In Which This Constitutes A Troubling Question

What I Do

by MOLLY CAMERON

“So, what do you do?”

This is my most dreaded question in a social setting. And it’s an inevitable one when you’re meeting new people, especially in New York City. After everyone in the group has shared where they live and which train they take and how much that train sucks, we all move on to what we “do.” Most people have simple answers:

“I’m a copy editor.”

“I run a catering business.”

“I teach high school English”

And then it comes around to me and I say something dumb like:

“You mean, where I work?  Or what I do outside of work? Or, like, a combination of both? Because it’s complicated.”

But it’s not, really.  The truth is that I work a mentally exhausting day job and I’m not succeeding on a real, tangible level at the things I pursue outside of my day job and honestly: I don’t know what I “do.” But how do you say that to a group of people you’ve just met at a birthday party? 

I’ve tried emphasizing just one thing, hoping that would end the conversation, but it never really works.  I often start with my day job:

“I do customer support for a tech company.”

But then people want to know more about the company and I have to try and sound smart about it.  Or, even worse, in a room full of creatives, I just get a small “oh, cool” with a fake smile and then everyone wanders back to where the beers are, with a mixed look of pity and confusion for me being in such a boring industry.  And I want to chase after them and say “I know!  It feels like a waste of brain activity to me too!” but I also don’t want the panic in my voice to come out too quickly.  But it’s too late and they’re all taking about their new web series or podcast or McSweeney’s article so I swallow and smile and try to live vicariously through them for the next hour.

If I try to emphasize my real passions I’m just as doomed: 

“I’m a writer.”

Because we all know the next question.

“Oh cool, what do you write?”

Crap.

“Um, I write a short pieces on websites and stuff but right now I’m really concentrating on blogging.  I’ve got a few Tumblrs. I’m also sort of working on a memoir-ish thing.  Oh, and I do Morning Pages. Have you heard of The Artist’s Way?”

But they’re already backing away towards the beer, desperately trying to make eye contact with someone over my head.  So I smile again and pretend it didn’t happen.  

It’s just as bad if I focus on other things:

“I’m a performer.  Mostly comedy stuff.”

Because then, like saying you’re a writer, people want details.  

“Oh cool!  Like stand up and stuff?”

“Ummm, yeah, I’ve done stand up before.  Like five or six times.  In my life.”

“Oh.  So you do plays?  Or TV or something?”

“Well… um… I do sketch comedy sometimes.  I use to have a sketch group back in 2011.  Oh, and I did some background work last year!  Do you watch the Investigation Discovery channel?”

And they’re gone.

One of these days I want to tell the real, absolute truth.  

“You want to know what I do?  What I really and truly DO? 

I ramble in a journal for 30 minutes every morning and I save all the completed books in the hope that someday I might discover a work of genius in their pages.  Or maybe someone else will after I’m dead and I’ll feel fulfilled from the beyond. 

I hoard magazines so I can cut them up and make dark and weird collages and birthday cards.  

I daydream about the ‘70s music scene, wishing so badly that I could see David Bowie play a Ziggy Stardust show and go to CBGB before it became a John Varvatos.

I imagine what my mom was like at my age and think about how she already had two kids while I still live with two roommates.

I create iTunes playlists for every mood or occasion: wake-up music, concentration music, getting-pumped-to-go-out music, cooking-dinner music, let's-be-thirteen-right-now music.

I go to hip hop dance classes and fantasize about getting good enough to be a backup dancer for Missy Elliott, whenever she decides to tour again.

I stand in my kitchen and eat chocolate chips out of a shot glass and wonder how the microwave got so gross but I don’t clean it.

I walk around downtown with my boyfriend and we pick out the very old brick houses and try to guess who might have lived there in the 1880s.

I watch that scene in Boogie Nights where they try to rob Alfred Molina just to appreciate the segue from “Sister Christian” to “Jessie’s Girl” and see if the firecrackers still make me jump.  They always do.

I flip through all of my cookbooks and daydream about what I might cook when I decide to spend money on specialty ingredients.

I go to happy hours that last three hours and I drink Jameson and play every Bowie song in the jukebox and laugh with my friends about dumb things we’ve done that day.  

I think about what I might be doing right now if I had accepted the offer to train at Circle in the Square in the summer of 2004 instead of getting a job.

I tell embarrassing stories about myself to large groups of people and melt with relief when they laugh.  

I sit in coffee shops and tap thoughts like this into my computer to see the white space fill up with words and feel like I’m getting somewhere and accomplishing something.  Now that life isn’t evaluated by good grades or audiences who feel forced to applaud, every period to a sentence is my own tiny award for finishing a coherent thought.  I keep going.  I don’t have a path or a vision board or a career strategy, but I just keep moving in this direction and trusting that something cool will eventually happen.”

That’s what I do.  And if anyone knows how to condense all that into a single, crowd-friendly phrase, please let me know. 

Molly Cameron is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about her hospital stay. You can find her website here.

"Sound & Vision" -  David Bowie (mp3)

In Which It Was Due To Drugs And Denial

The Bubble

by MOLLY CAMERON

You might find this hard to believe, but there are actually some upsides to living in a hospital room while recovering from major injuries.  Here are a few examples: 

1) Much like being on an airplane, you can choose food from a small menu and get it delivered right to your lap. Plus: free, unlimited water in your very own pink plastic pitcher!

2) Your very own TV. Sure, it might be limited to only the very basic channels, but even PBS nature shows can be fascinating under the influence of heavy painkillers.  Which leads me to…

3) Unlimited painkillers straight into your vein at the click of a button. Well, not totally unlimited, since you can only release so much over a certain time period. After you hit that limit it’s the equivalent of pressing the "door close" button on an elevator over and over - pointless, but still satisfying.

4) Unlimited naps. Even if people come to visit you, it’s perfectly acceptable to close your eyes and take a nap while they’re talking because you’ve been under a lot of stress and they understand.

5) Weight loss. It’s totally possible to lose eight pounds in, like, ten days!  Without moving!  Heavy painkillers are very effective appetite suppressants. And it’s ultimately good to have less food in you because heavy painkillers also make you completely constipated.

6) Never having to get dressed.  Occasionally a nurse might find it necessary to change your wispy hospital gown after giving you a sponge bath, but for the most part you’re just going completely commando under a thin layer of green cotton.

 

And that’s about as far as I can stretch the positives.  The rest is pretty terrible — because, of course, you’re in a hospital, not a luxury hotel — but I found ways to get used to it.  

I checked into St. Vincent’s in the West Village thanks to misunderstanding between a firetruck and a Chevy Suburban.  It was October of 2006 and I had just moved to New York City from a tiny town in New Hampshire, fulfilling a lifelong dream.  To say “moved” is really stretching the truth, since I was sleeping on a futon in a friend’s living room and the only job I had found was a part-time reception gig at a small theater company.  But like most people who find themselves moving to New York, I was pushed by my own naive dreams and the allure of a city where I could “make it.”  

That one particular grey October afternoon, as I unknowingly strode towards something terrifying, I was hungover.  My friends had a fresh, young theater company — as so many twenty-something New Yorkers do — and the night before I had helped them with the opening night of a set of short plays. It was the kind of carefree celebration that comes easily when you're making art with your best friends and feeling on top of the world because you haven't had enough rejection to be cynical yet.  I ate a lot of cake - well, specifically, a lot of frosting - and drank a lot of cheap white wine.  It was glorious until that next grey day.

So when I strode down the sidewalk of East 8th St, I was enjoying that slightly-chilled early autumn on my face like a dog on the back of a Jeep. I was refreshed, I was confident, I was in New York Fucking City.  And then I heard a siren and I looked up. And then a big vehicle was flying through the air, like something out of an action movie. And then that vehicle hit me.

This is where I'd like to say I suddenly flashed back to a fond memory from my childhood, like my fourth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s or the dance recital where I first got to wear lipstick, but I didn't. I didn't see God or Mohammed or any kind of fancy white light either.  It was just siren, flying car, impact. Boom. And then I was in an ambulance, totally confused.

According to the police report that I later got a look at, there was only one witness to this entire incident.  I find this a little strange, since it was early on a Friday evening and I was one block away from Washington Square Park. But based on the tiny bit of information that they did gather and based on my injuries, this is how we can surmise that it all went down:

At approximately 5:15pm on Friday, October 20th, 2006, a firetruck from the West Village sped down East 8th St in response to a call of a fallen scaffolding. At the same time, a rabbi was driving a black Chevy Suburban southward down Fifth Avenue. As he approached the lights at 8th St., he did not slow down. Neither did the firetruck. The firetruck hit the Suburban, causing it to fly onto the sidewalk and hit me. The vehicle struck my lower left side, breaking the smaller bone in my left leg and the left side of my pelvis, plus my pubic bone (crotch) and sacrum (ass).  It also splashed some kind of car chemical onto my left leg that would sink through my jeans and into my skin and eventually cause a third-degree burn.  I then somehow bounced against the building beside me, which smashed the crap out my right arm, shoulder, collarbone, and part of my right leg, plus gave me a little bonus fracture in my jaw.  My front teeth were a bit mangled and my body was scattered with the type of smaller scratches and burns that come naturally after a collision with concrete. Conveniently, there was already an ambulance behind that firetruck. I guess they gave up on the downed scaffolding after the collision (I sure hope those people are OK). Despite this laundry list of injuries, when the EMTs got to me I was lying conscious on the sidewalk and had no injuries to my spine, neck, or head.  

So by the time I was considering my free water pitcher as a nice perk of this living situation, I had already been wheeling around the place for a few days, staring at endless ceilings.  I had spent some time in intensive care, where I got my face stitched up and got a titanium rod in my arm, and once I was stable, I got moved to a “regular” room. Thanks to the morphine fog and the overall trauma, my whole sense of time was off. It was unbelievable to think that just over a week ago I had been standing, laughing, walking, dancing. And now I was permanently horizontal. This was my new life. Or at least it’s how I felt it would be.

My morning routine was getting pretty predictable: I’d get awoken by a nurse who would give me some cocktail of pills and check my temperature, I’d poke at a sad bowl of Cream of Wheat, and then watch the door and wait for a visitor. One of my parents was usually first to arrive. They had driven down from New Hampshire the night of the accident and were staying with a family friend, since they weren’t allowed to stay in the hospital. I also had a fair amount of college pals visit, since many others had also made the move to the city from their respective suburban towns.  

It was nice to see people I hadn’t seen in awhile, but it made me feel a little weird about how I had earned the attention. It was like getting three hundred posts on your facebook page just because it’s your birthday. I was the female Harry Potter: “The Girl Who Lived.” Although I didn’t do anything valiant other than bounce upon impact. It was impossible to have a normal conversation about what they were doing in New York and where they lived and what train the rode and all that. They wanted to gaze wide-eyed at my bruised face and gigantic, swaddled arm. They wanted gory details about what I remembered about the impact and how much blood there was and what hospital food was like.  I would indulge them for as long as I could handle, thank them for visiting, and then close my eyes and take a nap.  

If that hadn’t made me feel like enough of a circus freak, then the consistent tours of medical students sealed the deal. St. Vincent's was a teaching hospital and I was a med student's dream: eight broken bones, stitches, and a Terminator arm. Four or five of them would come in at a time, accompanied by a doctor who would pick up my chart and summarize the injuries. I was right there in the bed and - despite the tiny jaw fracture – I could still talk. I could have given them a riveting first-hand account.  But no, they preferred to hear it from their tour guide and scribble furiously in their little notebooks like I was a rare work of art and they had to remember every detail.  I eventually got so used it that I would just retreat inside my little morphine bubble and stare at the TV with my best Mona Lisa face.

There was another everyday reality that became my least favorite part of the whole hospital experience: peeing in bed. I don't mean wetting the bed, like a child or a blackout-drunk adult, but I mean the next closest thing – peeing in a bedpan. The bedpan experience was the bridge into true hospital living.  Once I crossed over there was no going back. Sure, I had already swapped my clothes for a thin cotton gown, I had some tubes in my arm, and I got sad thrills from playing around with the incline of my bed.  But I didn’t truly give in to this reality until that first time that I released the contents of my bladder into a hard plastic disk placed strategically between the mattress and my bare ass.

With that first piss into the bedpan, I lost all modesty, all inhibitions, and, really, all hope for even a tiny bit more comfort in this medical experience. But after the fifteen seconds or so of shame that came with a stranger wiping my nether regions and then emptying my pee from the bedpan into a toilet, there was another feeling: complete resignation. It was clear at that moment that if I was going to have to rely on other people to even help me pee, then I was probably not able to do much of anything by myself. Sure, I could move my left arm arm to transport all that free water to my mouth and I could operate the TV remote and press the buttons to pump morphine and move my bed and call nurses, but there was no likelihood of me jumping out of bed and running around anytime soon. I was at the complete mercy of hospital staff and visitors. The first time was like a bad dream – like one of those nightmares where you’re giving a speech to your entire high school and you suddenly realize you aren’t wearing pants – but after a day or two, it was just another part of my new reality. 

Somewhere around this time is when I first got a look at myself in the mirror and it was… not good.  The opportunity came from a rare light-hearted moment where my mom tried to fix my hair.  A few weeks earlier I had dyed it jet black, as an expression of impulsive recklessness on my 23rd birthday. While it looked cool at the time, six days of no showering made it real gross real fast. My mom’s solution was to flip it into a weird ponytail-bun on the top of my head which she thought looked hilarious (although, really, I have to give her credit for anticipating the popularity of the topknot). She gave me her hand mirror so I could take a look and while, yes, my hair looked ridiculous, I was more shocked by something else: my teeth were black. Not all of them, thankfully, but three in the very front were almost entirely black and blue like bruised skin. I freaked out.  

“Mom!  My teeth are black! Why didn’t you tell me my teeth are black!?”

My mom considered this the least of my worries — it’s not like the hospital is some kind of fashion parade — but I was infuriated that everyone had been keeping this secret from me.  If I pulled the hand mirror further away, I could see the full extent of it:

- Greasy, black hair, piled into a poof on my head

 

- A bandage around my head, Jacob Marley-style, purportedly to help my jaw but really just making me look ridiculous

- Stitches on my forehead, chin, and lip, leaving just one side of my bottom lip looking like Melanie Griffith

- And then, of course, the black teeth

I just couldn’t win.

Around this time both my sister and my brother arrived. They are about seven and ten years older than me, respectively, and although we’ve always all lived very different lives, I still felt so relieved and soothed to see them.  Having my whole family around made me feel safe amidst the chaos, if only for a little while. After all the years of getting pushed around as a little sister, it was strange to suddenly have them able and willing to do things for me. Once, when I said offhandedly that all I felt I could stomach was popsicles and toast, my sister appeared in a flash with a box of frozen fruit bars and buttered toast wrapped in aluminum foil, fresh from a nearby deli.  My brother and his wife came bearing a Discman and some new music, plus an abridged CD version of The Nanny Diaries.  It was something I would scoffed at weeks ago - I mean, it was 2006, I had an iPod already - but they became my saviors during the sleepless nights.  

Suddenly, my doctors and my parents started to talk about me “going home.”  I was confused. I was home. New York was my home now. Sure, I had broken some bones but give me, like, another week in this place and I’d be back at work… right?  No.  Not right.  I knew I was in bad shape, but I didn’t quite understand how bad until everyone started talking about my recovery in terms of months rather than weeks.  Now that the hospital had done their part by putting my arm back together and pumping blood back into me, the rest of my repair no longer fell under their jurisdiction. The doctors and parents all decided that it would be best for me to go to a physical rehabilitation hospital, where I could still get the same kind of rest and medication and care that I was getting in the hospital, but also with some real hands-on therapy to get my body working again.  And it would be best for me to do that back in New Hampshire.  

Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was straight-up denial, maybe a little bit of both, but I truly had not considered that I would have to leave New York. I had a job and I was settling in. I didn’t have a permanent place to live yet, but I was working on it. I was working on being a real independent adult and now here were my parents by my bedside, telling me that I had to leave it all behind. I cried, but more out of defeat than out of protest. There was no other option. I realized was actually going to miss that little corner of a room, those green cotton gowns and pink plastic water pitchers.  They were my last New York belongings, my last footholds. I left on a sunny Sunday morning, bundled onto a stretcher and squinting at the changing leaves. It had so suddenly become fall.

Molly Cameron is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about a closet full of sweaters. You can find her twitter here.

"Elephant Woman" - Blonde Redhead (mp3)

"Magic Mountain" - Blonde Redhead (mp3)

In Which He Kept A Closet Full Of Sweaters

Unknown Artist

by MOLLY CAMERON

I met Dan during my first November in New York City at a friend's housewarming party. I picked him out of the crowded basement immediately as being the only guy there who didn’t look like he had rolled straight out of a frat house. He was exactly my type: tall, slim, and slightly scruffy but in a way that looked thoroughly thought out — essentially just a shave and a corduroy blazer away from being Wes Anderson. I was wearing my best selection of H&M separates and attempting to look completely relaxed while I hijacked the host's computer in search of more party-worthy tunes. I had just started DJ-ing a much better playlist, when he came over to help me find some David Bowie and introduce himself. By the end of the night we were making out in the passenger seat of his friend’s parked car, steaming up the windows like a scene from some teenage movie.

When he called the next day to ask me out on a real date, I was overjoyed. Between complications of my own shyness and then a car accident that had kept me out of commission for awhile, I hadn’t had any male contact beyond a high five or an awkward hug in over two years. The fact that I had finally found someone I wanted to kiss and that person wanted to kiss me back was almost overwhelming. I had come barreling into the city practically declaring how independent I was going to be, working for a nonprofit theatre company and getting a gym membership and taking improv classes. But now here was Dan, so mature with his beard and his History degree that my brain started to forget about its need for schedules and computers and adult achievements. I wanted that other thing that grown-up city-dwellers had — a relationship.

We were essentially strangers to each other and so had very formal dates at the start — like sushi dinners and serious movies at BAM — as if we had to make up for steaming up a car before we had even talked about where we went to college and how many siblings we had. Dan was only a few months older than me, but I looked up to him as if that gap was ten years. He had attended NYU so his six-or-so years of city-dwelling made him a pro in comparison to me, constantly carrying a laminated map of Manhattan. He introduced me to McSorley’s, Korean restaurants in Woodside, downtown diners, Chinatown karaoke, and his friends’ creaky apartments in the South Slope. Though his apartment was modest, he lived just a short stroll away from Prospect Park and we spent our weekend mornings walking down Park Slope’s 5th Ave in search of good strong coffee and baked goods. He had a room full of books and a closet full of sweaters and kept a small, separate, unheated room in his apartment that he used strictly for writing. I was smitten with his seriousness.

I was totally falling for him. Not just him, but the whole relationship fantasy. I made us breakfast on the weekends. I bought him funny ties from the Salvation Army. At work, I would gchat him as often as possible, always waiting for that little window to blink at the bottom of my screen. One time I came straight from the gym to his place so we could make a “fancy” (meaning: served with wine) spaghetti dinner together — a move that felt very daring to me. I figured if Dan still wanted to see me with slightly sweaty hair and a sports-bra-induced uni-boob, then everything was going to be OK. We went to some holiday parties, friends of his from school, and if I’d start drinking and dancing, he’d get fake-embarrased and say “Oh no, Molly’s getting wild with the dance moves again!” It made me feel like we were an old married couple and this was our usual party-going schtick.

At Christmas time, we exchanged the ultimate early-relationship gifts: mix CDs. I put so much time into mine, packing it with hip, '70s rock, touches of ironic dance music, and a sly progression into serious topics. It started with Calvin Harris’ “I Created Disco” and ended with The Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside," which I figured was a pretty good emotional journey. I even got a blank jewel case and collaged an album cover, with weird animal pictures cut out of magazines. By contrast, Dan’s mix had been burned onto a blank disc and came without any attached description — not even a track listing. Plain and mysterious, but at the same time, charming. He also knew how to carefully scatter ironic pop, with the Tommy Jones and the Shondells hit "Crystal Blue Persuasion" and "She's Gone" by Hall & Oates placed in between more serious Pavement and Lou Reed tracks. I imported it into my iTunes and labeled the album "Xmas Dan,” leaving the ten or so songs I didn't know stuck with the standard double-digit track number and "Unknown Artist" listing. I listened to it over and over as if his mix, too, might have a buried message of true love and adoration that I could dig out after so many listens.

Towards the end of January, I figured we had made it through the awkwardness of the holidays and things could only get better. We had been dating nearly three whole months, which was pretty epic for me. I was starting to try out the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" — although still not quite ready to try them out in front of Dan. One freezing Saturday night I met him at his apartment so we could go to my friend James’ house party in Bushwick together. Dan usually met me at the stoop outside, but this time he called me and asked me to come upstairs first. I didn’t suspect anything could be wrong until he invited me in, asked me to sit down and offered me some water. I went stone-faced and slowly sat on his bed.

He said he liked me. I was a great person. But he didn’t see where this relationship was going. (I didn’t either, I suppose, but I had never realized that could be a problem.) His job was getting busier, he was trying to figure out some life goals, and this all meant that it was a bad time for him to be in a relationship. He thought it would be best if we stopped seeing each other. These were all stupid excuses that most ladies my age had surely heard many times and could just roll their eyes about and move on, but for me it was the first time. And it hit hard. It was like a switch flipped inside my chest — I went from sweet and composed to a crying and crumpled mess in about ten seconds. I begged him for a better explanation than “bad timing,” but he didn’t have one. He looked at the floor with his hands in his pockets, silent in contrast to my sobs. I finally pulled myself together, got up, and said I was leaving. He asked “Are you sure?” and for a moment I thought he was having second thoughts, but I realized he was just being polite, like I was a dinner guest who had lingered a little too long after dessert. He said goodbye, closed his door, and that was it. I walked out of his apartment in slow motion and stopped in the freezing air on his stoop. It felt like the me who had entered his apartment fifteen minutes ago was now curled up inside this harder, frozen shell of the new me. I had no idea what to do but I knew that I couldn’t go home and be alone. So I decided to go to the party anyway.

I showed up at James’ place in Bushwick about 45 minutes later, too early for the party but already exhausted. The long subway ride had given me time to replay the entire 2 and ¾ months with Dan in my head, searching for answers. Was it because of the sports bra uni-boob? Or was it the crazy dance moves? Was he secretly seeing someone else? James was shocked to see me at his place so early and red-faced from crying. Only he and his roommate were there, wearing their nice plaid shirts and quietly playing music from their rooms. I told James I was so sorry I was a mess and explained what had just happened, saying that I didn’t know where else to go. Like any good host, James immediately sat me down at the kitchen table and brought out a glass and some vodka. He didn’t have anything to mix it with except grape soda, which was gross but also so dismally perfect. In the absence of any lady friends, James assumed the role, saying “what a dickhead” and “you’re better off without him.” He promised me that I had made the right decision to come party with him rather than being alone and sad and said that I could drink as much vodka as a I wanted. So with him and his roommate, I drank my purple drink. And drank and drank. My blur of sadness mixed into my blur of drunkenness as more people began to arrive and the apartment filled with the smells of weed and sweat and the beats of old hip hop.

I kept going through the full cycle of emotions like a bipolar patient on speed. I would feel so drunk that I would nearly forget what happened and start dancing and yelling, like any old party, but then it would wash over me again. Dan wasn’t here to get fake-embarrassed about it and then take me home afterward. I’d slink into the corner and get silent, then go into the bathroom and curl up on the bathmat. Then after I’d cried all I could cry, I’d stumble out of the bathroom and James would hand me another grape soda cocktail and I’d start dancing again. Eventually I gave up and made the long journey home, numb from tears and vodka.

I kept listening to the “Xmas Dan” mix for weeks after the impact. But this time I was hoping to discover some kind of justification for why he would have dumped me. There wasn’t one. Eventually, the days got warmer and my insides stopped feeling like ice too. I met different boys — and even some men — and I pushed Dan into the back of my mind. I went back to my job, my blog, and improv classes, finding my own new city hangouts. That winter became just a little stumbling block in my memory, a misfire at the beginning of a race for coupledom and companionship. Eventually, he was out of my head and heart altogether — except for those brief memories that stirred whenever a mystery song from the mix showed up in the shuffle of my iPod, jolting me back to into that other time.

Track 07 is an Animal Collective song called "Winter's Love" and when I learned the title I had to smile a little at the perfection of it all. Dan was my winter's love. We didn’t have a love that was meant to blossom into spring or sweat into a dirty New York summer — even though that’s what I so wanted at the time. It was an experience that was just long enough to give me little moments that I could experience and then put away — just like the CD itself. I'll never know Dan's intention with that song — if there even was one beyond it being "cool" — but the sentimental part of me likes to think he put it there for the name too. It was my first New York winter and I needed someone — someone to go to the movies with, make fancy spaghetti dinners with, keep me warm and make me feel like I really belonged. But eventually I needed a soft push into the cold to figure it all out on my own.

Molly Cameron is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here.