I was in a play with my friend Lauryn as part of this show called Quickies at this place called Live Girls Theatre in a neighborhood named Ballard. I played a girl who gets smothered by her sisters as they explain the ins and outs of a wedding night. We all wore white dresses and no shoes, and our only prop was this giant stretchy white fabric that they wrapped me in. The plays were mostly pretty dark, one of them had pieces of Howl by Allan Ginsberg, and that was the first I had ever heard it. In-between the shows were little one person talents, and one actress ate a banana with her feet while singing a clown song. Lauryn and I ran around the sidewalks barefoot and fought with the fake severed legs we found in the prop room and drank way too many coffee milkshakes from Tully’s and listened to terrible music and screamed along until we lost our voices. the record store across the street always had free posters, and the homeless men outside of the theatre told me stories about finding drugs under bridges and drank liquor out of evian bottles. we named all the pigeons names like “freckles” and “honky.” I bought chunks of bread and soup from the Great Harvest next door for dinner every night. I joined the metaphysical library in the basement of our building and read a book called “Personal Magnetism.” and strangers would recognize us on the street from the plays, and I felt famous and so great. And then later one of the best families in the universe got its start, Gillian got married in a vacant lot just a few blocks away from the theatre, and she wore a yellow dress and had flowers in glass bottles and we met Sean Nelson there and he shared Kelsey’s chocolate chips. I wrote terrible poems in a composition notebook sitting in the buss stop out front, and they were all about Ballard and being in love with the world.

I was working at my first real job ever, at a pizza place on the island, with my friends Emelie and Levi and Evan and our manager Kevin. I was the worst employee and I never stopped eating, I would make ciabatta and mozzarella and basil sandwiches in the big oven or just eat cheese straight up by the handful. We played awful music so loud and Kevin would pick me up and throw me in the sink when I got too cheeky. That’s good management. Levi was my bestfriend, and we turned Seattle upside-down and he stopped smoking weed so much and we’d take his mom’s minivan on epic adventures and he would hold me with his whole self and I fell in love with him, and then he loved me too. 

But I think the real reason I was so happy was because of Lauryn. Some people just make you feel like yourself, and it lingers. I didn’t really learn to feel grateful about those kinds of people until maybe last year? Well now I know. Good people who are honest and real and make you a happier person are something special and rare. If you find them, hold onto that feeling however you can, even if it’s just in the writing of really sentimental run-on blog posts when you should be reading about Dadaism.