We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Read online

  SB’s ashes are tucked away in a box in a Gap bag inside my hall closet. The sheets and duvets within are decidedly unfolded.

  A Case for Remaining Indoors

  Wouldn’t you rather be dead than hot? I am 100 percent over people pretending that open-mouth breathing in 1,000 percent humidity while being burned to a crisp by the sun is the jam. I prefer winter, when everyone has to be bundled beyond recognition to survive. Or fall, when you can wear something nice without sweating it sheer in the punishing heat. Too bad I can’t afford to pack my one bag and move to the Arctic, because the minute I start seeing bare arms and booty shorts my sad kicks in and my happy doesn’t return until late in September when, thank goodness, I can cover it up with a scarf. You dudes frying under the sun at the beach can’t really expect the rest of us to believe that you enjoy painfully peeling your seared flesh from plastic chairs while everyone in the restaurant is staring at the armpit stubble revealed by your tank tops, can you? I’m not hating, it’s just that I’m baffled when these hot-weather enthusiasts try to convince you how totally awesome it is to be standing around outside in air that’s as thick as soup while trying to pick the char off smoldering ribs and hot dogs. While gingerly clutching a beer that won’t stay cold. Would it be so bad if we ate this inside? At a table that is sturdy? Where no flies can vomit on my plate while I’m trying to balance it on my knees?!

  It is a cloudless seventy-two degrees in Chicago today. The sun is blazing in the sky (I closed the blinds when I finally woke up around one thirty in the afternoon), birds are chirping sweetly in the trees (I shut the windows), and people are crowding the streets in droves celebrating this long-awaited break in the dreary gray spring weather (I assume—like I said, I shut the goddamned windows and blinds). I’m going to take a shower and order a grocery delivery, then maybe stare at the wall until it’s time to go back to bed.

  If I went outside, I could:

  • Walk down the street to the beach, stroll along the lake path, and get bit by a dog.

  • Suffer through an awkward conversation with someone who lives in this neighborhood, someone I will now be forced to avoid until the end of time.

  • Watch children beating each other with sticks while enjoying the fresh air.

  • Soak up some vitamin D and also harmful UVA and UVB rays.

  • Get the perfectly-acceptable-to-wear-again-tomorrow clothes I’m wearing all sweaty and gross.

  On the flip side, in my apartment I can:

  • Eat the rest of this box of cereal, dry, by the fistful.

  • Look at people outside without having to smell them or listen to their opinions.

  • Organize my ketchups.

  • Write song lyrics for my easy-listening band, Queasy Listening.

  —

  Words like “outdoor music festival” are why I am so glad summer in Chicago lasts approximately seven minutes. I nearly wept tears of seasonal affective disordered joy as I pulled out my North Face boots at the end of last November. As good as the warm air feels on my immobile joints, I can’t help but love winter and fall. Mostly fall, because fuck snow, and that hawk blowing off the lake is enough to make your teeth drop right out of your skull, but winter can be kind of okay if it doesn’t snow a whole lot and no one asks me to go sledding or do some other Hallmark-movie nonsense. The more sweaters and scarves I can wrap around my head the better. Summer can be an exercise in torture (but not an exercise in actual exercise, duh, it’s too humid) if you don’t want to do crazy shit like “wear sleeveless shirts” or “enjoy close proximity to actively sweating strangers.” One summer, I walked by these dirty hipsters at Division Fest—the kind of outdoor food and music festival that sounds like fun in theory until you actually get there and find yourself eating an overcooked hot dog while standing in a curdled pool of someone else’s puke—dancing in a large gray puddle of used tampons and diarrhea and thought miserably, “I hope you guys catch something incurable.” I was instantly burning with hatred for those people, dancing with their mouths open in a shallow pool of urban toxic waste. And the band they were dancing to wasn’t even that jamming. I never have to go outside again because:

  1. My boyfriend, the television, is inside.

  Have you heard of those thunder shirts for dogs to help them stay calm during loud storms? They should be made for people, to help us stay calm in situations when we have to listen to someone explain at great length why they are too busy to own a TV set. Picture it: you’re chilling in the corner at a party full of people you’ve never met before and hated on sight, humming the lyrics to a Coldplay song to yourself to drown out the Swedish death metal the hostess put on to prop up her apparition of coolness, then here comes some asshole who makes her own yogurt and just discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates condescending at you about how damaging reality shows are to impressionable youth. MAN, I FUCKING LOVE TV. And I don’t mean educational programming on PBS or crackly documentaries about important historical figures. I mean I know all of the cast members of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, past and present, and all of their children, pets, and significant others by name. I once walked blindly past my own sister on a sparsely populated train platform on a Saturday afternoon, but I could tell you who won Survivor the last few seasons without even having to google it. Television has forever been my unwavering companion and trusted friend. Every bad day, every breakup, every inexplicable 2:00 a.m. awakening: television has been there for me through all of them. I would trade every deadly hornet sting and itchy eye-causing spring bloom, without hesitation, for the warm glow of my Samsung for the rest of my life.

  2. Are there enough blazers in my closet?

  Years ago I decided that I was going to be a jacket person. I’m not sure it was a conscious decision—like, I didn’t just wake up one day and throw out all my long-sleeved shirts, but I remember finding this insanely well-cut cropped denim jacket with a military collar and cinched waist and the first time I wore it I didn’t take it off for the entire day. At some point the next morning, stumbling around hungover and bleary-eyed trying to get my shit together for work, it dawned on me that I could just wear that jacket again. I already knew it looked good and anyone paying close attention would just assume I’d changed the T-shirt I had worn underneath, so why the fuck not? I put that damn jacket on every single day; if Michael Kors could wear the same uniform every day, why not Samantha Irby? Now I have all kinds of jackets: leather ones, tweed ones, twill ones, the works. And you would not believe how many pajama pants you can get away with wearing to nice places if you just slap a sharply cut blazer on top of them. I went to a party recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and I almost took an anxiety shit in the charcoal Spalding Women’s Boot-Leg Yoga Pant I’d just ripped out of the plastic Amazon packaging after gazing at all the angular haircuts and avant-garde outfits teetering around on sky-high heels, their delicate ankles bound by complicated-looking straps. I was wearing a baggy V-neck, riddled with holes from moths and actual wear and tear, but I had gotten my nicest blazer from the dry cleaner. So even though I felt wildly out of place between the blush I’d put on in the cab and the jacket my dry cleaner starched the shit out of, I felt okay enough to hang out for an hour before demanding my homeboy drive me home.

  Home, where I can gaze lovingly at my closet and organize my jackets. By color, by material, by the likelihood they will ever see the outside world. I’m sitting in my crib right now, listening to this Gretchen Parlato record from three years ago, ripping sheets of toilet paper off the roll I keep on my desk because buying boxes of Kleenex feels like a waste when allergy season is about to destroy my life anyway, and I am wearing a jacket. A black pleather motorcycle jacket I got for sale at ASOS that has a little fringe on it but not so much that I look like I’m going to an Aerosmith cover band audition later. That’s the thing about being an inside person who enjoys the occasional wardrobe splurge; you gotta be cool with modeling it for the cat and hoping the delivery dude from Apart Pizza Company assumes you just
got home from work. You were so busy writing checks and taking important calls that you hadn’t had time to shrug it off before opening the door for your pizza, even though you both know deep down that you haven’t left the apartment all day and only put the jacket on because it’s a shame to let an eighty-dollar coat go unworn.

  3. Food just tastes better inside.

  White people love picnics. So much, in fact, that they’ll stop just about anywhere to have one. Why? Everywhere you look someone has turned a bus bench or statue or filthy curb into an outdoor café. You dudes just stop and bust out your wicker baskets anywhere, hmm? I know my people love a summertime cookout as much as anyone, but we don’t just set up a three-legged grill in the alley next to the dumpster as soon as the winter snow melts and throw our chicken on it. We organize, we plan. First of all, we need to know who is going to be responsible for the potato salad. You can’t just let that one lady from work you invited to be nice bring hers—it has to be known potato salad, from a vetted and reliable source.

  I can’t even commit to going to a white person’s house for dinner in the summer unless we have specific plans to do something that requires four walls and a roof while I pretend to be picking at their homemade tabouleh. Because guaranteed I am going to walk into the house and be greeted with, “Hey, let’s eat this out on the patio!” And by “patio” they mean “that little scrap of cement at the base of my back stairs that holds only one chair and is right next to the trash.” LOL FUCK THAT. And I try to avoid restaurants with outdoor seating at all costs, especially with my non-melanotic friends, because when your Uber driver makes a wrong turn and they beat you to the place by a hair, they always do some slick shit like put your name in for an outside table. I don’t care how long the wait is, I’d rather wait an hour for a table that won’t get covered in pigeon shit and the airborne pathogens expelled from the mouths of curious passersby.

  4. You can daydream about things in catalogs you are never going to buy.

  Without fail I get the IKEA catalog every single year. Let me remind you that I currently live in a space that contains this many things:

  • a full-size bed

  • a television on top of a television stand

  • a stack of magazines next to the bed that used to hold a small fan and my BiPAP machine because finding a bedside table seemed like too much work

  • a desk whose resale value I just today discovered I ruined with a broken bottle of nail polish

  • a large air conditioner currently sitting on the floor beneath the window

  • a table my friend’s dad made that I keep in the dining room to hold wine bottles and plants

  • a stainless steel shelving unit that serves as an “open-air concept pantry” *eye roll*

  • a dresser whose bottom two drawers I am terrified to open

  • a bookshelf I have inexplicably moved six motherfucking times

  • one chair

  There’s other shit in here (laptop, house phone I no longer remember the number to, prosperity candles from the occult bookstore) but it doesn’t count, since those are things that go on top of other things. Suffice it to say, I have no reason whatsoever to be comparing backsplashes. I have been a renter my entire life; my home-improvement joy is firmly grounded in novelty items like matching clothes hangers and interesting dish towels, affordable splashes of color and beauty that can liven up this space that’s crumbling at the corners and painted like a prison cell. The idea of owning a home feels stressful to me. Like, if the toilet breaks and it’s not my paycheck week, am I really going to have to shit at the gas station for nine days until my direct deposit clears? YES. Also I don’t understand how mortgages work other than a handful of scenes I can remember from The Big Short, and don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure Steve Carell told me the dumbest thing I could ever do is sink my regular-person money into any type of real estate. Let someone else take the risk, and I can relax and waste the money I should be putting into a savings account on decorative pillows and champagne flutes I’ll never use.

  But catalogs are a miracle, because you can design your very own dream house with none of the risk or expense. I’m like a little girl with my Post-it notes and red Sharpie: “I want the farmhouse sink and these marble countertops and a butcher block island in the center of the kitchen. These brass sconces would look good in the master bathroom, and definitely some track lighting in the family room, and ooh wouldn’t this leather sofa look amazing in the den?!” I could spend an entire weekend locked in a five-hundred-square-foot studio apartment circling armoires in the Crate and Barrel catalog that will never see the inside of any place other than my brain. I like to pull all the Bed Bath & Beyond coupons out of the Sunday paper and stick them in a drawer for the day I decide to stop living like a trash person and buy sheets with an impressive thread count. One of these days I’m going to move to a place in which a footstool might not look out of place, and I am going to need that 20 percent off, okay?

  5. Your space, your rules.

  Now, this is assuming that you haven’t made the fatal mistake of trying to be inside at someplace other than the one in which you live. People who don’t understand that my writing ~process~ consists of staring sullenly at my computer waiting for the jokes to come while willing myself not to get up to reexamine the contents of the almost-bare refrigerator I just took stock of ten minutes ago often ask if I like to write in coffee shops. I used to, especially before I caved and got a high-speed Internet hookup in my casa. Sometimes I’d roll down to the Heartland to pick at a bowl of vegan chili and soak up their Internet, but then my favorite bartender quit and they took the black bean nachos off the menu so BYE. There are a handful of coffee shops in Edgewater that feel cozy and relaxing, but the problem with that is I am never cozy or relaxed. Even with headphones on, I could never get over the idea that someone was watching me, that they knew I had a deadline or a draft due and noticed that instead of putting my head down and working, I’d spent the entire time glancing around wondering what everyone else was working on. And I live near Loyola University, so the answer was probably definitely “a term paper for Indigenous and Settler Colonialism,” but still I’d sit there with my laptop open to a blank page waiting to be filled with at least forty-five hundred words on the scintillating topic of my anus, wondering what the girl with the blue hair and hand tattoos had picked as her major. I would pack up my computer and the book I liked to carry in case I got frustrated with the writing and grumble as I banged out the door, take the train a few stops to a place with quality scones and iced tea, then sit there for hours paralyzed with fear that if I drank too much I would have to go to the bathroom and be faced with the dilemma of whether someone would steal a computer cheaper and more busted than theirs for the three minutes I was gone.

  I am unfamiliar with coffee shop etiquette. Since I let the dude texting across from me hog the outlet, is he morally obligated to make sure no one runs off with my wallet while I’m in the can? If I take my wallet, will he keep an eye on my laptop? And what about my bag?! I am anxious, and I don’t trust anyone and would also never want to burden a stranger with my literal shit, but I had to buy a drink to get the Wi-Fi password and didn’t want to look like a cheapskate, so I got the big one, and a doughnut, and now I have to pee but I’m not ready to leave and Jesus God what can I do?! So I would take everything in with me, a mess of tangled cords spilling from my shoulder bag, my unfinished teacup balanced precariously in the hand not fumbling for my phone. I usually could manage to pee without letting my cup touch any contaminated surfaces, and when I emerged from the bathroom someone new would inevitably be sitting in my seat, unsheathing her gleaming MacBook Pro from its protective case, nodding with a smile at the outlet hog as he unplugged so she could use it. Defeated and deflated after multiple days sulking home with my work undone, I finally called RCN to come connect whatever wires I needed to get the fastest possible mature lesbian porn on my phone. I can make my own tea. Better yet, I can sm
oke a bowl, and drink an entire pitcher of Crystal Light, and finish that butthole essay in my nicest house jacket and take as many breaks as I want, and no one is going to steal my seat when I get up for a cookie refill or cause me to break out in a sweat when my battery is at 7 percent and the nearest outlet is in use. I won’t get sucked into watching a young man artfully arrange his latte and muffin just so for the gram, no eavesdropping on conversations about bands I’ve never heard of and am too uncool to understand, no nervously asking an irritated barista what “sumatra” means: just me and the cat and the bags of Lipton I shoved in my pocket at work because buying an actual box of tea in real life feels like a ridiculous, unnecessary thing. It’s fucking perfect. BRB, gotta go pee.