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 I'm tired. I have a stage tomorrow night--a stage being a restaurant term used to describe a sort of working interview, where you go behind the bar and you show how well you do under the pressure of a busy intake of drink orders and where you are watched by the other bartenders to see how you gel with them. Usually it's the type of situation where you basically already have the job, but I have had two stages now in my life where management emailed me a few weeks later to say that they had offered the job to someone else. 

"This is just like your apartment," my mom says on the phone, meant as a bit of encouragement, a concession of comfort. "Remember? It came when you least expected it." Of course I remember. Crying in a gig car I couldn't afford as I saw one apartment after another, interview-like phone calls, filling out the same information about my previous addresses, my previous landlords, my references, my two jobs and my unemployment, the real bulk of my income. And when I got the apartment I really wanted, I didn't have time to be excited, because a horse died at my horseback-riding job and I was too stunned to cry. I looked in one of the other horses' eyes the next day and I saw glassy nothingness, and I felt dead, a little. Sometimes the things I've been through don't feel like real life, don't feel like real living, at all. 

What does it take to be happy? I don't mean that so existentially, I know that none of us is happy uninterruptedly, forever, but what does it take to not disappear into myself for a while when I'm driving, to read through emails and not feel like I've cracked and there is liquid dripping out of my sides, to have something to be excited about that isn't tinged with melancholy, with financial worry and insecurity, with the oozing drip of misplaced sexuality? How can you feel the desperate want to be kissed gently and sweetly and yet simultaneously be repulsed by the suggestion of it when it comes near you? On the roof of my building (we climbed a scary fire escape ladder to get there) a boy I used to desperately want to like me told me about a coffee shop I hadn't tried yet in Oakland and he took pictures of the city that he posted, artistically, later, on instagram, and he still didn't stay the night, even though I was the perfectly aloof cool girl, even though I knew in that moment and later that I had no desire to actually have him stay in my apartment, in my bed. 

I'm forgetting how to be normal, how to have normal reactions to things, I think. Sometimes I feel dead, empty, numb, and sometimes I am filled with so much emotion that I want to scream, and then I hide it in singing along to the car radio, in scolding my dog when she gets into the garbage again, in the breaths that I take deeply and slowly and reassuringly, as if I am preparing to go on stage. There's a guy who comes to the dog park sometimes, with his dog, her name is Yuki, and he tells her she is a good girl in his British accent and he only rarely exchanges pleasantries with me and I wonder what is wrong with me that he hasn't come up to me yet. He brought a friend last time I saw him, two weeks after I had been going every day at the time when he used to be there, and his friend waved at me as they left, and a kind lady sitting next to me with her dog, Raisin, said (about the friend) "Oh, isn't he the cutest, and with an accent too!" and all I responded with was "Yeah, they're both British, I think." 

When would I ever get the opportunity to tell the guy with the dog, that it is him I am interested in, not his friend? And yet I keep up this little flame in my chest because one time I saw a guy in the gym and waited for twenty extra minutes for him to come talk to me and he didn't so I finally left, and then I went out to a bar later that night and there he was, sitting right next to me, and we went out dancing and we had sex, and he lives in Florida, and I went to Brazil the next day, and now he has a girlfriend; they look super happy on social media. What's the point of that story? I don't know, but I laughed at the time, and I felt a little invincible, like a lucky, slutty little girl who was beautiful and impervious to the losses of trusting chance. Today I just feel lonely. 

My birthday was last Saturday. I turned 26 and so now that is the age I have to tell people when they ask. I lost my health insurance, but as my mom was so glad to point out and be grateful for, I make so little money that Covered California allows me to be insured for as little as one dollar a month. Because I make so little, can you believe that? Finally a reward for being low-income. And yet with as many jobs as I've applied for, and as strange as existing has been because unemployment plus student loans of 2020 provided me with the first period of financial stability of my life, I still feel dead inside. When the closest grocery store you can shop at is Whole Foods and you're living in the first apartment that you've really loved, that really feels like yours and that is more expensive than all of the other things you spend money on combined, and the semester at the school where you just graduated with your master's degree has started without you, as if you never were there in the first place, and when you walk dogs and apply for bartending jobs for a living, it's easy to forget that you are a real person living a real life and doing real things. Am I a person? And if so, what kind of a person? 

After a doc club meeting where the guy my friend advertised enough for me to get ideas into my head had his new (basically) significant other come in during the middle of it, I went to the Rauw Alejandro concert at the Paramount by myself. I was sober, and I was an hour late, and I ended up sitting next to a boy who was also there alone, because his sister-in-law was sitting on the other side of the venue, and he was so sweet and was someone to talk to, someone whose arm I could grab with my fake nails when I knew the songs or when there was a crazy dance number or when the thousandth pair of underwear made its way onto the stage and into Rauw Alejandro's hands. The guys on the other side of me asked me if I spoke Spanish and then bought me a Modelo with no expectations because the girls in front of us started twerking and making eyes at them after they came back and I had already finished half the beer. I hugged the guy with the missing sister-in-law and then walked home in my shirt made out of a bandana. 

Well, almost home, because on my way there these guys stopped me and asked if I was going to the concert afterparty and then they bought me a ticket and then they bought me drinks, and they didn't make me feel awkward when I danced by myself. The one guy, the one who was the most attractive but who I still wasn't attracted to, said he would buy me anything i wanted, and said he had Don Julio at his house, but didn't pressure me to come, just left it there, a suggestion we both knew he was making but that i think he was too old to be truly douchey about. I guess maybe when you're in your thirties you have to be a bit kinder about things, if not more subtle. 

But anyway I kept seeing this guy that I recognized for some reason and thought maybe it was just that I thought he was attractive, but when we finally met up and I asked him where I knew him from, he said, "We met at the beach, remember? You're Emily, right? Your friend introduced us because you asked him to." And I started to feel alive again, like being physically attracted to someone didn't have to be work, didn't have to be something you have to convince yourself of, and we danced together for a while, and I started to feel myself disappearing, but in the right way, in the way when you feel yourself settling into something because you actually do want it, not just because it feels nice to be wanted. 

Even though he was clearly drunk and asked me a hundred times what I wanted to drink after I had told him and kept saying "I never come up here, I never come to Oakland," he remembered my name and he kissed my neck and I didn't hate it and he danced like the way I had watched Rauw Alejandro dance on stage and that felt like something. But then he told me to wait a second for him in the middle of the dance floor and I did, and a couple minutes later I saw he was dancing with some other girl with pink hair, and so I went back to the other group and then decided he wasn't coming back and I was just going to go home. And the most attractive guy of the group of guys I wasn't attracted to asked if he could come home with me and I said not this time and I walked the couple of blocks home. 

It's strange because sometimes it feels like you are still in the middle of certain moments and like at any point the person who made a choice you really wished they hadn't might all of a sudden come to their senses and make the right one. It feels too depressing to admit that things already happened and you have to respect yourself enough to interpret the moments for what they were, what they are. and sometimes taking things at face value feels like giving up, feels like numbness, feels like the way you wish you didn't have to feel disappointed in other people for not valuing you, disappointed in yourself for not being valuable. 

im tired.