It’s been a year since I’ve moved back to L.A., and I keep waiting for it to feel like home again. Instead it feels like an old sweater I found in the back of my closet, one that I remember fitting perfectly, only when I put it on, it’s stiff and plasticky, permanently creased from being forgotten. I wonder, sometimes, if this is my penance for leaving L.A. for New York in the first place. Then I remember that Jews don’t believe in penance. Not like that, at least.

I duck into the bathroom before I head to the patio. I press my hands to the cold porcelain of the sink and tell myself that this is just another interview.

I’ve gotten good at lying to myself when it comes to Gabe.

The last time we met, we were young and brash and stupid. I remind myself that two people can experience the same exact thing in completely different ways. I remind myself that I now know better.

My phone buzzes.

It’s a text from Katie.

You can say yes, she writes.

She’d read a book recently about saying yes to things. To life. To opportunity. To everything.

“I like saying no,” I’d told her when she offered this advice the first time.

“Only because you don’t know how to say yes,” she’d countered.

Katie Dahn was someone who loved her mantras, celebrated the start of astrology seasons like people celebrated the start of baseball, and who I’d once seen swish mouthwash with her pinky raised.

She was the best friend I’d ever had.

“She’s a kook,” Jeremy had always said with affection. “She’s the kind of person who would accidentally join an MLM scheme and somehow manage to either make money or take it over from the inside.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Katie was the only thing that Jeremy and I had really fought about during the divorce. Jeremy argued that he should have first dibs because he’d met her in undergrad. That the only reason I knew her was because of him. I had countered that Katie was an adult woman who could make her own choices when it came to friendship.

Katie had promised that she could remain friends with both of us, but in the end, she came to L.A. with me. We lived in the same building, like we were college students in a dorm. I’d come home some days and find a bag of crystals on my doorstep, or a note reminding me that Mercury was in retrograde.

It seems like Mercury is always in retrograde these days.

But Katie is a reminder that even though it had gotten bad the last year or so between Jeremy and me, there had been some good there too.

“You gave it your best shot,” she’d told me. “But you were up against the stars.”