Leigh Alexander

No one is ‘shouting.’ No one is ‘being ironic,’ and those who comment on the tonal choices people make in the use of text just kind of seem really inhibited or legislative.

“w00t,” says the office ‘cool guy’, who likes to wear his plaid fedora on the group coffee outings while he explains joyfully to everyone about all the circa 2007 bands in which he is interested.

At some point, I learned something important: that being ill could dissolve the uncompromising infrastructure of your young life like so many bad dreams. Instantaneously, sympathy! Others to do for you what normally you were left alone to manage! And most importantly, liberty from obligation.

Already the air around me feels different. If you are a secular adult and you want to know limbo, stay in New York City for Christmas.

Your life becomes a constant progress of trying to sleep at night and work during the day — at least until you realize the utter impossibility of that endeavor, until you surrender to the fact that you’ll wake with full intention at 11 a.m. and instead spend four hours gazing at social media for some purpose you’ll justify to yourself somehow.

Sometimes I feel like wouldn’t Facebook be even better if you and I were the only ones on it, so that when it said I had seven notifications or nine or that I had two unread messages I could just be excited because it couldn’t be anyone but you.

There is a robot dinosaur asleep in my closet, with its eyes closed and a fine sheen of dust on its ridged back. I’m not even lying. I can hardly look at it because it makes me so sad.

Once when I was young I tied a bag around my head with a little string I knew I could break because I wanted to see how long I could stand it, the panicked clanging of oxygen-starved alarms throbbing inside my skull, knocking furiously at my chest as if some force was begging me, poor child, open the door to your lungs again. I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to see how close I dared walk to the threshold of actual death. Like it was just a country that I had never visited.

At some point, preferably in the evening when the desolation of night presses down on you — cars and the implacable noises of distant strangers, leftover smells of other people’s meals, the artificial tide of faraway cars ebbing and sighing — you will look around your place or residence and realize, dimly, that you’ll never be able to pull yourself together.

You can’t tell someone that you perused their Facebook profile, even though their profile was not private, i.e. clearly perfectly available to be perused by those curious about them [caveat: they’re dumb at the internet and don’t realize everyone can see everything they don’t designate behind privacy settings]…

Maybe we’re laughing about how are we going to get necessities like Bloody Mary drinks this weekend to veil, a little bit, our anxiety about what would we do if anything really bad happened. And do we know how to make those life or death calculations, and would we mean something a little bit more than we do if we had to?

Senior year. Everyone is turning eighteen. Everyone is applying to college. Everyone is very serious about their future adulthood. Everyone has bought Catcher in the Rye and it is changing their lives and then one day in English I say something like, “I think that book is pretty lame” and this one girl in soccer socks turns to me and she has the gall to go, “you’re so ignorant, Leigh.”