Seeing the word “Riverside” makes my stomach churn. I like to think of my fans as the coastal elite, not tragic suburbanites. I respond, then close Instagram. I’ll do the chart at Subtropical.

I look at the date on my phone. It’s November 26. I decide to write out my December rent check and slip it under Marta’s door, four days early, so she understands that I am a responsible tenant who would never miss a rent payment.

After I write the check, I put on my black dress with my purple Juicy sweatsuit top. It is getting colder. I grab my laptop and wallet, put on Counting Crows in my headphones, and skip downstairs to slide the early rent check under Marta’s door.

Then I go to Subtropical.

The walk is nice, with the fall breeze and the endorphins and everything. When I am about halfway there, I receive a text from my mom. I am worried someone died, but she just wants to know what I am doing for Thanksgiving.

I try to remember the last time I saw my parents. I think it was about five years ago. I was making money for the first time in my life and feeling pretty cocky. My cousin Rachel invited me to her apartment in Los Feliz, which is the nicer neighborhood next to mine, the neighborhood landlords claim my street is in. Rachel had a charming apartment in the hills toward Griffith Park. It was only a twenty-minute walk from my apartment but felt worlds away from my grungy little street. She hadn’t told me my parents were going to be there, hers too. Everyone could fit comfortably in Rachel’s apartment she somehow afforded, and she cooked for all of us.

In retrospect, I was a little rude to my parents that evening. We’ve never had a good relationship. They always act annoyed with my presence, and I act annoyed with theirs. I always wondered why they had even had a child to begin with. I think my parents had expected to create a nerd like them. Someone who fit the name Emily. Someone who wore glasses and read “voraciously” and only tried weed once in college. Someone like Rachel, who worked at a company that gave her benefits and knew how to cook Thanksgiving dinner.

Instead, they got me. Moody and unpleasant and fame obsessed. I wouldn’t have liked me either. But I wanted them to be proud of me for finally making money, especially since they’d treated me like a failure my whole life.

But they weren’t proud. They told me my lifestyle was unsustainable. They told me I wasn’t investing in my future. They always said this, and I was sick of it.

I may have stormed out of the house saying, “I wish I’d never been born!”