I have rug burn.
In the first six weeks of living in our unbelievably cool apartment in D.C., which is on the second floor of an enchanted corner brownstone, I have dragged a dozen huge, heavy rugs—shags, sisals, and stripes—from every store imaginable, tethered them to the straggly-gold Jeep I bought us from Craigslist, and hauled them up to our living room, where I lay down the padding, unroll the rug, and mumble to myself, “Close, but not quite—damnit.” Then I pull it all up, roll it all together, go down the stairs, into the Jeep, and straight back to the store, where they already think I’m a lunatic with some version of architectural OCD.
The floor coverings aren’t the only thorn in my side. The entire apartment, as sun-drenched, bohemian, and beautiful as it is, is a bitch to furnish. The rooms are quirky, curvy, and easily cluttered, and the minimalist in me wants to murder the original contractor.
“Strong as an ox,” as my mother would say, I’ve single-handedly carried a few couches up and down the stairs, too, shuffling heavy objects all day long, until the Crate & Barrel Outlet escorts me out, or my left arm dislocates, or I stub my toe so bad that I tell an oversize credenza to kiss my ass. And then I head home to our love-pad-in-progress, with its misshaped rooms that reject all clean lines, and wait for Chef on whatever yellow-velvet or caramel-leather midcentury chair I’ve decided that I can actually live with that day. I’ve always needed my home to feel exactly right, but I’m being extra crazy with C Street. The furniture gives me some purpose and helps me temper a certain nervous energy that’s crept up from behind.
My life with Chef happens between 11:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., except on Sundays. This isn’t much time, but if love is measured in quality not quantity, our romance is as rich as ever. The second Chef comes home, he switches from local personality to cozy homebody. Because he’s bone-tired, dinner is designated to me. And by dinner, I mean sandwiches. For three months straight, we eat sandwiches every night that we’re home. (Sometimes we have cereal.) I stock up on smoked turkey and Swiss cheese, and Chef requests foreign and porky meats like mortadella and sopressata, which I research, find, and buy. I’ve learned the difference between salumi and salami, and I know that spicy mustard is a must. Mayo makes its appearances, against my will, and sometimes Chef brings home interesting-looking chutneys, which he teaches me to slather on ciabatta, and lay with sharp cheddar. And chips. All kinds of chips. Chef has a potato chip problem.
When I present us with the sandwiches, he’s always so appreciative that it makes me feel like the winner of The Next Food Network Star. He offers subtle suggestions like taking the time to really toast the bread instead of rushing the process and popping the slices out before the ding, or using fresh basil the next time I opt for Brie. I gladly process his constructive criticism and get a little better with each baguette.
We always eat in front of the tube, in the dark, with as many body parts entangled as possible, every ligament fitting together perfectly. We love our shows—mostly on Showtime and HBO—and we usually watch them (with breaks for fooling around, ice-cream sessions, or making tea) until three o’clock in the morning. We fall asleep feeling like two of the luckiest people in the world.
And then the sun always rises, and our rushed, unruly mornings begin. The alarm goes off, the phones start ringing, or one of Chef’s business partners comes knocking on the door to get him somewhere that’s not with me. I turn on some music and quickly make us coffee, which he drinks in the shower. When he gets out of the shower, I turn up the volume and he gets down in his towel while I roar with laughter. Unlike me, Chef is an awesome dancer. We kiss, as he dresses himself in ripped Dickies and whatever T-shirt smells best; he reads his e-mails, morphing into a crackberry addict; and then he hops on our fluorescent green bike—which I secretly bought at Kmart, but he thinks is vintage—and rides off into a fifteen-hour day in the weeds. Being “in the weeds” is a restaurant term for an insane kitchen situation where a chef is busting his or her ass with no end in sight. It’s all I really know about Chef’s work: he is always in the weeds.
The second he leaves the apartment, my world is silent. After a few months on C Street, I have nothing to do and nowhere to be, especially now that the decorating is done. There is no in-box to empty, no morning meetings, no breaking news, no tight deadlines, no lunch dates, no après-work appletinis. No one needs to borrow a tampon, tell me a secret, or raid my closet. As much as I adored them, I had no idea how important my girlfriends were until they weren’t around.
With hours and hours of time to kill, I Google “Best coffee shops for writers,” and find my way to “quirky cafés” that are neither quirky nor cafés. I graze around new neighborhoods, with my laptop and notebooks, but I can’t get comfortable anywhere. Either the couches are itchy, the Wi-Fi connection won’t work, or the scones taste like sneakers. I ride the Metro—thinking of New York’s freestyle rappers, teenage runaways, and impeccably dressed women who all would enwrap me in their world for the short duration of my commute to wherever—but it’s dead air in here, dead on arrival, devoid of emotion, a snoozefest of political stiffs and school marms. Dejected, I always come home to C Street, where at least our apartment has style that the city does not.
Halfheartedly, I contact some local magazines, but my stories lack enthusiasm, and I never follow up. Between my savings account and Chef’s pathological generosity, I don’t feel the need to make serious money, and for the first time in my life, I am utterly unmotivated. The only work I really want to do is on Chef’s marketing. It helps me stay connected to him and his career in a way that doesn’t involve the kitchen. Plus, any time I’ve met a successful chef’s significant other, they say that working with them—whether it’s as their pastry chef, general manager, or marketing director—is the only way to ever see them. I take that advice very seriously. By now, Chef has a publicist, an agent, a manager, and a bunch of partners, but I push myself into all their projects, demanding to be cc’ed on everything, like I’m Chef’s CEO. I have a feeling this embarrasses him, but I just really, desperately, want to stay in the loop.
We cherish Sundays, as the restaurant is closed, which means we sleep late and Chef makes us pancakes in any rendition I desire (always with chocolate chips). In the spring, which marks four months on C Street and seven months together, we incorporate gardening into our Sunday ritual. Early in the morning, we drive to the local nursery, discussing which produce we’ll want to eat come fall, and what flowers my purple thumb can’t kill, since I’ll be chief waterer. We load the car with dirt and shovels and spend the day planting our garden, which essentially entails me sipping spiked lemonade on the stoop, and Chef raking, digging, and planting our oregano, basil, arugula, tomatoes, bell peppers, and brussels sprouts. I play music and feed him fresh fruit, and just sit there and love him.
On most Sunday nights, we explore new restaurants in the D.C. food scene, trying to integrate ourselves into the community that has been so kind and generous to Chef. Sometimes he experiments with recipes at home. One night he serves us a Vietnamese-style whole fish but doesn’t do a thorough job filleting it because I keep making him lie with me on the couch instead. So he accidentally serves the dish with lots of little bones in it. He tries to save face by saying that’s how it’s done in Asia, but he’s busted and he knows it. In my best Padma impression, I tell him to pack his knives and go, and we both get our kicks. The fun we have on Sundays carries me through those stagnant weekdays.
For one weekend, we make plans to hit a hot spot that’s getting glowing reviews for its elegant Italian entrees and ultrachic interior, and it’s only a ten-minute drive away. The best part about these date nights is that I have an excuse to dress up for him. It feels like Chef sees me only in pajamas during the week. So, as he finishes watching an episode of Planet Earth—the only TV show we’re not equally addicted to—I surface from the bedroom in a short, flowy miniskirt, smoky eyes, and a spritz of Stella McCartney perfume. It’s hard to get him out of my bra and into the car after that, but I force him to behave. He drives with one hand and tickles my thigh with another.
The second we walk into the restaurant, I get a really bad vibe, which is strange because I’m not a restaurant snob. The place looks like a hospital cafeteria, and there’s a faint smell of fish. Chef nods in agreement, making a funny expression with his gingery eyebrows. But it’s late and we’re hungry, and quite frankly, we don’t know D.C. well enough to escape to some “old faithful” yet.
So we sit down graciously and I try to wipe the sour look off my face. But I’m let down. Our date nights are precious to me and this place is a bummer. I can’t seem to laugh it off or let it go. The music in my head has come to a screech. This is what Washington thinks is cool? Really?
When our waiter comes to our table, he reaches over me to pour some water and I get a whiff of the world’s most pungent body odor. The stinky pit really sets me off. More than anything, it reeks of the disappointment I’m finding everywhere I turn in this town. There’s not enough Right Guard in the world to fix that.
And then I start to hyperventilate; I am derailed. Chef looks really frightened. I’ve started to bawl my eyes out. He’s never seen me lose my cool like this … and over B.O.? He apologizes to the staff, cancels our order, and delicately takes me outside.
By now, I am laughing and crying in unison. I can’t believe what a scene I made. Chef is laughing, too, but he’s concerned. What is going on with me? We walk back to the car and he insists that I tell him what provoked my outburst. “It just felt so wrong in there,” I say, weeping. “That place pushed me over the edge.”
As we keep talking, I admit to him, and to myself, that lately I’ve been feeling a little panicky. It’s making me kind of cuckoo being home alone all day, and that as hard as I try, I can’t seem to catch a wave anywhere in D.C.
Until this stage in my life, I’ve always sided with Confucius on the “Wherever you go, there you are” philosophy. But nothing is clicking in Washington. We recently went to a White House party at a rooftop bar where everyone wore panty hose, no one voted on Idol, and I was impossibly invisible. Standing in line at J. Crew, I made a friend who worked for a senator, but the second she found out I had once written for People, she demanded I lose her number, stating, “You can’t be in politics without being paranoid.” Earlier this week, Chef and I went on a midnight stroll, hoping to get a late-night snack, a fresh pastry, or swirly soft-serve, only to come home with hot dogs and Snapple from 7-Eleven. “Wherever you go, you miss New York” is more like it.
“Nothing feels right in this city,” I say, my wet face nuzzled into his chest. “The people aren’t my type, and I’m not theirs. I mean, look at tonight, this entire city is raving over this ugly, impotent restaurant. This place wouldn’t last a second in New York,” I say, fully upset again, knowing my frustration is not really about the bleak restaurant, and that I’m sounding like a real brat.
“Baby, calm down. Please. You’re still adjusting …”
“No. Fuck adjusting. A paper clip has more heart than that place.” I pout, pointing to the restaurant.
“You’re right, Lys, it sucked in there,” Chef says. “But what’s this really about?”
I look gravely into his eyes and say that I’m just sad for myself because, among other things, I have no life.
My first few months in town, Chef made it a point to extract himself from the restaurant every few days to be near me, take me out, and share the occasional afternoon of doing nothing. We’d roam around the neighborhood, or grab an afternoon matinee, and make nice little memories wherever we went. Now, a mass hysteria has surrounded his restaurant. The lines are always out the door, the press is hot on his success, and D.C. just wants more, more, more. Throw in a blossoming TV career and a jam-packed schedule of events and appearances, and he is always on the go. He can’t just “peace out” when he wants to anymore. Even our Sundays aren’t a sure thing.
“It’s not your fault, but when you’re not around, I have nothing here,” I cry. It embarrasses me to swallow my pride and verbalize this, but it just comes out.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true and you know it. I have nothing here.”
I’d never begrudge Chef for having an impeccable work ethic, and I’m not trying to make him feel guilty about it. But it feels good to let it go. He listens carefully, and cries when I tell him how rootless I really feel, and how silent my existence is every day. We keep talking, making our way to the car, and eventually to 7-Eleven for some cereal and milk. He says he understands exactly what I’m saying, and together, we sit up all night long figuring out how to make my life in Washington less of a wash.
We decide I’ll join a gym for some sense of community and because exercise has always been my best release. And I’ll follow up on a few potential new friends that have been recommended to me by trustworthy people from New York and Los Angeles. We contemplate befriending our perky neighbors, but with their freshly trimmed bangs and cutesy toddlers, I doubt they’ll give me the spark I need. And lastly, we agree that I’ll visit him more often at the restaurant. He wants me to feel like it’s as much mine as it is his. “Every hour I put in there is for our future,” he says, not for the first time. As far as my writing career, or lack of, he reminds me that I’ve worked hard my whole life, and not to be so tough on myself; a little break isn’t so horrible. He wipes both of our sniffles away (because whenever I cry, he cries, too) and we watch an episode of Sons of Anarchy, all curled up.
The next day, I join the local gym. In New York, I was going to a spin lover’s candy shop called Soul Cycle, where bikes have the sweat of Brooke Shields, Renée Zellweger, and Kelly Ripa. It’s the Rolls-Royce of workouts, way out of my league, but I got to go for free because I wrote a big story about them. I would always leave class feeling fit, refreshed, and unstoppable, not to mention two pounds lighter. Returning to spinning, even at a not-so-glam gym, would be the perfect solution.
Despite my newfound optimism, I fight back tears throughout my first class. The music has no beat (a mix of Shania Twain and show tunes!) and nothing, not even the flabby naked, unwaxed women in the locker room, feel vaguely familiar or okay. Determined to make it work, I offer to teach the damn class myself. I present my credentials to the seventy-something manager and his rusty whistle, explaining that I’ve had the world’s best spin instructors in New York and Los Angeles, that the super-cool DJ Sam Ronson has made me an original workout mix, and that I could maybe even get the editor in chief of Allure magazine, Linda Wells, another spinning devotee, to vouch for my riding style, if that’s what it takes.
Nobody cares. Condé Nast name-dropping has no place on Capitol Hill. Coach says I’m not experienced enough and coldly dismisses me like I’m some Jehovah’s Witness ringing the doorbell at dinnertime. I walk away feeling undignified. No soul. No cycle.
“You would die if you saw me right now,” I say on the phone with my sister, driving away with one hand on the steering wheel, one to my ear, talking illegally. “I’m wearing crotch-padded spandex, with like, a big lump in my throat, because I just got dissed by an old man who looks like John McCain in warm-up pants.”
“What the hell?” She laughs, muffling her voice at work. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. Ya gotta laugh, right?” I say, hanging up quickly because there’s a cop about to pull me over.
I go on a Ferris wheel of “friend dates.” The women are either profoundly conservative or profoundly crazy. One covers her ears every time I say a swear word; the next one tells me, like it’s nothing, how she (perhaps the whitest girl in America) wears a big, black dildo on her married CEO boyfriend, cordially inviting me to join in. Check, please. They’re all either painfully boring or on the bad side of weird, and I feel ridiculous having these first-day-of-college-like conversations when, in the real world, I have the most amazing and hilarious friends ever, whether they’re ER nurses in Western Massachusetts or man-eaters in Lower Manhattan. Our neighbors also keep trying to chitchat, introducing me to their depressingly adorable kids, and asking if Ryan Reynolds is as dreamy in real life (duh …), but I have convinced myself that they’re just too ordinary to ever understand me.
“Still no friends?” Shelley says with an evil smirk from Los Angeles, where she’s now representing celebrities and seeing Leonardo DiCaprio’s life coach.
“Shellz, the last girl I was ‘set up with’ said she was thinking about leaving her husband … which I thought sounded promising … but it was because they couldn’t agree on health-care reform!”
“Yikes. Come to L.A. It’s Oscars season.”
In the next few weeks, I try to visit Chef more often at the restaurant. His partners and I don’t quite mesh—it seems we’re in constant competition for his attention. They think I’m a prima donna, coasting in with my big shades and flowery sundresses. If only they knew that I once worked eighty-hour weeks, too, also all stressed out and exasperated by my job. But no one in D.C. knows that girl. “Just another day at the beach,” they say to me. Or, “Must be tough being you.” I try not to be oversensitive, but their ridicule is not very pleasant.
Even more belittling, I don’t have any friends to bring along when I go there, so I end up eating alone, pretending to catch up on e-mails, trying not to look too pathetic. I once tried to help at the cash register, but I screwed it all up, then hid in the car until closing. Chef thought it was cute, but I felt like an idiot.
One afternoon, I show up at the restaurant wearing a tight white pencil skirt and carrying my black leather portfolio. I tell Chef I have five minutes to kill before a big meeting with Capitol File magazine. I make sure his partners overhear this. Of course, I am lying. I have nowhere to be. I never have anywhere to be. All my plans are fake. He kisses me all over, wishes me good luck, and then I leave the restaurant to go to a bar by myself.
Belga Café is the only spot in town I hate a little less than the others, so that’s where I go for my faux power lunches and imaginary creative consultations. Really, I’m drinking huge beers for breakfast, reading a four-dollar New York Post, and trying to connect with whomever is the least creepy person also hiding from life like me. I’m not proud of lying to Chef, but I’m sick of looking like such a loser. And anyway, part of me thinks that he knows I’m fibbing but is too sweet to say anything.
Another time, I surprise Chef at work for a quick hello and to borrow his computer because our Internet isn’t working. He’s happy to see me, puts everything on hold, and gets me situated with a salad and Diet Coke downstairs in his office. I am not snooping, but his e-mail happens to be open, and staring me in the face is an X-rated fan letter from a Playboy playmate, and a few flirtatious e-mails from prominent women around Washington. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I knew he had admirers (after all, I was once one of them), but I naturally assumed they were obese or incarcerated. Chef hadn’t responded to any of these hussies, as far as I could tell, but I still yank him from the kitchen and start crying hysterically in front of all his customers and colleagues.
These days, it seems he spends as much time behind the grill as he does talking me off the ledge. Miraculously, he never loses his patience. The worst he’ll say is that my attitude is “unbecoming,” which for some reason always cracks me up and snaps me right out of my mood. Such a rigid word from such a rugged guy.
We do still get out of town now and then. We travel to Miami for the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, a promlike weekend for the country’s most famous foodie insiders. I am so excited that I buy us shopping bags of clothes, sunglasses, and swimsuits. (If nothing else, I’m definitely Chef’s stylist.) It’s an intense and intimidating crowd, with cliquey food writers and chefs that he’s only observed from afar. We share most of it with our eyes wide open, hand in hand.
At the end of the long weekend, it is announced that Chef has won a big cooking award and I scream at the top of my lungs! My boyfriend ate the bear. He makes a short speech, thanking the Boys, his partners, and publicists, but he doesn’t mention me. I try to let it roll off my shoulders, but not before mentioning it to him.
“Hey, you forgot to thank me!”
“It’s not always about you, Alyssa, jeez. Are you really doing this right now?”
He’s never been that sharp with me before, and I assure him that the issue is dropped.
Instead of sulking, I focus on celebrating. After all, I may not know how to patty a burger but I do know how to party. Not long after we arrive at the rooftop gathering in his honor, however, I find myself slouching next to Chef, uncomfortable in my own skin, as everyone bonds over blends of meat, Michelin stars, and the technicalities of deep-fried bubble gum. “That actually sounds yummy,” I say, trying to participate. “Ew, babe, really?” shuns Chef, making me feel gauche.
As the alcohol flows, a famously unfiltered female chef says in front of all the jerks who are already pushing me aside for a piece of my guy, “So you’re the People magazine reporter who stalked him!” Thank God I have a sense a humor, but it was really tested at that moment. I spend the rest of the night non-conversational, afraid to say the wrong thing, and freaked out by the whole environment, including Chef, who’s having a grand time.
A few weeks after the festival, one of Chef’s partners plants a seed that it’s unprofessional to bring one’s girlfriend everywhere. He shrugs it off, but in the days to come, there’s a shift imperceptible to anyone but me. Sometimes he still includes me … other times I feel forgotten about. Deep down, I think I let him down at the food festival because I couldn’t hold my own. That weekend turned me into a real drag. No one from my old life would believe it.
He’s traveling almost weekly now—from Anaheim to Amsterdam and everywhere in between. It’s mental motion sickness, especially with his disorganized ways—uncharged cell phone, expired driver’s license, missing house keys, disappearing wallet, unflossed teeth, and untied Vans. I try to see the charm in it all, as I always have in the past (who wants an uptight guy?), but for the trips where I’m excluded, or worse, the ones he forgets to tell me about, my tolerance is diminishing. “I am not some 1950s housewife, whose only purpose is to find the fucking passport,” I say, dumping his entire dresser on the ground.
I use that same argument to explain why our fridge is always empty, save deli meat and beer, and why, on the counter, there’s only a sad butcher block with a few slices of bread, a box of stale granola, and two avocados encircled by fruit flies. Despite a full year of dating a chef, I remain sanctimoniously kitchen-phobic. He comes home exhausted and famished, and I, having done less than nothing all day, have no excuse for our sandwich-only fare. For my own meals during the day, I eat peanut butter on a spoon, cheese and crackers, green olives, rocky road ice cream, or whatever is around. Sometimes I just drink. I don’t tell my mom how disenchanted by D.C. I am, but when she says “Why don’t you give cooking or baking a shot, hon? It’s always been so therapeutic for me,” I know she’s picked up on my mounting sense of instability. I tell her she sounds crazy, while inhaling dozens of dried apricots for dinner.
I wish I could say that I refrain from my domestic duties out of some real sense of feminism or gender equality, and maybe subconsciously I do. But more likely, I’m just depressed. I can barely buy milk without a meltdown. Chef goes easy on me as far as my culinary inadequacies—he’s much more worried about my perpetual tears than my prep table. We do have a good laugh when I buy him cheeseburger-flavored Pringles, though, thinking it’s some heroic act. “Never buy cheeseburger-flavored anything for someone who makes cheeseburgers allll daaay looong!” he sings, wrestling me to the ground with one of his famous tickle attacks.
He rarely cooks for us at all anymore. There’s no time for such luxuries. In opening a second restaurant, his hours get even worse. He comes home so physically drained that all he wants is a long kiss, a bag of chips, some juice, and for me not to be upset about anything. It kills me to see him so weak and bleary-eyed. The guy has more joie de vivre in his pinky finger than most people in their entire life span, and here he is struggling to stick a straw in a Capri Sun.
“What would you say if I gave you a list of five things I want my wife to cook for me one day?” he says in the middle of the night, over some soggy cereal.
“Um, was that a proposal?” I say, jokingly, deflecting the issue.
“One day, babe, one day.” He smiles, mischievously.
“Remember, rubies, not diamonds,” I remind him, reiterating my preference for my birthstone, rather than the typical rock.
“Okay, but you remember: roast chicken, not Cheerios!”
WE DON’T have too many Sundays together after he starts working at his second place. And he comes home so late now, after closing the restaurant and getting through his paperwork at the office, that I can barely stay awake for snuggle and TV time.
Nor can he accompany me to anything at all. I visit New York about once a month, and unless it’s tied to a TV appearance, Chef doesn’t come along. So, I go to most family birthdays and friends’ weddings alone, leaving some worried that I’m robbing myself of a normal life. You can’t truly respect the grind of the restaurant business until you’ve lived with it. That said, it is rough. If I had my New York life, that would be another story. It would be so much fun finishing up our grueling days around the same ungodly hour, collapsing on top of each other with hot pizza and cold beer, too tired to talk, though not too tired to sleep without sex. Now, I just stare out a window and wait all day.
While helping out with Chef’s PR is the only activity that makes me feel ever so slightly relevant, I am also getting the drift that my input is becoming a serious annoyance to everyone involved, even him. By now, he has a well-oiled machine on payroll; they know what they’re doing and don’t need my input.
“You don’t have to include me in everything that’s going on with the media anymore, if you don’t want to,” I say to Chef, a few days before our one-year anniversary. He’s just come home from work at 4:00 a.m. and I’ve forced myself out of bed to fix him a roast beef sandwich.
“Okay, baby, perfect …” he says, not looking up from his BlackBerry.
Okay, baby, perfect hurts.
It triggers a catastrophic sense of rejection.
Hello, cruel nothingness.
So I start drinking at noon and logging in and out of his e-mail to read the latest slutty note from some sex-deprived housewife, or the details of his travel itineraries to places I’ve always wanted to visit yet haven’t been invited to. I eat very little, can’t sleep at all, and have developed adult acne. I show up at the restaurant tipsy and in tears, unraveling every time one of his partners gives me a disapproving look or a customer pushes me aside for a photo with Chef.
I think about shaking things up the way I would in the old days … partying hard, starting an affair, disappearing for a few days, but I love Chef too much to risk it. And I’m older now. I also wouldn’t even know how to bum a light in this town.
One afternoon I’m feeling so unsteady and insecure about all his female fans, and the fact that he’s usually perceived as single in the press, that I drink screwdrivers like it’s my job and send anonymous sightings of us “looking very much in love” into the Washington Post from a fake e-mail account. He’s mine, bitches. Somehow my real name appears along with the alias, and by the time the reporter e-mails back, “Wait, aren’t you the girlfriend you speak of?” I just want to curl up and die.
I am not myself, not even a knockoff of myself, which is a problem for so many reasons, not the least of which is that my boyfriend fell in love with a lit-from-within writer, with bluebirds on her shoulders, perfectly content with a few strands of licorice, a handful of real friends, and a library book about Mötley Crüe. We need to find her before he bolts or I have a nervous breakdown.
Chef panics at the sight of me so sad, frustrated, and lonely, promising that his hours will calm down soon. He tempers me by hinting at the ruby, but we both know an engagement ring can’t give me the closeness I require.
I’m just desperate to feel part of something. But who am I to make a peep? I am a nobody now.
