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019 - Testosterone Boys and Harlequin Girls Friday, August 15th, 2014. Panic! At The Disco’s The Gospel Tour, Mizner Park Amphitheater, Boca Raton, Florida. Only my second concert, the first having been Kanye West’s stop in Detroit with Kendrick Lamar the December before. I wasn’t the fan of live music that I am now — hell, I wasn’t even much of a music fan. The same couple albums were the background to workouts, and that was about it. I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity however, to fulfill the prepubescent dreams of an intermediate schooler riding around in his older brother’s mufflerless Ford Taurus, Brendon Urie barely audible over the undampened roar of the four-cylinder engine. I didn't even know they were still a band; it was a chance banner ad showing concerts in my area that informed me the scene sadboy soundtrack to my middle-school years still survived. We arrived in Boca Raton; I was buzzing with excitement, ready to mos with Myspace misfits, the nineteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds who once haunted Hot Topics, painted their nails black, and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas in the summertime. To me they were frozen in pre-2010 carbonite: the weird Victorian clothes from their music videos, nonsensical full sentences as song titles on their debut album. I apparently was behind the times. Strolling out onto the grass of the amphitheater, I wasn’t met by a vanguard of veteran vamps, instead by... preteens. As if the demographic I expected had all jumped into a time machine to experience Panic! at its peak. I saw more parents than peers. V and I towered over the crowd of teen toddlers. Were these kids even alive on 9/11? Where were all the people who scoured the internet for cool Myspace backgrounds, navigating the HTML and setting their favorite songs to autoplay on their profile, carefully curating their Top 8 and posting vague, vapid updates to their friends? Where are the kids who bought studded belts and mismatched Vans with neon laces? Where was the Pete Wentz eyeliner? Never having tapped out shorthand flip-phone text messages that cost five cents to send or receive — I bet they would think VHS is a High School. Generation gap aside, the show was great. This little band of nobodies from Ohio opened, you’d know them better as Walk The Moon, a group headlining festivals five years later. I didn’t know half the songs Panic! At The Disco played, having come from recent albums, but all in all, musically-speaking, it was excellent. Except I was on edge the whole time. V and I were surrounded by people jumping up and down and screaming, but as always she was in her hyper-reserved state of wanting to be looked at, but not looked at. Even at a concert, where there are literal spotlights pointed at a raised platform, she still felt the bright bulbs of social anxiety fixed on her. In private she was open, loud, silly, talkative, but in public she immediately retreated. It made me feel like I couldn’t be myself either. The goofy, outgoing boyfriend was not the public look she wanted. I think she wanted to be perceived as the unapproachable couple — quiet, black-clad, with an air of “we’re better than you and we know it”. All we were missing was a couple cigarettes and foreign accents. In the car, driving back, with a sense of poise and rationality, our incompatibilities lit up like an X-Ray. It’s one thing to have your own perceived limitations, but V’s were so all-reaching that they affected everyone secondhand. There was a gravity to them. A role I needed to play — I was beginning to feel like a bit-part extra in the movie of her life. Were we ever going to be exciting? Spontaneous? Dance like nobody’s watching? Run through the rain back to the car laughing, kissing once we got to safety, our wet hair stuck to our faces, clothes drenched, makeup washing away? Was I ever going to feel free?I effectively lived for the hours of about 10 PM until 2 AM, and then 1 or 2 PM until 5. In the narrow venn-diagram where we were at home, and her parents were asleep or at work. The only times when Secret Boyfriend and public perception weren’t influencing who I could be. Everything else was a Stalinist state, worried I might end up in the Gulag, guilty for crimes of unedited and unacceptable existence. So I made a plan. When I got back to Michigan, I moved into a new place with six other guys, a cramped section of a house on **** Street near the **** with bedrooms about the size of the cupboard under the stairs on Privet Drive. South Campus had a totally different feel than the apartment complex on ****. Kids on the east side of the Diag disappeared into high-rises or frat houses, but down here it seemed more like that picture of Americana I had expected. Less house-on-the-hill, more Animal House. Especially during football season, there’s something going on all the time. Things quiet down slightly Monday through Wednesday, but by Thursday it’s back in full swing once again. Our Y-Chromosome compound consisted of my sophomore year roommate and friend-from-across-the-hall, two other kids who also went to the same high school as my roommate and I, and two of their friends. This felt like college. Inadequate space, smoke detectors that blared if someone even though about burnt food (but someone slept through bong rips), piling into one car to go to Meijer, neighbors, tailgates, characters, conflict, and compromise. I guess I’m getting ahead of myself; I still haven’t told you the plan. The plan? I was going to show V the value of work. It seems incredibly petty now, but at the time I really thought I could change her. That I could shake her out of whatever stasis she was in so we could actually have a life together beyond her parents’ house. **** had a fashion magazine, and I went to the informational meeting, looking like something the cat dragged in and dropped right onto a J Crew catalog. Boots, tight black jeans and a leather jacket, I found a seat formself among the cardigans, flowy tops, and cuffed khakis with Stan Smiths. Being with V gave me the confidence to unleash my final form upon the real world. Behold, the edge lord. The charmander years of closeted goth kid were over, no more Puff the Magic Dragon, your boy was now a bona fide Charizard, Smaug busting out of the Lonely Mountain to fuck up your day. So just sit your ass down and stay the fuck out of my way. The dam had broken, the Kraken released, our relationship had shot me right past all the pumpkin spice girls and basic boys. A monster had been created — two decades of anxious conformity gave way to a pyroclastic flow of fuck you, erupting in rebellion. I was going to break into this fashion scene and show V just what she could do if she snapped out of it. I was going to run the four-minute mile and disprove her delusions. I looked like  got lost on my way to an anarchist rally and accidentally stumbled into an Anthropologie, but I ended up on the marketing and fashion teams. At the first fashion team meeting, I remember walking into the small classroom on the third floor of **** Hall, the sole representative of the unfairer sex. Then came one of the directors, who was a fellow male, and fashionably late, another brother burst in, backpack and all, high-cheekboned, looking like he just ran half a mile to not be aggressively tardy. The meeting began, the strange way they all do amongst college students; the people in charge going over the basics via PowerPoint as if it were a quarterly report, trying to maintain a professional air, even though we are all doing this for free, and for whom getting wasted weekend ranks higher than whatever outlined responsibilities are on the slides the presenters slapped together during a fifteen-minute break between Psych 201 and Comm 132. We were going to be broken into groups the next meeting, and our job was to conceptualize, style, and execute a photoshoot every month, scouting for models within the student body, partnered up with people from the photo and design teams to round it all out. The meeting wrapped, and as I started for the stairs, Cheekbone Boy jogged to catch up to me. “You like Kanye?” he asked, gesturing to my shirt, one I purchased at that first-ever concert I told you about earlier. We got to talking and introduced ourselves, his name was Jack. He was a freshman and we started brainstorming ideas — that we should ask to be put in the same group to focus on bringing more menswear into a magazine comprised of and marketed to almost exclusively women. It sounded like a great idea to me, and we exchanged numbers before parting ways; he had to catch the long bus ride back to North Campus. Oh, to be a freshman again. Where the shiny veneer of college life hasn’t yet been eroded by cheap vodka and repeated disappointment. Speaking of cheap vodka, let’s return to that house. Our next-door neighbors were PhD candidates in partying, all from **** City, and all names starting with K — three girls, Kim, Kell, and Kristen — the midwestern spin-off of the Kardashians that didn’t make it past pilot season. They say it’s always five o’clock somewhere and I think Jimmy Buffett was talking about their house. On any night of the week, we could be roused from whatever activities we were absorbed in by Kelly’s shrill cry of “Heyyyy neiiighhborrrrrrrs” after two tequilas too many. Their house was bigger, nicer, and they were the socialites of ****, never missing an occasion, always hosting something every weekend with a rotating studio audience pulled from their immense circle of friends. It was an injection of socialization I desperately needed. Two future dentists, a prodigy programmer, econ major, two directionless humanities students, and Dave. Dave got the boot after failing out of his sophomore year, but stayed in ****, despite being out-of-state, on the fence about whether to go home or to Community College, and spent hi

018 - Whole Lotta Love In late July, I went back to spend a month — yes, a month — with her. The change in her parents’ perception of me ratcheted up one more level; my stock continued to rise and I could feel them trying to divine just what V and I were meant to be. In the dark about the romantic aspects of our relationship, V told me that before I arrived, her mom had broached the subject, asking V if she had feelings for me beyond the platonic. V shrugged it off and said no, and in her playfully innocent tone, her mom replied “Okayyyyy, but he is pretty cute”. Her dad played the other side of the ball. One Saturday, V and her mom had to go somewhere — I think to buy birthday presents for somebody — and V’s dad asked if I wanted to go to the Taproom with him. With nothing better to do, I agreed. It wasn’t anything fancy, nor was it a dive. A concrete floor covered in metallic resin, a long bar against the North wall, and a dozen small tables surrounded by stools, this high-ceilinged establishment was purely functional. Nestled in a strip mall, it carried a dozen rotating local craft beers, which you could also bring home by the growler. The lone television was playing a rerun of a college football game from the previous season with the sound off. Nearly alone, her dad and I ordered our first drinks and I went to the jukebox, one of the 21st-Century-Download-Our-App type. I picked a half-dozen of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs, and as I walked back to the bar, the opening riff to Whole Lotta Love rang out over our deserted watering hole. He asked if I put it on, and prompted a discussion of classic rock: Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Stones — all things I grew up on from my dad. One beer became two, became three, and his liquid courage soon took over as navigator. He put his arm around my shoulders and turned down a road of commendation, voicing his approval for me, ending on the point that I was the kind of man he hoped V would find for herself. It felt awkward. I didn’t show it, but I was immensely uncomfortable with any praise or flattery of myself at that age. I was also secretly dating and fucking his daughter, so...yeah. V’s parents were desperate, I think. I don’t think they knew what to do about their twenty-year-old daughter. Their son had everything going for him — college, in the Marines, had a car, self-sufficient — but V was another story entirely. One of the greatest hurdles they faced was her utter lack of ability to reasonably respond to criticism. Even the most well-phrased constructive comment from a  loving place registered as an attack. V put loyalty above all else. If you do something for her once, expect to do it always. If she had a problem with someone, or something, you had to have it too. She would get into fights with her parents, and would reprimand me for continuing to be nice to them, failing to give them the same cold shoulder she was. She and her brother once were in the middle of an argument and she mispronounced a word — both he and I laughed, the stupid circumstances of their petty squabble defused by by her foible. That should have been good, right? She later scolded me in private, how could I take his side, laughing at her? My compromise was then to plead the fifth any time objectivity ran perpendicular to V. Any time she found herself in a familial disagreement, I simply kept my mouth shut and opinions to myself, because nearly every time I agreed with them. While not always perfect angels descending to deliver the good news, they weren’t the enemies V made them out to be. They were trying to help, but V’s meter did not often register their intentions properly. She once became very angry at her mom after her mom inquired as to when V would be ready to start driving school — politely. Instead of hearing the true intent, which was “Hey, it would be a good idea to take steps toward independence and agency soon”, V’s brain rewrote it as ‘Yo, you lazy good-for-nothing child, are you ready to grow the fuck up or not?” V lashed out at the very people who tried to help her the most, and did not have a strong grasp of the concept of tough love. Not even tough love — if it was a steak, maybe medium-well. Perfectly palatable, but to V it had to be rare. She truly, and it pains me to commit this into writing, wanted to do nothing herself. If someone else could do it or pay for it or arrange it or plan it, she wanted them to. And if they turned it around and suggested maybe she should, that was an attack. “Do you not care about me?” I think as a coping mechanism, she developed a bizarre system of preposterous absolutes. A system of evers and nevers that did have a fair deal of logical soundness, but zero practical effectiveness. It eliminated all possible variables that could lead to the ridicule she so feared. That was its purpose. But the byproduct was entitlement. I remember, venting to me about that driving school debacle, V said there was no point to her even getting a license, because her parents couldn’t afford a car for her. I disagreed, sure they could scrape together a couple grand for a journeyman’s jalopy, but she replied in disbelief: “You think I would drive some shitty ten-year-old car? No way. I want it to be new, and black. Like a Tahoe or something. So nobody can say shit to me.”If V could have laughed at herself, if she could have taken herself less seriously, if she could have let the little things go, I think she would have had a happy life. But like all of us, she was her own worst enemy. Just as I was mine. While I didn’t know it at that time, the wheels were already coming off our relationship by the end of that summer. I had started doing medical studies to make cash on the side, a hundred dollars here and there to support my frequent Florida flights and time away from work. I was spending one quarter of my time in Miami, so work-study alone wouldn’t cut it. V wasn’t doing...anything. She would wake up at whatever-the-fuck o’clock, then spend the day scrolling through Facebook, online window-shopping for things she couldn’t afford, to later beg her parents to buy, playing World of Warcraft, and watching TV. I am not here to shit on anyone’s hobbies or pursuits. While prevailing attitudes have changed greatly in the last decade and half-decade about video games, I will still always go to bat for my fellow keyboard warriors. I don’t really play games much anymore, but the friends and memories I have from losing myself in Warcraft will be something I forever hold dear. Like drugs or any other dopamine pursuit we unfulfilled primates use to supplement our life, it’s not the game, it’s the player. It’s not the drug, it’s the user. V was doing fuck all with her life. She got me back into the game briefly, before Spring Break when I retired once more. It just wasn’t fun for me — my glory days of obsessive play, putting in the hours to do all the things and be the best were past; the zeitgeist of that game was long elapsed, and it felt boringly repetitive. Remember when Arena Football was a thing? That’s what it felt like.  I had found better ways of pushing and challenging myself as an adult. Things that had more staying power than a handful of pretty pixels or inter-nerd bragging rights. In the five years I played that game, my focus was always social, it was about making friends, having fun, playing a game. Escaping from the real world for a night. It’s why I have such fond memories and still talk to and hang out with the people I met as a fourteen-year old. For V, it was very real. Much like away from the keyboard, her desktop disposition took things deadly serious. She would meet new people and make friends, but then maybe they wouldn’t be online when she was or they’d forget to show up, or they’d go do something with someone else, and she’d lose it. It was Mean Girls with swords and spells. Drama followed her everywhere as she drove people away. Her desire to do and acquire everything seemed exhausting. We are talking about one-percent drop chances on things you can only kill once a week, and like a job she had a schedule. Hours and hours of time spent for digital dice rolls that might take months, if not a year or more, to come out in her favor. Sure, if she had been having fun, like most people who play video games, it would be a different story. But it was an obsession. For the uninitiated, I will give you the most boiled-down version of World of Warcraft: every six months or so, new content comes out, and your group of ten friends log on at the same time each week to try and kill all the bosses and collect all the new items. Those who do it better and faster get to stroll around the in-game world with the inflated electronic ego of being a cut above the rest, until the next update when all you did previously becomes yesteryear’s news. If that isn’t the opiate for insecurity, I don’t know what is. It’s a microcosm of the real world, where you can bask in the glory of success in a linear system with clearly defined objectives and singular indicators of accomplishment and status. It’s why for me, as a fifteen and sixteen-year old, I would sometimes spend upwards of thirty to forty hours a week playing. Because I could run away from the things I struggled to control. I could hide from my failures, and instead use my standing in a fantasy world to subsidize that lack of self-satisfaction. As a teenager, that makes some sense. Life is awkward, you’re not in control, everything that “matters” won’t mean anything in just a couple years — you’re still in training for adult life; the clock hasn’t started; you don’t yet have agency. Like modeling or being thin, it was a pursuit of perfection. Of immunity. So like a Disney Princes, she would be the invulnerable envied entity. As with her other endeavors, she took the path of least resist

017 - Ballerina Tea I only saw V naked two times — the first being the first time we had sex, and the second when she was walking out of the bathroom after taking a shower, and in one smooth flourish I pulled the towel from her body like a magician’s tablecloth covered in china. Except I wasn’t met with stunned applause. She was stunned alright, but neither wonder nor amazement filled her eyes. It was venom. Betrayal. She tried to cover herself, but her two arms were not enough to hide behind. “What is wrong with you?!” she snapped, snatching the towel from my hands, quickly rewrapping herself and marching toward the stairs. I was trying to be playful, to be fun. I wanted to show her how beautiful she was to me. At home, V wore exclusively old shirts from her dad. Two-X on her small frame, she disappeared under them. That’s how she hid. I didn’t know it then, but her choice of clothing wasn’t solely for comfort, but also protection. V didn’t own a single pair of pants. No jeans. Only skirts. Sitting on her bed watching her get ready, she’d put on a skirt, still wearing a tent-like t-shirt that covered her from knee to neck. Then I’d have to turn around and face the wall as she removed her regalia and put on whatever top she was going to wear. I tried to change her mind, to tell her how gorgeous I thought she was. How perfect. I may as well have been speaking a foreign language. Despite a love for fashion, V owned very few clothes. A dozen outfits, basically. Any sort of form-fitting bottom was out of the question, hence the skirts. Because she hated her thighs; she thought they were too wide. V was a willowy white girl — they weren’t. I remember floating the idea of black jeans, how well they’d go with her wardrobe, and being categorically shot down. The skirts had to be high-wasted as well. Her hips, her waist, her thighs — she said they looked fat. Bitch, I know what fat is and you are not it. She complained that her shoulders were too broad, that she looked like a man. It was as if I could see color and she couldn’t. I tried to describe what I saw, the vivid greens and blues, but to her, the mirror held only a grey, lifeless portrait. That was a distance that could never be closed. I had no idea how to feel — how can this person not let me in? Of all the people on this planet, how can I not console her? How can that doubt remain? How can there be such a broad and deep line in the sand? It was no line, it was a canyon. Even when we had sex, she tried to cover as much of herself as possible. Shirt staying on, or pulling the blankets over her abdomen or lower back; she wanted to be an object of desire, but as invisible as possible. Why won’t you let me see you? V’s body dysmorphia was two-fold. It was, like many insecurities, planted in those awkward and cruel years of pubescence. Girls at her middle school and high school often bullied each other about their bodies. So much so that V began to take drastic action. For a very long period, she subsisted on a diet of rice cakes and “ballerina tea” — the nice term for “shit your pants detox drinks” that Instagram models sell nowadays. She would take laxatives at night before school; the only way she could feel “skinny” was if her whole body was empty. Long-term use wreaked havoc on her digestive system, as her tolerance and dosages increased. Honestly, I don’t know where her parents were in all that. If they knew, if they enabled it, if they looked the other way, or if they tried to help. When I met her, she was twenty, and she suffered terrible bouts of stomach pain almost every time we ate. I imagine they were largely physical, but likely had a psychosomatic component as well. Any time we went out to eat, she would curl up for hours after, immobilized, capable of little more than keeping her eyes open to watch a movie. I don’t know if V’s pursuit of modeling was in spite of the bullying, or to spite her bullies, but she nonetheless developed a need for validation. To stand above the rest. To prove something to others, to be seen as greater than. If you don’t know already, that is a philosophy doomed to fail. Destined to lead only to chronic unfulfillment. Like trying to outrun a treadmill. When I met her, V was — in her words — “in-between agencies”. Her last trip to Milan had not gone well: she made no money, lived in a cramped apartment with five other girls, and was largely ignored by her management. She didn’t seem to be looking for new work though, which I thought strange. Modeling was the only thing she wanted to do, so why was she sitting idly, letting time pass? I asked her once, completely ignorant to the industry at that time, and I believed her answer. That it was hard to find time for one of her parents to take her to Miami for casting calls, that it’s a long process, that there were some things she needed to do first... those things were true in a sense, but they weren’t what actually stood in her way. I think she was afraid. Afraid to walk into an agency, and have some guy in a tight black v-neck look at her portfolio and say no. Afraid they may not accept her measurements, that maybe they too would think poorly of her things or waist. Maybe they’d say she had broad shoulders. Afraid to stand in front of an emotionless panel in nothing but a swimsuit and heels, hoping they would validate and accept her. Afraid that she wouldn’t make it, afraid to try again, afraid to fail and lose that dream. In professional purgatory, on Schrödinger’s Runway, she could still cling to that dream. She had been in a couple of small fashion week shows, some indie magazines, and had earned her coveted title. It was not easy — she told me stories of hellish gigs, packed on a bus with no air conditioning driving through Turkey for an AXE Body Spray campaign, subsisting on only McDonald’s, trying to lose weight while the old, madamely manager poked at their stomachs and demanded they find another ten pounds to shed. Having to go out to clubs in Milan to earn her keep and be hot-girl wallpaper for the VIP section, so ugly rich men would waste money on bottle service in the hopes that they could woo one of the models with the content of their wallets. Managers who tried to have sex with her, then kicked her out when she refused, the catty squabbles between models as they shared unbearable living conditions, fighting for dreams that may or may not every come true. Her sole income was an allowance from her parents. She didn’t get some minimum wage work to stack up a few sheckles for herself. She refused. She couldn’t imagine being seen like that. She worked at Hollister in High School, and the idea of people — chiefly other women — coming in and passing judgement on her, real or imaginary, was unbearable to her. That was the greatest wedge driven between us, her insecurity. Having to constantly be tuned in to the imaginary monsters she saw projected in the world. I couldn’t open my car door before she did. We had to do it at the same time. I had to be on guard to alert her if there were creases in her eyeshadow, or if her lipstick was wearing off, that her skirt wasn’t bunching... it was exhausting. Couldn’t walk too fast or too slow, I couldn’t relax. In V’s mind, the spotlight was on her at all times, and the cameras never stopped rolling. Not in the glamorous, paparazzi way either. More like the hacked webcam, Big Brother, CCTV way. As if the whole world tuned in to her version of the Truman Show every night, picking her apart, burning each misstep moment into their memory and definition of her. As a nineteen-year old, I didn’t have the perception, experience, or communication skills I do now. I tried to minimize the perceived threat she felt, to explain that the eyes and minds of the world didn’t work the way she assumed. Like a dog on the Fourth of July, she was convinced it was the end of the world. She saw no other explanation. No logic or plea from me could change that. High alert was the norm. I adapted, I grew numb to it. Like her, that high frequency slowly became my baseline, and I found myself bending and twisting to meet the needs of that mold. I was insecure too; mine simply stayed further under the surface. Mine wasn’t public, it was private. I didn’t have haunted memories that made me afraid of others, I had the grinding self-doubt that keeps you awake at night. V eliminated some of that — a great trump card for my own self-loathing was our relationship. Look at me, with the gorgeous Miami model girlfriend. That has to be worth at least something. But unfortunately, I let it become everything. I returned to Michigan in mid-May 2014, with confidence unlike any time in my life. But it was superficial. Since I wasn’t taking summer classes, I no longer had a membership to the school gyms, and with my sole financial focus being the ability to fly back and forth to Miami as often as possible, I laced up my shoes and ran. That summer, I was either working or running. Long ago, I told you how weight loss was the ultimate drug for me as a Freshman. That had taken a backseat my sophomore year, replaced by lifting weights and getting stronger. I was about to relapse. I remember V once saying how she liked that skinny, rockstar-body look. She wasn’t terribly turned on by muscular men, and that off-hand comment burrowed into my brain. As did her personal obsession with thinness. In May of 2014, I weighed one-hundred and sixty-five pounds. By August, I’d be one-thirty-five. All that work in the weight room was about to be erased. It started out with a run around the block, then it was a mile, then two, then five, then eight. Every time I stopped, I’d say no, just one more block, one more lap, one more mile. I started eating less — first it was fifteen-hundred calories a day, then twelve-hundred, then eight-hundred, and even sometimes five-hundred.

016 - Secret Boyfriend May 1st, 2014. Away I go, back to Florida. My sophomore year was officially over, and off I went. That year was so strange. The place I escaped to first had now become undesirable. Call it wanderlust or withdrawal, rambling or retreat, the rope I had tied to pull me ashore had begun to drag me deep under the surface. Over time, **** Lake became a haunted place. A time capsule of bad memories and squandered years. **** was becoming that too, in its own way. I was about to be an upperclassman, and all I wanted was a reset button. Some way to start over. Florida was the closest thing. I had become averse to going out or partying; I was going to the gym so much that alcohol began to represent nothing more than empty calories and wasted time. The winter that year was also the coldest I can remember, so that helped seal the deal on many a Friday night. Instead, I spent more and more of those nights staying up talking to V. Getting to know more and more about her. V’s a Scorpio, to the T. Fiery, stubborn, not-so-forgiving at times, loyal, and a rather sexual being. All but the latter-most of those traits didn’t pose much of a problem, but the last was — as you know — effectively outer space to me. So I lied about it, shocking, I know. I was incredibly taken by V, and our connection had only continued to strengthen after I visited the first time. I left a note for her parents on the table, thanking them so much for their generosity, among other things. Apparently they were so moved by it that her dad even choked up while reading it. Her tone began to change and I even received a couple “I miss you” texts over those two months. I had to lie to her about my sexual history. The alternative was coming clean as some meek virgin who crisscrossed the country to come see her. You get the idea. The poor kid, the fat kid, the loser, the no-life, the unconfident, the unwanted, the unloved, the unworthy — those labels had hung around my neck my whole life, suffocating me and keeping me from ever feeling comfortable in my own skin or my own story. There was no way I was going to let my lack of sexual experience scare V off. Which it totally would have. It’s not like I wasn’t prepared, either. I had been fully committed to doing my best to catch up over the preceding years. I remember finding Reddit threads like “What do you find most attractive about the opposite sex?”, or “What non-sexual gesture makes you swoon?”, and reading the female users’ replies, for which rolled-up sleeves and putting your hand on the small of their back to guide them through a crowd ranked highly. I sought out what women liked, both inside and outside the bedroom. I knew that one day I’d enter the arena of sexual intercourse and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to make the best first impression I could. A lot of people’s first encounters with sex are awkward, intimidating, and short. As time dragged on, and I neared twenty — rightly or wrongly — I felt the goalposts moving further and further. The social acceptability of my situation was dwindling more and more as time wore on, and as a man, there’s a lot expected of you. I did all I could to be ready to meet those expectations. I don’t remember a whole lot from that two-week trip in May. One evening, I have no idea how far into my stay it was, laying there in her bed, V turned to me and asked “What do you think about us, well...being boyfriend and girlfriend?” SKKKRRRRRRTTTTTTI was dumbfounded. I never even remotely considered V might be the one to break that ice first. I ecstatically voiced my support for her idea, and let her know for the first time how I truly felt. One thing lead to another, and luckily I had been presciently hopeful enough to put a couple condoms in my suitcase. All in all, I’d objectively say I gave a satisfactory first showing in the new frontier of sexual intercourse, but it wasn’t without its share of stumbles. Being the consummate gentleman, I prefaced penetration with oral sex. I’m sorry for the clinical terminology, but there’s really no sexy synonym for cunnilingus — eating out, going down, giving head — they all seem excessively blunt or juvenile to me. Whatever you want to call it, it was short-lived. She pulled me away and said it felt weird. Welp, I guess my research had mislead me. I will fully admit that I probably wasn’t the Michael Jordan of clitoral stimulation, but I had done the assigned reading, and gone over the material a couple times. Wikipedia had helpful diagrams. With the previews fast-forwarded, it was time for the feature film presentation. With the sole focus of hanging in there like the kitten-on-a-branch motivational poster, reciting the names of presidents in ascending chronological order to distract myself, I am pleased to announce that there was no incidental release on my part. Instead, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in, V just said “Whenever you’re ready, you can finish. Don’t worry, it’s not happening for me.”Well this wasn’t on the study guide. I had a rather realistic view of sex — it wasn’t a thirty-second scene from a romantic comedy, nor was it the hyper-staged world of pornography where some girl exclaims her “orgasm” to the world with a boom mic six inches above her head and a guy who smells like stale cigarettes thrusting a camera in her face under bright set lights, while she fails about like an electrocuted fish to entertain the absurd fantasies of ignorant male sexuality.It was my first question after things wrapped up: was it me, was it something I did, what can I do...but it wasn’t. V informed me she had never had an orgasm. Ever. Not with a partner, not with a little bit of healthy self-exploration, I was shocked. Not even on your own?“No, I think I get close, and it feels like I really have to pee, and then my arm always gets too tired.”She told me the closest she had ever been was one time when she was in Milan, a little drunk, and this really hot — and apparently dexterous — Italian guy demonstrated his manual deftness in the bathroom stall of a night club. I didn't know what to think. It was like my bar-mitzvah happened the same day as the 2016 election. Congratulations, you’re a man now — wait, what the fuck? He actually won?! There was no time for celebration, we had to figure out what the hell Russia was up to — collusion! Meddling! Voter Fraud! Was it my responsibility to figure this out? Did it lay on my shoulders to deliver her that tsunami of oxytocin like a carnal courier? Is it Prime Eligible? I was too embarrassed or afraid to ask, and in my own hubris, assumed it my duty to liberate her from unfulfilling fornication. Hindsight is 20/20, and in reality probably much sharper than that. Caught up in the emotional maelstrom of young love, I made a lot of mistakes. Necessary ones. Lessons I’d have to learn at some point. Lessons most people probably learned far earlier than I did, but no matter. The nominal nature of our relationship changed things. But it also didn’t. We were dating, but we weren’t. Remember that surprisingly-liberal sleeping-in-the-same-bed thing? Well, that only worked with the plausible deniability of me as a platonic friend, not as her boyfriend. So to her family, for our own sake, the relationship had to be secret. That was hard for me. Sure, when I was in Michigan, I could proclaim to the world my love for that woman. But even out to dinner alone, if we were somewhere someone might recognize here, covert once more. Behind enemy lines. I’d tempt fate, stealing little kisses when her parents were out of the room, or holding her hand in public — things that V sometimes didn’t mind, but would other times frustrate her in a playful way. I had built up two decades of romantic resources that longed to find an outlet. And unfortunately, the flow of them was limited when we occupied the same space as her parents. The sexual side of things became complicated as well, V often being worried and stopping to make sure there wasn’t the sound of footsteps downstairs, or that the bed wasn’t creaking. It was like having an Associate’s Degree — sure, it’s something, but also not exactly a crowning achievement. That deep connection with someone, that affirmation — I finally had it, but with an asterisk. Like a timeshare. A relationship on eggshells. It was nobody’s fault; it was simply the nature of the situation. If I was seen as a suitor, that whole place would’ve been locked down. If I had been found out, that would’ve been curtains. If we had been caught in the act? Lord have mercy.V was always my girlfriend to everyone in my world. But in her world, I spent most of the time as her friend, like a sucked-in stomach, waiting to be alone so I could relax and let it all hang out. The secret boyfriend.Covert courtship aside, our relationship brought us much closer together, and dissolved the barriers from before. I would get to know who V was, I would get to know her story. I would learn just why she did the things she did and where her fears came from. I’d learn more about myself; I’d feel free for the first time. Empowered, confident, valued, attractive — all thanks to V.

015 - Armchair Historians Not much changed from there. My final few days were filled with more excursions and movies and time together, all underpinned with the ambient buzzing of sexual and romantic tension. We took a day trip to Miami, and I couldn’t believe how the hell that place even functioned. Driving around in her mom’s 2010 Ford Explorer, I felt like a schmuck. Every other car was an import, none more than a few years old at most, many worth more than a Michigan mortgage. I guess Rick James was right — cocaine is a helluva drug. We went to Vizcaya, an estate-turned-museum on the water some industry magnate had built in the style of Versailles, complete with sprawling gardens, exotic furnishings, themed rooms, and all the things you’d expect from pre-depression decadence. Miami is just crazy. Everyone looks like they're on the way to close their next big deal, or to polish off the better part of a bottle of Moët & Chandon over a late lunch. Downtown at least, that is. Everyone looks like they’re expecting to be seen. The clothes, the cars, the way they walk — I was starting to get why Miami had the reputation it did. People were there to make a lot of money, or spend a lot of money, no middle ground. Success and excess. But before too long, it was time to go back to the snowy Robocop dystopia that was Detroit. Back to awkward academia. My life was fracturing more and more. Before I met V, my social life was split between local and virtual. Now even more of my social life, and possibly a budding romance had taken up even more real estate. I was a stranger to everyone. Like after Vegas, the truth once more seemed too heavy a burned to disclose to my friends. To them, I met V through mutual friends, that she had had some modeling gig in Detroit and that’s how we got acquainted...all bullshit. I was tired of my life being qualified by adjectives that made it less-than. “Online” friends. Friends “from the game”. Why the qualifiers? Why the labels, why the categorizations? I was a stranger to my family as well. When I left that factory and that house and all those problems **** Lake seemed to dredge up, I was fucking gone. I scheduled myself out of family functions. Working over school breaks, trying to limit my holiday stints to at-most a seventy-two-hour flyby, where I could be back in **** before I felt like I had even left. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing with my life. Nothing stuck. I guessed I was going to wind up a History major, and with it, who knows what I’d do. I was nearly failing German 102, and losing all motivation for anything scholastic. I can count the classes I gave a shit about in college on one hand. Every semester I’d pore over the course catalog, seeing classes whose descriptions really interested me, that seemed like something that would finally hold my attention and make me show up. It wasn’t until my senior year that I had a class before 11 AM, or on Fridays. My meager harvest of givable fucks existed between the hours of noon and six, Monday to Thursday. For me, classes were nearly all the same. Professors write some brief description drawing you in, thinking on the other side of their door lays a great font of knowledge so enthralling that one can’t help but be engrossed by the information to come — until two weeks in when you’re just reading more and more pages of what someone else wrote, so you can have two things to say about it in class, while ninety-percent of the students who occupy your class can’t muster so much as one original thought, usually choking out little more than a rephrasing of someone else’s comment. You would think that if someone dedicated their lives to one narrow subject, they’d at least be able to inject the slightest bit of personality into a fucking class. But in the bulk of cases, that simply didn’t happen. To make matters worse, people who study history make class time unbearable. Let me break down the archetypes.The first, and most egregious offenders are the armchair historians. Usually white men lacking in social skills or awareness, these keepers of the Neckbeard Chronicles find it important to interrupt the lecture to mention tangentially-related events, in an attempt to impress the professor or fellow students with their tertiary knowledge — far too often related to military history. Be prepared for some “Well, actually” and for everything to somehow circle back to Nazi Germany in World War II. I’m serious — the Nazis found their way into every history class I took, even one about pre-modern Southeast Asia. Most likely seeing Hitler as a “misunderstood” figure, with many notable qualities left out of mainstream historical accounts, these insufferable validation-seekers will make you wince every time their hands go up, and can often be found holding the teacher up after class, trying to build rapport and be seen as a cut above the simple scholars who comprise the rest of the student body.Next is another awareness-less individual, usually a class of twenty to thirty will have at least five, who madly scrawl down every word, and are so focused on keeping pace they don’t actually take in anything that’s being said, or develop any sort of sense as to what is or isn’t important. This breed of pupil is so prevalent that every professor begins to annotate their lectures, saying “and you don’t need to write this down” before the less-important sections. Never having had to think for themselves, the students inevitably begin to question everything: “Do we need to know this?”, “Can you repeat that?”, “I’m sorry what was that?”Yo bitch, just pay attention and write down the key points and you’ll be fine. This isn’t stenography. Lastly, you have the tactless, clueless student who stumbled in to take the class as an elective. Asking such questions as “So...what exactly is going to be on the midterm?”, or “So...is there going to be a study guide for the final?”such people have zero regard for professors as anything more than glorified spoon-feeders, whose sole purpose is to “Here comes the airplane!” a puree of answers into their eagerly-awaiting mouths. As if a tenured educator will suddenly abandon their teaching methods — “Well Chad, no one’s ever asked me what the essay questions will be, so here you go. Everyone gets an A.” What bothered me so much was how disinterested in learning these people were. They talked to hear themselves speak, or alternatively never paid attention, had nothing of value to add, and were more worried about their grades or chumming it up with a professor than actually gaining something that they might find useful outside the classroom. I walked out of several history classes, and was asked to drop one after I involuntarily exclaimed “Jesus fucking Christ” when a kid managed to shoehorn in American Military Strategy during a conversation on the Moors’ conquest of Iberia in the eighth century. One professor had to rewrite his attendance policy after I skipped a third of his classes and simply did the required “make-up” assignments for each — a one page paper summarizing the day’s readings — something I could do at work and save myself a ninety-minute lecture a few times a month. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m inherently better than these people or institutions — I was utterly disenfranchised by the whole thing. It just felt like a bigger version of High School, that also cost me five figures of student loan debt. The students just cared what grade they’d get, the professors seemed mostly uninvested in bringing their teaching style into the twenty-first century; everyone was punching some kind of clock but me. I just wanted to grow and expand my mind, while everyone else only cared about the bottom line. I thought college was supposed to be an adventure, some great escape, but all I wanted to do was escape college. Whatever idealized expectation I had been sold wasn’t lining up — everyone was thinking about what was next, and I wanted to enjoy what was now. If **** hadn’t given me a generous financial aid package, I may have dropped out. My sophomore year was by far the most trying academically, where I felt the most out of place. The shiny timeshare pitch of my freshman year eroded as I moved out of the dorms, and into disillusionment. I can’t tell you what year the Magna Carta was written, or what Pope Innocent III did, or recall even one-percent of all the things I learned in those classes. I do know far more about history than the average bear, and often flex my knowledge at bar trivia nights, but there was one thing I learned in class that made that stupid piece of $36,000 paper worth it. History 359, sophomore year, my professor John **** said: “There are no right or wrong answers, only better and worse ones.” Professor ****, if you ever hear this, thank you. You taught my first history class at ****, and my last. And somehow, in January of 2014, you remembered me from the Fall of 2012, a kid one hundred pounds heavier in a class of close to one-hundred fifty. I don’t know how; I think I said maybe six sentences to you that semester. Maybe you remembered my writing, who knows. You were the only kindred spirit I ever found in that faculty or that school, academically-speaking. You became an educator because you loved learning. You didn’t care about the politics or the guidelines or tenure or any of that shit. I remember laughing during your office hours when I commented on how insufferable it must be to teach some species of student, and all you had to say in reply, as you peered down your bifocals in threw up your hands was, “It is what it is, ****.”If it weren’t for you, I may not have stuck with that college thing. Your classes were the only time I ever summoned something greater for the sake of academics. To prove I could. Because you saw me f