“What should we tell them you’re doing?” my mother asks over the phone.
It is the summer of 2014 and my last month in Montreal—the first time—the time I’m there for grad school. I am thirty-two years old and moving back to my childhood home (the place I have spent all my in-between years, all the figuring-it-out spots in my resume and my life). Everyone expects me to have a real game plan. Expects might be too strong of a word—hopes. Together, my parents hope. I have a master’s degree now and a plane ticket home and I think I have a plan, but I do not really have a plan. I have optimism and arrogance which can serve you well or ruin your life—it’s luck of the draw.
I have this dream that I’ll write a book and someone will want to publish it. I have a thousand things to say, some of which I’m certain are worth saying. I have the naïve belief that people have when they believe themselves uniquely talented. I have a desperate need to make something of myself. Maybe I have nothing at all. It’s too hard to say in this heat. Salty confidence drips down my back.
“Tell them I’m sweating,” I joke. When you’re fat, everything is always damp and just a little bit funny. Tell them that it’s hot here, what with the humidity and the dating eighteen-year-olds, and the terrible, terrible fear of never amounting to anything. Make a joke on my behalf. Tell them that you were kidding about their ages. Say, “I was just making a joke.” Say it laughing, “Never younger than twenty-one, that’s gross.” Never younger than twenty-one.
Dad chimes in on the phone (you must have it on speaker) and asks if age is searchable, asks if there is a box to check on the apps so I can stop collecting youth. He says it as a joke, and I tell you both that it’s not me. I say, “I haven’t searched for shit.” I look at my face in the mirror to see what young men must see: a leg up, a time capsule, discount Valentine’s Day chocolate. I say nothing.
Mom says, “I’ve been telling them that you’re writing and handing out resumes.”
“Good,” I say, “That’s the truth.” I reassure my mother that they can be proud of me now, their daughter with three degrees and no job lined up. To feel like such a loser with such accomplishments in this life is a real mindfuck. She reassures me that they’ve always been proud. I know it to be true even if I’m not sure I can be so proud of myself. Earning a master’s degree (in the arts, no less) at thirty-two doesn’t feel as bona fide as it should. I know people my age who own homes. I regularly google where is the cheapest place to live but no answer is ever cheaper than back at home with your parents.
Tell them that if a writer dies in the forest everyone hears it, but if I die in an apartment building it’s just called a sublet. Tell them that that you’re joking. Tell them that the famine is over. Tell them not to worry anymore. Stand in a coffee shop, on a golf course, at the greek restaurant I bussed tables at when I was sixteen. Tell them that I’m sweating. Say “It’s the best summer ever.” Say it loud and use your hands “BEST! SUMMER! EVER!” Say it again, no need to worry anymore (hand them my resume).
Tell them that I’m Hemmingway until I remind you how much I write about handjobs. Tell them that I’m Dostoyevsky’s right hand, jacking off Kerouac. Say, “You're going to change the world,” and mean it. Say it again. Use the Meisner technique. Say it until I believe you. When I’m hanging up the phone, whisper it again. Hope for osmosis. Hope for happiness. Hope for someone, maybe, just a little bit older.
Before I hang up, Dad sneaks in, “Don’t forget to at least look for jobs in Vancouver.” I must’ve scared him a bit with all my talk of moving to Romania or up north. I probably wasn’t serious, but you never know with me. One day I’m filled with fear and the next day the adventure starts. Brave and anxious in equal measure.
Tell them that I’m sweating. Tell them not to worry. Hand them my resume.
The summer after earning my master’s degree was as light as lint. I breathed with ease; I was optimistic and certain. The future seemed so effortless and guaranteed. I would be somebody now. I had done a thing of worth. But that’s not how life or worth works. Someone has to see value in you for you to have worth (your value is constant and of your own making but your worth—that’s something the market decides). The market for moderately educated fat women is not nearly as thriving as you’d think. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about my career or my dating prospects—the results were the same.
July came and I left. I packed what I could fit into two suitcases (and two boxes to ship) and sold everything else on craigslist (at rapidly declining prices directly linked to my terrible fear that I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it all before I left). By the final week I was basically giving it away for free (insert metaphor for my sex life). Nobody told me that I could just leave whatever I hadn’t sold in my apartment. Nobody told me that because you didn’t pay a deposit you could just up and leave, no fucks given. Instead, I let a string of strangers into my apartment for five bucks here (a lamp) and ten bucks there (my printer). I gave all the fucks I had stressing myself out so completely that I developed shingles two weeks before heading home. It was an absolute nightmare which, honestly, seemed a fitting way to leave Montreal. When I landed in Vancouver, my dad picked me up at the airport. Driving back to my parents’ house, in the town I had grown up in, I swore I wouldn’t stay long.
“A few weeks, maybe a few months, just until I figure things out,” I said.
Swiping right on Tinder, in my childhood bedroom, I felt like a real hero, a champion of the no-shame brigade, a real fucking patriot. I mean, do you understand the level of courage it takes to be a full-grown adult, swiping right on Tinder, knowing damn well you’re about to be back in your childhood bedroom and may or may not be swiping right on people you went to high school with or theoretically worse the younger siblings of people you went to high school with? Do you understand the sheer level of confidence and lack of self-doubt that takes? Was I strong of character or a beacon of chaos, honestly it was a bit hard to tell at the time but what was the worst that could happen?
Three days later my dad had a heart attack.
(He’s fine though. Don’t worry, he’s fine.) They put a stent in his heart, gave him some meds, and within a day or two he was back home with us.
Sitting in the front seat of the car that day, and every one that followed, it seemed much harder than it should be to breathe. “Stress,” is what my mother said. “Completely understandable.”
“Is it though?”
I wasn’t sure what I deserved to feel. After all, my heart wasn’t the one under attack. My Dad has and will always be one of the great lights of my life and while I’ve always known that the death of my parents would happen one day, his abrupt heart attack really put it all at the forefront of my mind. I just had to keep reminding myself that he was okay. He was okay. The next question was whether or not I would be?
Every new match on Tinder seemed to ask the same question. How was your weekend? Any big plans? Get up to anything fun this weekend? and I didn’t know how to say, my dad had a heart attack, and I am now completely untethered but like, without being a bummer, so I just unmatched them. One after another, I matched and then unmatched. Until there was enough distance. Until the question had a better answer. Until I could breathe in the front seat of the car.