It’s October 1992 and I have one of the weirdest jobs I will ever have. I am 20 years old, in year three of a six-year undergrad degree in Creative Writing. I still don’t have an ID that says I can drink but I do have a live-in alcoholic boyfriend four years my senior, a Mechanical Engineering major named Matt. We love each other and have spectacular sex and he is incredibly jealous, which is terrifying but will end up curing me of jealousy forever. 

Long Island, July 1989. I am 17 and a virgin (for only five more months but I don’t know that). I have graduated high school. It’s my last summer at home before heading to college in central Florida to begin to become myself.

At this point, the only things that define me are:

1. Being bullied by my classmates, my erstwhile friends, and my stepfather.

2. A strange sense of fashion (my attempts at replicating looks from Vogue and Star Hits with what I can afford from Greenwich Village secondhand stores and LI department stores, and what I can find in my mother’s closet) that doesn't help with the above at all.

3. A best friend named Kristina, who does.

4. A steady diet of books and movies, which also does.

5. A radio station called WDRE, previously WLIR, which plays weird music, mostly but not entirely from the UK, and which kids all over Long Island wear buttons for on their long black wool coats, giving each other nods of recognition at multiplexes and malls.

When I was 12 and just starting high school, whatever I had written the year before got me put into a "Talented Writers" group. I don’t remember what I wrote in junior high, and I don’t currently have the free time, patience, or neurotic stones to crack open my foot locker to fuck around and find out. I can tell you that the first poem I think I ever wrote went “Candle, candle, made of wax/your flame does flicker/never does it relax,” so I can also tell you that the bar was probably pretty low in the Nassau County Public School system to get one classified as “talented,” and therefore suitable for this proto-writers workshop that allowed some lucky English teacher to try and get kids from all four grades to act like we were in an MFA cohort. 

This month I went to see that singer who we loved so much in our youth. I have kept up with him since, because he has kept up without trying too hard, not striving, burning out or getting buff or disappointing us all like so many others. No, he hasn’t gone that route. He has held onto his paisley and stayed unutterably himself, his words getting slightly less weird, slightly more silly (like, every fifth song now is about balloons, whereas that used to be way rarer) still just as twisty-turny but nevertheless ever-earnest.

This month, my 15-years-old-or-so dog started wearing diapers. He was just peeing inside too much — usually in the only room of the apartment with carpet, but lately in the various doggie beds that we have scattered throughout the place so he doesn’t have to try and get onto the couches or person beds. Henry has always had a bad leg, his arthritis has been getting bad for years, and getting up and down the stairs to the backyard is now a struggle most of the time. So I got him cloth diapers — they are called “pee bands” but we call them “penis belts” — to save stress and money on carpet spray. Plus, it’s the holiday season, and I am tired of my home smelling like piss.

When my mother died, I was in the room. When my father died, I was on a plane.

When my mother died, I was 29. When my father died, I was 43.

When my mother died, she was a mystery to me. When my father died, he was my friend.

When I moved from Tampa to Oakland in 2001, I refused to speak ill of Florida for many years. I had moved from New York to Tampa for college but ended up living there for 12 years — my late teens and all of my 20s — so what would speaking ill of the state say about me?

Breakfast came. Breakfast went. Parents scooped up my friends and my bullies and the boy I had a crush on. Lunch approached. I was the only kid without parents visiting. My father would come up to see the play in a few weeks. My mother was supposed to be there for Visiting Day.

So now that I’ve written it, what happens? Does the sadness stop? I don’t think so. Because the more I dig, the more debris flies loose.