This essay was written in January 2015, while moving to Los Angeles from Chicago.

Here's Tanya and I looking like we may be a picture of our moms circa 1980.

“No way… I’m destined to be famous!”

I was beaming hard at Tanya. It was summer 2010. We were sixteen and sitting on a dock.

“No, same!” She was smiling the same way – our lips fuller than our caucasian counterparts. Our rich suburban high school friends, making s’mores and screaming R Kelly lyrics on the sand of the gritty lake house beach behind us. Our physical differences bonded us together. Tanya’s parents immigrated from the Philippines and my grandparents from Ecuador. W e were the racially ambiguous girls, the minorities. The 5’3’’, size 6 foot, little girls both plotting to take over the world.

She wanted to be a talk show host and I wanted to be a movie star.

We kicked our bare legs underneath the first splattering of constellations I had ever seen, “When I tell people my dream… they usually… make fun…”

“No, yeah. They don’t get it.” She plopped down next to me and the dock’s wood gave a bit, creaked a bit, under her tiny weight, all bundled in a scratchy blue blanket larger than both of us. We pondered as our girlfriends tried to get boys to give them their sweatshirts. Their voices whispers, ours proclamations! Both of us used to loud homes you have to scream in to be heard, neither of us understanding the concept of volume.

And when I talked about my dreams to Tanya, when I told her I’d wanted to act since I was eight, how much I loved movies, how I wanted to write one some day, maybe be a Matt Damon, write some killer screenplay then force the producers to let me star in it too — as I told her all this, Tanya didn’t look like she was holding in an eye roll or like she was waiting for her turn to speak. She looked like she wanted all my flamboyant, teenage dreams to come true. Tanya believed in me. And in that moment, I believed neither of us could die.

Lobsters hold the key to immortality.

The species Nephropidae, belonging to the family Crustacea, do not decay with time. Human cells, they disintegrate as we age ‘cause of this little telomerase thing. It’s this cap that protects chromosomes, but that little cap thingy, it wears away and the chromosome eventually dies. Like we eventually die. But lobster telomerase? Strong as hell – stays right on top of that chromosome and protects the shit out of it so when lobsters are sixty they’re just as strong as when they were twenty-two.

Lobster cells do not die. Human cells die. I will die.

“No. No. NO. I don’t want to anymore.” We were 18 standing outside the Theater Building of Columbia College Chicago for the first time. Open house. Tanya’s eyes were narrowing in front of me and I’m pretty sure I was thinking about dying.

“Maggie…”

Tanya grabbed the shoulders of my yellow pea coat and I jolted backward, almost into a brick wall. My curls flying everywhere – both the smacking wind and my neck slicing refusals. My heart bubbling and multiplying and racing. Tiny little heart beats pinching with each sprint up and down every vein in my body until I assume I’m running.

Am I running? Am I levitating? I don’t think my feet are on the ground and there are echoes, who are the echoes? I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want to inside.

“MAGGIE!” Tanya shoved her palms into my shoulders so I felt their heat. She looked right in me– both our eyes exclaiming – hers with aggression and mine with fear. My flat foot arches rooted to the ground under her tiny snowflake mittens. “MAGGIE! THEY WANT YOU TO GO IN AND ASK QUESTIONS! IT’S AN OPEN HOUSE. THEY ARE THERE FOR YOU TO ASK QUESTIONS. GO IN AND ASK QUESTIONS.”

“NO. TANYA. NO. DON’T YELL AT ME. I’M SERIOUS I DON’T WANT TO ANYMORE I SPOKE AND I DIDN’T MEAN IT AND I DON’T WANT TO GO HERE I DON’T WANT TO ACT ANYMORE. OK I’M FINE.”

Tears were welling and freezing. Skin was flaking off my nose. Tanya’s cape of black hair whipped to the side then back and her eyes loosened and my voice murmured, “I’m fine. Really. I don’t want to go to Columbia. It’s fine. I changed my mind. I can’t go in.” Tanya stepped back and her boots clacked on the sidewalk. Groups of prospective students hustling passed laughing. Parents looking up buildings to grey sky, clutching flapping folders to their puffy coats. No one looked at me but I was crying.

“Fine Mags. Fine,” she looked at a passing cab, “but you’re being a pussy.”

Tanya and I have appeared in friends' music videos.  We always look very deeply in love. — Tanya and I have appeared in friends' music videos. We always look very deeply in love.

Pussy. Noun. Informal: a cat. Vulgar Slang: North American, informal: weak, cowardly.

I don’t know if I have anxiety but I have something I like to call racing burning syndrome. I feel weak, cowardly. My body flutters and palpitates. Usually with anger but it can be any emotion too large for my body. I explode. My eyes are next, spewing tears, aggravating the final and worst step of all - my mouth flings open and expels fire.

I remember in high school yelling lines at my mom I‘d heard in movies while I was well aware that nothing I said even applied to our situation. MOM NOTHING IS EVER GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ME. My soul’s circuits shorting, every thought I've ever had but held in, sparking and sizzling out of every loose wire and me this small girl.

I always saw myself as this young little girl in this bath tub filled with millions of people more important than me, talking over me, bubbling up water, drowning in electric shocks.

You can kill a lobster with electric shocks. You can kill a lobster in a tub of boiling water. You can cut off its food supply or subject it’s body to infectious diseases. You can kill a lobster or you can leave it alone in the depths of the ocean and let it thrive. You can let it grow to 20 lb. and 140 years old. A fisherman in Maine found a 140-year-old lobster in 2009 and in 1977, Guinness records the biggest lobster finding at fucking 44 lb.

“That’s a fucking child.” I said as Tanya leaned over the diner booth to glimpse at the Monster Lobsters I had pulled up on my iPhone.

“No!” She yelled when she finally saw the picture. Neither of us noticed the waitress subtly slip the check on our table, nudging us to get the hell out. We’d been sitting in that booth for close to two hours and we were still planning on ordering Red Velvet Cake.

After Tanya harassed me into going inside the Theater Building Open House, I asked a few inconsequential questions to the students hanging around – how do you like Columbia? What shows are lined up for next season? I nodded and pretended I’d heard of the plays before. Oh awesome! The small talk leaving me exhausted. Talking to people can be exhausting. I often cringe when people approach me. No please, I don’t feel like talking, no please I really don’t feel like talking.

God.  Isn't she beautiful? — God. Isn't she beautiful?

When I first met Tanya she was talking. Loud. I instinctively hated her.

Suspicions and mistrust have been instilled in my psyche and so my life is a series of hate at first glances, yet the people I end up loving the most have always been the truly cringe worthy in the beginning. I remember seeing Tanya in my Freshman Algebra I class – this gorgeous tiny girl talking too loud to everyone, even the terrifyingly beautiful soccer boys, when none of us even knew each other’s names yet. Above all, this girl, she had no grounding in reality. None. Everything a joke, everything nonsense. Everyday she would yell at this guy in our class “OH MY GOD! DID YOU GET YOUR BRACES OFF?! OH MY GOD YOU LOOK GREAT!” Everyday, all year. He never even had braces.

And me? I was too afraid to ask a classmate if she could hand me the pencil I had dropped on the floor. I ended up reaching over my desk to grab it and tipped over - desk and all. Flat on my side. On the first day of high school. I laughed silently to myself, lying there on the floor, my shoulders shaking wildly. Everyone in the room thought I was crying.

Lobsters cry when they die. Scream.

For the majority of their lives, they make little to no sound but when they die they just let all the shit out. Screeching and piercing off-key, scratching violins with brittle fingernails.

By 18, I was near my screeching point.

All I wanted to do was act and be loud but the world seemed too large and my dreams too self indulgent. I hushed. Sucked in my passions and let them gurgle. But Tanya was as big as me, maybe smaller. Tanya wasn't blonde, didn't have blue eyes or drive a Lexus. She'd never even had a cool party or a boyfriend, and yet people listened to her. Respected her. How the hell did she manage that?

Tanya and me, we believe in Monster Lobsters. We believe that when we’re famous we will each purchase a 140-year-old lobster, and we believe we will build a perfect habitat for our lobsters and we will watch them grow. We believe our children will ride our monster lobsters, some twenty or thirty years from now when both our families live next door to each other. We believe our children will race them down the cul-de-sac and we believe our neighbors will be terrified and our husbands will wonder if its safe but we will shake back our hair and laugh and say “aw let the kids be kids!”

“We’ll move to LA after graduation.” Tanya bit into red velvet cake and bits of cheesecake frosting smacked on her lips.

“OK.” I said, but my hand was sweating under the table. Four years ago I was 18 and terrified. I had been writing letters to my parents prematurely explaining why I had run away to LA since I was 13. I had delivered Oscar acceptance speeches to my shower rack, had even imagined my children giving interviews about me after I’d died. Talking about what an inspiration mom was. I’d imagined every movie I wanted to star in, novel I wanted to write, place I wanted to live but every fantasy was just that – a blip of make believe in my little girl mind.

I think and Tanya does.

Like the hydrochloric acid that broke down all that turkey burger and fries and red velvet cake in my stomach as we sat at that diner, Tanya’s an enzyme. My catalyst. I dream about LA and one day, before we even started college, she says that we will move to LA. In a month we make the big move and it is all I can talk about and think about but Tanya’s my legs.

Tanya’s gonna name her lobster Banana Couch and mine’s gonna be Bruce after the boss and those two things are gonna grow for generations after us, and be passed on to our grandchildren, expanding wider than skyscrapers and mountains and even in the occurrence of the slight possibility that the two of us may not succeed in conquering the globe, I take comfort in the fact that, if by some chance we fail, at least I know the future post apocalyptic world will most definitely be ruled by my and Tanya’s 2,000 foot tall, immortal lobsters.