What Came After

It’s been awhile. Graduation came and went, as did the Bar exam. And now I’m living the after afterall. So it's only fitting I begin with the new chapter of my life--and how I got there.

When the Road Doesn’t Go On Forever and the Party Does End

“The world tried to break me; I found a road to take me home. Ain’t nothing but a blue sky now—after all of my running I’m finally coming home.” ||Gwyneth Paltrow ‘Coming Home’||

Around February of this year the fear of what was looming was finally settling into my bones. In two months I would be ripped from the environment I called home for the previous three years and thrust once more into Valley life. I had taken a year off between undergraduate and law school and had returned to where I grew up. Growing up, I felt I didn’t belong there. On my year off, I screwed up a lot, trying to find where I belonged among my old friends—those who had left and returned, those who had never abandoned it in the first place. My main worry: Add three more years of schooling and a completely different way of socializing on to a personality who already felt like a fish out of water there and you’d get a disaster in the making.

I’d try to forget the nagging feeling that began eating at me that month. I drowned it out with a lot of Scruff’s nights and softball games with friends I knew I was soon going to be separated from. But the feeling would return, usually in the dead of the night or in a quiet moment during the day. How would it all end this time? I only kept in touch with a select few people from high school—most who had moved away or were in grad school in a different area. I only had two life-lines: my cousin, Cartman, who is like an older sarcastic brother to me and GP, a life-long friend and my cotillion escort. Other than that, I was on my own. AEG, the boy I usually compared every other guy to and dreamt about building a future with, had been my pillar at home for the last eight years, my anchor in the storm. But after he suddenly disappeared and ceased all communication with me for the last two years (for reasons that are still somewhat unexplained), I have been adrift—at least when it comes to being home.

Starting over in a new place is terrifying enough, but starting over in a place where you have already failed? That’s a whole new level of scary.

To add to this already mounting anxiety, I was duly informed that p2 was looking at summer jobs in the Valley. At the beginning of February we had still not spoken to each other since the events of the preceding Fall and generally it seemed both of us were trying to forget the other existed. One night we ended up talking to a mutual friend of ours and her boyfriend at Scruffy’s. Both of us were carrying on the conversation as if the other wasn’t there. Granted, I was dealing with p3 ridiculousness at the time (why, oh why, did I ever do that crap?), but the wounds were still raw.

A lot of my more “socially liberal” (best euphemism I could think of) friends liked to tell me right after things blew up with p2 that the only way to get over someone is to get under someone else. I’ve never been a fan of this saying or this way of living. However, it’s a piece of advice that gets thrown around a lot, and was dispensed to me liberally in this circumstance. Given p3, the youngins, and the general events of last Fall and Winter, I’m inclined to say that getting over someone by trying to get with someone else only leads to disaster.

NOTE: This is NOT a model for happiness.

Cue the interviews for summer jobs in the Valley. Aside from 12 hours of delays (screw you very much Southwest airlines), my stomach was doing somersalts at the thought of having to do interviews with p2. On the plane, the terrible thought struck me that I might actually be stuck having to deal with him in MY space, MY home. The Valley is a very small place and getting smaller every day. Mental images of p2 canoodling with girls I used to go to school with made me vomit in my mouth a little bit. And in the back of my mind, it bothered me that p2 still had such power over me. Maybe it was the lack of closure. Him and AEG had that in common. They were the itch in my brain I could never quite scratch.

I can remember that day like it was yesterday. The marble floors. The nervous law students milling around, pacing to and fro. The sideways glances of cutthroats sizing up the competition. Me, in my best suit, repeatedly checking my Betsey Johnson watch, looking at the floor just in case p2 suddenly walked into my line of vision.

Luckily, the boy I caught walking into my line of vision in a moment of weakness WASN’T p2. Instead it was an old friend I had grown up with that went to a law school in Houston. As we got reacquainted, I made polite conversation asking about his daughter and what kind of law he was looking to get into. While he was telling me about possible judicial clerkships he was looking at, p2 passed behind my old friend. He was wearing something typically p2, probably Brooks Brothers, and my stomach did one of those sickening thuds, recognizing the inevitability of a run in.

I was saved by a summons to begin my first interview of the day.

This reprieve didn’t last long. After the interview I went to the now empty waiting area and pulled out information about the next firm I was interviewing with—who their big clients were, how they got their start, the main partners, etc. While reading about a case that had involved State Farm, p2 himself walked into the main waiting area, offered a half smile and a small “Hey.”

Hey. HEY. 

That’s all it took. As miraculous as it seems, with that little word, the tension split and started to melt away. I gave him a smile and a small greeting, and before you knew it, we were talking like old friends. He asked me about p3, which we laughed about and commiserated over. We talked about his roommate, p1, and found common ground in hating his newest girlfriend, whom my friends and I had begun to refer to as “Trachea Snatcher” behind her back. Her kind of crazy seemed to earn a special ire from us. We talked about the jobs that we wanted and our pending plans for the summer.

And after all that tension, all that build up, we just went back to being friends in five seconds flat. Well, I shouldn’t say back to being friends. I’m not sure that p2 and I ever really were friends. In the beginning I used him and was awful to him. I’d tune him out when he actually tried to communicate with me. And then, you know, I fell for him. And whatever that whole thing was, it certainly wasn’t friendship. Friends don’t do the kinds of things we did to one another.

So I guess the accurate statement is that in five seconds flat we became the friends we never really were.

As I was summoned once more for an interview, p2 wished me luck and I did the same to him. It was five minutes into my interview when I realized that I meant it sincerely and that perhaps a summer with p2 around wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

My, my, how fast things change.

Jackson: "This Sounds Like the Plot to A Ridiculous Romantic Comedy."

“I want to be unique, I want to be your kind. I want to make you hate me then change your mind. I want to wear a skirt, I want to make mistakes. I want to kill you first and then take your name. I want to tear you apart, I want to make your bed. I want to break your heart, I want to break your head—so I guess this means we can’t be friends.” ||Lorene Scarfaria, ‘We Can’t Be Friends’||

Girl meets boy----oh wait, girl already knows boy.

You know how it is. My boy tales can never have just one leading male role. Enter GP, the aforementioned old friend.

Anyone that has known me for more than five minutes can tell you that very few things in this life make me nervous, the least of all, men. They can infuriate me, impassion me, placate me, sate me, but they never EVER make me nervous.

Well, that was until Christmas of 2009.

GP and I decided to get together for lunch. Him and I, as I mentioned, have been friends for as long as both of us can remember. We ended up going to different high schools, but still hung out. The real distance between us grew throughout college, both of us forging our own paths at different schools, hanging out with different friends. But nothing that is ever lost in the Valley is lost for long.

I’m not really sure how we started communicating again, I’m sure it was probably something as inane as Facebook, but we decided that we should start hanging out again. Which brings us to that lunch.

I won’t recount the lunch, because most of it isn’t memorable enough to entertain whoever reads this thing. Suffice to say this: there was a lot of verbal vomit on my part.

My verbal vomit would likely consists of a lot of legalese, stories of ridiculous law school shenanigans, mixed with copious amounts of "Dude!"

I was studying to be an attorney, and I enjoyed talking, but I just couldn’t stop the things that were coming out of my mouth. Apparently, trots of the mouth is my nervous tick.

Yes, I just said nervous.

As soon as lunch was over, I dialed CLit, still shocked.

“Yeah?” He sounded drunk.

“Dude. This guy just made me nervous. We were out to lunch and I just completely lost my cool.”

Silence on the other end.

“HELLO? CLit?”

“You’re kidding me, right? A guy made you nervous? Is this a joke?”

I could see my breath in the air. Rare, for the Valley at least. “No. It’s no joke.”

CLit laughed and spoke words truer than he could imagine, “Wow. You are in trouble. Watch yourself.”

I laughed the incident off then, but now, with the passage of time and hindsight on my side, maybe it was a little more significant than I ever would have liked to have admitted.

The nervousness didn’t stop there, either.

Fast forward to early Spring 2011, right after the previously mentioned interviews with p2. I had texted GP during a lull in the day and asked if he wanted to grab lunch. Much to my surprise he hadn’t eaten yet and his schedule allowed him to take off some time and meet me.

And the verbal vomit continued in full force almost a little less than two years later. GP, who ate and listened to me across the table with a small, amused smile, took it all in stride. I still think he got that he was making me nervous and got a kick out of it.

And the verbal vomit was further aggravated by the feeling that I was going to be alone when I moved back. Not alone in a romantic way, just, ALONE. The girl I had hung out with most when I moved back a year before was moving out of the country with her husband and toddler. AEG was a ghost. PAC and most of the guys I graduated with were in school or living in other parts of Texas.

I voiced this concern to GP and he quickly waived it away, finally getting a word in.

“Lo, don’t worry about that. You know that you always have me.”

I nodded quickly and continued on that tirade, but inside, I breathed a sigh of relief. At least there would be him. And possibly p2 to wean myself off the law school teet, so to speak. So I’d be okay, right?

At least if I found a way to ignore the nervousness.

Summer: Where the sand is your seat, waves kiss your feet, your friends outnumber the stars, and even the chilliest of nights are still warmer than the cold one in your hand.

“Tan lines may fade, but these memories are forever.”  – Nurse, after half a bottle of Jager at my 26th birthday

“You need to figure your shit out and go for what you want. And by ‘what you want,’ I don’t mean p2.” –Anonymous

There’s more stories from summer than I can or care to recount. Needless to say, I went in to the whole thing being apprehensive because I didn’t know where I stood with GP or p2 or anyone else for that matter. Perhaps the European put it best when he asked me the night before I moved, “What now?”

Truth is, I had no clue. I was dreading mixing law school friends with life long friends with family. p2 had gotten a job for the summer in the Valley and before school ended, we actually became friends and hung out a bit.

Of course, all that was good and well until the night of my graduation.

After spending most of the evening pretending I was far less inebriated than I actually was (mostly to keep my family from worrying), I let my guard down at Scruffs since I had 2Ls chaperoning and chauffeuring me around. I sung and danced with JFrank and toasted to the completion of three of the most arduous and terrifying years of my life. I celebrated with p1 and p2 and Nurse and AP. And of course, we afterpartied. It just so happened we ended up at p1 and p2’s house.

p2 and I decided to play a game of beer pong against Tennessee and another classmate. It turned into the most ridiculous game I’ve ever played. By the end of it, Tennessee was shooting me curious looks. Something was in the air and she could sense it. I had felt a twinge of familiarity earlier, but I had dismissed it as a drunk notion.

Could it be I was walking straight into the past I had taken so long to get over?

Too close. Luckily, not close enough.

Apparently, she was not the only one getting that vibe. Nurse, AP, and even p1 all made comments about it. And  pretty soon the warning signs were so bad that not even graduation drunk me could miss them.

No, I willed myself. This shit was over. OVER.

And, although some people may not believe me, it was. And as mistakes from everyone else’s past repeated themselves around us, I felt a sort of triumph in all of it. Ha. We had done differently. We were better than all that.

Weren’t we?

Meanwhile, I was adjusting to being around GP on a regular basis. With each passing encounter, my nervousness was fading, but I still occasionally had trots of the mouth around him.

This never manifested itself more than when I was caught off guard by the information that he was talking to some girl. A law student no less. An ugly feeling settled into the pit of my stomach.

Wait . . . was that jealousy?

I never get nervous. Probably following right behind that is how rarely I get jealous. This actually has been somewhat of a problem in my life as some boys equate my lack of jealousy to lack of caring, but I don’t really believe that’s really it. Usually I have what I want, so there’s no reason to be jealous. Simple as that.

Also, jealousy sucks. I’m kind of glad I don’t feel that way all the time.

So, of course, trots mouth me spouts off about how there’s no attractive or nice guys in the Valley. When GP guffawed at this, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Oh, come on. You don’t count. I look at you like a brother.”

I should have “Insert foot here” tattooed above my upper lip.

Well, as things work out, I did mix law school and old friends and family. I actually spent most of the summer hanging out with p2, GP, and Cartman. They all got along fantastically, which is more than I ever could have asked for. We watched p2 run his game (which is surprisingly good and advanced—where did that swagger come from?) and GP bring around that law student . . . which just ended really, really badly. We laughed a lot and had a lot of fun. It was, in a lot of ways, the perfect summer.

One night p2 and I were having beers by ourselves in the Arts District. We were talking about everything and anything—a new thing for us, since we were actually listening to one another. He asked about GP. I admitted I didn’t know what was going on. He nodded and said probably the nicest thing ever.

“He’s a good guy, GP. And it’ll work itself out. I know it.”

If someone would have told me I would have gotten that ringing endorsement from p2 back in January, I would have laughed in their faces.

And that was one of the best things about the summer—p2 and I continued being really good and actual friends. Not to say that we didn’t back slide a bit. We did. But we remained friends and were careful not to fall into the same pattern that ended disasterously for us before. When he left for Memorial Day weekend, I actually missed him—which was huge, because I wasn’t just missing what he could do for me. p2 became a real person this past summer, at least in my eyes. I understand him better now and he understands me better now. We’re the way we were always meant to be.

As for GP, the nervousness abated and all that was left was warmth. There is something about him and the way I feel around him that just felt right and comfortable. Maybe it’s because we’ve known each other so long. Maybe it’s because we’re kindred spirits—souls who are slaves to our careers, but have the hearts of ten year olds. It just works. And it quickly became apparent to me that my life in the Valley would be a lot less enjoyable without him.

One of the qualities about our friendship that I admire most is that GP inspires honesty in me. I’d like to think that’s a two way street. We are both very candid about our pasts with one another. Of course, I know a lot of his because he used to date friends of mine. He knows little of my life since I moved away.

One day we were watching something and a conversation about cheating and home wrecking was brought up. Both of us have a lot of opinions on what people should do in these situations. We discussed those first. And then a pause brought back the things I regretted.

And although some girls would undoubtedly say that it’s not smart to share this kind of information with someone you care about, I did it anyway. I talked about p3 and finally told him the truth about p1 and p2. The whole truth. And I talked about how these sorts of actions were spurred and condoned by the environment I had been in. I accepted full responsibility for my actions.

This conversation made me realize how two months out of law school had changed my perspective on life and the things I had done. Everything seemed seedier now. It seemed easier to be a more polite and relaxed person. As much as I enjoyed my time there, I also realized the place changed me. And I was glad I was changing back. Back to someone better.

So . . . what is the point of all this? What about these two very different, but very important guys?

The point is that a choice had to be made. I had to choose what I wanted.

Way to be torn.

And the funny thing is that the choice really wasn’t so much about the guys—I realize that now. It wasn't like both guys were competing to get me--that was completely NOT the situation. It was more about the lifestyles they represented. Would I continue my shenanigan-full lifestyle from law school? Or would I want something that was calmer and more honest?

And this is where me turning 26 comes in.

I had the genius idea to turn my birthday, the last weekend in June, into a trip to South Padre Island. I hadn’t seen Nurse in awhile and I had been craving sand and sun. GP, ever the gentleman and far more organized than myself, planned the entire thing. He found us a house with a pool (‘necessary’ he said). It also happened to be p2’s last weekend in town, so it seemed the proper way to send him off.

We invited Cartman, Cartman’s cousin BRue (also a really good friend of mine), AP (who sadly couldn’t make it), p2 and BLo. And of course, Nurse. Nurse, who really is the best friend a girl could ask for, was excited to come down and meet GP.

The house was beautiful—GP really did a great job on it. As soon as we all got there, the drinks began flowing and my family came and took us all out to dinner. BLo even made time in his crazy schedule that had kept him gone for three weeks to come and have a few drinks with us. Of course, it being the Island, we all ended up at Wanna Wanna’s. The smell of the ocean and the feel of the sand and the breeze and having some of my best friends around me was something akin to heaven. As I was talking to p2 about him leaving, I realized I could not have wished for a better birthday.

I knew when p2 left the following morning, I was going to have a rough time of it. He was my last link to the BLS world and we were really good and genuine friends now. He had grown close to my family—he came to our Sunday lunches and played with my baby cousins—and we’d gotten close. And there were so many things I appreciated about him—his trademark scratchy laugh, the way he always carried a koozie like me, the way his really dark eyelashes brought out the light brown in his eyes, his impeccable fashion sense, that mischevious look he got whenever he was planning something or was in on some joke. I would miss him like crazy when he was gone.

But I, even after partaking in tequila with p2 (my birthday gift from him), finally figured “my shit out” as it was so eloquently put to me above. And I knew that this time, it was different. The summer had changed me, being away from BLS had changed me. My decision was well thought out, heart-felt, not tactical in any way (a rarity, at least before).

Instead of p2 and the life he represented, my old life, I chose the boy who was getting shit-talked by my cousin Cartman within my earshot. The boy with his cap pulled low, less fratty clothes and Rainbow flipflops. The hard working guy who liked dive bars and to argue with me about the merits of Miller Lite v. Coors Light (or “trots water” as he calls it). The one who called me on my crap and would warn me to “Stop lawyering him.” The boy who liked hunting and wearing boots and was constantly shaking his head in disbelief at me. The guy who, when his light brown eyes would meet and challenge mine, constantly struck me with this handsomeness that had been undiscovered for years. I chose him—not specifically him, but the lifestyle he represented. One of honesty, hard work, close family ties, limited debauchery, and simplicity.

And I’ve stuck to that decision ever since. I haven’t waivered, not even in the slightest. And the fact that GP kind of came along with this choice hasn’t been too onerous either.

So I made the choice and I remember the contentedness that followed it. I looked around. GP and Cartman were arguing about who would school who in the gym over a couple of beers. Nurse and BRue were having a deep discussion about music and life. p2 was telling me a story about some crazy divorcee. This is exactly how I wanted to remember my friends and this past summer. This was perfection. 

GP caught my eye and sent me a warm smile. I smiled back.

“You alright?” p2 asked me.

I smiled. Genuinely.

“Yes, p2. Everything is perfect.”

The next morning I woke to Nurse making bacon. I was in the kitchen, surveying the damage of the after party, when p2 walked out an announced he had to leave.

As we said our goodbyes and I watched p2 back out of the drive, I started tearing up. I actually started tearing up for p2. For the life he represented; the life had previously loved and lived to the fullest. We had both apologized for everything from our past. We had thanked each other for everything good that had since come from our friendship. For the first time ever, p2 and I were square. I’d never thought I’d be able to say that.

Nurse seemed to sense my melancholy after p2’s departure.

“You sad?”

“I almost cried. How fucking pathetic is that?”

Nurse smiled, and because she is a better person than me, she did not mock me for almost doing so.

I could hear the beginnings of life from GP from the hallway. He was on his phone with what sounded like a customer. The boy is always working—and I admire that.

Nurse turned to me suddenly, “Oh, and by the way, you totally undersold GP.”

“Hmmm, did I?”

“Totally. He’s a great guy.”

Maybe I undersold the type of life I was capable of having down here—even to myself. Now with time and a little perspective, I realize that I am going to be insanely happy down here, no matter what happens. 

Nurse and I are still close, despite living almost 400 miles away from one another. I have my family. I have GP. I have my friends. I have my profession.  More than that, I’m a better person here. I make better decisions.

So the after afterall? It’s pretty freaking fabulous. I've finally attained an awesome balance and there's no better way to live.