A truncated list of things I love: Dancing when The Pretenders come on. Gushing about the dried hydrangea arrangement on the counter at the coffeeshop and the picture of Dani that lights up my phone when she calls while I’m there. Blue sky, vermillion leaves, Billy Crystal sweaters, Sunday roast with gravy and popovers, hardcover books with thick pages to...
Tracey’s last audio message to me was extremely atmospheric. She left it while walking home from the subway. She’d just seen Aladdin. Lest I think she’d changed completely as a person since I saw her six weeks ago, she went to investigate hearsay about the musical, not because she thought she’d like it. She and a friend had heard that...
I’m almost nervous to write this goals update because my life feels like it is going so well that I wonder if, by subjecting myself to this ritualized review, I’ll find the cracks in it. I think about taking the “almost” out of that line before I realize it’s necessary. I’m not actually nervous. Being nervous is one of my...
Vermillion trees. Long, low houses roofed in red. Blue-gray mountains with frosted peaks. There's still snow here, in south Bulgaria, even though Easter was last Sunday at home and this Sunday here. Viki, our tour guide who chucks lukcheta — small honey- and mint-flavored candies named for the onions they look like — at us when we get a trivia...
I said I was going to live my last day of 2022 one half hour at a time and then I did. I read in bed and highlighted lines I loved from the book I’m reading. “Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk.” (Barkskins.) I texted people I wanted to see. I walked to the park and pulled...
When I was still going to twice-weekly mass but before I got glasses, I used to see the candles around the altar of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church as hazy white halos. My nearsightedness blurred the candle’s flames until they looked like the Holy Spirit in a Rembrandt painting: orbs of diffused buttery light pulsing against the...
You are 28 and you feel like a rubbed-raw carcass, scraps of flesh clinging to the bone. Your new therapist tells you that it must be both exhilarating and exhausting to be in your head, to process the way you do. Yes, you think — and say, because you believe in a fairly short line between thinking and saying —...
I’m writing this on the road south from San Sebastián. I’m wearing jeans that button all the way up, though right now the top button is undone, because in the hour before leaving this goodie bag of a city — small, cheap joys on every corner, wrapped up in a bright cerulean bay — I left no taste untasted. That’s...
I am behind on things that I, if not the U.S. government, recognize as entirely arbitrary. My tax returns. (I filed for an extension though, don’t you worry!) Getting my gallery wall framed and up in my new house. (More on that in a second.) Writing and posting this Q1 2022 goals check-in. I’m embracing being behind. It’s the Spanish...