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...
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...
Books have had to do some heavy lifting this year. Personally, they continued to be a major source of comfort and companionship as I traveled to all the places year 26 took me, from Mexico to Cuba to Belize to Guatemala to several places in the States. They were a distraction and a salve post-breakup, at least when I wasn’t...
I watched the coronavirus news spread from Asia to Europe in the early weeks of 2020. Then to the United States. Then in mid-March, it reached Guatemala, where I was living at the time, and began to impact my daily life. Even as the country shut its borders, instituted daily curfews, and emptied of tourists, I didn’t recognize how long-lasting...
Here I am, laying on a collection of embroidered pillows in the Airbnb I escaped to three days ago when I couldn’t handle living in a hostel under quarantine with eight strangers and Diego in a country not one of us belonged to for one second longer, reflecting on what goal-setting means during a global pandemic. I’m watching content roll...
“If you could choose to live here in Cuba or to live anywhere in the world, what would you pick?” asked Diego. While Yasmany thought about his response, I watched sunburned blonde tourists struggle to negotiate their way into one of the “Gran Car, Rentar Una Fantasia” vintage taxis lined up behind us, rims gleaming. “Well, let’s see,” responded Yasmany....
Walking through La Havana Vieja, I couldn’t stop taking pictures of streetscapes. I’d be walking down one block when I’d catch a glimpse of another and hurry there to capture it before it—I don’t know, disappeared? Changed? Before the onion seller moved his cart? The pristine vintage Studebaker pulled away? The wind moved the sheets drying from the windows into...
Going Back Before We Go Forward: 2019 Recap It has been a YEAR, y’all. I wrote about it all in my end-of-2019 goals check-in, but I’ll give you the quickest of summaries here, too: I’ve lived in Buenos Aires and in Mexico City. I’ve spent three and a half months traveling around my own country, falling in love with its...
This end-of-year check-in feels like eating a caramel apple. I know it’ll be a little unwieldy—especially since I didn’t, for the second year in a row, do a Q3 check-in and now have to process six months of data and life versus three—and a little uncomfortable. Holding yourself up to the light always is. But once I get past that,...