Having watched enough medical dramas might not make me a surgeon, but I know enough to be terrified right now.
Dave sees me shaking, starting to hyperventilate, and takes me down to the ocean. He lets me say nothing while we walk silently. Kicking waves and pacing back and forth across this gorgeous shoreline—it’s all I can do.Worryingis all I can do.
When I finally settle on a spot, I set my hands on my hips in anger and swipe my feet through the sand. “A brain bleed? What in the fuck?”
The reality of what’s happening to my best friend hits me.
Please, he’s got to be okay.
But the odds are that this is catastrophic.
I’m not stupid, but I just hope I’m wrong.
Just as my legs give out and when I start to dry-heave and choke on my tears, Dave swoops me into the water and reminds me to breathe.
“Just wait. That’s all you can do.”
When I’m Twenty-Nine
Maybe I should have kissed Patrick back that night, no matter how weird and creepy it would have been. But perhaps it would have saved us from such a severe fracture in our friendship.
After that unsettling, horribly unexpected moment, Patrick vanished. According to RobBob, I gather he rushed inside, grabbed his suitcase, and took off to the airport in a Lyft.
After one stupid moment. After justonebad decision during the worst time in his life.
Why would he think I couldn’t forgive that? His embarrassment and his shame were maybe too much.
He’s barely been in touch with our mutual friend, and he’s not replied to any of my texts. Not the ones I sent the day he disappeared, nor the ones I sent over the subsequent weeks and months. My phone calls have all gone to voicemail, and my heart sinks every time I try to reach out and get nothing back, but after all kinds of rejection, I have to accept that maybe staying away from me is helping him heal for some reason. Maybe it’s what he needs.
I just miss him and missusso damn much.
So, against my heart and my instincts, I have forced myself to refrain from continuing to send texts, from calling. Every effort has been met with rejection. And maybe he needs me to stop. So, I do.
It never occurred to me that we’d go without talking for more than even a few days. So when it gets to be a year and then some without hearing from him? I’m equally furious and understanding.
My unintentional career continues to grow like mad, and I’m having a blast with it. Making a living championing local, smallrestaurants, but here I am, and big companies are taking notice and offering up insane money to partner with me. It’s easy to reject the junk, but when I’m sent products that I actually love and use? It’s a joy to share them with my followers. It started with little stuff—ceramic cutters that I said needed to be in every room, cute chip clips that should be used to seal everything, a simple post about vacuum-sealing up meat because it’s cheaper to buy in volume, et cetera. And now I’m being hit hard with sponsor requests, and I admit that I’m loving how I am able to accept and reject who I want. It’s actually very thrilling to partner up with companies and products I love because yelling out about stuff I dig is so on par with how I started my online presence.
A year ago, I hired Megan Madonna as an assistant, and she helps with all of my socials. I take all the videos, but she curates them into such cute posts. Slowly, I am learning to do all that it takes to edit, add music and text…but I find it all so tedious, so I’m very reliant on her.
One night, as I’m about dying to collapse in bed, my phone sounds, and I get a text from my mother. Shenevertexts me. I’m actually surprised that she even knows how to do so.
Mom:Your father died.
That’s the entirety of the text.
After leaving my father, the second nice thing my mother ever did for me was to stay with that bastard until he paid my way through college. While she and my dad might have been apart for years and I now sort of casually and indifferently fucking hate both of them, she could have perhaps presented this fact more softly.
That’s what a normal parent would do.
I reply as passive-aggressively as I can.
Me:Okay, thanks for the info.
You fucking bitch,is what I mentally add on.
Per her next hundred texts, it’s understood that I’m to fly back home to deal with all the things. All the bullshit. Not only am Isupposed to be in charge of arranging gross cremation logistics, but I’m responsible for some kind of celebration-of-lifeevent for this person I hate.
I have to laugh at the idiocy of this, yet I book a flight home and a hotel room. A nice one.
