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My dad would tell me, “If you were a horse, you would be worth a lot of money.”
I am 100% Armenian, a purebred if you will, and apparently a very rare thing today. Growing up Armenian meant I was to get good grades, get as many accolades as possible, graduate college in four years, get a good job, marry Armenian (or something that looked very close), inherit all irrational character traits as well as family grudges, and never leave home.
This, however, left a lot of grey area. So I was quite unprepared for Zack and his boat and his pierced nipples, and the dried pieces of scalp I picked out of my hair in the parking lot that summer. He was a nurse whose good looks trumped that and pretty much everything else. He pulled up in a 4-Runner with roses and a promise to meet his mom, and soon I was contemplating smoking pot and having sex. I began to practice profanity in the bathroom mirror and it was laughable.
God, I am going to leave you for a little while. I can’t take you where I am going, but it’s okay, I will come back.
I learned to wakeboard, I bought the right clothes and paraded around in the right places. I practiced playful hair and pouty lips. I stood drunk in his bathroom brushing my teeth, trying so hard to spit and look beautiful doing so. And somehow the absurdity of it all made more and more sense. Eventually, he dumped me. God, I thought we understood each other. I wouldn’t concede, far from it.
I went out with his friend who smelled of pot and Buffalo wings, and worked at a snowboard-surfboard shop in a town that has neither snow nor surf. I wanted to prove something, I imagine, but it ended the same way. Then there was the firefighter who ended up marrying an ex-stripper (at least that’s what I decided since all the single bridesmaids had plastic surgery and two kids), and sadly enough, a guy nicknamed Sizzle.
As I retell the fairly pathetic story of how his nickname came to be Sizzle to my older, much wiser cousin, who also happens to be my counselor, she scribbles something down on her notepad and says that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome is one definition of insanity.
“Huh,” I say and nod my head.
She says people wandered in the desert for 40 years. “How long do you want to wander?”