Free Graduates in Wonderland by Jessica Pan

night. Also, he gives great massages and always texts back. But you know how it is, I just see him as a friend and vice versa. Maybe this is because of his name, Platonic Nick—­he is cursed in this sense. I think we’re both kind of lonely, so we turn to each other for distraction—­of the nonsexual kind.
    I am actually beginning to like New York again. Now that I’m not on the Upper East Side and am dividing my time between Brooklyn and Chelsea instead, it’s gorgeous and all the things people always say it is. I spent yesterday afternoon at the New York Public Library, which made me think of Joan Didion, and which really struck a chord with me—­it really is set up like a cathedral for books. It was beautiful, and I got a lot of good writing done.
    Point being, though, I was in Midtown during the holiday season and it didn’t make me hate the city.
    I’ve been staying in a lot lately, and not just because it’s been bitterly cold. My new resolution is to save money, and so I’ve stopped going out. I don’t want to be in a position where I can’t afford to leave this job or even this city. So I’ve been spending my time running a lot—­as much as I can out in the cold (scary because no health insurance for the first three months—­so if I break a leg getting hit by a bus, it’s just going to have to stay that way) and writing as much as I can. It’s hard. Working all day takes it out of me.
    I still can’t help thinking: Is this the best life I could have? I miss having the time to mull over ideas for stories and to actually write. Tomorrow, the plan is to get up early to go to Café Angelique (the good one at 49 Grove, NOT the bad one at 68 Bleecker) and write before I go to work.
    In only a few weeks I’ll be in Wisconsin for Christmas, riding horses with my sister and pretending that we are the girls from Sense and Sensibility (don’t you dare judge me, hillbilly kisser).
    I’m glad it’s almost Christmas break. I’m going to keep running when I get home to Wisconsin. Right now, I’m going to read O magazine, which my mother sent me, because apparently I am forty.
    WRITE BACK.
    I LOVE YOU. And capital letters.
    Love,
    Dimples
    P.S. What does a four-­year-­old carry in a purse? Crayons? Lipstick?
    DECEMBER 17
    Jess to Rachel
    I can’t move my knees. I just Googled “delayed-­onset ski paralysis,” but it turns out this is not a thing. Sometimes Google is blocked here, sometimes not. YOU NEVER KNOW. One time I urgently needed to know how to kill a spider without looking at it and the Internet refused to tell me. I still don’t know!
    Last night I returned from a skiing trip with Astrid and some of her coworkers. We drove a few hours away from Beijing, but the snow is artificial (it’s not naturally very snowy near Beijing, but why let a good mountain go to waste?).
    Learn from my mistakes: Do not ever give into snow sports peer pressure OR take your first snowboarding lesson in Mandarin without first taking a Mandarin lesson in snowboarding vocabulary. All I remember is being near tears halfway down the mountain with my Chinese instructor (the only word she could say in English was “No”), looking down, and picking out which pile of fake snow I would prefer to die in because anything was better than continuing to try to snowboard. Luckily, I made it down the mountain alive, but I never went back up again.
    Invigorated by near-­death, telling Astrid I wanted to move out didn’t seem like such a big deal. I think she had been sensing my growing unhappiness, and at dinner that night I finally just told her how I felt and that it will be better for our friendship in the long run if we lived separately. And actually, she didn’t freak the fuck out. She agreed, and seemed to take it really well, until a few glasses of wine later, when her eyes filled with