By February you’ve come to conclusions about why you go cold on people. You became collateral damage in your best friend’s transition into adolescence, just as you did in your father’s transition into his sister’s apartment, and his ongoing depressive episode that followed. Suddenly you’re 130 pounds and praying it’s just muscle. You put your plate in the sink after your first serving, a gentle way of saying “no seconds.” You remind yourself why you’re staying in New York and not carpetbagging your way to LA after graduation: Hollywood is for the pretty faced and faint of heart, Broadway, like the city by which it is encompassed, is for the children of grit and true passion. Yet, you know not-so-deep-down that it is a choice you make out of necessity, not desire. You’re not pretty enough for Hollywood—at least not at this moment in time—but to evade its becoming a pipe dream, you remind yourself of a moment when you were. How ungrateful, you think, scanning your kindergarten headshot. You shutter, knocking up against memories of the involuntary humility that comes with living in a white suburb. You become dependent on the hope of a second chance and have dreams about driving and your teeth falling out. In therapy you admit to being crushed by the weight of a successful career, the partner and family of your dreams being the hand that doubles newtons each day. 

January feels like a forever. GAD and SAD and any other pronunciation of hell, have every doctor showing you the way to psychiatry. But you’re timid around things concocted in a laboratory, so you give SSRI’s the finger and start smoking weed because it, at least, comes out of the ground. You can’t distinguish between the pleasure originating in consumption and that borne of the social indication to which it has introduced you, surrounded by new different faces that quietly ring with the hope of reconciliation. It is not a cure, only a rose scented fog that transforms the stench of prohibition into a perfume named possibility. You shed tears over a love you missed out on, and yet everyday torture yourself by dancing in the rubble of your self-sacrificed shrine when he invites you to fill your lungs or your heart with substances so affectionate, but that are perpetually fleeting, substances that leave you islands away from him or anyone. You shut yourself in your room for days at a time, grieving over the tragedies of your past. Your mother, reading Bell Hooks’ All About Love, tells you that abuse and love cannot coexist. Maybe daddy doesn’t love you. You’re temporarily freed by the idea. She speaks of your grandfather who did everything for your family of females, playing chauffeur and fairy godfather through the changing currents of generations. But when lost to the unintelligible desert of Alzheimer’s none of his granddaughters appeared to guide him. Girls can be selfish too. You realize you like dogs more than cats because you like men more than women, but the stray cats that hang around your house have outlasted the dogs you once called family.

You wonder where December is as you board an ambulance in the darkness between dusk and dawn with nothing to keep you warm but the purple North Face you thought would make you cool in the third grade. The liquid from the IV makes your veins jump like children running through the sprinklers in summertime. You haven’t fainted in years, and you’re curious as to why no one stopped it from happening this time. Now it is clear that the people meant to protect you are only concerned with keeping you in good enough condition to get what they want, so you sign away your father’s seat in your college process. You cry about it outside your advisor’s office, equidistant from the boy you’ve fallen in love with again who sits with the current keeper of his heart. Reeking of desperation, you vie for the only attention that has ever made you feel worthy. Yet when he approaches, you can only laugh at his feigned interest, his legs hesitantly shadowing yours as muscle memory propels you back to your nest, high in a tree he is not built to climb. He’s a good actor, but you too, have studied the method.

November is kissing, kissing all the time. You’re kissed more times in this month than in your entire 17.5 years on the planet, but pushing the boundaries between fantasy and reality is not a game for amateurs like yourself. Though hailed as admirable, retaining the facade is only a method of defense. True strength is allowing the bowling balls that tumble from the collapsing racks inside you to roll straight out of your mouth and knock you and your fellow lip-lockers to the cold, hard ground. To acknowledge the past, could give voice to the present, and save you all from the labyrinth of ‘what if’s.’ But it is in your nature to disguise and deceive, and each night as the audience rises to commemorate your performance, only your trio of co-stars knows the true depth of your performance. 

A Florida number calls on Thanksgiving. You have a hunch of its owner’s identity, but send it to voicemail to continue exploring your analytical essay on Ellison’s Invisible Man. Upon checking your voicemail, the hunch is validated: your father has called to inform you of his having a new number. You wonder how long he has had it, and who, had you tried to reach out, would have picked up his old line—if anyone at all. You call him back but only get his voicemail.

October turns you into things—a party planner, a mother, an adulteress—and out of things. Any sense of self you believed yourself to possess evaporates into the ether, and you forget to be a griever when a heart-attack lands your godfather in a casket. Friendships unravel and threads find their way to the hats and scarves and sweaters they are meant to make up, and you are dragged from rehearsal each day begging to be the Baker’s Wife for another hour, another day, another month. When you put your hand to your abdomen it is flat lifeless flesh that rumbles only with anxious indigestion, and a spouse’s warm embrace replaced by the crunchy plastic joints of a seat on the railroad. 

In September you stop trying to be palatable. You’re quite terrible at it, and it makes you hate yourself more. You make the mistake of kissing your date before you go out with him. A mistake hard to place as such because it’s one everybody is making. Over lunch you speak from a hidden stash of charisma that can illuminate any moment, but casts a blinding light on this figure, leaving your truths in the shadows. It’s not until he halts the short-lived fling that your authentic emotion comes into focus, hardly distinguishable from the monotonous, gray concrete of the sidewalk. You cry, but only as a formality, and senior year has barely made an entrance when you prepare to dedicate the next two and a half months of your life to acting in a play.