“What is it like?” she asks me.

“What is what like?” I ask back, not understanding.

We are in Starbucks, decidedly not having coffee cognoscenti-approved third wave beverages. I sip on my very basic mocha frappuccino with absolutely zero shame and plenty calories. (It’s cheat day anyway. On cheat day, you are allowed to cheat not only on your diet, but on your high-brow pretensions as well.)

For some reason, real talk is easier in Starbucks. There are so many of them these days that you’re unlikely to run into anyone you know, and depending on the branch of your choosing and the time of your visit, it can be so crowded with the noise of strangers that you need not worry about anyone overhearing — let alone caring about — anything particularly sordid or sensitive that you intend to discuss.

“What is it like? Well. You know.” There is the shrug of shoulders and a quick quirk of the head. “Spending your entire adult life trying to figure out who you are and what you want, and finally getting there,” she replies. “It must be pretty damn good, right?”

I laugh at her incredulously. “Mel, I’m not even 29 yet. If I’m at all lucky, I still have some time to go, and a hell of a lot to learn.” There is a lot of world yet to see, and even more than that to experience, and I feel as young and wide-eyed as I ever have, except with more of the freedoms that come with age, and I may not look it or feel it, but I am aging.

I pause to think. It is not an easy question to answer. “It depends, I guess,” I tell her. She arches a perfectly groomed eyebrow at me. “‘It depends’? The hell kind of answer is that? What does that even mean? ‘It depends.’” She rolls her eyes.

“It depends on what you find yourself becoming, in the end, and how easy or otherwise it is to continue to be that,” I reply.

“Explain.”

“It’s the best and worst thing in the world,” I say, “to start to determine for certain who you are, who you want to become, and what you want your life to be like. Because once you hit that point, there’s no going back.”

The look on her face is quizzical. “Why would you want to go back? Isn’t it a good thing, to definitively know who you are?” she asks me.

For her benefit, I try to give myself an approximation of the Manhattan once-over for emphasis. “Look at me. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be different here on a superficial level, let alone in terms of principle? To, I dunno, swim against the current with the knowledge that it would be infinitely easier for someone like me to just go with the flow and become what everyone thinks and expects I should be, yet also knowing that to do so would kill me inside?” I ask her in return. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be that girl. It’s for other people, but it’s not for me.”

She laughs. “You and your Goth/fetish aesthetic,” she jokes, glancing at the leather collar I’ve taken to wearing lately. “Yeah, name five other people we know who can pull this look off,” I smirk back at her.

Sometimes I think I am resigned to this, to always being the oddball. Sometimes I resent myself for it, for not trying harder to realign myself and my interests and my attitudes, for not trying harder to fit in. I resent myself for the isolation I feel; the loneliness. (“He said you had too many issues for him,” I was once told by a friend about another friend with whom I had briefly shared a mutual attraction. And at first, it hurt like hell to hear — would I ever have a chance at love? would I have to make myself basic for it? — but when I was composed enough to think, I realized, who doesn’t have issues? Ours were likely just as incompatible as we were, and all the better to have discovered this early on.)

When I look past the internal conflict, though, mostly I am content. I have compromised, in some ways, as we all must, but I have never truly compromised myself.

“I’ve spent the greater majority of my adult life warring with expectations, real and imagined,” I tell her. “One time, I was at this very Starbucks with my friend and former co-worker Irish, and we got to talking about our time at Cosmo, and she straight up told me, ‘Mads, we always used to wonder why you were even there in the first place. Why did a girl like you even have to work? And you worked so hard, and never let anyone help you.’” I laugh, mix my fast-melting drink with my straw, and take a sip. “That’s just one of the things people thought of me — entitled little Daddy’s girl, which of course I sometimes am, but when you give me a job to do, nobody will do it better. Others thought I’d run straight to Dad and get a cushy job at the newspaper handed to me, which is the last thing I wanted, so I applied to Summit after graduation without anyone’s knowledge and worked my way up from the bottom for years.”

“And you’ve avoided politics like the plague,” she adds.

“Like the fucking plague! Yes!” I exclaim, laughing. “There was a point where I could have still been molded for that, but those years have passed, and nobody would ever vote for this anymore.” I am a little too strange now, a little too immovable, a little too uncompromising. Far too idealistic. Politics would destroy my spirit more than society ever could, and society has done enough.

I nick her fork and take a bite from her slice of Oreo cheesecake. “Is it so rich girl problems?” I ask her.

She smiles at me sadly. “To people who don’t understand, and most don’t, or won’t even try to because they can’t fathom that people like you have the right to have issues, yes,” she replies. “But you understand, right? You understand that this is the context you were born into. You didn’t choose it; this is the subset of planet Earth that you just happened to materialize in, and you’re only doing what you can with your life and everything you’ve been given. You just happen to be lucky to have been given a lot, and you can’t be blamed for that.”

I look down at the palms of my hands, and promptly press my face into them, grateful beyond belief that someone gets it. I feel her hand rubbing circles on my back. “You feel guilty, don’t you?” she asks me. “That’s the worst part, isn’t it? You feel guilty for being born into the world — the life — you were born into; something you had no control over. You feel guilty for things you shouldn’t feel guilty for.”

I turn to face her and look her straight in the eye. I am trying not to cry, but I’ve always been terrible at that. “Mel, I’m clinically depressed and I’ve never felt lonelier in my life, but at the same time, I wouldn’t trade this life for anything in the world,” I tell her. “Because it’s mine. Because I’ve done what I could with it. Because I actually get to choose what to do with it from this point on.”

(Photograph: Joseph Pascual)

In the early 2000s, it would be the flashing of the bottom-most light on our intercom — my personal line, indicating a call — that would set my heart to racing. Only a handful of people ever knew that number for the thirteen years it existed, and for the life of me, I can’t remember why my parents even gave me my own landline to begin with when the advent of cell phones had already begun. But it would be that light, blinking, and I’d know there was a conversation ahead with someone who meant something to me.

I can no longer remember what it was like to talk for hours upon hours on the telephone, like I used to almost daily for years. Nobody does that anymore. What did we talk about, when we still used to talk?

Ten years later, advancements in technology changed the art of communication completely and my landline went mostly unused, partly because smartphones and the Internet made messaging more efficient than long chats on the phone, and partly because I had parted ways forever with the person who last used that number.

I use R2-D2 ringtones on my iPhone for receiving messages because I am a proud nerd, and also because so few other people do that I almost always know it’s my phone ringing.

The first is a frantic string of beeps and bloops — Artoo sounding adorably panicked — that I’ve set specifically for members of my immediate family. ‘R2-D2: Curt,’ it’s called. It’s the perfect choice for them, because they typically only text me when it’s important, and theirs are the messages I can never miss, never ignore, and never not reply to unless I want to get into more trouble than I’m already in, so the sense of urgency I’m immediately launched into upon hearing that particular tone is ideal. It puts me right in the “Oh shit, what have I done now?” mindset — I am instantly ready for action, or snap into the creative writing zone I need to be in so that I can come up with a logical, reasonable explanation for whatever it is I’ve done wrong. (Usually it has something to do with my curfew, which I believe has finally been abolished.) I remember when my brother still had a BlackBerry, and the indicator light in the corner would flash in multiple colors every time it was Mom messaging or calling, like mini disco lights. “It’s so I know it’s you and I can start freaking out,” was the logic behind it, just like mine, though I get the feeling he received far more angry text messages typed out in capslock than I ever did. (And probably still does.)

The second is a fairly standard series of R2-D2 chirps; cute, brief, and cheerful. ‘R2-D2: Happy.’ It’s the tone I use for everyone else, and it is what it is: functional, pleasant, and nondescript. It could be anyone, it could be anything.

And there is a third one that I only used once, and have not since. It is called ‘R2-D2: Tri-tone,’ but the name doesn’t do it justice. It is three happy notes, bright, excited, and thrilled; precisely the way I would feel every time I would hear it. The only time I ever used it was for a boy, and the sound of it would send a jolt up my spine. I imagine I must have had the dumbest smile plastered onto my face every time it would beep from my purse or pocket, but I just loved hearing that tone and knowing that there was something waiting for me from him, even if it was only a hello or a how are you? It made me light-headed, like a schoolgirl with a crush. (I certainly wasn’t a schoolgirl, but I did have a crush.) “O, who is that? It’s him, no?” Raymond or Milan used to say in the office on closing days, when I’d zone out of work and zoom onto my screen with a self-satisfied little smirk on my lips, fingers tapping out a snappy reply. I would just smile back at them after hitting send.

The last time that tone beeped was when I got The Message from him — the digital equivalent of The Talk, the one every girl dreads, the formal apology and the ending of the affair. And after that, I set his tone to the same one I used for everyone else, and he became just like everyone else again, too. Anyone, anything. No one, nothing. I didn’t realize how much that small action would hurt until I actually had to do it, but it hurt, like having hopes dashed, like defeat, like potential gone kinetic, then come to an abrupt and unexpected stop.

And the silence afterwards was deafening.

I briefly toyed with the idea of using that tone again for the next one who seemed like he was serious (for some reason, it’s when you transition from online messaging applications to actual text messaging — even though iMessage is essentially the same thing — that things start to feel a little more serious), but I had since learned caution, and in the end, that lesson paid off. It was one less hurt to handle when that, too, came to a sudden, unforeseen end.

It has lain dormant among my selection of sounds for almost two years now. Part of me thinks I may never use it again. But the smaller part that still knows what it is like to hope is just quietly waiting for someone who will deserve those three utterly delighted notes, that much joy.

(Illustration: Ralph McQuarrie)