The last prank I ever pulled.

Sometimes it really seems like it’ll be funny… only… it’s very much not.

I’ve done a lot of truly stupid shit in my life.

In my 49 years on this earth, I’ve gone for the wrong guy like 99.99% of the time. Bartenders, bad boys, ever-so-charming scoundrels who turned out to be cheaters as scoundrels so often do.

And the reason I say it’s not a full 100% is because I’ll never know what might have become of my relationship with a very, very handsome, extremely smart, super thoughtful, sensitive, funny and considerate 6’2 blonde named Chris who I started dating in college and was incredibly into and loved spending time with… until his family decided to move to Kansas City a few months after we started dating.

Sometimes I like to imagine myself and Chris navigating that long distance love letter writing stuff expertly, growing closer and closer despite the miles between us, only to later to get married and move to some super cool suburb of Chicago where I would have a career as a world famous author and he would be an Indiana Jones type archaeologist - bronzed skin, desert sun bleached hair, permanent 5 o’clock shadow, and a whip… and we would have three beautiful children named after famous American writers and a Chocolate Lab named Moby… but I digress.

I’ve driven way too fast around sharp curves, eaten questionable at best raw shellfish, given myself bangs, when I was 11 I dressed up as a nurse in scrubs for Halloween and when the parents came into the class party, I saw Ben’s mom in a wheelchair, and I made what in my head at the time, was an extremely funny joke about how we made the perfect pair as ‘doctor and patient’ only to then learn that she was suffering from some terrible disease and might not ever walk again, and once, when living in the city, I missed campfire s’mores so much, that I decided to recreate them in my apartment, over my gas stove, with a metal fork, which I only stopped to consider might be extremely hot and not at all something I would ever want to touch my skin, when it was quite literally stuck to and scalding my very unluckily assigned to my dumbass, lips.

Like I said, I’ve done some stupid shit. And I own it. We all do stupid shit. I’m absolutely positive I do tons of stupid shit at least once a week to this day.

But, there is this one thing I did, many years ago, which may take the cake for the dumbest Fucking thing I have ever done.

I was working as a waitress (no, not in a cocktail bar) at a brewpub. My boyfriend was a bartender there. We were in our twenties, no kids, not married. Everyone who worked there was essentially just like us. A bunch of twenty-somethings who thought we had it all figured out, and spent our nights hanging out after our shifts at the brewpub bar.

If my boyfriend was the “closing” bartender, I would stay until he was done. Which usually meant that I’d have more than a few drinks while waiting. After all, he would drive us home, so how much trouble could I really get into, right?

There were I think, three managers working there back then. And there would also always be one who would stay until the end of the night. Also, to “close”.

One of the managers was named Heidi. She was a very cool, very funny, super chill chick, maybe a few years older than I was. She was dating an artist and they had a tumultuous relationship at the time, one she and I would talk about often.

She trusted me. I trusted her. We told each other stuff people tell people they trust.

One night, she told me how personally terrifying it was for her to bring what’s called in that business, “the drop” (or in other words, all the money which had come in throughout the course of the day, in addition to what they had started with) from our building, across the poorly lit parking lot, up a dark set of stairs and into the infamously haunted building where the main office (and the safe) was located.