PART I
PAIGE CLICKS
MIA
Hey loves, hiking thru the gorgeous woods in one of #Colorado’s amazing #stateparks. Tucker says hi! Check out this view. (No not talking about myself for once, I swear!) I defy you to stand in the soaring Rockies without your heart soaring a little too. QOTD: What makes your spirits soar? How can you get more of it into your everyday life? <3 you! xoxo Mia
From where I stand, I can see mountains in every direction. Over to the left they are tallest, they stretch, they seem to grow every time I look back, they cast shadows, they tower. To my right they topple, fall down, tumble like hair over Rapunzel’s back: rivers of rock and shrubbery and, probably, if I could see better without all these tears in my eyes, actual waterways. In front of me is a bench, and I sit on it, and from it, when I let my head tip all the way back, back, back, in a position that every yoga teacher knows is unhealthy, I can read the sign above me upside down.
What Tucker said when he found out I could read upside down: “You’re amazing. Is there anything you can’t do? How did I get so lucky?”
What Tucker texted when I asked him why he was late to this park bench where I am craning my neck and probably ruining the C1 through C4 vertebrae: I don’t think we should do this. “This” being our wedding.
My brain flips the letters on the sign around for me, so I don’t see them as upside down. It reads:
WELCOME TO LANGE STATE PARK
There is a trail map worn thin from fingers tracing it and a Plexiglas registration-form holder and the words Elevation 8890, which I would have cropped out of the photo of me and Tucker—if Tucker thought we should do this, which he doesn’t—because 8,890 feet above sea level isn’t particularly impressive in Colorado, and those who realize that will know we hiked not at all but just drove here, parked in the parking lot, posed for several photographs, and then drove back to the hotel where we are staying.
Where I am staying. Where I am staying alone, I realize.
I have been staying alone since I got to Colorado. It’s hard to be an internet celebrity alone, but I have been doing it because Tucker had to travel for work last week and needed a chance to decompress between work and our wedding. I, too, would have liked to decompress, but my followers won’t have it. They need updates every day, multiple times a day. They need something to like. For some reason, it has to be me.
Tripods are all well and good, but they are slow and unwieldy, and I bought a cheap remote, so it takes three clicks to get a picture. Three clicks while I am frozen in a certain spot, with a certain look on my face, with my body tilted one way or another, or sometimes in an asana, a yoga pose like warrior two or half moon—one of the positions that photograph well. Not warrior one or crow pose. Though I have been doing yoga for years and have been an internet celebrity for many of those years, I have yet to do crow pose without making an expression that is best described as “gastrointestinal-distress face.”
“Hey, are you using that bench?”
I bring my head up slowly, slowly, slowly, until it’s back on top of my shoulders. Sure enough, my neck hurts. In front of me is a guy wearing one of those enormous climbing backpacks, but his mat isn’t loaded up into it yet. I have worn that kind of backpack before, when I did some climbing during hashtag outdoor matters month hashtag sponsored by hashtag Outfitters Inc. and hashtag Mountainhigh Climbing Gym, and I know it is heavy and unwieldy. I stand up from the bench. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” he says, then adds, “I won’t be long.”
I look at him. He is too doughy to be a climber, I think, then remind myself to stop with my assumptions. He is pretty good at getting his gear loaded, compared to me, who had to wave Tucker over and get him to do it and then take my picture after it was done. I smile at Mr. Doughy and say, “I haven’t seen any other climbers out today,” which is true, and well informed, considering I have been waiting near this bench for Tucker for an hour now.
He shrugs. “Guides never come here. Takes too long to hike out to the routes. And they’re high rated—I mean, they’re steep.”
I nod but also wonder if I should stay a few more hours, just so I can call 911 when I hear his body hit the ground. “You’re climbing alone?” I ask. I sit back down on the bench because thinking about climbing has made me tired.
“My girlfriend’s out there already,” he says, scooching away from me.
I want to clarify. I wasn’t flirting. I want to tell him that my fiancé is on his way here to take the prerehearsal dinner photos with me because we are getting married in two days.
But we aren’t. Tucker just texted me to say that we aren’t.
I start to cry.
The climber looks horrified. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say it like that. I just meant . . .”
I wave him off. He doesn’t need to know. “It’s not about you,” I say, and it comes out a bit bitchy, which is fine—I don’t know this guy. But the thought that I’ve been mean to a stranger makes me feel awful, until my mind helpfully turns it back around on him. He could have been nicer, after all. I wasn’t asking him to marry me, was I?
I turn to leave. It’s well past time I leave. I should have left hours ago. I should have never come.
But first, the photos. Even at my worst, there have to be photos.
Carefully, I take my pointer fingers and wipe straight lines under my lower lashes to clear away the tears without smearing my mascara. I am mindful not to open my mouth while I do this—the universal impulse to open one’s mouth when touching one’s lashes was caught on film one time, and I learned never to do it again. I looked like a drowning fish.
“Can you take my picture?” I ask the climber. “Just a quick snapshot.” I inhale and pivot and lower my chin and widen my eyes into a facsimile of a secret smile. He just needs to get me and some mountainscape in the frame. Beyond that, well, I will edit the crap out of it anyway, like I do all of these pictures. Like we all do.
Maybe not all of us. The climber looks perplexed. “Well . . . ok,” he says after a second and takes my phone. He points and clicks and hands it back to me without looking. I exhale and let my shoulders slump and flatten my mouth into a line and take the phone back, my real, heartachey, deflated self reappearing as I do. “Thank you,” I say, meaning it. “Have a good climb.”
“You too,” he says, even though I am obviously not climbing. The only climbing I’m doing today is into a bottle of bourbon. But then maybe, just going from the look on my face, that’s exactly the climb he’s talking about.
PAIGE
“I don’t mean to shock anyone, but the FRS just gave this penis a name.”
My cube farm breaks out in laughter. I’m laughing, too, but also I’m curious. What is it about the penis in question that made our facial recognition software think it was a person, and which person did it think it was? Knowing my company, it will turn out to be someone for whom this mistake is wildly offensive, like Gandhi. Or Pat Nixon.
“I want to see the penis,” I say.
“Of course you do, Paige,” says Peter Mason, the original penis announcer. “It’s the only way you’re getting a look, eh?”