A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall

by Andy Abramowitz

“Mean people are just sad inside,”

The front door was always left open, perhaps in eternal hope that a swarm of Chi Omegas might clamor in off the street in yoga pants and bare midriffs.

“I always thought that having one thing that set me off into a disturbance wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Until I realized that most people don’t have any.” “Oh, please,” Charlie snorted. “I have, like, ten. I’m expelled, I’m a bully, I’m unprepared for my finals, I’m well on my way to a pot dependency, I’m a child of an ugly divorce, I’m Canadian, I’m Canadian but I’m also unlikable—who ever heard of that?—my vocabulary sucks, no colleges love me, very few people love me, and I use the expression ‘Nobody puts baby in a corner’ but I’ve never actually seen Dirty Dancing. None of this is okay. So I may not be a crybaby like you, but I’ve got issues, cabana man.”

So much of life was holding on to the people and the things that rooted you in the world, so that you didn’t have to wake up each day and start anew.

Not every conversation needed to be about his personal growth, for God’s sake, his magical transformation into A Better Person.

My manic and depressive episodes, those horrible highs and lows, and what they much later started calling bipolar disorder, it was all so hard on your father, and he was right to let me go. Barry, however, paid for it in spades. He dealt with me, my mental illness, and my hospitalizations for many years after we ran off. I have been healthy and managing myself for a while now, and even had been at the time that Barry took his life, which will be two years ago this January.

You didn’t need to be crazy to leave. Sometimes you had to be crazy to stay. Sometimes all you needed was a better offer.

It was okay to fear anything, even french toast. As long as you ate it anyway.

still a shock to find her dad living in a place where neither she nor Davis nor Kitty ever had.

“This is pretentious, isn’t it?” McGuinn said. “No.” “A little hokey, though.” “I’m okay with hokey.” “And definitely clichéd. This is like the worst cliché.” “Clichés get a bad rap,” she told him. “There are worse things than being a cliché.”