No Longer Necessary

My deep brown hair falls into my face as I fumble with my phone to quickly turn it back on after the airplane touches down on the Los Angeles tarmac. A few buzzes begin to light up my screen. My stomach flips. Michael. A reply to a picture I posted to my story, me, standing in the airport bathroom, taking a picture of myself in the mirror. “ Six hours to LA” the picture of me annoyingly says.

“When do you get back?” His message hits my stomach humiliatingly. I inhale too quickly. Thinking about him. Thinking about him thinking about me. Which is still embarrassingly enough to reorganize my nervous system.

It had been six weeks since we had last spoken, if you measured from the breakup and not from the beginning of his slow disappearance before that. One night, he texted me, Call me. And I did. He said he was sorry but he didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore.

The thing was, I already knew. That whole night, I’d watched his Snapchat story too many times in bed, examining it with the kind of concentration people probably used to reserve for war strategy. A picture of him holding a red solo cup. Next to him, part of a girl’s arm. I knew it was a girl’s arm because women can tell these things immediately. Another picture: a beer pong table, some blonde girl smiling on the opposite side, blurred enough to make her seem both insignificant and threatening. I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to see it or if I just needed to believe everything men did was secretly deliberate. “Okay,” I said on the phone, trying to sound like the kind of girl who could metabolize rejection gracefully. “We can still be friends though, right?”

Michael and I met on Tinder in December, six months prior. Even though I didn’t have much trouble drawing attention at school, or at my part time job at a tea lounge in downtown Syracuse. Boys would come in and flirt with me behind the counter, ask about my classes at the university, things like that. Boring things. There was no spark, no mystery. I felt like I could see through all of them. Despite all of that, anyway, no one was even asking me out. Their curiosity would fade as soon as they stepped away from the sticky wooden counter, with their iced lattes or milkshakes, finding their friends at a table in the cafe and preformatively pulling out some dull board game to play loudly while other students all did the same.

When I saw him on Tinder I had a spark of hope. He seemed interesting. He was in a band. Bass player for hardcore music. And then I learned it was hardcore Christian music, which seemed counterintuitive. We met up at a party, got drunk and had sex. Our relationship was surface level. He was hard to reach, and because I was undoubtedly lonely, I was entirely too available. I wanted him to want me though. For a while he did. He would pick me up in his cheap little toyota and we would steal glances and he would put his hand on my thigh, which I always made a mental note to remember how big his hand made my thighs look. He would skim the inside of my leg, tracing his fingers up and down.

We stayed in this routine until March and then he asked me out officially. He told me he loved me and I said it back, even though I wasn’t sure I meant it. I liked the sex. I liked being needed by someone. I liked the routine, the structure.

He ended things in the beginning of May, only two months later.

The girl sitting next to me on the crowded plane stands up and I stick my phone in my carry on backpack. Back home. Back to LA. Every step I take brings me back to the reality of the life I lived before I left for college. To my best friend, Julia and her tiny little white WV bug that should be waiting by baggage claim for me. To our group of friends, Chris, Joey and Terio. And my one first love, Sam.

I left California over a year ago for school, or perhaps to manufacture a new life. I didn’t really want to go to school in the first place but I felt at the time it was my only option. To run. Run from responsibility, run from accountability, run from the version of myself that had become impossible to recognize, only to arrive somewhere else and become another stranger entirely. A different city. A different home. A different routine. A different version of me wearing the same face.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine what my life would look like at this age. I was a lonely child, mostly by choice. I had friends, sure, opportunities for closeness, but I often preferred to be alone. I remember becoming close to someone and then, suddenly, no longer needing them. Stop returning calls. Stop showing up. End a friendship with such ease it barely registered as loss.

Julia and I met in middle school, just as you start deciding who you want to become. We orbited each other’s worlds and remained acquaintances until high school when we suddenly decided to spend every day together. Us. And then it was us and Nadine. After graduating high school we spent every single day together, and because none of us had particularly good home lives, Julia having an unstable mother, Nadine being adopted by a couple who didn’t like her, and me with an absent and neglectful father and a mother who moved across the county, we found ourselves attached and leaning on each other for survival. We all got jobs fresh out of high school and rented a small room in an old man’s house in Venice, close to the beach. We had two bunk beds and a small twin bed shoved into the even smaller walk in closet.

We fell into routines easily and without resistance. Work, community college, parties, drinking, and smoking. Sometimes, I found myself leaning towards Nadine more than Julia. We had similar personalities, but also so different we complimented each other so well. She was loud. Almost obnoxious, some may say but she didn’t care. She was a lesbian. Or maybe she was bi. I’m not really sure now. At the time she would tell me how hot I was, she would help me take my nudes for boys.

Julia was a stark opposite. She was heavily boy oriented. Everything she did was to appear available. In school, she was often referred to as easy. But she was so beautiful. She had olive tan skin, bright green eyes and the boys would gawk over her and give her all their attention. She cared a lot about her appearance, and much like Nadine she had a loud mouth sometimes. She would stand up for herself, loudly, and proudly, she never seemed to be meek or shy. Like me. This would cause rifts between Nadine and Julia a lot. They would fight and fight and never want to let the other one win.

But mostly, we had fun. We didn’t have much and somehow that made everything feel more expansive. Nadine would sleep with our weed dealer and we’d smoke for free. I never liked weed that much. It made me paranoid. I was always locating exits, always glancing over my shoulder as if something terrible had decided to wait for me specifically. I preferred drinking. Not in a destructive way—I told myself I knew where the line was. I liked the feeling of being lightly altered. I liked getting buzzed and flirting. I liked becoming someone people couldn’t quite place.