Inside, it’s always too crowded, mats overlapping, everyone’s belongings piled against the walls like a storage unit. The whole place reeks of palo santo and desperation. Last week the teacher told us we’re all just light-beings having a human experience.

There are highs people spend their whole lives chasing, and mine is wholeheartedly, unequivocally believing in bullshit. I want a very specific kind of bullshit though. The kind you find between a Massage Envy and a cell phone repair shop. Mediums who take Venmo or Zelle. Psychics who also sell LuLaRoe and swear the patterns contain sacred geometry. A reiki master who keeps her certificates from online courses framed above a water feature she bought at HomeGoods.

Echo Mehta was everywhere at NYU. Mostly on Facebook, but also in night clubs and lit readings at KGB Bar and warehouse parties and house parties and rooftops in the Meatpacking District where people did coke, right there, out in the open. She studied marketing but dropped out junior year. She was beautiful in that way that made you forget what you were saying mid-sentence. And she wore lavender lipstick. Not purple, not mauve. Lavender. I’ve been trying to find that exact shade for over ten years.

I met her in a summer acting workshop where she performed a one-act about alien abduction. All the parts herself, including the aliens, who spoke in what she claimed was authentic light language. The professor kept looking at his watch. I stayed after class to ask her about it.

Have you ever liked something so much that it gives you nightmares? THAT is how I felt about Echo. She had big, wide set eyes, like Kate Moss. A flat nose. Childlike - neotenous - but not so much so she didn’t look like an adult woman.

Echo weighed exactly 98 pounds, which she brought up constantly while explaining how she was learning to survive on prana alone. She had once been in Interview magazine. She interned for Purple, for Oyster. She was a model. She was that special kind of New York cool that is impossible to explain to people who have never seen it first hand. She went to psychic fairs and could read auras. She dated a guy in finance. She dated another model. She dated a man who went by Lazuli, who had dreads and read cards in Washington Square Park. None of these people ever seemed embarrassed by her. And she wasn’t embarrassed by them, either.

Echo taught me about moldavite, how it was formed by meteorites, how it could accelerate your spiritual evolution so fast it would ruin your life. She wore a piece around her neck that she’d shoplifted from a metaphysical store in the East Village.

“They’re overcharging anyway,” she said. “Moldavite wants to be free.”

Echo had a secret Facebook group where she shared Pleiadian downloads. About thirty of us, mostly NYU grads working jobs we were overqualified for. I was an archival producer for American Experience, the PBS show, which sounds more impressive than it was. Mostly I watched old footage and wrote timestamps.

The parts of my life I remember with the most tenderness always involve unconditional acceptance of people like Echo. That yes, Echo was a starseed. That yes, these crystals contained ancient wisdom. That yes, the universe was desperately trying to communicate with me through angel numbers and parking spots.

Echo’s posts started gentle.

“The Pleiadians want you to know you’re loved.” “Your struggles are preparing you for your mission.” Then came the warnings. The dimensional shift. The purge.

“Not everyone will make it to New Earth,” she wrote one night at 3 AM. “Millions will choose to exit rather than ascend. This is their soul contract. Do not mourn them.”

Once, Echo invited me to her apartment and served me golden milk. This was before you could buy golden milk at a coffee shop. Back when it was a special drink only Echo knew how to make, with dried roses floating to the top, and too much turmeric burning my mouth. She touched my forehead with her sticky hands, her face close to mine. Her breath smelled like cigarettes and rot.

“You’re opening your third eye too fast,” she told me. She said that my soul was from earth, not the stars. She held my hand. She burned sage and Nag Champa.

“When I met you, I didn’t think you were that energetically connected. You seemed dead inside. Like there was nothing there. But you’re not. You have it. You’re special.”

There was a woman in our group, Lauren, who had bipolar disorder. She stopped taking her medication because Echo said pharmaceuticals lowered your vibration. She gave away her furniture. She started calling estranged family members to tell them she’d see them in the next density if they made the cut.

Echo never broke character. I’d heard her on the phone with her mom, sounding completely normal, complaining about student loans. But when Lauren posted increasingly unhinged messages, Echo just responded with more Pleiadian wisdom.

The intervention came from David, this pudgy Marxist kid who’d joined partly as a joke and partly because he had a crush on Echo.

“This is fucked,” he told me over terrible coffee at Veselka. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

I defended Echo. I said Lauren had her own issues. I said we all knew it was metaphorical.

What follows is blurry, maybe from shame. David screenshotted our conversations where I’d admitted to doubts, where I’d joked about Echo’s downloads. He shared them with the group. I was expelled first, my vibration too low for the coming shift. The betrayal felt physical, like something had been ripped out of my chest. The whole community collapsed within a week.

Lauren ended up hospitalized. David went back on everything he said, started posting about mercury retrograde. Echo mourned the loss, cryptic Facebook statuses about how she couldn’t trust people anymore. Sympathy pouring in from everywhere. From writers and models and Chloe Sevigny.

I missed the group immediately. Not the drama, but the feeling of being connected to something vast and mysterious. My ex-husband and I were living in Middle Village, Queens, in an apartment crawling with roaches, an hour from anything that mattered. Every day I’d watch WWI footage then take the train home to nothing.

So I developed a ritual. Every day after work, instead of going straight home to Queens, I’d take the subway to Manhattan. Sometimes to Namaste Bookshop, sometimes to crystal stores on the Upper East Side where rich women bought amethyst geodes for their foyers. I’d stand in front of walls of tumbled stones, intuitively feeling their energies, waiting for one to call to me.

And they did call.

Even knowing it was bullshit, I could feel the rose quartz promising to heal my heart, the black tourmaline offering protection, the labradorite whispering about transformation. My checking account dwindled but my apartment filled with stones. Oracle decks in candy colors featuring mermaids and unicorns. Statues of deities I barely understood. Ganesh, who Echo had assured me was “the Hindu god who specifically comes to white people.” Quan Yin for compassion I couldn’t find anywhere else.

I felt, for brief moments, holding a piece of celestite up to the light or pulling a particularly synchronistic oracle card, like I could access whatever dimension Echo lived in. Like I could be that certain, that special, that magical.

A flaw of mine that’s only become worse as I’ve aged is that I don’t admire people, I envy them. My brain runs this constant calculation, a detailed accounting of who has what and why it’s okay I don’t have it. Why the karma works out. The calculations balance, but only briefly. The envy just finds new targets, metastasizes into new resentments.

But Echo inspired something different.

Later, when I briefly joined a Wiccan coven, so did Swann, the high priestess who ran things. With them, my place in the hierarchy was so clear that envy became impossible. They were teachers, I was student. And that’s how it should be, that’s how I liked it.

I think that’s what I’m always seeking: an authority so absolute it overrides my critical brain. But it has to feel earned. The coven fell apart when I met Elder High Priestess Ravyn. She shopped at Ulta and ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. She wore those transition lenses that never quite clear up indoors. Then she’d turn around and claim she was “of the fae,” of a special bloodline, while the rest of us were just boring humans who were shut out of the higher realms.

I wanted transcendence, not someone’s wine aunt playing dress-up. So I left that too, politely, claiming work conflicts, and never went back. People tell me to find Christ, that I’d like it there. But that’s not what I want. I am not a Christian.

I want magic.

Every ending is a false ending. I am still in purgatory. Last month I paid $75 to lie on the ground of a re-purposed office space and hyperventilate while a woman in palazzo pants played a singing bowl. I cried so hard I thought I was dying. She said that was energy blockages leaving my body.

Sometimes unable to sleep, I’ll see someone from those days, while scrolling. Once, I saw Echo dancing across my TikTok For You Page. Still posting about starseed activations and twin flame journeys and the coming age of Aquarius. She’s an astrologer now.

She seems so...certain. So held by her beliefs.

There is a reason for everything, isn’t there? Even if that reason is complete bullshit.

The crystals collect dust in a bowl in my basement. Sometimes I take them out and hold them, hoping to feel something like I did when I was 22. But they’re just rocks now. Pretty rocks, some of them, but rocks nonetheless. The oracle cards ebb and flow. Sometimes the spirit moves me again, but only sometimes.

I am still investigating, always investigating.

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Also, I was told to subtly remind you guys that the dress code is serious and so is the start time, sinc…

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Regular programming returns next week. Or maybe I go on hiatus, and it comes back in 2023. It’s anybody’s guess. We’ll see.

August 14, 2013 

The Persian–who I’ll sometimes refer to as ‘my New Friend’ or ‘the Stanford Alum’–and I have been hanging out, but he’s always having me meet him in buttfuck nowhere. Over a…

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August 1, 2013 

The wine bar was one of those places that newly-minted quants or first-year Columbia business students promise you is cool or exclusive but is really just expensive. They probably are aware of places that are cool, but they can’t get in, and they hope you don’t know any better. So they take you to the next best thing. A place where they c…

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Read the original thread here.

Boca Raton, 2018.

You wake up in the attic for the first time since you were 17. You spent all night drinking warm 40s and smoking American Spirits. Today you feel like shit and smell like a urinal.

You're 28 now, and you don't drink and you don't smoke (you never smoked) but this was the closest thing to freedom you could conjure—Vic's backyard and chain smoking and no parents to tell you to go to home or turn the music down or not to smoke inside.

Where have Vic's parents been all these years? Ten years later and he's still living at his mom's house and his mom is still perpetually "at work."

Vic wakes you up by throwing you a bottle of Adderall which lands right in your eye, so dry it feels swollen shut. He asks you if you want one like he's offering you a cup of coffee.

"Isn't it hard to get these refilled?" you ask him.

You almost open the bottle but think better of it. You grab a half-empty water instead. It's warm and tastes vaguely like garlic and that disgusts you, but it's better than whatever you'll get from the tap.

“Nah man, it’s easy.”

Alright then.

Waking up, you appreciate how much Vic has changed. His 33 is a well-worn 33. He's gained 40, 50 pounds, his facial hair is flecked with gray, and he dresses exactly the same as he always has.

This ages him in a way that surprises you.

The morning—which you realize is really the afternoon, it's 1pm—goes exactly the same way these mornings have always gone. You laze around and listen to Vic argue on the phone with his girlfriend of the month, you two go to Burger King, you idly shoplift.

At the Goodwill, Vic asks you if you're on steroids, and before you can say no, what are you talking about, tells you about how Andrew, who still works at food court at the mall, got obsessed with steroids in 2015 and…

And one story bleeds into the next, each new fact losing its shock value within the first 5 seconds of hearing it.

Michael Baker got a crazy sales job and moved to San Diego. Matt married Erica. Katie has an OnlyFans.

Andrew's balls shrunk.

Talking to Vic, you feel like a tourist in your own memories. Nothing can re-anchor you there. You've completely forgotten what it feels like to be comfortable around him

Driving along 441, still listening to the same music you listened to when you were a teen and he was an early 20-something, he asks you how the wife is.

Kids yet?

He launches into something about how Steve had a kid. You know Steve has a kid, because it happened when you were a senior in high school.

You don't tell him that you haven't had sex with your wife since you were 22, and you don't tell him that you haven't cheated on her either, that you two just don't have sex, and you're 28 and fucked more at 15 than you have in the whole of your 20s.

No. No kids.

He says, "Oh. Well, Katie got an abortion," as though to suggest that maybe your wife got one too.

There's a moment of silence for your shared potential children.

Vic lights a joint.

You wonder if you'll ever have kids.

You're not having them with your wife, Mary, that's for sure. You're 28 now and you'll be 29 soon. You'll probably work up the nerve to ask for a divorce around 30.

You don't think you can get remarried right away...

Vic asks you if you want to go to a show tonight. You might as well.

If you felt out of place at these shows as at 17, you feel out of place now. Even in two day old clothes, sticky with your own grime, you're a little too clean cut for your surroundings.

And worst of all— for the first time in your life— you feel old.

A girl who you could only describe as dressed in "2011 retro" comments on your sneakers.

She says they look "orthopedic."

What? Why can't she give you benefit of the doubt here? These assholes can wear velcro shoes and it's ironic and alternative but if you do it, it's...

"They're the wrong kind of ugly," she explains to you, ashing a cigarette in a sea full of vapes, dangerously close to your arm.

You stare at your feet.

"You're the wrong kind of trashy," you immediately start panicking as you hear yourself say that too abrasively.

As you wince at your own comment, you realize you recognize her. It's not 2011 retro. It's the same thing she was wearing in 2011.

This is Katie Osborne, Vic's ex with the OnlyFans.

You're in fight or flight trying to figure out how to backpedal, but Katie Osborne doesn't care that you called her trashy.

She recognizes you too, and she's excited to see you.

No pleasantries. Just a, "I never thought I'd see you at one of these again!"

Then she asks you if you want to get a drink instead of hanging out with middle schoolers who think they're in bands.

Are they really in middle school? Of course not. But we can do better than this.

Even though she's your age, Katie drinks like she's still 17.

For the second night in a row, so do you.

You two don't catch up. You're just two people at a bar. You don't remember yesterday or an hour ago or your life back at home, and there's no anticipation for tomorrow.

You just are.

Katie kisses you. You're too drunk to pretend to want to say no, to pretend to want to push her away, to make some mean comment about her being almost 30 selling pictures of herself online, to re-position her in your mind's eye as Vic's ex, to manufacture contempt for her.

In fact, the opposite happens, and you see her as you first saw her in high school, and it's more than just desire—it's more than just wanting to fuck her, you feel warmth spread through your body, the kind of fondness reserved for adolescent crushes.

The rest of the night happens in a quick clip. A $9.00 Uber, fumbling to get through the front door a $800/month beachside bungalow, the kind crawling with palmetto bugs, more humid inside than it is outside.

Finally being too tired and too drunk and too porn sick to consummate the first instance of mutual desire you've experienced in 6 years.

You pass out and wake up at 7 AM, 3 hours later. Even though you've sobered up, you still feel the afterglow of affection.

Katie isn't suddenly ugly to you, there is no overwhelming sense of shame or guilt. You think she looks even more beautiful in the light of day.

Katie's eyes flutter open and while you anticipate a smile, she doesn't greet you with one. She asks if you could leave, because she doesn't know how to share a bed and she has work (what work?) in a few hours.

You walk out to the beach, not even a mile away from Katie's place and lie there for a while.

You just feel empty.

7 turns to 8... 8 turns to 9...9 turns to 10.

Mary calls.

"When are you flying home again?"

Soundtrack:

1. Ruby Soho by Rancid

2. Jesus Does the Dishes by Wingnut Dishwashers Union

3. New Mexico Song by Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains

4. Bad Kids by Black Lips

5. So You Wanna Be A Cop? by Leftover Crack

6. Change Your Mind by The Killers

Advice, op-eds, and everything else you probably subscribe for will return soon. Thank you for bearing with me during this writing drought.

You’ve been in love two times in your life.

Three times if you include the person you used as a canvas to project what you thought love was after a particularly difficult break-up right before college. But now that …

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You are now 32 years old, and your life is a constellation of humiliations.

You hate your job. Your duties lie somewhere between intern and manager and your salary lies just north of intern. Since Christmas, which after a long stretch of doing nothing at all you serendipitously had to work, it’s been slowly creeping into earlier hours of your mornings and later hours of your evenings.

Then there is the never-ending slew of text messages from women whom you don’t respect, but more importantly, who also don’t respect you. You listen to their problems with the utmost deference because these are your friends. They’re not your friends though, not really.

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Jesse had an air of desert kitsch about…

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Walking to Downtown Pub or 7/11 or to a beachside Holiday Inn, I’…

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A high school friend of mine once described our hometown as a place with no places.

I think I learned at some point she’d taken this phrase from a book—I don’t remember which one—and that this was a common descriptor for the sort of town we grew up in, not an original thought from an unusually perceptive teenage girl.

A place with no places,

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So far, I’ve written two installments of “The Principle of Least Astonishment,” a story about a Bitcoin centi-millionaire’s love affair with an East Bay barista, a now deleted thread about a Russian software engineer obsessed with Bruce Lee, a glimpse into what I think life might be like in small-town Ireland, and now this—a snapshot of a Coast to Coast AM-loving Texan who fell in love with an alien.

You live in Texas. Your days are simple: Go to work. Go to HEB, go to Dollar General. Get parts for the car you're fixing up. Maybe get a drink.

Each night at 11:50 PM, you begin your ritual.

You drive to Bread Basket where you buy a bottle of Big Red. You park your car by the now long abandoned Kingdom Hall and you turn on conspiracy talk radio, on 99.7.

Every night, the host greets you the same way: Live from the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you may be on this great planet of ours…

You drink your Big Red, and settle in to your stories.

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Today, I tweeted this prompt:

And it inspired me to write a story.

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