On Being Cooked, and It Being Over for Me

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I’m around the age that features in marriage pacts between teenaged besties. “Okay, if both of us are still single by 35…” I made some of these pacts myself, which says something about being young. I thought 35 was impossible. No one was 35. I didn’t know anything. I’m supposed to want to go back to that brain? My body doesn’t ache nearly enough to trade wisdom for youth! I imagine this will change.

“Still.” A nauseating word. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in it. Still single. Still going on bad first dates. Still figuring it out. Still finding my voice. Still learning how to write. Still working on that novel. Other people, meanwhile, move past me in one swift, ebullient motion. Getting married. Giving book talks. Writing things that people “like.” Whatever. I’m sure it’s secretly bad.

Some days I wake up and the first thing I see is my 35 years, the most years I’ve ever had, loafing on me like fat, lazy cats. They stop licking themselves to stare at me. “So, is today the day you finally get around to it, or…?” Sometimes I get embarrassed. Like I let a situation get out of control. Sometimes I feel cooked. Like it’s over for me. This goes away. I distract myself.

There are people older and younger than me. I’m grateful to anyone older than me. Especially the failures. Thank you. On the internet, I see my anxieties, reflected back. People ask aloud if it’s too late for them. Everyone younger than me asking this question is a crying baby on a plane. Everyone older asking it is pitiable. There’s no winning with me. This famous author didn’t publish their first novel until they were in their forties! Yay. A poultice, repeatedly applied: I have time. I have time. I have time.

Do I? Time feels like something I have and don’t.

Shortly after my first book came out in 2021, I started seeing a man who didn’t like me. I was roughly the age my parents were when they had me. 31. This guy had bought a house on the outskirts of Austin. Home ownership was one of his three personality traits. I spent a lot of time in his house. I’d put my head in his oven and announce an intent to Sylvia Plath myself. He didn’t know who that was. He did know his oven wasn’t gas-powered. He’d say so, and we’d laugh like it was a new joke. For well over a year, I didn’t write anything.

He got mad at me for having fans. We’d been going along fine, had discussed a future, a future that excited me for how banal and attainable it was; us, and a kitchen island. Then I took him to one of my book events in Houston, where he saw a long line of people waiting for me to sign their copy of my bright blue debut. He started putting me down. I thought this was a tolerable situation because he played rugby and I thought he was very attractive and not very clever. As someone who felt ugly, I had no natural defenses against a hot person wanting to kiss me, and I thought anyway I knew what he was up to. I could handle it.

The problem with playing chess with a dog is you can only lose. You’re playing a game. The dog is not. One-and-a-half years went down the drain. One-and-a-half years I could have spent writing, reading classics, becoming an eccentric bodybuilder, doing anything other than what I had done. The money I could have saved on airfare alone! Some spectacular outfits were in that sum. Lost. The ghost-life running parallel to the one I chose haunted my daily activities. I could have been different.

Months sailed by. I received a lengthy email from a guy who told me that Mr. Texas had been seeing both of us at the same time. I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw his face, he said, but he’d seen me. He’d once passed himself off as Mr. T’s “Uber driver” while dropping him off to a brunch date with my family.

I was 33 with no romantic entanglements to speak of, uninspired to write, and the victim of some kind of true-crime-esque scheme drawn up by a guy who’d once pointed at a Holiday Inn and asked in all earnestness if it was the Alamo.

Cooked! Over!

I recall picturing the emotional trajectory ahead of me in my mind’s eye. It was like the flight map on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of me on a long international voyage. I began partitioning time into chunks. I will probably feel angry for this many months, then sadness, then lunch will be served, which will eat some time. Then I’ll read some books. More anger. Play on my computer. Bathroom break! Numbness. I’ll laugh about it. All told, I should be good to date again within a year or so. A year or so. 34. Do I have that kind of time?

Do I have time? Time to read Proust? Time to catch myself mid-conversation on a first date in a sun-streaked bar and think, Wait, this is going well? Time to get closer to the truth of things, to make a contribution, to write something good, to agree that a courthouse wedding is more our style, to share the baby names I once wrote down, to wake up in a strange country with strange ideas in my head, to make mistakes?

No! And I will explain: