At nearly four in the morning, I was driving home losing an argument with someone who was no longer talking. They had said something about my portfolio that annoyed me because it was incomplete and, worse, basically fair.

I have rebuilt my website a stupid number of times. There was one version before a job, another immediately after it, one I loved for …

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I came in and studied a pact of these creatures,

They were all different shapes and sizes;

Most of this group would stand on two legs,

With their backs very horizontal,

But one of the creatures stood out on its own,

It had a very furry complexion,

It did not make noises like the rest of the group,

It had a special language of its own;

Woof! It would say and the…

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I had a title. I had a caption. I had found the last line after months of mistaking exhaustion for revision. The piece had become long enough to contain a year, a multicultural experiential agency, a mentor, a co-founder, a firing, six cities, a hospital, a dead man I had never met, and another man I had temporarily killed because…

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waxing,
waning,
sometimes hidden,
sometimes full.

what are we but the things we have witnessed,
the seasons crossed in the course of becoming,

the moons caught full
just as the tide came crashing in?

alone, but luminous.

Temporary.
Everything.
All of it.

and you, not a weight.
not a tether.
a single star i carry forward.

something i reach for when the cities blur,
when the phases overlap
and the moon goes quiet.

temporary.
everything.

some things we hold not because they anchor us,
but because they witnessed
who we were becoming,

transformations
neither of us stayed
long enough to see complete.

everything is precious
because it passes.

everything is altered
by being witnessed.

everything i keep
is already leaving.

Temporary.
Everything.
All of it.

Hello Charlotte, this is Peaceful Waters Aquamation. Your beloved Luna is ready to come home.

I read it again.

Your beloved Luna is ready to come home.

As though she has been away somewhere. As though I can drive to San Diego, open a door, and find her waiting on the other side of it. As though home is st…

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She moves—

not light, not slight, not barely there.
She moves like thunder through the air.
Like wind that shifts the shape of grain,
like tides that swallow and remain.

She builds—

not walls, not homes, not monuments,
but bridges made of dust and tendon.
Takes what fractures, finds the seam.
Takes what buckles, makes it beam.

She carries—

not just weight, but the weight of years.
The residue of laughter. The sodium of tears.
The stories folded into bone,
the breath of women she has never known who lived,
who pressed, who would not fold—
whose names she carries in lieu of gold.

She bends—

not broken, not weak, not worn,
but bending like wheat when the wind is born.
She bends like rivers widening stone.
She bends and bends— then stands alone.

She waits—

not idle, not still,
but holding time between her teeth and will.
She waits for no man’s nod or claim.
She waits like thunder waits for rain.

She speaks—

not softly, not shyly, not small,
but when the silence has become the wall—
to protect what was taken,
to name what was erased,
to hold the injustice up to its own face.

She holds—

the space they said was never hers,
the seat they swore she’d never fill.
She holds her ground the way a root holds hill—
quiet, lateral, impossible to kill.

She lifts—

the fallen, the still, the gone,
the ones whose bones forgot to carry on.
She lifts them not because she’s strong
but because she knows
how heavy is the song
of a body told it doesn’t belong.

She rises—

when the weight says fall.
When the road says stop.
When the world says small.

She rises—

on spent feet, on aching spine,
on the architecture of a stubborn line
of women who refused
to be the minor key,
the footnote,
the aside.

She rises—

like a hymn that outlives the church.
Like a spark that teaches fire how to search.

She rises—

and I see her now.

Not a stranger. Not a dream.
Not a shadow in between.
Not a whisper. Not a name.
Not a lesson dressed in flame.

She rises—and I know her face.

She was never far.
Never lost.
Never hidden.
Never crossed.

She is here. She is whole.
She is threaded through my blood and bone.

And now I see—

she is the was and the will. The motion and the still.
Her entire being, mine to witness.
Everything she survived in me becomes permission.

The Women I am.

San Luis Obispo, May 2025

It began with a green freeway sign, one of those mundane markers of distance we usually register without thought. I was driving down the 101, sunlight spilling across the dashboard, mind half-occupied with finding this food hall with its promising 4.9 stars.

Then I saw it:

Pismo Beach —

Santa Barbara —

Los Angeles — 203 miles

Something twisted in my chest. Not grief, not longing. A freeway ache, that peculiar hollowness that appears when you're just close enough to your old life to remember it, but far enough that it no longer belongs to you.

Right before I saw that sign, I'd been on the phone with my family. The conversation hummed with a familiar dissonance, that particular frequency of connection and disconnection that's been our soundtrack for years. They were eating dim sum together somewhere in the SGV, a ritual I could picture with painful clarity: steamer baskets passed with casual urgency, stories colliding mid-air, laughter punctuating silences too brief for truth to surface.

I found myself smiling through the call, a reflexive muscle memory, while something older and more stubborn stirred beneath my ribs. The kind of ache that simmers just beneath "I miss you", the one that acknowledges absence while questioning why I should miss something that never fully held me.

"Came here Sunday for the dim sum," one review promised about this local spot. It felt like a small portal, a chance to participate in parallel communion, as if consumption across distance could somehow tether me to what I'd left behind, yet never completely escaped.

The industrial warehouse loomed before me as I parked, concrete and glass housing clustered eateries. I walked in with a performative confidence, hungry for more than food.

"Dim sum ends at 2:30," the man behind the counter said flatly.

It was 2:33.

Three minutes. The insignificance of it should have been laughable. Instead, I felt heat rise to my face, my body responding with a disproportionate sense of betrayal. I walked out like I'd been personally affronted, my steps heavy with the weight of rejection.

Only in the harsh light outside did I recognize the pattern. This was how I'd react to Tony, my stepdad, whose presence in my life has always existed in that discomforting space between gravitational and toxic. A man I don't trust, don't feel safe with, yet somehow still call when I'm lost in a city that he might have been to and could suggest something like a place to eat.

It’s the strange grief of caring about people who hurt you, of still reaching for connections that never quite satisfy. What makes home "home" isn't always comfort or safety; sometimes it's just the devil you know, the pain you've learned to navigate like familiar streets.

I stood outside, staring at my reflection in a dusty window, and asked myself: What exactly are you punishing the world for right now?

The question hung in the air, unanswered but necessary.

Then I did something different.

I walked back in.

Not with the expectation of bending rules or finding dim sum materialize against time constraints. I returned with curiosity about what else might be offered. What I might find if I released my grip on the narrative of what this moment was supposed to be.

The sushi, it turned out, was why the place had 4.9 stars.

I sat at the counter, ordered, and watched hands transform rice and fish into something both simple and profound. With each bite, the ache softened, not because food can heal what family has fractured, but because I had chosen to remain present rather than flee the scene of disappointment.

That's the quiet marker of healing I'm learning to recognize: the ability to feel yourself falling into an old pattern and choose, however imperfectly, a different response. Not without struggle, not without feeling the pull of familiar reactions, but with enough awareness to pause at the threshold of repetition.

I'm in San Luis Obispo for two weeks. Two hundred and three miles from a place that shaped me without ever fully holding me. The air is different here, cleaner, less weighted with memory. The people move at a pace that doesn't require constant calibration of my own rhythms to match.

Perhaps that's all I need right now. Not the absence of ache, but the space to feel it without being consumed by it. To acknowledge the paradox of missing something, I was desperate to leave, carrying the weight of a home that exists now primarily as muscle memory, a reflexive turning toward something that no longer faces me.

The freeway sign was right about the distance. Los Angeles is 203 miles away. But the measurement that matters isn’t found on green highway markers. It’s in the small moments of return, to yourself, to the present, to the possibility that exists when you don’t let old wounds dictate new choices.

So I ordered the sushi instead of leaving hungry. I stayed instead of running away wounded. And in that ordinary choice, that small rebellion against my own patterns, I found something I'd been seeking far longer than dim sum.

What I’m learning, 203 miles from the city that holds my history, is that healing doesn’t announce its arrival. It happens in these quiet pivots, these barely perceptible shifts away from what we’ve always done toward what we might become. The ache doesn’t disappear, but it transforms into something I can carry without being crushed by its weight.

This is what 203 miles has given me: not escape, but perspective. Not absence, but presence. The realization that I am not that little girl anymore, waiting for a family to make room at a table where I never quite fit. I am here, making my own place. Ordering what nourishes me. Staying when every instinct says to leave.

In this log cabin suspended between seasons, I find myself caught in the amber of transition. The wooden walls hold warmth like memory, creaking slightly with each shift of wind. Grants Pass cradles me for these forty-eight hours, a necessary pause between what was Portland and what waits in California. The air here carries more than pine and pollen; it…

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I didn’t come here looking for answers. I came to turn the volume down.

On the noise. On the pressure. On whatever frantic pace I’d been keeping, that made me forget what it felt like to just be inside my own body.

Portland wasn’t supposed to change me. It was supposed to hold me while I caught my breath.

But it’s done both. And not in any dramatic, capita…

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This adventure started with a single drive—a stubborn decision to go after 48 hours without sleep, even though I knew I probably shouldn’t. My phone kept buzzing with calls.

“Don’t drive up,” they said. “The cyclone’s bad.”

But I was already late, and a golden retriever in the Mission needed me.

The sun accompanied me for most of the journey, its warmth steady, as if trying to reassure me that the chaos ahead might dissolve into nothing. But as I neared the Bay, the storm came alive. Sheets of rain hammered down, the road swallowed by a gray so dense it blurred into the sky. Each mile clawed at my nerves—the kind of drive where you count every minute and feel every muscle.

When I finally arrived on Lexington Street, exhaustion buzzed through my body like static. Still, there was something else too: relief, sweet and immediate. The city exhaled alongside me, as if welcoming me into its fold.

I didn’t know it then, but I was chasing home—a concept that had always felt theoretical rather than lived.

275 Lexington was everything I didn’t know I needed. The neighborhood sits between Valencia and Mission, just one left turn from a straight shot to Dolores Park—maybe four blocks away. The Mission was buzzing with color and chaos, everything about it unapologetically vibrant. I didn’t realize how much I needed that energy until I felt it.

The next morning, I woke early. Giant windows in my temporary bedroom revealed sunlight pouring through blue skies. The storm had vanished.

Walking the golden retriever to Dolores Park, I felt strangely light, like I’d shrugged off something heavy I didn’t even know I was carrying. Strangers made eye contact with me—actual eye contact. There was this openness about them, like they weren’t rushing to be anywhere. And maybe for the first time in months, I wasn’t either.

At the dog fountain, I met a stranger—a guy who laughed easily when I teased him about filling a water bowl that was already full. He worked in events. His rhythm naturally aligned with mine, as if the city had orchestrated this meeting as its own kind of magic. I told him I’d just moved here yesterday. He nodded like he’d seen that kind of beginning before.

At some point, I asked if he knew a good breakfast spot nearby. He paused to think. I looked at him and said, “Or… do you want to go to breakfast?”

So we did.

Over breakfast, he told me about a circus show he was working on—Dear San Francisco. He lit the stage. Literally. He didn’t describe it with much enthusiasm, but something about the way he mentioned it made me curious. We didn’t make plans. It was just a thread hanging in the air.

A week later, after a failed first attempt—when my comfort in the Inner Sunset kept me nestled away—I found myself sitting in the dark at Dear San Francisco, the show my fleeting park companion had invited me to see. With my sister beside me, I watched as bodies defied gravity, as strangers created something beautiful from nothing but trust and precision. Tears slipped down my face as I clutched at the threads of beauty this man had unknowingly gifted me.

The show moved like memory—broken pieces, rewritten and restaged with grace. It made me feel like I understood the city for the first time. Like someone had stitched together all the parts I was trying to hold and turned them into a performance. It wasn’t just art. It was a mirror.

Afterward, we lingered briefly. No arc. No aftermath. Just a quiet parting.

We never saw each other again—and somehow, that feels perfect too. A connection without expectation or continuation, existing purely in its moment. San Francisco seemed to specialize in these: encounters that asked nothing of me but presence, and offered everything without demanding I hold onto it.

Later that first morning, as my park friend and I walked along Valencia, I realized I was staying within walking distance of the bar where my little sister was set to perform that same night—a fundraiser for strippers and sex workers. I hadn’t known how close everything would be—me, Simone, my sister, this strange city—and how quickly it would all collapse into itself like a scene already in motion.

On that first full day in San Francisco, Simone came to stay for the weekend. Simone carries the kind of love that doesn’t need a backstory. Just being with her settles something. That night, we walked to the show. Inside, the room was packed—half with my sister’s people, half with strangers, all of it vibrating. I watched her dance in front of a crowd that saw her fully. I didn’t expect to feel so much. But I did.

And then, like a curtain drop, everything quieted.

When Thanksgiving arrived, the days had already shifted into solitude. Unsurprisingly, I found myself alone, but not in the way I’d felt alone in L.A. This wasn’t isolation. It was stillness.

I walked the dog through hushed streets. Wandered without direction. Ordered Thai from the only open place and ate cross-legged in bed. Took a nap big enough to call a reset.

There was something in the simplicity of choosing peace over the noise of what Thanksgiving could have been—a day spent drowning in family drama if I’d been back home.

Eventually, I moved to the Inner Sunset. Just for the weekend. The apartment sat above the fog line, and the view reached all the way into some forgotten part of me. It was hard to leave. The quiet there felt earned. The fog rolled in and out like breath, and the layered, endless views carved themselves into memory.

Here, I found a different kind of belonging. For the first time, being alone felt like a choice rather than a condition. And I wondered if home might be less about where or who, and more about how I feel within myself.

Then came Oakland, where I stayed with Raven. Time with her felt like stepping into a version of home I hadn’t thought possible—a quiet, loving space that didn’t expect anything from me but to be exactly who I was. Who I am.

There was safety in her presence. A grounding that allowed me to examine the layers of myself I’d been carrying. With Raven, home wasn’t a place—it was the feeling of being seen without judgment, of exhaling fully without fear of what might rush in to fill the space.

And now, I’m in the Marina District. With Phil.

What started as potential has spiraled out of my control. It feels more unsteady than before. Familiar in ways I wish it weren’t. I wanted this to feel different than it did in L.A.—new city, new rhythm. But the dynamic followed us here. He hasn’t shown me the city like I hoped he would. And the space between us feels sharper now, less poetic.

I keep bumping into the truth I didn’t want to admit: some people don’t soften, no matter how much room you make for them.

That first night held promise—the way beginnings often do. But it quickly devolved into something volatile and draining. He arrived expecting immediate attention, then punished me for not providing it. Our conversations twisted into arguments, his expectations shifting like sand beneath my feet:

“Be someone I’d want to date.”

“I don’t want to date you.”

“I really like you.”

“I don’t like who I am when I’m with you,” he said, as if I were the architect of his behavior rather than a witness to it.

I once thought he might be the one. Now, I wonder if he’s simply a mirror, reflecting the parts of me that still accept chaos as a substitute for passion and still mistake intensity for intimacy.

Maybe that’s another lesson San Francisco has offered: the clarity to distinguish between what feels like home and what merely feels familiar.

San Francisco has been a kaleidoscope—chaos and calm, light and shadow, belonging and yearning.

It’s been weeks that feel like years, moments that feel eternal. The city has shown me reflections I wasn’t ready to see, and offered gifts I didn’t know I needed.

It isn’t just a backdrop. It’s an active participant, holding space for solitude, joy, and disappointment.

It doesn’t try to fix or explain. It just offers fragments:

a boy at a fountain,

a show lit like memory,

a room full of dancers,

fog that wraps around your thoughts,

a holiday spent in your own company without collapse.

It hasn’t given me clarity.

But it’s given me space.

And I think that’s what I needed.

Maybe home isn’t somewhere I’ll arrive.

Maybe it’s something I carry—something I’m building in real time,

In each moment of authenticity,

In each breath that feels like my own.

For now, the city shapes me.

Its rhythm slips into mine.

And maybe that’s the gift it offers:

The permission to be exactly where I am, exactly as I am,

and to call it home for as long as I need.

I’m not searching for more right now.

I’m here.

Awake.

This life I have in this city?

It is not a placeholder.

That feels like everything.

- CHRX, December 2024

Hello, beautiful you,1

I don’t know where you are as you read this. Maybe you’ve left all of this behind, found a peace I can’t even imagine yet. Wherever you are, I need you to hold this close—not to ca…

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Every now and then—rarely, but still—something will catch me off guard, and I’ll find myself gutted by the memory of the dogs I used to love. A dozen or so tiny souls who crossed paths with me throughout different seas…

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We all start as strangers.

It’s curious how people transform from everything to nothing, slipping away like sand through the cracks of time. We force ourselves to forget, shaping those shared memories carefully, filling the empty space with disassociated fragments—attempts at connection that never quite fit.

We all start as strangers.

I’ve come to realize …

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Wednesday, September 18

I write this now, unsure where to start or what to say,
But deep down, I know there's something about today—
Something that begs me to remember
The feeling it is to be me, right now, in this moment.

The version of myself where once again,
Everything and everyone has come in a crashing symphony.
A moment where all three pillars of my life—
Connection, meaning, and the reason to live—
Have finally decided to give up on me.
All. At. The. Same. Time.

Haven't I said, "When it rains, it pours" enough in one lifetime?
How can I be here, in this chaos, when just days ago,
I wrote with peace about the tumultuous waters of a year ago?
Back then, I knew, I was on the right path—
The path that made sense for the first time ever.
But now… now I’m meant to do something different.
I’m meant to close the loop, to take myself,
Because only I can save me.
A lonely truth, but truth nonetheless.
For what I must rescue myself from is—
Myself.

And here I am again.
On the other side of a text from a man I wanted to love.
On my last orbit with the dream job, where belief in me ran out—
And I, so paralyzed by his sudden shift,
Can’t even discern what’s real.
How did I become the orchestrator of my own undoing?
How did I lose myself while staring at the screen,
Pretending to be everything they wanted, but never… enough?

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There’s a certain magic in the in-between, in those days that exist between the milestones, the quiet moments that seem insignificant but are the truth of our humans life spent. I’ve always found solace in these spaces, savoring the small joys, the fleeting seconds of peace that punctuate the chaos. I’ve spent years learning to appreciate the little things, to find beauty in the unnoticed and the overlooked. It’s in my nature to hold these moments close, to revel in their simplicity. But lately, I’ve been wondering—has this appreciation for the now become a blindfold? Have I been tiptoeing so close to the line between gratitude and settling that I’ve lost sight of the adventure, the wildness that’s supposed to be my life?

Have I let the uncertainty of tomorrow be my guide not in the ways like that of an explorer and dreamer, and instead come from the being of life that results from this stale contentment in a chaos that drains me but excites my nervous system.

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It's comical, really, how we stand at the threshold of greatness, coffee in one hand and a manifesto in the other, proclaiming today as the day we conquer our peaks. Here I am, embodying the very essence of creativity and human endeavor, poised to move mountains and win hearts. Yet, what is readiness if not a shadow that vanishes at noon? I’ve groomed m…

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It’s amusing how quickly my equilibrium can be thrown off, how effortlessly I can sabotage the fleeting sense of relief I managed to voice yesterday. The declaration of, “Wow, it really didn’t take that much time to get over… Phil.”

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Let's reminisce on the audacity of a man whose best quality was his...DICK.

After months of trauma dumping, gas lighting, and then becoming the villian to this man’s story - I was on a Facebook group dedicated to “Are W…

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I feel like I’m finally in the place I've long avoided. The version of me who craves deep love and might even indulge in wishes or daydreams about the possibilities with the new man I’ve been exchanging direct messages with on Instagram. But finally, though I'm not yet sure if this is a fortunate or unfortunate turn of events, I've risen above the vast …

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