I Don't Have a Happy Place by Kim Korson

Digest account of your high school career. Hilarious, right?
    Write soon,
    Me
    Dear You,
    Does anything good ever happen to me?
    Sigh,
    Me/You
    My Darling (ha-ha) Kim,
    That’s the thing! All kinds of good things happen to you—you just can’t see the bright side of anything. You don’t know how. Your insides feel like a hollowed-out canoe but nothing is actually really wrong. You have friends who write things in your yearbook like, You’re a great kid! And I never would have survived Mr. V’s math class without you! You waste all kinds of years pining for Robert Levine, but you actually end up having a decent array of boyfriends. You are relatively healthy, no one you know dies for years to come, and you don’t even have to get a job until you’re out of college!
    Don’t let the turkeys get you down,
    Me
    Dear You,
    I just want to ask one last thing. I read once in my mother’s Cosmo magazine that a lot of people have a rough time in high school but you shouldn’t worry if that’s the case because it all gets better. Is that true? Does it get better?
    Me
    Dear Kim,
    Nah, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. You’re not going to see the light of day untilyour forties. You live in your head too much and you’re going to take just about everything personally and feel sad most of the time. Don’t worry, though, you’re not going to become an alcoholic or anything. You have a Jewish constitution and booze doesn’t really agree with you. Instead you’ll sort of become addicted to sadness and negativity. Sometimes, while still living under our parents’ roof, you’ll feed the malaise with Doritos and water it with Diet Pepsi. You’ll not be able to identify what’s wrong, or talk about it with anyone in your family, so you’ll keep it to yourself, hide it in the back of your brain somewhere, but it will ooze out all the time like that toy slime you wanted when you were nine, the one that came in the little lime garbage pail but our mother said we couldn’t have because it would stain the rug. Eventually you’ll go to a few colleges, then move to New York and get jobs you think you aren’t very good at and make lots of friends you are convinced don’t really like you and spend much time not wanting to go to parties you are invited to and get morose because no one asks you to be in a book club even though the last thing you want to do is be in a book club but would it kill them to ask?
    I know I said that thing in my first letter about not changing the course of history, but I think they should make an exception for you, because if we’re being honest, you’re kind of a sad sack. People say to enjoy yourself because life is short. Sorry, kid. Full disclosure here, but life is long. Really, really long.
    Love,
    Me
    Dear Kim,
    Maybe you shouldn’t write me anymore. You’re depressing. And kind of a downer.
    Kim
    Dear Kim,
    You don’t know the half of it.
    Be well,
    Me

There’s No Business
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    M y favorite records, when I was nine, featured ORIGINAL BROADWAY C AST RECORDING across the front of their cardboard covers. I could identify the eleven o’clock number of any musical, owned a satin show jacket, and knew the entire Liza with a “Z” concert album by heart. If I was a middle-aged gay man in my youth, no one said a thing. It’s possible you heard my rendition of “The Ladies WhoLunch” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company during my nana’s Passover seder, at which I’d performed regularly. Zaida Max had requested the Four Questions, but I knew he’d rather hear my interpretation of a drunken toast to the rich ladies who wasted their days at luncheons instead of finding meaning in their lives. My family would prod their gefilte fish as I, third grader,