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 went back to ceramics today after a month away. Our studio was closed for August so that our teacher could put in new shelves — long stretches of raw wood twice as tall as I am — and plan our curriculum for this upcoming year and go on vacation in Italy, where each day her family ate lunch with one...
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...
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 spent the last minute of 28 and the first minute of 29 wet and naked and surprisingly not cold. “This is 20 percent for the checkmark of it all,” I’d told Cam as we walked towards the cab, my arm hooked around her shoulders like a parenthesis, hers tucked around my waist. (I’d promised myself I would swim in...
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 —...
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...
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...