One of the first times I flew on an airplane without an adult it was to visit Zoey in Texas. I was eight or nine years old. Zo and her family had moved from their house across the street from mine in Los Angeles to a new one in Austin, and so our friend Allison and I went to visit her for a few days.

I don't remember much from the trip itself: flashes of playing bocce on their front lawn, paddling a canoe down the river, calling the boy Zoey had a crush on to say he'd better not hurt her feelings or else. She taught me rude jokes about the students at a nearby state school (her parents taught at a fancier public university, though I'm pretty sure they were not the source of these jokes) and to say hook 'em horns and y'all.

At that age, and for years afterward, I didn't really know anyone else who'd been to Texas. I grew up in liberal Jewish enclaves, and my friends went to New York and Hawaii, but I knew about keep Austin weird, and I'd eaten tacos on South Congress and swum in Barton Springs and taken the escalator at Whole Foods. Now, of course, everyone has done these things. Everyone calls it South-by. 

(yes, these are scans of actual Polaroids, yes, I was an insufferable teen)

But not everyone has stood on Zoey's back porch in late August, after a long, horrible, lonely summer interning in Manhattan, and felt their blood moving in their veins for the first time in months. Austin was the first place that wasn't Los Angeles that I knew on my own terms-- not because my parents brought me there and took me around, but because I went, on my own, to see my friend. Zo turned sixteen a year before me and her parents bought her an ancient turquoise Volvo and once-- I can't remember which visit, how old we were, anything, except that it was night and she said let's just drive around for a while and we did, cruising through the hot, dark suburban streets with the windows down and every house a blur of fractured white light as it passed. Ever since we were kids, she's been taking me places with her and letting me call them home. 



Austin was my first grown-up place, and in certain ways, Zoey was my first grown-up friend. It has not always been easy to keep place for ourselves in each other's lives over the years, but we've managed it: made space over and over and over again. This weekend I went to her wedding, and I knew her fiancee, her family, her friends from high school and college, and her aunts and uncles and cousins, too. Zoey was one of the first things I ever chose for myself, and there's never been any question that I chose right; this weekend all I could think was how stunningly grateful I was that she has always, always chosen me back. 

(I almost never write about people who read this Tinyletter in it so intimately but I couldn't help myself this time. Sorry & love you, ZoZo.)

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Speaking of history, I wrote about Hollywood Forever and Musso and Frank's and spirits and ghosts for my personal geography series at Medium.

If you live in a state where there's an election today, please, please, please vote.