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...
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 —...
There is a phrase I have been embracing in my own life, and, by definition, have repeated to several people around me, because I am an external processor who needs to say things out loud for them to feel real: “Strong opinions, loosely held.” I didn’t make it up. (It seems like a strategist did in 2008.) But I saw...
Casting off I arrived in Ireland with two sweaters, both borrowed, and one pair of pants. My 15-liter daypack, clean but worn, was a relic from the last time I’d seen Seán, when we were both trailing around Latin America and met in a hostel dorm in Cali, Colombia. I didn’t need sweaters then. I haven’t needed sweaters since, really,...
I leave for Lisbon tonight. It’ll be my first international trip in well over a year. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m ready. I don’t know how to answer them. Am I ready logistically? I suppose—I have a new suitcase and a renewed passport and two weeks of accommodation booked. Emotionally? Also yes. I’m sad to leave New York, but...
Hello from the passenger seat of my beloved (and newly reconstructed) Penny as the valleys of central Pennsylvania rush by my window. Smoke hangs in long coils above the copses of oaks and aspens. Blue-grey clouds, long and low like train-flattened pennies, crowd in the rearview as raindrops splat and shake their way up the windshield. I’m on the road...
Welcome to New York (It’s Been Waiting for You) A fun little essay in which I tell you my life philosophy and how it served me as three (okay, it was actually four) very unpleasant things happened to me all at once. Blood (not mine), penises (also not mine), and vehicle damage (sadly, mine) are all involved; take this as...
No tears this time around. Wild how three months will do that to you, isn’t it? Take you and reflect you back to yourself, warped and wavy along the edges. Time is funny that way. Years feel infinite until you break them up into their disparate days. Every time I sit down to write one of these, I feel like...
Rereading my Q1 goal wrap-up to prepare for writing this one made me cry. I’ve been crying fairly regularly lately—the complete dissolution of some of the major parts and people in your life will do that do you—and this wasn’t a particularly bad jag. Just a few chest-shaking, staccato-breathing moments and a couple of sharp inhales. My face didn’t turn...