hot sauce and thongs! (jenn)

your boyfriend loses the job he would’ve quit before he started, if only walking away from paychecks was as easy as eating bacon. so you take your nissan murano with its hit-and-run dents to remember asshole philly drivers by—and pack it with your life possessions, your mugshots mugs, your mutt from the mean streets of bulgaria, your 1,000 bottles of Tabasco sauce and Beaver for Britney thongs from businesses that didn’t work—but hey—at least you got hot sauce and thongs to barter with for shelter and maybe a hot meal. you make sure to leave enough room for your dreams to sit bitch, ‘cause you called shotgun, you, you with your wide slanty-eyes, sensitive skin,

your hit-and-run mind.

before you go, you learn to write all over again ‘cause you’ve been comatose, paralyzed, a catatonic veggie girl dreaming she was a volunteer, dreaming of orphans in post-communist countries, dreaming of grey. that was yesterday. today it’s ?-to-? writer’s rehab, no insurance, a physical therapist who rips you from your white bed, white room, white clothes yelling–there’s no island! you have run. you have to write. write until your thumbs lock up because of last night’s one-climb-too-many. write and giggle when ryan says—you bastard—why do you get to be saffran foer, and i have to be the wannabe wife? write during grey’s anatomy commercials, after phone conversations with your mother, after e-mailing your old harvard roommate words of writer’s encouragement, even though she’s a dirty whore who has a full-time job as a film producer and manages to write a novel in her free time. (you begin to understand all time is free, but losing value by the minute.) write feeling the countdown of days, about to exchange the comfort of an address for stories you’ll laugh about later. write until it’s 3 am and you’re nauseous with exhaustion, afraid to stop, because it might not come back tomorrow, these words and possibilities. you might relapse. you might sleep forever.

in the meantime, you buy a tent and 0 degree sleeping bags and wonder if that’s enough to keep your family warm. fill your radio event-sponsored free duffle bags with 1,000 Places to See in the US and Canada Before you Die of Hypothermia in Fargo, campground books, AAA maps, writer’s market books, neuroscience books, old comfort novels, unread novels, the photo book ryan made your for your 28th birthday. you make sure to backup your files, your photos, your dreams just in case of a crash.

belongings clutter the hallway, and you laugh in that god-i-love-us way, cleaning out the best apartment you’ve ever had. you laugh because you never bought a bed or dishes–only necessities like a $500 movie projector, a massive iMac, a Macbook, an iPhone (still un-activated), two iPods, a food processor, and a whole lot of tea.

you wish you could take this apartment with you–the stained glass, the old eye doctor sign out front, the windows for walls, the blue-orange-green corner, the view of trees out every window, the swing set graveyard out back, the massive manayunk yard that was walled-in, but not high enough for mati: the ever-resourceful wonderbitch.

you never wanted to live in philly–philly never made your top… 50 cities… but you fell in love, lost and found your license there. left and returned from your bulgarian adventure, drawing a neat circle in your life, if neat circles can include bulgaria without sounding ridiculous. you’ll miss the wissahickon park down the street with its endless trails—every now and again feeling as though you were in bulgaria, alone on a narrow trail, dodging branches, minding footing, when—holy shit–you’re in america, running with fellow americans who run too!, running down kelly drive along the schuylkill river to the art museum, flashing back to the charles, to harvard and watching crew boats slice the still water, gliding under underwater bridges, making you wonder which reflection is real. and how you can ever know for sure. here, you made ryan drive you everywhere for months, too afraid to drive after three years of walking and bulgarian public transportation. when half a year later you do drive, you realize it was nothing. it was just driving. it’s all just driving. and the climbing gym that you spent all year putting off joining, and finally you did at the beginning of october, paid three months, found a fabulous climbing buddy, and just as a crimpy 5.8 becomes climbable again, just as your back, your arms, your hands feel powerful again–you need to go. typical. we’ll miss ardmore—the suburb we re-dubbed, “you make my life HARDmore” because of the thousands spent at nissan HARDmore trying to repair a car that stubbornly refused to let go of its “totally shitty” identity. and the manayunk scene you watched from afar, walking your dog at 1:00am on friday nights in your sweats, watching the yuppie-somethings do whatever they do in bars, talking about whatever they talk about, thinking it all matters, this shit we do. loving the food, god, oh god the food, sitting outside at our every favorite restaurant on main street. that country western bar you went to in the middle of nowhere quakertown to try something new, which meant lying on the bar and letting strangers take shots of your stomach, someone shouting, “she went to harvard!!” and cheering. you were sober; you wanted to get on your boyfriend’s good side. montage clips picking up speed: laff house on south street, ryan emceeing. more good nights than bad. your mom visiting, driving to amish country. you as stage mom every thursday at the wired studio–ryan recording the weeksauce, you as audience laughter, with chocolate and high fives. driving to new york for john mayer. to jersey for john mayer. to long island for bill maher. seeing jon stewart, justin timberlake, ozomatli. ryan attempting charity–emceeing the most amazing high school talent show you had ever seen. the sad revelation that white girls really, really can’t dance. broad street run, philly 1/2 marathon, every friend you love coming to visit you, in philly, a ten month parentheses in time with everything you never expected.

you hit the restart button on your relationship, because for the first time your boyfriend is free. the man you love who can talk for hours on neurophilosophy, who had to squeeze, squeeze himself down into five second punchlines, no pulp, just 10% funny from concentrate that left a fake taste in his mouth. for the first time you are a team, fighting for the same life, saturday morning writing fest ’07 baby–we’re ready to do it all, and say we did.

we’re ready. ready to burn the vision board for fire kindling in montana, ready to start over in california, or hawaii, or sri lanka, or anywhere with a little more sun.

(well, except for africa.)

10 more days. you don’t want to see life as just a series of countdowns. years until degrees received. months until christmas. days until next paycheck. just minutes until dinner. i want to count up, eyes open, to 100,000 and yell into space, warning the adventures hiding off every highway exit–ready or not, here we come.