who he was, of course, but I was going to be cool about it.

At this point, I’ve gotten pretty good at schmoozing with strangers — which is a nice way of saying I’ve become a total flirt. The truth is, to be a good flight attendant, you kind of have to be one. It took me a while to learn that, but I’m a professional now, in every sense.

And thank God, because in the presence of Chris Evans, I genuinely felt like my brain was melting.

He gave me a quick wink, then pulled his cap lower and walked to his seat — 2D — where he slung his beat-up duffle bag (the kind that screams “Celebrities, they’re just like us!”) into the overhead bin.

He gave me a slight wink, then pulled the cap of his hat down a little further and walked to his seat (2D), where he slung the beat-up duffle bag he’d been carrying (one that screamed Celebrities, they’re just like us!) up into the overhead compartment.

In between helping other guests get settled, I snuck a few glances over to his area, watching him as he explored his pod — the pull-out table, the adjustable sleep-shade, the personal snack basket, and so on. There was something strangely earnest about him, a kind of purity.

“Ahem,” Hinata, my counterpart in First Class, nudged me back to reality. “Do my eyes deceive me, or is Little Miss ‘Acting is Just a Job Like Any Other’ starstruck?”

“She is not.” I pushed my hair back and straightened my skirt. “She’s just making sure our guests are adjusting to their sleeper pods.”

“Ah, how noble of you.”

“Someone’s gotta do the hard work around here,” I grinned as Hinata shook his head and grabbed the PA handset for the pre-takeoff spiel.

As I stood in the aisle demonstrating how to put on an oxygen mask, I made eye contact with Chris Evans.

He was watching closely, like he’d never seen a safety demo before and was determined to hear every last word.

It was so... cute? In a way that was entirely disarming. Watching his eyes follow the motion of my hand as I pulled the strap on the inflatable life vest made me swoon. It was the way he actually listened, the way he leaned in instead of tuning out. Like he genuinely respected what I was doing. It told me everything that I needed to know about him, and confirmed all of the rumors: he was indeed kind, humble, and sweet. The trappings of fame had not yet gone to his beautiful, baseball-cap-wearing head.

Moments later, as we taxied toward the runway, Chris Evans pressed the flight attendant call button.

“You want to take that?” Hinata asked, glancing up to see it was 2D.

“I don’t care,” I said, already standing. “But if you’re too lazy to do it, I guess I’ll have to.” He snorted, and I smirked back at him as I made my way to Chris Evans’ pod.

“What can I help you with, sir?” I asked in my Customer Service Voice, leaning down to meet his eyes.

Chris Evans did not look good. Relatively speaking, that is. He was still Chris Evans, but his face had gone pale, covered in a light sheen of sweat. His eyes were dark, his pupils swallowing up the blue, his knee bouncing so fast it blurred.

He fidgeted with the snacks in his snack basket. “Yeah, uh, I was wondering if you—” he cleared his throat. “Do you guys have any ginger ale?” His accent seemed suddenly stronger, as if his nerves had somehow commandeered his vocal chords and were hellbent on removing the letter “r” from the end of any and all words.

“Of course.” I turned on my heel. “One sec.”

“Everything good?” Hinata asked as I knelt to open the fridge.

“Yeah,” I said, holding up the can. He nodded, and I headed back to 2D.

”Here you go,” I said, handing him the soda. His hand shook violently as he reached out to take it.

“I don’t mean to overstep,” I said, lowering my voice, ducking a little closer. “But are you okay? Normally we don’t do this until after takeoff, but I could get you something stronger” — I winked — “if that would help?”

His eyes shot up, brows furrowed. “What? No.” He hesitated for a moment but then decisively patted the space beside him.

I tilted my head, confused.

“Would you mind — or uh, are you allowed — to sit with me during takeoff?”

If you’d told me three hours earlier that Chris American Marvel Evans would soon ask me to sit next to him in his sleeper pod, I would’ve rolled my eyes and moved on with my life. But here he was, meekly asking if I would sit next to him. I wondered if this meant he was, somehow, feeling what I was feeling: The spark. The instant connection. The question of Could this actually be something? bouncing off the walls of your chest like a game of Pong.

I looked back at Hinata, who was watching with his own confused expression, silently sending a million questions down the aisle. I responded with my best approximation of an I’ll explain later face, then sat my happy ass down next to Chris Evans. Hinata’s jaw dropped.

“Whatever you need,” I said, my Customer Service Voice officially lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

My mind was spinning with the possibilities of what could come next. What if Chris Evans asked me to get a drink when we land? What if we ended up staying up all night, Before Sunrise-style, having a whirlwind adventure in Tokyo? Now that I was thinking about it, didn’t Chris Evans star in a Before Sunrise knockoff, at one point? I made a mental note to Google it later.

Another thought came to me: What if Chris Evans was completely overwhelmed by his feelings for me and simply couldn’t wait until we landed? What if he asked me to join the Mile High Club with him? I could lose my job, but it could be worth it. It could be the origin story we tell our grandkids one day. And surely Chris Evans’ big-time Hollywood salary would surely be enough to sustain us both as I look for new opportunities.

As a flight attendant, I’m no stranger to the public allure of the Mile High Club. It’s one of the aspects of my job I get asked about most frequently.

On a nearly daily basis, I can anticipate at least one joke (generally from a snickering twenty-something dude), comment, or question about the club. More specifically:

• Best practices for joining

• If I have caught anyone in the act of joining

• If I have joined

Some notes for those who are thinking of attempting some mid-flight shenanigans of the sexual variety:

Going into the bathroom is rarely your best bet. It’s certainly not a fun, sexy time, anyway. The smells, the stickiness, and the space itself all leave something to be desired. Not to mention the risk factor: You could be spotted by a savvy flight attendant (raises hand slowly) or another passenger who has to, y’know, actually relieve themselves.

It’s no surprise that most chicken out when it comes down to it.

Sex on a plane is like losing your virginity — it’s more to say you’ve done it than it is for true pleasure. On the risk vs. reward scale, I personally tend to think things are a little off balance.

That being said, there are exceptions to any rule. And Chris Evans is exactly the type of person these exceptions exist for.

The plane began accelerating, preparing for takeoff — and as we gained speed, Chris Evans grabbed my hand, squeezing it so tightly that his knuckles turned a bright white. Drawing my gaze up to his face, I saw that his eyes were squeezed shut, his mouth a thin line, his lips gone pale from being squeezed so tightly together.

That’s when it all started making sense.

Chris Evans wasn’t into me. Of course he wasn’t.

No, Chris Evans, world-famous actor — who Hollywood had turned into not just one but two separate superheroes — was afraid of flying.

And it was at that very moment, as I realized the truth of what was happening, that the plane lifted off the ground and Chris Evans vomited directly into my lap.

Chris Evans, when he was finally able to speak, was extremely apologetic. Ever the sweetheart.

“I try to avoid flying as much as possible,” he explained, pressing the warm towel I handed him to his forehead. “But I’m shooting this new movie in Kyoto and there aren’t exactly a ton of non-plane options for getting there.”

I’d done my very best to wash my uniform in the tiny bathroom sink. Now, I was in a soaking wet dress, freezing my ass off, smelling vaguely like vomit and ginger ale. It was going to be a fun 10 hours.

“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “It happens.” As if Chris Evans emptying the contents of his stomach into my lap was just par for the course, a standard occurrence. Typical Tuesday stuff.

But the flurry of activity I’d been feeling in my chest only a few minutes earlier had already completely cleared out.

Chris Evans was a sweet guy, but he just didn’t do it for me anymore.

More than the final ring of the school bell, the annual mecca to Barnes & Noble was the true signifier that summer had begun. Choosing just three books out of the hundreds available became an exercise in not just autonomy but willpower — I had to find some way to make these selections stretch for weeks, rather than consume them all within the day.

More often than not, I would fail this test of willpower — I would finish these books within the first three days of summer break, unable to sleep until I found out what happened next. But then, with that initial read behind me and not much else to do, I had the rest of the summer to pore over every line, every sentence, every word. I was able to appreciate the finer details I’d missed on that initial, frantic read-through. That first read was pure fun — but it was in these second and third and fourth reads that I really fell in love with the art of storytelling.

So this one goes out to Meg Cabot and Sarah Dessen and E. Lockhart and Christopher Pike and Sarah Mlynowski and many more — your words left me tired and energized all at once.

Fiona had her first kiss when she was 15, in the men’s bathroom of a random hotel in Tucson. It was one of those big bathrooms that has multiple stalls in it, not the truly private kind. No, there was an audience of urinals looking on when their lips met.

She was at a conference with her parents. She doesn’t even remember what the conference was for — saving money or making money or some other thing adults care about. All she remember is that, while the grown ups were in some ballroom, listening to a tiny man on a big stage drone on about business or something, all of the kids had formed some kind of conference of their own: a little society with a three-day lifecycle, but a society all the same.

She was ridiculously uncomfortable in her body, which was, at that point, in a near-constant state of flux. She didn’t have boobs yet, but she also didn’t have acne yet. Rest assured: both would come in due time.

At this conference, though, Fiona set out to be… Different. Mysterious. As mysterious as a boob-less 15-year-old girl can be, in any case.

As she’d been packing for the trip, she was struck by the realization that no one at this conference would know her. They wouldn’t know her past, or what she was like back home. They didn’t even know where home was, for that matter.

No one here knew that the cool Abercrombie shirt she’d packed in her bag was the sole one in her possession, among piles of Old Navy (her mom: “Old Navy is practical! Plus, I feel like I’m going to cough up a lung every time I step into Amber-crombie and What’s-His-Face. And why is it always so dark in there? What do they have to hide?”). To them, there could’ve been hundreds more folded away in her closet somewhere, each with a matching pair of jeans, to boot.

They didn’t know that she was the “good girl” who wasn’t a pariah but who also wasn’t anywhere close to the top of the food chain. They didn’t know that in 7th grade, when a group of boys made a list of Hot or Nots that then circulated around the school, Fiona’s name hadn’t appeared in either column. Some may have seen that as a gift, but to her, it felt like she wasn’t even worth considering — like she didn’t exist.

But at this conference, things could be — they would be — different.

In this new society, Fiona could be whoever she wanted to be. She didn’t have to play the same comfortable roles she played at home. She didn’t have to be stuffed into the same box, suffering away claustrophobically inside.

Looking back now, Fiona can identify that conference as her first brush with getting high — high off the feeling of being someone else.

People don’t become addicted to things for no reason. If alcohol had no effect on us — if it didn’t do what it’s “supposed to,” at least for a little while, there wouldn’t be alcoholics.

All of that to say: That conference — her first stint as someone else, her first attempt at reinventing herself, her first unpaid acting gig — whatever you want to call it…

It wouldn’t have had a lasting impact on her if it hadn’t worked.

Cooper Bryant was the It Boy of the conference.

At 16-and-a-half, he was the oldest of the bunch of kids, and he only graced them with his presence occasionally. No one knew where he spent the rest of his time.

Most likely, he was up in his hotel room playing video games or something. But in Fiona’s mind, he was propped up against the back of the building, a lit cigarette hanging loosely from one hand and a beat-up, well-loved copy of On the Road in the other.

Cooper’s younger brother Morris and Fiona had become friends — bonding over their shared belief that the 100 Grand Bar was the superior (and most wildly underrated) candy bar. They were splitting one from the hotel vending machine on their second afternoon at the conference when he broke some very important news.

“My brother asked about you,” he told her, wiping his chocolatey mouth with his hand.

Fiona inhaled the chewy bite she’d been taking and instantly began choking on what can only be described as the candy equivalent of a mozzarella stick. “He what?” she coughed.

“He asked about you,” Morris repeated, shuffling his feet against the hotel carpet and avoiding eye contact. “He wanted to know if you’re going to the dance thing or whatever tonight.”

There was a big dinner happening as part of the conference — one that attendees were encouraged to bring their entire families to. Apparently, there was supposed to be a huge dance party after. They’d heard rumors that, in previous years, the party had turned into a night of middle-aged debauchery, and the kids were all looking forward to seeing their parents get smashed — mostly because it meant they’d be able to get away with their own teenage brand of debauchery while the adults were all under the influence.

Cooper Bryant had literally never spoken to Fiona. They had made one brief moment of eye contact as she had been (rather firmly, she’ll admit) explaining the rules of Fishbowl to the rest of the crew, and he’d been headed out on one of his mysterious adventures. He’d smiled slightly when their eyes met, but he kept walking, leaving a trail of Axe body spray in his wake.

“Um,” Fiona replied to Morris, opting to play it cool until she had more information. “I haven’t decided yet. Could be super lame. I think I’ll just see how I feel later and, y’know, go with the flow.”

“Yeah,” Morris said, finally looking back up at her. “Totally.”

The rest of the day passed in a rush. Cooper made an appearance as they all ate lunch — snagging the leftovers of the conference buffet and setting up court in a grassy area under a tree on the resort property.

This is a new me, Fiona reminded herself. A confident Fiona. A Fiona who isn’t a goody-two-shoes, or a “sweet girl,” or anything else she could be described as back home.

So she flipped her hair over her shoulder and addressed the group:

“Who wants to do something crazy?” she asked, standing up and wiping the grass from the back of her jeans.

Looks were exchanged across the crowd.

“What kind of crazy?” a girl named Taylor with an unfortunately bulky set of mouthgear asked.

“Sneak-onto-the-roof crazy,” Fiona responded, with what she hoped was a mischievous grin. She couldn’t be sure, as she’d never really attempted to make such an expression before — it wasn’t really on brand for At-Home Fiona.

A few people ooohed. A few people shook their heads immediately — Morris was one of them.

“If you’re with me, meet me back here at exactly 8:32PM,” Fiona continued, sounding confident even to her own ears. “Our parents should be feeling pretty toasty by then, and I’m sure most of the staff will be working the event, so it’s our perfect chance.”

She scanned the group one final time, and her eyes locked with Cooper’s for a moment. He looked impressed. Mission accomplished.

With that, Fiona turned on her heel and did her best approximation of a saunter as she headed back toward the hotel.

By 8:28, she was back under the tree.

Her parents were inside the ballroom, each two glasses of Chardonnay deep. Last she’d seen them, they’d been dancing (with much gusto) to the Electric Slide — which was equal parts disturbing and adorable.

It was getting dark, but the final remnants of the day’s harsh sun were still streaking through the twilight — and that, combined with the cool fluorescent lighting coming from the hotel, made everything look like it was blanketed in a hazy glow. It made Fiona feel like she was in an old movie — which was fitting, because this was her Sandy showing up to the carnival in an all leather ensemble moment.

She pulled the sweater she’d been wearing up over her head and shoved it into one of the branches of the tree. Underneath it, she wore a black tank top with a contraband (i.e.: purchased without the knowledge of her mother) push-up bra that was doing quite literally everything in its power to create cleavage out of nothing. Paired with a pair of black jeans with a hole in one knee and her high-top black Converse, she was doing her very best to emulate “sexy spy” vibes. The untrained eye would simply see a bony teenager wearing black, but that wasn’t the point: Back home, she wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing this get-up. She would’ve been way too insecure to even try.

By 8:30, Fiona could spot a group of six of the others heading toward her. She searched for Cooper’s taller frame, but she couldn’t spot him. Her heart sank a bit, and as a slight breeze rustled the branches of the tree and sent goosebumps prickling up her arms, she was tempted to pull her discarded sweater back on and pull out of the mission entirely.

But she still had something to prove — whether it was to the few who had actually shown up, or to all the people who wrote her off back home, or simply to herself, she wasn’t sure. Either way, she knew that she had to go through with this.

“Okay,” she said emphatically, smacking her hands together as the group closed in. “Let’s do this.”

The climb — if you could even call it that — up to the roof was entirely anticlimactic.

There were no security guards waiting to catch them in the act.

There was a ladder that made access extremely easy.

There was even a pair of old lawn chairs up there, implying that this was some kind of popular hangout spot.

So, Fiona’s attempt #1 at personal badassery: relatively unsuccessful. But they did still get a pretty sweet view of the entire resort property.

After a few moments, the rest of the group started heading down, but Fiona decided to hang back for a second. They still had another day here, but she was already mourning the loss of this New Fiona — even if she hadn’t really done all that much. She was dreading going home, where she would inevitably continue to be typecast as the barely-existent Girl Next Door in someone else’s movie.

Moment of self-deprecating reflection behind her, she began her (very short) descent. When she made it to the bottom of the ladder, she hopped down and immediately set off toward the ballroom to rejoin the rest of the group. But then she remembered her sweater, dangling from an oak tree’s branches. She turned on her heel to retrieve it.

But as she did, she ran smack-dab into someone.

Not just someone: Cooper.

“Hey,” he said, grabbing her by both arms to steady her as she bounced back from the impact.

“Um, hi,” Fiona replied, breathlessly.

“You’re crazy.” He smiled at her, shaking his head.

She could’ve exploded with joy. No one had ever called her crazy before. It was, without a doubt, the greatest compliment she’d ever received.

“No, I’m Fiona,” she responded — instantly regretting it and wanting to crawl back up onto the roof and plop down in one of those folding chairs, with only the birds to talk to, for the rest of her life.

“Woooowwwww,” he said, drawing out the word so that it sounded like each letter was its own syllable.

She smacked herself in the head, a warm blush spreading up her ears and down to her neck. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Me either,” he grinned. “It was super lame.”

She covered her face with her hand, shaking her head in shame.

“Plus,” he continued. “I already knew your name, crazy.”

“You did?” Fiona slowly removed her hand from her face.

“Yup,” he said, and her head started spinning. One of his hands was still gripping her arm. She looked down at it, at the place where their skin met, and then back up at him.

This is my moment, she realized. Her chance to really prove that she could be different.

“Do you, um,” she stuttered, frantically pushing her bangs away from her face with her free hand. “Want to go somewhere? To um, talk?”

A slow, lazy smile spread across his face. “Okay,” he said. And for some reason, the fact that he was only giving her one word responses didn’t bother Fiona in the slightest.

He pulled her arm, leading her back into the hotel.

Three minutes later, they were in the men’s bathroom furthest from the ballroom, his tongue poking around her open mouth and his hands poking around her push-up bra, searching for nonexistent gold.

And thirty seconds after that, it was over.

“That was amazing,” Cooper said, pulling away from her.

“Totally,” Fiona lied, adjusting her shirt and smoothing her hair.

And with that, they went their separate ways. She never saw him again.

Laying in her bed that night, wide awake as her parents snored in the bed beside her, Fiona couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off her face.

It wasn’t the kiss. The kiss, in and of itself, was by no means earth-shattering. In fact, it was barely even pleasant.

But it had happened.

And that fact alone was enough to change her life — to change her — forever.

All of the cool kids had braces. Was this causation or correlation? To my preteen prefrontal cortex, it was, unquestionably, the former. My lack of braces was what made me uncool — not my obscenely hairy arms or my obsessive-compulsive tendencies and deep-seated belief that I had somehow caused 9/11, or the resulting inner shame that permeated its way into every single thing I did, said, or touched.

But even in my state of deep physical and emotional immaturity, upon that first watch of the Rob Reiner/Nora Ephron classic, I was struck by something that felt — and still feels — profoundly true:

There is nothing — not one thing! — more intimate than watching a movie together-but-separate.

To that 12-year-old braces-less twerp, the iconic scene in which our two leads — separated by distance — watch Casablanca was the most romantic thing conceivable. It became a romance mecca, the ultimate item on a love bucket list. Sex was completely uninteresting to me; pedestrian, boring. Watching a movie together-but-separate? Almost scandalous in its intimacy.

Much has been said about the influence of When Harry Met Sally — on modern romance, on the romcom genre, on the far-reaching (arguably negative) cultural impacts of Harry’s Low-Maintenance/High-Maintenance spectrum, and so on. If you haven’t seen WHMS, you’ve likely seen ten (lesser) films that were inspired by it.

Even still, a large part of WHMS’s magic stems from its re-watchability and its staying power. It’s a movie that feels like its growing up with/alongside you. Upon every (near-annual) rewatch, I find myself relating to a different character: I’m a Harry. No, I’m a Sally, and I was just too afraid to admit it to myself. No, I really am a Harry, and I was too afraid to admit that to myself. Actually, you know what, maybe I’m Carrie Fisher.

Side note: This is part of what makes Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy such a triumph, too — it is ever-evolving in its relatability. We’re all a little bit of Celine and a little bit of Jesse, and their dialogue throughout different phases of their lives provides a great jumping off point for self-reflection. Another point of overlap here, while we’re on the subject: Before Sunrise also contains a more-intimate-than-sex moment, when Jesse and Celine stand, side by side, listening to Come Away by Kath Bloom in the record store’s music booth, trading glances.

Before my husband and I were together, I was a first-act Harry in that I had very practical (borderline cynical) views on “love,” and I was a first-act Sally in that I believed men and women could certainly be friends without sex/romance/expectations getting in the way. This blend of honest skepticism and deep idealism did not coexist kindly. Inside of you there are two wolves, yaddah yaddah yaddah.

For a combination of reasons, I didn’t feel like it was “right” for my husband and I to be together. We had a complicated history. I was afraid of what people would think. I was afraid of what I would think. But most of all, I was afraid I’d eat his brains. (In reality and in retrospect, I was likely not evil, just a 23-year-old who’d made some mistakes and had at-the-time-undiagnosed OCD.)

That being said: I spent a great deal of time attempting to deny having any feelings for him, even while we were texting deep into the night about nothing and basically incapable of having a single thought or observation without expressing it to the other.

But when he suggested we watch the movie Garden State together-but-separate, I was aghast.

To him, it felt arbitrary — Um, we’re talking constantly, but we can’t watch a movie at the same time? That math doesn’t check out.

He didn’t know about the quiet — yet undeniable — intimacy of the act that is watching together-but-separate. And to be fair, I was just putting the pieces together, myself.

My reaction to the seemingly-innocent suggestion was proof, to me, of the fact that I was just as naive as Harry found Sally to be in act one. Men and women couldn’t be friends after all; at least not these two. (Clearly, I still had much to learn about nuance, but that’s a conversation for another day.) At the time, being naive felt like the worst thing to be, so I spent the better part of the next year shutting him out and listening to the Garden State soundtrack in a state of shameful melancholy, staring out car windows with a single photogenic tear streaming down my cheek.

But back to our central thesis (there is no central thesis, this is an article on Substack from one of a thousand-and-one people who has a Journalism degree collecting dust in their closet):

Watching something together-but-separate is more intimate than sex. But why?

I’m asking more than telling. I have theories, of course, but I don’t know the real answer here. I’m in pursuit of the answer just as much now as I was when I was that 12-year-old with no braces, watching a misanthrope-who-calls-himself-a-realist and an HM-who-thinks-she’s–an-LM reach out across the split-screen void.

Why did this strike me so much? How could something so simple and ordinary feel so special?

Is it the closeness of shared silence? Maybe, but that doesn’t feel all-encompassing enough.

Is it the intentionality? Perhaps, but plenty of things require intention and attention — yet don’t feel as intimate.

Is it the shared understanding that you’re thinking of each other the whole time? The fact that you’re watching the movie, in part, through the lens of the other? The knowledge that, no matter what happens next, you won’t be able to see the DVD in a vintage shop or a clip circulating around Instagram without thinking of each other — and, thus, in some sense, you’re gaining some perceived permanence through the act, some level of outside-of-and-beyond-me-ness that makes you feel meaningful in some grand, cosmic way?

Quantum entanglement proves that our universe is inherently romantic.

It’s a phenomenon in which particles become so intrinsically connected that their properties become intertwined, no matter the distance separating them. If you change the state of one particle, the other reacts instantaneously, no matter how far apart. We don’t really know how this happens — or why it does, for that matter.

We just know that it does happen.

We also know that most things within the universe make some sort of logical sense once we really understand them — which means there’s likely some sense, some logic behind quantum entanglement, we just don’t understand it yet.

Einstein famously dubbed quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.” (I am absolutely obsessed with this phrase.)

Maybe this is why watching something together-but-separate is so tragically, poetically romantic. Because it’s spooky action at a distance. Because it speaks to some deep, universal, particle-level capital T-Truth. Because it says: “My parts will always find your parts. Something in me will always seek something in you, no matter the physical or existential distance.”

Or maybe it’s something else, idk tbh.

Anyway.

Things more intimate than sex:

• Watching a movie together-but-separate

• Texting under the same table

• Listening to music together in confined spaces/sharing headphones

• Simultaneous crying

• Sharing an ice cream cone (I would never do this, with anyone, ever, even if I loved them very very much)

What would you add?

Her palms are slick against the vinyl-encased shoulder straps that secure her to the seat. She wipes the sweat onto the pant leg of her flight suit, then wonders if she’ll be able to keep this thing when she’s done, as a souvenir. The jumpsuit has her initials embroidered across the left chest — A. MUNNS, very official — so it’s not like it will be used again. But she won’t be surprised if they force her to return it immediately after landing; billionaires, after all, are famously cheap.

Her neighbor casts her a sidelong glance, his eyes friendly. “First suborbital civilian spaceflight?”

She’s about to respond when the roar of the engines increases, the vibrations now pressing the back of her head deeper into her seat. There’s a lifting feeling in her stomach, that moment when the rollercoaster finally blasts forward and upward, momentum building, potential energy becoming kinetic.

But this isn’t a rollercoaster. There’s no track. She’s literally blasting into space.

Holy shit, she thinks. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

Based on her experience in the simulators, she guesses they’re at about 3Gs. Tom Cruise reached over 9Gs in his training for Top Gun, she reminds herself. Then over 10Gs in his training for Mission Impossible. This is nothing.

The simulator didn’t account for the sounds, though. It’s not the sheer volume that bothers her — though it is very, very loud — but rather the creaking and straining and groaning sounds coming from the ship itself, which do not inspire confidence.

Out the window, she can see the launchpad dropping away, the horizon stretching out below her, the Earth’s subtle curve visible.

As is typical of her when nervous, Anna begins babbling. But in order to be heard over the rumbling around her, she has to shout-babble, which she’s not sure has ever been done before. Add it to the lists of records being broken today.

“You may not believe this,” she shout-babbles, maybe to the man next to her, maybe to no one at all, “but I actually have a lot of serious ethical concerns about space travel in general. Like, we have enough problems down here that we should probably solve before searching for a new planet to, inevitably, fuck up.”

The man next to her coughs, and she’s not sure if it’s because of how hard it is to breathe right now or if he’s attempting to politely shut down the conversation. Which would be kind of rude, honestly, since this entire flight is only eleven minutes long.

You can’t make small-talk with a stranger with whom you’re sharing a once-in-a-lifetime, potentially life-ending experience for eleven minutes? Seriously?

A moment later, though, he coughs again, then clears his throat. “I guess the argument is that maybe we’d do better on the new one?”

“When has a second chance ever actually worked out?” she scoffs, not that he can see her, as they’re both being pressed against their respective seats by the ever-increasing G-force. Probably now about 5Gs, specifically.

“I mean, my college girlfriend dumped me for her ex, and they’ve been together ever since. They have a kid now, and another on the way. Been married for six years. I think he’s, like, a tomato farmer or something? Or maybe they just grow tomatoes at their house? Actually, maybe they just, like, went to a farmer’s market once and took photos of the tomatoes? I don’t know, but it seems like they’re happy either way.”

Outside, the sky around them darkens from blue to purple to black, the soft blurring of one color to the next making everything look fuzzy.

Ground control’s calm, robotic voice comes through the loudspeaker: “Preparing for engine cutoff.”

“That’s great for your ex,” Anna says, still shouting. “But — no offense — I don’t think that makes a great case for humanity’s collective ability to not fuck up a new planet.” She tries lifting her hand, but it immediately slaps back against her chest. No hand-talking in 5Gs, apparently. “Plus, they could still get divorced. Six years and a couple of maybe-homegrown tomatoes do not a happy ending make.”

The voice over the loud-speaker returns. “Engine cut-off in five. Four. Three. Two.”

Suddenly, it’s completely, eerily silent. No engine roaring. No creaking. Just the quiet of being surrounded by absolute nothingness. Outside the window, there’s nothing but darkness. She can’t explain — nor fight — the instantaneous feeling of depression that accompanies this silence, this view. It’s profound in both its intensity and its suddenness.

Her neighbor breaks the silence, finally able to speak at a normal volume. “Yeah, but they got two kids out of it. Two kids who wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for that second chance. So even if they get divorced and have to, like, split custody — and all of the tomato profits — it would probably still be net-positive?”

“Unless one of those kids goes on to become a murderer or something.”

“Why stop at one? Maybe both kids go on to become murderers. In that case, I would withdraw my argument and become a passionate believer in the theory that second chances are actually just a prolongation of the inevitable.”

Anna shifts in her seat a bit, straining to take a look at him. Movement is much easier now that they’re not accelerating. “I don’t love the idea of rooting for two kids I’ve never met to become murderers — but I also really hate losing. This is quite the moral dilemma.”

He grins at her. “Moral dilemmas: the soup of the day, eh?”

Another voice comes through the loud-speaker. “You may now unbuckle. Please do so with great care, as weightlessness has begun.”

Anna unbuckles slowly, each strap one at a time. Instantly, she feels herself lifting out of the seat. She holds onto the straps, still suspended there, hovering, her back floating an inch or so off the seat.

“You may roam about the cabin as you please,” Ground Control says.

She lets go, and her neighbor does the same, as do the other six passengers onboard.

They all float toward the outer edges of the capsule, pressing their hands against the large panel window that peers out into the blackness.

“I’m only here because my boss made me,” she whispers to her neighbor as she pulls her phone from one of her flight-suit’s many velcro-sealed pockets. “I’m supposed to take pictures for her social media.”

“What do you do for work?” he asks, pushing off the wall and doing a somersault.

“I’m Kim Shike’s assistant?” At the look of total non-recognition on his face, she continues. “She’s, like, a science protege. At sixteen, she invented the flame-retardant material they use to line the zippers on astronauts’ space suits. She’s only twenty-one now.” She sighs. “So, yeah. I’m a thirty-year-old with a master’s degree who is the assistant to a 21-year-old multi-millionaire who didn’t go to college. My parents are very proud, thanks for asking.”

He’s quiet for a moment, doing his little flips and spins. She copies him, because it looks like fun.

“Isn’t it impossible for fire to exist in the vacuum of space?” he finally asks.

“What?”

“Why would astronauts need flame-retardant fabric around their zippers? I don’t think there can be fire in space.” He stops flipping and just floats in front of her.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess there were, like, fires breaking out during their training sessions or something? I actually have no idea. I should probably know that. Anyway, she’s scared of heights, so that’s why I’m here in her stead. Not sure if that’s ironic or not, but based on Alanis Morisette’s definition, probably.”

He swims through the air to come beside her, then swipes at her hair, which is flying out in all directions. It moves with his touch, like seaweed floating on water.

“According to Alanis Morisette’s Rules of Irony,” he says, “we’re probably going to die on this mission, since you didn’t want to be here in the first place.”

She stops mid-flip. “That’s a crazy thing to say right now, but okay.”

“Because she says the whole thing about the dad who was afraid to fly? He waited his whole damn life to take that flight, and then it goes down?” he explains.

“Yeah, no, I got the reference,” she laughs, resuming her motion. “It's just a weird thing to say as we’re literally floating around in space right now.”

“Fair,” he agrees.

Another passenger gasps, and they turn their attention back toward the large window. The capsule has rotated, and they now have a clear view of their planet beneath them. It looks so much closer than she expected it to. Bigger, its colors more bold and saturated than any of the many photos of Earth she’d seen online. The thin, bright-blue line of the atmosphere looks like a colored–pencil outline surrounding the entire thing.

“If it helps,” her neighbor says, floating beside her as they take in the view, “I’m not really supposed to be here either. My dad won this contest but then he had a heart attack so he sent me instead.” He pauses, pressing his finger against the glass and leaving a tiny fingerprint. “Apparently cardiologists don’t advise space-travel within six weeks of open heart surgery.”

“Great, so we’re double-screwed. We’re going to ironically-not-ironically die twice.”

He laughs. “Probably.”

She hands him her phone, silently asking him to take her photo. He snaps a few of her in various flips and positions, the curvature of the Earth framed perfectly in the window behind her, then tosses the phone back to her. It floats slowly through the air between them before coming to rest in her hand.

“I’m sorry about your dad. Is he okay?”

They swap positions, him pushing his phone toward her. She grabs it and starts taking his photos.

“He’ll be okay,” he sighs. “Just has to lay off the butter, which is basically a death sentence for a Sconnie.”

“Sconnie?” She lowers the phone. “Is that his name?”

“No,” he says, pushing off the window and coming to meet her. “It’s a term used for someone who hails from Wisconsin: Home of the Butter Burger, and also my dad, who is actually named Ronald.”

“Ronnie the Sconnie.”

“You’re the first person to ever call him that.”

“Really?”

“No.”

She takes a few videos, panning the entirety of the small capsule they’re all floating in.

“Are you guys close?” she asks. She’s not worried about this conversation being caught on camera because she’s going to edit it to have Bowie’s Space Oddity play over it, anyway, for Kim’s socials.

“Yeah,” he says, putting his hands in his flight-suit pockets. They’re too small, so the gesture is awkward. “Pretty classic midwest father-son story. He coached my Little League team and gave me a polite-yet-gruff version of The Talk when I was twelve. He’s my best friend.” He looks almost embarrassed of his earnestness, like he knows he sounds like a cliche but, after almost losing his dad, he can’t bear to not be so sentimental.

“That’s really sweet,” Anna says, genuinely, pausing from taking videos to make eye contact with him. His pupils are as black as the empty space they’re suspended in, the adrenaline of present circumstances making them larger than average. His hair is floating around him like a halo. He looks crazy, and she’s sure she does, too. She snaps a selfie that instantly confirms the assumption. But that’s okay — this one isn’t for Kim’s socials; it’s for her.

“What about you? Are you close with your dad?” he asks.

“No. He actually died when I was three.”

“Oh, I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah,” she says, dodging another passenger who is swimming her way, chasing a runaway camera. “I never really knew him, so it’s hard to miss him per se? But I’m getting close to the age he was when he passed, and it’s been really weird imagining him at this age. The person he was. Who he would’ve continued becoming. How close we would’ve been. How much he would’ve influenced me. How much I’m like him without knowing it. It feels like this perpetual state of grief over all the different ways I’ll never get to know him.”

She doesn’t know why she’s telling him this; she just met him five minutes ago and doesn’t even know his name. But something about being in space really seems to bring your walls down.

Before her neighbor has a chance to respond, a new, yet familiar, voice comes through the loudspeaker. The Billionaire. “Hello crew! We here at Zenith Unlimited really hope you’ve enjoyed your journey so far. We’d now love for you all to take a group photo with the ZU GALAXY™ Ultra Energy drinks you’ll each find in the compartments under your seats. ZU GALAXY™: One small sip for man, one giant sip for mankind.”

Anna rolls her eyes. “This is so dystopian,” she says to her neighbor.

“Very,” he agrees. “Did you see the rest of the PR kit they gave us? Mine had some anti-aging face cream in it. I think the slogan was Erase gravity’s impact: Embrace agelessness.”

“Ugh,” she groans, as they float toward their seats, then proceed to open the compartments underneath.

“At least I got a good flavor,” he says sarcastically, showing her the can. It reads BIG BANG BERRY and features a cartoon woman with giant breasts — each of which appear to be planets — colliding in the center.

“I got BLACK HOLE BLACK CHERRY,” she shows him, cringing. “This drawing is so graphic I honestly don’t understand how they’re allowed to display this product in stores.”

They all corral into the center of the craft, then stare into the camera attached to the ship’s ceiling. The camera pans around them as The Billionaire’s voice comes through the loudspeaker: “Say ‘Zero-G Guava!’”

They all — begrudgingly — say it, staring into the camera’s reflective black lens.

They disperse, floating back toward the window to take final looks and photos before it’s time to strap back in. Anna and her neighbor remain close, floating to the corner of the window together.

“It’s weird because, normally when I do things I’m not entirely proud of, I’m able to at least hide them a bit,” she says. “No one has to know I watch old episodes of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant religiously. Or that, sometimes, when there’s nothing left in my fridge and I don’t feel like going out, I’ll eat sour cream straight from the tub for dinner.” She gives him a look that says she’s daring him to judge her, and he raises his hands in a gesture that says he comes in peace. “Meanwhile, this is going to be broadcast to the entire world and they’re going to assume I have sponsored energy drinks coursing through my veins and want to colonize Uranus or whatever.”

Ground control gives a 60-second warning before re-entry prep. Anna and her neighbor float slowly back toward their seats.

“Do you always care so much about what random strangers think about you?” he asks.

“Um, it’s kind of impossible not to?”

“I guess,” he shrugs. “I don’t have Facebook.”

She scoffs. “Okay, neither do I, but that’s because it’s 2037 and no one under fifty uses Facebook anymore. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three.”

She nods. “Anyway, it’s less about caring about what other people think — although that does matter to me, too — and more about what I think. It feels like there’s no way to exist without Selling Out. Sometimes, I tell myself I’m just doing what I need to in order to survive, that we’re all simply part of a larger machine that’s entirely out of our control, and that we shouldn’t blame the individuals who are just trying to get by within it. Other times, I feel like my complacency makes me part of the problem and I have this crushing guilt and shame over it.”

They reach their seats and hover there for a moment, not quite ready to strap back in.

“I spend most of my time organizing meetings and making stupid social media posts for a 21-year-old,” Anna continues. “I’m not doing anything meaningful, or helpful, or good. And then I find myself in experiences like this, and it feels like an accident or something that’s happened to me — but if I really felt so morally opposed to this program, or to The Billionaire’s entire business and all of it’s stupid spon-con shit, shouldn’t I have just said no? Even if it meant losing my job? A job I hate anyway?”

Ground control’s voice comes over the speaker. “Passengers strap back in. Preparing for re-entry sequence.”

They sit down, clumsily re-buckling the many straps and clasps.

“I really relate to your dilemma,” her neighbor says. “I toggle between feeling like I should quit my job and do something meaningful with my life and feeling overwhelmed by the fact that my privilege is the only thing that even allows me to consider that in the first place.”

He sighs, clicking the final clasp into place, then continues. “It feels like there’s no way to exist in this modern world without being a selfish dumbass. But then I don’t want that sense of apathy or nihilism or whatever to keep me from doing anything at all, so, like, what do you do?”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a software engineer for a tech company,” he says, cringing.

“Re-entry sequence beginning,” Ground control announces.

Instantly, the G-forces start building again. It feels so much stronger than it did during takeoff. They prepared them for this, but it still surprises her. There’s a growing rumbling sound coming from outside the curved metallic walls of the capsule, and the vibrating sensation has returned.

Their heads flatten against the headrests. For the first time, it’s impossible to speak. Even breathing is a challenge, the pressure crushing into their chests and making each exhale shallow. Once a floating feather, they’re now decelerating rapidly, a cinderblock falling from a tree.

Ground control: “Parachutes deploying.”

There’s a jolt, and suddenly they’re floating again — a bit heavier this time, but floating.

The final announcement comes through from mission control. “Stand by for landing.”

Anna dares to take a look out the window. She sees the desert floor, rising to meet them.

There’s a soft thump as they land, dust billowing up and out and clouding the view.

It’s silent — but not as silent as it was in those first moments in space. This silence isn’t an absence. It contains something, something intangible but still real and true in a way Anna can’t totally pinpoint or articulate.

After a moment of collective quiet, the adrenaline dump slowly fading, someone coughs and the spell is broken.

Anna looks at her neighbor. He looks at her. They share a smile; the kind of smile that isn’t necessarily happy but isn’t sad either. It’s a smile that says I get you and we’re all just trying our best and is that really enough and you’ll figure it out and am I even more of a hypocrite if I actually drink this ZU GALAXY™ Ultra Energy drink because now that the adrenaline is gone I’m actually feeling kind of tired and, finally, I wonder if we’ll ever see each other again.

As the door to the capsule opens and piercing light comes blasting in, Anna doesn’t shield her eyes.

So when, on the first day of my second semester of sophomore year, I walked into my Political Theory class and noticed the professor at the front of the room was both strikingly handsome and young(ish), I didn’t think twice.

I turned around and walked out of the room before he had a chance to see me, then headed immediately to the drug store, where I bought a pair of cutting shears and a box dye in a bold-yet-practical shade of auburn. I stopped at the bookstore on the way home after googling famous political theorists and grabbed a copy of both Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and a SparkNotes breakdown of the very same book.

Later, I dyed my hair in the sink of my dorm bathroom before chopping it into an angled bob. The slight roughness of the cut said I’m not shallow, just naturally chic.

I stayed up all night reading.

The next afternoon, I walked into class with Kant’s book (sans SparkNotes companion) under my arm, the array of colorful sticky notes I’d strategically placed in various pages making it look well-loved. When I slid into a seat in the first row and began arranging my pens and notebook in front me, it felt like I was existing in the perfect meeting place of Old Me and New Me. I had no difficulty playing the role of Teacher’s Pet, I’d just never done it with quite as much boldness — or with the same goal in mind.

Throughout the lecture, I noticed Dr. Lawrence’s eyes linger on me as he scanned the crowd. I saw him take in the Kant book I’d displayed on the desk in front of me. I noticed his gaze slip down to my mouth as I chewed on the eraser of my pencil (I’d seen people do that in movies when they were trying to be sexy, and it seemed like the kind of thing he, in particular, would be into).

When he was finished, I took my time packing up my things — flipping through my notebook and dog-earing a page, placing my pens back in my bag one by one, pretending to drop an eraser on the ground and kneeling to find it, and so on. When I stood up from retrieving the “lost” eraser, Dr. Lawrence was standing on the other side of my desk, the bottom of his pen tapping the Kant book.

“Kant, eh?” he asked, his mouth turning up a bit on one side in a sardonic smile. “What do you think?”

“I think Kant gives humans too much credit,” I said, without hesitation. I’d done my research, after all. I was prepared. “I don’t think we’re nearly as rational as he claims.”

His laugh was a rough sound that seemed like it was fighting its way out of him. “Interesting take,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Camille.” I stuck my hand out over the desk.

“Camille,” he repeated, his eyes dark and giving nothing away. He still hadn’t extended his hand to meet mine, and I was starting to feel a few faint tendrils of insecurity creep in. I was trying desperately to read him, but it was nearly impossible.

“Call me Ryan,” he continued — and finally, his hand met mine. His grip was firm, sturdy. He shook once, then lingered for a moment, his eyes locked in on mine. Just as quickly, he dropped my hand and abruptly turned away, returning to his podium to grab his things.

I slung my own bag over my shoulder before starting down the path to the exit. His voice stopped me when I was halfway to the door.

“My office hours are on Thursdays from four to seven,” he said. “If you’d ever like to shit on Kant together.”

I turned back to face him again, but he was already gone, the door at the other end of the room left swinging behind him. We were playing a game — but I’d seen enough movies and read enough books to know I was winning.

That Thursday, I showed up to his office at 6:45. There was another student, a boy who I recognized from our class whose name was Kyle or Lyle or something like that, sitting across from Ryan. They appeared to be engaged in a heated debate.

“He’s entirely derivative,” Ryan was saying, coolly. He was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed in front of him, and I remember thinking that I’d never seen someone look so relaxed and so powerful at the same time. He reminded me of a panther — his laid-back demeanor a deliberate attempt at making his prey feel at ease. He was in control of the situation, and he knew it. “I have yet to read an original thought that came from that man’s brain.”

“Bullshit,” said Kyle/Lyle, his cheeks flushing, his hand smacking the mahogany desk in front of him. He possessed not even an ounce of Ryan’s calm, cool, collected energy. People usually don’t when they have something to prove. “If either of us had a single thought as original—”

At that moment, Ryan noticed me standing in the doorway. “Camille,” he said, cutting Kyle/Lyle off and glancing at the leather-strapped watch on his wrist. “You’re late.”

“Sorry,” I said, holding up my (brand new) copy of What is Enlightenment? and lifting one shoulder in a casual shrug. “I got sucked in.”

Kyle/Lyle looks completely comfortable and is making no move to leave, so I’m thinking this visit — not to mention all of the studying I did leading up to it — may have been a bust. Until Ryan says: “Kyle, Camille reserved some time to discuss some concerns she has over the syllabus, so I’m afraid you’ll have to head out.”

An hour later, Ryan and I are on our second pour of bourbon — courtesy of the very fancy looking decanter he has stored on a bar cart next to the bookshelf behind his desk. I thought I hated whiskey, but the warmth of it was spreading through my veins like maple syrup, and I’d started to come around to it by the time Ryan leaned forward in his chair, taking me in as I took a small sip.

“Camille,” he’d said, his eyes scanning my face. “You’re not like other girls.”

He said it like it was a compliment, and it felt like one. At the time, I couldn’t think of any higher praise. I didn’t want to be like other girls. I wanted to be different, special. I wanted to be the kind of girl you looked at and said, You don’t belong in this half-baked town. I wanted to be the kind of girl you just couldn’t shake — less human and more ethereal being. I learned from the School of Manic Pixie Dream Girls that the only way to accept — and be accepted for — my weaknesses and vulnerabilities was to turn them into quirks. To not really need saving, when it came down to it, but to always appear save-able. Ryan’s words felt like a feather in my cap, proof that I was evolving and that it was worth it. At twenty, I was drinking whiskey and having philosophical debates with a thirty-year old professor; I’d made it.

“Well,” I leaned forward myself, closing the gap between us and crossing my arms on the desk in front of me. “You’re not like other boys.”

“That’s because I’m not a boy,” he said, a grin that could only be described as devilish spreading across his face as he lifted his glass to take another sip, maintaining eye contact all the while.

“Good,” I responded, gathering all of my whiskey-induced courage to slide my hand across the desk and graze his fingers, which were still wrapped around his glass, “because I am so sick of boys.” It didn’t matter that I felt like I was playing a part, cosplaying as some more mature and bold version of myself. I was ashamed enough of the real me buried deep under the facade that I actually took pride in my ability to suppress her. If I could convince Ryan, maybe I could convince myself. And then, maybe one day, I could forget the scared, needy, embarrassed little girl underneath it all had ever existed in the first place.

He didn’t move, just stared at the place where my fingertips met his hand. After a second, he cleared his throat. “You should go,” he said, his voice low and gruff enough that I could tell he didn’t mean it. He was saying it because he knew he had to. He was saying it to let himself off the hook later. I tried to get her to leave, he’d remind himself. I’m a good guy.

“You sure?” I asked, keeping my hand in place.

He raised his eyes to meet mine. “No,” he said, almost sheepishly. It was the first time I’d see him look less than in control — but even then his earnestness had felt slightly contrived, faintly hollow. It didn’t really matter to me at the time.

“Let’s get dinner, then,” I said, my fingers dancing lightly across his. “I’m still not done hearing about all of your philosophical soapboxes. Plus, I’m starving. What was it Descartes said? I eat, therefore I am?”

He laughed. “It’s pronounced day-cart,” he said smugly. “Not des-cart-es.”

I blushed. “Whatever, you knew what I meant.”

He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. I could see his brain performing a million and one calculations, trying to quantify the ethical implications of the situation he was in, the impacts of taking it further. I wondered what variables he was considering.

“What if we ordered in?” he asked, finally. “There’s an excellent Thai spot right near my place. It puts all others to shame.”

In time, I’d learn that this was Ryan in a nutshell — a pendulum of you should go to come back to mine in the matter of ten seconds flat.

Later, I had only taken a sip or two of the fresh pour of whiskey in my glass before he was on top of me, my back against the leather couch in his stylish studio apartment, the entirety of his weight pressing into me. We hadn’t even ordered dinner.

He went slow, every touch seeming intentional. He checked in multiple times: “Is this okay?” (It was.) “Does this feel good?” (It didn’t.).

At the time, it felt like he was reading me like a book. Later, with more experience, I’d realize he was working off a script, one that was prescribed and deliberate, and one that he rarely deviated from. He had sex in the same way he engaged in conversation: like he was trying to reinforce a theory he had about himself.

The next year and a half was filled with countless nights just like that first one — secret meetings, too much whiskey, stolen kisses and ordering in…

Until one day, when I went to surprise him at his office, I found him with his hand up another student’s shirt.

He tried to tell me it was nothing — that it wasn’t a big deal, and that it wasn’t about me.

He was right about that — it wasn’t about me. But rather than that fact being a source of comfort, it was the most devastating thing of all. Because his cheating was confirmation of the fact that it had never been about me. It was proof that his interest in me had far more to do with him and his needs than it ever did about me.

I had long suspected that I was simply a bright, shiny object occupying Ryan’s time for a moment — but I was happy to take pleasure in his marveling over me for as long as it lasted. But maybe I had never really been all that captivating in the first place. Maybe the only thing bright and shiny about me, in Ryan’s eyes, was the fact that I thought he was bright and shiny.

I used to look back at the version of myself with so much shame and contempt. Now, I feel compassion for her.

I think back to being a little girl, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, watching Grease for the 700th time, falling in love with Danny and Sandy as they sang and danced their way through high school. Their story felt like the epitome of what love was; it defined romance.

Throughout the film, we see Sandy change everything about herself to be accepted by some random guy she met over the summer. She was a good girl, made “cool” when she started wearing skintight leather, smoking cigarettes, and sexily smushing the butt under her high-heel. For so long, I thought that was the goal: if I could just find a man worth changing for, I’d be better for it.

Ryan’s voice, coated with whiskey as he says, Camille, you’re not like other girls flashes through my head. I remember the comfort and excitement his words gave me then — and that, if I’m being entirely honest with myself, they still give me. Because on some level, I still want to elicit that reaction. Some part of me still wants to be some version of that girl: the broken girl whose insecurities only make her more lovable; the spontaneous girl whose impulsivity and irresponsibility are character traits, not character flaws; the mysterious girl who you can’t quite pin down, who can be anything and everything you want her to be; the refreshing girl whose unique perspective is a testament to the fact that she is different, unforgettable, special.

Because if what I see when I look at myself is all that’s really there — if there’s nothing more attractive, more lovable, more captivating underneath — I don’t see why anyone would ever stick around.

But the problem with basing your identity around the whims, interests, or desires of another is that whims, interests, and desires aren’t permanent. They’re fleeting things, subject to change — and unless you’re a mind reader, you’ll never be able to predict when a breeze will flow through the mind of the other, shifting things just enough to make you less interesting or desirable to them.

The shine always wears off.

And when it does, whoever you’re with will inevitably leave you to chase the same high they were seeking when they were drawn to you in the first place.

I really try not to judge.

I try to be understanding. Empathetic. Gracious. To assume the best. And so on.

But sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Because you have the entire 40-minute wait in the airport security line to get your shit together.

Yet as I crane my neck to take a peek at the front of the line, I see people fumbling with IDs and searching for boarding passes buried at the bottom of backpacks while their respective jaded TSA agents stare off into the middle distance.

In an ideal world, everyone would put a bit more pep in their step so we could collectively break free from the Armpit of America — also known as the Newark airport — as soon as possible.

But no one here appears to be operating on a schedule.

I’ll never forgive whoever issued the directive to get to the airport two hours early. Now no one’s in a rush; they’re killing time.

I, on the other hand, am in a rush. My interview today went well — which means it went long — and now I’m running late.

It’s not like I have somewhere important to be. I’m just ready to be wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, sprawled out on the couch with my cat on my lap, watching a few episodes of The Sopranos, and eating cold Pad Thai with a shit-ton of peanuts and cilantro sprinkled on top.

Interviews — even the ones that go well — are exhausting. This one in particular was a near all-day event, in which I was forced to be so consistently cheery that my mouth is left feeling numb from all of the fake smiling and fake laughing.

I’m doing some very intentional frowning to give my facial muscles a break when I spot him.

Put simply, an Airport Crush is the first hot person you see in an airport. The person about whom you think, Okay, if shit went down and I had to live the rest of my life in this godforsaken liminal-space-hellscape, I’d pair up with you.

Less dramatically, they’re the person you fantasize will somehow end up on the same flight as you — and, if you’re really lucky, as your seat partner. You’ll hit it off, discussing the kinds of deep things you can only talk about with strangers you’ll never see again. You’ll both fall a little bit in love with each other, suspended above the planet in that gravity-defying tube — still closer to the earth than to the stars but feeling like the opposite is true — and then you’ll follow each other on Instagram and likely never speak again.

More likely, you’ll be sat next to a chatty grandmother or a middle-aged man who smells oppressively of Cool Ranch Doritos, but you can dream. That’s what Airport Crushes are for — they’re the stuff of dreams and travel fantasies and romance books. They’re not real life. They’re not supposed to be.

He’s in the next lane over. Our eyes meet while I glance around to suss out whether the line is moving (it is, but just barely). His are a steely gray — like a baby blue that grew up a bit, and also like the color of my mom’s Subaru — but still somehow manage to convey warmth. They are, in short, Very Nice Eyes.

I wonder if he’s noticed me, too; if there’s a chance that I could be his Airport Crush. For all my understanding of Airport Crushes, I’m unsure about the chances of mutuality. Does the fact that h’s mine make me more or less likely to be his? A question for the data scientists, or perhaps for the TSA once they’ve moved on from important tasks like inspecting miniature shampoo bottles and ruining rolls of film.

After the first moment of eye contact, I find myself looking for more excuses to scan the area, checking to see if his head is still parallel to mine, that our respective lines are still moving at relatively the same pace.

The thing about Airport Crushes is that, more than anything, they’re just a way to occupy the time. You know from the get-go that the odds are near-impossible that you’ll ever even end up saying a word to each other, which makes it all feel entirely harmless — pure fun and fantasy amidst a myriad of chaos and stress.

All of that to say: by the time I finally reach the end of the security line and complete the litany of safety rituals and undressings required of me, my mind is firmly replanted in the Real World — which is not comprised of the stuff of fantasies but, rather, a place in which missed flights and overnight layovers in this shithole are a definite possibility that must be avoided at all costs.

…Especially if I don’t find my heels, which have inexplicably gotten separated from the rest of my stuff, immediately.

I’m pushing aside bins in search of them when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around to see him. Today’s Airport Crush, in the flesh.

“Here you go, Alice,” he says, holding out my no-longer-missing heels with a grin that, to put it completely undramatically, knocks the wind out of me.

“I, um,” I stutter, pawing awkwardly at the bangs I cut for myself last week (an instantly-regretted attempt at making myself look more friendly and approachable before the interview) to push them out of my eyes. “Wait. How do you know my name?”

He points one of the heels toward my chest, where the name-tag I’ve been wearing since the interview is still pinned. Cool.

I facepalm. “Duh,” I say, smiling sheepishly as I reach out to grab the shoes that are still dangling from his fingers.

He returns the smile but withholds the heels, instead bringing them behind his back. “One question: Is your last name really Aardvark?”

“No,” I laugh, shaking my head. “We had to pick an animal that started with the first letter of our name. A mnemonic device, to make us more memorable.”

“I feel like you’re not the kind of person who requires a mnemonic device to be remembered,” he says, surrendering my heels and looking into my eyes, one corner of his mouth pulling up like he has a secret.

After a too-long moment of silent eye contact, I — completely at a loss for words — duck down to put my heels back on, and when I look back up, he’s slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder.

“If I wasn’t about to miss my flight, I’d stick around and see if I could make you blush again — but, alas: I gotta run,” he says with a wink. “See ya, Alice Aardvark.”

Running even more late myself — and now completely flustered and scatterbrained — I frantically grab the rest of my stuff and start speed-walking, as fast as my heels allow, toward my gate.

“You’re lucky.” The gate agent scans my ticket in a hurry. “We were just about to close the doors.”

“Thanks, sorry,” I call back to her as I scramble down the jetway, the doors closing instantly behind me.

I’m immediately greeted by a flight attendant when I cross the threshold into the plane. “22B?”

The second time today that someone knows who I am without an introduction — but I know my name-tag doesn’t have my seat number on it. “Yep, how’d you know?”

“Only empty seat left on a fully-booked flight,” he says, handing me a water bottle and a sanitizing wipe and wearing the same fake smile I’ve had plastered on my own face for the better part of the day. “Head on back and get settled, we’re about to do our thing.”

I make my way down the aisle, awkwardly lugging my tiny bag behind me, apologizing to all of the elbows that I bump on my way, keeping my eyes on the numbers lining the baggage compartments.

When I get to 22, I finally look down, only to be met with a pair of familiar gray eyes and an incredulous grin.

“Hi,” he says, those steely eyes twinkling.

“Hi,” I reply, breathless.

I sit down, smiling like a schoolgirl — which is a phrase I’ve never fully understood, but here I am, doing it — and we both instantly start laughing. It’s a laugh that says we both were secretly hoping this would happen, but never believed it actually would. A laugh that feels like taking a load off. Like coming home. It’s a laugh that says we’re both in on the joke — and that we both think this means…something. What that something is remains to be seen.

“I don’t even know your name,” I say to him, wiping tears of laughter from my eyes as I use my foot to shove my bag under the seat in front of me.

“Adam.” His grin deepens as he extends his hand toward me to shake. “Adam Aardvark.”

On my lunch breaks. After work. On the way to work, to get a Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso from the Starbucks inside.

I am a creature of habit, a lover of routine, a happy hamster on a wheel in which all roads lead to the Target off New Brighton Boulevard.

I’ve seen all of the memes about walking into Target with a list of three items and leaving with a full cart and an empty bank account, but the good thing about going to Target as often as I do is that it’s more about the experience than it is about the shopping itself. The appeal of actually purchasing items wanes fairly quickly. As such, on most of these trips, I don’t buy a single thing (overpriced latte aside). I merely stroll through the aisles, discovering what’s new. It’s like the adult version of those Spot the Difference games I used to play as a kid.

There’s a system to my exploration, and that system has been carefully refined over the past year.

I’ve learned that this specific Target usually restocks merchandise two to three times a week — generally on Mondays and Thursdays. As a result, these days are my favorite. Naturally.

I’ve gotten to know most of the staff. Customer Service Todd and I have the same taste in books, so I see him for recommendations. Every other week, barista Leah hands me a pumpkin muffin, “on the house, hunny,” to accompany my latte. My favorite cashier, Melissa, has three kids who are a pain in her ass but also her pride and joy — she let them decorate the lanyard that holds her nametag and it’s covered in abstract doodles. “God love ‘em,” she says, rolling her eyes, but she can’t keep the smile from her face when she speaks of them and their hijinks.

I’m very lonely — though, at this point, I doubt I needed to tell you that.

Minneapolis is colder than I imagined it would be.

The only memories I have in this city are ones with Cam, and he himself is only a memory to me now. He made sure of that.

I resent myself for following him here.

I resent him for deserting me in a new place within three months of moving here, with not a single friend to my name.

I resent Claire in accounting for being pretty or funny or kind or whatever enough to make Cam lose interest in me.

I resent the entire concept of romantic relationships, and the patriarchy, and the ever-rising price of goods and services for making it nearly impossible to imagine existence without codependency, or a life in which thriving independence is attainable. I’m just scraping by.

But, at least there’s Target.

I’m currently making my way through one of my favorite sections of the store: outdoor rugs and furniture. It would appear that rattan is very en vogue, as well as white cushions and white-washed wood. The very idea of having a proper lawn in which I could house this furniture is so distant it’s barely even a dream — yet I still find myself debating the practicality of this white furniture. The light fabrics and wood seem ill-advised in an outdoor space; the inevitable dirtiness and water damage feel like reason enough to go with darker tones. But trends, I guess, do not exist to be practical; they exist to make Target (and other stores like it) more money.

I’m running my hands along the textured surface of an outdoor rug (also in a way-too-light shade of tan) when someone joins me in aisle 19.

He runs his fingers through the mop of dark, curly hair on his head, and in the same motion, brings his hand down to scratch his trimmed beard. The messiness of his hair combined with the neatness of his beard borders on comical — a juxtaposition that screams Today did not go as planned! The deep sigh he lets out while staring at the collection of aesthetically-pleasing birdhouses is further proof of the fact that even a fresh restock is not enough to redeem this Monday for him.

He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, and I quickly look away, cheeks flushing. Apparently, in the four months since Cam left I’ve devolved to having the social decorum of a third-grader and have taken to staring at strangers in public. The remembered flashes of things like casually chatting up people in bars, getting excited about the prospect of a party, and making friends with strangers in the bathroom seem so distant they might as well be someone else’s memories now. When did I become so boring? So bored?

I begin walking toward the end of the aisle, making a deliberate effort to appear engrossed in welcome mats as I do.

“Excuse me?” A voice that can only belong to the Frazzled Stranger comes from behind me. “Do you work here?”

I stop in my tracks and peer down at my sweater. It’s red. Of course it is. Rookie mistake. You’d think it was my first (rather than my three-hundredth) time in a Target.

I turn to face him again. “I don’t. I just…own this sweater.” Smooth.

The furrow in his brow deepens. “Oh, sorry.” He turns back to the birdhouses, and I resume making my way toward the end of the aisle, assuming this brief interaction is over with.

But then, again, his voice comes from behind me.

“This is a longshot,” he says, clearing his throat. “But are you, by any chance, a birdhouse enthusiast?”

I turn back toward him, hesitantly, and he continues, confident enough for the both of us. “You’re not at all obligated to help me, considering the fact that you don’t work here. But I could use some objective eyes.”

“I don’t know if I’d consider myself a birdhouse enthusiast,” I say. “But I’ve seen tons of birds, just, y’know, out and about. So I think I’m still qualified.” God, I’m rusty. My cheeks turn redder than my Target-red sweater.

He coughs out a laugh. “Right.”

I step closer to him to take a look at the birdhouses. There are only a few options, and two of them are new additions since the last time I was in this aisle.

“It’s for my grandmother,” he explains. “She’s in Europe for the winter and I’m taking care of her house while she’s gone. She randomly called me an hour ago with an urgent request to set up a birdhouse so her quote-unquote friends don’t freeze, but somehow misplaced her old one? I don’t understand how that’s even possible, but here I am.” He gestures vaguely to the merchandise in front of us.

“First of all,” I say, daring to look up at him for a moment, “you have a very fancy grandma. Europe for the winter? What a dream.”

He nods, and several curls flop around in the process. He pushes them back. “She’s a regular Diane.”

I narrow my eyes. “Lane or Keaton?”

“Have your pick. Either way, she thrives in a coastal town, wearing shades of pastel, and gazing sentimentally into the middle distance while delicately swirling a glass of chilled sauvignon blanc.”

I laugh, and the sensation feels weird in my throat. I haven’t laughed in a long time. It’s not the kind of thing you do when you’re alone. Even the funniest of television shows rarely elicit a true laugh-out-loud reaction when you’re watching by your lonesome.

I clear my throat and turn my attention back toward the birdhouses. “Okay, so, considering the fact that warmth is our primary goal here, I think I’d eliminate these guys.” I gesture toward the new additions to the birdhouse merchandising selection. They’re designed in that same light wood, trendy aesthetic that’s spreading through the aisle, item by item. It’s the vibe of summers in Hawaii, not late fall in Minneapolis — who are they kidding?

He nods and shifts ever so slightly toward the rest of the options. “Too trendy anyway.”

“You never know,” I shrug. “Your grandma could moonlight as an Instagram home and garden influencer. She winters in Europe, after all.”

“True,” he concedes. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She does have an impressive collection of hats.”

Todd from customer service enters the aisle, clearly on a mission. “Oh, hey, Libby,” he says when he spots me. “Have you happened to see the new jute rug that just came in? A customer wants an exchange.”

I point toward the rug in question. “Yep, that one.”

“You’re the best,” he says, grabbing the rug and hefting it up onto his shoulder, then leaving as quickly as he appeared.

I turn back to the birdhouses and the task at hand.

“I thought you said you didn’t work here?” Diane’s Grandson says. “That you just…own that sweater?”

I glance up to see him staring at me with the most confused look on his face. Rightfully so. I see how this looks — and it is, admittedly, quite bizarre.

“I don’t work here,” I say, shaking my head. “I just…come here often.”

He raises his eyebrow, while still somehow managing to maintain the seemingly ever-present furrow. I can tell he wants to know more, but then remembers that we are nothing more than strangers standing in the outdoor rugs and furniture aisle at the Target off New Brighton Boulevard and thinks better of it. “Weird. I was going to make a you come here often? joke to start the conversation but decided against it. Now I’m kicking myself.”

“Probably would’ve been a bit too on the nose anyway,” I say, turning back to the birdhouses again to get us back on track. The sooner this interaction ends, the sooner I can escape the embarrassment of the first hot person I’ve interacted with in months discovering that I basically live in this Target. “Shall we?”

He nods. “Right.”

I point to the largest one. It’s unfinished wood, completely plain, but infinitely more spacious than the others. “This one has the most room for adding warm things like little towels and blankets inside, to keep the birds warm. It’s simple, but that’s an opportunity.”

“An opportunity,” he repeats, sticking his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels a bit.

“Yeah,” I shrug.

He faces me, taking one hand out of his pocket and extending it. “I’m Pete,” he says.

I look at his hand, then back up at his face, confused. Are we doing this? His warm brown eyes are firmly fixed on mine, and he juts his chin out a bit, as if to say, Yes, we’re doing this. Shake my hand, you weirdo. It’s not that serious.

So I do. I can’t make eye contact with him when I do it, though — again, I’m rusty here — so instead I stare at the place where his large, hairy hand swallows up my tiny, freckled one. We exchange one firm shake. An up-down-up. Professional. Sterile. “I’m —”

“Libby,” he finishes for me. He adds: “Libby who definitely does not work at Target, but is on a first-name basis with employees and somehow knows where all the new merchandise is before they do.”

“Exactly,” I say, and when I drag my eyes up to meet his again, I can tell there’s laughter there — the with me, not at me kind — and it makes me smile my first genuine smile in probably months.

“So, Libby,” he says, that hand returning to his pocket, a grin still planted firmly on his face. “Do you come here often?”

I’m not supposed to be here.

But the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my life of white collar crime is that confidence is everything. If your shoulders are back, your gait is purposeful, and your heels are designer, people are unlikely to ask questions. There is no such thing as a closed door if you’re rich enough — or if you appear rich enough.

Still: when it comes to “fitting in” at these events, I have to be realistic. The reality is that these people all have old money coursing through their veins. Since they were born, their every heartbeat has happened under the umbrella of Total Security. You can’t become that way; you’re either formed under those conditions or you’re not. You can dress a cactus up like a Christmas tree, but you can’t change its makeup, its history. I’ve done a good job of covering myself in a shit-ton of (very expensive) lights and baubles and all sorts of ornamentation. But if someone gets too close, they’d still see the barbed spikes that cover me.

That’s why I have to be careful. Confident, not cocky.

If they ask: a backstory that explains the spikes, doesn’t try to pretend they’re not there. A history that’s sad and tragic, but that positions Someone Like Them as the hero. They say everyone loves rooting for the underdog, but that’s not true: to the overdogs, a compelling underdog is something to fear, not celebrate. They want to feel like the Good Guy. So I let them.

That’s how I came to be Mackenzie Albrecht. Adopted by Sally and Charles Albrecht (now deceased, RIP), Good Guys with deep pockets and philanthropic hearts. They plucked me out of poverty and brought me home to Connecticut’s Gold Coast, where the houses are big and the egos are bigger. An elite oasis for retired entrepreneurs, Greenwich could’ve been unkind to young Mackenzie, an outsider with a tortured past — but instead, the town welcomed me into the (bill)fold with open, generous, magnanimous arms. I was one of the lucky ones.

That’s my story. None of it is true, obviously. But borderline con-woman who's been working the system since the ripe age of seven doesn’t go over as well at parties. Especially not this kind of party.

I walk in easily, following closely behind the group of suited men in front of me. The room is huge, the decor extravagant. It’s barely worth noticing at this point, because if you’ve been to one of these events, you’ve been to them all. The point isn’t for each to set a new standard of excellence; it’s to continue a long-standing tradition. Newness and novelty aren’t things to aspire to in this crowd; they’re of the if it’s not broken, don’t fix it school of thought. Old money is uncreative, because they don’t want things to change — why disrupt the status quo when it's serving you well?

As I look around at the ocean of Mulberry silk gowns and well-tailored tuxedos, I can’t help but be acutely aware of the fact that I’m the only person who has actually worked to be in this room — but to them, the fact that I had to work at all is what makes me undeserving. The irony of the fact that the only reason they’re in this room is because the fruits of some great great great great grandfather’s labor trickled down is lost on them. The lesson here, for people like me, is that trying to get ahead is a losing game — unless you stop trying to win big. Small, strategic wins are the path to success.

Which brings me to my goal for the evening: Edward Carrington, heir apparent to the Carrington communications empire. His father, Louis Carrington, is a bit of an anomaly amongst this crowd — a first-generation American by way of France, he built an entire media conglomerate from the ground up. He’s gritty, but rumor has it his children have been buffed and filed and smoothed over to no end. They’re shiny, and scandalous, and every media company (outside of the ones they own) loves to have a heyday with them and their seemingly endless shenanigans. Leonora Carrington Bares All After Another Wild Night! Gabriel Carrington and Ariana Call it Quits (Again)! This Sad Edward Carrington Meme is Soooo Relatable!

Edward is far and away the least dramatic of his siblings — known more for his signature hangdog expression than he is for any disreputable activity. The youngest, he wouldn’t have been many’s first guess at a Carrington succession plan, but he’s the only one who actually seems interested in taking the reins. My research tells me he’s worked at the company since graduating from Oxford (of course), and has worked his way up to the C-suite. Obvious nepotism — but still, I can appreciate the fact that he at least has enough of a conscience to actually work, rather than simply coasting through life on someone else’s coattails like most of the people I’ve encountered in these circles.

Not that it matters. My job here isn’t to sympathize with a mark, or to respect them; it’s simply to get what I need from them and then move on, with as little friction as possible. Of course, getting to that stage requires capturing some attention in the short-term — which I’ll be sure to do in the emerald green Loro Piana gown that brings out the same tones in my eyes, and that contrasts nicely with my jet-black hair. The eyes are natural, the hair isn’t — but with a high-quality (read: cost an arm and a leg) dye job, no one would be the wiser. Looking in the mirror as I put my earrings in, I could’ve fooled myself.

The first move is heading to the bar. Waiting in line is the perfect opportunity to mingle, to join a group that will increase your perceived value. Everything in this world works through association — which, in my case, translates to ingratiation.

As I’m laughing along to the jokes of two boring, middle-aged men who are barely bothering to hide the fact that they’re speaking to my breasts rather than my face, I spot him. Edward, one hand in pocket, staring into the middle distance broodily, his puppy dog eyes matching the color of the bourbon he’s swirling in his other hand. He’s Eeyore in a tux, let loose on Billionaires' Row.

He’s with a group of others, but he doesn’t seem at all present. His mind is elsewhere, which is perfect. A distracted man is an unaware man, and an unaware man is the ideal mark. His ambition and status did initially give me pause, but I’m also bored enough to take some calculated risks. At a certain stage in any career, you reach a point where you feel stir-crazy, ready for a new challenge. I’ve reached that juncture: it’s time to uplevel a bit. Edward Carrington is perfect.

“Like what you see?” A deep, gravelly voice with the slightest trace of an accent I can’t place comes from behind me, just over my shoulder. His tone is hushed, but I can hear the humor in it even before I turn around and see his eyebrows raised in amusement.

I don’t recognize him, which is odd; I’ve got this entire guest list memorized, have been researching every attendee for months — poring over their histories and their connections and their divorces and so on. But the tall, golden-haired man standing before me is a stranger. It takes me mere seconds to understand why. Something in the way he holds himself, the lines at the corner of his eyes, the tension in his jaw: Spikes. He doesn’t belong here, either. Interesting, but not cause for alarm. I’ve got my story straight. I’m prepared for any situation.

“If the rumor mill is correct, I think I may have more luck,” he continues, relaxing the smug expression on his face to take a sip of his champagne.

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” I say cooly, with a demure bat of my eyelashes.

“Someone hasn’t done their research,” he says, the smug look returning. I want to wipe it off of his (objectively very pretty) face. He raises his glass to me. “We haven’t met.”

“We haven’t,” I say, raising my own glass to delicately tap his. “Mackenzie Albrecht.” I’m not sure what’s happening, or where he’s going with this.

“It’s funny,” he says, breaking eye contact to look at the crowd around us, his eyes scanning the room as people mill about before being seated. “I know everyone in this room. But I’ve never seen you before. Or heard your name for that matter.”

A chill runs down my spine, but I don’t show it. “Speaking of: you still haven’t told me your name,” I say, taking a casual sip of my drink.

“Henry,” he says, turning back to me. He takes me in through narrowed eyes, then sighs, apparently done playing games. “Listen, kid: you’re not going to have much luck with Edward Carrington.”

I should be more surprised that he’s caught on to me that quickly. I should be concerned that he’ll somehow give me up. I should be worried about why he’s so sure I’ll strike out with Edward. But instead, the only thing I can focus on is that it’s completely condescending that he’s calling me kid.

“Again: I don’t know what you mean.” In spite of myself, I add: “And don’t call me ‘kid.’”

He laughs. “You do know what I mean.” He leans in closer, his icy eyes fixed on mine. “You and I are the same, Mackenzie.”

He says my name like there are quotation marks around it, like it’s an inside joke between us. Another shiver runs down my spine, and I can’t tell if it’s because it seems like the jig is up or because he’s standing so close I can see the frustratingly endearing spattering of freckles that cover his nose.

“Actually, I take that back,” he says, taking a small step away from me as he drains the last of his glass. “We’re not the same; I’m clearly better at researching marks than you are. If you need any help on the next one, just let me know.” He winks, then turns on his heel, starting to walk away.

He wants me to think he’s done with me, but I can see what he’s doing: He’s baiting me. He thinks I want to know what he knows. And he’s not wrong.

I should leave. I should walk away, right now. I should play dumb, act offended, politely step away.

But it’s clearly pointless to play dumb with him — and my curiosity gets the better of me. So, just like he wanted me to, I follow him.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, kid,” I say, through gritted teeth. “I know what I’m doing, but thanks.”

He smirks, then leans in to whisper something in my ear. “Edward Carrington has been engaged in an affair with Bobby Stark, CFO, for over a year.”

I choke on my champagne. I cough, my eyes watering. As I dab under them gently with a finger to avoid ruining my makeup, I glance back over to where Edward is still staring off into the ether. Only this time, I track his gaze…where it eventually lands on none other than Bob Stark, whose hand is resting on the small of his wife’s back while he makes small talk with some other execs.

Shit. He’s right. How did I miss this? But, better yet: how did he know?

Before I even have to ask, he sees the unspoken question in my eyes when they meet his. He shrugs, one shoulder lifting lazily. “Bob’s assistant hasn’t been given a raise in four years, while ol’ Bobby's pockets keep getting deeper. She’s bitter, and bitter people have loose lips.”

“And axes to grind,” I sigh, rubbing the spot between my eyebrows.

He nods in smug agreement. “Exactly.”

Losing isn’t fun. Losing to him? Salt in the wound. I can’t believe I missed this. Months of research, planning, and prep flushed down the toilet, just like that. Clearly, I’m off my game. I flag down a waiter and place my empty glass on his tray.

“Well, this has been so fun,” I say to Henry, “But I’m gonna get out of here.”

“Wait,” he says, his hand grabbing my forearm lightly. “I’m not done here yet, but something tells me you and I could be beneficial to each other. Meet me at Jimmy’s Corner at eleven?”

I stare down at his hand, still loosely wrapped around my forearm. He lets go as I do, holding his hands up, signaling to me that he’s harmless, even though we both know that’s not true. “No worries either way,” he says. “But it’s probably in our mutual best interest if we’re at least casual allies — I don’t want to have to worry about you ruining my game at the next one of these.”

I consider his offer for a second. It’d be a lot easier to accept if I felt like I had the upper hand here, if he hadn’t just outplayed me at my own game. I don’t want to be the Robin to his Batman. I made a miscalculation, sure, but I’m not a sidekick or a B-player in someone else’s game.

“Dive bars aren’t really my style,” I say, reapplying my lipstick and then sliding it back into my clutch, closing the clasp with a satisfying click. “So I guess you’ll just have to wait and see what happens next time I run into you.”

He grins, eyes sparkling. “Fair enough.”

Let the games begin.

Here’s another fun little ChatGPT-generated image of this Meet-Cute, just for fun: