Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

by Katie Yee

When I was growing up, my family didn’t eat out at restaurants much, and there are some things you never grow out of.)

You’re never too old to be afraid of what you can’t see. How scary it is to be in the dark of things.

Yes, my mother was always good at taking the scraps of life and turning them into something worthwhile.

Memory is a funny thing, the way it distorts. If a heart is like a home, then memory is like a fun house. You never know how the mirrors will tilt. Bad memories have a way of casting a film over everything. Bad memories are greedy. They lay claim to a place.

I was always the one holding the camera, in need of proof of this happy life we built. Always the one desperate to make life still.

They say the intensity of your emotions dulls with age, but the complexity of emotions increases—more mixed feelings, things that are bittersweet.

For me, this has largely proven to be true, with the exception of one primal thing: fear. My fear has only grown.

This, I realize, is the first time that I will not have Sam as a sounding board. Everything is echoey without him.

Know them by heart. (A funny phrase—implies that memory lives more deeply in the heart than in the mind.)

identifier, so you might want to choose it carefully

Maybe if we could just pluck his fickle heart out, I could keep the rest of him.

So much about the way kids think is based around the idea that you can divine the future just by thinking about it in precisely the right way: if you hope enough, if you behave, if you are good, if you don’t step on any cracks.

There’s something in her devotion to these rules that sticks with me: the way you can feel like you have any control over anything. If you wish right at 11:11, it just might come true. If you cross your fingers, you are hoping, but if you hold them behind your back, it somehow makes it okay that you are lying. If you pull a soda tab back and forth and say a letter of the alphabet on each move, you can tell the first letter of your future spouse’s name.

Maybe every lover becomes an archivist of their beloved.

I think if enough bad things pile up, they inevitably cross over into comedy. I am a collector of bad things with the hope that I can make them funny.

“Oh, I used to date a guy who…” A fun party trick. The phrasing of it—the way it centers the self. When you say a thing like that, you do not conjure the ex. No, you call a past version of yourself into the room for a little while. (Joan Didion said we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I think we tell ourselves stories in order to live different lives.)

It feels so special to know these intimate glints of someone’s day. But what happens when you build your home on silly things like this?

I’m obsessed with endings. I may not be the one to execute or act first—sometimes I feel like my life is simply happening to me—but I will write these endings in my mind: I am always telling myself this is the last time as a way of reminding myself to savor something—as a reminder that everything can be taken away. As a way of taking control over something I have absolutely no control over—as though I myself had penned and therefore chosen the way the story ended. I want things to be tied up neatly. No extra string.

Or maybe there really is only one, but everybody carries with them their own version of the same people.

Yes, a habitual orange-eater is the most annoying thing a person can be.

Home Depot always smells the same. It’s one of life’s great comforts.

Home Depot: the true epicenter of self-help. I find that as I get older, I’m running out of places that smell like my childhood.

I am so grateful for you and for this weird little life we have built.