What Could Happen Now That We're Not Close

       You’re going to live in a city where you can start over, befriending new people at grad school with your literary know-it-all personality, meeting them for coffee at some hip, relaxed café, and you’ll be charming in a blue pea coat and red-orange scarf. Over time, as you work hard and meet people, some of them will be well-intentioned, romantically interested guys for whom you’ll set aside your negativity long enough to learn something new about dating and about yourself.

 School is going to kick your ass, but the people whose very presences make life harder by triggering your anger and jealousy will be thousands of miles away, including me.

       Since I was roughly seventeen years old, I have dreamed of packing up my jeans and pyramid studs and moving way out of state to start a brand new chapter of my life with more maturity, new friends, and a more serious career pursuit. So what if I have to put off that big move indefinitely? I made that decision for my well-being, for my bank account, and because it was the only thing preventing you and me from trying to kill each other. There’s no need for you to be so condescending about my canceling our plans to move together. I'm supposed to look out for myself and I will. Look at how I already have the publisher meeting-friendly collection of cardigans and blazers to prove it. I’ll put out an e-book and a novel and change my address, visit Boston and Portland and Prague and blast Bob Seger through open car windows and start to raise a child and  someday reunite with you at a friend's party, months after you’d earned a PhD, days after you will have dumped your English business owner boyfriend of three years, and just hours before Hanukkah, and we can then discuss The Virgin Suicides and movies and existentialism like we used to, all without the rude sarcasm and self-involved insecurity that stood in the way for so long.