The deli near work downgraded its bread today. When I bit into my mozzarella-tomato sandwich it felt like a wet magazine. This wasn’t a baguette, it was a hot dog bun.
At best a hero.
Better than if they’d raised their prices, I told myself, but once I’d finished I admitted I would never go back there. Tomorrow I’ll eat a slice of goat cheese-sun dried tomato pizza. It’ll be $3.75—seventy-five cents higher than when I moved to the city, but still the cheapest lunch around by about three dollars.
I need money.
Once I lived through something that felt like the end of a story. So, in the months-long cold sweat that followed, I wrote a story which I called a novel. Almost all of it was fact.
The story began when I was a 20 year old poetry fan who wanted to turn into a happy and useful woman. A degree from the fifth best law school in America was supposed to be my shortcut.
It didn’t work out that way.
The Word document lived in a folder titled “Unused Desktop Icons.” I was ambivalent about publishing the story because it would humiliate most of the people depicted, especially–as I called her in the story– the perfect lawyer.
I called her the perfect lawyer because she was the perfect lawyer, and because all the other pseudonyms I came up with sounded fake. Even her actual name, as constant in my life as a flashing red hand, began to sound fake. Not as pure as she was.
I was in love with her.
Everything is different now. I’m not living off of student loans anymore, I’m repaying them. All of a sudden unilateral love doesn’t seem to carry obligations. Because if I don’t make something happen fast then—
What happens to broke people?
My schedule’s blocked with two jobs. No one on craigslist wants my green 2004 iPod mini. All I’ve got left for the market is a story. Screw printing it out at Kinko’s and mailing it to the slush piles in midtown. That’d take too long.
I’m going the post-medieval route, the one where you stake out a web feed and get discovered.
So I’ll tell a little bit more of my story here every day, maybe a few times a day. It’s about me three years ago, and my friends and professors; and how we disgraced ourselves in the end.
Loyalty’s for the well fed.
Go to the Table of Contents.
You write beautifully. Continue, please.
Hahaha! I’m a lesbian in law school too! ^_^ *cheers* Hurrah for law school … although it’s hard … and stressful.
you have an amazing writing skill! you should continue with this story! i, like some other readers here, is a lesbian in law school! hahaha… weird, but in a good way!
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