I'm not sure if I ever posted this

I'm cleaning out files in an attempt to free up space on the laptop now that I have the bigass computer, and I came across this. It's obviously not finished, but I'm not sure where I was going with it, so here:

That summer was the summer that my roommate died; it was the summer right before I moved to Tucson, which I still count as the biggest mistake of my life. It was the summer that I broke both of my ankles in separate strange accidents involving South Africans, a telephone and a fence. It was the summer that I could feel everything I knew to be true tipping on its end and sinking into the Atlantic. (Actually, that was also the same year that Titanic came out. ) I turned twenty-one years old. Sancho was a baby still. Anyway.

I’ve spent half the night looking for a picture of me on my 21st birthday, surrounded by camp folks. You can see in the picture I can’t find that I have injured myself in at least one leg, but the truth is that I couldn’t walk or drive, so I was barely making it on crutches until like the fifth drink, at which point I became the champion of Gimp Mobility. That was the summer of Holly, who had a shunt in her brain because she was hydrocephalic. That was also the summer of Jean, who remains one of my top ten most inspirational people ever. Jean was from South Africa, and she traveled the world, not because apartheid had ended, but because her best friend started dating her ex-boyfriend, and she couldn’t handle it, and what she saw as weakness and escape, I saw as ballsy adventurousness. Anyway.

Because I had two broken legs*, I couldn’t drive my stick shift car home for my birthday, and so I asked Jean the South African to do it. She enlisted like 800 other people to come to my hometown to celebrate my 21st birthday with me, and she drove my car. We all showed up to my mom’s house, where we were fed and showered, and then Jason and Nikki came over. Jason had just broken up with his girlfriend at the time, and Nikki was about to be divorced, though she didn’t know it yet. We all piled into various cars after we ate, and we stopped by Clint and Kathy’s house. They’d set up an amp and two mics, and Clint and Destiny, who he was about to impregnate, gave me a birthday concert where, ironically, they sang “Don’t Follow” by Alice in Chains.

I remember that Jason thought I lived this great life with all these friends and drinking regularly and a close family friend who played the guitar and sang and sometimes wrote his own songs. And for a moment there, I believed it too. It was pretty great. It’s still my favorite birthday.


*The first, I broke whilst playing elbow tag, a game of tag where other people are base, so that if you and someone else were partnered up and I hooked your arm, the person to whom you were attached would have to run, just like life. Anyway, I sank my foot into a mole hole
The second, I broke while favoring the first broken one while climbing a fence. I landed on a raised patch of grass and because I landed one-footed, I didn’t have the balance to recover from the twist and then the fall. It hurt.

And there is also this:

The first time I ever took a pregnancy test, my friend Emily and I had been driving around the island listening to Sarah McLaughlin when the subject of my late period came up. I don’t remember much about the preceding conversation except that I felt like the trip to Safeway’s pharmacy aisle was a trip I was made to take. I think everyone expected me to be a teenage mother because my reputation for being a whore had been established and discussed so often by anyone who knew my boyfriend’s family. The truth was that he was the only boy I ever Did It with, but it didn’t matter. Even my friends were sure I’d be stuck with a dumb Cro-Magnon baby suckling from my evil whorish teat. Emily and I drove to the Denny’s parking lot, which was about fifty feet from the Safeway parking lot, and I unwrapped the package in Emily’s car, shoved the pregnancy test in my pocket and went inside. It was about 2:00AM.

We sat at a table and drank about fifteen cups of coffee. I peed on the stick in the Denny’s bathroom and then watched the ‘not pregnant’ line turn pink while the other window stayed white. We stayed up all night talking about how great it was that I was not pregnant.

Not long after my trip down the aisle with Emily, I made my friend Shannon buy one for me. I’d become shy, and Shannon was already about seven months pregnant, so having her do it had the added benefit of being funny. She said that the checker looked at the test, looked at Shannon and rolled her eyes. Shannon just shrugged and said, “I just want to be sure.”

Pregnancy tests are like the Biore pore strips of the uterine world, especially for teenagers. Sometimes you just have to check to make sure there aren’t any parasites hanging around in there. My friend Bethany used to say that she wanted a seasonal abortion just to clean her uterus out, to get rid of the dust bunnies and any stray fetuses.

I hadn’t taken one in a long time. There hadn’t been a need. But then my period was late, not to mention that I might be out of a job soon and every single already not-so-blissful scenario about the future was made infinitely worse when I added a baby to the equation, especially because I am certain that if I am ever with child, the child will have something terribly wrong with him/her. No worries; the window still shows white.


My book club is comprised of a group of women my mom’s age. At the last meeting, Barbara told us that her 95 year-old mother fell and cracked her sternum. All of the book club ladies started sharing stories about their parents and how they’re dying. Susie, one of the younger ladies, said that she doesn’t have parents anymore. No parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles. And then Diane said, “So here we are, eight women, and only one of us has children.”

And Ginger said, "Now we know what to get each other for Christmas."