Okay so, some of you may be wondering how the fuck I got to be this way if you’ve been reading up until now and that’s valid. Chaotic relationships, oddly timed coincidences, and connections with people who sound like they’d walked straight out of a 90s sitcom—it’s like what the hell girl?

My little dance with serendipity didn’t start when I got to college. Timing played a role in my life well before I was sourcing Manolo’s, and clocking cashmere like Parker Posey in Party Girl trying to decide whether to pay her rent. As all things do for a character like me the cosmos intervened right when I thought my life would go down as the most unremarkable narrative one could write. And it all started with me opening a king-sized box of Cheez-Its in the middle of a classroom.

This is the story of how I met Susannah.

Right, so believe it or not this K-Mart Carrie Bradshaw thing I’ve got going on didn’t exist for a very long time. When I was Dawnie in college it was like something clicked and previously untapped aspects of my personality dialed up to a ten; the dating rich men thing was pure coincidence. In reality, I started out as a girl with big dreams born somewhere too small to hold them.

That’s how Susannah was too, I think. We recognized that in each other. High School where I grew up was its own type of ecosystem. If you were born and raised in the town I lived in or the one that was a mere fifteen minutes over, it didn’t matter how quiet you were, everybody knew you because somebody knew of you. And that’s a little hard to grow up in when you’re still trying to figure out who you are.

Susannah was no stranger to being handed a role she didn’t know she was casted in. She was sardonic, compassionate, and self-aware almost to a fault. In our world Susannah was the “smart, quiet girl” who would put you in your place if you tested her then go back to her AP Bio flashcards without missing a beat. No one knew the Susannah who was a secret romantic and swooned at rom coms even if she thought the plot was stupid, or the one who devoured mint chocolate chip ice cream as if it was the last thing left on the planet to eat (our bond was luckily strong enough to survive her taste for toothpaste-flavored dessert). This was the Susannah I knew and the one who at one point helped remind me the world was bigger than where I was born. Our friendship didn’t end in fireworks or betrayal; it ended with the same posture of hearing a screen door click shut before you’ve turned around fast enough to see who’d walked away. Which is all the more reason why it was so unforgettable.

When I opened that box of Cheez-Its in the middle of class she got this look on her face. It was an expression akin to a mix of bewilderment, curiosity, and admiration. The box was as big as my head. See everyone else saw me as the “weird girl” who was smart but chaotic in a way that wasn’t cool for the time. To give a good picture of what I was like I was the person who wore glitter freckles (not even the ones made to be freckles just straight glitter on my face), eccentric lipsticks, and a jean dress over a jean skirt with a similar wash to school. BEFORE you judge me and say they definitely needed to bring bullying back remember behind every fashion icon was an era where they were a fashion flop. Do you really think Anna Wintour’s bob was always perfectly symmetrical? Get real.

Where my classmates saw a girl who was always trying to be different or quirky for shock and awe, what they didn’t see was someone drowning under her family’s high expectations that needed to release all that pent up expression the only way she knew how. Art. It was painfully misguided and coded with the aesthetics of early-Melanie Martinez/Halsey Tumblr era stan culture, but it was still art. So, as everyone else rolled their eyes or groaned when I released the gargantuan cardboard box from my tote bag and I, unconcerned with the absurdity just tried to enjoy my snack, Susannah didn’t see chaos. She saw a girl with taste and asked me for some crackers. She would later tell me in that moment her first thought was:

“I have to get to know this girl” and I’d later tell her my thoughts were “Boy, this is so much more efficient than using a snack bag.”

Girlhood is the myth that never quite becomes legend. It turned out suburban malaise was a strong bonding mechanism for two teenagers who thought too much for their own good. Susannah and I talked almost all the time. About our families, our hobbies, our big dreams of going off to big schools and leaving our town to rot. It felt like all the things we’d been thinking about alone for years finally had a place to go and it was nice at the time to be around someone who just got it.

Despite all my yapping about romance, for the first seven years of my adolescent life I wasn’t into all that. That’s actually why I felt out of place. I wasn’t boy crazy and I wasn’t canonically rebellious. Now, I wasn’t a “good girl” either, but my defiance was internal and private. Because my dreams were lofty, I knew back then I couldn’t afford a stain on my record so anything uncouth was always done in secret, completely separated from the eyes of the people around me including my friends. I would let nothing jeopardize my plan of getting out of there. But I guess you could call it a fracturing of selves; the girl I presented to my family or the school authority made me feel like a liar, while the girl I was alone made me feel like I was wasting my potential. This tension within me that I couldn’t express out loud made this time of my life deeply, and almost unbearably lonely. Having a friend like Susannah meant a lot to me because she didn’t need my words to understand what that was like. She felt it herself.

Things began to change when the mental health for both of us started to decline around our sophomore year of high school. We’d both expressed we were depressed but how that played out for us looked different. For me it was falling apart in private, not being able to get out of bed, and fantasizing endlessly about what it’d be like to end my life. We both became withdrawn and tired. We still hung out but it’d lost its sauce. Soon after Susannah started to hang with a group of kids about a year older than us. On the weekends they got drunk, did drugs, and partied from time to time. To be clear there is no disparagement: they were all nice kids. They, like me, were just the product of growing up in a place with a cookie-cutter cover and a fucked-up interior. Because they knew Susannah and I were close they even invited me a few times to hang out with them, but I’d respectfully decline because I didn’t trust myself not to self-detonate with unregulated access to things that would numb the pain. This only made the chasm between Susannah and I wider, and the catalyst for what would change things between us forever.

The change in Susannah had gone from something gradual to something undeniable. Our friendship had become almost transactional. She only reached out to talk when she was in crisis or needed my advice but would brush me off whenever I’d want to hangout. I didn’t mind her leaning on me because I wanted her to be okay, and I wanted to support her, but I didn’t want her sadness to be the only thing about her life that I knew about. I didn’t want depression to be the only thing we still had in common.

Things between us balanced out as we got deeper into the year, but by that point I’d stopped sharing about what was going on in my life entirely—not just with her but anyone. Every day I crossed the threshold of my front door I was collapsing on the carpet in tears because my brain just wouldn’t let up. My grades were excellent, I was Vice President of my class, I was on track to go to college, and I did have friends, yet I couldn’t stop thinking:

I should be happy.

I should be happy.

I should be happy.

But I wasn’t. And I beat myself up constantly for feeling like what I had just wasn’t enough. The only way I thought I could fix it was by ceasing to exist.

Towards the middle of the year a mutual friend of ours had told us she was moving away, and a few other friends had planned a going-away party. Susannah and I decided to go together since her house wasn’t too far from mine and my mother adored her, so she didn’t mind picking her up. About halfway through the drive my mom answered a call over a speakerphone from my father, he was frantic and panicking. My mom told him to slow down and tell here what was going on. Then, in suddenly the quietist most eerily still tone he said:

“The police are here asking for Dawn. They said they were responding to a request for a wellness check from a hotline over a plan to commit suicide.”

My mom didn’t stop the car. She didn’t yell. She didn’t fall to pieces. She just looked calmly over to me in the passenger’s seat and asked,

“Is that true?”

I turned around to look at Susannah, whose eyes were blank and expressionless. Tears formed in my eyes. I was so exhausted. I was tired of lying, tired of hiding, and seeing the ache on Susannah’s face I wanted to hug her because, I was sorry she had to witness the moment my facade all fell apart. I nodded at my mom, and keeping her composure, she continued the drive to the party, let Susannah out, let me say quick hellos to my friends, then drove me back home. That was it, I think. Nothing was ever the same between us again.

We didn’t really talk about that. She never told me how she felt or what she thought, and I never told her how I felt or what I was really going through at the time. But, I knew she felt something because the distance between us had grown disparately larger than before. She’d reach out from time to time when she was going through it, but we didn’t discuss our lives much. It felt like she was in one corner of the world, while I was in another. Eventually we just grew apart.

I did try to bridge the gap, but nothing ever changed. We didn’t talk about anything other than depression. I was too afraid to be honest with her out of fear of being caustic to someone who I felt then, had failed me as a friend because she couldn’t reciprocate the support I gave, and simultaneously felt I failed her for putting her through a traumatic moment when she was already struggling. Friendships as a teenager are weird like that though; you get so close to somebody but when real-life creeps in, neither of you have the scaffolding to survive it. I wanted to go back to when things were simple. To go back to mint-chocolate chip, Anne Hathway rom coms on the living room floor, and making fun of high school social hierarchy knowing none of it mattered. But it was too late to go back. I was too angry with the world to forgive her and too cowardly to ask to be forgiven. So, we said nothing. And that’s how we left it for many years.

In college, years after all this occurred Susannah reached out and we caught up. She wanted to mend the rift, but I was still angry because right when I hit college was when all the stuff I’d been repressing in high school started to spill out. It wasn’t her fault, or anyone’s fault for that matter, but I couldn’t look at her the same without admitting just how much our friendship mattered to me then. I couldn’t admit how much I cared. And I still couldn’t admit how much guilt I carried over her finding out I’d been suicidal that way. I didn’t tell her, and even though we tried to rekindle our friendship for a while we couldn’t ignore our inability to relate to each other. Our communication faded once more. And the screen door clicked shut.

I’m getting used to not ending these articles with a lesson because aside from a few of these experiences, the lesson wasn’t something that arrived on the dot with fanfare. In fact, it was my friendship with Susannah that helped me understand life didn’t provide clarity like an overnight Amazon package. Healing isn’t and wasn’t linear. Through a lot of self-discovery over the years, I can say now I’m probably happier than I’ve ever been, and have since let go of as well as forgiven the people from my past. Including myself.

But that wasn’t the point of all this. This story wasn’t about forgiveness or depression; it was about girlhood, the cost of silence, and how some people come into your life early to wake you up, so you’re prepared for the journey that lies ahead of you going forward. People aren’t steppingstones or plot devices, but they are portals to aspects of yourself you may have never encountered otherwise. I’ll always be grateful to Susannah for her friendship and remember her laughter at my oddities with love, because her warmth was the beginning of me recognizing myself. If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed the story and if you see someone eating a comically large quantity of snack foods—go say hello, you might just meet your new best friend.

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But what was tragic about this contemporary tale wasn’t that we bonded over a lavatory, no, it was that like in all perfect stories where the perfect princess met the perfect man, the clock eventually struck midnight. And honestly, it’s a little hard to unsee the rags when you were promised riches. This is the story of how I met Kristopher.

So, let’s take it back to the Fall of 2023. Picture it: Pennsylvania birds framing the changing leaves, everyone in State memorabilia because let’s be honest my alma mater’s a cult, students bustling and excited to be back with their friends in the quad. Possibility was bursting through the air that year and I remember it so vividly because I was absolutely fucking over it.

I know what you’re thinking, “Dawnie, how could you start off such a funny story with something so negative?” Because I had the worst summer EVER. Literally, it was a whole mess like imagine the most dramatic Netflix original plot and then add in an emotionally charged reconnection with a friend-turned-lover, butterfly needles, a guy named Hugo (not relevant), and a parent diagnosed with cancer. Yeah. It was that kind of summer. All joke’s aside I had a lot of shit going on before I went back to school that I was determined not to let haunt me during the new semester.

I mean, let’s tally it so you get the full picture: I went back to my hometown because I was too burnt out to work in the lab I’d been in over the summer, so expecting to chill, me lightly reconnecting with a friend turned into consecutive TWELVE-HOUR dates. On top of that I was getting my phlebotomy certification, so I was drawing and getting my blood drawn for three out of the seven days of the week by strangers and acting as a scientific translator for my family during doctor’s appointments for the other four. It was honestly amazing I had time to bleach my roots.

Returning to Penn State I was tired of talking about cancer, tired from my classes, and tired because my life seemed to have turned in a direction that I couldn’t have saw coming. It didn’t help that with all of that I’d fallen in love with that friend (and despite these stories I don’t use that word lightly). Unlike the rest of the summer though, it wasn’t dramatic; it was the equivalent of buying a questionable sweater on a whim from the thrift store and wearing it for weeks before realizing how well it fits. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was I was pissed that I felt something at all, pissed it was inconvenient, and pissed that one more thing albeit objectively wonderful, had happened without my permission. So, I did what any nineteen-almost twenty something would do and tried to outrun the hell out of it.

This time was what I called my era of just doing shit for the plot. I had a brand-new friend group, a brand-new look (this was the second time I’d gone bleach blonde in the wake of a crisis), and Riot Van era Arctic Monkey’s songs on repeat. I was ready to take on the world. Which just so happened to be the perfect conditions for universal timing to intervene. If you take nothing from this story, understand that when everything in your life seems to be going to hell it sometimes becomes the most ideal cosmic set-up for something to change the architecture of your life. Because you’re not paying attention. And I wasn’t. Which is why when my gorgeous, earthy, Lisa Bonet coded, Haitian-American friend asked me and our other girlfriend to go to a Golfing and Boating Party it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I had no idea where my friend Jamie met half the people she did. Golfing and Boating? I tried golf camp once when I was ten and couldn’t hit the ball, and boating? None of us could swim. We weren’t just fish out of water we were Spongebob and Patrick drying up on the beach before David Hasselhoff intervened and ironically, that was that kind of timing that saved the night. My friends had gone off to look for drinks, and I was standing in a crowd of strangers who looked like they knew how to position a sail. With my very on-brand “I’m too cool to be here” look on my face, my outfit totally screamed I-came-here-with-a-friend. I was sporting my black sweatpants with the lint balls all over them, a black top with my bell-sleeved blue velvet wrap, and yellow Doc Martens. Judge all you want but that outfit was like catnip back then. But I wasn’t looking to meet someone that night, and I didn’t plan on staying long. I almost walked out and let my friends know I wanted go. That’s when I felt a pair of eyes on me. I looked across the room and that was the start.

His first words really were “Do you know where the bathroom is”. It doesn’t sound like a pickup line, and I didn’t interpret it as a pickup line, because what sane person would? I only noticed he was still standing there when he didn’t move after I told him where it was. We talked for awhile, and his friends who were headed to the basement had tried to pull him away, but he stayed put. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking but I was wondering how the fuck I could get out of the conversation and why he was staring at me so intently. I chose my (favorite) path of least resistance: acting like a dickhead.

“So, are you like an art major or something?”, I asked disinterestedly staring out a window and wondering why the hell my friends weren’t swooping in to save me.

“Are you calling me dumb?”

I turned my head toward him. He had a goofy, half-smile I’d come to know well and this amused look in his eye as I caught my mental balance. I laughed. He was blunt. Now he had my attention.

He turned out to be a biochemistry major with a bit of a genius complex. We bonded over educationally classist jokes (as an artist/scientist I swearrr I’ve reformed), how no one was talking about the absurd male to female ratio of the party (think 6:1), our nerdy science aspirations, and how neither of us expected to click with someone so well someplace so random. Our talk lasted for an hour and I found myself more curious about him than I’d been about anything in awhile. Whatever this was felt different; the conversation felt light but electrifying and he could keep up with me as well as whatever obscure references I pulled out of the vault to make a joke. I enjoyed talking to him. So, of course what happened next was he disappeared into the ether.

He got a mysterious phone call about a “situation” and asked me not to leave before he came back. I didn’t even get his name. My girls found me and twenty-five minutes later I was ready to bounce. I chalked the interaction up to one of those random one-offs where you never see the stranger again and my girls and I headed out the door. Jamie, drunk off her ass, halfway down the road starts fangirling after revealing she’d been watching the whole interaction with our friend Kira from a corner.

“You and that guy looked like you were having a nice time”

“Yeah, I guess”

“You guess? You guys didn’t stop talking for an hour. Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, he left to handle something, but I didn’t want to wait around for him to come back”

“Wait a minute—did you get his number?”

“No, of course not he le—”

“You DIDN’T get his number?”

“Jamie, no, it was just one of those rare occurrences if I’m meant to see him again I wi—”

“We’re turning around” We’d already walked two blocks. She was leaving nothing up to fate.

When we got back to the golfing and boating house I hesitated on the steps in front of the screen door. He was in the living room, surrounded by his friends. I felt my stomach drop. I couldn’t do it.

“Guys this is stupid—” Jamie, bless her heart and bless the Tito’s, wasn’t having it. She opened the screen door and pushed me all the way in. I bumped right into him. It was now or never.

“Ohh there you are, I thought you’d left”

“Well we did but I turned around because I wanted get your number”

“My number?” Oh my God.

“Yes”

“My number?” Oh my God.

Did I misread the signs? Was this way too bold? Did I just embarrass myself in front of a group of boys on what was supposed to be a casual Friday night—

He took my phone out of my hand, made me unlock it, then put his number into my contacts. He gave me his to do the same. His name was Kris. We were almost inseparable after that.

Most of my relationships no matter how serious or unserious they were functioned as mirrors. With the exception of one they formed quick, burned hot, and then crashed ridiculously. Despite this however, and the obvious pattern you’ll surely see as this column continues, I wasn’t delusional. I approached these relationships with a sort of anthropological curiosity. I thought it was intriguing that people could bond so quickly and rather than wanting an outcome I was more focused on what made these men tick. I was screwed up and I endlessly searched for the answer to the question of what made other people so screwed up. Kris was a mystery.

He was my type I mean I will not lie about that. Very tall, dark hair, extremely cocky, ridiculously smart, very obsessed with me at the time, great sex, and devastatingly romantic. I mean hello! I didn’t think I’d find Prince Charming looking for the bathroom line at a house party. He didn’t overdo it with overly romantic gestures either; he was a great listener, and when I was with him, I felt oddly safe. He threw great parties. He was funny. His sisters and his cousins were super cool. He’d give me his jacket and spin me around to dance with him in the streets. Kris was exactly what I needed to forget about the baggage I left behind me at home. But fantasies only last so long don’t they?

He dropped the bomb on me one night while lying in bed that on the day we met he’d actually broken up with his girlfriend a week before we met. Ouch. I knew what I thought about it and asked him what he thought about it. I kid you not he said to me:

“It means we’re either soulmates or this is the biggest mistake of our lives” Oy fucking vey. Boy was it.

After that, I couldn’t stop noticing the cracks in the facade. Like how when we weren’t alone just the two of us Kris was always blackout drunk. And I do mean always. As a person who would get blackout drunk in the past, I knew that most of the time it was a thing people only did when they were running from something. I was running from something too that year but not that way, and not like that. He also never talked about his father ever but spoke kindly about his mother often even though his dad was an alumni he saw almost every weekend. He carried a lot of responsibility within his family, I mean his sisters were always crashing out about something and he always felt like he was the guy who had to fix it. Fix things in general actually, including me.

He encouraged me to talk about my mom and talk about how I felt. Something I hadn’t been able to do with my own parents. I sobbed on his chest one night while he held me. He didn’t flinch. Kris had really strong shoulders but the thing about a bird with a broken wing, is that anywhere but oncoming traffic was a safe place to land. No matter how perfect it all seemed on the surface I couldn’t ignore that it was all too much and too fast. I couldn’t ignore I wasn’t ready and given his circumstances neither was he. At some point I had to admit to myself that even though he wasn’t a bad guy, he wasn’t my guy.

My last straw, was when he brought me an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny, consolation pumpkin after flaking out on our plans to go to the pumpkin patch. As a girl who grew up in what was considered a rural part of my home state, where the biggest event of the year was our annual county fair—so big that we were given a free day off from school to go—this was a cardinal offense. The last time I saw him was a party at his apartment. Everything was normal. We’d been pong partners. I met some of his extended family and he’d re-told the story of how we met a few times. His younger sister had a crash-out, and I decided to leave. He kissed me on the lips and on my forehead and told me he’d call me tomorrow. But deep down, I knew we wouldn’t talk. Nothing had happened but I just got this feeling. I wasn’t going to call him, and he wasn’t going to call me. The next time we’d talk it’d be to say we couldn’t do this anymore and our time together had run its course. And that’s what happened.

I feel like in your early twenties even though you’re trying to build your life, build your career, and remember who you are there’s also this profound pressure to get it right the first time when it comes to dating. To find this perfect person who’s supposed to make your life complete. But, I don’t think that’s what matters. As tempting as the narrative is to do it right, especially at a place like Penn State where legacy is everything (I mean they call children born from Penn State alumni Nittany Lion Cubs for chrissakes), I think what matters is having experiences and being able to distinguish the forest from the trees.

Kris was not my Prince Charming that was clear. However, he was the catalyst for me realizing just how dead I’d become from grief and how fast I’d been running to keep it from catching up with me. We weren’t in love, not even close, but being with him gave me something I didn’t know I needed then: youth. And that was important. I needed to remember that despite my circumstances I had my whole life ahead of me and the world still had a few surprises behind its back. Besides, I did fall in love for real much later in my life but that’s a story for another time. For now, I’ll say if the shoe fits and you’ve met your Cinderella, just take her to the ball and skip the tiny pumpkin.

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My personal life has been marked by certain transitions that borderline narrative cohesiveness—the people I’ve met in each of them and the experiences I had with them all seemed to reflect whatever internal thing I was battling at the time whether that be positive or negative. The timing of which I connected with Kevin was no different.

I wish I could add a catchy little tag-line like the other articles about what I learned and how it shaped me, but the truth is while clarity with everyone else I met in my early twenties unfolded like a lotus flower, when it came to him and I it exploded like dynamite. Besides being feral the only thing I learned was how to behave like a grown-up, so I guess there’s a kind of silver-lining in that. Alas, being a grown-up always seems easier after you’ve blown everything else up, right? This is the story of how I met Kevin.

If you can recall from an earlier article the origin story of Kevin and I, upon hearing this I think you’ll understand why for at least a little while, our dynamic felt a little mythic.

First of all, before the first night of college when he’d knocked on my door, due to events that’d take a cigarette and three shots of tequila to explain I swore off blondes for the rest of my life (I would break this rule thrice). So, when I met Kevin that first night it was less about his looks and more about the serendipitous way we met that drew me to him. He wasn’t unattractive, and he was downright charismatic but before I knew what real love felt like I was a stone-cold hope (ful!) romantic. Okay yes roll your eyes, I know it’s like:

“Dawnie, why would you think the guy who happened to knock on your door on the first night of college was going to be someone special?”

I grew up in a town where you basically saw the same people every day for all eight years of school, and I watched a lot of ‘How I Met Your Mother’.

I wasn’t totally delusional though; Kevin did play an important role in my life it just had nothing to do with a preacher and a chapel. And while you’d think the Uno game and the conga line would be the catalyst for all of that it actually began much simpler. It started with a spoon.

After sylly week ended and the conga line debacle had become a hazy memory, Kevin and I didn’t really see or talk to each other much. There was no lore there—yet—we were in different major programs so there was no reason why we would have seen each other, even though he lived in my building. But me being me and plagued by an unresolved narrative, I couldn’t stop thinking about the night we met. It didn’t help that my girlfriends kept gassing it up saying,

“OMG did you SEE the way Kevin looked at you?”

“You guys looked so cute together!”

“What happened why haven’t you guys gone out or something?”

God, freshman year. Have you ever seen the movie ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’? Despite the title, the movie is really about the innocent ways friends lead each other astray by giving them hope in situations that required cognizance, not an aspirational mood board. And again, my friends weren’t WRONG, I know it sounds like I’m just protecting my ego here but the problems between Kevin and I revolved around timing not connection. Ironically, that’s what ended it too.

Sick of their comments and equally sick of thinking about him I decided it was time to take action. Why not, it was 2021, who says a girl can’t make her interest known? If the cosmos wasn’t intervening to make our paths cross, why couldn’t I be the cosmos? So, I did what any self-respecting person would have done. I marched up to the seventh floor on a random Sunday, knocked on his door, and asked him for a spoon.

“A spoon?”, he asked, one arm propped against his doorframe. He looked confused. I was confused. I was confused even though I’d spent ten minutes giggling with my girlfriends planning this out. The reality was not matching the intention. But I was already there in his doorway probably wearing my bright green, Will Ferrell Christmas pants with his face across the ass and there was no going back now.

I doubled down.

“Yes. A spoon.”

“What…kind of spoon?”, he asked now a little amused.

It was embarrassing in the moment because it’d hit me that I had not thought this through as much as I previously believed. Every time he smirked, I felt my cool-girl exterior crumbling with every eyebrow raise. It was devastating for my brand.

“Just, a regular metal spoon! I didn’t bring one with me, so I wanted to borrow one.”

“Borrow a spoon?”

He was not letting me off easy here. After watching me squirm a little he finally reached into a drawer and handed me a small, silver spoon. I told him I’d return it and left. That was definitely a lie.

The idea for this scheme (and for anyone reading this who has never considered themselves the object of someone’s affection, you would be surprised about all the hijinks a person has gone through that you may never know about, just to find an excuse to talk to you) as curated by my friends, was that he’d come looking for the spoon if I didn’t return it in three days and that would drum up a conversation for us to get to know each other.

I know, picture it: Four highly capable women pursuing advanced science degrees and their masterplan to bait and switch a man was built around silverware. The world says, intelligence doesn’t make up for lack of social skills, and I fear it was right. Shockingly, the plan didn’t work and later on I learned from a mutual friend after he casually dropped it in a conversation between lectures, that Kevin was in a long-term relationship and had been since high school. Oy vey. The situation went from awkward, dorky-cute embarrassing to oh-my-goodness-bury-me-now embarrassing super quick.

Needless to say, I didn’t talk to Kevin and intentionally avoided him for the rest of the school year. I focused on me regretting my major ( :-( sorry Biochemistry), the terrible fallout from the Mitchell situation, and the jarring realization that after spending most of my life so sure of who I wanted to be I was starting to question whether or not I was good enough to be in science.

Our paths didn’t cross again until close to the last week of Spring semester when he saw me wheeling the whiteboard I’d stolen a month prior from the science major building across campus. My grades were tanking, chemistry had beaten my ass, and I was losing hope that I’d last another year as a science major. I needed something to remind me why I got into all of this in the first place. So, I followed the mental trail for an independent research project idea I had, stole some ancient neuroscience books from the library, then swiped a whiteboard to work on it. I’d gotten it into my mind I wanted to get an undergraduate research grant for it. The day I saw Kevin again was the day the college notified me I’d won.

He asked about all the shit written on it when he stopped me in the quad yet somehow didn’t question why I had the whiteboard in the first place. As much as it sounded like I was just trying to brag earlier, my point was that interaction formed the basis of our chemistry going forward. Kevin listened to me ramble about glucocorticoids, neurons, and pissy neuroscience professors for like fifteen minutes asking me questions every so often trying to understand my thought process, my motivations. It was intellectual foreplay. We recognized the same things in each other: we were too smart, too quick, and too bored with the structure of college for our own good. We went our separate ways then, but we lingered just a bit before going in opposite directions. And that was the spark that lit the bonfire of me and Kevin.

Months later, while finishing up my research for the summer Kevin messaged me that he was coming up to State College for a while because he’d just bought a house there for the next school year (I’d later come to find out his family was filthy fucking rich). When we met up we both bonded over our significant relationship woes. He and his girlfriend had broken up months ago and he was still sorting through the emotional residue, while my boyfriend and I had broken up weeks prior. I can see you raising your eyebrows and hey, I don’t blame you. I’m not saying we were right, I’m not saying we were healthy, but it was the perfect storm for acting without thinking about the consequences. So, we hooked up, obviously. Everything went downhill from there.

The dynamic between Kevin and I was built around something all passionate relationships are built off of: being fucking assholes. Our love language was arguing. Constantly. Sometimes he’d intentionally piss me off so I’d tear him a new one, and a few minutes later our clothes would be off. Enemies to lovers was the real deal. The chemistry was also built off of sharing our interests; we’d talk for hours about books we’d read, research interests we had, and the assortment of random hobbies we’d pick up then cavort over them like a couple of nerds. Then we’d start arguing. Rinse and repeat.

It was intoxicating. We both knew it was unhealthy, or at least I did, but for the first time I didn’t care. I’d gotten my academic career back on track, I was living in my body for the first time in a long time, and I was sleeping with someone I actually trusted a lot. I felt confident, competent, and sexy after an extended period of doubting myself. Things felt like they were clicking into place. But, as all good things do, they had to come to an end.

By sophomore year, I started realizing I wanted more. But not from him. There was a voracious, insatiable hunger inside of me but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Casual worked for me with him until it didn’t. It wasn’t about me wanting a boyfriend and was about me not wanting to be with someone who was (and I say this with love) batshit crazy.

Kevin would do shit like offer to pick me up to take me home after he’d driven from Maryland to PA in one day just because I complained about being socially drained from a girl’s night AND follow through, then pick a fight with me in the car since him picking me up meant he couldn’t stop by Sheetz for a chicken sandwich. Then he’d spiral because I’d woken up early to get him this chicken sandwich he wouldn’t shut up about (dubbed in his words the “appreciation chicken sandwich”) and he felt like he didn’t deserve it.

He’d insist to my friends he wanted to help plan my birthday party, drive me TO said party, brood in the corner before making me leave early, then start a screaming match with me in the car over nothing. He’d tell me we were going to IKEA to pick up a mirror, then without warning me take me to meet his parents and have dinner with them. He’d drop everything in the middle of the day to help me transport a giant rabbit I bought on a whim for fifty dollars at the mall, then tell me he’d marry me if I wasn’t so ambitious about my career.

I want to emphasize Kevin was in no way a bad person, and the toxicity wasn’t one-sided. I liked arguing with him. I liked that me being angry didn’t scare him. I liked the freedom of being messy. But that’s all we had. Being with him was like perpetually sitting in a spinning teacup. We saw each other so clearly, but the way we saw the world was very different. It’d become too apparent for me to ignore anymore and by this time during sex, I was just thinking about what I wanted for dinner. It was irreconcilable. The thing with Kevin had to end.

So, it did. I wanted passion and vitality, but I didn’t want to fight over gas station chicken sandwiches, or get tricked into meeting parents, or have hypothetical conversations about choosing marriage over my career. I wanted a fire but not a supernova, just a steady flame. I wish I could sum this up with something profound about chemistry or impulse control but I’m coming up empty since Kevin wasn’t a chapter really, he was a threshold. He marked a time in my life where I was starting to understand the passion I had burning within myself and my craving for a life that was bigger than the one I’d been taught I was supposed to want.

We’re still good friends to this day actually and he supports my writing as well as my research like he always has. The story we briefly lived together is one I’ll always appreciate. I will say however that now, whenever a partner wants to take a trip to a furniture store, I clarify I won’t be having dinner with their family first.

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He was a flat-earther. He didn’t believe in the flu. He ate dirt as a holistic remedy. No, I’m not making this up.

It surprises me constantly the things I learn from people, especially those who are different from me. I’m almost ninety-nine percent sure the Earth is round (joking), my bachelor’s was a science degree, and I prefer using dirt for burial not for lunch. Yet no matter how irretrievably different two people may be on the surface, there is always one thing that connects them even for a moment: their capacity to be human. This is the story of how I met James.

During my sophomore year of college, I was taking a neuropsychology course that focused on causative factors for behavioral disorders like major depression, bi-polar, etc. I had an A in the class (self-glaze) and used that to justify me skipping that particular afternoon. I did this often. I had a rule for myself: if my grade was high in a course and attendance was optional, I could skip whenever I wanted. Of course, this backfired repeatedly as most decisions you make in college do. But that day, it ended up working in my favor.

It was uncharacteristically warm. I’d put on a cute outfit, my tiny purse and went on a cig walk. At that time in my life cig walks were sacred; though a destructive health habit, as a chronic people pleaser it was my way of being disagreeable. Unacceptable. Sovereign. It was a choice I made for myself independent of the identity I’d felt forced to embody before I went to college. I don’t smoke anymore but looking back on the scared girl fighting to become someone I understand why I did.

I didn’t spark a light immediately the way I usually did. I wanted to walk around downtown, get a coffee maybe, then find somewhere to sit and watch the people pass by. I settled on a bench just a few paces from the coffee shop, right in front of an abandoned department store that closed during COVID. Like many of the dilapidated stores in the area, whoever was responsible for clean out took everything but the mannequins in the window display. It sounds strange but I liked watching them sometimes while the students passed in front of me, frazzled about getting to their next class. It made me feel like I was both part of something real and caught in between somewhere not fully realized yet. As if I wasn’t crazy for feeling lost.

These thoughts were a magnet for weirdos. James must’ve sensed this or at least that’s what I tell myself to shake off the eeriness of the moment we shared. He was over six feet tall with a thin comb of grey hair, and a plaid shirt tucked tightly into high-waisted jeans like he’d stepped straight out of the seventies. There was a long scar above his eyebrow, and his shoes had holes in them. I was mid-light when I noticed him standing over me.

“Do you mind if I sit here? I usually sit at this bench around this time of the afternoon.”

“Not at all”, I said snuffing my lighter, “Go right ahead.” I believed in smoker’s etiquette, I didn’t smoke in close proximity to people, especially strangers. We sat quietly for a bit, admiring the sunshine and the birds. Eventually, he asked for my name, and I gave it to him.

James was seventy-three and lived in the area. He wasn’t born and raised there like so many of the other locals I’d met but was actually from an industrial part of New York. He’d moved to Central Pennsylvania for a job opportunity years ago and loved the town so much he never left. After conversing for a while he abruptly asked me if I was married. I told him I wasn’t and that I was a student. Then he asked if I’d ever want to be and I felt my teeth clench. I replied that I didn’t know but it was half a lie and half the truth which didn’t bother me much. I wish I could say I make it a point not to lie to strangers because of the nature of this column, but that’s actually a time where I uninhibitedly lie. My emotions are real in the moment though even if whoever I told them I was, wasn’t. Ironically, that’s precisely the reason why I was unsure about marriage; you can’t hide from the person you’d promise your life to.

He looked at me with a kind of reserve in his eye someone would have going to confessional and wrung his hands a bit. I couldn’t tell if he was afraid of offending me or afraid of losing his composure.

“You should get married”, he said to me quietly.

“And why is that?” I didn’t know where this was going. I was bracing for something misogynistic or creepy, even though that probably wouldn’t have made me get up. It takes a lot to scare me away.

“I think everyone should marry someone they love. You seem smart and you’re nice, you’ll find someone who’ll marry you. Just don’t be like me when you do. I had to die before I realized that I loved my wife.”

It was unclear exactly what led to James and his wife getting a divorce. All I gathered was that the relationship was intense and they were both very passionate people. He’d met her when he was young and had been married almost or a little over five years before she asked for a divorce. They’d had kids together so there was back and forth because of that and partly because James didn’t take her request seriously. He was stubborn though, and he was young. He gave her what she asked for believing she’d done him more harm than good. He disregarded at the time how it was before they were married—how much they supported each other and that her father had invested a lot of money into his career to see to it she was taken care of. His words at that point weren’t nostalgic but frozen. When he spoke about her, he looked away like a man recounting war.

He remarried and moved to Pennsylvania to work in a factory around the nineties. On one of the days after his shift, he’d gone back to work during the night to let a new welder in and right as he was leaving, the factory exploded. He woke up on the concrete with gaping wounds all over his body and soot on his face. He’d said he should’ve died. Based on his account he did die, and while he was unconscious, he saw the face of the person he thought he’d left behind: his ex-wife.

James explained that the incident haunted him for months. He didn’t know why he saw her during his brief stint in the afterlife. Unlike the bullshit platitude I’m inclined to give here the truth is unfortunately much simpler. He was afraid one day she’d see him for who he was and leave him. He slowly understood he never felt worthy of his ex-wife because she came from money and he was a working-class man. James never expressed that to her. Twenty-three years after their divorce James had realized he wasn’t mad at her for leaving, he was ashamed of himself for not having enough courage to fight harder for her.

By the time he was able to tell her all of this Jame’s ex-wife had remarried and moved on. She still loved him, but things had changed. It was too late. He divorced his second wife eventually and for the rest of his own was consumed with the regret of what he’d lost, citing his only happiness those days being seeing her during their outings with their grandkids. He was still looking away but I saw he had tears in his eyes.

Of course, after telling me this painful, harrowing story was when he casually dropped his hot takes about the flu vaccine containing poison as well as how eating a tablespoon of dirt everyday kept him healthy for fifty-something years. Yes, it was relayed as sudden as I’m relaying it to you now. Upon learning my major he also urged me to research the science behind tin-foil hats protecting you against radiation, clarifying he didn’t believe in aliens, and he’d arrived at this conclusion by doing studies of his own. He even offered to make me one.

Lunacy aside, James’ story taught me a lesson I wouldn’t get until many years later. You never know how important someone is until they’re gone. Sometimes the lesson comes too late and the great love of your life isn’t the one you marry, but the one who marks a before and after in the way you experience life. Sometimes, it’s being seventy-three and learning from your mistakes, so you don’t repeat them when you find them again in the next one. I’ve only ever been in love and loved once. I’m still figuring it out. But that’s a story for another time. For now, I think I’ll take James’ advice and make a tinfoil hat; it definitely won’t protect me from radiation but maybe it’ll keep the loss away long enough so I can get some sleep tonight.

When you’re young and romantically connecting with people in college, it’s impossible to know exactly what you’re looking for when you start. You learn through relational trial and error often mixed with miscommunication, mismatched timing, and a whole lot of alcohol.

So how do we know when we’re really compatible with someone, and where’s the line between chemistry and compatibility? My second week into college I learned this lesson the hard way.

My birthday fell on the second week of September (Virgo rights!) also known as the start of the semester. Almost every freshman subconsciously hopes they’ll meet their best friends for life on the first day of orientation but given my rather isolated high school experience, I didn’t gaslight myself into believing I’d gain my ride or dies by osmosis. I went in with the expectation that I’d celebrating that year alone.

Now, I am extremely grateful to say I haven’t thrown myself a birthday party in like six or seven years. I’ve been lucky to have wonderful, generous, and loving friends who take over planning before I’ve had time to brood about whatever age I’m turning. That trend though, started the week I met Mitchell.

Weeks before school I’d seen that tickets were selling fast for a comedy show happening on the day of my eighteenth. Remember how last week I talked about saying “yes” to life? Well, this time I said no. I wanted to buy them! But I’d never heard of the comedian in my life. I didn’t want to end up seeing an unfunny show and I was too lazy to look up the comedian’s set, so I debated until the tickets sold out. Thank God I did though, that no catalyzed what would end up being the most memorable birthday ever.

Day three of move-in week, I was walking around with Nash, a guy I’d befriended at a new student dance on day two. It was over eighty degrees out; we were both wearing all black and were so busy trying to look cool we ended up sweltering and cranky. We were out there killing time waiting for Nash’s roommate. It was our first time meeting him; Nash brought me along in case he ended up being a “psycho killer” (his words). All we knew about him was his major and that he was from California.

“California?”, I’d said like it was Aruba and not a reasonable flight away.

Nash was from New York, so he was unfazed—he’d met loads of people from different places. My small town, bumpkin ass was so enamored by the idea that not everyone lived and died in the same place that this roommate of his was already pretty interesting to me.

I told Nash he better be the most intriguing goddamn person in the world for not just making us wait so long for him but burn way over the daily recommended number of calories doing so. Mitchell did not disappoint.

There are very few times I’ve been able to “tell” where someone is from, with the exception being for anyone born and raised on the West Coast. Mitchell fit the bill: light pink shorts, a vintage embroidered shirt with our school crest on it, and an ascot. A real Fred Jones, mystery gang ascot, which unfortunately for Californians, are a dead giveaway to the rest of us.

At first, we thought he didn’t like us. He was so nonchalant with his funky outfit and SoCal twang, Nash and I were almost positive Mitchell thought he was too cool for us and did not expect him to hang out with us again. We later found out the letterman jackets and hippie bandanas were just armor. Mitchell was as strange as the two of us were at the time.

On my birthday Mitchell and I went thrifting. There was a little consignment shop on the Eastside that neither of us had been to. Before this we’d spent a good amount of time together; every few nights he made the trek to my mid-campus dorm to let me style his hair (or rather matt up his curls), but all of that was platonic. It was the bus ride downtown however, that I saw Mitchell differently.

He sat across from me in a plain, white t-shirt, blue jeans and tousled blonde hair. It looked great, probably because I didn’t do it. As the light hit us both something changed. I looked Mitchell in the eyes and realized: “My God, he’s actually kind of hot.”

Okay before you sigh, I recognize how lame this sounds. But haven’t we all spontaneously crushed on a friend, and what’s the real difference between a friend and a lover anyway? As all of this dawned on me his gaze also changed. Suddenly we were both staring a bit too long while we talked. I gaslit myself that the vibes hadn’t changed until he bought me a twenty-eight-dollar coat as a birthday gift. Keep in mind, we’d known each other barely a week.

But we were adults, right? And that wasn’t enough evidence for me to believe something was brewing between us, I just assumed he was being nice. Even if it was it’s not a crime to be attracted to your friends! Acting on it was a different story; we could totally be mature about this. Until we took shots.

Nash had surprised me that night with a pink shot glass that said Birthday Bitch, a convenience store cake, and a word document projected on his bedroom wall that said Happy Birthday Don. The room was filled with our friends and balloons. I didn’t think the night could get any better until Nash busted out the fireball. In between shots two and three, Mitchell told me he had an extra ticket to the Bill Bur comedy show happening later and asked if I wanted to go. The Universe was watching, and I delivered this time.

We took more shots and left together sometime later. I’m going to be honest we were so wasted I don’t even remember the walk to the convention center; it was a miracle we even got there considering neither of us had a sense of direction. In line, we slurred our words bonding over stories about sick or dead grandparents. I stepped a little too close to him. He stepped a bit too close to me. We stared at each other for a while. Then we kissed.

Before this happened, I’d only ever kissed one person before. It was anticlimactic. And slimy. I was so impartial to kissing after that, I questioned whether I was a kisser at all, thinking maybe there was something wrong with me for not gaining the same pleasure everyone else did from swapping spit. After this happened, I understood finally what I’d been missing.

When Mitchell and I kissed, we kissed. It was exactly what you’d imagine a drunk kiss should feel like. Slow, desperate, sloppy, electric—I couldn’t remember Bill Bur’s set if I tried. Every time a hint of sobriety peeked in, we realized what we were doing and broke away. We were always inevitably pulled back together though by a mysterious force known as this is a terrible fucking idea but God you taste so good.

Our little stint on my birthday turned into a near daily routine of trekking up the steep hill in between my dorm and his and spending the night. I practically lived over there my first semester. Everyone in the group knew what was going on and shocker, it had dire consequences for more reasons than one.

First, both of us were too afraid to talk about what it all meant and because boundaries weren’t put in place we ended up hurting each other repeatedly. Things were always awkward for our friends when we were on the outs. Second, I learned later my roommate had a crush on Mitchell during this period. I didn’t know, hand to God until she saw us kiss coming back from the comedy show and lost it. For the next two weeks I had to deal with everyone asking what happened between her and I and being referred to as the dorm floor slut (we’ll save that story for later).

Our dynamic ended Spring semester. Even though we continued to hang out in the same friend group, things were obviously a little weird. It didn’t end as badly as it could’ve and eventually it just became niche group lore. The effect of the whole thing lost its weight on everyone else, but Mitchell and I’s friendship didn’t recover for years.

Before I went to college, I thought having good chemistry with someone meant you’d be good together. It sounds silly now, five years and seven romances later but since I’d never experienced chemistry with anyone before that, I didn’t realize I was more enamored with the feeling rather than the person I was experiencing it with. I wasn’t into Mitchell and he wasn’t into me. He was a great friend and we cracked each other up, but we couldn’t get vulnerable. We couldn’t connect on that level. And I was so aloof to what I wanted out of a relationship I didn’t even know how.

This situation not only taught me that chemistry and compatibility weren’t the same thing, but that sometimes having a crush on your friends just means you really admire them, which is good. If you’re around people with qualities a little bit better than yours in some way, it means you’re in good company, not that you should stick your tongue in their mouth. I’m happy to say Mitchell and I remain good friends to this day and yes, I still have the coat.

*All names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved

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This column has a lot of ground to cover when it comes to stories. The past 5 or 6 years I’ve been speedrunning the plot of a low budget indie movie, or horror film depending on the day you ask me. We’re going to get to how I met everyone else, but I thought no better than to start with the story of how I met the most important person in all of them: my adult self.

So, what does it mean to say yes to life?

2021. If you’re over the age of 18, you probably remember exactly where you were when you realized those coming-of-age milestones you’d been dreaming about since you learned the words high school—homecoming, prom, weren’t happening. Personally, I was with my high school boyfriend arguing about Disney World.

I’m not dredging up the past to bum you out. I want to emphasize that isolation left me with a thirst for something I never cared about before, living. I was tired of who I was and spent quarantine using every bit of my manifesting power to conjure an exit out of my small town.

If you’re from one you know that once you get stuck with a label, whoever you’ve been told to be is who you are until you leave or die. Once I left, I decided the person I’d been for almost a decade would never exist again.

My first night at college. I’d basically used a broom to usher my family out when they finished helping me set things up. I wanted to be independent, and I was sick of my parent’s hovering. To prepare for sylly week (sylly week= syllabus week, AKA a week of college kids living like it’s purge night) I’d watched a bunch of college rom coms, so I could handle any situation with the grace of someone who’d been in it longer than 5 hours.

Something I didn’t account for was the silence of an empty building in a strange place. I’d made the genius decision to move in 4 days early and instead of the possibility I felt dreaming about my first night of college during quarantine, all I felt was lonely. I was curled up in a ball literally an hour after they left.

I called my mom in tears, snot covering 30% of my face and begged her to pick me up.

“Mom, this isn’t what I thought it was, I need to come home.”

“You’ve been there for 5 hours.”

“No one is HERE.”

“It’s 9:00.”

“Mom, I legitimately cannot do—”. A knock on the door.

Reader, sometimes when we’re about to give up the Universe (or whatever you believe in, even if it’s just entropy), steps in just as you’re taking a step back. If you’re lucky, that moment might just lead to something that’ll change your life.

My door wasn’t closed during this crash-out and was propped open on its own against a closet. In fact, our door (Rm. 506) was the only one on the floor that stayed open by itself. This led to a literal open-door policy down the line, which was set into motion by this one encounter.

In my doorway stood a blonde-haired, blue eyed skinny kid in dad shorts. His sunglasses were pushed to the top of his head. A literal Ken doll. His name was Kevin.

Kevin told me he was walking the halls looking for other people to talk to because he’d also moved in too early. He offered to introduce me to some other people he’d met in the building. It was a Tuesday, I was scared shitless that college would just be a repeat of high school, and my outfit still looked fantastic. What else was there to say but yes?

Kevin took me up to the roof where three other boys were sitting around a wooden table. Their names were Griffin, Lewis, and John. All of them, including Kevin had rooms on the 7th floor.

We did the college intro song and dance. You know the one,

Where are you from?

What’s your major?

Why [insert college name here]?

Kevin and I bonded when we realized his mother lived in the same town I grew up in (a town people from my own state couldn’t place). He visited there often but somehow, we never met. What were the odds? Then we played Uno.

If you take nothing from this story, understand that all great friendships and big romances start with Uno. At some point, I’d convinced them to let me shuffle. I didn’t actually know how but told them I did knowing it’d be a disaster. I’m a bit of a liar when it comes to a bit. In a non-serious situation, I will lie for a joke, and humor is my Achilles heel. Ironically, none of my exes were funny.

You know how I said the Universe likes to stick its grubby hands into our lives? Well in this moment, after being spared from allergies for three years, my body decided to tweak out. I sniffed then sneezed, and there went our unshuffled cards across the room. A disaster it was.

“Nice going, Sniffer”, Kevin had said. Just like that, no one used my real name for two and a half years.

Eventually we got bored sitting inside and John had seen on Snapchat there was a party happening across campus. They all wanted to go. I was apprehensive—what if the police showed up and we all got caught? I couldn’t start my first week of college in jail.

“Are you coming, Sniffer?”, Griffin had asked. They were standing near the door. Once in a while you’ll encounter times where a decision will mark who you’ve been versus who you want to be now. I hadn’t been in college 24 hours and the Universe was quietly asking who are you? My new life demanded an answer.

So, I made a choice. “HELL yes”, I’d said. Then we were out the door.

On the walk to the party, which took place in a dorm courtyard twenty minutes from our residence hall, John had converted his crisp, collared shirt to a crop top and played 90s hits through a speaker. The courtyard was packed; there were more students on campus than I thought.

Everyone was either chatting or dancing, all of us in shock to see so many people in one place after being cooped up for a year and a half. John and some other guy had become in charge of the music, shouting “We Are!” (a Penn State thing) in between songs. A large circle had formed, and two random dudes started break dance battling in the center of it. Campus police showed up right as one was finishing the worm.

The guys and I booked our asses out of there making a beeline for a steep hill leading to downtown. John (who is now one of the most promising emerging young physicists on the East Coast) never stopped playing music or untied his shirt.

“Literally what the hell happened tonight?”, I’d asked Kevin and Griffin filled with adrenaline, “I didn’t do any of this in high school.”

“Well, welcome to college, Sniffer”, Kevin had said.

After we’d been walking for 5 minutes, I realized the guys were all freaking out in excitement. When I turned around, there was a line of 30 or so other students behind us, hands to shoulders, singing along to John’s music and the five of us were at the head of it. I’d been soaking up the moment so much I didn’t even notice.

As we made our way to Weirdoughs (a now-closed pizza shop, infamous for both its roaches and pivotal role in all my stories), John put me on his shoulders as we chanted “We Are” for the 50th time that night. He was 6’1; I felt like I was on top of the world.

What comes up must come down however, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that everything had changed. Goodbye girl from high school who hyperventilated talking to more than four people, hello leader of a conga line. I wasn’t quite Dorothy, but I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

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