Free It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny Purmort Page A

apartments, with central air and cable TV and furniture that I’d bought firsthand. A place where instead of a logical form of public transformation, we all just got in our SUVs alone and sat idling on the freeway, inching off to where we want to go. The kind of world where we stack our empty dishes on the edge of the table to make life easier for our server. Back to my people, who wear shorts when the temperature hits forty degrees and go running when it’s zero. I was going to be close to lakes and forests and men who wear Red Wings because they actually work . Specifically, I was going back to my parents’ house in south Minneapolis and the Laura Ashley dream room I’d designed when I was eleven.
    Living with my parents was not the happy family reunion I’d been hoping for. Even the best parents tend to be terrible roommates. Before my dad started emailing me apartment listings from Craigslist, I’d crawl into bed after walking around the neighborhood smoking American Spirits, and wake up to Steve grinding coffee beans and telling me to get my ass out of bed and get to the store to buy him some half-and-half.
    Living at home was the pits, but Minneapolis felt good to me. New York teaches you to be addicted to discomfort, but Minneapolis (when it isn’t so cold you could die) makes it so easy to be comfortable.
    One day when I went to check the mail, there was a note from the postman telling me to go to the post office to pick up a package. I found it annoying that he would leave a note when he could have just left the package, but as I found out that afternoon, he can’t bring you the package when your ex-boyfriend hasn’t actually paid what it costs to mail it to you.
    I paid the remaining postage to bail my package out of post office jail, and went home to open it.
    Graham had been texting furiously in anticipation of my reaction, so I knew the box contained a big, romantic gesture.
    The contents were:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •     1 heart-wrenching mix CD
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •     1 doughnut from my favorite doughnut shop (hello, Peter Pan Donuts on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. May you forever serve your community with delicious doughnuts and surly Polish teens behind the counter), a pulverized and dried-out symbol of our love.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •     1 T-shirt, which, as his note explained, he was returning to me because it was my favorite shirt.
    I had never seen that shirt before in my life.
    I texted him to say thank you, but threw it all in the trash. Okay, I took two bites of the stale doughnut first. But I was done. With Graham and with New York, though I’ll always feel my stomach catch a little when I think of either of them. I still get nervous when my plane lands at LaGuardia, like I do when I think I see a boy I once loved at 10:00 A.M . on a Saturday at Target, when I haven’t hadtime to put on my eyebrows or wash my hair. I think you always get that way when you see an old love: like your old self, the one he adored, could be right around the corner, young and happy and wild. When I come back to New York and my cab drives down the BQE, it passes all the rooftops I drank on with Graham, and all I see are the ghosts of the good times. I don’t see myself overdrawing my checking account for the third time in a month, or getting caught in the rain and showing up to my first day of work so soaked that I had to wear a sweat suit from a stranger while my clothes dried on a heater. I just see us riding too-small vintage bikes through the cemetery, high and smiling, the best Easter I can remember. I see him pulling my shirt over my head and tumbling into bed beside me in his tiny bedroom, and the way he’d always whisper “beautiful” when he saw my bare skin. I see myself in silhouette, lying