Things like graduating, and unexpected period stains on nice panties at New Years parties in hotel ballrooms which you silently curse while standing on swollen feet stuffed in borrowed shoes. It’s strange because you never quite expect anything to happen to you, because everything seems to happen to other people.

Death happens to other people’s grandparents. Other people manage to find great Black Friday sales. Other people get part-time jobs and have sex in cars and go to music festivals and get caught in the rain while wearing something inappropriate. Other people, it seems, live life the way we are told life is supposed to be lived. It never once occurs to us that for other people, we are that other person.

We are someone else’s example on what to do, how to dress, which angle to expose your pretty neck when pretending to look at the wall clock. I bet you anything the day I fell onto that attractive green eyed man in a subway car in Toronto and then loudly lamented his departure, someone went home and told their friend about the dramatic girl on the subway who made bedroom eyes at a stranger. I became a story, which is fine, because other people become my stories. And, in this way we all learn from each other the intricacies of the things we were never formally told about at home or in our classrooms. You know, the things we are supposed to look forward to, however small they may be. This is how we are living and how we learn to live for ourselves is by watching other people do it.

(Source: gatsbysfuneral)