If you, like me until May, don’t really know what fibroids are: they are benign, dense, vascularized uterine tumors. Super common, but not always as enormous as mine. It was growing from the outside of my uterus, out into my abdomen. The only symptom was I had to pee all the time because it was squishing my bladder. I just thought it was aging.

It was discovered incidentally at a check-up appointment right before I was going to start the shots to freeze my eggs. They were like “Nope, that’s gotta come out. We can’t reach your ovary. That thing is huge.”

On the MRI I got a few weeks later it reminded me of the moon.

For three years of my career I spent every day editing peer reviewed articles about long misunderstood topics in women’s health. I only edited one article about fibroids, which is wild, and shows how complex and vast female reproductive health is.

Outside of my work in the field, I became a real nerd about it. I read everything I possibly could—looked for the best evidence, looked for the new trials, looked for the extra matrilineal and spiritual wisdom that was not contained in the science, looked for the pleasure when the dominant narrative was pain. An optimist and an optimizer.

I read the book “Spiritual Midwifery” by Ina May Gaskin, which is a groovy text from the 1970s about a midwife on a hippie commune in Tennessee helped introduce the modern concept of “natural” birth to the United States.

During this time, I was also doing more psychedelics, entering different mind states that allowed me to play with the idea of surrender, the idea of witnessing your own pain and riding it.

I developed a very groovy vision of the unmedicated birth I’d have some day: I’d be kissing my partner, acknowledging each “rush” as temporary feelings that I could manage by design, listening to all the music I want, hanging out in a bathtub, groaning in an unashamed guttural way, letting it all hang out. I even entertained the idea that I could maybe experience orgasmic birth.

Of course, if anyone would have asked, I would have said: I’d do whatever it took to get the baby out, whether it was C-section or not. But I had a vision.

Many women grieve a birth plan that does not come to pass. I’m doing it now—long before a baby or even a partner enters the picture.

The surgery was more complicated than I’d hoped it’d be. I’d hoped, optimistically, they could just kind of…remove the tumor and call it a day. But this beast weighed half a kilo, and was distorting everything around it, including my uterus. So they had to extensively reconstruct my uterus.

If I have a baby someday, it’ll be too risky to labor—the risk of uterine rupture increases with the scar tissue caused by a myomectomy—so I’ll need to have a scheduled C-section.

On one hand, I’m grateful to still have my uterus and reproductive abilities, grateful that this surgery now exists, that a future fetus doesn’t have to fight for space in my body. Grateful for the absolute miracle of modern medicine and the mystical capacity for our bodies to heal. Grateful for my youth, my friends. I also have now avoided the potential of excruciating “worse than labor” pain that may have occurred during pregnancy if the fibroid degenerated inside of me, a terrifying condition called “red degeneration.”

If this sounds like a laundry list that I’m reciting at you, it’s because it is, and that’s my current state with it myself. I feel these things, but other things feel stronger.

Like the grief of the lost fantasy of an idealized birth, something that might connect me to an ancient, essential idea of motherhood, a transformative experience that I wanted to endure in the same way that I wanted to (and did) run a marathon.

Grief is long, I tell my friends who’ve lost parents. It’s too long. I’m finding my joys within it, and I’m finding lots of solace in talking to friends who’ve faced similar complex grief:

• that our bodies have their own logic that no amount of research and manifestation can possibly control

• that our plans and visions for womanhood and motherhood so often “gang aft agley,”

• that these losses are somehow not fixed by looking at the positives of the situation and doing little gratitude rituals

• that the healing power of time is slow, so slow, too slow, at times.

I’ll write you again soon, certainly from a different place, and that gives me lots of hope. I’m gonna go boogie this weekend, I need to dance! After four weeks in bed, banned from Sport Schwimmen Sauna und Sex, I’m officially cleared for movement and you fuckin’ bet I’m going to.

Here’s part of the opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of my favorite books:

“to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.”

Jangly jazz over city buses in Manhattan and Taipei

• SEX AND THE CITY: The Movie (2008)

• SEX AND THE CITY 2 (2010)

(the surreality of the Abu Dhabi plot line)

• Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994)

(free on YouTube with ads)

Sam’s OpenEvidence login

“birth outcomes after level 3 uterine plastic reconstruction during myomectomy”

Kaeleigh’s Criterion login

“build me a menu inspired by THE FIRST FORTY DAYS: THE ESSENTIAL ART OF NOURISHING THE NEW MOTHER, protocols for rebuilding iron after blood loss during surgery, the ingredients of late July in Berlin. limit all recipes to 15 minutes of cook time”

Blue Majik smoothie
Don’t know what the blue is

Zora playing that video of Maddie Mick and I singing How To Save A Life at karaoke making me contain my laughter in a pleasurable way like…edging? Hissing and holding my abdomen to contain it but still enjoying it and letting it happen as much as I possibly can.

“create a workout plan informed by evidence around post c-section recovery”

little lovely Victorian visits
visiting friends, old friends
telling me about their weekends of disappointing dancing and slurping up details

1 episode of Jeopardy per day
Men appear out of the mist and then slither back into the mist
Rice

An unnecessary rehearsal

Something grew
Heavy losses
Jellicle CATS (1998)

Decisions for a distant self and a distant being

The last time I really went out much was before I met Christian. Classic relationship pattern. I was younger then, too, and it was Covid-era Berlin, with correspondingly wilder experiments happening (the wildest one also involved Chamo).

I know myself enough to know that connecting with other people cures my blues a little bit. I enjoyed the sun, had a few drinks, a little bit of this and that but no uppers, and at one point followed the leader to the bathroom stall but then just chose to enjoy the moment of closeness and energy, and skipped the line entirely. The moment I started to feel a little needy and itchy, I left. It was perfect.

The best clubs create an atmosphere where posturing feels embarrassing. The people who are the coolest and most magnetic in any situation, I’ve realized, are the ones truly enjoying the company of the people they are with—not looking elsewhere, not wanting to be elsewhere.

I wish more people knew that clubs are their best when they are spaces for conversation. Of course, some of that is opened up by drugs, but half of the people are sober or just drinking Club Mate, and most of us aren’t there for that anyway.

I measure a club’s quality by its areas for relaxation. There needs to be ample space, it needs to be cozy, there needs to be an outdoor area to smoke a cigarette, it needs to be dimly lit, it needs to be relatively insulated from the music coming from the dance floor.

Berlin club culture grew out of reclaimed spaces and friend networks, which is probably why the best clubs still feel communal rather than extractive. The most established clubs have a clear point of view in the artists they book, and take part in political action and protests.

The atmosphere sets a clear expectation that you should not look at your phone unless you absolutely need to. So you commit to curiosity: about peptides, your yellow sunglasses—I’ve been wanting to try that look!—your winter away, your level of disillusionment with Berlin, your drink, that book, what you liked about Pittsburgh, the surprising quality of Desigual dresses.

On the dance floor we talk too, because the music is designed for that. At the beginning, when no one’s dancing yet, it’s never too loud. DJs know that you have to earn people’s presence on the dance floor—to build toward it.

Yesterday I met not one but two people who were celebrating their first dance after a surgery or major life event.

One of them had his cane on the dance floor, covered in glittery pipe cleaners. “Just so everyone knows. My third leg. Fourth.”

The other one was also a writer, who I had a million things in common with. Including a surgery I just found out I need—she’d had the same one, a fibroid removal. She gave me loads of tips. So grateful, so lucky.

We go to the club to find each other, and dancing is conversation, too. To two-step and vibe with your new pals until there’s a shift you didn’t expect, and neither did the others, and it picks up, you sweat, look around a little bit, make eye contact, close your eyes. You’ve arrived somewhere different than where you started.

One of the jolts will eventually turn on all the lights and they’ll stay on, but we don’t know which jolt it’ll be, and we don’t know when it will happen.

Here is what is lighting up my blue little electric thread:

• “Kei wareware i a tātou” — San Jose choir performance of a Māori song – in tribute to those who’ve passed before us — came up on my TikTok FYP. It stunned me and had me sobbing. I’ve been listening to it on loop.

• Bulgarian split squats and assisted pull-ups. I’m getting jacked y’all! I love the gym now, truly never thought I’d say so lol

• Learning a new ‘auana hula to a transportive and elegant song about a beautiful house in a lush forest in Kauai.

• Removing the center rib from 30 ti leaves and folding them and putting them in the freezer for later use in lei making.

• My neighbors who text me to tell me to come to the bridge for a Späti beer. And my other neighbors, who throw massive open air parties on May 1 right outside our building, with pretty decent music!

• Running into old friends you don’t see enough anymore on the best day of the year.

  

• Line dancing. Tried it for the first time last night with Clár and I really want to lock in. Fellow Followers of the Line—ID yourselves please!!

Thank you for being here with me!

With love,
Amanda

I’ve just completed a cycle. I finished the enormous photoshoot I had been creative directing for months, which was the main reason I was in the US. It took a lot out of me, but I feel pretty good about it.

Geographically, I’ve been filled with good fortune and mobility. I got to spend a few weeks in a cute apartment in the basement of a 1910 Craftsman in the Hollywood Hills. I made trips up to San Francisco, where on Easter Sunday I attended the Hunky Jesus contest with my Berlin friend Tonia. I even got to visit my brother in the hippie foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains 3 hours east of San Francisco.

I toured all of the important sites of my childhood and young adulthood and familial line, revisiting psychic scars that needed to be rubbed gently with my thumb: San Diego (twice!), New York (twice!), western Massachusetts, Hawaii.

My ideas have never been quite so in congruence with the speed of the life I live, and it feels quite good. I have an idea, I make it happen, I pitch the client, I buy the candle and the notebook, I tell the person how I feel. The yeses and the nos feel very clear and sharp.

This congruence is erotic. But I’m also quite far away from the things I care about most, which are to be present and of service and loving to the people around me. And to create art, write, dance, and cook, in a way that provides the kind of internal peace and stability required to be a resource for community and to generate ideas that then compel others to generate their own.

I’m back here now, and walking into a summer in Berlin. I’m hoping for it, and wanting it, and looking at the people in the eye on the sidewalk and under the bridge, and they’re touching my arm and saying that we’re friends, saying that I don’t need to show my wrist stamp on re-entry to the venue because they remember me. I’ve missed you.

The thick pack of chads attached to a stack of paper
Whose holes have been punched
but not all the way through.

I keep them all there on purpose and hold on to them for as long as they will let me.

Apples in a hot pan.

Three girls who could have been my friends,
but I confront one about using her water bottle to briefly try to save a seat,
which I take, without asking,
and then ask her honestly and without malice what she was hoping to do
with her water bottle,
since the tram to the museum was so crowded.

It is clear that talking to her is an affront.

“Well that was crazy.” One says to the other afterward

when she thinks I’m not listening.

Earlier,

A different museum
Of things that are all very real to you,
until reading about it after and
learning that everyone else has the experience of questioning whether the exhibited information is real.

“It takes you a second to realize that it’s not real.”
A woman says, when you talk to her.

You tell her her nails remind you of the butterfly wing scale sculpture.

Those were real.

Men fall temporarily into shallow pools I can see all the way through. They are stuck in sand. I tell them about the pool with great detail and they sit still for a bit.

The moment I do not fear confrontation is the moment I am perceived as mad.

The smell of wet mesquite, romantic, suburban, and desperate. Flies buzzing at the lamp lighting a teenage boys’ soccer practice. It will always be that for me.

A sign warns me that mountain lions

Rattlesnakes

And coyotes

Live near this paved path and

Are not bothered by the crackle of the tram

Nor the roar and whistle of the 405.

I open my mouth and blood comes out.
A gaping maw, endless. Clots and goo.
Inviting others inside without shame.
Knowing full well.
When they leave I beg them to stay without shame.
A woman's poems, a woman's art.
I still strive for the kind of genderless, deadpan truth
that earns love and awards.
Is that where "earnest" comes from?
Work for your keep
Work for their ears
How did I end up in a citrus grove alone?

Early in my time on Substack I wrote a 3-part series about Hawaii—my family history here—my parents always looked back on their time here with the rosiest of glasses, and I had very formative memories on my Tutu’s lanai. I also wrote about the last few years I’ve spent learning hula.

Here are those pieces:

Part I: My ballerina mom and Army dad. They met on the beach while living on Oahu in the mid-1970s. That must have been a time.

Part II: What Hawaii meant for me growing up.

Part III: How I got into hula.

I’m heading to Hawaii Island (The Big Island) tomorrow. The highlight so far has been intensive hula training with a Kumu Hula who has taught for more than 50 years. Her lineage is only two steps away from a name I saw in the Bishop Museum today, someone known as a “teacher of teachers.” Her instruction and wisdom gave me so much in such a short short period and I’m so grateful.

Until I can process here’s a long but worth it poem that stopped me in my tracks the other day. The wind ripped the cover of my book; so I was literally gripping it.

Toward the Solstice

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to address
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhood,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

—Adrienne Rich, 1977, from the collection “The Dream of A Common Language”

My intention with this time in California was to try to open the channel—to find art, poetry, friends, maybe even lovers—in a place I know by heart, to bring more of my newer selves into the old. I’m taking tentative steps, baby steps, while trying to be grateful for what is, which is often beautiful and heart-warming, and do as much good for myself and my family and my dearest friends.

Trying to observe culture shock without passing some kind of judgment—on yourself or your environment—is an interesting challenge. I’ve experienced such profound, extensive culture shock in Germany that I know it quickly when it’s happening. I’m experiencing quite a bit of it, though I’m sheepish to admit this—I don’t wanna seem holier than thou, an “expat” doing dumb expat shit.

I definitely was a little holier than thou at this new sauna in lower Manhattan last week, where I attended two Aufguss ceremonies.

I gave lots of kind but unsolicited feedback to both the sauna managers and fellow sauna-goers. German public feedback culture, despite my misgivings about it and the tantrums I throw in Berlin when it’s applied in my direction, has seeped into my being. (More on that East Coast work + family trip some other time; gotta digest.)

In Solana Beach, I've also provoked a few altercations—tense moments, I guess—with men at the grocery store and the gym, when I inform them that their behavior is not good etiquette.

This, and, the weight of my home, the weight of the forces that have made my family leave the city limits behind, to Ramona, a beautiful house on a dirt road, with nothing but grassland preserves beyond the eucalyptus trees. Maybe this was the real California all along, not the tiny boxes but the hawks on the fence, far from the coast, over a hill, dry.

A few weeks ago I tried to go into my elementary school to see if there was a tree still there. It used to be that you could cut through the school and use it as a kind of park on the weekends. It’s locked up tight now, and I’m not sure how or whether I can access the campus at all.

Debt beckons longingly. Every expense is absurd, a scam. When eggs and oats and basic medicine drain your bank account as rapidly as they do in Southern California, sushi nearly always seems like a merited expense. I mean my uncle’s adult diapers are $40 a month if you buy them at Walmart; $300 if the memory care facility provides them. Sushi for dinner sure why the hell not. The extra padding that I have for the first time now—which should really be going toward the establishment of some kind of retirement account—is going toward takeout.

ICE detains citizens not so far away, praying in the parking lot in the morning. Everything else doesn’t really matter, actually. In retrospective view, military states never seem inevitable. In the years I spent reading a lot about the 1930s in Germany, I read so many passages with disdain for the inactive. What is it about this military state that is uniquely successful at keeping our eyes on other things? I made an intention to go down to a protest at Otay Mesa, even spoke it out to friends. But I didn’t go.

A misplaced sadness, loneliness, grief. And also a desire to go deeper, deeper, deeper into all of it until I can get some kind of tangible quality . Clarity? A book outline? Healing? A promising new friendship? I’ll know it when I feel it.

The other night a friend and I went down the beach steps at night to look at the shore. In years of coming and staying in Solana I’d never actually gone at night. We saw lobster divers out there.

Regular guys. One of them chit chatted with us on his way back up, nothing special except the suit and the lobster bag and the big honking headlight. His wife would be disappointed: no lobster today.

Something about it terrified me. Pitch black, their shadows—thick black wetsuits, headgear—were even blacker, walking straight into the expanse. He reminded me of a creature. How could he just...go in there? And not be scared of what he'd find? Wouldn't even the lobsters be frightening?

While on a stoned shopping spree at Surf Ride on the 101 last month, I inquired about wetsuits. I've never had one and I'm curious about winter swimming. Shouldn't women like me—with appetites like me—be swimming in the cold ocean every morning?

There was some disagreement between the guys working there about the type of suit best equipped for this task. A spring suit? None available this time of year. Others thought a normal winter suit. I decided against it. My housemate has one he said I can try on, but I always worry about my boobs getting in the way and causing problems. And does it feel weighed down, claustrophobic?

Not when you’re in the water, they say. It makes floating easy.

Humiliating, like

Believing a loaf of bread could last forever.

Perfect order.

Telling everyone about it too, convinced.

Pasta sauce made a miracle

Just onions and tomato,

Lazy, braised.

I am afraid to approach these images again

and also

Know that their possibility is essential.

Fish from the market, but it is closed.

So chicken, coriander. Pick up a bottle of white. Remember the object's stature.

Their indignities, yours.

"I am, intermittently, unfaithful.

This is the condition of my survival;

for if I did not forget, I should die."

Think about indigestion every time. Dry heaving.

Put smelly, daily things into the frame.

Put loose, runny eggs into a mold and fry until set.

Do this every day until the utterances

Yearning

Wailing

Grow

Quiet

My best friend Sarah, who I’ve stayed with when I come back for almost five years now, taught me a while back that you should take a different exit to get to her house—fewer stoplights. The Via de la Valle exit, which always reminds me of my father because he used to say it in this funny singsong way. It’s the exit you take to get to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Via de la Valle! I’m home and it’s starting to feel like it.

Last year at this time my arrival in San Diego was pretty dark. I was absolutely heartbroken, crushed, and tired and had headlice. The love in Brazil had ended but I wasn’t over it. At the same time, I was confronting the deep love I still held for Christian, completely confused and unsure of what to do, though I knew our story wasn’t completely over yet. I did not feel hopeful about much in my life, because it all felt so murky, though work was feeling promising and exciting.

This time is a bit different. The problems of my love life are still bountiful but they feel like a dull ache rather than a nasty gash. Work takes up a lot of my brain space now, more than I would like, actually—I had to stop hula, and I have not been writing much. I need to figure out a better balance. But it’s nice to know that problems change into new problems. Keeps things interesting.

I’ve developed some rituals in my years of staying in Solana for at least a few weeks at a time. I try to go to the beach every day, whether for a walk, to watch the sunset, journal while sitting on the canga I bought on Ilha Grande, or to just stand on the cliff for a bit.

I walk a lot, hang out at the house, exercise. I consume a lot more weed, to be honest—not rationing my supply of Camino gummies like I do in Berlin. I cook as much as I can, big dinners for the whole house, there are four adults and a toddler here, and it feels like family. Last night I made beef bourguignon. I drive inland 45 minutes to visit my mom and my older brother’s family in their house in Ramona.

There’s always a bit of tenderness coming home, one I imagine many of you may also feel in the coming days, interacting with families of origin and all of the constructs about this time of the year. Loneliness—wondering whether I belong, where I belong, who I belong to, whether I am alone, fundamentally—an instinctive rejection of new people, an irritable anger that comes out of nowhere and must have teenage roots. If that is you, I wish you equanimity and a gentle reminder that it always passes.

Here is a poem I’ve been working on called “Resettle.” My dream worlds lately are a mix of farm cults and manhood rituals in a future society of space warriors.

Love, safety, friendship, and pleasure to you, this solstice,
Amanda

Resettle

Slip right in, honey.
Room for everyone in this covered wagon,
can fit several thousand,
Expandable and retrofitted.
Forty minutes until we arrive.
Have a mustard tart.

We start with an agenda, enjoy the forest passing by,
keep the flaps closed on account of the mud.
Our days begin with the harvest of the gourds,
followed by singing of anthems.

Four hours of weaving for the stockpile.
Our lady's barracks must be adorned with tapestry.
Short recess for meal.

Then back into the forest, this very one, until the sun sets, chopping of wood.
We form a line, us hundreds in a row, transporting the wood to the shed by hand.
During the chopping of the wood, we sing the night anthems.

At day's end we eat vegetables.
In the evening we pray.
The lady is available to those who require a story.

You,
You waited by the drone bee hives before joining our caravan.
I ride this wagon all day.
I give the mustard tarts.
We pick up many like you.

Today my dad would have turned 74, but he died of a heart attack a month after he turned 50 in December 2001. 24 years ago I was 11, Nick was 16, Katherine was 8, Christian was 6. Sometimes my brain compulsively does this kind of math, trying to find something new. Nearly half of his life ago. More than half of my life ago. Etc.

It doesn’t hurt because it was indeed a very long time ago. But because I was a child then, and because the pain of the loss—and the burden it placed on my mother—was enormous and unprocessed, ricocheting around my family at high speed for years, there’s always the potential for new meaning to uncover as an adult.

I’ve got a fully formed brain and mostly healed heart now, and as I grow more stable, I’m finding that the meaning I uncover in reflecting on loss isn’t just self-help type stuff. It also allows me to know other people better, to know grief and family better.

A few weeks ago I wrote this poem while reflecting on family, and how it is created, taken apart, and rebuilt. I shared it in with my poetry workshop and now I’m sharing it here.

Love,
Amanda

—

Origins

Tic Tac Toe.
Vomit in the late evening
straight through to morning.

The Reading Olympics held by
the elementary school.
Aviator sunglasses for glassy eyes.

Hair already curly when I met her.

A joint — a spliff — that was so strong.
When we kissed I asked if there was something else in it.

A dark garage office, Civil War books.
A marathoner past his prime.
Rosary beads on separate beds.
Tapping maples in winter, running away.

“Die die die” —
Easier to say
than “eins zwei drei” —
Counting down your first footrace
Across a long, pre-loved Wohnung.

A golden retriever named after liquor.

A tulle cupcake frock,
Singing a Shirley Temple song in the talent show.
The Good Ship Lollipop.

Dancing with the cat
to DDR youth propaganda on
YouTube.
Bau auf,
bau auf,
bau auf,
bau auf.

Five Octobers ago was weightless and sparkling with future. Last October felt heavy and saturated with choice.

In Berlin we always get about five days in October that are perfect blue and orange. In the ‘90s blue and orange were the colors of the San Diego Padres. I think I will always be sensitive to autumn and spring.

I started writing on Substack Christmas last year just a few days after discovering I had picked up head lice somewhere between Brazil, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Chattanooga, and San Diego. My grip on reality was already quite loose at that point.

Being here with you has been very important to my ability to identify as a writer again. I find myself more attracted to poetry. With poetry the risk of incoherence—or worse, obvious coherence—has always proven too scary. I never even really read poetry outside of what I had to for school. Now I’m in a poetry workshop where on Mondays, in a small circle, we read incantatory poetry and drink tea. It’s so cute. We’ll start sharing our own work soon.

In the last year, I’ve experienced many rather earth-shaking events related to romantic love, loss, and family. During this anniversary season, I feel the urge to metabolize these experiences with specificity. To move more fully toward acceptance, to not let my fingers and toes wrinkle from too long in the grief pool, to find a stable narrative.

But these experiences feel too close and too sharp to handle with prose. Reading half-baked memoir makes my stomach turn, and I want my stories to feel full inside of me at the moment I commit them.

Poetry offers some solace, some opportunities, a way to close the loop without causing harm, or letting my emotions take the sentences somewhere selfish.

I’m preparing my space to leave Berlin for some of the winter months, something I’ve considered doing for years now but it never came together just right.

I am purging items, buying old new furniture, preparing my body to take a snapshot of its fertility, just in case, watching auto-dubbed translations of a French video about how to prepare the injections. Preparing my citizenship paperwork, it’s all almost ready, it’s all almost done. Preparing a big pitch at work, preparing oatmeal, I must clear the pantry.

And within this pregnant moment it is nice to feel the freedom, and the impulse, to write bad poems on a regular basis. Today was much colder and wetter than the day I started writing this letter. I will share some poems soon.

I think because it also feels like some kind of cycle is closing in my life.

I feel my desire dispersed in a million directions.

Need to write poetry dance salsa

freeze my eggs next month refrigerate the medicine.

submit my citizenship application,

play with Bele more often,

do my taxes go to Colombia or California or the Canaries for the winter,

go to the gym and do strength training and keep up with my training plan

go jogging

masturbate as soon as I wake up every day

Check in on my friends.

Need to go back to the protests and need to stop thinking about myself truly incessantly, wow, heartbreak is a black hole of that.

Flirt with waiters at beach clubs on vacation and send my info to the Dutch apartment broker guy Rolf.

Need to clean my fucking apartment oh my god it’s vile.

Be more chill and not so aggro when people don’t agree with me that it’s all about preservation of capital of the few.

Need to maybe stop drinking for a bit.

Get a wax, go to the Gotxa 2nd anniversary party they’re gonna have little tapas with drinks and they said they might run out early. They know my order now even though I haven’t been there in months. Vermouth and tortilla at the bar.

Need to give Chamo back the spray bottle for his mushrooms and pulverize and capsulate the mushrooms I grew months ago and I honestly should probably start microdosing.

Print out the reading for my poetry workshop and need to find more time to write and I need to write and I need to write and I need to write.

Return the keys to my old studio and organize a drinks with the studio mates.

Bake a cake for my salsa partner’s birthday party tomorrow.

Need to go to the renter’s union because my landlord is threatening to sue me. Need to let my nails breathe from the gel,

need to make decisions about my work. Need to keep caring for the people I love.

Find a more serious book to read even though I absolutely loved the ‘80s lesbian romance novel set at NASA.

Find a more serious thing to write about, another rabbithole to report on like the bra story I did. I miss reporting. Do people think the diaristic writing is boring?

Need to plan a slutty photoshoot for myself inspired by angelic Pokémon. Big loose ropey nets that trap proud but playful white griffons wandering through a tropical rainforest.

It’s fine! But wow does it make a ton of sense.

I was diagnosed with a severe form of PMS a few years ago called PMDD. It’s been hard to manage. But this new knowledge is wild because it’s like—maybe it’s not all in my head, maybe I just need a lot more rest and to eat a snack every two hours? Who knows, but snacks being the answer is great. My best friends in San Diego just mailed me a Trader Joe’s care package! Serendipity.

Getting to know more about yourself, especially when you think you know it all, is invigorating.

Today I rode my bike around at sunset to a park I hadn’t been to in years, to practice dancing salsa. I thought about how nice it is to live my life as it is. I can get stoned and listen to Prince and ride around on my blue bike wearing my blue cowboy boots.

I’m starting salsa again because I like it. I know I’ll get back to hula soon. I’ll get back to the big wide world of ideas soon! There’s a lot of shit to pay attention to, and I’m eager to write about other things.

So many friends are going through very tough shit right now, with rock solid boundaries and strength—beautiful people I can learn from while we lean on each other.

Dayana and I were chatting about just how lucky we are to have so much agency in our lives. Particularly when we think about the women in our family lines.

To live how we want to live! And to be able to take care of ourselves and our hearts, even when they are broken—to have the time and ability to tend to our own selves first. It is a unique privilege.

A cosmic gift, even, and one I take it very seriously! I make decisions intentionally, with my whole heart, and as such, when my whole heart is broken, shit gets very confusing. I’m in a phase of grief which is making me forgetful about who I am.

There are parts of myself that I feel I don't know or trust anymore. Coincidentally I have found myself revisiting past selves:

Riding by my first apartments in Berlin. Emailing my favorite teachers and mentors who knew me when I was very young. Going to the Italian ice cream store on that first street in Berlin. They still remember me there. The parks I used to go to, too—they still receive me.

On Sunday I went to the rose garden in Hasenheide, where a second spring is unfolding because of all the July rain.

Because we never really lose ourselves, every version, there is always just adding to it, as long as we live. You’re always yourself, and unless you stay in one place, every day of life just adds and adds to the self, and so when everything else is physically gone, yourself and everyone who lives in your memory is always there. This makes it easier to believe the idea that all life is good life.

I’m spending more time riding big laps at Tempelhofer Feld, the old airport turned into a massive public park.

There is a protected breeding ground for skylarks there. Skylarks are special birds. They flap their wings in one place, hovering in midair, not going anywhere until they know where to go. It’s mesmerizing. “Male skylarks hover primarily to sing, establishing territory and attracting mates.” Sing, boys!

My favorite part of Tempelhof is letting fucking loose on an actual runway. I enter a trance, pedaling directly through the center of those massive arrows that the planes used to follow! It’s soothing. Follow the big arrows, small human. Human flight is unnatural, often unpleasant, a marvel, and simply how we go to where we need to be.

Full price, it would have been $240,000. So given that, $45K seemed reasonable. My family was low-income so Columbia paid for the remainder in need-based grants and work-study jobs.

But every month for 13 years it has been $200 to $400. It’s been part of my life for so long! In my early career, these payments prevented me from taking risks or taking more than a few weeks between jobs.

Maybe if I had prioritized jobs that made more money, or was better with my money, or traveled less, I could have done this sooner, but actually I’m exactly where I need to be and I don’t regret a thing. I have worked hard to get debt-free.

Here’s to the future :)

When I first moved to the big city as a 19-year-old student, I wanted to catalogue everything I saw, like all my favorite writers. When I graduated, I summed up those first years in New York City in our university newspaper:

The city happens around me. Someone is having an orgasm and someone is crying and someone is dying and someone is being born and someone is experiencing the pinnacle of human joy, all within a very limited radius from where I stand. This penetrated through my depression, somehow. I guess my thinking was: if everything around you is moving, well, you can't just lie there. So now I walk and watch.

At some point you stop indexing everything. You only register the truly traumatic or erotic or euphoric moments. But I’ve always used long walks as a tool.

I’ve had eras when walking is the only thing that makes me feel human. I’m in one of them now.

This Sunday:

Soft ice cream from buffalo milk, blackberries macerated in lime and mint.

The easy parts of the newspaper and a new notebook. One of the waiters: maybe hthe guy who lived across the street from Lucia in Buenos Aires? We met him a few year ago. I glanced once, then back at the newspaper, tired and lazy. Hausgemachte limoncello.

Sugar and booze, little pep. Headphones in.

Cross the cobblestone and I don’t glance back toward Giorgio’s place, which for maybe three or four years I would do every time I crossed that street. Massive grand piano, polpo salad. I didn’t look back this time, and didn’t even register that I hadn’t looked back until just now.

An illuminated sign colored in with red marker. The pink light seemed flattering and I thought about taking a picture of myself.

A gallery, too bright for 10pm. Tiny 3x5 black photo frames in the windowsill: a straw hat, a vegetable. No art on the walls. Or maybe there was art, somewhere, but installed in a way that is intentionally confusing. I walk past.

A späti—short for spätkauf— “late store” —corner store—a lively one. Maybe even a party späti? A couple outside drinking beer, classic Berlin date.

A Turkish men’s club, with the door and windows open! I could take a look inside for once. Just men sitting around a table, plastic chairs, cigarettes. A woman at a bar, neon.

A corner apero bar I’d been to before. A table full of men slightly younger than me, stylish. I turned down Fiona Apple to hear where they were from. Accented English: a group of Mixed Internationals.

Smell of piss. The back of a man with hips jutting forward in the doorway. As I pass, I expect to hear the piss. But he is not pissing, he is just about to kiss with a woman whose neck reaches up to him in a way that I know she is really turned on, and not performing. I’m happy for her and turned on too. I still don’t know where the piss smell comes from.

Another men’s club, windows open. I wonder why the windows are open today. Same scene inside.

I look up. The second floor balcony of this building is haunted. I’ve seen this one before, it’s a bit of a showpiece, but I don’t get it. Tons of little troll dolls hanging from the ceiling. And plants, not the tropical kind—forest green, curly, European, ugly. The whole thing should be ironic and funny but it creeps me out.

Two more doorways, a bare foot on the step. A man with his hands on his ankles, and a purple face. Green sweatshirt. I scan the step for a needle or a piece of foil, but all I can see is a lighter. He seems OK.

The song ends and I turn the corner.

I can’t say exactly when the dream stopped happening. Was that when I was cured?

A pink room made of special salt.

Letting base desires and the thrill of attention run the show. But only for the time I have left to exercise it. “You could still flirt for another 10 years” someone said to me, setting an alarm.

I don’t think falling in love with women would cure me. I’ve had crushes and hookups but they haven’t extended tentacles into my nervous system. In 2019 a friend said, “Check back in 6 years and see if you’re gay.” I set a calendar invite as a reminder. It goes off in a few weeks.

Another tattoo, French perfume, ice cream, olive oil, spritzes after work, a new dress.

Two heavy, warm forearms around my chest any time I’m sitting, a loose vice, weighted blanket of human. Veins, hair, clean fingernails.

I guess…ketamine? It’s been a while.

A corkscrew inserted into the ear and turned slowly, manually adjusting thought speed, slowed to 0.50x. Salmon swimming upstream toward the spawning ground, instead of rushing panicked over the falls.

I’ve been stumped for years about the best way to share his story. He writes it so compellingly himself! I highly recommend his book “A Socialist Defector” to get the fascinating details of his biography, or for a shorter version, this post he wrote last year.

Right now, I feel we are all hungry for inspiration and the idea that maybe a different way is possible. Something that lives beyond the borders of our global hypercapitalist misery.

The German Democratic Republic did not survive; it surveilled its citizens, and committed many injustices. But that shouldn’t negate some of its successes—especially in areas where the U.S. falls short, like providing basic dignity (food, shelter, healthcare) for all.

Victor (born Stephen Wechsler) brings a rare, grounded perspective, having lived fully in two radically different systems.

A few months ago I returned to his apartment for another chat over sherry. We covered a lot of ground. Here’s the first part of our conversation!

Archival footage:

The other day I searched for something in Gmail and accidentally found emails I wrote to an artist/programmer about seven years ago. We had this weird formal epistolary thing. He wrote every email like it was destined for an archive, so I matched his performance. Philosophy, art, theory, etc. I spent hours on these emails. He’d jet off to Brazil or Frankfurt to build out the technical part of another artist’s vision and would write me an email. Maybe because he had run in the same circles as Aaron Swartz, I saw him as some kind of cipher? I always felt stupid around him. A challenge!

Then he moved from Berlin to San Francisco and hired me to do some marketing work for his new startup. He mentioned me in a recruiting email to a woman he wanted to hire, then forwarded the email to me so I could see how he described me.

I guess he thought I would be flattered?

When I got wise to the way he was treating me—as an attentive, flattering mirror with conveniently huge boobs and inconveniently strong emotions—I told him I didn’t want to be part of it anymore, and then he fired me. I raged and it ended horribly.

Anyway. Sometimes our chaotic online existence means we dip back into worlds of former emotions.

The only thing I felt reading these emails was grief for a time I spent feeling inferior, orienting my potent creative output toward someone else’s center of gravity. Have you ever felt this grief?

So I don’t feel like writing but I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to lose myself, I don’t want to enter a loop of bad feeling, I’m desperate to keep my self.

In the last months I’ve started to visualize my body as the body of a guitar and emotions as guitar strings. The hollow part of the guitar is where my pelvis and hips are. Sometimes the strings are thick and deep and luscious and echoey when played. Sometimes they are tightly wound, tinny, sharp.

Hormones, substances, stress, and things I didn’t really want to see on Instagram brushed a particularly taut string last week. It happens.

But here are a few things and moments I’ve loved recently:

• “Marilyn,” Gloria Steinem’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, who savvily used the patriarchy to create safety for herself after deep childhood wounding, but always sought out unconditional love in every man and every friend she encountered. It is a deeply insightful book.

• “Perfection,” a perfect novel of Millennial existence and a slice of Berlin life

• My 9 week Cuban Salsa Basics course. It’s distinct from other styles of salsa—it’s actually called “casino” and the music (timba) is rhythmically complex and fast. During our last class, it began to feel like we were actually dancing, and it was magical!

• Jackie from Indonesia who sat next to me during my German citizenship exam. She seemed kind, so I asked her after the test if she was going back the same way because we were two hours outside Berlin and I needed to get back to the train station. She called her Kartoffel husband and they gave me a lift. Jackie and I celebrated our hard work having completed the exam, and it made me happy.

• Orion’s Belt, a store for candles and soaps and “spell oils” in the Chamberí neighborhood of Madrid.

I’m working on an interview of a very special person that I recorded last month in his home. I can’t wait to share it with you.

With love,
Amanda