Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

I’m about to meet my soul mate feels like more of an in-person thing, or at least a phone call. We convey too many important things in too few words these days.

I take him in. Real, incarnate, across from me now. He has a birthmark under his jaw, a freckle by his left eye. All of these minute details that make up a person, that make up this person, my person.

And from that point on, that’s how it happened. Sometimes it would be a postcard, sometimes it would be a sheet of paper, once it was a fortune tucked into a cookie. Sometimes the note would come after I’d met him, or right before, or in the case of Hugo, six weeks in. But it always told me the same thing: the exact amount of time we’d spend together.

“There should be an evening farmers market for people like us where the latest arrivals get the best things.”

We had the unicorn of all relationships in Hollywood: a functional female-female one, with a power dynamic at play, to boot.

There is a certain warmth to him that makes him feel larger or more pervasive. In the way he pulls back my chair, in how he holds the door open, in the way he places his hand, gently, on the small of my back when we cross the street in front of a waiting car.

I still wanted forever love. I still wanted my perfect mate, my smiling husband. I’d picture the white tulle dress and the lace veil and a man who was kind and attractive and who my parents loved, because why not.

That’s the beauty of LA—it’s sprawling, searching, a horizontal buffet of experiences. In New York, everything is happening on top of everything else—energy and expectation, stacked up like dominoes. Here, you have to hunt for what comes next.

Wasn’t the hardest part of heartbreak the unpredictability? How you could feel the most connected to a person in one moment—like being in a teardrop together, the world a watercolor outside—and like strangers in the next?

Conversations around weight bored me. There were so many more interesting things to talk about than the particular shape of someone’s body.

He was from Texas, with a slow drawl and just the right amount of facial hair and blue eyes that when he looked at you felt like they were missiles.

The man likes to look good, and he likes everything around him to look good, too.

Murphy was never interested in anything canine. It is my genuine belief that he is a 1940s banker who was once cursed by a witch to live in a dog’s body. He sniffs almost nothing and is appalled by the game of fetch. You want me to catch a ball? With my mouth? I imagine him saying. How uncivilized.

couch. I know I should just stay in motion—teeth, pajamas, bed. Keep going until I can lie down. But even the bathroom feels too far right now.

Here’s the truth: I do want love. In some ways, I’ve been looking for it forever. Real love, the kind that makes you want to grow old together, makes you not just unafraid of all that time with one person but electrified by it.

If you never stop long enough to sink into something, then it can’t destroy you. It’s easier to climb out of a pool than a well, is the thing.

do miss the thing I don’t have. It’s strange to feel that, to want something that you’ve never even known before. But that’s love, isn’t it? The belief in something you cannot see or touch or even explain. Like the heart itself, we just know it’s there.

I wonder if I’ll miss it, I think. The feeling of openness. The understanding, even buried down deep, that anything could happen.

Being single is like playing the lottery. Most of the time all you’re left with from that trip to the convenience store is a bag of chips and a six-pack. But then there’s always the chance. There’s always the chance, however slim, that with one piece of paper you could win it all.

I looked at her razor-sharp black hair, perfect cigarette pants with crisp creases down the middle, and starched white button-down, collar slightly popped. If this artfully constructed woman could be spontaneous, so could I.

Paris is a city that despises Americans but loves American chains.

decided to let the whole thing play out. Usually when I got the paper, I felt engaged, called to action—an immediate co-conspirator. I’d been deployed. I had a role. This time I wanted to see what would happen if I did nothing—if, perhaps, I appeared even mildly antagonistic.

Watching the two of them saunter through the courtyard was like seeing the first bold swipe of red paint hit a white canvas. Art, I thought. I’d never seen it so alive before.

In the summer in France it could be light until nearly 10:00 p.m.—the city bathed itself in every pastel color before bed. A slow ritual of yellow to pink to violet to baby blue.

I felt his homesickness—or was it mine—pulsing through both of us like a heartbeat, and I knew I would miss that, too. The particular feeling of being twentysomething and lost in Paris, together.

Why is he early? Everyone knows you’re supposed to show up on time to a restaurant and late to someone’s house.

the amount of things I’ve accumulated over the years of living here make it hard for the place to appear completely orderly. There is just too much stuff for the space.

especially over the last decade, there is so much more diversity of business. Downtown is a haven of installation art and fusion food and, yeah, a layer of trash, too. It’s real in a way Los Angeles never was, at least not in my lifetime—and New York used to be. And it’s all here for the taking, if you just look.

It’s a comedy of relief, it turns out. It feels good to hear the things you think but don’t say out loud. It feels good to just be spoken to honestly, for once. So much of our current moment seems to be pandering—she says that, too.

Jake takes me to Pace in Laurel Canyon, a restaurant I have loved since I was a kid—my dad would take me here if we ever found ourselves on the east side. It’s this Italian place that does a really solid dinner menu—but the main draw is the atmosphere.

The best seats in the house are the ones by a heat lamp and glass window with a sign marked WASH AND FOLD.

“We used to travel when I was younger—my sister and me and my folks. We went to Europe two summers in a row, and Costa Rica for the holidays one year. But as they’ve gotten older they’ve been less interested. My mom likes to garden, and my dad has his golf game.” Jake shrugs. “They enjoy their routine.”

“To meet the right person, to be with someone I want to see in the morning and naked. To not be afraid to have a bad day around them. To be happy, I guess.”

I am familiar with this dance, the space between being open and being a liability. The fine art of dating.

The thing no one ever wants to say about dating is this: It’s hard to be real, sure. It’s harder to let someone else be.

Not only was Stuart now accomplished—I found out he, predictably, worked for a bank and had just been made the youngest partner. But he also turned out to be as interesting as I always suspected he might become.

In high school Stuart and I had bonded over the fact that we felt we were special, different, better than the run-of-the-mill girls and guys at our school who ate frozen yogurt from the Bigg Chill and carried Louis Vuitton shoppers as if there were only one standard of belonging. But now, Stuart had made good on all of that potential.

I felt all at once like a Christmas tree on December twenty-sixth.

When we were dating, I hated his phone. I felt like it took him away from me, and I wanted all of him—so much more than I got.

My parents do love Hugo but in the way all parents love tall, rich prospects. I did not consider it to be particularly individually focused.

feeling electrified by all the specific heady freedom of being in the second half of your twenties.

Painted ladies all over the city were painted during the gold rush to show off the burgeoning wealth of the city’s residents. Now, they’re beautiful landmarks.

view of the Hollywood sign were, in a word, desperate. I was embarrassed by their visors and fanny packs and clear out-of-water attitude. Who would be that earnest on purpose? Who would let it show? It was grotesque. But now that I was new somewhere—in some ways for the very first time—I saw it. All the wonder that comes from seeing something that is so known, so recognized. For witnessing a place’s celebrity.

the Palisades Village, a Mickey Mouse shopping mall that looks like it belongs in Stepford Wives, California—the sequel. There is an Erewhon, which is the best upscale grocery store in all of California. The strawberries are twelve dollars, but they’re life-changing.

My mother smiles. This is their thing. My mom sweats everything, and my father calls her out on

personalities and no one had any patience. But I always appreciated that she opened with joy. That’s who Kendra is. Fun first.

goes to get some water for the flowers—the orchids take one ice cube of spring water, and the fiddle-leaf fig trees get eight ounces of tap, every two weeks.

who they are. He loves to hike; you’ll never find her on the trail. He’s a true pescatarian, and Kendra lives off hamburgers. But they balance each other.

Brisket Brigade?” My grandmother was fond of the phrase. She said in her later years, whenever a man’s wife would die, women would show up in droves with brisket in the hopes of being his next wife. Whoever made the best brisket won his hand.

When I was young I used to want to live in New York in a building just like this one. I wanted to be high in the sky, way above ordinary life. Somewhere I could get some perspective, where problems would seem small and petty and pocket-size. Somewhere untouchable.