Love Street Read online

  Dedication

  For brokenhearted girls who will always love again . . .

  “BE REALISTIC”: the most bullshit, soul-crushing advice you will always hear along the way.

  I want someone who makes me feel the way music does.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  George from the Beach!

  Head vs. Heart

  How to Be Beautiful

  My Orgasm Timeline

  To-Don’t List

  Convos He Just Can’t Win

  Letters I Never Sent

  Red Bull and Rabies

  Lifestyle Advice

  How to Crash in Love

  Whatever! Dolly Would!

  Things You Should Never “Just Wing” but Always Inevitably Do

  “24”

  Yung Luv

  How to Ignore Your Life and Trip the Light Fantastic

  A Very Short Story

  Security Question Spiral

  Crossword Puzzle

  Doing Drugs with Your Ex

  Bad Pussy!

  Recipe Book

  Food for the Brokenhearted: Garlic Pesto Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes

  Food for the Newly in Love: Twirled Spaghetti Carbonara

  Food for the Busy: Slow the Fuck Down Chicken Soup

  Food for the Lost: Rainbow Cereal with a Side of Kettle Chips and Hummus

  Fears Only a Woman Knows

  15 Reasons Why I Wore a Dress Like This

  Things People Do When They Are First in Love

  Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!

  Advice to the Lovelorn

  Thanks for the Memory

  How to Do Anything

  Crazy in Love

  Horoscopes

  Paper Dolls

  Crossword Puzzle Answer Key

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dear Readers . . .

  To know me is to know that I have loved you. Probably too much, probably too soon, and probably too intensely. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve just loved . . . harder. Perhaps I learned too early that the things you hide in your heart will eat you the fuck alive . . . You see, for the better part of my life, I easily gave other people the power to love me, fix me, and make me feel “grander” than I was—I also usually gave this power to those who were unattainable or uninterested. I battled with impulse control and would easily abandon my own life with a certain level of what-the-fuckery to chase the object of my affection. “Sport d’amour” they call it in France. It was like every new relationship allowed me to feel ALIVE. Each new love bubble gave me purpose and identity and cute stories to tell my friends about how he tickled my back as we listened to Van Morrison and kissed the world away. I was addicted to the high of falling in love and terrified of the intimacy that followed—because when things became real . . . so did the risk of abandonment. Because of this, I unknowingly fell in in lust with men I couldn’t have. But you see, this “love” distracted me from my anxieties and fears about my own life and identity . . . this “love” allowed me to escape. And like all drug addicts . . . I am an escape artist.

  I remember the first time I felt it. Pure, unadulterated dopamine straight to the heart, like sleeping in on a snow day when you were eleven years old. The weightless float I felt deep in my belly, as if flying high on a swing, the clamminess of my hands, the pitter-patter in my heart . . . it took me thirty-two years to realize that this feeling wasn’t love. It was wonderful, but it wasn’t love. Love doesn’t scare you, or make you feel like you’re about to rob a bank. Love cradles you and sneaks up on you and makes you feel safe and secure and like you’re alone with someone together. Love is a best friend that you want to die with. Love is you telling him you’ll suck his dick if he can find your missing sock. (He finds it very quickly.) Love is calm and simple and terrifying. It is nothing that I thought and everything that I wanted.

  Since starting this book, I slipped in love. Real l-o-v-e. It didn’t feel like falling, it felt like melting into molten lava together—there were no games, there were no questions—I am still confused and overwhelmed at how simple it all really was. Either way, nobody knows anything. Including me . . .

  So take what you will from the following pages, and ignore the genders—love is love is love is love.

  And remember, no matter what the big bad humans tell you, it’s always better to be a little too much a little too soon than a little too little a little too late . . .

  Love always,

  Leah

  Trying to Figure Out What’s Wrong with Him Before He Figures Out What’s Wrong with Me

  One day we’ll look back on this period of unemployment and wish we had called it FREEDOM.

  What kind of camera is that?”

  I looked up and shielded my eyes from the morning ocean mist. “It’s an 8 mm. My uncle fixed it for me,” I replied to this tall, dark stranger like the basic, artsy bitch I was.

  It was early Tuesday morning, 6 a.m. to be exact, and I had decided to be one of those girls who loves life and wakes up to film the sunrise. It was hard to see because the wind was blowing and the tide was high. I guess ocean spray is actually a real thing and not just a cranberry juice cocktail that reminds me of bladder infections.

  “I used to have one of those. They’re a real pain in the ass. Make everything look really beautiful, though.”

  I looked up again at the stranger hovering above me, this time noticing the surfboard in his hand.

  “You live around here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, just around the block. Here, let me see the camera.” The wind died down for a second and I blocked the sand from hitting the lens as I passed the stranger my camera. I don’t know why I did it. Yes I do. Did I mention the stranger was bloody gorgeous? Dirty, hot, bearded, he was a real fucking man.

  And he wanted to hold my camera! “I’m going to film you. Don’t pay attention.”

  I immediately got weird and paid attention.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I want you to see how beautiful you look right now.”

  As I awkwardly acted normal and got really weird about what to do with my hands, I let the surfing stranger film me. After about 30 seconds he passed the camera back to me, smiled, and went on his merry way. I watched him disappear down the old beach boardwalk until he was a tiny speck, and then he was no more.

  Frozen in the charming stranger’s wake, I took a seat on the sand with complete disregard for the camera or its fragile, sensitive lens. (I ruined it that day, btw.) Damn, I thought. Now that was some American Beauty shit.

  “I didn’t even get his name!” I complained to my friends later that day as I shoveled a spoonful of poke into my overly lip-glossed mouth like an anxiety-ridden female version of the prince in Cinderella. My friends all sort of ignored me, refusing to fuel my projection fire. I guess I did sort of have a bit of a habit of romantically projecting onto strange men I met in what I considered serendipitous circumstances. (There was Ryan, who I met during jury duty, and Frankie, who I started texting after he rear-ended me—with his car.)

  “If you’re meant to be in each other’s lives you’ll run into him again, I promise,” one of my friends reassured me.

  “And if I don’t?” I asked.

  But I didn’t need an answer. Because somewhere deep in my belly, beneath the poke and matcha and Sour Patch Kids and Klonopin, I KNEW THAT I WOULD.

  And fail me not, my gut was right.

  Just two days later, I called off work with an awful case of the fuck-its and decided to have a “me day.” So there I was, lying in the middle of the beach with the rest of the superrich
and/or unemployed, when whose shadow blocked the sun from reaching chapter 5 of the The Power Within? My stranger! My Prince Charming. My—

  “George.”

  I acted like I just then noticed him. “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s George.”

  I smiled. “Hi, George,” I said, absolutely loving the way his name sounded rolling off my tongue. (George! So timeless, so underrated, so classic.)

  After some short chitchat about how weird this twice-in-three-days run-in was, I invited George to sit down with me and share my turkey sandwich. He couldn’t, he said, he had to meet his buddies out at the breakwater for the afternoon surf. I briefly wondered what George did for a living that afforded him all this time to surf. He was probably really rich. Yes! A rich artist. His beard said so. Either that or some sort of famous photographer—you know, with the way he took my camera that first day and all.

  Or maybe he was a bum like me? A 28-year-old college dropout who was still figuring out what she wanted to be when she grew up. Naw. He looked like success. His name was GEORGE, after all.

  “Lemme get your number, though,” he said before he left.

  I asked for his phone, but to my surprise, he said he didn’t have one. “Oh, right. Duh. You’re surfing.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I mean I don’t have one at all.”

  After a long pause I felt my innards rumble. “That’s beautiful,” I said. Yep, I thought, he’s DEFINITELY an artist.

  I gave George my number verbally, and he swore he’d remember it. I didn’t want to risk it, so I tried to write it down on a piece of paper and give it to him—but he was already gone. Please let him remember it, I literally prayed to the shitting seagulls above. Please!

  RING RING RING!

  Two days later, right as I was going into a fuck-that-motherfucking-tease spiral, I got a call from an 800 number. It was George, of course, and he was calling from a pay phone. And just like that, pay phones were sexy as fuck and 1-800 numbers would forever dampen my romance-hungry panties.

  Image courtesy of Envato Elements

  On our first date, he walked to pick me up, like a true gentleman. There was something so old-school about him. So connected to every moment and every word. Perhaps it was the no-phone thing, but George from the Beach was literally the most present human being I had ever met. And goddamn was it intoxicating.

  I loved how he looked into my eyes as I told him stories. How he didn’t care about status updates or mutual friends. I loved how we walked everywhere and never took his car. I loved how he paid in cash and often didn’t wear shoes. I loved how he called me from random numbers and showed up at my door often without warning. I loved everything about George, and I couldn’t wait for him to meet my friends.

  Our third date was when things started to get a little weird. We had had some beers at a boardwalk bar, and it turned out George had forgotten his wallet. No biggie, I could pay. He ran into an old friend of his who was roller-skating by with a snake wrapped around his shoulders.

  “Yo, bitch! You owe me twenty dollars!” the street performer barked at our outdoor table.

  “What was that all about?” I asked George as he chugged the rest of his Blue Moon.

  “Oh, that’s Ricardo. He’s probably high.”

  I laughed. I didn’t know what else to say. Were they friends? Was that his drug dealer?

  “Let’s go back to your place,” I said, instead of pressing the subject.

  “Shit, we can’t. Not tonight. My place is messy.”

  I told him I didn’t care and that I loved messy. He said not this kind of messy. I felt creeped out a little by the snake charmer, and I think the beer was going to my head, so I decided to call it a night.

  “Can I sleep over?” George asked as the California sky uncharacteristically started to drizzle.

  “Um, sure,” I said, unaware of where the night was going to take us.

  He took a two-hour shower that night, and I’m pretty sure he stole one of my soaps. Not to mention 40 dollars from my wallet and a bag of Kettle chips. I somehow justified the missing stuff from my apartment to myself.

  My friends were begging to meet him, so when he called me a few days later and invited me out, I said, “My friends are going out, too! Let’s all hang out together!”

  George liked the idea, and pretty soon all seven of my B-list friends were just as in lust with George as I was. One thought she recognized him from an American Apparel ad a few years ago, and another swore she had run into him at a rave downtown. He was an international man of mystery. He was MY international man of mystery. But later that night, George became more than that.

  Image sourced from Unsplash

  The moon was full, and as George and I sat on my apartment roof in sweatpants and ate nachos, I couldn’t help but feel so comfortable I started to cry. “I’m sorry,” I sniffled. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve felt so cozy around someone. It’s like you don’t even care about how . . . how . . .”

  “How what?” he sweetly asked, completely void of prediction or judgment.

  “How fucking lost I am,” I wailed as I dipped back in for a handful of nachos. And then George just shut the fuck up and let me spill to him. About my lack of career. My lack of dreams. My lack of direction. He held me close that night and stroked my hair like a best friend in middle school would have as I cried myself into a salty, swollen, teary-eyed slumber.

  When I woke up, George from the Beach was gone.

  I felt emotionally cleansed and eager to see my cuddly beach beau again, as I rounded the corner for a hot cup of coffee and perhaps even a croissant.

  AND THERE—in the alley behind the coffee shop by the beach—was George. Inside a dumpster.

  “GEORGE?” I yelled.

  “Hi! Good morning. Sorry, I had to start my day. Didn’t mean to sneak out on you.”

  I continued to stare. Dumbfounded. “George, what are you doing in there?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, obviously smelling like garbage, he followed me into the coffee shop and ordered a latte and three hard-boiled eggs, on me.

  As he cracked open his eggs at a tiny outdoor table, I suddenly noticed the dirt beneath his fingernails.

  “Protein.” He smiled. “Eat enough of these and you basically don’t gotta eat anything else all day!” I sipped my iced coffee and chewed on the straw, staring at my new boyfriend as some Sixth Sense–type shit ran rapidly through my mind. (What was his job? Why had I never been to his house? The missing Kettle chips, those long showers, the lack of phone . . .)

  “George, can I ask you something? And you promise not to lie?”

  “Of course,” he said through a clearly never-braced smile.

  “George . . . are you homeless?”

  He finished off the third hard-boiled egg before answering me. “I’m not homeless. I just don’t have a home.”

  I’M SORRY, WHAT?!

  He did nothing wrong, I suppose. Because he didn’t technically ever lie to me. I guess I just never asked.

  I bid him farewell and gave him 20 bucks before walking down the long boardwalk to my apartment. And there, as I passed a sleeping bag next to a half-erected, sand-scratched tent on the beach, was a half-eaten bag of jalapeño Kettle chips.

  Now, years later, I still occasionally run into George along the boardwalk. We always nod at each other and smile—me on my way to get poke, he on his way to surf. (Where did he get that surfboard, by the way????) Me on my way to keep trying to figure out what to do with my life, he on his way to doing nothing all day and loving it.

  I dated a guy named Derrick for nine months right after George. Derrick was a fashion designer with a vintage Jaguar in his garage and a retractable ceiling in his bedroom. He didn’t have a home; he had a compound. After Derrick, I dated an actor named Ryan, who lived in L.A., Sydney, and New York. He didn’t have a home, either. He had three.

  I wasn’t in love with either, and neither made me feel safe or cozy. />
  I missed George. And his beach.

  Born with a heart,

  Enlarged from the start,

  Just a matter of time,

  ’Til her world fell apart.

  HEAD: Buy toilet paper, Epsom salts, and other things to improve your life.

  HEART: Research celebrity skin-care regimens, then purchase overpriced face products that don’t ever work.

  HEAD: Just a trim, please.

  HEART: Fuck it, cut it all off. And while you’re at it, get me four lychee martinis and a telephone. Time to quit my job, buy a motorcycle, and contact a ladies’ intelligence agency that can help me change my identity and start a brand-new life.

  HEAD: Go to work, hustle hard, impress your boss, and be kind to your coworkers.

  HEART: Quit at lunch, fuck the hot intern, drink water from the tap, and horrify your coworkers.

  HEAD: Don’t call him. He’s been ignoring you. You’re better than this.

  HEART: Go ahead! Do it! Fuck up your life!

  HEAD: Get your shit together, go to work, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

  HEART: Smoke some weed you find on the kitchen floor, throw up when you realize that it’s dried broccoli, take a “me day” to deal with the trauma, drain your bank account, get an overpriced manicure.

  HEAD: Go to your work drinks, eat a healthy dinner, and read a relaxing book.

  HEART: Go to the strip club, make best friends with a coconut-scented dancer named Big Titty Tina, eat overpriced shrimp cocktail, make plans to abandon your lives together, combine your life savings to purchase a Triumph Bonneville, and call off work for the next four years due to an incurable case of the fuck-its.

  I sexually identify as a romantic sponge with the emotional skin of a third-degree-burn victim.

  My heart is all like, Go ahead! Do it! Fuck up your life!

  Image sourced from Unsplash

  Want to fall 60 percent in love and ignore our issues, then wake up ten years later with four kids and a house we can’t afford?