It’s like Sex and the City, but instead of Carrie and her three best friends, there are versions of me at four different ages who counsel each other over cosmos and brunch.
It’s like How I Met Your Mother, but instead of the mother, there’s the miniature Barbie my sister loved the most, and for nine long seasons, you will follow me, seeking it, since the one time I held it when I was just three, then adorned in Baby Gap and ignorant to treasure, I dropped it from my stroller and lost it in the mall, and to my sister, the potential of this new small person to bloom into a friend was never quite the same.
It’s kind of like Jeopardy! but all of the questions are multiple choice and based on my life, and one of the contestants is someone I know and another is a stranger and another is a bot that has studied every photo and message on my phone and can mimic the bark at the back of my laugh, and at the end of every round, when the questions are answered and our notions of intimacy are parched from the brawl, I will walk from the podium to embrace first the friend, and then the unknown, and then the machine.
It’s like any docudrama, starts with me in college, and I am sitting in my dorm watching Season 4 of Glee, and the camera zooms in on the screen of my laptop as Lea Michele sings “New York State of Mind,” and for the next fifteen hours, the camera will remain there, and it will take different viewers different quantities of time before they learn that the show is not a docudrama but fifteen straight hours of Season 4 of Glee, and when critics attack it, I’ll say it’s a comment on obsession or depression or the chapters of my life that I’ve lost entirely, making camp for a promise that couldn’t spot me in a lineup, couldn’t tell you my name.
It’s like Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, but the shtick is I meet with every man I’ve ever kissed, and instead of us driving in a car hand-selected for the guest’s personality to a diner around the block, we stay in the studio and meet with one child who I think, after interviewing thousands of children, is most like the child that we two would have had if we touched that horizon that has never reached back, and we ask the child questions like: “What’s your favorite song? What do you like most about your kindergarten teacher? Do you believe in redemption?” Then none of us speak as we wait as a group for the parents to return.
It’s like the Sex and the City reboot, but it’s you, not Che Diaz, who tells me: “You don’t love me. You love you when with me.” And the version of myself who hears that will listen. And the version of you lets go of my hand.
