"Some of us are very selfish people and sometimes this is a lesson we learn a little too late, after we have already trainwrecked other people’s lives and hopes and hearts, or in this case their houses. We had some good times in that house, the four of us, before everything went to shit. We had some epic dinner parties and we stayed up on the front porch as bikers rode past us all through the summer night until one by one the stars slid into dawn. We made bread and watched all the good seasons of the Simpsons and fell in love and told each other about it. They threw me a party for my twenty-seventh birthday that was the best birthday party I’ve ever been to, so great a party that I had to lock myself in my room in the middle of it to cry because I didn’t understand how I had come to deserve that many people who loved me that much. We put on shadow-puppet shows—the best one was one I wrote, I won’t be modest, about the French revolution; the cat in the puppet show cried out “Le meow! Le meow!” before it was beheaded, and for weeks afterward all our friends repeated it to one another, le meow, le meow. I don’t miss that house but sometimes I miss that life, which was infinitely less complicated and often a lot more fun than the life I have now. A kid’s life, an enviable life. Bike rides and popsicles and beers by the river and in the winter someone was always making soup and we’d put on our rain gear after dinner and pedal through the downpour to basement shows and dance parties, everybody’s sodden wool layers steaming in the corner while we sweated out our ghosts in the circle of each other.
But ambition is like a poison and a gift tangled together and it makes you leave and leave and leave again, leave places, leave people, leave your whole life. Ambition and something else that I don’t know how to name but it’s what I share my house with, the house of my body, ambition and something that is ruthless and cruel and says only, ever, Is that a good story, and if the answer is no it says Move on."