1. Quit job
Michael cries. You wish you could say that you didn't expect it, but you do and he does, falling all over you and sobbing into your shoulder. It makes for the most uncomfortable ten minutes of your life and all you can do is hold him.
When you feel him begin to wind down, you loosen your hug on him, hoping he'll take the hint, but he only grips harder and between hiccups, he asks in a watery voice to see your breasts at least once before you go.
You don't come back from lunch, unable to face Michael and feign food poisoning. At twenty past one Jim appears at your front door with a bottle of champagne and an unread memo from Michael saying just one breast would suffice.
4. Pack
You've been pilfering boxes from the warehouse for weeks, but the growing pile doesn't motivate you to start the process. Your move out date is looming, the highlighted calendar tiles moves nearer every day, so you steel yourself, take a weekend and just do it.
Jim offers to help, but you decline. You need this to yourself, a private memorial to things that may never be seen again. All you can afford is a small loft and there may not be room for all the remnants of your life and this is your time to say goodbye.
This doesn't stop Jim from trying to help, but he's in the way and for every surface you clear, he takes you, christening every room, every table, every counter and every floor until you don't think you could ever pack again, or walk.
It takes a week to get through your single bedroom, kitchen, living room and bathroom and you feel sore and sated.
6. Attend surprise going away party
You know about this from the get go after Michael handed you the memo, to hand to Angela, ordering her to plan your surprise going away party. She huffs about it, glowering disapprovingly like it your fault, but you like ice cream cake and almost look forward to see how Michael will spoil Angela's plans.
It goes surprisingly well and almost uneventful. You walk in after lunch, twenty minutes late because it was Dwight's duty to distract you and you spent lunch guarding your car from raccoons because, well, it's just a fear you have now. There is ice cream cake in Michael's favorite flavors, an inappropriate card with an even more inappropriate joke written inside and a hefty gift certificate for art supplies that brings moisture to your eyes.
For a moment Angela's scowl turns to pride at the choice of gifts, but she squashes the smile before you can thank her and begins to divvy up the cake to Michael's delight.
You leave a thank you note with a framed sketch of Sprinkles wrapped in cartoon kitten paper on her desk the next evening.
7. Break up with boyfriend
It's inevitable and you both can feel it. You're moving out and moving on, faster than anything has ever moved in Scranton and he can't. He's a small town paper boy and no matter how he hates his job, he enjoys the static.
You have a week before you leave, but you can't drag it out and tell him over dinner. You're eating off paper plates with Styrofoam cups of wine perched on packed and taped boxes. He chokes on his pizza, but recovers to flash a reassuring grin.
"I was way too good for you anyway."
You don't talk about it after this because you don't have to and you finish your movie in comfortable silence before he has you in bed for the final time. He moves against you, inside you and this is how you'll remember Scranton, and him, while you're away.
In the morning you get up together and make breakfast. He bumps your hip playfully and you wonder if you were ever really dating.
12. Unpack
You never actually get around to this and every night you return to your loft to trip over the same unopened box of dishes you've inconveniently placed between the door and the closest light switch.
You've been living out of suitcases and boxes and you like it. It leaves things open-ended, like you could pick up and leave at any moment if you really wanted.
After being stationary for so long, it's nice to have the freedom.
14. Make friends
It embarrasses you that you had to add this to your list, but it's your way of giving yourself a shove in the right direction. The sooner you do it, the sooner you can cross it off.
It works.
New York isn't like Scranton and there's new people everywhere. It starts with Sharon, from across the hall, who almost reminds you of Kelly, but in a subdued manageable way. You meet as your dragging your things up twenty-some flights of stairs and Sharon gasps in horror when she finds your doing this by yourself. Soon she has you sipping margaritas while her attractive and shirtless boyfriend brings up the rest of your stuff.
You find more at school and you can barely contain your delight when you're invited out for coffee with the boys you sit next to. They have a group going and you just might be the oldest one there, but you don't even notice as you lounge in an overstuff chair, the taste of chocolate and coffee on your tongue as you discuss the art shows around town and make plans to attend.
You feel ten times younger. You go out for drinks with Sharon and her friends, your friends too now, who hail you as a romance goddess for leaving your fiancé for the man of your dreams, breaking up his relationship and then leaving him in your dust. It sounds bad, but it's mostly true and here you can wear those events proudly because it means your have life experience now.
You frequent art shows and movies that require extra thought and discussions afterwards with your school friends who don't notice your age, but do notice your art. You meet every other night at the nearest coffee shop, a bohemian hole in the way where the barista flirts with you and gives you free drinks when you flirt back.
You run into Karen for the first time there.
15. Mend bridges
It doesn't start particularly remarkably. You meet some days, infrequently, for coffee because she's newer to the city than you are and admits with some distain that you are the only familiarity she has found. She came to the city for a job in a publishing house, something that never had a great interest for her, but it puts her on a different end of the only business she knows, paper, and she almost likes it.
Besides it gives her time for Call of Duty tournaments on the weekends, which she also admits are ten times better in the city.
You pretend to understand, but you don't because you have no idea what Call of Duty is. But you listen because she does the same for you and for her sake, you want to understand.
You don't talk about Scranton, or Jim, and you find it's safer to pretend you've only just met because for you this is a fresh start. You're not sure what is it for her, but you're happy to take it as it comes.
8. Begin lesbian affair with ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend
You never meant for it to happen, but somehow you manage to squeeze it in between the winter-art show and picking up your dry cleaning.
When it starts, she's had a single beer and you're in your apartment. You're almost friends now, though she still resents you and you don't blame her.
But its confession night and she's comfortable enough to confess that she's afraid this city is overwhelming her. She's getting nowhere fast, one more Scranton all over again and she's bitter at the way you've been thriving. She's always talked big, but somehow this city is just so much bigger than her.
Somehow this leads to kissing. And the confession that you might be a little gay. Later, she'll toast you for winning the admission game you didn't know you were apart of, but for now, she kisses you and shows you the dirty things she learned to do with her tongue in college.
You don't tell Jim this, despite your weekly phone calls.
25. Live art
You share an apartment with Karen, an affordable two bed room, that is mostly affordable because of her, but she doesn't hesitate to give you the spare room as a workshop.
You paint at night, to the noise of machine guns and heaving cursing from Karen's Call of Duty wind-down sessions. It rocks you, throws your work off balance and sometimes you miss a stroke from a particularly loud explosion.
You have an IPod, but you know the sound of violence creates more than any carefully constructed playlists.
You sketch her near the dawn, leaving pages of body parts and shadow that will someday make up a person. You're not sure how to sketch her as a whole, to capture the fierce, boldness she holds in her eyes because she's almost peaceful while sleeping.
You work for a design company, an upstart too new to really pay, but you sketch for them and build computer graphics and somehow head a department. You know the titles means even less than the name of the department, but the promotion brings champagne and an addition to your resume.
You take classes and paint landscapes and human figures. You fight with Karen over flirting baristas and free coffee and you scrape charcoal over innocent, pallid paper until its dark in consumption. You get drunk and construct stick figures from cherry stems and dissolve into giggles when your friends announce its time for go home.
You wake up to the dawn of the city, alive in color that never existed in Scranton and you continue on, searching for the next bullet to your list.