Kristine, 25, NYC
I freelance at a fashion-entertainment glossy in New York City and live in Brooklyn with two black cats named Trinidad and Tobago. After graduating from college in a post-9/11 economy, I found work as a wage slave at a national bookstore chain to supplement the nonexistent income I was earning as an editorial intern for a pop culture magazine. Before that I had completed a semiautobiographical novella disguised as an honors thesis called “Between Desire and the Spasm” at Boston College. And before having done that, I’d gone to no fewer than four performances of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” during the fall semester of my junior year, which I’d spent deconstructing the Bard and the British literati in London. Before that I’d met my potential someone on a memorable summer afternoon at a nondescript French creperie in Berkeley, California. But before that a boy who’d first caught my eye for having taken off his shoes after a back-to-school cruise had broken my heart. Even before that I’d found myself in a dimly lit basement with a guy who couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t understand the meaning of “no.” And before that I’d given my first kiss to a perfect stranger in uniform whom I’d met at a speakeasy in Florence. Before all that I’d never missed a day of high school and had miraculously achieved a perfect score in a national Latin exam. Before that I’d learned how to play Chopin’s “Waltz in E-flat Major” on the piano, under the tutelage of a virtuoso octogenarian. And before that I’d spent my first summer away from home studying Sartrean lit at a summer camp at Georgetown. Before that I’d lived only for cheerleading and volleyball, sleepovers and snack packs. But long before, my sister and I had lived for four months with relatives in Boston, while our parents looked for a good school and a suitable house for us in Florida. Before that was a move to the States from Manila, Philippines, and preceding that was an event more life-altering than any of the above: a near-fatal accident at age one-and-some-years-old, when I’d tipped over a pot of boiling H2O sitting on the stove. Before that I’d popped out of my mother’s womb like a porous cork from a bottle of Dom Perignon. And beyond that, who really knows what came before?
Kristine – Age 25 – New York City
400 Words, Issue 1-—Autobiographies
page 98
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