Julie Beck

I grew up in a dorm basement, earlier than the typical narrative demands. At a middle school dance, decked out in glasses and pleated pants, I ducked and weaved among the rest of the nerds who were spending their summers taking mechanical engineering classes at MSU, desperately avoiding the only boy who wanted to dance with me.

A person is not a prize. You can’t earn or win them by being good enough, fast enough, smart enough or special enough. You can’t keep them on the mantle to remind you of how good, fast, smart or special you were. They do not prove your worth.

Start small, just the ones you can handle: sadness when someone dies in a movie, anger at tech support. Those are the ones that make sense, that go down smooth.

The premise is simple: you write your wishes on a balloon, and then you let them go, watching them float up into the sky until they’re out of sight. Part of me is tempted to self-effacingly snark at our suburban high-school earnestness, but you know what? I’m not going to. It was poignant. It was nice.

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you,” said Joseph Campbell. “You have to move to New York,” said all my journalism professors ever.

I know that I could just get them from UHaul. Or UPS. Or Ukraine. No, not Ukraine, that was a joke. But, seriously, I will be damned if I pay someone money for an empty cardboard shell. There has to be another way.

I don’t really like driving. I’d rather ride. In the summer with the windows rolled down and gusts of warm air rolling in, smelling like dirt, but not in an unpleasant way, or bundled up tight in the winter with the heat up high enough to make it cozy and drowsy inside – either is fine by me. I do prefer the nighttime though.

I realize I’ve forgotten my lunch. That’s okay, I’m too tired to be hungry. When I get to work, I’ll just stick a syringe into a can of Diet Dr. Pepper and mainline it into my bloodstream, fuel my body that way.

I suspected the garbage. We took it out. I suspected something rotten in the fridge. We found no mold. Because we were in college (read: gross) and because The Smell was an intermittent phenomenon, we let it slide. Until it started to get warm out.

I appreciate that the preponderance of insufficiently covered breasts has probably thrown your testosterone production into overdrive, but I’m sorry to inform you that this isn’t a candy store. You can’t just grab fistfuls of whatever looks good.