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...
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...
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...
I know January 1st is arbitrary. I know it. I know nothing changes when the ball drops on the 31st and the clock ticks forward into a new day, into a new year. But then I hear myself talking to a friend and saying, “Yes, I spent four months of this year in New York,” and have to correct myself:...
Hullo, friend. Here are some things that have not changed in the last four years: my love for public accountability and periodic self-reflection,my belief in building the life you want,my appreciation for all the lives I get to live,my trust in my own self to know what’s right for me and to make mistakes and to keep trying anyways,and my...
Hello! Here I am! Showing up on my little corner of the internet, writing down what I hope this year contains, as I’ve done once, twice, three times over (and a dozen times in an old notebook before I took myself and my ambitions digital)! I don’t think about setting annual goals as navigating some brave new world. Or as...
I hold no illusions that the world will change when the clock strikes midnight tonight. We will still be living in a country that is mismanaging a pandemic, built on a capitalistic system that disproportionally punishes people of color, led by an out-of-touch man who won’t do enough to change the status quo (even if he’s from a different party...