Page 7 of People We Meet on Vacation

Instantly, I know she’s right. She’s seen right through the word vomit to the center of things. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” I groan-laugh. “My life turned out how I hoped it would, and now I just misswantingsomething.”

Shaking with the weight of it. Humming with the potential. Staring at the ceiling of my crappy, pre-R+Rfifth-floor walk-up, after a double shift serving drinks at the Garden, and daydreaming about the future. The places I’d go, the people I’d meet—who I’dbecome. What is there left to want when you’ve got your dream apartment, your dream boss, and your dream job (which negates any anxiety over your dream apartment’s obscenely high rent, because you spend most of your time eating at Michelin-starred restaurants on the company’s dime anyway)?

Rachel drains her glass and globs some Brie onto a cracker, nodding knowingly. “Millennial ennui.”

“Is that a thing?” I ask.

“Not yet, but if you repeat it three times, there’ll be aSlatethink piece on it by tonight.”

I throw a handful of salt over my shoulder as if to ward off such evil, and Rachel snorts as she pours us each a fresh glass.

“I thought the whole thing about millennials was that we don’t get what we want. The houses, the jobs, the financial freedom. We just go to school forever, then bartend ’til we die.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but you dropped out of college and went after what you want. So here we are.”

“I don’t want to have millennial ennui,” I say. “It makes me feel like an asshole to not just be content with my amazing life.”

Rachel snorts again. “Contentment is a lie invented bycapitalism,” Art School Rachel says, but maybe she has a point. Usually, she does. “Think about it. All those pictures I post? They’re selling something. A lifestyle. People look at those pictures and think, ‘If only I had those Sonia Rykiel heels, that gorgeous apartment with the French oak herringbone floors,thenI’d be happy. I’d swan about, watering my houseplants and lighting my endless supply of Jo Malone candles, and I’d feel my life in perfect harmony. I’d finallylovemy home. I’drelishmy days on this planet.’”

“You sell it well, Rach,” I say. “You seem pretty happy.”

“Damn right I am,” she says. “But I’m not content, and you know why?” She plucks her phone off the table, flips to a specific picture she has in mind, and holds it up. A shot of her reclined on her velvet sofa, laden in bulldogs with matching scars from their matching lifesaving snout surgeries. She’s dressed in SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and isn’t wearing a lick of makeup.

“Because every day there are back-alley puppy mills breeding more of these little guys! Getting the same poor dogs pregnant over and over again, producing litter upon litter of puppies with genetic mutations that make life hard and painful. Not to mention all the pit bulls doubled up in kennels, rotting in puppy prison!”

“Are you saying I should get a dog?” I say. “Because the whole travel-journalist thing kind of precludes pet ownership.” Truthfully, even if it didn’t, I’m not sure I could handle a pet. Ilovedogs, but I also grew up in a house teeming with them. With pets come fur and barking and chaos. For a fairly chaotic person, that’s a slippery slope. If I went to a shelter to pick up a foster dog, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t come home having adopted six of them and a wild coyote.

“I’m saying,” Rachel replies, “that purpose matters more than contentment. You had a ton of career goals, which gave you purpose. One by one, you met them.Et voilà: no purpose.”

“So I need new goals.”

She nods emphatically. “I read this article about it. Apparently the completion of long-term goals often leads to depression. It’s the journey, not the destination, babe, and whatever the fuck else those throw pillows say.”

Her face softens again, becomes the ethereal thing of her most-liked photographs. “You know, my therapist says—”

“Your mom,” I say.

“She was being a therapist when she said this,” Rachel argues, by which I know she means, Sandra Krohn was being decidedly Dr. Sandra Krohn, in the same way that Rachel is sometimes decidedly Art School Rachel, not that Rachel was actually in a therapy session. Beg as Rachel might, her mother refuses to treat Rachel as a patient. Rachel, however, refuses to see anyone else, and so they remain at an impasse.

“Anyway,” Rachel continues, “she told me that sometimes, when you lose your happiness, it’s best to look for it the same way you’d look for anything else.”

“By groaning and hurling couch cushions around?” I guess.

“By retracing your steps,” Rachel says. “So, Poppy, all you have to do is think back and ask yourself, when was the last time you were truly happy?”

The problem is, I don’t have to think back. Not at all.

I know right away when I was last truly happy.

Two years ago, in Croatia, with Alex Nilsen.

But there’s no finding my way back to that, because we haven’t spoken since.

“Just think about it, will you?” Rachel says. “Dr. Krohn is always right.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”

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