When I’m Twenty-Nine
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 just one bad 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 miss us so 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, small restaurants, 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. She never texts 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 I supposed to be in charge of arranging gross cremation logistics, but I’m responsible for some kind of celebration-of-life event 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.
But there is no way I’m going to host a celebration of any sort.
On my way to the airport, I share a social media post about how my father died and how I’m going home to deal with all the boring, annoying business and house stuff.
How it’s all crazy and complicated because my bananas parent hadn’t been in my life for years, so I’m resentful that I have to wade through his myriad of disasters.
How I wish I’d had a better father. I ask my online friends to talk about their own parents.
To maybe celebrate great parents, but also to unload about growing up with crummy ones.
Being truthful with my followers has always been important, and it’s moving to see how they comment. So many supporting me, sharing love, telling me their own stories, and altogether making me feel less alone.
I am not the only one with a family that makes my head spin. And I’m inspired—maybe reminded—that I could one day find myself in a family that isn’t wholly dysfunctional.
I force myself to correct my thinking. It’s not that I could find myself in one, tumble into one. It’s that I could create one.
When the plane lands, I about groan. I really do not want to be here. But I grab my bag from the bin above my seat and trudge off the plane
After I open my Lyft app, I pause. It’s tempting to run to my hotel, yet I put in an address and soldier on to my dad’s house. I’m almost pissed that a car is available to drive me, but I reluctantly lumber in.
When we’re at my destination, I’m sulking in the back seat, and my driver almost forces me out of the car, as my disinterest in leaving is pretty clear.
“Ma’am?”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t want to be delivered here either,” I spit out.
He exits his driver’s seat and pulls my bag from the trunk to the front door before he tears off in his Acura.
It’d be nice to pretend that I didn’t know about the key under the very fake-looking rock, but I sigh as I grab it.
I wish this fucker had locked me out.
But he didn’t, so I’m in.
The entryway is all mail, and I swear a thousand swears as I take a step in and kick his million envelopes across the floor.
I wander around his house, and I’m grateful he wasn’t a true hoarder of physical items. But when it comes to piles of paper?
He was a master. After wading through the ocean of crap in the entryway, I laugh with slightly maniacal rage as I gaze at the kitchen.
Stacks of mail have given up and begun to fall to the floor.
My experience tells me this is all bills, collection letters, legal documents. Did I really expect anything different?
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and settle into a chair at the kitchen table, which also holds its own mountain of everything paper.
I surrender and reach for the nearest envelope, having to start somewhere.
There are two categories, I decide: personal and business.
And fuck him for making me even have to deal with this.
I open a piece of mail that is obviously a bill and see that it is from an accountant. A past due balance. Then it hits me.
I am an adult with resources.
This does not have to be my mess. I don’t have to fear his disapproving gaze or shaming words. I have choices. I luckily find trash bags under the sink and go about the task of bagging up all this shit that has nothing to do with me and doesn’t have to be my problem.
While the literal trashing of all the nightmares is a nice cathartic distraction, it suddenly occurs to me that I am alone in this house.
It was only after I left for college that I started to reflect on my childhood and identify things that began to seem strange to me when I was young.
And things that now, as an adult, I know are totally fucked.
As I go through the house, I again am hit with how it is not normal for people to keep piles of cash in the air vents of their home.
Or routinely store cash in the freezer. A normal business person doesn’t have strangers coming to their door in the middle of the night to conduct “business transactions” and whisper in the shadows.
There are so many things that made me anxious as a child that I shoved to the back of my mind and refused to think about.
Years later, I am sitting in this now-unfamiliar house and feeling that anxiety that I hoped was gone.
When the doorbell rings, I assume this is someone calling whom I should fear, so my entire body is on high alert. There are no cameras or a security system.
But I know there are guns. I hate them, but there were always guns.
It doesn’t take long to find a shotgun, under a bed.
Loaded and primed to go. As I march through the house with all the adult courage I can muster, I realize how ridiculous this is.
A shotgun is not something you brandish while answering the door.
It is bulky, hard to handle, especially for a petite female, and is also meant for long-range shooting.
I also realize that if some dirtbag debt collector wants into this house, I will gladly let him in.
He can have the bags of shit and the ancient boxy televisions.
I’m happy to take what I came with and leave.
The doorbell rings again.
When I open the door, I don’t know what to feel. Anger, sadness, relief?
After looking at Patrick for a minute or two, I just say, “Fuck you.”
“Fair enough.”
“I almost shot you,” I spit out.
“Also, fair enough.”
“Like, literally shot you, with a gun, and I vehemently despise guns.”
“I know that.”
“I got scared and paranoid in this house. You know, waiting for thugs, who seriously could have shown up. I’m now basically working with a mix of fury and paranoia. It’s a weird cocktail of emotions.” I hold out my trembling hand. And the disgusting gun. “Can you take this from me? And unload it?”
Patrick takes the horrid gun from my hand and somehow knows how to make it nonlethal. The sound of bullets being expelled is both terrifying and reassuring.
Now that accidental shootings are off the plate, I hurl my hands against his chest, wishing I could scream, but unable to produce more than a crying whisper.