- Carefully coded a fake Myspace account for Joel Madden—copied the URL from his skull-and-crossbones profile, pasted it into a Layout Stealer, added Steve Aoki and Junior Sanchez to my Top 8
- Sent myself love letters from the account
- Showed off love letters from “Joel Madden” at band practice
- Threw some antihistamine pills from the medicine cabinet into a zip-lock bag. Kept the pills in the back of my school locker to feel beautiful and bad like Winona Ryder and the disaster girls on TV
- Once, during a middle school lunchbreak, made an elaborate display of secretly spooning a home-cooked meal into the trash, so the other kids would get off my case about being fat
- Had “Joel Madden” message my friends about the dangers of my eating disorder
- Drank only cappuccinos for meals to get cast as Christine in the high school production of Phantom of the Opera
- Made a display of slowly nibbling at baby carrots backstage so the English teacher slash director would get off my case about looking a little too thin
- On the night of graduation, after my dad’s friend handed me a going-away gift, told everyone the tucked lavender note in the jewelry box only said love, henry
- At the end of an above-average date, on the drive back home, when “The Boys of Summer” came on, and as my date drummed his fingers passionately on the steering wheel, loudly proclaimed: “when did Don Henley cover The Ataris?”
- Hung out with Nick Ramirez freshman year only because he had a poster of Nico’s Chelsea Girls taped to his wall and I liked sneaking 2 AM cigarettes with him in the boys’ shower room
- Once, after chain-smoking Marlboros in the boys’ shower room: scribbled a menacing note in glitter gel and snuck it under an ex’s door with Nick Ramirez
- Abstained from correcting the professor’s pronunciation of my name
- Intentionally mispronounced my name for efficiency on the phone to customer service
- Kept myself from ascribing names to any first-person narrator I write
- Smoked the second cigarette only as excuse to stage a casual run-in with the author after a reading
- Knew that getting drinks with my ex’s best-friend’s wife’s mentally unstable ex-best friend was probably a bad idea but I was craving crisis
- Lost twenty bucks playing chess in Union Square
- Told friends I won twenty bucks playing chess in Union Square
- Twice, at a karaoke bar in Chinatown: kissed the same pilot in exchange for my tab
- Dropped a blanched broccoli rabe on the kitchen floor next to the mouse trap and bent down with my fork to eat it straight off the ground
- Masturbated ten hours after finding out my childhood home was robbed
- Couldn’t finish because Bella Donna was on and it was impossible to think about anything besides the white cockatoo resting on the delicate slant of Stevie Nicks’ fingers
- On a drunk afternoon in Alphabet City, with an unrequited lover, borrowed a line from a CW show for tragedy points: “I think I could set myself on fire and nobody would notice”
- Set my bangs on fire while smudging the apartment with sage; no one was home to notice
- Wanted to sleep with someone from the band but instead fell into bed with the sound pretengineer
- Double-texted him
- Studied the senseless succession of blue text balloons on my phone screen
- Semi-confidently, and over fourteen-dollar spicy brunch margaritas: “I make forty-six a year”
- Spent too long surveying tattoos on the backs of strangers
- Sleepwalked to the kitchen and came to in the refrigerator light, the soft leathery warmth of leftover pasta clumps on my tongue
- Took a year off to write a book about boy bands
- Spent most of it listening to One Direction
- Wrote bad poetry on July 4th: and the fireworks looked like cupcake sprinkles
- Had sex while both the dogs were still in the bedroom
- Didn’t do laundry all of that September because I relished an excuse to not wear pants
- Spent my last two dollars on gas station caramel iced coffee
- Only volunteered at the event for the free food that came after
- Invited all New York exes to the same party because the rest of the week had been uneventful
- Left New York
- Missed New York
- Wrote about New York in honeyed inflections, first as prophet then as fool: unfinished apartments, creative class appalachian towns in the middle of a city. memories- good and bad and all mine
- Half-watched John Cusack films under white linens and fell into soft, three-hundred-thread count naps on embezzled Xanax
- “Freelancer” rolled easier off the tongue than “basically unemployed”
- Ritually painted my face every unemployed morning to softly make-believe I had somewhere to be after
- Moved back to New York
- Got a job working the front desk at Gizmodo
- Asked if I looked bigger than the woman on TV only when I knew the answer was no
- Lied to a boyfriend about liking Radiohead’s Ok Computer
- Slept with someone from the bar, someone who didn’t like Radiohead, while boyfriend was in Stockholm
- Told the truth a little too truthfully
- Whenever a car blasting reggae music trailed along the block, thought: I could be a person who drinks daytime beer
- Stuck a note on the desktop to tell my boss I quit
- Stuck a note goodbye on boyfriend’s fridge
- Read the news but didn’t throw out my Ryan Adams records when everyone else did
- Let the call go to voicemail because
- I never really liked my coffee black; it just had fewer calories
Gauraa Shekhar is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared in Nimrod Journal and Contrary Magazine. She lives in Manhattan with her husband. Find her online @bloodandGauraa
Art by Bob Schofield @anothertower