I want to tell her that six years ago I got drunk and married in Vegas and lost one of my closest friends. I want to tell her that I changed my entire life so that nothing like that would ever happen again. I want to tell her the reason I plan all my meals out for the week is because my deepest fear is that if I screw up one thing, I’ll screw up everything. I want to tell her that I’m the creator of a very successful digital comic and that a huge part of me wants to quit my job to work on it. I want to tell her that I would have already quit my job to do it full-time if I hadn’t gotten drunk and married in Vegas all those years ago. That maybe, for me, having my shit together is more important than my dreams. I want to tell her that I got robbed a few months ago and I haven’t slept well since. That I’ve been falling in love with someone and I tried so hard to make it perfect only to realize that it was doomed from the beginning.

I want to tell her that everything in my life feels like it’s connected, one thing bleeding messily into the next, only I can’t figure out how it all fits together. That if I could just decipher it, I might have a shot at fixing it. But looking at my life right now is like trying to read for me. Everything flips around on the page. Backwards and upside-down and hiding in plain sight.

“Vera,” I say. “I’ve gotta tell you some things.”

But she’s frowning at her phone again. I can tell she’s not listening to me. Her lip is bitten between her teeth and she struggles up out of the beanbag just like I knew she would. “I’m actually gonna take this call.”

“Stay strong.” I sound like a sarcastic asshole when I say it, but I actually mean it.

Vera’s gone long enough that I finish my beer and then I, too, struggle up out of the beanbag, not any more gracefully than she had. But suddenly I really don’t want to be the guy sitting alone in his parents’ basement drinking beer. I head upstairs and scrounge around in the fridge, smiling at the same neatly stacked tupperwares of leftovers that are almost always there. Without even opening them, I know I could find my mother’s mushroom chicken, a container of mashed potatoes, and a side of green beans. Because it’s Thursday night, and that’s what my mom always makes for dinner on Thursday nights.