Graduates in Wonderland by Jessica Pan Page B

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    37.Willing to live in a different country but also willing to settle down somewhere in America
    DECEMBER 30
    Ten minutes later
    Jess to Rachel
    38.cuddly
    THE END
    P.S. Cuddly is not code for fat .
    DECEMBER 30
    One minute later
    Jess to Rachel
    Shit. I forgot SUCH an important one:
    39. Asks questions and listens to the answers
    THE END!!! I GIVE YOU THIS LIST, UNIVERSE!
    P.S. As I write this, Bruno is still snoring and taking up the entire bed. He fits nothing on the list except that he is brunette and sexy. That’s like going to a grocery store to shop for Thanksgiving dinner and coming back with a frozen turkey and a bottle of Diet Coke. Good enough for now.
    JANUARY 15
    Rachel to Jess
    Well, it’s the New Year, and I’m back in New York. On my final night at home, I was packing and found a bunch of empty Southern Comfort bottles under my bed—­in high school, my friend Emily asked me to take them home after a party at her house. Years ago, I had shoved them behind my sleeping bag and forgotten about them entirely until I was searching for a backpack and found them ten minutes before leaving for the airport.
    So guess where they still are? My parents are planning on redoing my old room, and I’m hoping they don’t find them and think I’ve taken to drinking an entire bottle of SoCo...alone...in bed...every night for the past week. Little do they know, after they went to bed I was actually smoking a half a pack of cigarettes behind the garage in a parka and fingerless gloves.
    Now that I’m back at the nonprofit and assuming my adult persona again, I am surreptitiously writing this e-mail while supposedly writing board minutes. Bored minutes—­ha. Gets me every time.
    Being at work is such a harsh shift. At home, I was curling up in front of the fire, I’m in a city full of dirty snow, getting up at dawn (this is always the hardest part for me), and walking through the cold to the office, where there are about two hundred irate messages from artists all somehow pissed that we took two weeks off at Christmas.
    The other big difference about being back in New York is seeing my therapist again. It was freeing, in a way, not to have to “report back” to Claudia during my Christmas break about self-­destructive behavior (smoking behind the house, sleeping eleven hours a night). She always asks the questions I don’t want to answer. I know that she’ll just want to talk about whether my dream of Paris will be any different from the realities of New York, once I’m there. I don’t know that it will be, but I do know that Paris is more beautiful. It’s so hard to make myself go to our appointments. I guess it’s kind of like going to a dentist: You know it’s beneficial for you, but in the moment you’re paying so much money for someone to poke painfully at your gums.
    This was Claudia’s favorite topic for my first session back: “Did you apply to creative writing grad school?” No. “Why not?” I felt like I wasn’t ready, and I’m not sure I want to teach creative writing. “What does this have to do with your self-­esteem?” Okay, Claudia, you got me! I am terrified of being exposed as a fraud. Also, I have a fear of an imagined group of tweed-­jacket-­wearing assholes pointing at sentences I’ve written, reading them out loud to one another, and laughing hysterically. Claudia thinks that I have a tendency to dramatically catastrophize things, but I think she just SECRETLY HATES ME.
    I’m getting so antsy thinking about all of the many, many possible futures that could still happen. I’m still waiting to hear back from the Fulbright. It’s all about waiting.
    My back-­up was the master’s program in Cinematographic Studies at the Sorbonne. I just want to be in Paris. It costs almost nothing in tuition, and health care is included! It is, however, taught in