Josh leaned forward, elbows on the table. “No. Definitely not.”
I looked at him. “You sure?”
“No one knows what they’re doing,” he said, serious now. “Everyone’s just pretending they’ve figured it out. The trick is to try to enjoy the pretending.”
I stared at him a moment, unsure what to say. I wasn’t used to this version of Josh. Thoughtful. Gentle. Still a little infuriating, but now in a way that made my pulse skip.
“Enjoy the pretending.”
Easy for him to say. But for some reason, hearing it from him made it feel less like a failure and more like just another stage.
And maybe this—us, here, in this weird fake-date limbo—was just pretending too.
But it didn’t feel that way anymore. Or maybe it never would to be. My brain was still probably stuck so many years ago.
“Are you a fortune cookie now?” I countered.
He shrugged with a small laugh.
“And enjoy what pretending? Being a step from an empty bank account and having to explain to your sister that I can’t afford a five-dollar pizza night? Not knowing where I am going to end up or if I’m going to be writing articles about anti-aging creams and step-by-steps on how to live a dairy-free, gluten-free lifestyle for the rest of my life? Did you know there are different chocolate sandwich cookies for every kind of dietary restriction these days?”
“Enjoy everything, I guess. Even the not knowing.”
I mean, sure, that was easy to say. Too easy. And I was happy I was here. I’d made it to this point in my life, and I was living in a nice apartment with Gina, who I’d still somehow managed to keep as one of my best friends. She was my family, and now we were still together, and it was all I could’ve ever really asked for.
I was thankful for it.
Grateful.
But was I really enjoying myself as I suffered through employment applications and not doing what a much younger me would’ve been proud of herself for?
“I mean, you like to write. That’s amazing,” said Josh. “That’senjoying. I’ve always admired you for that, honestly.”
“You have?”
“It’s kind of what made me do whatever I wanted to finally two years ago. Among everything else going on.”
He admired me?
“You always had a notebook too. Constantly writing in it.”
I peered back at him again. “A notebook?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t you always check to make sure your bag would be able to hold it?”
I had done that. Or I used to. Now I had my phone I just kept notes on, though I remembered my notebooks. I loved my notebooks even if I thought I might’ve torn a few of them upduring college when I couldn’t look at what was inside of them anymore.
I didn’t realize that I’d stopped completely until now. I just stopped writing in them. Stopped writing the same stuff anyway, which was probably the entire reason. Because I’d grown as a writer and also because I didn’t want to relive the moments I had gotten through. It felt freeing at the time.
Now, I wonder what I would’ve thought if I looked back at those entries of fairy tales, mixed in with my life I documented each day.
“You always used to have one on you at all times,” he said with a chuckle. “I swore, wherever you were, I always knew that I could count on someone having a pen too.”
“I forgot I did that.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “More or less.”
