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I’ve told this story before, but figured it warranted retelling, especially considering The Fray’s current call for submissions. Sex n’ death! Yeaaah!

I was seventeen years old, and we had just gone to the circus. Not some two-bit, tired-elephant circus either, but A Circus, hailing all the way from France with its haunting melodies and impossible contortionists. A single ticket had been two days’ pay at the gift shop where I’d waited away the majority of my summer. I had been half-pining for him from behind those glass counter tops in Minneapolis for two months while he’d spent the summer at Jewish camp — where, as he would later confess, he had dated someone else. Someone more Jewish, which I suppose could have incited jealousy in my shiksa heart. But at the age of seventeen I was much more casual about these things.

“So, are you still with her?” I asked simply. “Nope,” he said.

After all of the acrobats had finished twirling in the air and erupting fireballs from their painted lips, Noah* drove me deep into suburbia, Minnesota, where I’d planned on sleeping over at my friend Melissa’s place — past the glowing Mall of America and still further along that dark, stretching highway. When he pulled into the empty parking lot and I reached into the back seat of his parents’ car to grab my purse, he suddenly kissed me: a lovely, long soft kiss. I nearly fell onto the asphalt as I closed the door.

“Melissa,” I would later announce, standing on the soft, snowy carpet of her room. “Noah and I . . . just . . . kissed.”

“Is he your boyfriend now?” she would squeal.

“I think he’s my boyfriend now.”

She would clap and jump, and I would clap and jump, swoon on her bed, and smother myself with pillows, and lose myself in daydreams, and relive that kiss, over and over and over. It was in fact a very nice kiss, even by current standards.

Suddenly I sat straight up. “Oh my God,” I said. “Melissa, I have a boyfriend, and I don’t even know what a penis looks like.”

She screamed.

“I mean, I’ve seen drawings — like, diagrams or whatever, with the vas deferens and all that. But what will I do when . . . when . . . I don’t know . . . ”

“When you give him a handjob or something?”

“Aaagh!” I cried. “And I don’t even know what color they are!”

Melissa instructed me to calm the freak down.

“We have the internet here,” she said. “We can just do a search for . . . penis.”

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We sat on chairs, couches, pillows, floors, we stood in lines against the stair railing — we watched CNN, NBC, and even Fox to see what they were saying about you. And, apropos for our generation, we happened to be watching The Daily Show when your projected victory was officially announced.

Things are looking up. (Larger version.)

It’s odd, getting news like that on Comedy Central. For what seemed like ages, we just stared at the graphic they’d thrown onto our screen. “Wait, seriously?” someone said.

Then, as if one cue, the whole room erupted in screams, applause, and hollers. We awaited your speech. (Full album.)

During my first election as a voter, I thought voting was enough.

I was proud of myself for little things: finding a notary, having a pen on hand, mailing my absentee ballot in on time. These things involved advance planning: phone calls, journeys across campus, freaking acquisition of stamps. Scrawling my signature on the back felt like I personally had just planted a small forest, ensuring hundreds of future generations a world of clean air and plentiful shade. “There!” I declared. “I have done my civic duty. Clearly this country is not going to be completely stupid, so we should be all set.”

Huddled in the campus center of our small liberal arts college, we watched in horror as the results came in.

Outside the Obama offices in New Hampshire

When I was in junior high, I was terrified of the telephone. I would practice conversations out loud to myself before dialing any numbers. I drew web diagrams, with “hello” circled at the top and their potential responses branching out below, with written-out and rehearsed replies branching from these. “How’s it going?” they might ask. “Oh, I’m fine,” I wrote. “Oh, I’m fine,” I said aloud, at least three times.

In short, I was insane: but you could also say that I was cognizant of my weaknesses. And at least back then, I was making an effort to work around them.

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I’ve spent the last couple of Tuesdays volunteering at the amazing 826 Boston, helping first and fourth graders write stories about aliens and super heroes and dusty bikes and things. I never thought I’d say this, because I hate working with kids. But apparently, I like working with kids.

It’s like traveling to another country — they have an entirely different culture, different expectations, different priorities in language. And most englighteningly, I have no idea how they’re going to react to anything.

There was a brief time in my life when I thought I might smoke cigarettes. I thought I might “be a smoker”. It was the beginning of my junior year at Bard: I had just knit my first pair of leggings, cut my hair short and dyed it black, and had recently discovered boys’ baseball shirts and lace headbands. I sincerely doubted that I would ever feel this pretty again.

Some context:

1. 1. A year before The Day I Considered Smoking had been notable due to a conversation I had with my then-new-boyfriend Adam, in which I informed him that every time I saw him smoking, it was like watching him vomit all over himself. “It’s absolutely repulsive,” I told him. “There is literally nothing more disgusting you could do in front of me.”
2. 2. The day before The Day I Considered Smoking, I’d seen a kid speeding on his bicycle down the hill from the cafeteria to our campus center, buck naked. “Wheeee!” he’d cried.
3. 3. I had spent the first part of The Day I Considered Smoking unpacking and arranging my closet. If there’s one thing sure to put me in a good mood, and thus open to terrible ideas, it’s a well-arranged closet.

“Hey, Adrianne!” Adam called to me from across the quad. “Do you want to come with Tony and me to the tobacco shop in Rhinebeck?”

Hell. Yes.

I could start with cloves, I decided — those sweet cinnamon sticks nobody was supposed to inhale. The brown paper crackling between my fingers, I would have a reason to stand outside in the winter months, surrounded by my comrades bundled in sweaters with hands like ice. I could stare into the distance meaningfully, or un-meaningfully. Everywhere I went, I would be followed by the scent of campfire and chai. You could ask me for a light! All my nonsmoking life, I’ve wanted to be asked for a light.

Hell. Yes.

We piled into Tony’s car and lurched out of the dirt parking lot, filling the cool air with dust.

It’s one of those moments that I replay often, in certain moods: the impulsiveness of it, that sudden shift from closet arranging into journey/adventure, two people whom I had missed desperately those past few months just sitting in the front seat as Anita O’Day crooned through the speakers, the trees of upstate New York spreading their arms over Route 9, everything crimson and gold paper fluttering around us like confetti. Sing, sing, sing, sing. Everybody’s got to sing. Rhinebeck is ahead, and important life decisions: will I smoke cloves or roll my own cigarettes, will I be a matches or a Zippo kind of girl, which glass jar will ensnare me for life with its aromatic promises of grandeur?

It is the last time I can remember feeling thrilled by the simple reality of a friend’s driver’s license. That freedom and joy, to just be in a car together, debating destinations, routes, stops along the way. Anything is possible and everything is beautiful, on that drive to Rhinebeck.