DO NOT - stay put. Move around! Explore the beautiful Newark Airport! Take the shuttle to Terminal A and see if you can get on a flight to Boston that leaves in 15 minutes. Pretend you’re in a rush! What else are you gonna do? Your flight to Vermont doesn’t leave for six hours! Pretend you’re in the standby line, waiting for your name to be called. Blend in - look hopeful. But then, be excited for the people who made it on the flight by the skin of their teeth, who are now jumping for joy.

3pm.

Consider getting on the next flight to Boston, for real this time! You’ve got an old friend, named Julia, who now works in medical software sales but whom you know as a dancer and a sharpshooter and a person who always does the nice soft scratches on your forearm. Remember that Julia lives outside Boston, and she’s going home to Vermont today, and she had offered to take you along. Call her! Right now! Ask if it’s too late to take her up on her offer! Then stand in line to talk to a gate agent about getting on the next Boston flight, for real this time. Feel rejuvenated by a man who speaks to her before you and who starts his sentence with “I’ve been here since this morning and they’ve changed my gate twice,” but who has a soft smile and speaks as happily as if he’s ordering a milkshake.

4pm.

When it’s your turn, talk to the gate agent - a pretty woman with a shiny bald head - in a defeated voice, as if you’re a child telling your mother you threw up in bed. Then, per her instructions (“I can’t help you you’ll have to go online”), open your phone to text with a United representative named Ami. Wonder if Ami is an American woman or an Indian man. You will be unable to ascertain this by texting with them. Listen to a little bit of the gate agent drama. Apparently one pilot’s ID photo is super cute. Ask Ami if it’d be possible to get on the next flight to Boston. Shriek when they text back that they’ve gone ahead and rebooked you on that flight. Call Julia to let her know. Luckily, her excitement to see you outweighs her eagerness to get to Vermont at a reasonable hour, and she’ll wait for you. Get giddy on the phone. Roadtrip!

5:30pm.

Get on the plane, seat 28F. You’ll be next to a father with his baby. Think about how any inconvenience you’re experiencing is eclipsed by the utter shitstorm that traveling with an infant seems to be. Ask the father where he’s coming from - Italy. He’s been traveling for 24 hours. Remember that it’s Newark, everyone is coming from Italy, Spain, Croatia. Watch the sky outside your little window turn purple and dump buckets of water onto the tarmac.

6pm.

Put your head in your hands when the pilot gets over the intercom and says you won’t be able to take off until the storm has passed, and, unfortunately, the storm might not pass for six hours. Remember everyone else has been traveling for 24 hours. Deplane. Back in Terminal A, in an undulating mass of transient people hovering around the gat agent’s desk, try to get onto the Vermont flight - your original flight - but oh! It’s canceled! Get retroactively mad at yourself for not booking the morning flight because you wanted to sleep in. Get retroactively mad at yourself for not booking the train. Refresh your weather app 17 times, convincing yourself the storm is retreating. Talk to a guy named Evan who tells you Newark is the airport with by far the most delays. He has just come back from Spain, he’s also been traveling for 24 hours. He’s in amazingly high spirits. Leave Evan to call Julia, and implore her to wait an indefinite time for you to land in Boston. Listen to Julia’s cool reasoning and her easy acceptance of what may be a very late night.

7pm.

Go back to Evan, who’s busy gazing with a half-smile at everything. Find a metal grate to sit on with your elbows pressed into your knees. Evan is hoping that they’ll cancel the flight so he can sleep in a hotel for free, but what you’re gonna wanna do is hope much harder than he is that they do not cancel the flight, so that the universe might hear your hopes over his. Lament about the fact that neither of you has playing cards. Show him your pictures of Macchu Picchu.

8pm.

Nearly sprint away from him when the captain announces over the intercom that the storm has momentarily broken and you have a small window to leave if you all GET ON THE PLANE RIGHT NOW. As you line up to board, flex on Evan about the fact that you’re in boarding group two because you have the United credit card. Feel good about yourself, you earned that credit card. Look about with tentative joy at the rest of the passengers; are you saved?! No one knows yet! Scoot down the airplane aisle to 28F, listen to the baby next to you cry and then revel in the fact that he stops crying when you look at him. To this baby you are either stunningly gorgeous or unspeakably ugly. Notice how light your heartbeat feels now that there’s a hope in hell of moving. Notice a little airport crew car zooming around outside and be thankful everyone is scrambling to get you where you need to go. Notice the milky golden glow that comes from a sunset trying to shine through a thunderstorm.

8:30pm.

Press your forehead against the window and clench your hands together and feel very distinctly the different rumbles reverberating through the airplane: thunder, or taxiing, or takeoff? After thirty minutes of taxiing very fast, then slowing down to the point of stopping, then speeding up again, your heart will begin beating once more in that heavy way, fearful that you missed the break in the storm and that you may never leave the Newark Airport. Try to stay hopeful. Consider whether you should make the joke to the girl next to you that the captain is edging all of you with this stop-start business. Decide against it because she’s talking to the baby’s dad about Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

9pm.

When there’s the conclusive rumble that comes quick and produces a sudden rapid forward movement in the plane, you must accidentally squeal with glee and turn to see the girl and the father next to you feel the same. Pump your fists up and down! All of you! Even the baby! As you take off and stagger around in the storm like a toy car over a gravel driveway, decide you don’t care if you die in this airplane. Nothing you can do about it now. Go sweetly and gently toward that infinitesimal spray that plane crashes turn people into.

9:30pm.

Then, when you land, and it’s a hard landing - people yelp and one of the overhead bins flies open and the dad on the aisle seat is cradling his baby in one arm and holding the bin closed in the other, decide actually you definitely fucking would care if you die in this airplane and God please let it not be today. Feel a little silly for thinking such things when the plane slows five seconds later. A woman at the back of the plane will clap and BY GOD you must clap with her! Join in the exhausted, knowing smiles that are being passed around by everyone as you get off the plane, as if you’d all just evaded Scylla’s teeth and Charybdis’ engulfment in the Strait of Messina and you’ve made it to the promised land: Logan International Airport, Boston.

10pm.

Rejoice at the sight of a red Volkswagen Golf - named Pepper - idling in the passenger pick-up area with Julia in the driver’s seat smiling so big you can see it from fifty feet away in the dark. Offer a dozen times to drive the three-and-a-half hours to Vermont. After being rebuffed a dozen times, settle with buying her a bag of local kettle corn from one of those gas stations that sells T-shirts with images of grey wolves and bald eagles facing each other as a token of your gratitude. Be thankful for how quickly the memory of Airport Hell slips the mind the moment you’re home

.

But even I want to kill myself just imagining admitting I have nothing prepared. Sitting through an open mic is torturous enough when people have written and rehearsed things they think people will like! And God, I do mean torturous. I’ve been participating in open mics somewhat half-heartedly for around six months. It’s the great and terrible Fear of Embarrassment that has prevented me from participating wholeheartedly (can’t be embarrassed if you actually didn’t even care in the first place), but I’m working on kicking that to the curb. My first open mic went GREAT. I had written out a five-minute funny story with a clever ending that directly compared a sexual encounter of mine with being in the Vietnam War. My dears Lucy and Piper came to cheer me on, and my name got called early in the night, and everyone laughed, and the club put me on their Instagram story, and everything was a dream. My worst performance (thus far) came a month later, at that same club. My friend Brenna, visiting from out of town and eager to see me on stage, begged me to sign up only to wait through a long, long train of acts including someone playing one loud droning chord over and over again on a synth, a woman aggressively humping a hobby horse, and several guys reading poetry with lines like I bury my regrests [regreSts] in her breasts, I didn’t go until 2:30am and by then I was angry and tired and there was nobody left in the audience and I basically! Wanted to bash my brains in with that woman’s hobby horse! Brenna was a trooper.

Back to present day. Now I’m on the M train headed to Black Cat LES in (you guessed it) the Lower East Side to try and get a walk on spot for their 9pm mic, which I am almost certain is a real thing. I’ll get there two minutes past the cutoff for when walk-ins are accepted, but what can you do?! I did the best I could with the information I had at the time, and I will continue to do so. Isn’t that just how life is.

Here is how it went when I presented that information at Brooklyn Made Comedy. I said, “I’m here for the open mic at 8?”

The sweet-looking young woman behind the table said, “oh great! Uh, what day is it?”

I said, “Thursday.”

She started looking flustered and said, “hmmm…uhhh…sorry I’m all over the place I’m sorry.”

I said, “hey no worries I’m feeling very high-strung so I’m keenly aware that it’s Thursday.”

Then a man next to her said, “$15 please!”

I said, “oh? To go on stage?” (Their website said $5.)

He said, “oh it’s not an open mic tonight, but you can watch our show for free if you want,” (So what was that $15 about?)

I said “oh…um.”

And then he said “you can go to the deli next door and get yourself a cold drink and bring it back!”

And I thought that was a funny thing for him to suggest but actually a very good idea because it’s hot and I have a UTI and I forgot my water bottle even though it’s more important than ever that I stay hydrated, and because I’d like to get out of this cramped little room with these people who are hoping I’ll stay and watch the show, so I can consult with my personal assistant (my phone) about what to do. So I went to the deli which was very warm and smelled weird but there was a jovial man behind the counter watching a very dramatic and violent show on his phone with lots of wet squelching and a nice fat black cat and the lights inside the refrigerators didn’t work and none of the drinks had been taken out of their packing boxes so I had to rip a Gatorade from its plastic neck-cuffs and I decided to get BLUE flavor even though it’s tied with RED for my favorite, because the red one leaves an unflattering ring above my top lip. My personal assistant phone told me if I leave immediately I could maybe make it to the Black Cat LES mic in time. The man behind the counter flashed me a beautiful smile over the squelching sounds.

I went back to Brooklyn Made and said, “I’m sorry I’ve got to do a mic tonight so I’m leaving. But I’ll be back!”

They said, “follow the Instagram!”

I said, “update your website!” Just kidding I didn’t say that at all. I said, “yeah totally I will! Bye!” and I’m sure I’ll go back there. They seemed kind.

The dude across from me on the subway is eating fries from a paper bag with his mouth open and I just saw his eyes catch on my big toe. The weird one. Hey don’t look there. Most people in here are on their phone, except toe-gazer and a teenager with red streaks in her hair and many nose piercings and very short shorts. I hate wearing short shorts (or short skirts or short dresses) on the subway because I hate hate HATE the feeling of subway bench against my thighs. Right now I’m wearing longish jorts for this very reason and because it can be beneficial, when going to an open mic, to dress as boy-ish as possible so they might forget you’re a girl. I find it’s very difficult to be funny on stage if I look nice. Some girls do it great; I’ve seen it. Just not me. I watch the sky fade lilac into coral behind giant glass buildings. Still feeling like patting myself on the back for being determined and brave. Still no idea what I’m going to say. Certain I will be embarrassed but fairly sure it’ll help prepare me to host the upcoming show.

Glory be, I’ve gotten a spot at the Black Cat mic! The host is a gregarious Serbian woman with a big smile and a bigger laugh, and I like performing in front of her. She always makes jokes about growing up under the shadow of the Soviet Union and how we Americans don’t know any Eastern European countries besides Russia. The second guy to perform says, “I’m a big hugger. But I give special hugs, with special strength.” I’m making eye contact, and there aren’t so many people in the room, so he’s making special eye contact back at me. He says something about how his dad had to tell him to stop hugging women so hard. I give him a thumbs up. Next guy up opens with: “I’m a Jew. UH OH!” I zone out during his set and start thinking about a man in his 50s named Jimmy who hosts an open mic right before the one I co-host with beautiful, deadpan Kaila. Every time Kaila and I walk in, sometimes flanked by Lucy and/or Piper and/or other girlfriends, Jimmy’s head immediately whips toward us and he gives us big grins and thumbs up. If he’s on the mic when we walk in he’ll interrupt himself to say, “YES! So glad you gals are here! Seriously! It just totally changes the chemistry of the room! I’m serious! It totally. Changes. The chemistry.” I appreciate that he feels that way, and I suppose I also appreciate that he points it out because I do think everyone notices a shift when a room of all male aspiring comedians is infiltrated by some girlies, and you can feel some of their faces drop as they realize they have to think up new jokes to replace the rape-y ones they scrapped when they saw us. And I appreciate Jimmy pointing us out because I like attention.

My five minutes on stage went fine. People laughed, but oftentimes not at the parts I was trying to get them to laugh at. I try not to think too much before I go up because thinking is fuel for the Fear Fire and I’m going to do just as well if I stress out and rehearse in my head or not. The trick is to trust that the light that glows within you will keep glowing no matter what the hell you say up there.

I stopped at Mr. Kiwi on the way home. Strawberries were $1 for a big box. Found Lucy lying down on Piper’s carpet while Piper sewed at her desk. Lucy rolled over and propped her head up on her elbow, Piper stopped sewing and turned to listen to me, leaning against the door, recite my floundering set to them, which they laughed at earnestly. But of course they did; it’s so easy to be funny in front of them. Considering the upcoming show I’m hosting will have Piper and Lucy and All My Friends in the audience, I can’t imagine it going poorly.

It’s a terribly hot day. The heat like a beast skulking the streets, intent upon gobbling up every particle of cold air in the city. But it’s July already and we’ve barely used our rooftop. Big, nice, outdoor space in New York, how lucky we are! Yet we’ve barely used it. Part of the trouble is there’s no door - you’ve got to get yourself through my roommate Lucy’s small bedroom window to access it. Part of the trouble is that it’s hard to find the time to just be outside. But today I have some time I plan to use to write, and, heat be damned, I’m going to write on the roof. Sliding my feet into my other roommate Piper’s sandals and scooting ungracefully through Lucy’s window, I sit in the bathwater heat with my journal. 90 degrees and nearly sunset. The sky a pale silk blue except for a shelf of bright white clouds, lit up as if by a giant spotlight. 

Now to write something Good. But I’m distracted by a huge fly, round black body with pocked silver eyes like the head of a microphone. It’s staring at me. It moves its many tiny legs impossibly fast and then stops at once, like it's been paused by remote control. I’m distracted by my neighbors’ friendly chatter with their guests in the stylish backyard behind me. I’m distracted by someone on Atlantic Avenue blaring the longest honk I’ve ever heard. 

All at once a gathering wind announces the arrival of a summer storm, casting dry leaves tumbling noisily and trees all around crinkling and creaking. The fly tries to take shelter against my leg, brushing its tiny legs maddeningly across my shin. I shoo it away. Out of a yellow, vine-laced apartment springs a harried man who snatches the rippling clothes from the banister and disappears back inside. I’d always wondered who lived there - that darling apartment with the fairy-cottage vines. Bright, spotlit clouds now smeared with a block of grey so two-dimensional and toneless it looks as if someone’s taken an eraser to the sky. Behind me something heavy shatters on the ground. The soupy air feels distorted, the frame rate out of alignment, and I’ve a sense of impending disaster. Am I imagining it, or is there the long drone of a siren somewhere behind me? In my mind: images of furious columns of grey, twisting wind hurdling down a plain, houses ripped asunder, plaster and wood and drywall flung impossibly high into the air. But there’s a mourning dove on the power line that hangs dangerously close to the ground, and he’s singing! While he sings he bobs his head and flicks his tail to stay on his perch. Slight, barely perceptible flicker of lightning in the corner of my eye. A car outside revs its motor, someone honks again, someone plays loud music. Now the thunder. In my neighbor’s stylish backyard, the small group chattering in overly optimistic tones about the likelihood of a downpour, trying hard to conjure an agreement that it’s still nice enough to be outside. Another flash of lightning, thin as a fingernail. And now the drops: fat, wet, heard before they’re felt. Landing with a thwack and lifting the ink right off my page. 

My neighbors, sighing, go back inside. I too scurry back to the window where I feed my limbs through the narrow opening, journal closed but with one finger inside to hold my place. Tiny slipperiness of wet ink against my fingertip. Steady churn of cold, conditioned air against my skin. Wondrously refreshing just an hour earlier, now sterile and anesthetizing, like the air in a doctor’s office. Heaving the window shut, immediately sealing out all the crinkling trees, tumbling leaves, the mourning dove and the honks and engines and music and thunder and rain patter. Blinking in the cold silence, familiar shapes in Lucy’s room fading back into view as my eyes adjust to the darkness. I miss the garbled heat of the gathering storm, but I should count myself lucky to not have gotten caught in it. Slipping off Piper’s sandals, sliding onto a kitchen stool. Now back to writing something Good.

The wind hurls fierce spits of rain at the living room windows. Thunder burbles low and menacing above my ceiling, every few seconds punctuated by a flash of lightning. Good to be inside, I think as I push the stool away from the counter and walk back to Lucy’s bedroom window to observe the storm over our roof. I crane my neck, cheek and side of my nose against the glass to catch a sliver of the sky. Drastic coral alighting all my neighbors’ windows in an orange glow. Good to be inside. I heave the window back open to hear the powerful sweep of the wind. Raindrops spray like icy bullets against my thighs, bare behind the open window. Good to be inside. I peel my socks - still sweat-damp from the heat - off my feet and step ungainly out the window into the three-inch puddle the rain had already leveled upon our roof.

Outside, the air crackles with the electric clash of sunset and storm. Well, crackling because of that or crackling because of the loose wires drifting into the water, sharing a cold bath with my bare feet, I don’t know. Several long minutes pass as I watch the carnage bloom magenta in the sky, watching despite the raindrops big as golf balls pelting me right in the eyeballs. The water - quickly rising - unearths cigarette butts and bits of plastic wrappers and used zyns and a lone flip-flop and a pair of sunglasses (I’d been looking for those!), all floating around in the muck. When I close my eyes I can still see the magenta sky. I think for a moment of all the people in New York sitting inside, dry, maybe not even knowing there’s a storm on. I think for a moment about whether Piper and Lucy are seeing the sky right now, probably on their way home, probably caught in the rain. 

I stay out until the golf balls shrink to pin pricks, until the last of the great orange glow has slipped down my neighbors’ windows. Can’t stay on the roof forever! My laptop is still open on the kitchen island, and I’m sopping wet, and I still haven’t written anything Good! The conditioned air delivers a too-cold blast upon my wet skin as I gingerly step back into Lucy’s room, trying - and failing - to not get water everywhere. Dark familiar shapes fading back into view. Still feeling the glow of the sky on the insides of my eyelids. Now for a towel, and my journal again.

Ellie lived the charmed life of a beloved dog in a family that was either too lazy or too tolerant to enforce any rules. She did what she liked: on walks she’d spend whole minutes investigating with her nose a particularly rich patch of soil, or she’d sprint along into the forest to get sprayed by a skunk. She knew what sit meant, and she sat if she wanted to, or if she knew we had a treat (Pedigree MarroBone Real Beef Flavor was her favorite). She might not come to us as soon as we called for her, but she wasn’t a tyrant; she’d come trotting back just as soon as she was done socializing or investigating, grinning with her eyebrows perked up as if to say, “you called?” She didn’t lick or cuddle to show affection, rather she’d bound up to someone and leap onto their shins, her paws outstretched high. She loved to be chased, to narrowly escape our encircling arms. Rachel and I had promised our parents that we would be the ones cleaning up after her, feeding her, walking her. But like so many halfheartedly disciplinarian stay-at-home dads faced with insolent daughters, if my father didn’t clean up after Ellie the backyard would be a minefield of shit, and if he didn’t walk her, she’d shit in the house. So she was his dog.

For fifteen years, my dad and Ellie were inseparable. Ellie was as integral to his form as his eyebrows; seeing him without her would’ve been as jarring as if he’d shaved them off. And what a funny pair they were: my dad, a 220-pound burly man, fishing and hiking and camping in the Alaskan wilderness, flanked by his loyal hound, our small, white, fluffy Ellie girl.

Small, white, and fluffy as she was, she was a keen and ferocious watchdog. Many times a walk was cut short or detoured because of a low growl from Ellie, all of the hair on her back standing up, as she stared into the darkness between the trees. On camping trips, she’d sleep outside our tent in case a grizzly bear decided to poke its nose around. We weren’t sacrificing her, we knew she’d bark long before the bear approached us, likely scaring it off and giving my dad enough time to grab his Magnum .44.

Everyone believes their dog is the best dog in the world. Well, Ellie actually was. The idea that she might someday die never really entered my consciousness, even when Dad, over FaceTime, showed us his outstretched hand, holding a Pedigree MarroBone Real Beef Flavor treat wrapped in cheese wrapped in turkey, in front of Ellie who, after her stroke, couldn’t open her mouth to eat it. Death was something that could flow all around Ellie but never touch her, like a river running over a boulder. It was more plausible that she might visit me on my deathbed. So the fact that her death would be so sudden, and that Rachel and I would say goodbye crying over FaceTime while Ellie cocked her little head at the screen, and that it would happen on my first day living in New York, while Ellie and my parents were in New Hampshire, a place none of us felt any connection to, was so nonsensical that it didn’t really feel like she’d died. Even when Dad texted and said, “Ellie was not scared. She did fine. She was ready to go,” I thought certainly he’d get a call from the vet telling him there’d been some miracle and they’d come back to the operating table to find her standing there, grinning, her brows perked up.

Post-Ellie, there were 15 months of our family existing without a dog. My parents moved to Tennessee. Rachel and I continued toiling in vague mid-twenties panic, on our respective sides of the continent. We all reported the same experience of hearing Ellie snore when we were alone in a room. There was talk of my parents getting a new dog, and my mom reached out to Ellie’s breeder. Then my dad texted our family group chat a photo of him standing on a tile floor, awkwardly holding a tiny, white, fluffy Westie puppy.

There was a flurry of excitement, a slew of happy texts from aunts and uncles and grandparents. A hundred name ideas were thrown around, but my parents settled on Tilly. Dad sent us a video of Tilly where she’s gnawing on a flap on the sofa, then bounds over to him, all floppy paws and big sparkling grin, and she leaps up to his shins with her paws completely outstretched, in just the most unmistakable Ellie fashion. I was walking with a clumsy tangle of people exiting the subway when I opened the video, and when I saw her put her little paws up like that I stopped dead in my tracks, almost tripping everyone behind me. I scooted to the side of the path and rewatched the video five times. That’s Ellie, I kept thinking. At first I was so happy I almost cried, as if my idea of death never touching Ellie was correct and our precious girl had indeed been reincarnated. But that happiness quickly wilted around my shoulders like a wet blanket, dampened by skepticism. They’ve just replaced her with a newer, peppier model! Who is this interloper, technically Ellie’s great niece, genetically almost identical, now occupying the beloved pet space in my parents’ minds?

The thing about buying dogs from breeders is that the breeder is constantly perfecting the gene pool that created your precious, one-of-a-kind childhood dog. So when she’s gone you don’t have to wait long for a litter of physically identical puppies, products of artificial selection that prizes friendliness and affection and weeds out defects like bow-leggedness. My parents reported that Tilly was perfectly happy in the car as she left her biologic family, didn’t throw up even once! And while Ellie took at least an hour to emerge, shaking, from her crate and enter our house in 2010, Tilly was leaping and bounding all over the place as soon as they got her home.

As we, as a society, are plunged headfirst into the Age of AI, my parents replacing Ellie with almost an exact copy of herself feels nefariously similar to AI art. Ellie is the vivid and nostalgic world of Studio Ghibli and Tilly is the ChatGPT-generated scene of 9/11 in Ghibli style. Kyle Chayka wrote for The New Yorker that “in our present moment, I worry much less for artists, who are driven to create things, than for audiences, who may be content to settle for so many pale imitations.” I worry that my parents are the audience settling for a pale imitation. That they’ll forget Ellie, the only childhood dog I’ll ever have, bit by bit with every new, bouncing, meticulously bred puppy, each more affectionate and agreeable than the last.

Many people might think I’m being horribly dramatic. Tilly is a sweet creature who didn’t ask to be born, it’s not fair to compare her to 9/11! Fine. Tilly is absolutely not the villain, and neither is the breeder who sold her to my parents. She, after all, gave us our dear Ellie. Perhaps there’s a woman out there whose family got a dog from that same breeder fifteen years before we did, and she would look at Ellie as a pale, bow-legged imitation of her family’s noble hound, ugly and unfriendly as it may have been before the breeder pulled together the stellar concoction of genes that made our darling girl. Thinking this way, Tilly is no more AI-generated than Ellie was. Tilly was just born further down the road toward the illusory destination of genetic perfection.

Talking on the phone to my dad about Tilly I can hear, tucked behind each word, the shadow of missing Ellie. Unconsciously comparing the two in each sentence, always finding Ellie superior. So far, at least, he is not settling for any pale imitation. Inevitably, Tilly will outgrow Ellie’s shadow; she’ll have her own personality, her own anecdotes in which she stars alongside my dad, her own watchdog duties (this time guarding against the Alt-Right in Tennessee rather than grizzly bears in Alaska). My dad’s form will be complete again with a small, white, fluffy sidekick. Though to me, Ellie will always and forever reign supreme as the Family Dog because I had the benefit of growing up alongside her. She is one of four beings who witnessed the greatest years of change a person will ever go through. She was often the only one nobody was mad at while the rest of us fought with each other during the thunderous, precious few years a family has where everyone lives in the same house.

In the months after Ellie’s death I would sometimes feel a rush of sadness when I’d think about the shape of her head. The precise slope from her forehead to the tip of her nose that I would stroke with my thumb the few times she let me hold her little head in my hands. It was a move I first saw Rachel do, when we were kids. My hands still remember every detail of what her head feels like: her soft hair, her delicate ears, her knobby brow. I hope that when I meet Tilly and get to hold her little head in my hands, my memory will make room for the imprint of two small animal skulls.

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My grandmother is 88 years old, and worldly as hell. She’s particularly likes to go to places that haven’t been overrun with tourists. Many months ago, she asked if my cousin Lucy and I would go with her on a trip to Taiwan. Of course, we said an absolute, resounding YES!

She bought three different travel guidebooks for Taiwan, and she mailed two to Lucy and me. “The more I read, the more I realize how much we’re missing,” she said, regarding the fact that we only had two weeks to gulp down as much of Taiwan as we could. We told her: stop reading!

I, as usual, packed way too goddamn much. At midnight, when we were planning to leave for Newark Airport at 1am, Lucy was helping me decide between FIVE pairs of shoes: street sneakers, running shoes, sandals, hiking boots, and Doc Marten platforms (for the club!). In the end, I brought three pairs (running shoes, sandals, and Blundstones), but I still had a full 60-liter backpack strapped to me, towering stupidly over my head.

Tucked into my second, smaller backpack, strapped to my front, was a little white journal which I ended up bringing everywhere on the trip, jotting down funny things Granny or Lucy said, or minute observations I knew we’d forget as soon as we got back to the US. The rest of this is a compilation of those notes.

Immediately, Taiwan was very different from any city we’d ever been in. Amongst all the giant grey buildings stand the most gorgeous Banyan trees, whose dripping tendrils sway in front of your face on their way to becoming roots. The air smells sweet and fresh (except for a sewage smell that invades your entire sinus system every once in a while but…it’s still a city). There are one hundred million 7/11’s – one on nearly every block. We were stunned by how quiet and clean everything is. Even the motorcycles – far more numerous than cars – are silent. Babies and toddlers waddle along with their caretakers politely, obediently. There are lots of people around, they just speak at a much lower volume. We become keenly aware of our loud American voices slicing through the streets. (Though at this point, Granny would like it to be known that she is a Canadian citizen.)

Our itinerary was quite loose – we spent a lot of our time wandering different neighborhoods, guided by our stomachs. We ate a LOT. When Lucy was with us – for the first week– she shouldered most of the burden of choosing where we should eat. Mostly, we ate in places that Google described as ‘no-frills’, or ‘pared down.’ That’s how you know the food’s gonna be GOOD! Most of these places had no English menu, and the Mandarin characters bounced against my brain like flies against a window. We stumbled through our orders using Google Translate. During the second week, when it was just Granny and me, I would decide where to eat based on who was leaving positive reviews. If the reviews were from Neil or Tyler or Diane, hell no we’re not going! I want to see five stars from Mei-Ling and Shu-Hui and Chih-Ming.

Breakfasts of egg pancakes (filled with scallions, bacon, and one labeled strange flavor, which was tuna), salty curdled soy milk with tiny shrimps (sounds wacky but…we loved this one), thick soft buns – bao – stuffed with pork, beef, cabbage, bamboo shoots (which I learned I do not like)

.Lunches of beef noodle soup (salty broth with deliciously thick egg noodles and great hunks of fatty meat), slippery pork noodles, soup dumplings (which always deposited a spoonful of boiling liquid onto our tongues but which we always forgave because they were so damn tasty), one oyster omelet, and a thick soup with fried cuttlefish (the soup was clear and had the consistency of shampoo). We collectively did not care for the thick soup.

Taiwan is famous for its night markets, and our dinners were often a collection of such night market treats as beef-wrapped asparagus (Granny particularly loved this one), a greasy duck roll, fried cuttlefish sweet custard balls (which tasted as confusing as they sound), grilled milkfish, crispy scallion pancakes. Outside of the night markets, we had more soup dumplings, the best ramen Granny’s ever tasted, tingling Szechuan squid, a fancy hot pot stew with thin slices of pork shoulder and beef, and, having ordered them by mistake, two massive jiggling bowls of thick soup. This happened only a few hours after we’d eaten thick cuttlefish soup for lunch and had not wanted any more. Shamefully we left the soup mostly uneaten on the table.

And the snacks! So much wandering means you walk past so many shops promising such delicious little things. An ooey-gooey pistachio cookie, a green tea ice cream cone (followed immediately by an oolong ice cream cone), dried guava, pastries, a corn on the cob (for Granny), a million creamy coffees, a beautiful chocolate mousse with a clear sheen on top. From 7/11: a tea egg, chestnuts, horse-beans, strawberry and chocolate crunch ice cream bars, steak-flavored potato chips (for Granny).

Miraculously, though we ate with absolutely zero regard for potential gastronomical sensitivity, and though I watched many food vendors use the same hand to assemble a dish that they used to handle cash, none of us ever got food poisoning.

We were a funny trio in Taipei: me with a massive camera hanging from my neck, Lucy, tall as hell with giant baggy shorts and giant sneakers, followed by a small white-haired old lady. Several times Granny got annoyed by Lucy’s and my tendency to speak quickly and to let our words intertwine in a muddled stew of syllables. Many times, when deciding where to go next, Lucy and I would discuss all the different options and all their potential benefits at the speed of light and would come to a conclusion within twenty seconds, leaving Granny in the dust right next to us. “I’m just trying to get two sentences in!”, she said once. “No, you got two, you were going for a third!” Lucy said back.

Lucy and I are addicted to saying, “no problem, no problem”, whenever there’s an inconvenience. Granny hates this. She’d say, “excuse me, it is a problem!” At the same time, she’ll reject almost any accommodation made for her based on her age. Anytime she comes to visit she insists there’s no need to fuss about a bed, she’d be more than happy to sleep on the floor. It’s a whole joke in our family. In Taipei, when we’d ask if she’d like a break or if we’re walking too much, she’d respond with confusing quips. At one point she said dreamily, “I feel like I could go on forever.” Then, the next time we check in with her: “yes I can keep walking, but then I will fall DEAD.” No problem, no problem.

The people of Taiwan loved Granny. That’s typically the case in the United States too: at first glance she fulfills the ideal sweet Granny stereotype, but she quickly subverts that ideal, to everyone’s delight, with her feistiness and acerbic wit. But in Taiwan she came across as just a sweet old Granny, her wit chopped down by the immense language barrier. And often, waiters and shopkeepers and cooks would direct their questions to Lucy and me, even if the question was about whether Granny needed to be shown to the elevator instead of the stairs, whether she needed a different chair, whether she’d like to sit down. While I know that bothered her, she was mostly a good sport about it. She’d smile and wave sweetly after someone said, “your grandma is so cute, I want to give her a hug!” then, once we were out of the shop, she’d go back to her regular self: all snarls and hisses. We got a ton of free stuff because of her. Almost any time we’d buy something, the vendor would send along another little treat with big smiles. I figured out that the deadly concoction for a free goodie was A) Granny being herself, whether in that moment she was all smiles or all snarls it didn’t matter, B) my big goofy grin and overall exuberance of gratitude, C) my use of the very few Mandarin words I know: “xiéxié” (thank you) and “hào chī” (tasty).

Granny was always bewildered by the fact that we could use our phones to lead us exactly where we wanted to go. She would say, after we’d been walking somewhere for several minutes, following a route produced by my or Lucy’s phone, “I’m sorry, do we have a destination?” “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” I took to explaining, at the beginning of a walk, “Granny, we’re walking to the Confucius Temple. I know how to get there by using my phone. Google Maps says it’s a twenty-minute walk. Do you have any questions?” And she’d say: “nope, no questions. I’m behind you 100% of the way, five paces behind.” Then, after twenty minutes spent walking a few steps, then stopping so Granny can peer into a shop window at a jade bracelet, or so she can cross the street to get a picture of someone’s air-conditioning unit, or so she can examine and identify exactly what kind of plant is growing out of the concrete, she’d say: “my God, how much longer?” And I’d say, “goddammit, Granny! It’s twenty minutes without all this stopping!” But I’d always – usually – say it lightheartedly. We get along really well. Well enough to snap at each other and then seamlessly go back to enjoying the other’s company.

Something Granny always stopped for was a shop window advertising porcelain. One of her most paramount objectives was to purchase some good porcelain. “I’ve been looking for something like this!” Granny said about a delicate urn she plucked off a shelf in a shop in Taipei, “to put my ashes in. But maybe a bit bigger.” Lucy and I said, “GRANNY WHAT THE HELL.”

Her favorite pieces are the wafer-thin cups you can almost see through. She has a good eye – though, to her dismay, her eye always leads her to the most expensive piece in a shop. Or, which happened at a pottery shop where she told the shop owner she’d like to buy a cheerful little clay frog he made, the item she wants is considered too precious by the artist and is not for sale. Her affinity for porcelain was most indulged at the National Palace Museum, which boasts the greatest collection of ceramics from the Qing dynasty. That day, while she filled up her iCloud storage space with photos of each vase and jug and mug on display, Lucy and I puzzled out, by means of deduction through reading the descriptions of each piece, the Mandarin characters for ‘jade’ and ‘mouth’. We were very proud of ourselves.

Before the trip, Lucy and I had spent one evening with our roommate Piper and Piper’s girlfriend Allison (who speaks some Mandarin), studying Mandarin with the HelloChinese app. The app teaches you first to say, “hello,” then immediately to say, “I speak Mandarin.” Feels like a cruel trick. An important word that Lucy and I learned how to say was “American”: Měiguó rén. We’d use this word to covertly alert one another to the presence of other clearly non-Taiwanese people (really, just other white people).

We regarded other Měiguó rén’s as if they were lepers. Granny especially. Once, in a restaurant, Granny saw some white people through the window and saw that they were eyeing our restaurant, so she ducked under the table so they wouldn’t see her and feel drawn by a fellow whitey to come inside. I don’t know why we act like we’re above other American tourists. Certainly, I’d say we’re good tourists; we chat as best we can with the locals, we buy local, eat local, learn some of the language.

Except, Granny didn’t speak any Mandarin because she was embarrassed of how she might sound. She’d listen to a word’s pronunciation on Google Translate, but she wouldn’t say the word out loud herself. On our first day she tried to say the Mandarin word for “sugar” to a barista. The barista didn’t understand her. The next morning, while Lucy and I did our mascara together in the bathroom, we heard the soft, robotic sounds of Google Translate saying the word for sugar over and over again. One thing that I’ve learned, from hanging out with people whose first language is not English, is to avoid turns-of-phrase that, to English-speakers, seem so basic. Things like: “how long will it take?” What will take a long what? From where? It’s not an intuitive sentence; it’s not the kind of thing people with very basic English comprehension will understand. I tried to explain this to Granny after she used the word “pharmacological” on a Taiwanese café-owner.

The trip can be split into two parts: the first week, in Taipei, with Lucy, and the second week, when it was just Granny and me, going around the rest of the island. The first day without Lucy was immediately off to a TERRIFYING start. We settled ourselves at a coffee shop in a giant underground mall within the Taipei Main Station, to wait an hour for our high-speed train taking us south. We’d just gotten our little chocolate bread ball and an actually very bad garlic-cheese-bread-ball when an alarm started going off throughout the whole mall. A woman in a uniform ran into our coffee shop and yelled something frantically in Mandarin, then people started RUNNING! They ran towards us, towards our coffee shop, but also away from us, which made it very difficult for me to decide what Granny and I should do. I leapt up and grabbed Granny’s arm, envisioning a hail of bullets flying through the corridors and a troupe of armed men storming the place. Then the steel automatic doors began lowering all around the coffee shop and I was immediately faced with the question of if I should get Granny and myself under those steel doors, Titanic-style, or if we’d be better off staying put. The woman running the coffee shop said (in English, mercifully): “don’t worry! Stay here!” and we obeyed. Once the doors shut, I typed into Google Translate, with shaking hands, “what is happening?” She typed back: “smoke alarm”. Minutes later the doors came back up and it was like nothing had happened.

One of my absolute favorite evenings in Taiwan was the night we spent in the old mining town on the wet and rocky northeast coast: Jiufen. A bus dropped us at the base of an intimidating series of crooked and winding stairs, at night, in the rain. The kind of rain where the water droplets seem to hang motionless in the air and an umbrella provides little protection. The only way to get into Jiufen, for us, at that moment, was straight upwards. The journey was as wondrous as it was miserable, Lucy running ahead and finding the next staircase hidden in the dark while Granny and I lugged behind. Granny LOVED it, despite it being a uniquely challenging walk for her, what with the slippery, uneven stairs, three-foot tall ridges of sandbags to cross (a literal obstacle course), and one hand occupied by an umbrella. There were several moments when, after reaching the crest of a staircase, Granny would squeal and say, “oh this is IT! This is the adventure!”

Exhausted by all the adventuring, Granny went to bed early and Lucy and I went on the most mystical, magical walk I’ve ever been on in all my life. There are very few left and right turns in Jiufen: the narrow paths mostly go diagonally, up, down, all around. And we just went with whichever path seemed to call out to us in that moment. A fog had settled around the small houses like cappuccino foam. Our umbrellas, Lucy’s blue and mine yellow, seemed to float untethered in the light from the streetlamp. Time stopped while we stared at an abandoned cement dwelling that had been entirely taken over by giant leafy plants. We smelled the spots on the walls where moss was growing through the concrete. Every time I turned, I expected a little gnome or sprite to peek out from around a corner and beckon us to follow him on a fantastical adventure. Jiufen that night, in the misty moisty rain, was Wonderland.

Regaling Granny with our Walk of Dreams the next morning, she said, “I hope you’re chronicling this!” (And, to the dismay of my friends whom I force to read my Substack, I was!)

Granny and I were both somewhat morose the last night in Taiwan. “I’ve been looking forward to this trip since September,” Granny said. I said I had been too.

I fell asleep immediately on the flight home, and I woke up to find an evil yellow line drawing the distance between our airplane and Taipei, on the screen in front of me. I pointed out to Granny how far away it was already and she said, “Taiwan doesn’t exist anymore for us. It was all a dream.”

Granny spent one evening at our apartment in Brooklyn before taking her train home, and we reunited with Lucy and gobbled down burgers (dunking ourselves headfirst back into the USA), then in the morning we gave Piper our gifts (basically just a bunch of different teas). But a switch had already been made as soon as we landed in the US – the old lady with me in Brooklyn was my American Granny (I say this even though she’s Canadian). My American Granny with big smiles for Piper, who knows which train to take and how to get herself to it, who doesn’t take photos of gutters and air conditioning units. My Taiwan Granny, who inspects every square foot of a new city, who smacks my shoulder in the train and says, “look! What do you suppose that is?”, who does the sweet old lady act for bystanders but will hiss something diabolical in my ear, she lives only in memory (and in the TikToks I made of her).

When I was in high school and the month of May would mercifully come around every year, I’d feel that THIS summer would never end. Sure, we had last May and then somehow I did also end up experiencing winter, but it would be a different Melanie who encountered that. This May Melanie would exist forever in warmth and sunshine. I was gluttonous, drunk on all the summer I had left! And it wouldn’t be till late July, when the days begin to visibly shrink, that I’d think, “now hang on a second. We’re really almost done with this thang.”

Filled with the memory of all those falsely eternal summers, I take stock of my Time Left in a much bigger way. I know I’m young still. I’m in late May – maybe early June – in the Summer of my Life. But still, there are people having their last day of school right now – nineteen-year-olds exist! I’m not always the youngest person in the room. Late July is coming.

Did people who were in their mid-twenties in the early 2000’s, or in the 90’s or 80’s or 70’s, think this way? Or is this a result of the commodification of youth, that causes something like shame to slither out of many thirty-something’s when they find out how old I am, as if I’m still part of a club they’ve been kicked out of.

A successful man I know (in his fifties) once said you should have things figured out by 26. He was trying to convey something like, “no rush! You have time!” When I was 23, this was comforting. Three big years for innumerable big things. Now I’m 24 and 26 is like a slowly lowering ceiling threatening to smother me to death. Early-twenties is a bed of sweet flowers; anything that doesn’t serve you is forgiven and forgotten into the spongy ground. Mid-twenties feels like a cold wet sidewalk where cars keep driving by and slapping you with shit water.

There are many aspects of my existence that I chock up to being a noodling 24-year-old. My existential inability to take myself seriously, for example. The feeling of being unformed, of being a collection of shapes floating separately in a milk of uncertainty, like an alphabet soup that spells: “halsidghtn?” But, looking in the mirror at my darkening hair and sharpening face, I see a woman. And this is confusing when you consider the nonsensical alphabet soup floating around inside that woman’s head.

Most everyone I admire in my life is 26 or older, and I don’t think they’d claim to have things figured out. Though they have Proper Fall Jackets and they’re in grad school and they don’t feel embarrassed.

I want the world, and I want it NOW! I’ve got to spend a summer working on a farm, and live in Ireland, and write a play and write a book, and get my heart broken, and firm up the skin on my upper arms, and stop apologizing so much, and figure out the exact right amount of time to make eye contact with strangers in the street. What I really want is to be fully formed without having gone through the process of forming. I want to be Done, but I want to be 25.

Recently I referred to a friend of mine as a WOMAN in front of a group of people who don’t know her. Cocking their heads, they asked, “how old is she?” “Oh she’s my age!” I said. They were confused because I had said woman rather than girl. But I like the word woman. It honors the person I see in the mirror, the physical proof of fact rather than the skittering hesitation I’ve been writing about. And maybe that’s a glimmer of a fledgling understanding that aging is actually the entire point of life. Something I can articulate easily enough in words but has yet to sink into my bones.

My friends in their thirties and forties say that thirties are much more enjoyable than twenties. And while July is hot hot hot, June can be snaked through with chilling winds. June has biting black flies.

Few things, I believe, are more frustrating than being stuck on a train. I believe that particularly fiercely right now because I am, as it happens, stuck on a train. New York City to Burlington. Visiting grandparents. Supposed to be a mere seven hours, and Burlington is the last stop.

Stuck just outside Albany. After having lurched forward a few minutes, then backwards a bit, then back several miles back to Albany to switch out engines. We’ve been stopped for about two hours. I have the urge to google, “AVERAGE LENGTH OF AMTRAK DELAY WHEN THEY NEED A NEW ENGINE” or something like that, that’ll give me the sense that I can reasonably set an expectation.

Two hours ago or so, I switched seats from one on the right side of the aisle to one on the left. I noticed, as soon as we got out of the city, that the left side had a much nicer view, of some large body of water, and I was just looking at a wall of snowy rock. Two older ladies got up from their left-side seats and I decided to take theirs. They’d left a lot of crumbs. Soon after I switched, a mother and daughter got on and took my old seat, which left me with a sense of frustrated possession. Now if I want that seat back I can’t have it.

More minutes and more minutes. The conductor is sorry, even though it’s probably not his fault. You can hear it in his haggard voice. I’m watching a snowplow gather up all the chunky powdered sugar snow in its steel trap and deposit it into one massive pile in the parking lot out the window. Now the lot is clear of snow and he’s just sitting in his machine next to his giant pile, the plow part still stuck into it.

Oscillating between reading, writing, mewing at my reflection in the dark window, texting my roommates, going on TikTok. TikTok scrambles my brain because it’s all Minneapolis and atrocities, or hot girls are doing their makeup according to their zodiac sign. I don’t want to be inundated with the atrocities, but paying attention to anything else feels like privileged apathy, like turning away, like betrayal. Seeing a TikTok of so many protestors in Minneapolis and nearly crying.

9pm.

We’re lurching forward, tentatively. Then gathering speed! Oh, bye bye snow plow man! As we move forward I realize the parking lot is much bigger than I thought and he’s currently facing down a vast expanse of unplowed snow. He’s got a long night. Peace be with you brother.

The engine (or something down in that area) hiccups and sends the train shuddering. How badly would it suck if we broke down again right now, in this black dark, in the middle of nowhere. We’d be a spotlighted beacon for the thousand vampires and zombies (the fast ones) that would certainly flood the train and kill us all. The old guy who keeps roaming the aisles would get got first, and I’d probably be in the top 20^th percentile of survivors. Would I get under my seat and hide from the zombie-vampires or would I run? Oh, look at that, we continue chugging along so there’s no need to puzzle that out.

11pm.

Rutland now. In my old seat, the mom and daughter pair who, unbeknownst to them, are my companions in this plight even though we haven’t shared a single word. They’re getting off here, but there’s a problem with opening the train doors and they’re stalled once again. Shocking, admirable calm from the both of them. To be so close to escape and then denied. I look over at the seats they left behind, the seat that I was in initially, so many years ago. So full of life I was then. Jaded and bitter I sit now in my seat with the better view, curled against the window and facing inside the train.

And when the conductor calls “last call for Rutland” after we’ve been stalled here for twenty minutes for reasons that are unclear, he can’t even finish the sentence without his words disintegrating into an exhausted sort of laugh.

It’s looking like we’ll be getting into Burlington at 1:30am. Thank God Grannie’s a night owl.

12am.

Going to see if I can get some water from the café (it’s midnight and we’re still on this train but the café is still running! Bless the café man) and seeing all the conductors hanging around one table and saying, “oh yeah just grab some!” and feeling warm and cozy in my tummy because they want us to have water. Their night must be so much longer than mine. And I get to eat a bowl of Grannie’s spaghetti as soon as I’m off this train.

1:30am

In Vergennes now, and the conductor comes over the intercom just to kinda scoff and sputter and groan. Was there a message? Is he okay? Should he be driving? That notion floats to the top of my head but I bat it away because Burlington is the next stop so I’ll be GODDAMNED if anyone tries to stop him.

My toes are actually beginning to get concerningly numb. The doors to exit the train are frozen, so the reason for these long delays at each station is because they’re lowering everyone down, two by two, through the wheelchair platform.

Standing in line, my giant backpack filled with dirty laundry on my back and my reasonable-sized backpack on my front. Standing like this for fifteen minutes until I, along with the guy right in front of me, am ushered onto the thin steel platform that lowers us down.

Barely recognize Burlington when I step out because the whole thing is covered in three feet of snow. The wind rips right through my stupid sweatpants and I get the sense that I’m in Antarctica as I teeter with my two backpacks in the direction of Grannie’s apartment. The few streetlamps casting an eerie, post-apocalyptic glow, the voracious cutting wind whipping off the tops of the snow banks so white and fine they could be of sand. Everything in varying shades of grey.

A mysterious figure in a long grey puffer coat, materialized completely out of the snow, stands on the sidewalk and watches me trudge along. I snap to attention when I see her. She could be…is that…?

“Grannie?”

She says nothing but keeps looking at me. It’s not her.

“Sorry, I thought you were my grannie.”

She just looks at me. What the hell. But then she starts to grin, and it is, of course, my grannie.

2am

Stepping into Grannie’s warm apartment, color returned to the world, smells of something sweet. All the frustration of the last seven hours completely melted away. She’s been holding dinner for me since 10pm! The best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten in my life, then chocolate cake, then my beginning to explain my successes and failures over the last several months before being hit with a wave of debilitating sleepiness. Barely staying awake long enough to change into pajamas and fall into bed.

Resolutions are fine. I find it very hopeful that we all examine our lives and chart a path to betterness every new year. But a word makes for a much richer examination, a much more comprehensive chart. Did you go to the gym three times a week last year, like your New Year’s Resolution required? I’m sure that for many weeks you did! But does that alone color how your year was? Perhaps you went to the gym but you didn’t save any money and you were late to everything and you didn’t do any writing and you neglected your friendships and you basically sucked pretty bad. Was that a disciplined year?

I’m still trying to decide if I had a disciplined 2025. I filled three journals, finished reading thirteen books (got halfway through two others), muscled through a few stints of three weeks in a row without a day off. I was always on time – usually early – to my internship (haters will say this cannot be true). I saved most of the money I earned (though truthfully this was less discipline and more Fear of Leaving my Room). My roommates and I furnished our apartment almost completely through Facebook Marketplace (I’m counting this as a discipline thing because furniture from Amazon is often the same price and they’ll ship it right to you, but we chose the hard way involving crouching on the subway with a backpack stuffed with too-tall wooden slats and rolling a kitchen island through Crown Heights on a dolly). I started taking German lessons. I worked out sometimes.

There were several moments in 2025 where I would be lying in my bed in the dark, pretending that it’s just twilight and not really night and not turning my light on because that would confirm that the day is gone and wasted. During many of these moments I’d be avoiding exercising or writing or going to the damn grocery store, but I would whisper “discipline” to myself and stumble into action.

My word for 2026 is FEARLESS, and I’m very excited about it. I’m so excited about it I’ve been asking all my friends and coworkers which word they want to strive for in 2026, waiting for them to settle on one so I could tell them mine. My chicest friend chose the word chic, blind drunk on New Year’s Eve, then in the sober morning changed it to presence (not presents, as I initially thought). My sister chose creation. Lucy chose thoughtful. Brenna: accepting. Two coworkers also chose discipline (it’s a good one!). My most Tim Burton-y friend chose discomfort. Tobi chose gentle. Jana, again missing the mark: peaceful.

Side note --- here are some words I want people to choose: discombobulated. Rage-baitey. Fearsome. Greedy. Goblin-mode.

I like to think that the simple solidity of fearlessness has already sunk into my brain, like a crystal disappearing into still water. For example:

On December 31, 2025 I was in a warm pool in the quiet section of a bathhouse, immersed in near-total silence, when two horrible people next to me began having a conversation at full volume. There is no quicker path from mindless, disassociated bliss to murderous rage. I planned for several minutes how I was going to skewer them with the sword of righteous indignation, when – mercifully – an attendant came and shushed them. But that was 2025.

A mere three days later, but after the transformational shift and the exalting power of the New Year, I was at the best nightclub in New York City (and the only one I’ve been to): Nowadays. Nowadays has a rule that conversations are to be kept to a minimum on the dance floor, and everyone is explicitly informed about the rules by a very serious person in a very cozy little room. My girls and I were tearing up the dance floor, lost in the music, finding ourselves closer to enlightenment than most of this country will ever experience, when two (I hesitate to say horrible…let’s say momentarily thoughtless) people started a conversation that appeared to be never-ending. This time I tapped them both gently on the shoulder and asked them not to talk so much. They were very understanding and my murderous rage was immediately dispelled. I turned back to my friends and they mouthed “FEARLESS” at me. It was glorious.

Really, these words just get us thinking about how we want to live. In talking with Marissa (you’ll remember her as the one who chose peace for 2025) about our words, I puzzled out that my problem (as if I have just one) isn’t a lack of discipline, but rather a fear of failure. My first article on this Substack was entirely about fear. 2025 was about chiseling away the fat surrounding my aspirations, 2026 is about attaching a rocket launcher to them. Hopefully next year my word will be something like grace or forgiveness because the world will be begging for mercy after the reign of my Fearless 2026. And in 2026 God help the person who utters a single word in the quiet area of the bathhouse.

While I lean against the railing and flip through the magazine and nearly drop it into the subway gutter, I’m thinking of a guy I saw at the party. He was super hot. Tall, with thin round glasses and iron cheekbones buttressed by a strong jaw. He kept his hands in the pockets of his big brown bomber jacket. He wasn’t trying to get anyone’s attention. Maybe he didn’t even know he was super, without a doubt, 100% smash, hot. I imagined he was an architect, or something else sexy and high-paying and creative.

I had been engaged in a conversation circle next to him, but I darted a glance his way every twenty seconds or so. A few times our eyes met, but then I would immediately, as if he’d flung hot oil into my eyeballs, look away. I had absolutely no plan for how I was going to approach him. In my head, he sidled over and said something immediately disarming and funny that opened the door for scintillating conversation, and we chatted all night and exchanged numbers and started dating and got married and had three really smart and awesome kids.

But then all of a sudden there was a gorgeous tiny woman in knee-length black boots talking to Bomber Jacket, looking up at him through her foot-long eyelashes. The rosy image of him and me playing in a backyard with our three awesome kids went poof! But it was almost 11 and I had work at 9 in the morning so I figured I’d capitulate to Eyelashes and take myself home. Touché, Eyelashes. I said goodbye to the circle and took a few steps toward the door, at which point Bomber Jacket and I totally shared another look and – goddammit you coward – again I turned away as fast as I possibly could.

Now I’m leaning against the railing with my slippery magazine, thinking about the likelihood of Bomber Jacket stepping through the turnstile. The likelihood that he saw me leave the party and thought, “well there goes my wife” and left shortly after, walking with his head hung so low he can barely see in front of him, tripping over his long legs. And then, just as he’s lost all hope that he’ll ever find love, he walks into Grand Street station and there I am leaning against the railing! But nobody comes. The train pulls up, and I go in.

There’s a lot of people in here. A scary-looking person with a pointy, feminine face inlaid with sharp silver jewelry and a black topknot, the bottom half of their scalp buzzed bald. They’re with the most normal-looking man I’ve ever seen, who’s wearing brown Carhartt pants and a hoodie. A king cobra with a wombat. Cobra looks at Wombat with such easy affection I have to turn away, as if I’d glimpsed into their bedroom while walking along the street.

What to my wandering eyes do appear but another hottie! Looking at me! Of course, as soon as our eyes meet I look away. After a minute, once I’ve ensured he’s no longer looking at me, I observe him through sideways glances. He’s a little short, dressed a bit too trendy, he’s reading a book (which could go either way), and he keeps flitting his eyes up at me. Is he actually cute? It’s hard to tell when I can’t bring myself to look at him head-on. Oh – and this is my stop. Bye, shorty!

Broadway Junction is bumping! Lotta people, lotta chaos, but I fall into step next to yet another attractive man. Immediately I can tell he and I must have a lot in common. I bet if I were to look at him I’d find that he’s looking right back at me and that he’d understand every feeling I’ve ever had and we’d both smile and kinda shake our heads like, “wow, look at all this hustle and bustle…but the only thing that’s real…is you and me, right now.” And while I refuse to look at his face, I see he’s wearing jeans that fit him well, and cool sneakers, and it’s decided: I want him bad.

But I’m walking faster than he is, and trying to look cool going down these extremely steep stairs in my giant clonking shoes, though I want very badly to turn and check if he’s still behind me. I’m taking the C towards Euclid, and I walk briskly, as if I’m focused only on getting to the platform. As soon as I’m down I turn, very coolly, to check, and…dammit he’s there! Across the tracks on the Manhattan-bound side, walking in confident long strides in those cool jeans. My train’s here. Guess we’ll never get to realize all we had in common and the burning passionate love that probably would have erupted between us. Ah, well. I duck into the train and glance at the list of upcoming stops. Wait…Van Siclen…Shepherd Ave…what the hell are these places? It hits me with a bolt: I’m supposed to be on the Manhattan-bound side! Jeans, I’m coming!

I turn and leap up the stairs, around the corner, down again to the platform where Jeans is waiting for me. I spot him: he’s leaning against a pole, arms crossed. Not even looking at his phone. So cool. He probably has so many interesting thoughts all the time that he doesn’t need to occupy himself with meager, low-level phone entertainment. Just like me. We should probably get married and have three awesome children. The train is screaming its arrival in the distance, and I inconspicuously move closer to him, just close enough that we’ll surely be in the same car.

He sits at a bench opposite and to the left of me. We’re definitely equally aware of the other’s presence, he’s probably just staring at the ground because he’s bashful. Which is also why I’m pretending to read this magazine.

Reading, reading, reading this magazine…glazing over words that, when put together, create a story that I am not even paying one iota of attention to – except YIKES I don’t like the way this sentence is written. Three SAT words in one clause? Wait a second, I’m actually reading the magazine. Wait my brow is furrowed in probably this really interesting way that indicates that I’m having big thoughts and opinions, so if he happens to look at me he’ll think I’m very smart because I’m reading an underground magazine with a genuine earnest and having important opinions about it.

WAIT A SECOND. Jeans is standing up. Two stops away from mine, no! I had such big plans to approach him and say something witty if we ended up getting off at the same stop. As he exits the train car his eyes pass over mine and I actually see his face for the first time: his skin is glowing. The only other man I know with skin that nice is my coworker Christopher – oh. This man is gay. I watch him for a little longer as he walks in those big strides with those perfect jeans through the station, and I hope he has a wonderful rest of his night, wherever he’s going.

German is SO hard. I can barely put together a sentence. I’m learning completely for the gratification of the look on Stefan’s face when he hears me speak to his parents in semi-okay German. Ich vohne in New York! Wo est mein jutebeutel? (I live in New York! Where is my tote bag?) Anywho. Here’s a thought I had today, while madly Citi-biking to dinner in the East Village with Serena from acting class and her Oxford friend. I passed two women crossing the street; I focused on one of them for a moment, she had those trendy low heels and a long silk skirt and her hair was pulled back so nice and tight, and I had the thought that I’ll probably never look that poised as long as I live. Lately I’ve been noticing more what other women are wearing, and how they style their hair, and thinking about how my clothes and my hair look like SHIT compared to them! This is part of the motivation behind wanting to invest in a $200 haircut. I also haven’t been happy with my wardrobe probably EVER, but it feels like the pieces I want are just…too much work to get. Like I either have to thrift VERY well or pay a lot of money. And that gets more to the core of this issue: I’m not willing to put the work into my appearance to rival these stylish NYC girlies. And that’s not to say it’s because I’m too interested in literature and theater and art and nature and other pretentious things to care more than I do about my appearance, it’s also about laziness! Many hours I’ve spent on Instagram reels that I wish I’d have spent on Depop buying cute clothes or watching YouTube tutorials on how to do my makeup better. I hate this pen. It writes nice and juicy but then will just cut out entirely for several whole letters and it instills in me a low-level anxiety, waiting for it to cut out again, that makes me frustrated and flustered.

August 14, 10:25am

So tired. Slept barely four hours last night. All of yesterday I was driving and walking around Brooklyn – ferrying my stuff from the Adelphi apartment to the Atlantic one, picking up a DESK from Facebook marketplace, going to target and to a stationary store to buy this journal. I’ve been borrowing Gaby’s car, and it’s like babysitting a big metal dog. Last night I got a parking ticket. This morning at 7:30 I drove to Bushwick for a Facebook Marketplace mattress and bed frame and, with Facebook marketplace lady’s father’s and roommate’s help, loaded everything into my car under the JMZ subway overpass. To my genuine horror, a few drops of the mysterious subway sludge dripped onto my BARE mattress. If I had had any more time to prepare yesterday, I would’ve got one of those impermeable mattress encasements. It really does NOT sit right with me that my mattress – the heart of my safe space, where I most want to feel CLEAN, might be exposed to the noxious elements of New York City for even a moment. Though it also does not sit right with me to buy a $215 new mattress when so many decent ones already exist. Rachel got in my head about bed bugs last night. I did check for them! Not SO rigorously, but more than I ever have with any other mattresses. The mattress is currently sitting in Gaby’s car in front of the Adelphi apartment, which is where I’m writing from. This will almost certainly be the last entry in this apartment. The mattress might be collecting bugs in the car right now, who knows. Must not think of these things. I’m having a flashback to South America where I lamented to Brenna about how nervous I was to have to move a MATTRESS in New York City. Now I’m doing it. I feel I’m constantly trying to keep the subway grime, the urine, the E. Coli of the New York streets OUT of my apartment, OUT of my room and certainly OUT of my bed. Sometimes one falters a little. If Lucy sets my mattress down on the street while we’re carrying it through I don’t CARE that it’s her birthday I will kill her.

August 19, noon-ish

Sitting on the deck of the Hill House in Maine. Breathing in the sweet air of dry blueberries roasting in the fields. The flies here are HUGE and LOUD, and on a mission to bump against every window of this house. This time escaping New York for the countryside feels different. The other time I’m referring to is when I went to Vermont, and when I came back to New York I was so distraught because I felt like, GOD my brain works so much better in the countryside than in the city. I didn’t want to be in New York at ALL, upon returning. This time I’m thinking of New York fondly, I’m gushing about it with Aunt Suzie (who is, perhaps, a little crazy).

August 20, 11am

Sort of funny. I get up early hoping to go boating, but here I am three hours later sitting at the dining table with Mom, listening to Dad downstairs singing along so loudly to Judy Collins. And really that’s what I’m here for. Almost immediately after waking up I went downstairs to get Dad to make coffee (I can’t get the machine to work) and FELL so hard. Wool socks against these smooth varnished floors is a deadly combo. Luckily the sound of my crash woke Dad up and he came and made coffee. Then we were tooting around the deck, looking at the overcast sky against the blueberry hills that apparently no longer have any blueberries, Dad raving about how great it is that he pressure-treated this wooden deck, and how wonderful this outdoor shower is but that I shouldn’t use it today because he needs it to be completely dry before he can treat it again.

August 23, 10pm

Work today. Meep moop morp. I think of the little phrases I say to people, “how is everything?” (and they respond, “the pancakes are incredible!”) “Glad to hear it!” And – “hi guys, welcome in! Can I get you started with still, sparkling, or tap?” Sometimes I accidentally bulldoze right through someone’s “how are you” with my “still, sparkling, or tap?” I say these things always in exactly the same cadence. Often if someone presents any sort of inconvenience to me at all during this flow (“can I get a cup of ice?” “tap water with lemon?”) I turn and DROP my phony, sickly sweet smile as soon as my back is to them. It makes me feel like I’m performing, even if the interesting part of the performance is only known to me, and anyone who might be secretly watching me (which PLSSSS I hope is happening). Today I wore thick eyeliner under my eyes, trying my best to not get it in my waterline because then it makes my eyes water all day. It didn’t even matter – Carlos walked in today and said, first: “are you crying?” Then: “did you sleep in that makeup?” I said, “NO, I put this on this morning.” I babysat Javi today and he also said, “ahh! Your eyes look different!” Then he tried to get me to wipe it off with a towel.

August 24 (technically 25) 3AM

Ahh, finally I can stretch my legs out to the lower half of my bed and there’s not a giant pile of clothes there ready to be knocked over. Did some serious unpacking today. My closet is almost fully organized in the way I’d like. I have the AC on in my room, it smelt funny for a second, now it’s either better or I’m used to it. Perhaps there’s no difference.

August 25 (technically 26) 1AM

I am addicted to my phone. Specifically, especially, the last two days I’ve felt my eyes are glued to the screen and I feel a sharp, barely-perceptible DREAD, like brushing over a splinter in your hand, about the moment I turn my phone down. Just now I found myself jumping from app to app – like WHATSAPP and DEPOP and GMAIL – boring ass apps! JUST to keep my eyes on that damn screen. Saw my old friend Addie, and her family The Swansons, in a big, expensive, slate-grey apartment in the Upper West Side today. The apartment belongs to Lynn’s childhood friend, who also grew up in Eagle River. Such a blast from the past. So funny – seeing their faces, even after 2-and-a-half years, is like honey filling a mold – their shape is immediately fresh in my brain. This metaphor is seriously lacking. I feel like my brain has been slow today and yesterday, and I am a little high right now, but I don’t think that’s it I think having my eyes glued to my phone fuses up my neural pathways and I don’t think as clearly or as sharply. I must be better about this. Addie described me as “very, very smart” to Lynn’s friend. How sweet! Then the pressure was on – I had to use big words all night.

August 26, 11am

I’m sitting on our poof in the living room, writing against the windowsill. Looking at beautiful, vibrant Atlantic Ave. A big cup of overnight oats and a yummy iced coffee made from Loog’s leftover Mokapot. I’ve been having my iced coffees in a copper mug meant for Moscow Mules. Everything tastes better in there. I’m listening to serious clacks and clanging coming from Piper’s room. Oh yes, Piper moved in yesterday! Wonderful vibes from her AND her girlfriend Allison, but I think Allison took a little longer to warm up. When I came downstairs yesterday to let them in, seeing them in their Blundstones and Carhartt overalls and Piper’s T-shirt and maxi skirt gave me such a strong immediate longing for Colorado. Because they LOOK SO COLORADO! Allison’s Prius had a Thule and two bikes strapped on top. It had bumper stickers like “Truckee Skiing” and shit like that. Hopefully I just miss that kind of stuff because it’s familiar. I DO really like it here. I step outside and, while there are many bad smells, sometimes there’s a burst of freshness from a park or a garden and that makes me very happy. Being around so many people makes me happy. Smiling at strangers who smile back makes me happy. Acting class, work, interesting new friends, having so much to explore makes me happy. I just ALSO love all that outdoorsy shit, and I think of summers spent on the river or camping and hiking all the time and I feel the tendrils of my heart split into a fork: one longing for success and business in the Big City, the other longing for a simple life. For now, I feel confident that if I were in Colorado I’d be secretly aching to get to New York. And now I’ve got my OWN APARTMENT (and Lucy’s and Piper’s). The other day Christopher said something like, “I feel like that’s when your journey really begins, when you’re in your own place.” I suppose I just feel I’ve been living in fits and starts here, fits and starts of feeling excited and motivated and then NOT. And now I’m in a bit of a fit. But it will pass. I feel like a HUGE reason I’m in a fit right now is because of moving. I’m hard-pressed to even find an open surface to write on! I have a desk, but it's completely covered in books. We’re lacking 80% of our furniture. There are one hundred more chores to be done before I’ll feel like I can really relax.

Aug. 27, nearly 8pm

I’m at a table! I made a 30 minute bike ride to get to what I thought was a late night coffee shop in Williamsburg, but actually transitions to a bar at 4pm. There’s live jazz playing behind me but I’m covering all that up with Weyes Blood’s MOVIES playing in my headphones. It’s such a wonderful song. I rediscovered it while I was high on the subway the other day, then tentatively put it on the AUX at Evelina today. Allie said, “WHAT is that beautiful melody?!” And I thought, “yeah this song DOES rock!” And now I feel confident in it because Allie validated it. She’s got great music taste. Between her (28) and Lucy (22) I get all the coolest songs listened to by people in their 20’s. Separately, I’ve been stuck in an Instagram paralysis lately. I’m fearful for my eternal soul that I even just used that phrase. But I mean that I still have some excellent photos from Peru in DECEMBER, that I’ve been meaning to post, and then on top of those all the stuff from the last eight months in New York! Now I’m listening to a song from Tyler Childers’ new album. I do fuck with this album, for sure. Eatin’ Big Time, Nose on the Grindstone, Oneida. I hate when people write country off as unintelligent music. Tyler’s lyrics are so layered and raw and vulnerable and tell some crazy and often freaky stories! Bitches be listening to this dumb ass song that I HATE, that just goes: “you make me wanna cry in a good way…” over and over again. SHUT! THE! HELL! UP! Yesterday, at a playground in Central Park with Addie and her family, Henry accidentally RIPPED me to shreds. He was on Addie’s back, we were preparing for an epic game of tag and deciding who would be It first, and he said, with his little speech impediment: “not to be mean, but your nose is kinda really long.” And Addie said, “What?” and he said, “her NOSE!” Then Addie scolded him and I tried my best to not laugh anymore. I laughed to keep from crying! Just kidding. It’s true, lil mans is right He’s just lucky he’s nine and not yet ten or I’d have kicked the shit out of him. He’s also lucky I’m not 16 or I probably WOULD have cried. Then on the way home on the subway I finished the Bell Jar. That doesn’t have anything to do with the nose thing, it’s just something that happened next. Now I gotta go back to reading As I Lay Dying, which kinda exactly describes how I feel as I read it.

August 31, 11:59pm

Did anything exciting happen at work today…except for the constant opportunity to make a friend (or an ENEMY) or brighten someone’s day (or give them a SEVERE ALLERGIC REACTION), or be the most smooth-talking, charismatic version of myself possible (OR the most stuttering, slow-brained version), not much excitement. About $350 in tips. Twenty to thirty minutes of barely staying afloat among the rush.

Sep. 2, just barely

Today, one of my tasks was to buy a NEW notebook for German lessons because the one I got was just too slim and dainty to actually be useful. I need a tactical-grade big plastic notebook. An actual book for NOTES, not silly whimsical thoughts that pop into one’s head and don’t need to be written down with any kind of order! Now I own way too many notebooks. “Note”books. Probably six that will never be filled but will move with me for the rest of my life. WHAT should my next Substack article be? I’m thinking about the moment where I turn the Toast over at Evelina, revealing the screen that says, “would you like to leave a tip?” and shoving it right in the customer’s face. I haven’t figured out how to extract the utter awkwardness from that interaction yet. Typically I just look the other way, often quite conspicuously, just to show that EVEN THOUGH I’M RIGHT HERE HOLDING THIS MACHINE AND I CAN FEEL WHERE YOU PRESS AND HAVE MEMORIZED INTO MY BONES THE LOCATIONS OF THE 20%, 22%, AND 24% BUTTONS, I AM NOT LOOKING AND YOU SHOULD TIP WHATEVER FEELS RIGHT TO YOU. BUT IF YOU TIP LOWER THAN 20% I THINK YOU ARE SCUM AND ROTTEN. A few days ago a woman, who had been a perfectly lovely customer, said it was a “whole cultural shift”, this Toast tipping mechanism where we turn away as we hold the screen right at their face. And it is. I hate it. Any sort of rapport is immediately banished once that damn tip screen comes out. It’s especially painful when you’ve been ki-ki-ing with the table and ACTUALLY established a GENIUNE connection, and then you turn the Toast around and ask them for money please and it just makes the whole thing look like a sham. Like I’d expertly buttered them up just for this moment so they’d hit the 24%. Well and I have of course. But also sometimes we are genuinely squad mode. And then, once they’ve given me my meager scrap of delicious money, there’s literally no reason for me to talk to them again and I’m just waiting for them to GTFO so I don’t have to keep smiling like a bozo at them. The ritual of doing a little math, perhaps deliberating with whoever you shared the meal with about how much to tip, was taken for granted. Leaving the tip as a parting gift for your weary server instead of banging it out right there and then. Old people hate this new way the most. But I suppose the old method protected cowardly lousy-tippers from being immediately faced with their shitty personality and watching the servers whisper about them (or just talk at normal volume!)

Sep. 4, 2:35pm

Sitting in the sleek, dimly-lit cafeteria of the Flatiron Bathhouse. I’ve been here since 11:30am, sauna-ing and cold plunging and lying motionless in the body-temperature pool. Man, this place is COOL! I think I’ve achieved some level of contrast therapy enlightenment. Here’s my process: sauna for TEN TO TWELVE MINUTES (harder than it sounds! The sauna is like 180 degrees!) I find the unbearable heat is even LESS bearable (and therefore more effective for enlightenment) if I’m sitting up. Then – stumble immediately into the coldest pool available. The staff want you to rinse off between these steps but honestly that throws me off my rhythm. So, if the staff are watching you, I guess go rinse quickly. Then, no thoughts, no hesitation: right into the cold pool. All the way up to your chin. Eight deep breaths, then shove your head underwater. Then get the hell out of there, grab your towel, and get BACK into the Sauna of Death and Enlightenment. Lie down on the second highest bench. Stretch your arms all the way over your head and your legs as straight as they can be. Stay there. Your heart will start thumping and your vision will begin running, like it’s on a very short, very fast conveyor belt. It feels like ketamine! Or like the most intense Spins in the world. But here, your mind is perfectly completely clear and aware. Another key element: do not drink water. You can drink water after the Spins have worn off and you’re back on Earth. I did this process SIX times, but only achieved the Enlightenment Spins twice.

Sep. 5, 10:20pm

Spent the prime part of this FRIDAY EVENING at Jiang’s Laundromat. I haven’t gotten a roll-y thing for laundry yet (I’m transitioning to a life without a washer and dryer KICKING AND SCREAMING) so I lug my thick cotton laundry hamper (definitely meant to stay indoors at all times) to what I think is the nearest laundromat…fifteen minutes away. There MUST be a closer one. The thing about the laundromat is that I don’t really believe anything gets CLEAN there. No matter how many tide pods I use. Today I noticed the dryer I had chosen had a little puddle of greyish water right below it. I made a mental note to NOT put my cozy laundry hamper in that puddle. Then I dropped my clean (“clean”) underwear into it. I picked it up, hesitated for a moment on what to do (back into the washer? All by itself?), then into the dryer it went! It’s just – if I’m doing my best to keep my clothes from touching any surface inside the laundromat, I do not feel that my clothes truly come out of there cleaner than they went in. They’re washed in the laundromat molecules. Also the coin machine at one point only gave me three quarters in exchange for my dollar. This damn city, man. Luckily I’ve mostly gotten over my fear of doing chores in public on Friday/Saturday nights. I used to be so afraid of what people would think of me if they saw me doing LAUNDRY on a FRIDAY! Don’t I have any friends? Now I know those guys are also losers. Anyways. I’m learning German, and how is that going? Das ist gut! Mir geht ist gut, und du? That was not correct AT ALL. My lovely teacher, Anita, who lives in Argentina, is a real stickler for grammar, which I appreciate, but man doesn’t it make German IMPOSSIBLE! Most recently, I stumbled across this rule: in verb phrases that include prepositions (get up, hang out), the preposition always goes at the VERY END of the sentence. For example: “I GET at 8 in the morning and go to work UP.” I said, “what if it’s a very long sentence?” And Anita said, “yes sometimes it’s very confusing because you don’t know what they’re talking about until the very end of the sentence. And sometimes the speaker confuses himself, too.” Whose idea was this? I would also like to write about a FRIGHTENING encounter I had on Tuesday, in Evelina, with a specter from a past life. A woman who worked in the office at Mountain Whitewater in Fort Collins! We weren’t close at all, but she stepped into Evelina asking if she could grab a table outside and my blood ran cold. Seriously. My heart started thumping and I felt panic. Not that I disliked her, she was mostly a neutral figure in my life, it was that it felt like I was confronting the simulation or something. Like in The Truman Show when they have to start re-using actors. And when I went up to her she seemed taken aback (sort of – doubt her blood ran cold), but I’m not entirely convinced she wasn’t just ACTING taken aback. It was extremely startling.

Sep. 8 (sort of), just past midnight

Today, during a long walk through an unexplored section of Prospect Park, I got a strong whiff of Fall – cracked dry leaves – and I had the immediate urge to call my mom. For a fraction of a second, inside that smell I was transported back to Alexandria, Virginia, sometime during October, between 2008 and 2012, and all the windows of all the houses are dotted with little singular candles and I think of Halloween costume stores and those catalogs (where did they come from?) that show JUST how to throw the perfect Halloween party, which I, being in elementary school and possessing no money of my own, took serious note of. I think I had the sense of holding my mom’s hand. And seeing her come home from work in her uniform. I called her and she was with Dad and Granny and she put me on speakerphone but obviously calls on speakerphone with people over the age of 50 don’t really work. Another smell-related incident occurred this evening, also right near Prospect Park, and the smell was, I believe, dry cement? Something a bit more niche than plain old warm asphalt – maybe warm asphalt under a layer of paint? Whatever it was, it smelled distinctly Fort Collins Summer to me, and I had one of those unable-to-be-fully-explained-in-mere-words thoughts where I think the gist was that those smells that trigger such specific feelings and memories of certain places will be transferred here to New York, and anywhere else I might go. Then in three years I’ll smell that specific variant of dry asphalt and think back to my first Fall in New York.

Sep. 9 (again – sort of)

After work I loafed about in Fort Greene park with Marina. We often talk about how HORRIBLY old she is (28) and I often ask her if she’s scared of being so old. We speak candidly about these things. She said she was more scared of it when she was my age. Earlier, I had said something about how great her jacket is, and how refined and cool her style is, and I said hopefully by the time I’m 28 I’ll have figured out how to refine my style too. She said she got the jacket (some very fancy brand she found for super cheap) when she was 25. So, going by Marina’s fashion milestones, I have one year to find the perfect Fall Jacket. We also talked about her thesis for psychology school, which is basically about how one may not have any discernible trauma responses from event A, but a lesser event which happens later (event B) might trigger an overwhelming response that is actually the repressed response from event A. Seems simple enough. But then we got into how the present is “constantly trying to figure out how it always was”. Basically that every new frame of information recalibrates the giant mass of all the information we’ve ever received from every moment of our lives. I imagine it like a giant, bird-like animal with metallic feathers and its head bowed. And the feathers make a hum of little clicking sounds as it constantly readjusts its position with every piece of new information. Right now my giant metallic bird is adjusting to the information that I AM SLEEPY. Goodnight!

It was so easy to imagine the spectacularity of life in New York with my friends beside me in Fort Collins. It was so romantic to look around our college bar - Trailhead - through a lens of premature nostalgia, secretly hoping that a hot stranger would take note and think I was having very intelligent and creative thoughts. (Which - let it be known - is actually what’s going on almost 100% of the time). I’d look around and think, so smugly, ‘well! This was lovely, but onto bigger and better things!’ which haunts me when I look around the bars here, next to one of my new Friends in New York, and remember Trailhead’s $4 gin-and-tonics. And because I miss my old friends so much.

The actual, articulated fear of I’M WORRIED I MADE A HUGE MISTAKE MOVING TO NEW YORK sprang into my head two days ago, on a blubbery bus ride back from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was returning to the city after a weekend visit to my longtime friend Julia. I felt a real urge to yell for the bus driver to STOP! Let me out! So I could return to Julia’s house and bask in that ephemeral atmosphere that is created during every short visit. It’s not just the saying goodbye to your friend, but saying goodbye to her bedroom, her apartment, the rose-colored atmosphere you two have created. That wisp of a world that exists only for you two and only in this town and only for these few days. And once you leave you wave a hand through that world - poof! The rose-colored cloud dispels.

The weekend before that, I was at LAX, blubbering at another friend - Lauren - from the passenger seat while she gently tried to get me out of the car so she wouldn't get harassed by the airport people. I thought about how there was a time when I saw Lauren every day, but now, for the foreseeable future, her face will exist only in the context of that tragic cloud - watermarked by a clock counting down the minutes until we separate indefinitely again. I was crying not about the loneliness of being New in New York, but because I was confronting the lifelong grief that comes with having good friends live so far away. A life of creating these mystical atmospheres and being forced to - choosing to - wave each one away.

Luckily, I’ve had many more visitors than trips. Which means I’ve been doing a lot less blubbering on public transportation than I COULD be! I’ve found that it is much, much sadder to be the one leaving rather than the one being left. When my visitors leave me, I fend off a tear or two, but once they’re gone I (sorry guys) pretty quickly continue on with my life. Do my laundry, go for a run. I’ll often remind my visitors to say goodbye to my bedroom, and that seems to make them sad. 

And I think that’s an important contrast. This atmosphere I’ve been talking about, that I’m always so devastated to leave, exists in New York too! In this bedroom, in this apartment. My friends feel it when they arrive, and they miss it when they leave. We all get to live in our own warm and lovely cloud; we’re only ever sharing it with our friends. We’re only ever guests in our friends’ clouds.

On the bus leaving Cambridge, I didn’t yell for the bus driver to stop the bus because A: that’s weird, and B: I knew the feeling would fade. You do some yoga, you clean your room. You see the view of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Q train. You remember that you actually really enjoy the New York cloud you’re creating, saturated with the wisps of friends’ visits left behind. I do still feel, though, that the only permanent solution is for everyone I love to move to New York. Bunk beds!

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