On the first day of the summer 1987 swim season, a college-aged guy in flip flops with electric blue eyes stood beside Mrs. Renolds, the team president. Our regular coach, who taught at the high school, was nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Renolds introduced Matt, a student from the University of Kentucky, as our coach. This new coach had blond hair and wore a U2 T-shirt.

It felt odd from the start.

“This is Coach Bedar,” she said. “He’s home for the summer from college and we’re so happy to have him here.” Mrs. Renolds looked his way and giggled, her stomach jostling in ropy swells she failed to notice.

“Coach Matt is fine,” he said and gave us a little wave.

Mrs. Renolds told us to have a good practice and left the pool deck, steel door clanging shut. During the school year there were anywhere from thirty to forty kids on the team. Attendance dwindled in the summer. Now I was one of ten kids standing around the Thorton Fractional South High School pool and the oldest there. I’d just finished the eighth grade and would be starting high school in the fall.

I stood there and shivered in my suit. I was nearly naked, but my bareness hadn’t registered until now.

Crouching under a tree, we select two rocks with which to crack the nut. The bottom rock—largish, flattish—is a sturdy anvil on the sandy ground. The other rock, fist-sized, is for pounding. The nut is an elongated egg, dark brown and glossy. My friend has acquired a handful—from where, I do not ask.

I am not a native of this village. I do not question why she wants to share with me, because the people here are generous and are always offering things to me, the outsider. My pale skin and straight hair signal my otherness, the necessity for generosity and preferential treatment, which makes me uncomfortable— all of it lives in a little knot in my belly. That and my natural shyness usually prevent me from confidently mingling with other kids, so I am happy to be accepted this afternoon.

My friend shows me how to place the nut in a hollow on the flat rock, how to smash it open with the pounding rock, probably a white-bleached chunk of coral. Most of this village is coral, or sand which was once coral.

Smash. The brown skin tears, revealing a surprising green pulp that protects a hard inner shell. Pound, pound, crack. She pulls apart the busted shell and inside is a translucent white nut. My friend calls it a ngali nut. Fresh from the shell, it looks tender as a larva, pinkish segments folded up on each other in whorls and furrows. My friend offers it to me, and I take a nibble. Soft but crisp, it has a sharp, sweet flavor. It tastes alive.

It was 10:30 a.m. on a weekday in October, my perfect moment. I had pinpointed a low-traffic time to avoid people—a paradoxical challenge, since I lived in New York City. I needed to buy something rare, something genetically engineered just for me—usually found in a shopping mall. Handheld, spongy and syrupy, with maximum mouth-feel—an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Or more specifically, twelve Auntie Anne’s pretzels.

Walking through the Penn Station food court, I was hungry and on a stealth mission. How loud is Penn Station during a weekday mid-morning? To me, it’s dead silent. I turned up my headphones to help me dissolve into the crowd of commuters. Listening to Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely (And Never Be Found)”—yeah, I know, I’m a cliché. But maybe things are clichés for a reason—there’s universal truth in what we do compulsively. I needed Thom Yorke’s sprawling chimes to distract me from my growling stomach and my other tape player, the one telling me I am skinny and fat and disgusting and ugly and . . . weak.

The perfect date for me would not include movies, dinner, or even April 25. For years, all I’ve wanted is to spend a late morning with a guy and do football drills together in an open field. I floated the idea with a few different guys—I always get a look that makes me feel like I have three noses or too many buttholes.

Years of great love have led to more than enough dates, life-changing thrills, and adventures with special men. But because I spent almost a third of my life up to this point playing the game, consumed by it, I want the man I love (or one I want to love) to get where I’m coming from, to feel it in their body. We’d go to a field, one with lots of grass and few or no onlookers. We won’t be doing anything salacious, but we deserve our own peace, separate from the outside world that kept us apart for longer than it should have. We won’t do much in terms of collisions, just the offensive and defensive line drills I did day after day for year upon year.

I don’t want to get all dressed up in full foosball fantasy regalia—we won’t need all that gear. It’d be more like a captain’s practice—one in gym clothes and devoid of coaches, mostly meant to bring the team closer together. So long as we warm up properly, we shouldn’t get hurt, especially not our heads. We’d wear shorts (preferably gray), tank tops (or crop tops if anyone’s feeling their oats that day), compression shorts that peak out the legs of our gym shorts even when standing up straight (because jock straps can get uncomfortable, tangling with thighs, hair, and nuts), and cleats as opposed to tennis shoes, so neither of us falls. Sweat stains resembling Rorschach tests would start forming on our backs before the first drill.

I need to leave LA. The cliché I’ve become sticks its grotesque tongue out and mocks me—a Midwesterner moving out west to be amongst the bright stars, only to find that the brightest stars are back home. The stubbornly unchanging fact of my dad’s death has made a fool of California’s promise of “fresh starts.” Without the promise of a life glittered with Hollywood lights, this city-that-is a-suburb has morphed from familiar friend to prison, trapping me in its relentless sprawl.

I have refused new friends in this city that’s already in my rearview mirror—in this desert, I choke on the dust that is “getting to know someone.”

In my self-imposed exile, I kept thinking about Johnie’s Coffee Shop (yes, one “n”) at Wilshire and Fairfax, a now derelict diner about two miles from my West Hollywood apartment. Apart from the fact that it was blissfully undemanding in our interactions, I couldn’t figure out why this abandoned building, one I now only idle beside—stuck at the obstinate red light at the intersection— made more noise in my head than the car horns outside my window. Laid off from my job, in between trips to get myself out of LA, and having fed my cats their mid-morning treat, I finally relented to Johnie’s siren call.

Da Capo: From the beginning

I learn to rely on music at a young age.

The melodies and harmonies that flow through my headphones are not mere entertainment. They are an escape from the cacophony that blares through my home when the conductor raises his baton, gestures to the strings, and begins the next phrase.

The evening starts like any other—four smiling faces sitting around a cherry wood dinner table, food steaming on plates much too nice for a Wednesday night dinner. The conversation is light—it has to be. The conductor sits at the head of the table. It’s his spot. The first chair cello sits to his right, her gold wedding ring glittering in the low light of the hanging sconce above. The quiet viola sits next to me as she picks at her dinner, her nimble fingers already shaking. And I, the violin, try to keep it together though the food before me is no longer savory but sour.

I don’t want to eat.

I want this concert to be over.

The conductor notices I won’t eat. He doesn’t notice I don’t like the food. He doesn’t care.

He raises his baton.