&mdash; toxic, quixotic

Mimi chose me the way cats choose their people, with morning nuzzles and the kind of devotion that feels special. She was mine in a way that transcends ownership, where the connection becomes part of your identity. I was her person.

When my mom remarried a man allergic to cats, the math was simple. The cats had to go. Rosie went to our grandparents. Mimi went to my mom’s coworker.

And I volunteered to be the one who put her in the carrier.

I told myself it was mercy. That my familiar hands would be a comfort in the terrifying unknown. That love should be present for the hard things. I thought I was cushioning the blow.

The first placement failed immediately. Mimi peed and hissed her way back to us within days, completely wrong-footed with the coworker who couldn’t handle her distress. When she returned, she forgave me. She rubbed against my legs, resumed her place on my pillow. Her trust was a miracle I felt I didn’t deserve, but I accepted it greedily. The betrayal was a temporary glitch, erased by her return.

So when we placed her with my dad, I volunteered again.

This time, there was no misunderstanding the pattern. From her perspective, the sequence was absolute: my face, the carrier, the end of her world. She had granted me a pardon, and I had used it to re-offend. I was not her comfort; I was the prerequisite to her despair.

She never let me touch her again. For the rest of her life, if I entered a room, she would leave.

She lived with my dad until he died. My stepmother, with no bond to honor, had her put down. I have never asked if it was necessary. The answer doesn’t matter. The ultimate cause was my betrayal. I set her on the path that ended in that room.

I thought I was being brave by facing her in those moments of loss. I thought I was absorbing the pain for her. But I was wrong. I was just teaching her that my love was conditional, and its ultimate expression was banishment.

I wanted to be the hero who shared her burden. Instead, I became the villain who defined it.

I thought I was doing the right thing. I was wrong.

A Gun Drawn

May 24, 2026

Addiction, Experience

A gun drawn on you will bring you out of a blackout.

People comply with a gun. In movies we don’t think about the mechanics of it; in real life, the automaticity is total. It bypasses consciousness, as if the body recognizes guns at an instinctual level. I wasn’t weighing options or calculating risk. I was responding to electrical impulses originating in the amygdala.

“Freeze. Put your hands up.”

I realized my hands were up before I decided to put them there. One moment I was drunkenly trying to find a way through the bushes or trees, I wasn’t quite sure; the next, everything was organized around the singular fact that there was a gun drawn on me.

I was not particularly afraid. But I understood with precision that if I miscalculated this interaction, I could actually die.

“Higher.”

My hands went higher. Of course cactus wasn’t going to cut it. The word did not need to be spoken forcefully to have force.

“Turn around slowly.”

I did not want to get shot. That was the only principle. I pivoted carefully and asked, “Like this?”

It was an honest question. The timid sound of my voice must have de-escalated something; whatever the worst case he had prepared himself for did not happen. I heard him exhale.

“Yes. Like that.”

The efficiency with which he apprehended me was stunning. He cuffed both hands in what seemed to be a single motion. I glided across the yard and he dropped me off in the backseat without friction. At the station I was removed with the same elegance.

But then, no one else in my entire life has ever been as kind and hospitable to me as the Warden of the jail on that night. He was warm, charismatic, and personable. He chatted me up with the enthusiasm of an uncle and child. He asked me about my hometown, education, and job. He praised everything he could find. For not driving my rental car. For maintaining friendships. For having gone to college.

It struck me how good he was at customer service in a role that didn’t require it.

“This mugshot is actually badass.”

He wasn’t being ironic, I saw it. My hair was a wild mane. My tattoo stood out. It was, objectively, a strong mugshot.

When they had finished processing me, I drunkenly began a speech to thank the officers for their assistance.

There at some point I drifted away in my cell.

The Russian II

April 26, 2026

Romance

A few years later I reached out to Anna.

I don’t know what I expected. She had said the thing she said and I had picked up my wine and left and that had been the end of it. But she was still in my head in the way unresolved things stay there, taking up space. So I messaged her. We made plans.

I taught her to drive a stick shift. She had never learned and I had a car and somehow this seemed like the right activity. We drove to an empty parking lot and I talked her through the clutch. She stalled it four times and didn’t apologize once. She just tried again with the same flat composure she had always had about everything. By the end she was doing it. She seemed neither pleased nor surprised. This was simply a thing she had decided to learn and now she had learned it.

She got a call. I could see it occur behind her eyes, the moment she went against her better judgment and included me in her plans. “Andy is with me. He is driving now.” The car really might have had something to do with it.

Her friends were not what I expected. She had always struck me as a socially average person. But the people she had somehow found herself living with were electric. His name was something like Emilio, and he seemed like an Emilio. He was a charismatic frontman from a band that didn’t exist. His girlfriend, whose name was something like Janinah, moved through a room the way his girlfriend would. They lived together, the three of them, in a studio near the old viaduct.

At the bar we stood in the crowded middle of it and socialized. When I turned my head, she was right there.

Carly. A year below me in high school. She was in the same general tier as me without ever quite converging. But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She was a woman. She had aged in a specific way that looked good. I recognized her and she recognized me and for a moment neither of us said anything.

I went first. We know each other. The conversation quickly found its footing.

Somehow, Carly and my groups merged. The rest of the night we moved from bar to bar, her group and mine folded in one. Anna was receding. Not dramatically. Not with any visible hostility. She was just slowly making clear that whatever tonight was, it was not going to include me in the way I had hoped. Carly was clearly uninterested in the direction her boy wanted the night to go. He was openly annoyed about it. She was unconcerned.

Eventually we split off and ended up back at Emilio’s place. Anna had completely frozen me out by this point. Just a temperature change that had been happening all night and was now complete. Emilio and Janinah were very warm toward me. They said they hoped to see me again.

I took an Uber home. They would not see me again because Anna did not like me, and it was Anna who had brought me there.

On my way home I added Carly on Facebook and sent her a message.

I have never had a stronger opening in my life.

Hazing

March 30, 2026

Experience, Work

I got hired at Port of Subs because Bobby and I had this strange form of recognition between us before I ever applied. I was just a regular who came in after class, but we talked like coworkers who hadn’t been hired together yet. We both had identity-through-work, the sense that being good at a job could stand in for having a self. And in a college town where the store got flooded with applicants every quarter, he brought me in on culture fit. It actually meant something. At that age, being chosen for anything felt like proof I was doing something right.

Once I started, the dynamic shifted fast. Bobby presented himself as the dedicated, service obsessed lead, the person who knew every quirk of the store and all the procedural trivia that made him feel important. Underneath that, he ran small power games that never stopped. Like most shifts, we worked in pairs, so writing the schedule gave him full control of who got along, who clashed, and who absorbed the burden of whatever he didn’t feel like doing. He avoided actual labor by assigning himself higher level tasks, though those tasks changed depending on what he didn’t want to touch that day.

One time he gave me the “Pepperoni test.” He just said everyone does it, you just have to slice ten pieces to an exact weight. He handed me the stack. I didn’t know it wasn’t real. I did what he asked and hit the number on the first try. Visibly baffled, he recalibrated the scale and told me to do it again. I hit it again. He didn’t react, no acknowledgement or recognition. He just shut down whatever he thought he was doing and never mentioned it again.

Jake was another issue. He had been there forever and treated that as an achievement. Right before I started, he got blackout drunk and broke his hand, so he couldn’t do anything except the register. He still outranked me because the owner liked him. He hated me immediately. Decided I was too confident on my first shift and turned that into some great character deficit. He complained to Bobby constantly. He started throwing pieces of meat at me instead of handing them over, waiting for me to drop one. I caught every piece. But he kept doing it, irritated each time I didn’t give him the result he wanted. But if I ever dropped one, it would be his fault. He would gain nothing if he was successful.

When the new girl was hired, everyone disliked her immediately. Too slow, too awkward, too much work to deal with. So Bobby assigned her to me. I mistook it for trust. It wasn’t. It was punishment. I treated her respectfully anyway, explained things clearly, and she adjusted fast. We became a solid team. When he asked how she was doing, I told him exactly that. He never put us on a shift together again. At the time I didn’t understand it, but looking back it’s obvious. Helping someone everyone else had written off was a kind of power, and I wasn’t allowed to have any.

Eventually I quit. I had worked hard in a place that rewarded nothing, and there was nothing left to push against. The dynamics weren’t special. The work wasn’t meaningful. And even when I excelled under impossible conditions, none of it mattered.

Sometimes you just lose, and that’s all there is to it.

Antihero

March 1, 2026

Addiction

I drank for ten years, though the first ones shone with false brilliance. In college, alcohol was the point. Everything worth doing happened with a drink. Everything worth remembering blurred into nights that were never fully remembered at all.

For me, the point was never the buzz. I wasn’t interested in getting ‘tipsy,’ or laughter, or surface-level fun, the things that ‘happen.’ I drank to black out. It was always the destination. The apotheosis of the evening wasn’t the joke I told or the girl I kissed or the party I stumbled through, it was the moment when memory failed.

People like to call alcohol “liquid courage” but I never experienced it that way. Courage implies stepping more fully into your life, doing the thing you were afraid to do. I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t interested in being bolder or more present. What I wanted was absence. Blackout was about vacancy, not bravery. It was a release from the untreated depression and anxiety that made ordinary existence feel unbearable.

And for a while, it worked. Obliteration felt like mercy. The night would dissolve into static, and for a few precious hours I didn’t have to be myself. It was more than being drunk. Drunk meant dulled but still tethered. Blackout meant severed. The tether was gone, the loop was cut, silence at last.

But the myth or glamour of it couldn’t survive with time. The first blackouts felt shocking, almost profound. Later they were just math. If you keep drinking, eventually you black out. What I once romanticized as antihero self-destruction was really just the structure doing what it was designed to do. The system wrote the script, and I just followed it.

By the later years, alcohol wasn’t giving me anything. It wasn’t a gateway to transcendence. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t fun. It was just a cure for the hangover it had caused the day before. I woke up sick and reached for the one thing that could help, even as it guaranteed it would return again tomorrow. The lie had long since revealed itself, but by then I was stuck in a closed loop.

Eventually, I quit. Not in a blaze of insight or a heroic moment of willpower. Not with a speech or a vow or an ultimatum. I quit because there was no other option left. My body was crumbling, my mind unraveling, my life was unlivable. Quitting wasn’t a choice. The decision had been made for me long before I claimed it.

That’s all there is to it: I drank for relief, and I quit for survival. The rest is details. The blackout-as-apotheosis, the antihero romance, the grand narrative of drinking as destiny; that was merely cover I laid over a decade of erosion.

I kept drinking until I couldn’t anymore.

Then, I stopped.

The Russian

January 11, 2026

Romance

When Anna and I matched, the app still felt like something people were wary of, so I gave her my full name and even my license plate number. It felt like the normal precaution you took when you were about to meet a stranger from the internet. She got in my car and the connection was immediate. She was a Russian student with a heavy accent, glasses, blond hair, a slightly awkward posture, and a directness that bypassed every American social rule I had ever learned. Nothing about her felt shaped by trying to be a certain type of woman. That made it easier to relax around her than I had ever experienced.

Our first dates were straightforward. Bars, restaurants, the usual places people chose without imagination. The hostess always seated us in the predictable part of the dining room where early Tinder couples were clustered together, all of them stiff and polite and trying too hard. We would sit there watching the slow collapses around us while our conversations never stalled. There was something steady between us from the beginning. She laughed easily. She asked simple questions. She didn’t act like she was auditioning for anything. I didn’t either.

After a few dates she came to my apartment. I had assumed she would look around and quietly recalibrate her interest downward. The place looked like it belonged to someone still in the process of becoming an adult. But she walked in and said she liked it. She didn’t mean she liked me despite the apartment. She liked the apartment. She said she wanted to live that way. Her tone never shifted to suggest she was trying to flatter me or make a point. She spoke in straightforward observations, always. I smoked Parliament Lights then. A week or two later she started smoking them too, not as a gesture or a flirtation, but as if it was simply the logical next step.

She needed to move apartments and I volunteered to help. Her place barely had anything in it. No mattress, no packed boxes, no evidence that she had prepared. I moved her things to the car and she worked beside me without apology or explanation. She didn’t thank me. It didn’t register as rude. It felt like she assumed I already understood the situation and didn’t need the interaction padded with ceremony. I found it refreshing. There was nothing performative between us.

The night it ended didn’t feel like a turning point until the very last minutes of it. I brought a bottle of wine because at that time I brought alcohol to every interaction. Earlier in the evening she had asked why I did that. I didn’t give her a real answer. She then told me stories about Russia, showed me photos of her hometown, played music she grew up with. We had sex. Everything about the night felt warm and steady. There was nothing tense or unsettled. When we were getting ready for bed, she said, in the same tone she used for everything else, “You’re only into me because you have no other options.” I didn’t register it at first. I asked her what she meant. She repeated it, worded more plainly, but with the same neutral delivery.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t explain anything. I didn’t feel insulted in the traditional sense. It was just true. The wine was still sitting on her table, untouched. I picked it up because it was mine. I walked out. She didn’t protest or ask for clarification. The whole thing ended in silence.

Years later, at thirty, I typed her name into Facebook out of nowhere. Her profile hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen it. Same photos, same posts, same faint trace of a life that had never fully transitioned into adulthood. I sent her a message explaining why I had moved back to Seattle, mentioned the bipolar episode, and gave a brief account of what had happened to me. She didn’t respond. That night I removed her from my friends list. The next day she liked a picture of my cat on Instagram. It wasn’t a re-opening of anything. It was a small sign that she had noticed the change and that was the extent of it.

Gravity

December 21, 2025

Addiction

I woke up in my apartment with no phone or wallet. Apparently, I had driven home blackout drunk over a span of ninety miles. With dread, I realized I had to go back to Bremerton, because my phone and wallet were still over there. But more than that, there was an understood social contract stating that I had to be present for Geoff’s bachelor party no matter what. I grabbed a jar of quarters and my checkbook and drove back without GPS.

Of course, everything planned that day cost money. I had canceled my cards the night before, and so I had none. I offered to pay for the arcade with quarters, but everyone refused. Allowing me that small dignity would amount to grace I did not deserve. I had to be present because of the social contract, but that same rulebook dictates that everyone should pull their own weight.

So, George paid for things because someone had to, and nobody else wanted to be responsible for me. I could feel it every time his card came out. It wasn’t generosity. He wasn’t willing. He was just the unlucky one on whom that responsibility had fallen.

At the end of the night, I wrote George a check out of desperation to do something. I had the money in my account. That was irrelevant. He refused it, because it was unambiguously pathetic. I did not earn the privilege of his redemption. It wasn’t about the money. It was about humiliation. I needed to feel it. I deserved it. I needed to learn a lesson.

Ten years later, quite unexpectedly, George joined Geoff and me for coffee. He had asked Geoff for my permission to join us, which showed he remembered something of the rift. But once together, we became the same old friends we always were. He didn’t remember a thing about me from that day. He remembered the bachelor party fondly. He wasn’t making a statement. He genuinely didn’t give a fuck.

Apparently, the worst night of my life didn’t exist for anyone else. I had fixated on it for years, believing earnestly that it mattered. I am not sure it is relief that it didn’t. These days, I write off my alcoholic years as sunken costs. But it turns out their meaninglessness has a gravity of its own. It is heavier than the shame I thought I was carrying.

Cocaine

December 7, 2025

Addiction

The night began as nothing, though I was in a reckless and cocky mood. I decided we were going to get cocaine. None of us had real experience. None of us had connections. None of us even cared that much about cocaine itself. I had just decided that this was the scaffolding I would build a night on, and I committed.

I recruited Noah and James. We met on Capitol Hill over pitchers and tried to act like we knew what we were doing, but the truth was that we had no plan. The only lead I had was a man I met at some party a few weeks earlier. He was magnetic and strange in a way that made you think he had lived everywhere and survived everything. His name was something sharp that I have forgotten. Job or Axe or something like that. Whatever it was, he picked up when I called. He was cool and casual, yet abundantly willing to help.

When he met us later, he told us he had already gotten a dealer’s permission to share his number with us. Pierre. He said Pierre knew who we were and approved. When I contacted him, he sounded warm and professional and almost too understanding for what we were asking. We met him, and our inexperience was obvious. We did not know quantities or prices or etiquette. Yet Pierre did not take advantage of us. He gave us what we could afford and told us to remember the framing so we would not be taken advantage of in the future.

Inside the restroom of a nearby club, Axe showed us how to do it correctly. You do not pinch a nostril shut like the movies. You dip the end of the straw into the bag and breathe in through both nostrils at once and let it hit clean. Simple and unceremonious. We watched him do it and copied him like kids learning something we should not know. We offered him a share. He accepted with real gratitude, thanked us, and then disappeared into his own night.

By then Morgan had arrived. Noah’s girlfriend of two weeks. We drifted through a few bars before ending up at Noah’s place. James dropped off somewhere along the way. Once we were inside, we stayed up until sunrise playing Kings Cup with cocaine, dealing out lines like they were part of the rules. Every card meant another hit. Every rule kept us going.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Morgan and I fell into a rhythm. Innocent but unmistakable. She laughed at everything I said. I told her stories I rarely shared. Half formed theories about myself. Vulnerabilities I had not articulated before. I watched her soak it in. Not seductively. Not romantically. More like a witness who had stumbled into my interior world and found it interesting enough to stay. The room kept shrinking until it felt like only the two of us were awake inside it.

Noah had tapped out first. His body simply gave up before ours did. He lay down in the other room and the night kept going without him. Morgan and I talked and laughed and kept doing lines until nothing was left. When the sun finally cut through the blinds, I left feeling triumphant and weightless. At some point she had given me her number in front of him. None of us reacted. It did not mean anything at the time.

The next day I texted Noah that I had left my shirt at his place. No answer. I assumed he was asleep. I tried again the next day. Nothing. I tried the next week. Still nothing. I kept sending these small, pointless messages into the void, convinced each time that he must be busy or distracted or hungover. It took weeks before I noticed he had blocked me on Facebook. That was the first real clue, but even then I did not understand what I had actually done.

Weeks later I walked into the convenience store in Union Square where I bought cigarettes. Morgan worked there. She had told me that during the cocaine night and it had felt like some kind of cosmic coincidence. I had avoided the store since then, but now she was behind the counter. She lit up when she saw me. Too warm. Too pleased. Her body tilted toward me like she already knew I would respond. It made the air feel unstable. I paid and practically ran out of the store.

That was when everything locked into place. She had left him, and he blamed me. Not for stealing her, because nothing happened. He blamed me for creating the conditions where something could shift. For building a night where he disappeared from his own life and someone else stepped into the space he was supposed to fill.

I never did cocaine again.

Lily

November 23, 2025

When I first adopted Lily, I made a point of introducing her to my mom right away. Not just a quick hello, but full visits. My mom came over several times a week in those early months, crouching down to Lily’s level, holding her, talking to her in that slow, deliberate voice cats trust. It was our plan: repetition until Lily stopped seeing her as a guest and started seeing her as part of her world.

It worked. Lily imprinted on her in that permanent, unshakable way cats sometimes do. She would run to the door when my mom came over, let her hold her longer than anyone else could. It was just another one of those small victories in early cat ownership, and I never thought about it much after that.

Until now.

Now my mom is paying for the vet visit that might save Lily’s life. The bond we built wasn’t a prerequisite for her help, but it fills the act with a meaning deeper than obligation. Lily doesn’t know this. She walks over and lets her hold her for a long time. Cats remember differently than we do. They remember in pattern and feeling. For Lily, the pattern was simple: my mom always arrived with fun and gentleness.

It’s strange to realize that what saves her is not the medicine, not the money, not even the vet, but the bond built in those first months. The bond we created without knowing what it might one day mean.

And now, when I watch her climb into my mom’s arms, I see the whole lineage of trust replay itself. From the first crouch on the living room floor to now, where Lily purrs against her chest, the line is unbroken.

She doesn’t know any of this, of course. She just knows my mom is here, and that she loves her.

Interviewing While Manic

November 9, 2025

I have had job interviews in every mental state you can imagine, but nothing compares to the ones I did while manic.

Sometimes it worked in my favor. I would walk in, connecting dots faster than they could ask questions, charming them with half formed but somehow compelling ideas. They would lean forward and I would think, I could land this before they even finish explaining the role.

Other times it went the other way. I would start answering questions I had not even been asked yet, following tangents into three other tangents, then circling back like nothing happened. I would pick up on every micro-expression and over interpret them in real time. Half the time I would forget the original question entirely.

And then there were the arrogant days. Like I am doing you a favor. I would sit there listening to their pitch and think, this is a waste of my talent. I would answer questions like they were beneath me or explain exactly what was wrong with their hiring process, their leadership, or their business model. By the end, I was not so much interviewing as explaining why I would never work for their shitty company.

Once in a while I landed in that sweet spot, charismatic enough to intrigue them and qualified enough to make them think twice. That is when I would get the bait and switch offers. Not a flat out no, but, we would like to bring you on as a consultant. Or, we can do a contract to hire arrangement. A yes with a leash attached.

In my head these were moral assaults. I refused them every time, because I told myself I would not take a job where they were betting against me from the start. In reality, those offers would have really helped me, even if they came with invisible strings.

But overwhelmingly, interviewing while manic does not end with a job offer. It ends with a look people give when they are not sure what just happened but they know they will never forget it.

The Downlevel

November 2, 2025

I was working a stable job at a premium company for a good salary. I liked my work. I liked my peers. I liked my leadership. I had relocated to Boston for this job. I’d been brought on as a contractor and was about to convert to full-time, which was the single professional milestone I wanted more than anything; incontrovertible proof that I belonged.

During my interview prep, I became suspicious of the level I was being considered for. I was supposed to focus my answers on sourcing, submittals, ATS, and inmails. I knew something was up. My foot tapped obsessively, filling the silence with palpable anxiety.

“Is there a problem?”

I hadn’t slept for three days by now, and that is since I started counting; which was after weeks of not sleeping well, or possibly at all. I had started going on long walks every morning and evening to vent off some of the accumulated energy, at least 10-20 miles a day, just for maintenance.

“If I had past projects of bigger scope, would you consider looping at a higher level?”

“Why don’t you give me an example of what you mean, and I will let you know if it maps.”

I did. He said it didn’t.

He was going to say that no matter what I said.

“You operate as an L2 here.”

I was speechless. My foot stopped abruptly, I packed up my laptop, and excused myself without explanation. I couldn’t even argue with it. This job was a massive reduction for me. But what he was saying completely dismissed my previous experience.

If I wasn’t manic, that wasn’t fair. But because I was, the injustice wasn’t just frustrating. It was incomprehensible. My brain couldn’t metabolize it. I tried to rationalize the situation, tried to reframe it, I tried to accept it. But I absolutely could not. It was a week until my interview, but I was too disoriented to stop or postpone it. I was on a slow collision course with an outcome I knew I wouldn’t accept.

They ran me through the full interview loop. I was manic as hell, talking too fast, veering off script, pushing too hard, but they knew my work. They had seen it. So they still wanted to hire me, not because I interviewed well but because I had already been doing the job.

Obviously, the offer came in at Recruiter 2.

I turned it down.

Not because it wasn’t fair, although it wasn’t. Not because I had another opportunity. I didn’t. I turned it down because I was so angry about the downlevel that I couldn’t accept it. And then I went further and quit the contract job entirely.

That moment sits in my memory as a fracture. My life divides cleanly around it. Before, Boston was a wonderland. New job, new city, new life. It was working better than anything had ever worked. I had gotten sober permanently.

After I quit, I became radioactive.

Companies saw nine months tenure and assumed the worst. I obviously hadn’t converted because I wasn’t good enough. Clearly I was let go. No one knew the real story, which was in some ways worse because I technically rage quit over a job offer.

I couldn’t exactly explain it. “Sorry, I couldn’t process injustice” doesn’t land in a professional interview.

The interviews I did get didn’t go well. I was still manic, still scattered, and still pissed. I couldn’t fake normal. I spiraled, alone in a city where my only real connection had been work, and now work was gone. I burned through my savings.

Eventually, I took a contract job in California.

A former manager did me a favor; there wasn’t a real hiring need.

As soon as budgets got tight, I was let go.

My Girlfriend for Two Days

October 19, 2025

Romance

I was deep in the college party and bar scene when Sabrina came front and center. Everyone knew everyone, or pretended to. Sabrina had been an ancillary figure in our group, always there at the edges, bumming cigarettes on the porch, but suddenly she was throwing herself at me with an intensity that felt both flattering and overwhelming.

We’d end up on barstools that wobbled, her knee pressed against mine while she leaned in close enough that I could smell her perfume mixing with whiskey. The way she looked at me felt like I was being selected, pulled from the crowd into some private frequency. In retrospect, she was attracted to my social role and image in that world. I was part of her extended friend group, had the same habits, and moved in the same circles.

It escalated to official dating status in a matter of days. We were socially aligned, attractive to each other, sexually compatible. It felt good, or at least it felt like it should feel good.

But I suffered from depression and anxiety that would come in unpredictable waves. One evening we were sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes; the air was thick and still. I don’t remember what led to it, but I admitted I sometimes had crippling anxiety.

The moment I said it, her face changed. Not gradually, instant – like a door slamming. Her mouth twisted into something between disgust and confusion. “Okay…” she said, drawing out the word with such contempt that I can still hear the exact pitch of it. Then she stood up, dropped her cigarette, and left.

I don’t remember the exact breakup conversation, but that was functionally it.

She was still around constantly, though, and the reality of the bomb I’d dodged quickly surfaced. I watched her throw herself at every guy in our group with the same aggressive focus she’d used on me. The same lean-in at the bar, the same intensity that had felt flattering when it was aimed at me. Everyone saw it. Everybody resisted.

One time she was over when some guy approached the front stoop. He didn’t knock, didn’t hesitate, just walked up and punched someone in our group square in the face. No words, no warning. We all lost our shit. At some point during the chaos, he dropped a screwdriver on the ground, a weapon he’d been carrying. I watched Sabrina quietly pick it up and slip it into her purse, like she was collecting something that belonged to her.

I realized then she’d had him come over to meet her. He wasn’t random, he was hers. It revealed everything about her taste in men.

My Shot at Redemption

October 12, 2025

It was the same agency I had walked into a decade earlier and stumbled out of just over two months later. Back then I was drinking too much to keep my footing. This time I came in sober, lucid, desperate, and hungry.

The pitch had not changed: we are an elite boutique, we work only high-fee searches. I saw only dollar signs. Commission only did not matter. It was all anyone was offering me, and this place carried a different weight. I had failed here once. This was my shot at redemption.

The invitation back felt like recognition, like someone had noticed the distance I had traveled and decided I had earned another chance.

For a while I believed it. I found the rhythm fast, calls, pitches, the slow burn of turning strangers into clients. Every small win was proof I was not the same person who had left years ago. I could see the arc taking shape, the clean ending I had been chasing.

Then the floor shifted. I was working on niche, impossible job orders, and I had already contacted every single viable candidate there was. Everything that had made the agency appealing – high fee, niche searches – was in reality reasons you could not succeed there. I just did not see it that way at first.

I had told myself I would not walk away again. This time I would be successful here. Earn the respect of the owner, a god tier recruiter who billed one million dollars running his own desk while also managing the company.

But there is a difference between proving you can win and proving you will not quit. The first is victory. The second is erosion.

When I left, it was not because I could not do it. It was because I could, and that was no longer the point.

The day after I quit they posted an ad for a salaried position. They had the budget all along. The truth was simple and ugly. They had been betting against me from the start. This was never a redemption arc. It was a rigged game, and I had played it to the end.

Roy and Luna

October 5, 2025

When I call for Roy and Luna, Lily comes too. She’s never been excluded, not once, but I’ve also never called her name. Just “Roy and Luna.” That’s the phrase.

And still, she comes.

I don’t know when it started. Maybe she noticed the pattern. Maybe she watched what happened next – the pets, the attention, the group cuddle on the floor – and decided that “Roy and Luna” must mean everyone I love. That’s not what I meant, but I don’t correct her.

Because she’s right.

Roy was first to steal my heart. He was bold in a way that never needed to prove itself. He simply belonged.

Luna came with him, a bonded pair, but she hid under the couch for days. She emerged slowly, the kind of cat who negotiates her trust piece by piece. When she finally curled up against me with Roy, I felt the balance click into place. Roy and Luna were always a matched set, opposites stitched into the same fabric. And now I was included.

So when I say their names together, Roy and Luna, it isn’t just a call. It’s shorthand for the whole history of the house. Their names are the spine of my domestic life.

And now Lily knows this too.

She wasn’t there for the beginning. She arrived in a world already inscribed with their names, a third verse to a song that had always been a duet. But cats are pattern-readers. She studied what happened when I said the words. She noticed the sequence: the sound of their names, the rush of paws, and the warmth that followed.

So when I call for Roy and Luna, she comes too. Tail high, eyes bright, no hesitation.

It moves me more than I can explain. Because she isn’t technically right, but she is emotionally right. She reads the signal correctly. The quiet certainty that she belongs. She wasn’t there when the words were coined, but she comes anyway.

I don’t correct her. The truth is, she has redefined the meaning. It no longer means just Roy and Luna. It means come home. And she always does.

The Bus Connection

September 28, 2025

Romance, Work

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The company I worked for ran on booze. Every party blurred into another round, and every team building ended at a bar. I played along because it was the currency of belonging. I could drink until my edges smoothed, sleep badly, then show up the next morning and that endurance passed for competence. After one of those nights I left fired up, not sloppy but alive in a way that felt like light coming from inside me.

There is a phenomenon I have carried all my life. My internal weather dictates how the world responds. When I am depressed, strangers recoil and treat me like static. When I am manic, people lean in as if caught in a current. I used to dismiss it as delusion. That night on the bus, glowing from drink and something more, I could not. The feedback loop was too real.

The bus smelled like vinyl and sweat. People stared at their phones. It was the kind of quiet where everyone was alone together, sealed off in their own screens. I felt like the only one awake inside that hush, the only one scanning for something beyond.

And yet ahead of me, a woman kept locking eyes with me. Not a glance, but held looks that lingered just long enough. Each time she looked away, she smiled. Each time she came back, the smile was a little wider. By the third time, she dropped her head too quickly, caught in her own embarrassment. She was flirting, plain as day. And it repeated for the whole ride until it was the only thing I could see.

When we pulled into the park and ride, the shuffle began. She angled herself so she ended up beside me as we stepped off into the night. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to bridge the distance.

And still I said nothing.

Because what if I was wrong? What if the glances were coincidence, or politeness misread by a man who wanted more from them than was ever there? What if I spoke and the spell collapsed, leaving me exposed as a fool? The glow can make you magnetic, but it can also make you reckless. I did not trust myself enough to risk it.

So I kept walking. I got in my car, and I drove home.

Cordy

September 21, 2025

Addiction, Work

In college I took whatever work paid. I repaired laptops, installed software, convinced elderly clients that the internet would not eat them. One of those clients was Cordy. He was a psychologist by training and a hobby photographer by habit. He and his wife Cindy lived on a property in Skagit County in a house he had drawn and built himself. It was the kind of place that collects things: carved masks from Indonesia, a faded map with thumbtack holes, framed Polaroids stacked like proof that the world was larger than my dorm room.

Cordy spoke like someone who had learned how to listen. He trusted simple pleasures. He trusted music, and he trusted the slow work of developing a photograph. He trusted people enough to let them be imperfect. I liked him because he was generous and because he made generosity look ordinary. Cindy had the same ease. Together they were warm in the way people are who have not given up on being tender.

I became their tech person. I showed up once or twice a month and sat at their kitchen table while Cordy fed images into his Mac that I had never used before. I taught him how to organize folders and back up drives and which buttons did which little useful things. The work was small and practical and it kept me connected in a way the campus job could not. It felt like belonging that did not demand performance. I liked going out there.

One afternoon Cindy asked me to do something that felt bigger than a tech job. She wanted a birthday poster for Cordy. She described an old western wanted poster except instead of criminal charges it would be praise. Wanted: More Men Like Cordy. A list of virtues where crimes should be. She imagined it pinned by his closet light so he would see it often. She did not ask for perfection. She asked for tenderness disguised as humor. I am not a designer. I made the poster anyway. The typography was clumsy. The margins did not align. The bullets were awkward. It was amateur hour and it still landed. Cindy loved it. Cordy loved it. Later he tacked it inside his closet where morning light might catch the paper and remind him he was seen.

Then I started buying Adderall from people who did not ask questions. Prescriptions were a gate I could not be bothered with. Street supply was easier. The pills were small and steady and they made it possible to stay up and feel useful. I told myself I was optimizing. It made everything efficient. It made me feel sharp in a way that felt like survival. But survival became excess. I did not measure my intake. My supplier cut me off when I looked like I was breaking. Mercy and refusal come in the same breath from people who know when a person is losing the map. My dealer stopped too.

Withdrawal is a slow erasure. Days become a fog of wanting. I lay in bed and practiced dying. I wrote mental scripts in which everything ended cleanly. The body has a brutal way of teaching you the boundary between useful pain and ruin. I slept badly. I pressed my face into the pillow and wondered how to keep the world far enough away that it would not hurt me.

During those weeks Cordy sent an email. His project was finished. He was showing the work in a downtown gallery, practically in my neighborhood. He extended the exhibit and sent another note. He wanted to celebrate. The messages had the patient tone of someone who expected you to be there. They were invitations wrapped in the trust of friendship.

I did not go. I imagined walking into the gallery and listening to polite people talk about exposure and frame sizes and I imagined my hands shaking. I imagined all the small signs that would reveal I was falling apart, and I chose not to let anyone see the ruin. So I stayed in bed.

Once the withdrawal had subsided somewhat, I called him and the line dropped. I called again and the phone went to voicemail. Just a missed call and then silence.

That was the end. There are things you cannot fix after you let them go. I think now about the poster inside a closet. I imagine Cordy seeing it each morning and thinking the world was kinder than it can be. I imagine how small acts of attention matter.

I never told them how grateful I was. I never explained why I could not come. They would have understood. When I think of Cordy it is with the weight of that unreturned invitation and the memory of a man who pinned a piece of paper to his closet.

The Austin Weekend

September 7, 2025

Romance, Work

In 2020 at a major tech company, I met someone who changed everything in the span of about six weeks.

We were both remote recruiters on the same team. The chemistry was instant and relentless. We would have two conversations running simultaneously, one over Slack for work and another over text for everything else. Hours would disappear into these layered discussions about recruiting, life, random observations, whatever. It was limitless.

I remember scrolling through her Instagram photos for the first time when I discovered she was a lesbian. I guess the math didn’t work out for me, after all. Or so I thought.

After several more weeks of constant texting, she asked me something unusual.

“Would you ever date me?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t even think about my reply. It was simply true, and I just said it. I felt no fear or vulnerability, no risk of rejection. She was unavailable to me; therefore, this must be some kind of hypothetical, intellectual exercise.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

That’s approximately how it started.

We immediately went into planning & logistics. Eventually I would relocate to Austin. For now, I would come to visit in four weeks. If we could keep the intensity for that long, we’d have a strong foundation.

We maintained it with plenty to spare. The month flew by with the same dual-conversation energy. I booked the flight.

Austin exceeded every expectation. The chemistry translated perfectly to in-person interaction. We talked the same way face-to-face as we had through screens. The physical connection worked. We had sex and it was excellent. Everything about the weekend was clicking exactly as we’d hoped.

Then I did something incredibly dumb.

Before heading out the second day, I took a small hit from my weed vape. She took one too, in solidarity. It seemed harmless. I’ve done this thousands of times in my life. Here we had a tiny, shared moment before exploring the city.

Except, we both got ridiculously high.

I became weird and uncoordinated. She got paranoid and uncomfortable. What should have been a fun day out turned into an awkward nightmare where we were both trapped inside altered versions of ourselves.

When we got back to the hotel room, she quietly collected her things and left. I bought a ticket home that night.

It was over like that.

The smallest possible miscalculation at the worst possible moment. Everything that mattered had worked perfectly; the emotional connection, the physical compatibility, the practical logistics.

Six weeks of building something rare, a perfect weekend confirming it was real, then thirty minutes of being the wrong versions of ourselves when first impressions were everything.

Thirty minutes that undid everything we’d built and everything we could have been.

The Craigslist Job

September 1, 2025

I don’t remember the ad, just the phone call. A dog was barking in the background. Her voice cut through the noise. “Yes, when can you come in?” she asked, already moving on to the next thing. She didn’t need to see my resume.

That moment set the tone for everything that followed.

Her house was chaos. Papers everywhere, dogs barking, phone always ringing. If you could handle it, you could work there.

My first job was reposting the ad and scheduling interviews with other candidates. But at the end of that first day, she said, “When can you come tomorrow?” And the next day it was the same. It wasn’t until the first year passed that it was understood I got the job. She didn’t particularly like me, but she couldn’t find anyone better than me.

At first, I was just helping, like printing things, carrying things, assembling things. But eventually I had become her secretary, marketing department, and professional voice.

What I learned was how to sound professional when you had no idea what you were doing. How to write emails that sounded like they came from someone who knew things, when really I was just mimicking patterns I’d seen online. Sandy would hand me tasks that required experience I didn’t have.

She sold therapy certifications. Expensive ones, $3,000 for a weekend workshop that would supposedly teach you her proprietary method. My job was finding people to buy them. I’d harvest email addresses from her mailing lists and send them copy about “life-changing breakthrough techniques” and “limited-time certification opportunities.”

The people who emailed back sounded desperate. They wanted to know about whether this would actually let them practice therapy. I learned to deflect those questions. To focus on the transformation they’d experience, the tools they’d gain, the community they’d join.

Sandy believed in what she was selling, which made it worse somehow. She wasn’t a scammer because she genuinely thought her method worked. But she was underwater financially and couldn’t stop pushing. Every interaction became a sales opportunity. Every conversation ended with a pitch.

I stayed because I needed the work. I stayed because the chaos felt familiar. And I stayed because, despite everything, I was learning. Not from her, she had nothing to teach me about professionalism or ethics or how to run a business. But I was learning from the necessity of filling gaps she couldn’t see. From having to sound competent when I felt like a fraud. From watching what happened when passion wasn’t backed by substance.

She never made me prove I was useful. She just handed me something and trusted that I’d figure it out. For that, despite everything else, I am grateful to her.

The Linen Closet

August 24, 2025

Luna vanished the day the contractors came.

The front door had been left open. Not for long, maybe a minute, just long enough. She wasn’t used to the noise, wasn’t used to the outdoors, and in that moment of panic, she must’ve bolted. That was the story. It made sense. There was no sign of her inside the house. I assumed the worst, because it looked like the worst. And once you decide something like that, it calcifies.

I canvassed the neighborhood with printed flyers. I walked the streets calling her name. I left food out and knocked on doors. I was methodical. I left no stone unturned, outside.

I never opened the linen closet.

Instead, I hired a pet detective. A real one with tracking dogs, cameras, cages, all of it. They followed her scent through the neighborhood and stopped a few blocks away. It was high alert; it felt promising. A woman nearby said a new black cat had been showing up at her house. The timing lined up. We gave her the trap and she agreed to monitor it.

But then it got worse.

A man contacted me. Said he’d found a black cat that looked like Luna a few blocks from my house. He sent a blurry photo, just enough to stir hope, not enough to confirm anything. He said he’d bring her to me, but needed gas money first. It was a scam. I knew it. But I was desperate and exhausted. I had handed him a flyer myself. Spoken to him in person. He was supposed to be one of the good guys.

I paid him. He asked for more. I blocked him.

A week passed with nothing happening, no trap results or footage. Just silence. My cat was gone. My hope was gone. I felt sick every time I opened the front door.

And then, for no reason I can name, I opened the linen closet.

She was in there. Alive and calm, just curled behind the towels.

She blinked at me, then walked to the litter box, and nuzzled Roy. Nothing about her behavior suggested trauma. She had been locked in that closet for a week, and she was fine.

I had never looked there. Not once. Because I knew she had gone outside. I’d watched the door hang open. I’d played the story in my head. It made so much sense that I didn’t question it. I never even noticed the closet was closed.

And because of that, because I knew she was outside, I gave a flyer to the man who would scam me. I searched the whole neighborhood. I hired a tracker. I cried. I barely ate. And I left my cat in the closet.

The Office Alcoholic

August 17, 2025

Addiction, Work

I don’t know what fucking genius in management thought putting a fully stocked liquor fridge in the office kitchen was a good idea. This was 2016, peak startup culture, where “work hard, play hard” meant having beer on tap and calling alcoholism “company culture.”

The fridge appeared one Monday morning like some kind of corporate honey trap. Vodka, the good stuff, not bottom-shelf swill. Ostensibly for “company events” and “team building.” In reality, it was like putting a loaded gun in a room full of depressed people.

I wasn’t the only one with a drinking problem at that company. But I was the known quantity. The guy who reeked of booze at 9 AM meetings. The one who got a little too animated at happy hours and stayed too late at company parties.

So when I started taking little sips here and there. Just a shot of vodka to get through the afternoon slump, I thought I was being discrete.

But apparently everyone was doing it. The bottles emptied faster than management expected. The vodka simply disappeared. It became obvious that employees were treating the company liquor like their personal stash.

The difference was, when management started having meetings about the missing alcohol, only one name came up. Mine.

I wasn’t invited to these meetings, obviously. But I could read the room. The way conversations stopped when I walked by. The knowing looks. The careful avoidance of eye contact. I could piece together exactly what was being discussed in those closed-door sessions with everyone who wasn’t me.

Everyone thought it was me. Every missing bottle. The office alcoholic had struck again.

The reality was probably that I’d taken maybe twenty percent of what disappeared. But once you’re labeled “the person with the drinking problem,” every missing drop gets attributed to you.

That’s when I realized how visible my drinking had become. I thought it was a secret, but actually I’d become a workplace character: the guy with the problem. Everyone knew.

I went to my first AA meeting that week.

Not because I was ready to get sober. Even though the humiliation of being the office alcoholic felt unbearable, I continued to drink myself to sleep every night.

The liquor fridge disappeared shortly after that. Management probably realized it wasn’t the brilliant culture-building move they’d imagined.

But the damage was done. I was the alcoholic. And once that label sticks, it follows you into every interaction, every meeting, every performance review.

The worst part is, they weren’t wrong.

How Jamie Died

August 10, 2025

Addiction, Grief

When they prescribed me Adderall again, I wasn’t addicted anymore. That part of my life was over, or at least it felt that way. I didn’t think about how I’d quit or what it had taken, because I wasn’t ready to pick that apart yet. But taking it again forced me into a question I couldn’t avoid: how do you reconcile needing something you were once addicted to.

Life without it had been worse than I wanted to admit. I could go to work, have conversations, finish some things, but never without friction. Focus slipped away constantly. Everything felt slower. It was the kind of constant, low-grade difficulty that wears you down. When I went back on Adderall, it wasn’t a dramatic choice. It was quiet, deliberate, and I decided from the start I would take it exactly as prescribed. I have kept that promise ever since.

My brother never got that chance. His doctors refused to prescribe him Adderall because of his history with opioids, as if they were the same drug or the same danger. He needed it. If we’re being honest, he needed the opioids too, for his pain. It was the same problem I had faced, needing the thing you were once addicted to, except in his case he was denied.

That denial sent him looking for something else. He found propylhexedrine, an over-the-counter stimulant that is harsh, dirty, and incredibly dangerous. He took it for years. In 2016, at twenty-eight years old, his heart gave out.

I still have my prescription. I still take it every day. And I’m still here.

The Walk to Kirkland

August 3, 2025

Addiction, Grief