The Disenchantments

We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.

Searching, always. And yes, we all are, or soon will be, disenchanted, I still want to know it all: the heartbreak, the fear, the friendship, the anger, the love. All of it.

Maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be.

If things happen for a reason, I was meant to get fucked over.

whatever I decide, I might be making a mistake. But if I'm going to make a mistake I want it to be passionate

They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country.

We all want to be feel something, we want to be someone to one another.

I need to leave something behind. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I'll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won't notice and wash it away. As I'm looking around I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It's another in the family series - a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls. It comes off the wall easily.I set the print on the bedspread and wit eht dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hood. I take out a Sharpie from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unremoved, for years. I fill the whiter space with this: I never got to tell you how beautiful you are. And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.

It's incredible," she says, "how much damage everyone does to everybody else.

In just a little while we will forget all the things we used to want and adjust to the lives that we're given.

I always knew what I wanted to do, I just didn't know I could do it.

I can't believe that we could be so impermanent

I don't know if any of this would have happened if we had been at home... Would we have crammed ourselves into the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant to play her song? I doubt it. There's something about distance, being removed from what's familiar, that let's things happen.

Here it is, all at once: rightness. Not the graffiti itself, even though it's undeniably spectacular, but this feeling of making plans and carrying them them through, of meeting people and getting to know them, of being asked to do something and saying Yes, of wanting something, asking for it, making it happen.

You get close to people. You get farther from them. You learn how much you love them, and then you say good-bye, believing that you will be together again, someday, when your lives curve back into one another's.

I've been waiting for this for so long--something new, life after high school.

Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe if we all force ourselves to act like we're okay even if we're not, eventually things will get better.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

Maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be. Able and brave. Maybe we still are.

All I have is a life's worth of school days. What came before school I can't remember. You can only sketch so many desks and teachers and chalkboards. You can only come home to so many dinners and homework assignments and nights of taking the garbage out. You can only go to so many museum field trips before you start to wonder, Is this it?

All men need to succeed in the music industry is talent, but women have to be hot.

But from now on, it's all about sunshines and rainbows.