College
That one Thanksgiving, we wanted to reuse our Halloween costumes, so you went as a Christiana Ricci and I went as Beverly D’Angelo. We sat at the children’s table even though we were nineteen, and we explained our college campus to the little kids.
“Like a resort without alcohol,” I said.
“Like rehab,” you said.
“Like a nursing home,” I said.
“Like preschool,” you said.
They were sympathetic but uninterested until I told them I worked in a refrigerator full of crumbling books in the basement of the campus library, and you told them you worked at the campus stables making sure sick horses didn’t die in the middle of the night. This finally impressed them, so we graduated to trying to impress their parents.
I told their parents I was going to grow up to be a mortician for books. You told them you were going to be a midnight-level horse girl. They said we should do whatever makes us happy, but to remember that nothing will make us happy.
A decade later, we swore off Thanksgiving entirely.
Collage
Our 2014 vision board (pasted on a piece of legal-sized paper) includes Martha Stewart’s hair, Lorrie Moore’s eyebrows, a nose like Kansas, a mouth like pressed slacks, a neck like a dead animal, arms like glitter gravy (something we invented), light instead of a chest, a kite instead of a stomach, hips like a cottage in the woods, thighs like spiral staircases, toes like poisonous mushrooms. It’s almost time to make a new one. Who knows what we want now?