in the desert we call this the long summer

where nights are no reprieve from the heat

& we all go a little mad for months

when the buzz of cicada is our loudest melody

sweat clinging to our sheets

our sun’s punishment

an atmospheric blood boiling

the cactus & the scorpion

✴︎

only the most brutal beings

survive this

✴︎

the long summer scorches our spring

ashes emanating off asphalt

the mirage i still see when the fever lets me dream

haunted by this vision cyclically

burning skin & ancient blisters

coyotes panting

heat waves pulsing off dirt

& this dust i imagine might kill me

✴︎

i pretend not to notice the long summer throbbing

until the stench of it returns me

to roadkill on desert highway

all these soft, weak bodies rotting

my own flesh will fall among them

if i don’t harden

become a soul encased in exoskeleton

sharpen every gentle, delicate piece of me

✴︎

because i know

only the most brutal beings

survive this

✴︎

i watch the long summer stretch beyond the horizon

vast & appalling

pretend my sweat drenched skin does not bother me

the desert has never rewarded vulnerability

like the creatures taught me

survival instinct or vicious necessity

i will claw, bite, crawl

until the cicada song belongs to my memories

✴︎

the long summer slithers back into hibernation

but not before coiling around my feet

return’s promise hissing

i take hold of my ferocity

my thorns & teeth

lock them away with every other sunburnt thing

keep the key close within my reach

& commend the brutal beings

✴︎

my heat stricken heart

will survive this

✴︎

Crazy girl

Don’t you know how unladylike it is to be so angry?

Don’t you know you were molded from clay to be beautiful,

a divine image of serenity, picturesque in your torture,

shedding one delicate tear?

Girl is lovely

She does not fight, she does not scream, she does not demand

Girl smiles & apologizes for wanting,

for expecting

She takes it & takes it & takes it

& takes it

✴︎

Perfect girl

You receive so well

Commended for your restraint,

such a peaceful, pleasant girl

You’ll be rewarded one day,

chosen & placed

in rooms where your skin will crawl,

but perfect girls with porcelain skin make no noise

Sit graciously

& take it & take it & take it

& you’ve gotten so good at taking it

✴︎

Hysterical woman

Don’t you know anger is reserved for man?

For wars & battles & bloodshed?

Look what you’ve done to this place,

mangled such a sweet, soft face

with your wanting & screams

Fits are for boys

& rage is for men

You crazy, crazy woman,

shut up & take it & take it & take it

& take it

At the risk of sounding affectionate, I carry you with me.

Like a burden, I carry you- the never ending and ever present feel of quiet touches made louder only in the buzz of my memory. Like a weight, I carry you- a consistent draw on my muscles that only loosens when somnolent.

It’s not affection. No, it’s disdain.

Because I carry you with me, like a permanent injury. Bruises left by strong hands last only through the week but their image has never left my imagination. I see them still, when I look in the mirror. I feel them still, when a lover’s touch grazes too closely to their phantom mark.

Because I carry you with me, like a vision. Heavy breath and softly spoken obscenities parch into air on a hot summer’s night, but their sounds echo like a ring in my ear. A predatory gaze meets mine & I meet it each night in my own reflection.

I carry you with me, not willingly.

I carry you with me, like a fear. Boogymen and ghosts would be too kind of a comparison for I carry your fear in my chest and in my steps and in my voice. I crack as I speak yes and your fear carries through the air on the word. I breathe it back in on my next breath only to spit that fear out like carbon dioxide with every shuddering syllable.

I carry you with me, like a curse. No curse could be so cruel, for a monkey’s paw might have at least lent me solace in trade. May I have these violent nights in exchange for just one sweet day? Which wicked potion and which vengeful foe could have cast this fate? Not one could have known the consequence of a curse such as this.

You wonder where I’ve gone, but I carry you with me. I’m beginning to fear I always will.

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It’s been just over a year since I left my favorite job. I managed a coffee shop downtown for three years and, after a series of events far beyond my control, I had no choice but to quit.

I loved my job.

By all accounts, I should have hated my job. I worked endlessly. I rose before the sun and solved a new string of problems every day and existed in a state of constant exhaustion. I’d have nightmares nightly about running out of coffee beans and wake up daily to calls from my baristas about broken machines. I was overworked, underpaid, harassed, and caffeinated beyond what any medical professional would recommend.

But, call it Stockholm syndrome, I loved my job. Specifically, I loved my customers.

Now, I work a cushy remote job five feet from my bed. I’m well rested and comfortable. I take vacations and maintain an appropriate work-life balance. I write more, stress less, and-

I miss my customers.

Today I found an old rambling in my notes app.

Written exactly three days before I left my coffee shop behind, here is that note.

⋆˚꩜｡

I have this customer. She’s got massive, injected lips that make it impossible for her to close her mouth. She has a sticker promoting her OnlyFans on the back of her car and she orders an extra, extra sweet matcha. She hates me, I don’t know why, but she loves my coworker. When her boyfriend cheated, my coworker was the first person she told. She barely looks at me when I take her order, but I know to put 8 pumps of honey without her asking and I know she needs a straw instead of a sip lid.

I have this customer. She orders a large breve with only one shot of espresso and cinnamon powder. It’s the grossest drink I’ve ever seen and nobody likes to make it, but she tips $4 every day- “one for everybody in there”- and draws a smiley face for a signature. Today she said, “I heard the ginger girl is quitting. Please tell her I say thank you and goodbye.” I didn’t have it in me to tell her that I was quitting too.

I have this customer. He’s the manager of a bar nearby and he orders a plain almond milk latte. I know that I can make his day by adding a pump of pistachio syrup and a dash of cayenne. He’ll be reserved about it, but his eyes will light up when he takes a sip. He tipped me $20 today.

I have this customer. She’s absurdly rude and always complaining about something, but I know that when she says, “make that with extra love,” she means add an extra double shot of espresso. I also know that she only words it this way because she thinks we won’t charge her for the extra shots if she does. It’s a bit scammy, but she’s a single mom. I let her get away with it.

I have this customer. He orders a honey oat latte and one day, a few years back, he started ordering two. He had just met his girlfriend. Last week they had twins and today, I was one of the first people to meet his newborn baby girls while I made his two honey oat lattes. If I stayed another fifteen years it might be four honey oat lattes.

I have these customers, and I don’t know how to not feel like I’m abandoning them.

It’s just a job. I’ll have another one, I know, but god isn’t it just like leaving a dear friend? Or five dear friends? Or forty dear friends? I once noticed a customer was pregnant before she’d told her family simply because she’d switched to decaf and jesus, I’ll know their coffee orders by heart long after I’ve forgotten their names.

It’s a weird job that I have. A sentimental one. A job that fosters a closeness you’d never expect and don’t find often. I’m really going to miss these customers.

⋆˚꩜｡

I still miss them. I missed each one while reading this back today.

I wonder how their kids are doing and if they ever quit that job they hated and if their new barista knows how to make their day. I wonder if they’ve graduated law school yet and if they’re still dating that one guy and I wonder if they wonder about me.

I wonder if I linger in the fabric of their minds the way they do in mine.

All these customers I knew and cherished and hated and loved.

I’ve got a better job now, surely. I don’t have nightmares about the coffee shop anymore, but I do still have dreams. I dream of all their little odd mannerisms and I wake up knowing I won’t see their faces today.

Maybe I’m too sentimental, but I miss my regulars and strangers and even the customer who stopped in for the first time on my last day. I can’t help it.

The world can be quite lonely. Though I don’t consider myself a particularly lonely person, I feel it in the stiffness of corporate life and the way strangers avoid eye contact in grocery stores. I never felt it in my coffee shop. That job was stressful and exhausting and bitter at times, but it was also warm and inviting and kind. For a few minutes every morning we met one another exactly where we were.

It was undeniably honest and utterly pure.

The start of their day was my entire life for a time.

Go be nice to your local barista.

I often joke that there are two months where I reach peak power- June and October.

October because Halloween is my favorite holiday and something about the fall air gives me the capacity to enjoy everything.

June, of course, because I’m gay.

June is always special to me. Despite living in the hottest city in America where a sort of reverse seasonal depression grips us all, I always leave June with an easy smile.

This June was particularly special.

I did not have twelve spare seconds to write this month. I wish I was exaggerating, but if you saw my calendar you’d understand. I’d hoped to write some more eloquent pieces for pride- dissections and dissertations on queerness and politics maybe- but instead I was swept into a whirlwind of nonstop joy.

Isn’t that what I was really meant to be doing anyways?

So, in lieu of something polished, I’m just going to ramble. I’m just going to share some of June’s most beautiful moments with you.

⟡ June 1st ⟡

The monthly poetry slam that I run with my friends hosted pride night. We invited 8 of our favorite queer poets in Arizona to compete.

We do this event on the first Monday of every month, but something about it falling right on June 1st was magical.

The first day of pride- spent surrounded by queer poetry and stupid bits and nonstop laughter and Chappell Roan at our local dive bar karaoke after.

I knew right then, maybe felt it in the air around us, that this entire month would sound like those echoes of laughter.

⟡ June 5th ⟡

I quite hesitantly agreed to compete in a storytelling competition hosted by my friend Meghs. I have crippling and utterly humiliating stage fright, so to say yes, no matter how hesitantly, is a big deal.

When she asked me, I sat on the decision for several hours. I told myself I just wasn’t ready yet. I hadn’t conquered this fear yet.

I thought about my friends, who get up on stage every week and how nervous they still are after all these years. I reminded myself that they never conquered the fear. They just face it every time.

So, I said yes.

I didn’t win. I placed 4th out of 10. That didn’t matter. Though it has little to do with queerness, I can’t help but remember pride and all the ways we find ourselves experiencing it. I was proud of myself.

⟡ June 10th ⟡

Arizona State Championship Poetry Competition.

As my previous statements might indicate, I did not compete. My boyfriend, Skyelyn, did.

This was a major deal. Winning meant getting sent to nationals next month in Kansas. I know- Kansas… snooze- but this was important for a few reasons.

First being that Skyelyn’s birthday, July 25th, happens to fall exactly on final stage night of nationals.

Second being that Kansas has just passed some of the most aggressive anti-trans legislation in the country. Bathroom bans, reinstatement of conversion therapy, revoking licenses. Every day it feels like we’re waking up to new state sanctioned cruelty and you might be thinking why would you want to go there?

But Skyelyn, in his never ending capacity for kindness and bravery, decided he needed to get on that stage. To stand in a city that is doing everything in their power to silence him and speak. In defiance. In solidarity. To just be.

We visited my favorite mountain in Phoenix late the night before State Champs. He practiced his poems for me and I caught every word through the whistling of midnight wind. I knew, right then, that he would win.

Here I am, talking about pride again. And again, it seems to have little to do with queerness while also having everything to do with queerness. Every time I watch him reach within to tear out these tender parts of himself- on stage, on mountains, in his notes app- pride is exactly what I feel, second only to love.

And yeah, he won. Off to Kansas we go.

⟡ June 16 - 20 ⟡

One of my best friends, Noah, moved to New York a few months ago. He was gone for about one week before I missed him so terribly that I bought a plane ticket to visit.

This was that visit.

New York City in June. God, I couldn’t have asked for a better cure for the malaise of an Arizona heat wave.

Burlesque and cocktails, cigarettes as the sun rose over the city, finding the perfect pair of shoes in a Brooklyn thrift store, seeing my favorite musical (Heathers), getting lost with strangers on the subway.

Of course, I couldn’t have chosen a better time to visit. Fresh into Mamdani’s mayorship and 3 days after the Knicks historic win, New York was smiling.

There are a million moments I could describe, but we’d be here all day and I might embarrass myself with the retelling of drunk escapades, so I will share two things.

On my final day, I spent 6 hours and walked 20,000 steps in the Met. I could probably do it again 3 more times without running out of things to see.

Art museums are a staple for me. Every city that I visit, I do my best to spend time in one. My own hometown Phoenix Art Museum probably knows the feeling of my footsteps in its concrete.

Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer magnitude of the Met.

The costume exhibit. The ancient armor and weaponry. The unending labyrinth of paintings and statues. The quiet corners where I found artists sprawled out with sketchbooks.

I was brought to tears several times. For the beauty of the art, yes, but also the scope. I’d think I had finished one wing of the museum and then turn a corner to discover another room, even grander than the one before.

I let myself get utterly lost in there. I didn’t speak a single word all day. I just existed among the art until my feet quite literally could not take me one step further.

The last thing I will share of my trip to New York has nothing to do with the city itself.

I just love Noah.

It is such an incredible privilege to have a friend who is just ultimately down.

I said I’m coming to visit and he said any day. We danced and sang and drank and smoked and laughed our way through the city. In all our time as friends, I’ve never felt too loud, too obnoxious, too much. He’s always right there in step with me, whether it’s quiet mornings over coffee or plastered nights out until the sun rises.

And on my final night, we stumbled into a Christmas themed Russian vodka bar, drank too many extra dirty martinis, and he still hopped up at 4:30am to ride the subway to the airport with me.

Noah, thank you.

⟡ June 24th - 28th ⟡

I’ve spent the last few months coaching a team of poets in preparation for the Bigfoot Poetry Festival in Portland, Oregon.

This was that festival.

9 of us, sharing a massive airbnb right on the Washington side of the Oregon/Washington border.

I’m not going to lie, I was dreading it. I was overly anxious from the chaos of my month, exhausted from the quick turn around of my New York trip, yearning for some time alone.

That fear could not have been more misplaced.

My team, my heart. I miss you now as I write this. I wish we lived in that house, all 9 of us curled up on couches and laughing into the middle of the night.

We did not win- which was the goal, I suppose- but we did not even blink at loss.

Growing up as a competitive dancer in the age of Dance Moms, I’ve been conditioned to fear what comes after losing. The silent drives home and reprimands. The need to apologize and punish oneself. I know many of my friends were conditioned similarly.

I think we healed each other.

I think we learned that mistakes can result in laughter and anxiety can be because we care and not because we’re scared.

Despite the team not making final stage-

Our piece warning about AI was requested to be utilized in a college curriculum. One of our group pieces was chosen by the event to be showcased. Skyelyn’s performance at the late night underground competition earned him a solo spot on final stage.

I don’t know if it would have been possible to find all these little successes if we’d been tearing each other to shreds for the sake of winning.

And damn, we just had fun.

Sometimes I take for granted how lucky I am to be surrounded by artists and writers. I get swept up in the pressure and scheduling and never ending to-do lists. That stress often fogs over what an absolute privilege it is.

My friends, who make my laugh so hard I can barely breathe, also inspire me daily. We write together and cry together and share little pieces of our souls every time we sit around a patio table.

I’m proud to know them and even prouder to love them.

⟡ June 30 ⟡

Nothing significant happened today, besides a full moon and the swell of joy that pushed me to write this for you.

Yeah, it’s basically a journal entry but I don’t care! The journal factory didn’t even explode, I just refuse to go to it!

At the end of a pride month even more special to me than usual, I can’t help but feel the true weight of the word.

Pride.

How apt it is to describe what I feel towards the little world I’ve created.

It’s not about queerness, but isn’t it all about queerness?

My queerness and the queerness of my loved ones. The ways we persist. My art and the art of my chosen family. The strength it takes to share it. My friends and our laughter. I hear it, still, in the beat of my heart.

I love this life and I LOVE BEING GAY!

Happy Pride!

I write to you as the clock strikes midnight, June 1st, 2026, making these the first words I write for Pride.

Tonight I could write about the pain. I could write about my conservative town and all the years I buried this love. I could write about the closet, the classroom, the pews- where I learned lessons in hate before I ever learned a lesson in love.

But tonight, I will not write about queer misery. I’ll write about queer joy.

I want to write about my family, my friends, my lovers, and the many lessons they’ve taught me.

My cousin, Christopher, was the first gay person I ever met, and I discovered that I was gay the day I learned the word.

Before my cousin, a decade older than me, I didn’t know that my crushes on girls were any different than their crushes on boys. It all seemed the same to me.

But Christopher, with nothing but his Pride as armor, held the front lines alone against a family of conservative Irish Catholics, and I learned a word existed to describe what I had always been. Too young to understand why his father shot a gun in the backyard after hearing the news, but old enough to learn that loving loudly was a battle.

To be queer was a war and I had been drafted.

I watched him like a cadet, knowing one day I’d fill his boots and I know this sounds like the misery I swore I wasn’t writing, but I’m telling you it was joy.

Christopher brightened every dim room, made bigots laugh despite themselves, and when he moved to New York, he brought stories of joy back like souvenirs when he visited home. I’d sit on the edge of my seat at family reunions while he recalled tales of kingdoms far, far away and I’d dream like a princess in a tower, waiting for the day I’d draw my sword and escape. He made living in a studio apartment in New York City sound like a fairytale. He made the war seem worth something.

Christopher taught me to hope.

My cousin may have been the only gay person I knew for many formative years, but when it rains it pours. Now, at 26, I can’t turn a corner without bumping headfirst into one.

It started at 19, when I got my first barista job.

If you know anything about working in coffee, you know it’s a gay job, and the people I met at that first coffee shop planted the seeds that would take root in my heart and eventually blossom.

My first real crush bloomed in that shop because, as any queer person might know, we tend to be late bloomers. Without gentle hands and proper tending, it can be almost impossible to imagine this love sprouting and growing out from the dark corners of our hearts.

The way I felt about her was so unlike all the boys I’d been seeking validation from for years. I thought love was supposed to be found in the obsession of a man. I believed the satisfaction, however unfulfilling, that I felt when a man found me charming and beautiful was love.

But she didn’t want anything from me, and she surely didn’t reciprocate what I felt for her. Despite the absence of validation, I loved her more than I’d ever loved a man. It terrified me, and it set me free.

She was kind and gentle. She spoke softly and offered laughter generously. She took me to Sedona and we played in parks like children and I yearned silently.

But this unrequited love felt better than any emotion I had mistaken for love before.

She didn’t know the impact she’d had and I’m not sure she ever will, but that crush, with an intensity that forced me to reconsider everything, caused a ripple effect that started with leaving my boyfriend and ended with leaving my hometown.

Nothing ever happened between us, but without ever meaning to, she tended the secret garden inside my chest and I grew.

I still hold her in a quiet, cherished place in my heart.

I told you, when it rains it pours. Once I knew I was gay, I was gay.

In classic coffee shop fashion, I met McKenna barista training her the morning after my 21st birthday. I knew I must have loved her instantly because- what other reason could I have possibly had to be giggling at 9am, hungover, sleep deprived, and still recovering from a bottle shattering injury I’d drunkenly endured the night before?

We dated for three years and McKenna is still my best friend.

I know! The gay stereotype of it all. An artist and a roller derby player who U-Hauled after our first kiss and lived together with our 3 cats for years only to break up and stay best friends! When we moved out, we even had to set aside an entire day for what we called The Great Mug Divide, dedicated entirely to a divorce hearing for our eclectic mug collection.

I don’t think you can be as close as we were (living together, working together, everything together) and not learn lessons daily.

She taught me anime and music and Game of Thrones. I taught her coffee and taxes and my favorite sitcoms. We learned the world together, sometimes in baby steps and sometimes in stumbling off cliffs. We fought through unemployment and poverty and found joy in movie theaters and beach trips and we really learned what it meant to grow up together.

But as far as lessons in queer joy are concerned, what she taught me beyond all else was how to take up space without apology.

As you might imagine an ex-hockey player, Aries, theater kid- McKenna never once apologized for existing. It was revolutionary to me. She was (and still is) loud and obnoxious and cocky and completely full of light and always has something to scream about.

I remember the first time we hung out, I got in her car and she told me I am the funniest person I know.

At the end of the night she said okay, we might be tied.

I never looked back. I followed her lead and made the world my stage.

If somebody who commanded so much attention with her unapologetic joy wanted to crack open my shell and unleash me onto the world, who would I be to deny her? I would be just as loud and just as obnoxious and people would look at us and say they must be having the time of their lives- and we were.

We may not be together anymore, but McKenna built the foundation I stand on today. She unintentionally taught me every trick- every theater kid trade secret- to shedding your fear of being too much. I would never apologize for my volume, my laughter, or the space I demanded from a room again.

For somebody who spent so many years cowering in an unlocked cage, learning that I could simply climb out, stretch my legs, and exist- there has never been a greater joy. For the rest of my life, I would never climb back in again.

At 24 years old, with an endless summer’s heat finally letting go of its grip on my sanity, I stepped into the first days of fall completely lost.

I felt like I’d finally found myself (thanks to that full frontal lobe development), but everything I realized I needed seemed just outside my grasp. I craved friendship with artists and more fulfilling ways to spend my days and a creative community.

I had no idea where to start searching for any of it, so when my coworker- just looking for somebody to do her a favor- asked me to work door for a slam poetry event, she had no idea she was going to change my life.

I showed up, a little tipsy and completely misguided about what kind of event I’d be working. It wasn’t a bar, like I expected, it was a quaker meeting house. It wasn’t a big show, like I’d imagined, it was a small, well-lit room, full of poets on the edge of their seats, salivating over the art on stage.

I had stumbled into working door for the very first Body Slam Poetry Show, and if you’ve read my father’s daughter article, you know I don’t miss an opportunity to take charge. Today, I am a member of the board, cohost, and coaching the traveling team.

This is particularly insane because- and I cannot emphasize this enough- I AM NOT A POET.

I’ve deviated from the premise a bit, I know, but Body Slam feels like its own teacher of lessons in queer joy.

For starters, it’s about the gayest place imaginable. The board is entirely queer and both the competing poets and audience are overwhelmingly so. I know that’s no surprise, poetry and all, but for a girl who knew one gay person for the first 18 years of her life, that space became sacred.

I could ramble on forever about the lessons I’ve learned running Body Slam (performance and craft and the importance of community), but for the sake of giving him the attention he deserves, I’ll concede. The reason I mention any of this is to accurately explain where I met Skyelyn.

I was his friend, his cohost, and prominently his biggest fan before I ever imagined I’d be his girlfriend.

Jumpscare, a man!

I’ll say that, as a self proclaimed lesbian, I did not expect to fall in love with Skyelyn and the lesson I learned in doing so was that a queer relationship can look a million different ways. I’d sworn off men entirely, but had not quite accounted for the distinct exception that turned out to be the love of a somebody who had been brave enough to say I am a man and recreate himself from scratch.

The lesson of my apparent bisexuality was internal though, and besides the point. The ones I’ve learned from Skyelyn changed me in a much greater way.

Though I’m no authority on the matter, being trans in this world is an act of sheer bravery. The strength I continue to witness in him has fundamentally changed me. I know his coming out story as well as I know my favorite book because every detail and every moment is a testament to the human spirit and the guts it requires to live honestly.

I vowed against queer misery here because right now it seems to surround us.

The news, the president, the bigots, and even the well-intentioned but uninformed- they seem to infect the air we breathe. It’s hard to open your phone or watch TV or write an article without wanting to scream HATE IS ALL AROUND US.

But Skyelyn never does. He breathes easily, not unaffected by the toxic air they create for him, but with a refusal to acknowledge it.

And isn’t that the definition of bravery? His existence alone is considered an act of defiance, but it isn’t. The defiance rests in his unfurrowed brow and the love in his eyes and his comfortable smile. The defiance echoes in his voice on stage and his laughter in dive bars and his compliments to strangers.

Since the moment I met him I have been in awe of that bravery and every day I work harder to embody it.

To display my strength in my unclenched jaw instead of my curled fists.

This particular form of bravery, though, is only made possible by a kind heart- Skyelyn’s being the kindest one I’ve ever held.

This is my final lesson in queer joy today. Kindness.

It seems so simple to be kind. We’ve been taught since we were school children the golden rule- do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A playground lesson meant to teach kids not to call each other names or push each other over, but with time it can seem almost impossible to follow. The world gets darker and people turn cruel and when faced with all this malice, we turn to eye for an eye instead. We meet hatred with hatred and I don’t blame us for it! We don’t owe bigots patience and we don’t owe hatred grace.

But then you meet somebody like Skyelyn, who still follows that golden rule as if it were printed behind his eyelids and every deep, closed-eye breath was a reminder.

He never assumes bad intentions. He never listens to one side of a story without hearing the other. He never judges somebody over their mistakes, no matter how frequent. He never snaps when attacked or fights to kill, even when he probably should.

As an outsider looking in, it makes me go crazy at times.

Somebody so kind, you can imagine, has a tendency to get trampled on. I have watched it happen, with my cynical eyes, and wanted to scream DON’T YOU SEE THEY’RE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF YOU?

But the funny thing about living that way is that if you never believe that people are out to get you, they never are. And if they are, you’re unaffected by it.

And with time I’ve come to see, to my surprise, the way the world stretches and expands to meet that kindness.

For every time he should have said fuck you and didn’t, I have seen cruel people soften around the edges. I’ve seen the ways his goodness paves a path for others to follow and I’ve seen them follow it. I am here, writing you this, because I am doing my best to follow it, too.

None of this to say he finds it easy, though.

I used to think kindness was an instinct and we were all on the spectrum somewhere. Kind people came by it easily and cruel people too. We were all just treating each other in whatever manner came naturally moment to moment.

But Skyelyn tells me he wasn’t always this kind. I’m still not sure if I believe him, but he tells me it’s a choice. Every day he decides to be kind. To walk with love as he says. Even when his blood boils and every instinct says otherwise, he takes a breath and chooses to be kind.

Somehow this makes it all the more incredible because, even if he falters, stumbles off the path for a moment, he will stand up, brush the dust off, and march along again. He will always return to kindness.

In a world that wants him to cower, he’s limitlessly brave and in a world that offers him endless cruelty, he offers abundant kindness.

There is no better final lesson in queer joy.

Queer joy is not always naturally occurring. It often is, in our safe spaces and third places and found families, but queer joy can also be the joy we create for ourselves.

Christopher, and the hope he held onto and passed down to me.

My first real crush, and the self acceptance she helped cultivate.

McKenna, and the refusal to apologize for honest existence.

Skyelyn, and the choice to meet each day with the unwavering bravery to be kind.

And to every other queer person I have ever known and each one I have yet to meet;

I will find new lessons in queer joy in the songs we sing to each other on long car rides and the way your eyes light up when you talk about love. I will find new lessons between the shattered pieces of heartbreak and the terror in your eyes. I will find lessons in the gaps between your teeth and the color of your eyes and the way each person says my name with a different inflection.

I will never stop learning from you.

Happy Pride. I love you all.

For starters, I might be the luckiest daughter alive. My dad, who had me at nineteen and became a single father by twenty-two, took to fatherhood like it was his life’s calling (which he often says it was). Looking back now with the knowledge that, by my current age, he had a seven year old daughter, I sometimes find myself near bursting into tears with gratitude. He was a child raising a child and, in many ways, I feel like we grew up alongside each other.

He was stricter than I would have liked him to be (I’d wager to say my high school 6pm curfew was a little bit overboard), but he loved me fiercely. He was, and still is, soft and affectionate and the type of dad to hug me tightly every day, even when my preteen embarrassment wiggled from his grasp. Every Valentine’s Day, I’d wake up to a basket of candy with a letter reminding me that I taught him what real love was. He worked overnights and twelve hour shifts and never once complained. He never, as I’ve known many other parents to do, made me feel guilty for the blood, sweat, and tears of parenting. Instead, he thanked me for the simple act of existence.

With all of the sap aside, he’s also just cool.

My dad is the life of the party, the star of any room he enters, and has never met a person he couldn’t make laugh. So, as I got older and more and more people started to attest that I was exactly like him, I was thrilled.

By thirty-seven and eighteen, my dad and I were undeniably twins. Everybody said so. We looked exactly alike. I had his big ears and curly hair, blue eyes with permanent creases from laughter, and all of the same little mannerisms. Even more notably, we acted alike. We had the same vulgar humor and brutal honesty. We were both kind in unexpected ways. We were both prone to argue and call it “debate.” We shared a love for art and long philosophical ramblings and good food. We were both always right (even when we disagreed, if you can believe it).

I’ve been wearing my father’s shoes since my first step into adulthood and have learned to fill them out over all the years that followed.

It wouldn’t take long, though, to discover that walking among men in my father’s shoes would never be the same as being a man.

I think that my first lessons in the crime of being my father’s daughter came earlier than I had realized. I thought the incessant bullying and mockery I’d been subjected to throughout my childhood had to do with my hair or glasses or gangly limbs. I thought, in my teen years, that I just didn’t fit the mold in a city that was primarily Mormon. I was too crass, too emo, too different. But, I thought, one day I would move out of my hometown to a place where I’m not so different and everything will change.

For the most part, this was true.

When I moved to a big city, I made more friends. My tattoos and piercings stopped being a thing to gawk at. My humor, at its most vulgar, killed in a dive bar. My theory must have been right- it was just the conservative town and, from now on, I’d be free from judgement and hate and otherness.

But, as I soon discovered, there is no distance you can run where this crime won’t catch up to you.

It dawned on me, slowly but surely in the following years, that all the traits I cherished like heirlooms passed down from my father were not suitable for a woman to possess.

I found this crime most punishable in the workplace.

I watched my dad for many years, a natural leader, and knew acutely that I’d inherited the gene. From the age of nineteen and on, I’d be fast tracked to leadership in any workplace I’d enter.

On the surface, this seemed to be an acknowledgment of what I knew to be some of my best qualities- communicative, instructional, confident, & decisive. Once placed in these roles though, something always shifted.

I fought harder for respect than my male counterparts. Where a decision would earn him praise, the same decision would earn me criticism. An idea of mine would be met with skepticism and when a man raised the same idea weeks later, it’d be implemented in days. Their promotions came easier. Their word was law and mine, at best, garnered indifference.

It’s not that they were better at their jobs- this I knew. It was just that these men, by the nature of their very being, were allowed to innovate.

Where he was communicative, I was blunt. Where he was instructional, I was bossy. Where he was confident, I was conceited. Where he was decisive, I was stubborn.

It wasn’t only the workplace.

I found myself in a constant battle of misunderstandings. My tone, as familiar as a hug from my father, was subject to constant critique from those around me.

The softest a man has ever spoken felt curt slipping out of the lips of a woman. I was expected, in every room, to sweeten my words. I could be forwardly kind and endlessly gracious, but if the tone of my voice had not been dipped in sugar, it would never be received as such.

This isn’t to say I didn’t try. I stirred honey into my voice and served every sentence on a pink trimmed plate for a time, but I found it all so exhausting. My world became a bakery and I’d been raised in a butcher shop.

I know as I write this that I’m running the risk of appearing like a million things that women are expected to never appear as. Pick me. Whiny. Surface level feminist. I know. None of this is revolutionary or unique to me. I have no aversion to being a woman or being among them. In fact, the people who find my boyishness most offensive are never women. It’s always men.

But again, as I write this, I beg the question- would a man have a list of words he is keenly aware will be levied against him as he presses publish? Would a man feel the need to justify himself proactively?

One night, at a bar with some friends and their friends, I was the only woman present. The men around me joked with ease. Laughter erupting from the table at every obscenity, I was a part of it all. With nothing but this humor from my father, that I cherish so deeply, I had become no different from them. I felt good. I felt understood.

That is, until two days later when a friend who had been there let me know that the new people I’d met found me crass. Vulgar. Unladylike.

They had no interest in my friendship because I had never been a peer to them. I’d been expected to blush at their crude jokes, to offer none in return. I’d been expected to find them hilarious and charming, not equal to me.

It’s not dramatic. It’s every day of my life.

I felt reduced to that child again, out of place in her hometown, wondering what it was about her that was so hard to swallow.

None of this is to say I am particularly manly. If you met me today, you wouldn’t find some disgusting perversion of womanhood. You’d find softness and girlish laughter and compassion and every deep facet of unrelenting femininity we’re all so accustomed to. You might also find me a bit loud and a bit forward. I am no less woman for it.

I walk this city in my father’s shoes, my womanhood unaffected.

Men, in every walk of my life, let their eyes graze down from my doe eyes to my breast to my hips until they rest upon these shoes and scream out THOSE AREN’T MEANT FOR YOU.

But they fit, don’t they?

I sit at my father’s dinner table and laugh easily. He’s always gotten along best with women. We often joke that the two of us have met each other somewhere in the middle of the masculinity - femininity scale. He is gentle for a man and I am harsh for a woman.

Identical in attitude, opposite in public perception.

I’m lucky, though. Not just for the dad who has cared for me so tenderly, but for the dad who made me so self assured.

I think I am lucky too, to know that I will always frighten away the presence of men who do not regard me as equal. What an easy filtration system I unknowingly implemented.

I hold every trait passed down in my heart and I never let the world take them from me. This patience. The creases at the corner of my eyes. This stubbornness. The laughter that echoes through a room. This vulgarity. The confidence so at odds with a world that wants women small. These are my inheritance from a man who loves me unwaveringly. Who would I be to waver in loving all that he’s given me?

For every hundred tables that would have me punished for the crime of being my father’s daughter, there is a table that saves a seat for me.

And if there were none, I know I’d have a seat at my dad’s.

Sometimes we are drawn to a person because of the innate goodness we see in them. People who remind us of kindness that exists in the world and, in turn, inspire us to be better people.

Sometimes we are drawn to a person who is inexplicably terrible. People who walk with selfishness and cruelty and, despite it, we seem to walk in step with them for a time.

Today I’m talking about the latter.

I’ve recently undergone what I can only describe as an exorcism- a complete expulsion of one of these dark, but alluring figures.

Like you’d assume any exorcism might be, it was disgusting and brutal. My mind and body left aching, but my spirit lightened.

It feels a rather dramatic metaphor to describe the falling out of friendship that happens often throughout your life and particularly in your twenties, but there’s no better way to explain its absolute shredding, pulsing, exhilarating, and ultimately unburdening sensation.

I’ve wondered often over the months following this exorcism- how did I ever let this happen?

Like watching a horror movie and screaming at the naive protagonist as they buy the clearly haunted doll, I’m looking at the last two years of my life with similar clarity. I am banging my fists against the TV screen and falling back in exasperated defeat as she takes every wrong turn and finds herself completely possessed by an evil spirit that was entirely avoidable had she even a modicum of common sense.

It’s fruitless, of course. Myself and the protagonist alike, had no inclination until this thing had slipped right under our skin and undone us so thoroughly that every sign of something being terribly wrong felt as silly as a ghost story.

But then again, how did I ever let this happen?

I think at our most stagnant, we are too willing to seek thrill without reflection. At our most self loathing, we are too willing to accept cruelty without question. At our most vulnerable, we are too willing to accept love without the labor of truly being known.

Or maybe I am speaking only for myself.

Regardless, I was in a dark place. This is where ghosts find you.

Nearing two years ago now, which is almost unbelievable to me, I was at my most insecure and unsettled and broken. Like the widow or orphan or outcast walking into their newly purchased haunted house, I would have given anything to feel less alone. In the physical sense partially, but much more importantly in the deep, unrelenting emptiness that had grown and settled in my bones.

Now looking back, I can tell you unquestionably that what I needed was purpose. I needed honest friendships and a place to pour my passion and a job that wasn’t sucking the life out of me.

What I got instead though, was this possession.

Stumbling upon a person who preys on feelings of inadequacy at your darkest hour is a horror movie curse of cinematic proportions.

In a series of arbitrary events I had mistaken as fate, I found myself surrounded by new people, new places, and new opportunities that all seemed to center around this enigmatic figure with their sights set on me.

Wow, how lucky am I?

I thought, naively, that I’d been so deliberately chosen. In many ways I suppose I was, but not for any of the reasons I had hoped. I thought, naively, that there must be something truly remarkable about me that I had yet to discover. I thought, naively, that this stranger must have a sense of these things. I mean, look at this world around them!

Much like an evil spirit that creates visions around their victim, I was nothing but so carefully shown a life that could be mine if I was only willing to sacrifice little pieces of myself for it.

The warning signs were there, obviously, but what were a few red flags in a haze of colors so bright they whispered promises of never knowing loneliness again?

We were friends, above all else, though I won’t lie and say the lines weren’t blurred, and what I needed more than anything was a friend. It was a need embedded so wholly within me that I allowed anything in its path to be destroyed. I will take fault in that regard, for the ways I let my desperation blind me.

I look back on those first few months with the sort of fondness you might feel towards believing in Santa Claus. Unwavering belief that the world was good. That I was good. That I was being rewarded for it, even.

The facade did not last long, though.

Being so willfully blind to the evil surrounding me, the evil that I knew was starting to consume me, became even lonelier than isolation.

At every turn, I made decisions that felt foreign to me. At times where, in my right mind, I would have always chosen patience or kindness, I was allowing cruelty and selfishness to guide me. Then, when spiraling and self loathing in the aftermath, I would turn to this person, this ghost, for comfort and they would assure me these were the sacrifices that must be made for a glorious life.

They would look at me, with an all knowing eye, and say I see you. I know you better than anybody knows you. There is nowhere else to go.

And I believed it!

At my best, I believed in some convoluted way, that this person had my best interest at heart. At my worst, I believed that I deserved a life possessed- in the same way that you might utter well that’s what you get at the horror movie protagonist after they’ve made every glaringly wrong decision.

The most vicious part isn’t even the toll it took on my well being. It was the slow and all consuming realization that these ghosts feed on pain. Crying in the arms of a friend and hearing the quiet voice of my intuition whisper they like you best this way.

That voice got louder with time. I got braver with time.

I tried countless times to free myself. I wrestled with the monster in a million futile ways, never with enough conviction to succeed. I became bitter and resentful. I hated them and I hated myself more every time I glimpsed their eyes brighten with the exhilaration of watching me lose myself. They were hungry, and I was serving my rotting flesh for them daily. Despite my best efforts, my most violent attempts, I couldn’t banish them.

But then- after a year and some change- the exorcism.

I hadn’t been prepared and, as much as I had dreamed of it, I didn’t see it coming.

Sparing the gory details of what was essentially the ripping, clawing, and dragging of a malevolent spirit from my body, I walked into a new day with the sun shining and my bones aching, covered head to toe in scars and bruises that only I could see.

In the thick of something like this, the idea of an end seems so abstract, so terrifying. Truthfully though, I have never experienced such a great sense of calm. After all the thrashing, head spinning, and searing pain, I was just there. Relieved. Alone. Content to be so. Ecstatic, even.

I burned the doll or sold the haunted house or hired a movie star priest to send the demon back to hell. God, this metaphor.

The point remains. I am myself again.

It feels an awful lot like possession- to be taken advantage of. Ridding my soul of it doesn’t necessarily mean the phantom marks have vanished. I’m not entirely certain that they ever will.

I am certain though, that there will be no sequel.

My bones creak and groan under the weight of holding my life entirely on my own, but I am now thankful for the pain. It is an ever present reminder that I am strong enough to carry myself. That there is no beautiful life for me that requires ugly sacrifices. That loneliness is not the evil I need to fear. That the people I love will not take the shape of ghosts and demons.

And above all else, that I am still alive. Breathing. Flesh and blood. Walking into a new day, with the sun on my skin and the credits rolling.

I think I am most accustomed to grief and, subsequently, most terrified of its resurrection.

Grief doesn’t get easier with practice- as much as I try to convince myself it does. Loss and death and disappearance. A wound heals shut leaving scarred, stronger tissue in its place but the next blow doesn’t strike in the same location. No, a fresh, bloody gash opens just below, deeper than the last and as I hunch in pain, panting to catch my breath, another strikes fresh skin.

I’m covered in these scars. I don’t hide them beneath bandages or cloth- I wear them loudly as if to say take a stab, I have no soft flesh left to pierce, with armor protecting every untouched piece of me. I’m invulnerable! I scream while cowering behind a damaged shield.

So, with miles of myself left open for grief’s attack, I watch each friend pass by with a knife. With no intention to turn their weapons upon me, I flinch when the sun reflects off the metal. I let out a soft cry each time our flesh meets. I strike first once I see their eyes graze my weakest points. It’s a defensive strategy. It’s a bloodbath. It’s war.

Weapons litter the battlefield. They’re dancing! My friends, they’re dancing! The soldiers, they’re dancing! They’ve tossed their knives into the dirt and they’re stomping heels into handles until the only proof of any battle at all is one soldier left cowering, hiding beneath a damaged shield screaming, I’m invulnerable!

Grief doesn’t get easier with practice. A fresh wound will always bleed.

I can drop my weapons, dance among my friends on the battlefield, and laugh through the pain of stray scrapes and bruises. I can be naked, expose soft flesh for gentle touches, and grit my teeth through stumbles and pitfalls.

Because the grief will strike again, but if my friends can dig knives into dirt and turn war into music, I owe it to them to do the same.

Earlier this week, I woke up from a beautiful dream with a pit in my stomach.

I was thirteen and it was summer break. This was back when the season meant no homework and unlimited free time as opposed to working through the sweat in my eyes as the temperatures reach the 120s (the worst time to be a desert rat). I was in my childhood bedroom- Hello Kitty comforter, Paramore poster on my wall- impatiently pacing in the early evening, waiting for my dad to get off the family computer. When he offered a soft knock on my doorframe to let me know it was free, I ran.

To the computer room.

Inside, I shut myself out from anyone and everything. I drew the blinds, wrapped myself in a blanket, and booted up the only game that had mattered to me since my Wizard 101 retirement in fifth grade.

⊹˚₊ MINECRAFT ₊˚⊹

In what I can only describe as my own personal cave, I drowned all sound with what I still believe to be the most peaceful music ever created. Entranced by the soft chords, the grass footsteps, the axe’s strike, hours passed me by until I noticed the sun creeping in through the curtain’s edge. Blinking away the blue light from my eyes, I found-

I’m 26, and late for work.

Now double the age of my dream self, I wondered where all that magic had run off to. The escapism, the hours that passed by like minutes, the joy, It’s easy to write off as coming of age. I’ve just grown too old for these silly games or whatever sentiment our parents swore we’d understand one day. But with my fists clenched as tightly as they were half my life ago, I want to scream I STILL LOVE YOU, MINECRAFT.

I’ve reentered those mines many times in adulthood, but it hasn’t felt the same in probably a decade. It’s nostalgic and as warm as watching my favorite childhood movie, but it just doesn’t lure me in the way it used to. I’ve been thinking about what makes us choose what games we play and when. I’ve been chewing on theories and choking on the ones that hurt to admit might be true.

The open world game model used to be the excitement of endless possibilities, but as my days became decision after decision, I grew weary of calling every shot.

But when you’re a kid, and especially a preteen, every part of your life is chosen for you.

You’re thirteen and you wake up everyday at a time that’s been preordained and you put on an outfit within the confines of your parents’ budget and you go to school where you sit in an assigned seat and do assigned projects with your assigned partners and you go home to do your assigned homework before eating the food your family decided you’d be having for dinner.

All of this while your little brain is starving for that first taste of autonomy.

So, Minecraft.

We were given this world- this block laden expanse of never ending possibility where we could decide what comes next.

I was a Creative Mode warrior. Yeah, I’d beat the game in Survival Mode from time to time, read the End Poem (admittedly, I have a line from the End Poem tattooed on my back), and shed a tear, but what I really wanted was to build a world. Better yet, I wanted to build a million worlds.

What I wanted was choice and particularly, utter freedom.

I never understood why my dad loved Assassin’s Creed so much as a kid. It seemed so restrictive to me- running around this massive world just to follow orders and complete quests. I wanted free reign, GTA style unlimitedness. Who would find any joy in sitting down and being told what to do?

Well, me. Now. At 26.

The game I’ve spent the most time on in adulthood? Zelda Breath of the Wild- a game where I run around a massive world just to follow orders and complete quests.

I’ve finally found the comfort in it. I’m in this life alone, making decision after decision, bearing the weight and consequence of each one. I’m exhausted and burdened by the hours I spend every day just choosing and when I sit down at the end of it, maybe I just want somebody to lay out a map for me!

Maybe now that we’re older, we just want someone to lay out a map for us.

It makes sense, then, why we all flocked to spending hours on Animal Crossing during Covid. Besides the fact that Animal Crossing just fucking rules, the world was upside down. Every day was restriction and uncertainty and fear and under that great weight of hopelessness, we were all reduced to thirteen once again- in our rooms, curtains drawn, wrapped in a blanket, with a colorful world of choice at our fingertips.

Of course, we all went back to Minecraft at the time too.

When I was young I always felt such a strange sense of defensiveness over Minecraft, over the why the hell are these kids playing that stupid block game? comments. I didn’t have the words to tell them why, but now I do.

Minecraft gave us a place to escape where we were in complete control. We were the masters of our own destiny in that family computer room at a time where every step we took outside of it was determined for us. This game taught us choice and will and even consequence when the world around us did not offer the same lessons. It was simple and, without overwhelming, profoundly empowering for those ever changing brains.

You know, it was also just fun!

Maybe you never gave up on Minecraft. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself. If so, consider this nothing more than a journal entry, but I found a lot of surprising truths hiding in a dream about blocks.

At the age of 26, I can confidently scream I STILL LOVE YOU MINECRAFT.

Maybe the next time I’m feeling powerless, I’ll boot up Minecraft. Maybe I’ll turn off all the lights and sink into a world where I decide my fate and maybe it’ll heal me again.

₊˚⊹

And the universe said I love you because you are love.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

You are the player.

Wake up.

NOTATIONS

You have these hands, lover

That insist on being gentle when the world is cruel

Drawing circles on my inner thigh

Tracing my heart shaped tattoo

⊹ ࣪ ˖

You have these hands, lover

That threaten to tear me to shreds

Fingerprint bruises

Painting my flesh softly red

LETTER FROM A SOFTER PLACE

I’ve watched how you hold the world so gently

Catching rabid things

Ugly things

With deep tenderness

As if to say-

Look how soft a touch can be

⊹ ࣪ ˖

I’ve watched these hands grip the blade’s edge

Bleeding & terrible

Wincing

Pained smile

As if you’d been told-

Hold tightly, your time will come

⊹ ࣪ ˖

I’ve watched as you let go

Birds & insects

Take flight from your palm

Weak & trembling

As if you had whispered-

Now’s your time to be brave

⊹ ࣪ ˖

I’ve wondered how it’d feel to be cradled

Against your love lines

My ugliness

My trembling

Would you tell me-

Rest here, you’re safe

⊹ ࣪ ˖

I’ve found shelter in these hands, now

Soft & unflinching

My weary eyes

My fearful bones

Your soft voice-

Let me hold you a moment longer

IMPERSONATIONS

I’ve been searching for a way to tell you

Of dreams outside of my kitchen window

Where I wake up as an orange on this tree

Waiting to be picked and torn into

Vision blurred & sticky

I lose sleep with desire

Citrus, pulp, & skin

To be peeled open & devoured

⊹ ࣪ ˖

I can’t help but wonder if you know

What I would give to live as your jeans

Pressed tightly around you

Your hands buried in me

Do you know I’d take every beating

Of your washing machine

All for the anticipation

Of how you’d soon fold me gently

Turning 26 means a variety of things. Lately it has meant joking about how the doctors are coming to cut my legs off since I’m out of insurance. It means telling somebody I just met at the bar my age and they lightheartedly go oh, you’re old! and realizing that the gap between me and the legal drinking age gets wider every day. It means having friends who are 28 to 32 tell me that I’m basically a child.

It’s a weird age. It’s almost a nothing age. I don’t have much to say about it. I don’t think it has revealed itself to me quite yet. I’m not even sure why I’m writing about it besides the fact that I haven’t written in a month and I want to put some pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard).

Do you remember what it smelled like to be 22? Do you have a color associated with 18? 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways I’ve categorized my life in these strange little ways. Sign of my obsessive compulsive disorder? Certainly, but I keep this meticulous organization in my mind. My ages all ranked from worst to best, kept in colored folders with visual markers, scents, sounds, and symbols to remember them by. 

Like my color coded closet, organized from tank top to sweater, I know exactly where to reach when I’m looking for a particular t-shirt or memory. My friend asks what year did we go to the Hozier concert? and I can suddenly smell the fresh cut grass in my favorite yard and taste the cinnamon pear redbull I drank daily and say 2023.

It’s a sentimental organization. I never want to forget a thing. The idea of forgetting even the worst moments of my life terrifies me. 

I’m a nightmare to argue with, truly, because I remember it all and I can recite it. Any word that has ever been uttered in my vicinity is tucked into a folder with a label like Fall 2020 next to images of Apex Legends and skateboards. I want to remember and reminisce and think fondly of it all, despite myself.

Anyways, I’m running circles around my point. What is 26 going to be? I’m not sure if we have any say in the matter. Some of my best years came completely unsuspecting.

21 was something particularly special. I turned 21 during Covid, which is admittedly not a great start to the age where you’re supposed to be out partying. I left my hometown, moved 3 times, and was absolutely dirt poor. In my mind though, 21 was sunset orange. It was nights by candlelight with my best friend and a dreamy, rainy Christmas morning and relaxing into a version of myself I’d never known I could be- one that laughed and rolled with the punches and loved loudly.

At 25, I went through a devastating breakup, lost my job because my boss went to prison, and had three people close to me pass. Despite it, 25 was the color of warm, dive bar red lights. It was nights out dancing for hours and creating a space in the Phoenix art scene and learning to make a home out of where I’d landed. I was distraught and wrecked by grief and shown a light and kindness in community like I’ve never seen.

So, now I’m 26. Who cares?

I’m going into this one blind with no expectations, which is a hard thing for me to do. I like to plan and anticipate and insure, but what did it do for me?

I’m looking back on all of these ages and versions of myself, sorting through the files and asking myself what made the best ones so special, and the most honest conclusion I’ve come to is that I love the years that shocked me. I have this unrelenting fondness for the seasons of my life where I surprised myself with my own strength.

I know that in some ways planning for no expectations is still just planning, but it’s an improvement, alright?

I turned 26 to the sound of a screaming countdown to midnight from all of the people I hold dear. I had bouquets of flowers and hand written letters and, admittedly, too much to drink. My friends picked me up and spun me around. They kissed my head. They danced with me.

I’m feeling ridiculously sentimental about it all. I can’t help it. For such a cynic, I find myself writing so much lately about the best parts of my life. When I made this Substack, I expected it to be so nihilistic or severe (and maybe we’ll get there, who’s to say), but I just keep coming back to these great feelings of love. 

I stepped into 26 like a warm embrace. I think that’s all I need to know right now.

Everybody’s been talking a lot about 2016. 10 years passed by in a blink and I think we all understand that it seemed to be the last good year before shit got really scary for just about everybody and I know that this is a classic case of unwarranted nostalgia (we were living in bomber jackets and chokers for Christ’s sake), but 2016 was the last full year I spent with my best friend.

So, yeah, I’m a victim to the nostalgia.

Rudy and I were laying on our friend Shannon’s trampoline in the middle of the night. Shannon had that house that everybody escaped to because her mom was kind and cool and we all felt safe there. It was early fall, first semester, which in Arizona means 85 degrees under the cool shade of night and, because we’re Arizonan, we’re shivering and wrapped up in those damn army green bomber jackets. Shannon was asleep in her room, where we’d just finished the finale of the MTV Scream spin off TV show (which was bullshit, by the way, but fun enough to eat a pizza and watch with your friends) and as the credits were rolling, I had whispered to Rudy about how I couldn’t sleep and we’d crawled away from our sleeping friend to lay under the moon, as we were often known to do. We brought two oranges outside, that he’d picked from his grandma’s tree, as he was often known to do.

We were 16.

The moon was full and I held up my orange beside it in the sky, squinting.

We were laying flat on our backs, digging our nails into the oranges’ skin, throwing the peels around us. The trampoline swayed beneath our bodies and we ate the citrus, letting ourselves get as messy as we wanted because- well, we were 16.

These days it’s hard to remember what we were laughing about. Maybe because it was something ridiculously 2016, like Drake or Harambe, or maybe because it’s been 10 years now, but I remember when Rudy’s laughter faded and he looked at me with the most softness I’d ever seen on a boy’s face and said, “I love you, Tool.” It was an asshole nickname he’d given me when we were in middle school- from my last name being O’Toole.

I told him, “I love you too, Roofie.” It was the asshole nickname I’d given him in middle school which prompted him to start calling me Tool. Obviously Roofie aged a bit worse than Tool but listen, we were kids.

“You know, the only reason you’re such an insomniac is because you don’t take my advice.”

“I’ve told you a million times, it doesn’t work!”

Rudy had been telling me since seventh grade that if I tried to count to 100, I’d fall asleep before I ever hit 100. It was his trick. He didn’t count sheep, because they were too interesting and he’d stay up for hours imagining them prancing through the sky. So instead, he counted numbers- cold, hard numbers were boring enough to knock him out.

I’d tried it maybe three times over the years, but it didn’t work for me. I’d always get distracted and lose my place, counting to 10 and then losing track a dozen times before giving up.

One night, at maybe 14 years old, I’d called him sobbing in the middle of the night and let him count for me. It worked to have somebody else do it. I called him countless times over the years, pleading for him to count me to sleep, waking up in the morning with a phone call still running, but I couldn’t do it by myself.

“Oh, it doesn’t work? Let’s try it right now then. Close your eyes and count to 100.”

I’m sure I rolled my eyes far enough to get stuck before I agreed. Rudy always had a way of getting me to agree to anything. Watching some terrible, low budget movie. Climbing onto the roof of the school after hours. Searching for clowns in the height of that 2016 clown phenomenon and actually getting chased through a neighborhood by clowns in the middle of the night. What the hell was in the air that year?

I conceded, “Okay, fine. Count for me.”

“No. Close your eyes. Let’s count in our heads. I bet you’ll fall asleep.”

I watched him for a minute, face sticky with orange juice and hair messy and eyes dark. I will never forget the way his face looked under the moonlight that night. When I close my eyes, I still picture him that way.

“Fine, but it’s not going to work.”

We didn’t speak another word until the creeping golden sunrise woke us up. We were surrounded by discarded orange peels and the trampoline still swayed slightly beneath our bodies. We cleaned up our mess and Rudy shoved my shoulder as we quietly made our way back inside, whispering, “I told you, bitch.”

By this same day the next fall, he’d be dead.

The next fall, on the same trampoline, I used his trick. I counted myself to sleep. I’ve counted myself to sleep more times than I can count in the 10 years since that night. I guess he was right about it.

I’ve had a lot of oranges in those 10 years too, and none has ever been as sweet as the ones plucked off his grandma’s tree.

Last month I moved into a house with an orange tree. On my first night in my new home, I counted myself to sleep.

I am almost 26, now.

I guess it’s funny the way we all miss 2016. I miss it, too. I miss Rudy. I think that the mass nostalgia makes me feel less alone- like I’m not the only person reaching back for a year, a feeling, an innocence, that I won’t ever touch again. But it’s sweet to remember those bomber jackets and chokers and orange trees and nights on trampolines. It’s even sweeter to keep little tokens of the memories, like an orange latte in the morning before work or a collective reminiscence of time passed by through 2016 throwback pictures on an Instagram story.

It’s all as golden in my memory as the sunrise that morning.

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions in the traditional sense. 

Quit smoking, hit the gym five days a week, give up caffeine- they’re pretty goals and I hope you meet them, but how will you feel about yourself when you don't? Why do we have this joke that everyone knows and nobody likes laughing at about how everybody gives up their resolutions by the first of February.

I’ve spent most of my life working in coffee shops and maybe that's where this distaste for the New Year, New Me started. 

We had this joke in the industry. December would be non stop, lines out the door, families of five, regulars grabbing three drinks a day, and you’d spend all month saying we just need to make it to January.

Because you know what happens in January? Everybody vows to give up caffeine, save their money, or use whatever coffee machine their in-laws bought for them for Christmas.

January was our break, not our undoing. Maybe we’d slow down in tips for a few weeks, but nobody would break a sweat because we all knew that come February our regulars would be back in lines around the corner. It was an inevitability and it never faltered.

I know you’re thinking I’m taking this way too seriously and I swear I’m not. I like your resolutions and I’m happy you’re doing it, even if it only lasts three weeks! I just know that when I fail at something I set out to do, it makes me miserable. I’d vow to quit biting my nails, bite them a week later, and then rip myself to shreds for it. I don’t want that for myself, or for you. I don’t want that for us! 

So, let me tell you what I do instead.

Reflect and set a small goal.

This isn’t revolutionary and I know I’m not a New Year genius, but just let me tell you about it anyways.

REFLECT

I spend the week of New Year’s thinking about the best and worst parts of my year. Then, I use those to shape what I want to bring with me and what I want to leave behind.

Sometimes a year is terrible and all the reasons why are completely out of your control. I can’t necessarily vow to leave them behind, because they could happen again any day, but I can reflect on the ways I got through it and what I did right or wrong.

This last year, for example, I had two people close to me pass away, I lost my job because my boss went to prison, and I fought to stay afloat through a really devastating break up and living alone for the first time in my life. It would be so easy to say fuck 2025 and leave it all rotting in my rearview, but it wouldn’t help. It could all happen again tomorrow and I’d have no way of stopping it.

I started smoking again this year and I know myself too well to say this is the last one at 12:00am sharp. I blew all the money I had saved up and I know better than to set some number to reach in my bank account by December. I’ve been coping in the ways that I can.

You know what else I did this year? I learned how to rely on my community and friends. I gave myself grace and I forgave others passionately, I made more art, threw more parties, and had more fun than I’ve ever had in my life.

There’s a lot to take with me and a lot to leave behind. There’s a lot to remember fondly and a lot to keep as a firm reminder.

I sift through all of it.

Every year on December 31st I pack a bag of lessons and regrets and I drag it into the New Year. I’ll take a goal as my carry on and hope for the best.

SET A SMALL GOAL

I’m talking about setting goals, not restrictions. This isn’t cut this or quit that. It’s start this and enjoy that.

This last year the only “resolution” I had was to sing one song at karaoke and I was wailing into dive bar microphones by February. My stage fright wasn’t cured entirely, but by December I’d written an EP, performed on stage, and hosted monthly events in front of crowds. 

My best friend told me at midnight a year ago that his resolution was to Be Nice To Evie and now we’re dating and nobody has ever been kinder.

All I know is that I’ve gained a lot more from letting the New Year inspire me instead of suffocate me. I brought a small goal with me and spent time with it until it changed me into somebody I wanted to be. If you’re careful, thoughtful, it always will.

And doesn’t that sound better than restriction? Punishment? The never ending cycle of shit, I smoked, I guess my resolution is over?

I watched customers trudge back into the cafe every February, tail between their legs, embarrassed to order a coffee. I’m exhausted by all the shame. I rebuke it.

Think about what you’ve done. Think about what you didn’t do. Pack a bag of wishes and regrets and bring it with you. Remember the good and bad and neutral. Keep it close to your chest or scream it out loud. Set a goal as loose as you need, you know yourself. Give yourself grace. Take a breath. 

Who am I to say? I smoked and drank and quit my job and sang a few dive bar duets and called my year a victory. But who are you to tell me it wasn’t?

Take my advice or don’t, but remember I’m always right.

Alright, goodnight. Happy New Year. I hope you meet every goal, succeed at every resolution, or say fuck it when you don’t. I’m proud of you anyways.

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Walk with me for a moment. Imagine your favorite writer. Not your favorite famous, award winning, best selling author, but your personal favorite writer. The mutual who posts movie reviews on their Instagram story that has you holding your thumb to the screen for obscene lengths of time. The girlfriend you dated two years ago who you were disturbingly incompatible with but wrote love letters the likes of which you don’t think you’ll ever see again. The friend whose text message recaps after a night out could compare to the great works of literature.

Now, that writer thinks nobody cares what they have to say.

Somewhere between LiveJournal and Tik Tok, our collective consciousness made a distinct shift and it felt like we all woke up one day with a new insecurity- who cares what I have to say?

If you spent your younger years on the beginnings of the internet like I did, you can probably recall a time where people unabashedly blogged. It was Sex & The City. It was your parents’ well dressed, red wine sipping friend. It was your slightly older cousin who let you try on her lipstick. It was cool. By my teenage years, the online sphere still applauded a well-curated Tumblr blog (even if they were often fan theories and smut), but I can recall that dreaded nonchalance beginning to seep through the cracks of our beloved internet spaces.

Suddenly, think piece is replaced by shitpost and blog is replaced by meme. I am telling you, I remember my favorite Tumblr users making the switch and I remember mourning the loss. One day I took a stroll through my phone and realized that I was consuming nothing but meme slop and devoid aesthetic imagery. Where did the substance go?

I’m not going to pretend to be a researched expert or a deep internet archaeologist. I only know what I’ve lived and I felt the shift in myself, too. By 2016, it wasn’t cool to care anymore.

We’ve spent years online convincing each other that nobody cares what you have to say. Whether it’s a brigade of who asked in your comment section or an uprising of male Youtube commentators making a living off of cringing at kids online, the zeitgeist declared nobody cares and you’d be lame to.

It isn’t true though, is it? It never was.

Every single week there is some event taking place in my city where people gather to share their art. A poetry slam or open mic or writing workshop. I’ve seen live nude drawings and zine-making meet ups and friendship bracelet nights at local dive bars. I log onto Instagram and between every selfie and nonchalant, bonafide cool girl caption is a flyer that somebody took time to make, inviting people to share a space and create. I make time to attend these events as a spectator, all while convincing myself, no, but, nobody wants to hear what I have to say. I know a lot of people who do the same.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with this fallacy and trying to take it down.

I am a reader and if my friend is posting their writing, I am finding the nearest cup of coffee and cozy spot to sit because I will certainly be the first to read it.

I am a writer and I’ve had four friends recently ask me to write on Substack. Each time I am asked, I meet them with a deep sigh, a head shake, and a hand gesture that offers God, no, why would I do that?

A rock. A hard place. Utter hypocrisy?

All of this to say, I’ve found my way here. Because I’d be writing anyway and as frequently as I may have dismissed the idea that anybody would give a damn what I have to say, I have opened my phone to read what somebody else does. I may be insecure, or uncertain, or just deeply infected by the idea that I am unspectacular enough not to matter, but I am not quite stubborn enough to deny one truth: I care, so that means people care.

And also, who would I be to deny those four friends who asked for this?