Chicago, Winter 2015
I’m living with two of my best friends — M and P — who are in a relationship with each other. They don’t charge me rent, an arrangement they kindly proposed when I fled Los Angeles after an unpaid internship that led nowhere and bout of depression. The catch: I don’t have a room of my own exactly. At night, our shared living room becomes my bedroom, and I flip the futon couch down horizontal. My friends leave early in the morning for their real person jobs, and I get up and write. I’m applying to several media jobs a day — it’s 2015, remember, media jobs are actually abundant, can you even imagine? — while also building out my freelance career, trying my best to maximize the luxury of a rent-free life. The futon is miserably uncomfortable, and I do not care even a bit.
I’m doing a cringe-worthy, cliche version of Living In Chicago In Your Early Twenties. Yes, I’m in improv classes. Yes, I have a bike. Yes, I have a shapeless giant winter coat, but mine is shiny purple, which does stand out in the sea of black ones. Yes, I go to “improv parties” which are just house parties where you can drink with the people who you also drink at the iO bar with. Recently, I have come out as a lesbian, a declaration emphasized by the Kristen Stewart-inspired undercut I got from the hair salon down the street. M and I walked in randomly one day and fell in love with its charm. It takes us way too long to realize almost everyone who works there is a dyke, including its owners, who are married to each other. In addition to my hair, I am trying out a lot of different makeup experiments: black and blue lipstick, winged glitter eyeliner, blue eyeshadow.
It is my first Chicago winter, and I am learning the hard way that no, my four years of Ann Arbor winters did not in fact prepare me for this. We don’t live far from the nearest L station, but we also don’t live particularly close, and in heavy snow, it feels that much farther. It’s too cold to ride my bike, which is too small for me anyway, but it was free.
Valentine’s Day is approaching, my first since I officially came out, though technically on Valentine’s Day 2014, I had already been with many women and was already starting to tell people privately I’m gay, a confession complicated by the fact that I had a boyfriend I wasn’t quite ready to let go of. I am single, very single. I’ve been trying out The Apps, which in 2015 includes Tinder, OkCupid and, if you’re lucky enough to live in Chicago, a very short-lived and regionally restricted platform for lesbians called Scissr. It is difficult to date when you’re living on your friends’ futon, turns out. But also, I don’t even know what I’m looking for really, casting too wide a net to the point of probably seeming desperate, meanwhile harboring a crush on a friend from college who lives in New York and texts me all day every day. She is, of course, straight.
I figure M and P have plans for Valentine’s Day until I remember they aren’t like regular straight couples at all. So one night in February, I propose a plan, no doubt after a threeway joint rotation between us. What if we all go to the movies for Valentine’s Day? The catch: What if we go to three movies for Valentine’s Day?
I am new to breaking rules and not very good at it. A couple years before, my friend Erin taught me the art of sneaking into a second film while at the movie theater. The first time I did it with her, I thought my heart would burst from my chest (also, the double feature combo we did was unwell: Pitch Perfect and Argo). But I have a tendency of mixing up fear and desire, and though I’m afraid to get caught, this bit of ultimately quite low-stakes rule breaking is instantly sexy to me. Indeed, what could be sexier than sneaking into a couple movies with a straight couple on Valentine’s Day? Surely, nothing!
They let me pick the movies, perhaps their first mistake. I select The Boy Next Door starring my longtime celebrity crush Jennifer Lynn Lopez, the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie though I have not read the books, and Jupiter Ascending which looks strange in every way but was directed by my favorite directors. I’m winning an imaginary contest to come up with the most bizarre triple feature in cinematic history. I want to have an anti-Valentine’s Day; I’m jaded when it comes to love, a skin I’ll soon shed. Perhaps foreshadowing the eventual end of their relationship, which won’t happen for a little while longer, M and P are also very enthused about this plan, eager to avoid tradition on the holiday for love.
The catch: They only make it to the first movie. We’re all too high for The Boy Next Door, but in my case, it just leads me to love it, laughing maniacally throughout. They’re overwhelmed and then tired. Maybe they want some time alone after all, though The Boy Next Door isn’t exactly the kind of film to inspire romantic introspection. It’s about a high school teacher (J.Lo) sleeping with her 19-year-old student, who then becomes obsessed with her and gives her a first edition copy of the Iliad. I love cinema!
So, I trudge forward with my carefully laid plans solo, enduring all 125 minutes of Fifty Shades of Grey which, after the over-the-top but self-aware and genuinely funny The Boy Next Door is a total snooze fest. I spend most of the movie grateful I am queer, which is a newish feeling, so I suppose I can’t say the film gave me nothing. The theater is packed for this one, mostly straight couples who perhaps thought the film might serve as a form of foreplay. I feel bad for them! They should have picked The Boy Next Door, which isn’t romantic but is at least erotically charged.
And then, to close off a very strange evening, I see Jupiter Ascending for the first time. I mean, an anti-capitalist space opera written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski? It doesn’t get more anti-Valentine’s Day than that!
I am not upset with my friends for abandoning me. This was a journey I was meant to take on my own, if only so I could write about it 10 years later with the media job I finally secured after freelance-roughing it for most of that decade.
This Valentine’s Day, channel my 22-year-old baby dyke self: break some rules, lean into chaos, do whatever the fuck you want to do.
