November 27, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
I was 20 years old
So, I’m 20. So far, so good. My birthday was this past Monday so I was on campus. My friends came into my room at midnight and spread the love. The whole day was filled with lots of love. Didn’t do anything, necessarily. But I’m totally fine with that. “Gypsy” by Fleetwood Mac was the first song I listened to, if curious. Here’s hoping I’ll be something of a gypsy during this new decade. My New York Post horoscope from November 25th read, “You will get the opportunity to go back and set something right and, if you’re smart, you will seize it with both hands. If you don’t, it will continue to prey on your mind and hold you back—the last things you need. And if you’ve got critics, it’s just a sign that you’ve made it.”
And hopefully six months in Sweden will bring me that much closer to “making it.” I was accepted to the exchange program with Jönköping University in Sweden. They made an exception for me. At first, it was just one Emmanuel student (a girl named Aline, she’s a junior) who was going to go, but they were equally impressed by my application and contacted the school to see if they’d accept a second. And they did! It’s terrifying in the most thrilling way possible. Going through all the visa shit right now. It’s nothing too complicated. Booked my flight last week. Aline and I grabbed lunch on Sunday to get to know each other. We’ll be seeing a lot of one another. She’s super cute. And she already offered to take my picture for my column once we’re in Sweden. I’m thinking I’ll call it “Swede Nothings with Brian Burns.”
Friends and family have been so happy for me. Mom and dad are, naturally, upset about not seeing me for so long. I am too. Not to mention not seeing Rufus for all that time. All the girls have been telling me how they don’t know what Emmanuel will be like without me around. Of course they’ll get along just fine but it’s touching, to see that I really mean something to my friends.
Mark Baard, my journalism professor, said he got goosebumps when I told him the news. I sat down with him for an end-of-the-semester check-in and he said to me, “You’re going to be famous.” He’s such a believer in me. From his lips to God’s ears.
Once again, here’s hoping that this week marks the beginning of an exciting, fulfilling, enriching, surprising, and inspiring decade. I hope that it brings me steps closer to the realization of my dreams and the self-realization of who I am meant to be. An existential crisis or two is to be expected but I know the good will outweigh the bad. So long as I don’t go schizo. Until then!
November 29, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 30 years old
What I remember most are these nights walking down Pilgrim Road in the Fenway neighborhood, headed home alone after a visit to Shannon and Hailey’s room over at their off-campus dorm, back when I was 20 years old. I’m listening to sad music under the sad glow of Boston’s streetlights, before LED bulbs ruined everything, stopping to take some sad picture of an old car that I’d filter to oblivion on Instagram with a caption that read, and I am quoting myself here, “Jan Brady, is that you in there?” That necessary and glorious blind confidence of being a high school senior and college freshman had shattered. What was pretty as an Easter egg just a semester or two ago had revealed itself as something hard-boiled, if not blown out completely. I hadn’t correctly completed all the paperwork for my visa so the TSAs at Logan Airport almost didn’t let me board that flight to my spring semester abroad. And then not 12 hours later, arriving to the inky gloom of Sweden in January, I was told I also hadn’t correctly completed my dormitory assignment. There wasn’t a place for me to live. But exceptions were made. Exceptions always seem to get made for me.
I was told, time and again, by all my new international classmates, that I had a “very American face” and a “very American voice” and a “very American sense of humor.” Living in a four-bed, four-bath student apartment, and paying rent for the first time, my roommates were from Austria, Latvia, and Hong Kong. It took five months of living together before I finally asked the Latvian guy, “I am so sorry but—what’s your name again?” Every time I grocery shopped, I’d listen to Blue by Joni Mitchell. Whenever I hear “My Old Man,” I’m in an ICA, looking at a package of ham, laughing at how Sophie from England told me that “skinka” is, in fact, pronounced “WEEN-ka.” It was also Sophie from England who had this cute boy visit her at one point that semester. Soft-spoken and tender, he lived in Edinburgh and dressed like he came straight there from a Smiths concert in 1987. Drunk, I asked him, right in front of Sophie and Aline, seconds before our respective buses were expected to arrive with Scandinavian precision, if he wanted to come home with me. It was so unexpected that Sophie burst out laughing, mistaking it for a joke. All told, I didn’t go home alone that night. Laying on Aline’s bed, we talked for hours and hours. Thank God for her. On a different night’s bus ride home, I had my feet up on the seat and a stranger said something to me—a most un-Swedish thing to do. I told him, “Jag talar inte svenska,” and he said, “You’re putting your feet which may be dirty on a seat where someone might sit in their white summer clothes.”
Stocking fruit at the Gilford Hannaford, my friend Emily’s mom ran into me and said, “I think this will be your last humble summer.” I made $7.50 an hour and hardly ever spent a penny. Back in Boston, Elliptical Boy invited me to his birthday party and, even though it was the start of my junior year, only then did my education begin. Never before had I paid such critical attention to my clothes, or the music I listened to, or the expression on my face while I laid on this boy’s bed and watched him play guitar, swallowing every sip of my longing. Finally 21 years old, I joined him at a bar one night where the bouncer refused to accept my temporary paper ID. In the futile mission to go grab my “Swedish residence permit” from my room—to which the bouncer ultimately said, “Get out of here”—Cam drove me back to campus in a car I didn’t even know he had. Coming in and out of view in Jamaicaway’s brake lights and high beams, he played “Lorelai” by The Cocteau Twins and “Round and Round” by Ariel Pink and everything was a movie. Insisting that he go on ahead and meet up with his friends already in the bar, I walked the whole way home, stopping at Harvard Med to stare out at its empty quad. I felt as punished as a saint, sitting there on those frozen stone steps, only letting myself stand up once the pain went numb. La douleur exquise, as that Sex and the City episode taught me. I applied to be a summer RA so I could live on campus and stick around Boston, all in an effort to keep hanging out with him. I didn’t get the position, not at first—but what do you know? An exception was made. A couple weeks later, Cam decided to move away. I had my own time again, lots of it, and I spent it all with Shannon—my best friend. That summer was many things but humble.
I still dream about this, and kind of often—that it’s my first day of senior year and I’m feeling oh so sad. It’s over? Already? During class one day, for her Images of Masculinity course, Kelly McGuire said, “Here, Brian and Ashleigh—don’t move. Everyone look at them right now. What do you see?” Ashleigh had been sitting close to her desk with her legs crossed tightly while I was leaning back, ankle resting on opposite knee, broad and expansive. Masculine, even. As soon as Kelly turned her back, Ashleigh and I looked at each other like we’d just been touched by an angel. We worshiped her. I took film photography and spent hours in the dark room, late enough at night so I was always alone. There was a CD player in there with a random assortment of albums long left behind. I played Jewel’s Pieces of You over and over and over again, as I watched prints of my feet and my friends and my bedroom come alive in the developer bath. My grandfather died the week before I graduated but I didn’t go down to New Jersey for the funeral because it was “Senior Week” and I didn’t want to miss out. I don’t think I told any of my friends that he’d passed away. How telling. Running late for the 57 bus, pulling up in front of our pistachio-green triple-story Allston apartment house any second, I fell down the stairs. A dog walker with a sprained ankle. Back at home that night, elevating and icing my foot, one of my roommates reminded me, “You said you wanted your post-grad life to be interesting!”
I went to New York City to lose my virginity with a PAPER Magazine editor but instead ended up having sex with a guy I’d known for years. An Emmanuel College boy who’d moved to Brooklyn. Go figure. Walking to the Kingston-Throop C station that next morning, I listened to “Like a Virgin” off The Confessions Tour live album and couldn’t stop laughing. To this day, the only place I’ve ever had sex is New York City. That, to me, is exactly why I believe in God. I went to Simmons College to vote for president straight from my overnight shift at a boutique hotel but, exhausted, fell asleep that evening before any results came in. There was a locked door connecting our two bedrooms and one night, from the other side, I heard Shannon crying on the phone. There wasn’t a person on earth I was closer to, but I was too afraid to ask if she felt like it was time to move on. Not when I was so content seeing movies at Coolidge Corner Theater and drinking for free at Hops and Scotch—with her. Quitting the hotel, I stayed with the dogs. I made maybe $175 a week, but other than my $470 rent, I hardly spent a penny. We were never able to get that door open.
Shannon and Juliette threw me a surprise birthday party and everyone was there. All the spirits still haunting Boston but also Koko from New York, and Cam and his girlfriend from Philly, and my parents from New Hampshire. The next time I talked to her on the phone, my mom said it made her so emotional, watching me that night. “The way you were working the room, so…confident. I could never have done that at your age.” Shannon moved away. I was dog sitting the weekend she left and as soon as I got to the bar to celebrate her final night in Boston, the dog’s owner texted me, “Hey Brian, we just tuned into the camera and Tommy looks home alone. Everything okay?” A girl named Anna took over her bedroom. She went to Oberlin and had a job at NPR and I couldn’t stand her. “As someone who used to be prone to sadness but now just gets angry,” I tweeted during that Shannonless spring, my final season in Boston, “I have to wonder…is that good? Is this a development? Is bitterness the byproduct of an emerging adulthood? Does anything feel better than expressed rage?!” Some gay guy responded, “Anger can be another expression of depression.” On my last day as a Boston dog walker, I handed my ring of apartment keys to my beloved boss and right there on the street, hugging her goodbye, I cried and cried and cried. I miss her so much.
I got the tannest I’ll probably ever get that summer, living in Chicago, where everyone was nice but everything was wrong. Sleeping out on the enclosed back porch of Keely’s Swedish grandmother’s apartment, I had tuna fish with Wasa crackers every morning for breakfast. I remember people looking at me as I walked down the street, cradling my stomach in distress. I remember so many people in Chicago looking at me. Always looking. On one of my last nights there, at dinner with Keely’s whole family, amidst the many well wishes for my next move to New York City, Mormor said, “I think he’ll still walk dogs there, too. No, I really do. He will!” Living with my parents while I was in between cities, I got my wisdom teeth removed and watched Moonstruck and Rosemary’s Baby and Desperately Seeking Susan and Crossing Delancey. None the wiser and setting the scene. Not two months after moving to New York, I turned 25. There’d be everything before, and there’d be everything after, but right in the center of it all, there I was. If you want to move to New York City, do it the year you turn 25.
In Bushwick, laying on my friend Austin’s bed, his mattress on the floor like a raft at sea, amidst the many rising tides of his beautiful Gemini Chaos, love bloomed. Listening to “Gay Messiah” by Rufus Wainwright one night, I remember how the two of us were sitting closer than we needed to, reading the lyrics pulled up on his computer. But more than anything else, it’s “Brooklyn Nights” by Lady Gaga that takes me back. So much it hurts. It’s a sad song but if Austin hadn’t pointed that out to me, I’m not sure I ever would’ve realized. I took a bus up to New Hampshire to borrow my dad’s car, driving back down to New York to pick Austin up and get us to North Carolina before his sister gave birth. I misheard something he said that weekend and responded, “I know…I love you too.” Oh well—it was the truth. Back in New York, I told this boy I’d been seeing that things got serious with Austin. “Well then, here, I don’t really want this,” he said, giving back the Wilmington, North Carolina postcard I’d just gifted him. The morning of my first day at a new job, I texted my dad, “I had a dream about Grandma last night. She was all smiles.” I was just beginning my time as an Educator at the Tenement Museum, where I’d tell the stories of real New York City families—and who appears to me in my dreams but Grandma Burns. A born and raised New Yorker. She was so happy to see me.
On a hot summer night, Austin and I got drinks with friends and it felt like entire minutes passed by before anyone so much as looked in my direction. After an argument where I suggested he can be “too much,” I made him cry. It was our first big fight. From my mother, from both my sisters, from my Aunt Karen, from Shannon and Cam and Juliette and Keely’s mom Roberta, I sought counsel. On many street corners, in many subway cars, over many phone calls, I cried heartbroken tears. And I lost weight. Hoping to get it published in this film magazine, I was writing an essay around then, comparing our relationship to Alma and Woodcock’s in Phantom Thread. “Equally-matched lovers are a neo-noir construct,” etcetera, etcetera. Kelly McGuire read my final draft and was so exuberant in her praise that I transcribed it into my diary. Austin had nice things to say about it too—until a couple months later, when he admitted how hurt he’d been by it, that he’d sent it to his friend who was so shocked I’d written such “mean” things about my boyfriend. It never got published. But by the end of the year, with a different essay, I was in The New York Times. I didn’t see that coming. So rarely do I ever see it coming.
Dog sitting the Welsh Corgi of my boyhood while my parents were on a cruise ship vacation—during that foreboding little month when the idea of catching that new virus going around China and Italy was still just a joke—I met up for drinks with my high school French teacher. She said something so profound right before we parted ways, and while I tried to jot it down as fast as I could, I think my third martini lost something in translation. “I love that these could be among your last chapters of reintegration,” said Madame Louise, more or less, maybe. Locked down in Austin’s apartment, I made us dinner every night and we watched 78 movies in two months and I made more money collecting unemployment than I ever had before. The domestic proved blissful. We waited outside a CityMD to get an antibodies test and, after a month up north with my family, we went down south for a whole summer with his. In a group chat with my parents and sisters, I sent a message at one point about how Austin’s family is like something out of a movie. All chatter and laughter. Wholesome. It was only an observation. My family didn’t take it that way. Out in their backyard, I was talking to my mom on the phone one evening when a conversation became an argument and she hung up on me. The texts she sent me that night were some of the most pointed and hurtful things I’ve ever been told. Because I recognized so much of it as the truth.
And then, on the morning of July 15th, Austin’s mother poked her head into the guest bedroom, waking us up to say, “Brian—you’ve got to call your mom.” At 22 weeks, Lindsay went into labor. On his way out the door to go to the church, Austin’s dad prayed for Mia and for my sister. We were at the foot of the stairs and, even though it was nine in the morning, what I remember is the two of us standing there in the dark. It was Jillian, our oldest sister, who called me with the news. We’d lost Mia. The next day, I flew to New Hampshire to be with my family. I washed so many dishes that week. It was something I could do. We have never been the same, in every conceivable way, and that—I believe—is Mia.
We moved into a brownstone in Clinton Hill, with a landlord who lives in Australia. As I often say, “My landlord lives in Australia—how’s that make sense?” That winter was cold, and it snowed a lot, and I loved it so much. I was writing again. Writing more than I had in a long, long time. Starting this here project, delving into my past to make sense of my present. For the first time since I left home, all of my diaries were in the same place. Austin went on vacation with his family and, with our bedroom all to myself, I started a screenplay about a dog walker in Boston. I’d sit down at my desk at ten in the morning and suddenly it was four in the afternoon.
Renting a ten-foot cargo van out of a garage in Greenwich Village, we helped Austin’s boss move stuff out of her country house upstate. She needed to sell it sooner than she ever expected. A prim English woman born the same year as Princess Diana, she cut her teeth in London’s nascent punk scene before moving to the East Village in 1986 where she’d host these huge parties for all her friends with champagne on ice in the bathtub and a muted La Dolce Vita playing on the TV. She had every issue of just about every magazine, organized by year and bound up with twine. Insisting we ask for anything we wanted, there was this copy of Blitz with a close-up face split down the middle, half-Madonna and half-Thatcher—“Was This The Woman of The Eighties?” Austin asked if we could have it and she told him, “No.” Dropping her off in Brooklyn, she said something so simple and so beautiful about family that, once again, was lost to me before I was able to write it down. Anyway. It’s women like her why I live in New York City.
Vincent was born. Awake in the middle of the night and sitting at the edge of my bed, looking at my phone, I saw my sister’s baby for the first time. I’ll never forget how it felt to smile at those pictures. I don’t think I’d ever felt myself smile quite like that before. We got tickets to see Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett for his very last live performance and I felt like I was fulfilling some sort of prophecy. Like the prodigal Burns son returned, notwithstanding whatever the actual moral of that story is. My New York City-born father, his New York City-born parents, his New York City-born parents’ parents, they all adored Tony Bennett. And here I was, witness to the end. The whole time he was on stage, I swear I could feel the tense hope of every person in Radio City Music Hall that he wouldn’t get lost up there. My mom got fired from her job. I was folding laundry when she called me to talk about it, and I started crying before she did. Feeling her sadness, knowing her anger. I can feel doomed by that anger sometimes. Earlier that same month, my dad called to say he wasn’t able, financially, to help me out with one of my student loans anymore. It made him cry, having to tell me this. Both of my parents, thinking and feeling the same thing at the same time, admitting it to me if not to each other—I’ve worked all my life, and for what? That night, after my mom told me about her job, Austin and I saw Caroline or Change on Broadway and I can’t imagine I’ll ever see a finer piece of theater. I don’t know music, not technically, so I couldn’t tell you if it was strings or bells that swell in its last moments, whether that final struck piano key was major or minor—but it howled, and it was glorious, and I heard it all.
Sitting in Fort Greene Park, a boy threw an egg at the back of my head. By the time I turned around, he and his friends had run away. I finished Molly Shannon’s memoir that same afternoon and it made me weep. Her Fresh Air did too. Regarding the loss of her mother as a child, she said, “I have a real feeling of, like, ‘You’re up to bat, Molly. Come on. Let’s do this.’ And maybe some things that other people complain about, I don’t relate to, because I just feel so lucky that we’re all alive.” She talked about the urgency of asking her father the “million dollar questions” that only a child could ask while that parent was still around. Still alive. On that park bench, with egg yolk in my hair, I began to think about sitting my family members down and recording them answer questions about their lives. I watched Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell a couple weeks later, and Marty Scorsese’s Italianamerican a couple months after that. Quoting the museum president who was quoting some psychologist, I began telling my visitors, every time I had the chance, “The resilient child is one who knows their family’s history.” And I read my first book by Annie Ernaux. Whispers, each of them, and only getting louder, as I turned 29 years old. Knowing we’d all be in different places for Christmas, I told my family we should pick a Saturday in December for a visit with our 80something-year-old Nana. Sick with COVID that weekend, I had to stay home. Lindsay texted me, saying, “We were talking about you as a baby and how you had a very shrill cry but that it’s all worth it now. After a moment of no one saying anything, Nana said, ‘There is nothing wrong with that kid. He’s a great son, a great grandson, a great friend.’ Me and mom both started crying.”
On New Year’s Eve, I posted all these pictures of myself taken over the past year, standing in front of this full-length mirror in one of the museum bathrooms. From Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, the caption read, “The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” Circled in pen and marked with a heart, I’d annotated that passage years earlier, back when I read it for the first time, during a particular weekend’s bus ride to New York City, where I’d lose my virginity. At a party at our friend Al’s apartment, surrounded by a throng of Park Slope mid-20somethings, I had the thought, “I’m going to be younger at 30 than I was at 20.” It came out of nowhere but I’m holding it dear.
Invited to the museum’s big annual gala, I wore my black sheep sweater and encouraged the couple other Educators in attendance to wear our Local 2110 Union pins. “Realizing I’m something of an enfant terrible,” I tweeted that day. After chatting with us for a couple minutes, just before he walked away, the museum president’s husband said, “And how cute—all your little buttons.” Edward Burns was there, the actor, and it took all I had not to tell him my theory that we’re related. His brother is a screenwriter named Brian Burns. I suppose I’ll need to start going by Brian Thomas Burns, in such an event. I went up to New Hampshire for a week in May to do my oral history project, first with my dad, then with my mom. It changed my life. On Mother’s Day, sitting on the front porch, I finished another Annie Ernaux book, in which she writes, “I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.” And on Father’s Day, I was exactly 29 years, 6 months, and 24 days old—the same exact age my mom was, the day she gave birth to me. Again—how couldn’t I believe in God?
Austin got a new job that had an initial nine weeks of fully remote training. He’d be working from home. When I’m not at the museum, I’m at our bedroom’s desk, writing. Or as some might say—working from home. Austin eventually decided to spend most of those nine weeks down in North Carolina, living with his family. He knows me so well, and does so much to make me happy, and for that—I’m sorry, Austin. “Be among the living, Brian,” that’s what I kept telling myself, during those weeks on my own. And so I got coffee with Dan, and with Emily. Drinks at Julius’ with Al. I set up my friend Jarod with my friend Ethan and when it turned out they might be too similar, I took that as a compliment. Staying late one night at the museum, without even asking for it, Maite read my chart and Laureen read my tarot cards. Maite explained that “your anger is the key to your life’s purpose” and Laureen pulled The Queen of Cups, Two of Wands, and The Empress. Watching Stop Making Sense in theaters, a man stood up from his seat, right down the row from me, and turned very slowly to look back at the audience. He knocked over his popcorn and didn’t even care, he hardly seemed to notice. I was waiting for him to pull out a gun. I was scared for my life. And it was my five year anniversary of moving to New York City. All day long, I’d sung our praises. Celebrated our compatibility. And here it was, taking the form of a crazed man at Regal Essex Crossing—my comeuppance. I lived to tell. That very same day, I got an email from a guy who very possibly could help make my dreams come true. I didn’t realize it, not yet, but this guy? I used to walk his dog. I love New York.
The morning of my 30th birthday, I woke up in New Hampshire. As always, we were up there for Thanksgiving. Me and Austin and both my sisters and—surprise surprise, flown in from Boise—Shannon. We hadn’t seen each other in two-and-a-half years and this was her first time ever meeting Austin. Hearing them talk, and laugh, hearing them get to know each other from across the room, it was like how a tree must feel, when all its leaves come back in spring. Jillian wanted to avoid Sunday’s traffic and I wanted to be back in New York City for the night of my birthday, for 11:17 p.m., so I said my goodbyes to my parents, to Lindsay and Cody and Vincent and Mia, and to Shannon, whose flight home was out of Boston—naturally. We hit so much traffic. Putting my face in my hands at one point, Jillian asked if I was okay and I said, “It’s just turned out to be incredibly depressing, spending my thirtieth birthday cooped up in a car.” The original plan was for Jillian to drop us off at an NJ Transit station in Newark but, about as soon as we crossed the New York state line, she offered to drive us straight home to Brooklyn. Making an exception, for me. I thanked her up and down but she wouldn’t have any of it. She said to me, “You’re my brother.” Austin and I went to an Italian place in our neighborhood. We got martinis, and this cauliflower soufflé, gnocchi and a warm octopus salad, and gelato for dessert. I talked about my parents getting older and, for just a moment, I cried right there in the restaurant. Pretending to catch my tear in the martini glass. Austin was already climbing up our stoop when I said from the curb, “I’m gonna take a walk and listen to a song.” He understood me completely. It was cold and the streets were empty and I listened to—what else—the opening tracks of the albums Madonna made at 30, and at 39. No end and no beginning. And now I find I’ve changed my mind. It felt so good to be alone. Almost home, I could see into our bedroom from the street. The light was on. And had I been just some lonesome boy, walking down the street all by himself, a perfect stranger, I think I’d look up into that window at this fleeting still life and say to myself, low enough so only I could hear, “Lucky.”