Ryan O'Connell

All my friends are turning thirty and they’re getting married in backyards and at wineries in Santa Barbara and people are giving toasts and crying and I’m trying to cry too

You woke up on a Saturday and came to the sudden realization that you were all alone, that everything you had surrounded yourself with Monday through Friday, all the happy hours and all the business lunches and all those technological noises you drenched your earbuds in: it all added up to zero.

It’s such a terrible feeling to want to reject who you are. The reality is that I was not built to be an Olsen twin. I was not built to sit around doing coke with people who looked amazing in Balenciaga.

I, for once, would just like to be used and objectified.

You are feeling sad and fat and then someone hits on you and doesn’t make you feel so sad and fat anymore.

See your parents through a very limited lens. Think that they are here to teach you, to answer the phone when you have a question about a suspicious mole on your neck or an ache in your belly.

Being gay means accepting that, one day, you could be left behind by the ones you love. Let me explain. When you’re in your twenties, your straight girlfriends are practically your other half.

“I need to be with someone who isn’t afraid to look stupid,” he finally said. “Otherwise, I just feel stupid.”

They were too busy shooting up a drug I like to call Single Person Heroin. Its street name is Tinder and it comes in the form of a dating app that allows you to peruse the profiles of nearby singles.

I start seeing a trainer once a week. He’s hot, from Ohio, and likes to eat lettuce wraps from PF Chang’s. I like him and I think we have fun productive sessions together, but I still have no idea what the hell is going on. I do weightlifting, I think? I do cardio, I think? I drink four margaritas and eat guacamole and chips after a workout? Yes, that I know.

I remember certain nights for no reason. I recall them with such a fondness you’d think that it was the night I met my one true love or something. Not even close.

This was not the plan. I had imagined LA to be the place where I went on daily hikes, drank cold-pressed juices and told strangers named Moonshadow that I was in a “really healthy place” but instead, I gained ten, fifteen, maybe twenty pounds.