Love Street Read online

  It was gradual at first. No trips over 200 miles, no steep hills, no highways on hot days . . .

  But the moment I’d get frustrated about Ruby’s lack of commitment, the car would do something magical and sweep me off my feet yet again. A life-saving detour, an amazing song, a midnight cruise, a bittersweet conversation with a homeless man whose dad used to have the exact same car—the exact same car! Can you believe it?!

  Life was wild and crazy, and the crappier the car got, the more money I threw into it. The more pictures I took of it. The more I thought I could change it.

  Ruby loved me, after all! We’d been through so much together, good and bad and bad and good. Hell, the car even jammed its door when a guy it didn’t like tried to get in. See? We had a connection, guys. A REAL CONNECTION! The kind of love you had to feel yourself to understand.

  During my time with Ruby, I dated A LOT of dudes. Dudes who strangely made me feel the same way Ruby did, see: adrenalized, lustful, perpetually unsure of where we stood. Like Ruby, their attention was either so there or so gone. There was Derrick, the fashion designer, who had tattoos and scars and felt like he was from another era. Jared, the waiter, who played the best music and had the worst coke problem.

  Like Ruby, they were charming, enigmatic men . . . with some huge red flags underneath the hood.

  Then Ruby saved my life. Actually saved my life. After spinning out on the highway one night, we did two 360s across six lanes of traffic and, miraculously, I got out without a scratch. Ruby, however, wasn’t so lucky.

  My baby was completely totaled and had to be towed away to the junkyard.

  Fucked up as it was, it was also heroic and romantic. Prince Charming saved my life! Again!

  And then, while riding the bus six weeks later, it hit me like a ton of bricks:

  I had let Ruby treat me like shit. I let me treat me like shit. I confused chaos with chemistry, and I guess it had just been easier to ignore the check-engine light than risk finding out what was really going on beneath the hood.

  I had dated Rubys all my life, and I was done. I didn’t want the cool guy anymore. I wanted the good guy.

  It was time to grow up and grow out and get rid of the notion that stability means boredom and reliability means lame.

  Six months later, I fell in love and leased a Prius.

  Oh—and it doesn’t count as saving your life if Prince Charming was the very thing that put you in danger in the first place.

  DEAR YELLOW-HAIRED GIRL:

  There is this boy I’ve known for quite a while. Let’s call him Tony. I think I am in love with him. The only problem is that I’m not sure he even knows I exist. We talk to each other sometimes, but it’s only about reclaimed wooden desks. He sells them, and I bought three (over six months’ time). I don’t even need these desks, and I have put myself in debt just for an excuse to see him. I want to get a glass of wine and talk about anything BUT reclaimed wood, but I’m afraid he won’t want to hang out with me in the REAL WORLD. What can I possibly do?

  —A Nobody

  DEAR A NOBODY:

  Follow him on social media. Follow him in your car. Get to know his interests outside of wood. Get to know so much about him that you know the name of his crazy stepsister, who’s always posting strange, semisexual comments on his Facebook page. Once you know him inside and out, casually run into him at his favorite juice spot while humming his favorite song. Serendipity! he will think. Once he is sure that you two are meant to be together, he will ask you to hang out. Proceed to date him for the next three months, until he finds out you hate Nine Inch Nails and that you accidentally friend-requested his uncle once. Return all of that dumb reclaimed wood, buy yourself a sensual, overpriced massage, and move on to the next somebody.

  —Yellow-Haired Girl

  DEAR YELLOW-HAIRED GIRL:

  I am a crier. I cry at least four times a week, and if I don’t cry, there is usually something wrong with me. I have noticed that tears make everyone uncomfortable. They paint me as unstable, thin skinned, too intense, and weak. I used to pinch my thighs underneath the table in an effort to stop myself, but the tears didn’t listen. Rarely do the tears come from actual sadness. More often the dam breaks in the presence of passion, frustration, or happiness. Why do tears get such a bad rep? Why is it wrong for your heart to sweat? For things to matter? Have we all just become too cool to care?

  —A Cry Slut

  DEAR CRY SLUT:

  Do not apologize. Do not stop. Fuck ’em. Cry harder.

  —Yellow-Haired Girl

  DEAR YELLOW-HAIRED GIRL:

  My boyfriend always tells me that I should smile more. What should I do?

  —Frownie McFuckit

  DEAR FROWNIE McFUCKIT:

  If a guy tells you you should smile more, tell him he should be alive less. Dump him and move to Europe. Frown and vape and wear black and be happier than ever.

  —Yellow-Haired Girl

  DEAR YELLOW-HAIRED GIRL:

  I’ve been dating my partner for about six months. At first, everything was candy and cigarettes. Sweet and deadly, morbid and alive! He asked if I wanted kids, and I asked him if he believed in God. We were deep and shallow all at the same time, and we spent every day fucking or cuddling or ordering pizza. Sometimes all three if it was a weekend. Anywho, lately there’s been an energy shift. I can’t explain it; I can only feel it. I looked in the dictionary, but just like the definition for “that feeling when you realize that your parents are no longer your heroes,” there is no definition for this change in tone. What’s happening in my relationship? Can you tell me more about this unknown phenomenon?

  —Energetically Confused

  DEAR ENERGETICALLY CONFUSED:

  The moment you are describing in said relationship is commonly referred to as THE TIPPING POINT. Often occurring around the six-month mark, this feeling is disconcerting and all consuming. It’s subtle at first: he gets annoyed when you try to tickle him and smell his neck in bed, he stops asking you to hop in the shower with him even though you’re both in a hurry. You try to ignore it as long as you can, but you feel it in your heart and know it in your thighs . . . And then one day, homeboy’s simply gone. You cry and you starve and you binge and you scream. You’re not scared you’re becoming your mother; you’re scared you’re becoming your mother’s friend. You know, the one who always came over for TV-dinner night with tear-swollen eyes and blamed it on guys? You itch your skin because your chemicals are off without him and nothing feels right and the walls are closing in. And then one day you wake up and the curse begins to fade. You feel a little freer and want to get a little stronger, so you eat more vegetables and drink more water and remember that you’re proud to be your father’s daughter. One day far away, you will run into him and he will be married to a girl named Heather, who sort of looks like you, and you will wish him happiness and smell your new lover’s neck, which smells sort of like his, BUT BETTER.

  —Yellow-Haired Girl

  HER/HIM

  HIM/HER

  HER: Dump me and blame it on your passion for “the arts.”

  HIM: Okay!

  HIM: Damn, baby. How are you still hungry?

  HER: The fuck did you just say to me?

  HER: I love how you ignore me for days and then expect me to just drop everything I’m doing and come over when you finally reach out.

  HIM: And I just love how you drop everything you’re doing and come over whenever I reach out!

  HIM: Just so you know, I’m emotionally unavailable, physically unreliable, and still completely in love with my ex.

  HER: Great, let’s date!

  Perhaps the only way she could fully recover was to become falsely infatuated with someone else.

  He was either so there or so gone.

  After my first date with Ryan, I didn’t leave his house for six days. I was completely blurry eyed and absolutely, 200 percent in love. Some of the blurry-eyedness might have been due to the fact that I didn’t have (or
didn’t bother to retrieve) contacts for those six days, but the other part of the blurry-eyedness was due to the fact that my heart literally couldn’t see straight. For years I had been anxiously awaiting my turn. To meet The One. To be knocked off my feet. To have my whole world flipped upside down, fucked sideways, and turned inside out. One could call me an anxious romantic, I suppose. Hell, some days I would wake up with the jitters just thinking about it! And if anything smelled even slightly like love, I would sniff it. I would snort it. Even if the smell was fleeting . . . even if the smell was inconsistent . . . I wanted it and I wanted it all. But I suppose “better to have loved and ________ than never to have loved at all” is a dangerous rule to live by for a girl who will fill in the blank with absolutely anything . . .

  In the case of Ryan, that blank was filled with “ruined your most prized memory of your father.”

  My father collected boxes, you see. Mystery boxes. Puzzle boxes. The kind that you have to tilt and turn 100 different ways to open. The kind you hide your valuables in. Your secrets. Your great-grandmother’s necklace. Your diary. Your leftover cocaine.

  Although my father and I had a strained relationship, the older I got, the more we started communicating. Through boxes. Every time I maxed out my credit card and quit my job to join a friend on vacation, I’d find a local gift store and send my father a box. A burl wood box from Montana, a marble box from La Croix, an Elvis box from Nashville—it was my way of telling my father I loved him. Even though we were having hard times. Even though we were barely on speaking terms. The harder the box was to figure out, the more excited he got. Sometimes he’d email me from his AOL account (he still has AOL) weeks after I’d sent him a box and tell me all about the hours and hours it took, and how he finally cracked the case! He used lots of exclamation points in these emails about the boxes. My father never used exclamation points. He was a calm man of few words. But damn, did my dad love those boxes.

  After getting home from the hospital (he was also a man of poor health), my father needed something to keep him busy. To keep his mind sharp and his spirits up, he decided to build me a box. BUILD ME ONE. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently it took him three months to finish. It was like building a maze, he said. He had to research, and saw and sand and glue.

  And there, on my doorstep one morning, from the other side of the country, was a gift from my father. The box was open when I unwrapped it. (The boxes came “solved and open,” and then you put them back together to lock them.) I marveled at the beautiful swirling burl wood and the craftsmanship of my father’s hands. I smelled the box and I smelled his cigars. I smelled his piney cologne. I smelled his soul.

  I took out the handwritten note that accompanied the box and started to do the millions of steps it took to lock and close the box.

  But somewhere in between all this sappy father-daughter shit, my mind began to drift back to Ryan. I had gotten waxed on Friday, thinking that maybe he would text me and reach out this weekend. It had been two weeks since we’d had contact, and I was confused and wounded and hurt and obsessed. We were in-fucking-love a month ago. I slept at his house for a week! I skyped with his mother in Australia! We made blueberry pancakes for dinner and watched Scarface! So what the hell happened?

  After our first date, he asked me to sleep over. He said he didn’t want to fuck me (damn it!); he just wanted to sleep next to me. Well, sleep next to me he did. Until I fucked him. That’s right! In the middle of the night, I rolled over and started touching him. I wanted all of him, and once I started he couldn’t help it. We literally moved the earth that night and slept until 2 the next day. After lunch and walking his dog (it was like we were a real couple!), he asked me if I wanted to keep hanging out. My legs melted like Milk Duds on the asphalt below me, and I agreed. One more night turned into two, turned into three, four, five—we were completely fucked. I sabotaged my waitressing job and ignored all my friends and family. I sent out a few “I’m alive don’t worry” texts, but inside I was completely dying. At least that’s what it felt like. But not a bad death, it felt like a beautiful one. Like a death of worry and anxiety and pressure and future and past. Like a death to the outside world and anything other than me and Ryan. Like a death of caring about anything else at all. It was fucking FREEDOM.

  You are my best friend because no matter how mad we are at each other, you will always be there to paint my right hand.

  During that week, we tickled each other’s arms and listened to the Velvet Underground.

  We grocery shopped and cooked lavish meals we could never finish, before we inevitably started fucking.

  We showed each other baby pictures and not-so-secretly wondered if ours would look like us.

  We watched whole seasons of cartoons from the ’90s and danced naked on his roof.

  We did mushrooms on the beach and ran into the ocean at dawn.

  The day I finally went home, I literally felt like I had been hit by a bus. My life was now split into two parts. Before Ryan and after Ryan. When I opened my tiny apartment door, I collapsed onto the carpet and made movements that were something like a child making a snow angel. The ceiling was spinning. Colors were more saturated, and the smoggy air somehow smelled like honey. I couldn’t tell anybody how I felt right away because I needed to take it all in. So I bought a pack of Capri Indigos (I don’t even smoke) and drove halfway to Santa Barbara and back again, listening to some of the new songs Ryan had brought into my world.

  I should have been arrested for Driving While in Love, because I’m sure I was swerving and speeding and slowing down at all the wrong times.

  A few days passed and I heard nothing. Then, on Sunday, when I was just about ready to jump out of my second-floor window and probably unsuccessfully kill myself, my phone PINGED.

  I lunged across the carpet from my bed and slowly turned my phone over with one eye closed. As if bracing myself for the results of a pregnancy test, I blurred my other eye and then slowly focused it.

  IT WAS RYAN.

  I let out a sigh so much bigger than the one from when I literally did take a pregnancy test and it was negative. Because somehow, in this moment, this result MEANT MORE.

  He asked if I wanted to hang out tonight, and I appropriately texted him back two hours later. We had a blissful night, and then another one a couple of days later.

  And then I texted him.

  Nothing.

  And texted him again.

  Nothing.

  And one more time.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  My mind was in a scramble, and my heart was clinging to the railing before being flung over Niagara Falls. How could someone be so there, and then so gone? Did he go on a trip? Did he get back with his ex? Did he realize what a desperate human I was for quitting my job to stay with him? Was his phone broken? Was he not receiving texts? (No one is ever “not receiving texts.”)

  Nope. He was still here. In town. Chill and unaffected as ever.

  At least that’s what my friend Marissa said after she saw him in aisle 7 at Whole Foods.

  SO WHAT THE FUCK?

  I couldn’t text him again. Not anymore. He’d clearly been ghosting me, and one more reach-out might take me into Fatal Attraction territory.

  But I needed answers! What had I done? How did whatever we had break? How could he be calmly shopping at Whole Foods and not thinking about me obsessively, the way I was thinking about him?

  I drank half a bottle of warm Chardonnay (because sometime during Ryan’s and my “love affair,” my refrigerator began leaking and then completely broke. But when you’re in love that’s how it works . . . you let shit break. None of that dumb real-life stuff seems to matter) and anxiously continued putting together my father’s mystery box.

  I was getting sweaty and impulsive and my fingers were itching for my phone, to say fuck it (again) and text Ryan.

  AND THEN I HAD AN IDEA.

  I grabbed a piece of paper, opened the list of contacts on my phone,
quickly as shit wrote down Ryan’s number on the paper, folded the paper, deleted Ryan’s number and all our text history from my phone, and shoved the little piece of paper containing his number into the mystery box.

  As I drank the other half of the bottle, I confidently finished putting together the box my father had built with his own two hands and coolly smiled when it was COMPLETELY LOCKED.

  Moments later I smoked a Capri (by then I actually had started smoking—thanks, Ryan) and burned the paper containing the directions to unlock the box.

  I’ve never had a lot of restraint, but now I had no choice. Now I would be the cool girl. Now I literally couldn’t reach out to Ryan. Now he would miss me and come running back to me and I would have the upper hand!

  NOW I WAS GOING OUT TO HAVE FUN AND SEE MY GIRLFRIENDS, WHO I’D ABANDONED DURING HURRICANE RYAN!!!!

  After an underwhelming wild-but-weird night at an Irish bar called O’Brian’s (for some reason Irish bars have always made me feel suicidal), I stumbled in a Johnnie Walker haze to a taco truck outside my stupid apartment. (Everything seemed stupid right then.) I ordered way too much, thought about that one time Ryan and I had made fish tacos and played Trouble, collapsed into my stupid bed, and shoveled a handful of cheese glop into my chops. I needed something to distract me. Something to fill the pit. The alcohol didn’t work, the friends didn’t work, and the nachos didn’t seem to work, either.

  Moments later I threw off all my stupid going-out clothes and put on one of Ryan’s T-shirts. His pheromones attacked my nostrils and dripped down my nose like the finest cocaine there ever was. Drip, drip, drip. It was almost like he was next to me . . . kissing me . . . holding me . . . loving me.

  Next thing I knew, I was holding a hammer.

  I had to do it. I couldn’t open the fucking box no matter how hard I tried. I slammed it against my desk and even ripped out a drawer that I covered with a pillow and then jumped on trying to crush it.