Doubting Thomas
Graduation season in New York this year takes me back to the first graduation season I witnessed, in May 2014, when all the Mizzou journalism students are buzzing on campus because Tom, the graduating senior urban legend, started writing profiles of his friend group and posting them on Facebook. This “autofiction” genre. Tom did ones of Brian, Rob, Garrett, closely observing how they would react to things, what they spoke of, how they made him feel — these were people I’d only get to know later, but at the time, it felt like I’d gotten a nice intro to them via Tom’s blog. It was true journalism of the soul, memoir through the eyes of the ensemble. I loved it.
Over the years, I partially befriended Tom, sometime around the period where he’d graduated but would still come on campus for the annual True/False film festival. I recall telling him and Garrett in 2015 — in one of the downtown dive bars I was too young to be in — how I wanted to go work in Grand Forks, North Dakota to cover canola farming and the impending Trump rallies that were beginning to pop up. Tom was so happy to hear about this, said I had the right idea. He actively encouraged people to get internships in bumfuck towns instead of trying to go to New York.
I have to credit Tom as the first one to dare to insinuate journalism has morphed into being about reporting and not about adventure rendered through prose, which fueled my ambition to go to Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Des Moines, all to intern and ramp up my eye for the unexpected in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Of course, he was quite shy when I thanked him for this my senior year, while I was reporting on the first Trump election.
Tom was never one to take praise lightly. He said at the time that he wanted to go to DC for the same reason he’s always wanted to go to Vegas, and that he hopes I’ve found a perverted form of happiness there. (This happened to be a month before I decided my journalism career was probably over).
As one of the most lauded talents in our social circles even long after he had left campus, Tom had an ear for scene I still reference in my work today. He knew how to utilize the correct amount of sensory detail to immerse the reader into the setting, something I still can’t quite land. Tom is content to write about the natural world we live in, not needing it to ‘make sense’ or scratch for meaning in a higher order register than the one he’s currently sitting in.
He didn’t care about impressing other people, which just made him more impressive. Not that that was any of Tom’s concern. You could always count on messaging Tom for a good book recommendation or some tips on form, but never assume he would show up to your birthday party for long.
At the time he was doing these profiles I loved so much, I was just a freshman, so I didn’t get to know Tom that well in that era — I only saw him around much because I’d worked with one of his best friends on a consignment store internship (she later told me she always assumed she’d end up with Tom, but she started dating their friend Brendan instead senior year. Tom seemed to be her one that got away).
Outside of dissecting his prose, I heard stories of his free spirited obliviousness to ‘the need to fit into’ some templated voice. Through his profiles, all of which I read, I found out Tom was only effusive with those he trusted, many of whom were his female friends, but everyone who got profiled seemed to be male. The underclassmen girls all wanted to join Tom’s future harem.
But Tom didn’t need a harem, as Tom was his own person, complete with a signature awkward apathy to most people not already in his inner circle. While everyone else was worried about job security after graduation, he practically shrugged in the face of our fears of being able to find journalism gigs in a changing media landscape that was quickly getting defunded. Tom said as long as he could write, he’d do what it takes to get great material. He was deeply cynical about superficial compliments, always alluding to his own doubts about whether people had closely read what he wrote, whether they were sincere or not; but he was all-around pleasant and friendly and gentle once you knew him.
In my eyes, he’s still the most successful product of our journalistic cohort, although some might say otherwise[i]. At one point, everyone was buzzing because Tom had decided to drive a truck around America and had been hired to write a GQ feature on it — the types of insane wild situations that were bona fide Tom.
As college ended, I was more and more frequently looking to him to read some of my writing. He was always kind to oblige, there for me when I was going through real heartbreak in 2018. When I sent him some poetry that year, he sent this back:
Last I heard of Tom, he’s now a field botanist somewhere in Missouri or Vermont. His bio says he’s an ex-wildland firefighter, and that he’s written for Esquire and GQ and The Nation. The idea of Tom being in New York ... I don’t think he would’ve liked it here.
Tommy, on the other hand, didn’t like it here. He was also a Midwesterner but living in NYC when I first moved to the city in 2022, a friend I met through the Twitter apparatus here. On my first night as a big city resident, I went to his birthday party in Chelsea with Ankit, Jeffrey, Andy, and Dan. Jeffrey and Andy would eventually move to San Francisco, where they speculated on what was going on with me and Tommy for years from afar. They weren’t the only ones.
Before Tommy told me in September 2025 he was moving back to Chicago, a year after we’d stopped being friends, he was one of the only people in the city I felt legitimately attached to.
Tommy and I couldn’t be more different, something he clocked as a problem faster than I in my infatuated state did. He was slow at writing: he told me he didn’t even learn to read til he was well past age eight, and only did, reluctantly and angrily, after his speech therapist mother locked him in a room over summer break and forced him to do it every day. For some reason he loved Anne Frank though, even going so far to have a framed picture of her hanging in his room. He also loved Dolly Parton, who shares a birthday with me.
We originally began hooking up when my Asian Canadian software engineer ex-situationship humiliated me by dumping me for a girl at church while I was out of town. Tommy found the resulting infamous viral “I want a fucking boyfriend” piece “heroically” bold, and told me, “it’d be an honor to be your rebound.” In a time where I had no sense of identity, he was the only one who made me feel less embarrassed that I primarily used Shiz With Crys as an outlet for my intense feelings of shame. He also was the first person who said, “fuck your mom,” literally, when I most needed to hear it, when I didn’t know what it’d be like to have someone pay close attention without making me feel judged.
Now instead of me reading Tom’s work hungrily, it was Tommy reading my work hungrily. He memorized entire pieces I’d done, quipping direct quotes from them, claiming he’d spend a day skimming my archive to see what I’d been up to before we would hang out, as if this was the most normal thing to do. He wasn’t analytically that fluent, so I was hardly intellectually stimulated. But I was emotionally enthralled that someone cared enough to remember things I’d said, and wonder why I said them.
The sex may have been a bit mid (mostly because we were really height mismatched), but it was the moments Tommy would listen to me talk after that got me attached. He prided himself on being a good listener. The thing about Tommy was he could shape shift to what I wanted him to be — there didn’t need to be a Real Tommy when he was with Crystal, who was Real enough for the both of us.
Then one day the Real Tommy came through, when my friend Zeke randomly messaged Tommy to declare he was “obviously into me” and should just ask me out already. Zeke had good reason to believe this; I’d told him about things Tommy said to me that broke the ‘friends with benefits’ typical staging. Such as how, when I sadly declared I wanted to be the one that got away for Asian-Canadian software guy, “I already was” that figure for Tommy — “my future girlfriend is gonna hate you because I’ll always be wondering about that hot smart broad I hooked up with in summer 2023”!
Yeah, hot smart broad. Poetic way to think of me. Almost as poetic as when he also said once, in response to me asking flirtatiously what his favorite body part of mine was —
“Your brain,” he said while I was straddling him. I stopped kissing him. “Uh.. what?”
“Don’t get me wrong, the pussy’s divine, but I’d give it up forever to be around your brain forever!”[iii]
Like a small infection underneath my skin, I started noticing me getting attached to Tommy’s validation. I started feeling like maybe he saw something special in me, because why else would he so obviously simp for me, right? He was the one that had told me though that he loved being a Good Luck Chuck to women, the last man they sleep with before they find their forever boyfriend. Now, what if that meant Tommy was waiting, like in the movie, for a girl to find him good enough to be her boyfriend?
This shattered when Tommy came to me, said he had heard this from Zeke (who didn’t tell me what he’d done until it was too late…) and that we should stop hooking up.
“What??” I said. At this point, I didn’t think the sex itself had to stop — just continue with the conviction that we shouldn’t date. But Tommy insisted now that he had to ‘protect me’ and that if we kept hooking up, my feelings would only get deeper. Which was absurd, because they probably only became deeper because of what ensued after.
Andy and Ankit and Jeffrey thought we’d started dating, because at potlucks and house parties, Tommy would act protective and caring, like a perfect boyfriend figure, except no, we weren’t hooking up anymore or even official, just ‘best friends’, as he said, I was one of the best people he knew, but it just ‘wouldn’t work for us to be more than friends,’ he told Ankit one night in the Uber home from my holiday party to go to a Sovereign House event.
I pleaded with Tommy to stop sending mixed signals, while he kept insisting he didn’t have any feelings for me, that I was beautiful but too different than he, that I only saw the side of him that he showed me.
Yanick, my shared best friend with my other long time friend Nate (from Nothing of Note), heard about this and has continuously been in disbelief at the extent of the gaslighting. “He’s fucking psycho pretending he had no needs or desires! He never acted like a real person!” he fumed to me in 2026 while we reminisced on the way to Kathy’s birthday party.
Tommy kept doubling down, insisting there was nothing between us. I didn’t know what his deal was, or what it’d take, but I started pulling away gradually. We only reconciled, briefly, in 2024 after Ankit started having psychotic breaks from being addicted to adderall and getting into suicidal fights with his girlfriend Sara. Nate was dating Ankit’s friend Maxine at the time, and Maxine was getting harassed by Sara as a way to fuck with Ankit, trying to dox Maxine’s family and posting daily Instagram stories about us. (To this day I don’t trust people’s mental breakdowns for this reason if there’s an obvious attention bend, ‘feminist empathy’ be damned) This escalated so badly that I ended up having to talk to Tommy about it when he became the de facto Ankit caretaker[ii]. Meanwhile, I screamed at Ankit to never talk to me again or I’d fuck him up after Sara began smearing me on her stories. For a while, things with me and Tommy were better, as we had a shared enemyship, even if it was in the fucked up form of watching Ankit live stream ‘being abused’ by Sara while they were sitting listless at a diner. (“Honestly psychotic,” I said on a three way call with Nate and Yanick while we monitored one of these streams.)
Even outside of the Ankit drama, Tommy and I eventually started hanging out again that spring, although always “platonically”. The end came when he took me on what seemed like yet another ‘platonic’ bordering romantic date, as we’d been doing things like watching Dune and walking around Lower Manhattan, where he’d pause to kneel and tie my shoe.
This time was a waterfront sushi dinner and stroll around the carnival area, where he told me about some of the drama back home with his Chicago friends, who he visited every two months. He carried my backpack and took as many pictures of me as I wanted under the DUMBO bridge. Then…. he told me he had just gotten a girlfriend, but that he’d hoped we could still be friends. Soooo… why didn’t you tell me this earlier?
There’s a lot I could write after this, but there’d probably be less of a point of rendering the aftermath, where I ran away from him, turned around and cried, “Che vuoi,” while breaking down crying and telling him to block me on Instagram, for if I blocked him he’d always find a way to make it about me, my feelings, not his, none of which he would ever ever tell to me. I’m never going to be good enough for you, aren’t I!
And then, as the months and years peeled on, I discovered to my horror that there are no relics of how our story went. The moments worth rendering were not sensorial, at all; they only live in some neomemory haze, ones I cry at not being able to cry at. I couldn’t name a single thing we had in common, even now, to where I felt as if maybe I myself in this period didn’t exist.
The only thing I faintly concluded to myself, eventually, was that perhaps this all started when Tommy said he thought my stated desire for a boyfriend was raw, ‘hot’ even. And this caught me off guard because what he wanted was my structural position, not me. The moment the Real Crystal emerged, he was out. And I was intoxicated by how he wanted my wanting, and the Real Tommy never had to appear because the want is what he’s mirroring, but to even be wanted for my wanting… thus, Tommy successfully objectified me in the only way I’d ever wanted to be, at the level I couldn’t see myself, as if he was a foot fetishist who only got off to my Achilles heel. I was given this idea of being good enough to finally want, because he wanted. But there were no words he could produce in time to tell me.
One time, I asked him if he missed hooking up. He sucked in his breath as if I punched him, and clear as day, choked out the words as if they were daggers, “You are… very beautiful… I would’ve been… very happy if we’d continued to be friends with benefits.”
His eyes stayed closed the whole time. It was then that I realized, just like the doubting Thomas of the Bible, he couldn’t believe in my realness unless he could see it for himself. But what do you do when someone has never seen you, but never looked?
Now I can’t remember anything except the last things I noticed he put in a Spotify playlist I was sure about me. Too exposing to render his selection. But one of the lyric lines goes,
I know I shouldn’t love you
I know I shouldn’t love you but I do
[i] One time I saw Tom at a party being cornered by Dana, who people would say is probably most conventionally successful today, as she is a famous top subscribed Substack newsletter writer and a darling of New York Media now; too bad her debut novel was kind of mid. She should’ve stuck with critical commentary like everyone knows her for.
[ii] Tommy and I talked about the situation psychoanalytically, how maybe this bout of insanity was the result of rebounding. Sara was allegedly the first girl Ankit had feelings for since his devastating obsession with scene girl Cassidy, who he met at Macro Sweetynickels’ 2023 Brooklyn house party (a party I went to with Eve and Sanjay, where Eve joked that we should all be on NDA that if you came to this party, you have to write about it. I met the following people for the first time: Ariel, Caylee, Elijah, “RFH”, Robby, Ava, Macy. Months later no one remembered me.)
[iii] I still can’t believe this is a real line…