Page 5 of My Super Sexy Spy
Walking the streets of places like London and Paris, San Diego and Seattle. I wrote about how those places made me feel, not only what was cool about them or what touristy thing a person should do there.
I called my blog A Lover’s Guide to Travel. And the absolute most bat-shit crazy thing happened.
It went viral. Not overnight or anything, but after a couple months I was getting hundreds of comments on each blog post. Then came the emails from people who wanted to pay me money to advertise on my site.
Money. For writing about places I’d only researched. It was like the universe was trying to hook a sister up!
I went from living on the streets to living in seedy motel rooms. To nicer motel rooms. To an apartment, and now, a condo. That I owned.
Meeting Jared at a bar near his college campus, it felt like that was the next move. The next step away from the life I’d had and toward something that would look and feel normal.
After a few years, it was almost like I’d never been there. On the streets. At all. Like I was a regular person who grew up in a traditional home. A woman Jared’s mother felt worthy of at least pretending to like.
Only now he was my ex-boyfriend.
The really horrible part about tonight wasn’t getting dumped. It was the guilt I felt at what I’d done to Jared. I didlikehim. I’d never not liked him. He was easy and comfortable.
Jared was like a sweater in the winter. Warm and soft and fuzzy.
Except my decision to date him had been practical, not emotional, and that was wrong.
Maybe I was too broken. Maybe those months on the street, during which I’d had to be constantly hyperalert every second of every day, made it so I would never trust another human being again. That I would never open up, emotionally, to anyone.
Because Jared was right about that, too. I worked solo. I didn’t really have any good friends. Any of the ones I’d had growing up, I’d had to scrape off or get sucked down into the gutter with them.
I had advertisers who I dealt with and had casual contact with them.
But really, there was only Leigh. Jared was right about that, too. She was someone I’d recently started chatting with online. A fan and reader who commented a lot on my blogs. One day I replied to her comment and we’d struck up one of those odd connections. Which led to the very existential twenty-first century question.
In the age of the internet, could you consider someone you’d never met a friend?
Not that I cared. Because what did it matter if I didn’t have people in my life? I wasn’t lonely. Should I have been lonely?
That was the impetus for me deciding the last piece of putting my life back together was getting a boyfriend. Once I had that, then I could really pretend I’d made it through a shitty teenage experience.
Only the truth was that hadn’t made me normal. It had just checked off a requirement I thought I needed in my life. Which meant I was still pretty broken. Having a meth-head mom will do that to a person.
Okay, so maybe the whole Jared dumping me thing was another message from the universe. Maybe it was telling me I needed to change things.
I glanced down at what I was wearing underneath the coat I hadn’t bothered to take off. Yoga pants, T-shirt and yes, I’d bothered to put on a bra.
He was right about that, too. It was what I’d slept in the night before.
Nothing was changing tonight though. I could deal with mynotnormal life tomorrow.
Tonight, I planned to drink wine, curse Jared in my head, and remind myself that no matter what shitty stuff had happened to me today, I was still a million miles away from my worst day on the streets.
I thought of someone who I could tell about my public dumping. Someone who might listen while I bitched about my now ex.
Walking over to my desk I snatched my MacBook Air. My most prized possession. I’d started my blog on an old PC in a library, and with my first real check from advertisers I’d bought the Mac and with it, my independence.
I could write anywhere, get free access to Wi-Fi at any Starbucks or Barnes and Noble. I could explore the world and tell people all about it from a shitty motel room with one window and a squeaky bed.
I poured my glass of wine, sat on the couch with my laptop and opened up my latest blog post and read the last comment.
LEIGH:You can’t be serious. You can’t say that bread is simply breadier in France.
I smiled. Okay, she might not actually be a real friend, but she was something. Our back and forth messages had started when Leigh, after raving about a piece I wrote, would ask some questions, which forced me to do even more research to provide the answers.
