So I Won't Be Afraid of Anything Ever Again
Fragments and assorted leftovers from 2024 mostly about running and young sheldon
If you want the whole thing, it can’t be chronological. I think you should know that.
This is a product review but it’s also a story and actually it starts with a girl that I met at a party two weeks before I turned twenty.
If she were to walk out of her body and not ever come back, the smell of cigarettes and something distantly woodsy and floral would still be on the clothes of whoever she’d hugged last.
So I’m looking at the metro map figuring out where I’m going and realizing it’s the end of the blue line, which is objectively the most boring of them, but the best color. And I’m like, ok, I’m going to be really early but I’ve got enough assignments due that I could find some coffee shop and camp there for a while. And I’ve never been to this part–I’ll have to walk, I’ll have to find a place online–I’ll kill the time. Easy.
I should have realized when everyone else got off the train three stops prior, or at least I should have guessed, but twenty minutes pass and I’m sitting there in my own world; I get off and walk up the stairs onto the overlook and within the span of the next minute, I realize why I’ve never been to this part of the city. I realize, actually, that I might have a hot bit of trouble finding anyplace to sit, and I realize that the officer next to me is yielding a rather large gun.
Legally acquired drugs, I’ve found, have what seems like a large margin of error. Here there was no “get what you get and be grateful,” but rather a game of gambling. I’d either gotten extremely lucky in the world of precarity or nobody here really could tell me anything about what I was taking. Atomoxetine, for example, turned me evil. I was not warned.
Above anything else, humans are physical representations of their actions. I think about this often, how what we do means more than what we say although we consistently do less. I jump into things headfirst. I think I think, but I very often do not.
My father does his wrapping in November because he is insane. In 2016, we stayed up watching the swing states slowly color themselves in and putting shiny paper around a new hand mixer and razor scooters. I danced around the house in the Trump mask he handmade me when the results were announced. I could not vote that year–a fact I lamented then, but have ended up grateful for: when I was thirteen, I was a staunch republican.
In a few years time, Baby Brother would pick up our holiday code like a language and join us. My political views would shift, secretly. My mother would be forced to reckon with the fact that her family may be rebelling against tradition. Anyway, this yearly sequence of events was my introduction to the television program Young Sheldon.
Young Sheldon premiered in 2017 as a spin off to The Big Bang Theory. My father and I began watching this yearly at Christmases just because it was on and it was cleaner than Gas Monkey, which he did not mind me seeing but Baby Brother was the only intentional child, therefore always slightly more protected than I was. Once the leftovers were cleared, we’d promptly forget about the show’s existence and then do it all again the next year like clockwork. I did not begin watching this show seriously until the tail end of my freshman year of college.
It feels oxymoronic to write that I ever “seriously” watched Young Sheldon, though it is not.
My friends, however, do think it is hilarious.
I loved dolls as a child, and my favorite game to act out with them was divorce. I would take two barbies and walk them through the seven stages of grief–one would get the house, the other would take the kid. They’d sign papers and fight and break down to the random people they’d meet during the mundane activities in between. My parents, married my entire life, looked on with a type of prideful horror. Apparently I’d mastered the art. By kindergarten I was going through the motions of a thirty year old lesbian divorcee almost daily with an accuracy that nearly made them consider reincarnation.
I think there’s some version of my life that plays out like that, too: a big old autumn wedding to a man and he probably works somewhere near the docks. On Sundays we worship and then a few times we play God. And someday I’ll be laying on some old couch and I’ll have cut my hair into that short thing you get when you gray and I’ll call for him and he’ll come.
They turned to me and kissed me on the neck, which always made me freeze in the best possible way. “You smell like vanilla.” I realized, oh my God, I have to wait. If I don’t wait, I’ll kill myself.
So a couple days after Christmas when the stores start panicking that they aren’t going to sell what they’ve got, I pick out a lighter, more coconutty vanilla, twelve dollars from the store-brand at target. I knew. I knew then, I know now I had to.
There’s an image that lives in my mind and has since I was very little: I’ll look up one day at some vast landscape in front of me and be able to see the whole world inside of it.
I only know how to write well about traveling. I’m very self conscious of this. I don’t plan my travels around my writing, but I’ve found the better part of what I’ve created has come from a trip only being half finished, me up alone realizing “something is happening here.”
So the other thing you do when you’re a child and you run away is learn to lack the fear that should come with certain situations. I think “oh, it’s an adventure,” and throw myself into it with open arms.
There is a line in Virgil’s Aeneid that I think about frequently: when Aeneas finally runs into his ex-lover Dido during his trek through the underworld, he describes witnessing what he believes to be her body “as one who sees, early in the month, or thinks to have seen the moon, rising through the cloud all dim.” For a while after my first read of the Aeneid this line had a sort of chokehold over me. It became the forefront of every research project I did, people would look at me and say “Riley’s doing that thing again” but I so deeply believed nobody had ever realized what I thought I’d found. I looked at Aeneas passionately coming face to face with his grief in a rather awestruck way, but I didn’t believe the figure he had seen was Dido. I had a whole argument for my case and fought it hard and convinced people and eventually ended up disproving it to myself. In a way I guess that could be counted as some sort of win, if that’s how you like to look at things, but really all my realization did was drastically change the way I read the text–or the way I couldn’t read it anymore. Really, I just wanted so badly for Aeneas to be brave. I think, right then, I wanted myself to be brave, too.
Almost a year after I became an alien, I walked the several hours to Vienna and boarded a bus to New York. I told no one. The first thing I thought when I left my dorm building was that I’d get in a bus crash. The second thing was that I’m obviously way too anxious about everything. Of course I wouldn’t get in a bus crash–who the hell has ever gotten in a bus crash?
Sometimes I don’t take my meds because I don’t think I deserve them.
I had a routine the year prior that one of my best friends called straight girl roulette: I would date the most evil men I could find just to prove my desirability, and when they inevitably stepped too far, I felt minimally bad about breaking things off. I kept a kiss list of over thirty people that year. The whole thing was manic and unnerving and I thought perhaps I was a little insane for it all–perhaps I was–but I was also nervous about the fact that I couldn’t seem to like the people I figured I should be dating. One night, the man I was with offered to take off his underwear and I nearly jumped before begging him not to. Ultimately, I ended up changing my tinder settings because I kissed girls at parties and much preferred the cleanliness of it all. Partner and I began uhauling the first week of November. This means there were two school breaks within the two and a half months we would be together.
It was my second year at college and I couldn’t really wrap my mind around the fact that at the end of this semester I’d be halfway there and a significant enough portion of my friends would be graduating and I’d have to miss them. Often I’d joke to myself about taking a few too many melatonin and just laying down for a bit in the snow. It was annoyingly pretentious for a suicide joke, sure, but there was a sinister layer of truth to it that seemed very easy to explore. Funnily enough, I hadn’t been on any serious drugs for a bit now. If I had them, I’d fully forgotten where.
I think my biggest thing is grief. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but over the past year it’s been my kicker: the plot of every essay, every underlying why, it all comes back to grief. Same for Montaigne. Yeah, we’re kind of twins like that.
On my twentieth birthday, I took the emergency fifty dollars my father had given me in cash and gave them to an upperclassman across the hall with very explicit instructions: the cheapest moscato in the store, the second cheapest rosé, and an entire handle of vodka–the big one. I got sixty cents back in change, two quarters towards laundry.
There is a Christmas that lives in my mind in which my uncle sliced his hand open with a dart. It was not serious, but I remember watching the red line emerge slowly in his palm until it began to glow fiery in the dim basement lights, swallowing his hand, then his arm, then all the way across his chest. There may be parts I misremember.
The new year’s eve directly following this incident, Baby Brother and I raced down the basement hallway on our grandmother’s exercise balls and I fell headfirst into the sharp corner of a doorway. My father carried me to the bathroom and I stared into the mirror watching my own blood soak through my pajamas and pool into the sink. He called the two doctors living on my grandmother’s street to “gather opinions.”
I anxiously awaited the arrival of the new American Girl doll of the year in the hospital
There is a small dent above my right eyebrow that is still visible if I pull my hair back far enough. This is because everything always stays.
She asks me why I feel all of this. I say it’s a lot to explain. Actually, I say it laughing, and I am laughing genuinely.
I say, “you should come over, I’ll make you a mimosa.”
She says, “I won’t drink that, but ok.” So everyone knows I’m a shit bartender then. We walk out of the party and I laugh and laugh and laugh. It feels so good, so new. Human emotion: I cannot stop.
The bus crashed. I knew it would. I had called it, in the least pretentious way possible–no plot device. I had known. So on the turnpike overlooking Jersey City (objectively the worst city on earth, I swear to God) I began to hope again. Deportation, devolvation, right? It should fully be in my hands.
If she had told me to do anything, I’d have done it before you could even start timing.
I’ve been having these nightmares recently where I see my middle school bully in the supermarket near my parents’ house. I guess this isn’t the most awful thing in the world. It’s actually happened before. I’m there roughly four times a year and by all odds she is too; suddenly we are standing in the yogurt aisle staring at each other, she takes out a rifle and shoots me and eats my carcass straight off of the tile floor.
I mean, she doesn’t. But I think that you know what I’m saying.
There was a particularly horrible day during my eighth grade year during which she told me I should kill myself and this time I actually responded: told her thanks, I’d consider it. So I went home and laid on the floor and decided that actually, I should probably see the rest of the world first. I’d only seen half of the DMV and a decent amount of Philly, and I also still had yet to have sex, which played into the decision of whether or not to take my own life far more than I care to admit.
I know I was a weird kid. Now I am a quasi-adult with an adderall dependency, in case that sounds any sexier. It’s probably more of an addiction if I’m being honest.
Either way, I did not enjoy keeping secrets from my parents. Young Sheldon was something to do to distract me from the constant nagging of what I was hiding.
What I really dreamed of as a child, though, what I want from life more than anything still, is adventure. There’s nothing like the feeling of waking up on a still slightly dim morning and deciding to just get up and go somewhere in full secret. I terrify my friends, but maintain that it’s absolutely worth it. Since the moment I realized I had the agency to be aimless, I’ve found myself dreaming up my own nonattendance, placing myself in new situations and new places with nobody powerful or aware enough to tell me I couldn’t. The first story I ever published was about a journalist who had to get an abortion in a foreign country while on a work trip. It ended with her dying in 9/11. Was it dramatic? Yes. But it was exciting and I found myself feeling almost like a liar while crafting it, not because I was touting it as anything other than fiction but because I so achingly wished that I could. It wasn’t that I ever wanted an abortion, especially not in a country where I didn’t speak the language, nor did I want to die at the hands of terrorists, but I wrote the whole thing while stocking the endless bread shelves in the sandwich shop I worked at in twelfth grade. I was starving for exile and exhilaration in literally any form.
And then there is this moment. I have made it to New York. I am standing in my friend’s bathroom and repeating to myself, I have made it. I have made it. I don’t know if this time, when I was leaving, I was praying for something bad to happen to me one more time, but miraculously, at least in the ways that I’d tend to imagine, nothing really did. All of this will just be a good story. And in this mirror, in the white light, I can see my grown-in roots, the bones popping out of my chest. I have seen this picture, and I whisper to myself like a promise, “she’ll come back.” I think, “I am starving.” And I know it will end–I know in three days I’ll go back and be there and be in this alien body still, but in this moment I’m thinking “I hope we sing karaoke tonight.” I’m thinking this is the first time in months.
Anyway, the point is that people dream of settled lives with their partner and I’m sure there’s sweetness to that, but I don’t think anyone is as romantic for absence as I am. It makes me awful at dating: I tend to fall into the trap of asking myself about whoever I may be seeing, “would I take this person on all of my future adventures?” when in reality, I wouldn’t have to take anyone anywhere ever, and it’s probably too soon to worry about the whole thing anyway. In the way that my childhood game of barbie divorce was me somehow playing by instinct, it’s taken me twenty years to discern that my greatest adventures in life start by leaving something behind. There’s a lot I’m willing to come back to, but very little I’ll take with me when I go.
I text frantically: “bomb threat. hide the vodka. if they do room checks we are DEAD.”
So it’s a few days before spring break and everyone’s got a million things due. Everyone was in my room earlier, a frenzy of computers and pages turning, but they’ve all long gone. My roommate’s asleep on the other side of the wall, now it’s just me and one of my friends sitting on my bed, everything splayed out. I’m typing the same word over and over again thinking about the whole breakup thing again and she’s talking about how she’s worried she isn’t lovable. I can’t even look at her slid up against the wall, perfect in every sense. I pretend I am still typing, flippantly replying, “I don’t know, I think you probably are.”
She says: “It’s four. I should probably go,” and because I don’t know when to let any act end I don’t even glance up at her one more time. I just reply, “Yeah, I guess so. If you want.”
The first step to really succeeding at anything is to write it down, to voice it. You want to say “I’m going to do this thing” and then it’s out there and you have to do it even if it’s horrible, because now everyone knows. Case in point: getting an undergraduate degree, anorexia, 9/11. So you’re going to tell your friends you’re walking down to the pottery studio on lower campus and hell or high water, you’re going to make something good.
The thing is, though, if you put a monkey in this bedroom and gave it a week, the mess would emulate something I’d make and it would probably write a poem of similar caliber. Even so, I keep on until my fingers bleed, my hands fall off and I can forget them on the floor of the Energeia office. I’m printing out this essay, going to lay each page on the floor and revise it and split it into something readable with my two front teeth.
And to get better? Joan Didion states plainly in her Book of Common Prayer, “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” Every step taken is a choice, and each step back, I want to believe, is some revolutionary love, some attempt to understand, to inhabit or be inhabited. I’ll saunter back to my hometown, to my doctors, to this body I live in. And in it, I will live. I will fix it, and I will live still. Thus far has been my most earnest attempt to do so.
Highly Necessary Footnote (TM)
Okayyyyy hi everyone we are back with another Not-Essay because it’s the end of the year and I had to do SOMETHING with these fragments, right?
To kind of reiterate from my last fragment dump (which you should go read because I am starving for attention) or in case you’re one of the three people who have subscribed within the last month (Merry Christmas to ME am I right), this is not an essay. Not an essay. No essay here. instead this is actual pieces of actual pieces that I wrote throughout 2024 and discarded because they were abysmal (except the Young Sheldon piece. I just didn’t know where to go with the end of that.) Even so, I like to believe there’s good in all things and some of my worst writing ever (Ever) did have gems in it that I desperately needed to see the world. Also nobody actually looks at this account so I can just scream into the void uninterrupted.
If you DID make it down here (crazzyyyy) you should comment whether or not I should rework any of these pieces and try again because if I’m being honest, as I compiled this I was considering some of them heavily (there are SO many dead pieces here guys I write kind of a lot—and the way some of them went together and faded into each other is jarring). Which fragments were good? Bad? Ugly? Someone talk to me I have been in my hometown too long and I am slowly going insane just sitting here alo—
Um. Happy New Year to all my hoes <3
R