You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen Read Free Book Online

old room until I left for the dorms. He was fascinated by the sheer Americana of my childhood, its parades and drive-ins and football games. “I didn’t realize that wasn’t just an old stereotype,” he said once. “It sounds so fun. You really had bonfires?”
    “You really lived in Thailand?” I countered.
    He nodded. “I developed a real taste for dried shrimp,” he said. “But why does every single bar in Wisconsin offer a Friday-night fish fry?”
    You think you’re just being terribly friendly until one day you start to catch on. Because it was always near zero we stopped for coffee, tugging our gloves off with our teeth and peering at each other through the steam. The weather made it easier; we were always inviting eachother into some kind of shelter: the bowl of chili at the pub, the foggy windows in a café.
    “It was a lot of fun for a while,” he told me one day. This was in January, a few weeks after we met, and we had run into each other on State Street (at that point our “unexpected” meetings had been happening in the same place, Mondays and Wednesdays, around two o’clock) and ducked out of the cold for some coffee. He was telling me about the job he’d had before he moved here. He’d written about music for
Chicago
magazine, freelanced around town, and basically cobbled together a living. “You actually
have
to go to clubs and see bands,” he continued, “and it’s not goofing off. The rest of the time you’re at home writing in your sweatpants.”
    “You didn’t have an office at the magazine?” I’d always imagined writers sprawled in a break room, wearing blue jeans and funky glasses, popping outside every now and again for a joint or a pizza.
    “Not the freelancers. I barely saw the editor for the first year I wrote for them. Frankly, after three years of it, I was getting a little hungover. Just in general. Your friends start buying apartments and cars with mufflers, and you still smell like smoke and old beer all the time. It gets in your skin.”
    “Oh yeah, I know,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. Here at last, something I could relate to. “Jill tries to guess the daily special by the smell of my hair.” In truth I was exaggerating my impatience with this kind of job. A few months later I would be ready to move on, but waiting tables was still fun to me back then. I liked bumming cigarettes off the bartender and getting a decent buzz after my shift on employee-discounted drinks. Yet as I talked to Liam I began to nurture the first seeds of discontent with the late hours, the potatoey-smelling aprons, and the way I came home from work not clean and rumpled, as a teacher would, but literally filmed with grease. This sort of thing was a kid’s job, was what I heard him say, and I was all set to agree.
    “I figured I could still go see bands and write about music or whatever, just make it a hobby like normal people. Plus by then Alison was ready to move somewhere quieter, a smaller firm.” He peered into his mug, swirling the coffee around.
    “You miss it, though,” I said. He looked up at me, startled, and then started laughing.
    “Yeah,” he said, “I do. Thanks for giving the lie to my ready-to-grow-up routine.”
    “I never believe people when they say that.”
    We watched each other, smiling. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs, and crossed his ankles. Our feet were propped against each other, but neither of us moved them away. “The job sounded a lot better when I told people what I did than when I was actually doing it. You know.”
    I didn’t know, actually. I had never had a job description that elicited anything but a tactful nod. The best you could say about my various means of employment was that they were usually over quickly. But Liam didn’t seem to know that, and I had the bizarre feeling he truly assumed I knew what it was like to have a great job you just didn’t love anymore. I wasn’t going to disabuse him of the