I’ve been thinking lately, about the books I’ve read (the many, many books). They have saved me, and taught me. Consoled me, enveloped me, even grown me.

As these years have passed by, I have occasionally returned to the same text … leafing through the dog-eared pages, devouring the words that have been read so often they seem almost seared into my soul already.

Each time that I have done so, it has hit me how vastly different these same exact words can (should I say “reach” me) … or in some cases, not. Sometimes the years of living I realize have developed a depth of empathy in me that allows me to see the flaws of characters through a kinder lens. Others? Surprisingly the other extreme, whereby life’s lessons have etched in me a deep ravine that doesn’t stomach shallowness well, nor plots and character arcs that no longer feel authentic once viewed past the rosy lens of adolescence.

I have many examples, but one that sticks out the most may be when I picked up once more the New York Times Best Seller (Julia Roberts even starred in a Hollywood movie about it) Eat, Pray, Love.

Before I start in on this, do understand I wish the author no ill … I only seek to share my story of the evolution of consumption, perhaps, and how life changes perspectives, and offers new lenses.

When I first read this book, I was still in school, studying writing and asking myself the big questions still of “What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?” ... or even dipping my toes in braving the shortened version: “What Do I Want?” (quite a bold inquiry of a Southern-raised girl).

As I leafed through the pages of the text, written by an author acclaimed as brave and empowered and emboldening (escaping a life she was no longer passionately fulfilled in), my heart flooded with Oh Wow. She’s so brave. I ate it up. As she traveled to Italy, and ate, to India, and prayed, to Bali, and fell in love. It was all … so … Epic. I let myself get swept up in it, and found myself rooting for her too.

Years passed, and much life was lived. Beautiful life. Hard life. Sad life. Incredible life.

Recently, I passed this same book in a lending library in France. I remember so clearly, I had just ridden my rented bike along the canals of Strasbourg to my favorite park and its lending library I had fallen in love with. I saw the title and immediately grabbed it, nestled onto a corner of grass and dove in.

Only this time, it hit different. To be honest with you, I could not get past the first few pages. You see, I saw the plot … the whole damn premise … so differently now. Having been through a painful divorce, following a marriage where I had not one shot in hell (and not for my deepest, sincere hopes for being the kind of amazing wife I had deeply prayed to be), the characters in this book seemed … confusing. WAS the author the hero? The empowered, brave warrior I had always read her to be?

I will give you the short version. No. I read her now as weak, and selfish (sorry, not sorry), and also saw her traveling the world more as a run away versus a bold journey. Along her route, she fell in love with a man (that ends the book, as they ride off into the sunset together). Spoiler alert: she has now left him too … “realizing” her passion is now for her best friend.

Again, a different lens. But no, this was not my brave, empowering hero. I saw how she moved through the world, and she reminded me of Daisy Buchanan. The men she met (and cycled through on her Eat, Pray, Love journey were band aids, covering a gaping wound she still had yet to heal .. despite her critical acclaim). This author was a careless person, “smashing up things and creatures, and then retreating back into her money or her vast carelessness or whatever it was, and let other people clean up the mess she made.”

I, too, have been traveling. Six years now. My journey started on a very different note than hers. However, the same temptations I have faced, and struggled with. However one heals is how they heal, and I went through my “just fun” phase, for sure. But there came a point where I realized that empowerment, to me, looked different … and would not require, or allow, a second party.

I am realizing how deeply rooted the premise is: the ending only feeling tied up and lovely when the heroine is swept away with her savior. I must confess even my very favorite film, Amelie, has my champion being scooted away as the credits roll.

It was my birthday last week, and how those life benchmarks give you time to reflect. There is much more to write on this (it will be Amelie next, I believe), but all of that to say, I, like so many others I have come to meet across these miles, am not waiting any longer. And the empowerment and bravery I seek, never ever requires, or leaves behind, casualties.

And there is something to that, for me. That reads.

It is my birthday today.

May have drank a bottle of wine.

I am the stray cat runaway.

I am the porcupine.

Some people fall in love with Paris because of her monuments. Others because of the pastries, the fashion, or the way her streets seem to glow beneath the rain.

I fell in love with Paris because of a shy waitress named Amélie Poulain.

You must watch Amélie. Friends, I mean it. My favorite film of all time wasn’t simply a movie I stumbled across in college. It was handed to me by a friend who looked at that quirky, introverted dreamer on screen and quietly said, “That’s you.” She was me. I was her. And from that moment on, there was no turning back.

I watched that glorious French film over and over and over again, until I could practically wander Montmartre with my eyes closed. Then, the very second life allowed, I followed Amélie’s trail of baguette crumbs straight to the 18th arrondissement of Paris myself.

And that was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with the City of Lights.

Sicily is passion (sun-drunk, impulsive, almost hedonistic in its affection), but Paris is something altogether different. More refined. More elusive. Paris never throws herself into anyone’s arms. Instead, she makes people wonder whether they’re worthy of hers. And that’s a hard-earned embrace.

At first, I wasn’t sure I belonged.

But then again ... neither did Amélie.

Miss Poulain preferred cracking the caramelized top of a crème brûlée with the tip of a tiny spoon, plunging her hand into sacks of dried beans at the market, delighting in raspberries balanced one by one on her fingertips, and quietly orchestrating happiness for everyone else before daring to chase any of her own. She saw beauty in overlooked things, and in ordinary people. In anonymous faces captured in discarded photo booth pictures.

Maybe that’s why she felt so familiar to me.

So, I stayed in Montmartre, naturally.

I found myself lingering outside Café des Deux Moulins far longer than necessary, smiling at the thought of that peculiar little waitress whose world seemed to exist somewhere between reality and whimsy. I wandered streets where every corner felt vaguely familiar, as though I’d already walked them years before from the comfort of a delirious, dreamy reverie while perched on a college couch.

Naturally, I found myself standing along Canal Saint-Martin, skipping stones in hand. I’d watched Amélie send pebbles dancing across those waters for years, and somehow this ritual of rocks leapfrogging over water felt essential. For a few quiet moments, each stone felt like another connection, briefly causing a rippling, making its own waves before sinking into silence …. becoming part of Paris itself.

I smiled every time I spotted a garden gnome in a shop window, remembering the one who managed to travel the globe before its owner ever did. Leave it to the French to tell someone to broaden their horizons by kidnapping lawn décor. Let us steal away, they might say.

Mais oui. *And we did.

And then there was Nino.

A wonderfully odd man who worked in a porn shop, collected abandoned photo booth portraits of strangers, and somehow became the perfect match for a woman who believed the smallest gestures could change a life.

Their love story was beautiful because they kept almost finding each other. Missing each other sometimes by minutes. Learning one another before they ever truly met. There was a tenuousness there, a fragility in the finding … it could not be forced. But once it came? That connect?

Well, that’s when Amélie gently kissed Nino on the corner of his lips. His neck, and then … his eyelids. Instead of speaking, Amélie gestures for him to repeat the actions. Nino then mimics her exactly. Kissing her lips, her neck, her eyelid. Both washing the windows to each’s soul with a warmth radiating from their very breath.

I remember so clearly, watching it. Tears springing to my own eyes. No words were needed. This was the meeting point. The melding. The morphing. From each other’s muse... to each other’s mine.

And, I realize now, Paris feels a bit like that.

She doesn’t reveal herself all at once. She lets you catch glimpses. A quiet café. A silver-haired, rail-thin woman with sun-weathered skin, smoking her cig while strolling along the Seine. You spend days collecting little moments that don’t seem connected, until suddenly ... they are. And somehow, you’ve fallen deeply in love.

By the film’s final moments, Amélie is seen on the back of Nino’s scooter, her face tucked into the nape of his neck, arms wrapped around his torso … heart … simply rapt. It’s one of my favorite endings in cinema. It’s peaceful. And for perhaps the first time in her life, she looks like she feels completely safe.

She looks like she belongs.

And somewhere between the cafés, the canals, the buttery pastries, and every quiet Montmartre morning that followed, I realized I no longer felt like I was visiting Paris, but that I belonged to her in some strange way, too.

Paris may never be my one and only.

She’s far too independent for that.

She’ll come and go as she pleases.

And so will I.

Istanbul.

How to describe you.

I suppose I should start with the Bosphorus. Or the Hagia Sophia. Or perhaps the cats, because oh my, how many of them there were … everywhere.

But every time I sit down to write about you, I end up back at prayer. Which is annoying, because prayer isn’t exactly my thing anymore. Or at least I didn’t think it was.

The first time I heard the call to prayer drift across the city, I was standing outside, half distracted by whatever shiny thing had most recently stolen my attention. A boat perhaps. One of those damn cats maybe. The possibilities were endless, and all equally likely.

But then the chanting began. It seemed to rise from the city itself, rolling over rooftops and water, threading its way through the heat and haze, and for a moment everything felt suspended. Not stopped exactly. Istanbul is far too alive for that. But more holding space. The air surrounding demanding deference.

And the people answered.

That was the part I couldn’t stop watching. When the people answered. How the people answered. Where the people answered.

Men bowing. Kneeling. Lying prostrate, foreheads pressed against the floor.

It was the sort of devotion that makes a person raised in American Protestantism feel vaguely called out, because standing there, watching men surrender entire portions of their day to communion, my brain immediately traveled back to the churches of my childhood.

Which was unfortunate. Not because I disliked those churches. Quite the opposite. They raised me. They shaped me. There were good people there, who meant well.

But let’s just say that if Pastor Rick got a little long-winded and kickoff was at one o’clock, people suddenly developed a remarkable awareness of time.

You could feel it. The shifting foot to foot. Fidgeting as the glances at watches turned to glowers. The subtle panic when someone suggested an additional prayer request, or God forbid, that extra hymn refrain. God was welcome, within reason. And time restraints. We had places to be, you see.

Meanwhile, here I was, watching people structure their lives around prayer instead of trying to squeeze prayer into whatever scraps remained after life was finished with them. And that stayed with me.

Then there was the Hagia Sophia. Most cities have a defining landmark. But Istanbul somehow acquired a building that feels less like architecture and more like a conversation spanning centuries. You walk inside and immediately find yourself staring upward like a bewildered child. Or maybe that was just me. But no. I saw other people doing it too. Nobody escapes that ceiling without succumbing to it.

What I remember most, though, wasn’t the ceiling, or the mosaics, or even the way the sunlight streamed through the stained glass creating a rainbow of colors that was a kaleidoscope like none I’d ever seen, or likely will ever again.

No, it was a rope, which sounds ridiculous, I realize, of all the things to become emotionally attached to in the Hagia Sophia.

A rope, separating the visitors from the worshippers. There were places I could go, and places I could not. Areas where people prayed, and areas where people observed.

Yet I was not offended by this separation. Strangely enough, I loved you all the more for it. There was no offense in me. No feeling of exclusion. No inner American demanding to speak with management. There was simply the recognition that something sacred was being protected, that not every space existed for my consumption.

And that some things remained set apart. And not for all the jangling coins in every visitor’s pocket would these rules of sacredness be bent.

There was something beyond love that this birthed in me. The refusal, and boundary. A respect welled up in me, because the world feels increasingly designed to accommodate us. To flatter. To hand us access to everything.

Yet there I stood on my proper side of a rope, at least in this context, completely content to remain there. Just watching. Listening. Respecting.

After the prayers were done, I wandered down to the Bosphorus, cats accompanying my every step. Because one can’t really write about Istanbul and not mention them. The cats deserve their own paragraph, probably.

They lounged on ancient stones, slept in market stalls, supervised restaurant patios, and generally carried themselves with the confidence of creatures who had survived multiple empires and intended to survive several more.

Nobody bothered them. They, in turn, didn’t bother anyone either. This coexistence, or agreement? (You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone), also made perfect sense here.

I finally reached the Bosphorus. It shimmered in the afternoon heat as boats bobbed and crossed lazily between continents.

The food? It was impossibly fresh. The coffee? Dark and strong. The wine? More potent than I was prepared for, significantly so.

But it was Istanbul, and not the grapes, that had me drunk long before the second glass. Somewhere between the call to prayer and the rope, the chanting and the silence, the sanctuary I could enter, and the sacred space I could not.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I gasped... I had just finished reading (and re-reading) the passage about the withering figs.

So many thoughts swirled, but mostly …

When did we stop reaching? And why?

The effect was visceral... almost, dare I say, primal.

Like a paper cut, imperceptible to the eye, but boy did it smart ... and sting. It tapped somewhere deep, that seed of doubt already sewn. What if I reach? And then what?

The passage niggled at me for days.

Not because I found it tragic that the figs withered while she sat beneath the tree unable to choose. We tend to focus on the paralysis, the indecision, as though that is the true sorrow of the passage. But I wonder if the deeper grief lies elsewhere.

What if choosing means the end of the unfettered?

What if that is what we are mourning?

As long as the fig remains on the branch, it can be anything. The sweetest fig. The right fig. The fig that changes everything. It exists in that peculiar realm occupied by all unlived lives and unrealized possibilities, nourished entirely by imagination and therefore spared the burden of reality.

But the moment you pluck it?

The moment you bite into it?

The moment possibility becomes actuality?

Something is gained, certainly. Sustenance. Experience. Knowledge.

But something is lost as well.

The imagined sweetness gives way to an actual taste. The fantasy collapses into fact. The infinite narrows into the particular.

And perhaps that is why the passage struck such a nerve.

Because sometimes I think we tell ourselves we are afraid of failure, when what we are really afraid of is certainty. Of knowing. Of exchanging the delicious ache of possibility for the confines of reality.

After all, the fig on the branch can remain perfect forever.

The eaten fig must submit to judgment.

It must be enough.

Or not.

And so we linger.

Not always because we cannot choose, but because choosing requires surrendering every version of the thing we have imagined it might be.

Better, perhaps, to go hungry in the missing and keep imagining.

To preserve the fantasy. The potential. The unfettered.

Yet the passage refuses to let us remain there comfortably, because the figs do not wait. Possibility is not static. Left untouched, it does not remain preserved in amber. It ripens, ages, withers.

Which leaves me returning to the same question with which I began:

When, and why, did we decide it was safer to watch the fruit wither … than to reach?

To choose the ache of longing over the confines of having.

To remain unfettered by certainty.

Hungry, perhaps.

But free to imagine every fig was the sweetest one.

I am learning, life is ripe for the taking.

The figs are at my fingertips.

They may not taste as sweet as my imaginings, but there will be sustenance.

I am also learning, satiety is subjective.

And life … figs foremost … need not be perfect to nourish.

Krakow is almost offensively pretty, in fact. Bordering on arrogance. Even violence.

Church spires puncture the sky at dramatic angles, goring the clouds with a gargoyle-riddled glory even the darkest gothic romance novels could never.

Cobblestone streets practically demand a heeled boot to strike a tune.

The clip…

The clop…

All the better with curled mustache, maybe cigarette in hand. Alas, I possess neither.

Even the light in Krakow feels curated, but not gently. All golden and honey-dipped, hurling its heated rays against centuries-old facades that have been through enough. These faces have seen wars, survived occupations, and outlasted humanity’s repeated attempts to destroy.

This city sits like a beautiful woman at a bar, unbothered, interested only in the olive drowning in her drink. She knows everyone is staring, but still, gazes at that briny bauble bobbing. Strong, with a kick, that martini … means something.

Maybe it is a symbol. Clear, a bit caustic. Burning as it hits the back of the throat. Awakening yet dulling senses simultaneously.

I drank you in, Krakow.

My days were spent ambling about aimlessly (my preferred method of travel). Drifting in and out of narrow alleyways, wandering below towering walls, I would gaze up to see scaffolding, crumbling yet still beautiful in its current state of ruin.

Maybe it wasn’t so much awe I felt, not like breath being stolen by sublime perfection. But more like recognition. Understanding? Solidarity … maybe.

I see you.

You have seen. So much.

You have earned my awed silence. My reverence, upon reflection.

At night, I found myself pulled repeatedly back to Rynek Główny, that Main Market Square that is the center of all you are. Horse hooves assaulted the hard stone, clacking as they passed. The towers of St. Mary’s Basilica loomed near menacingly amid the moonlight. Music often drifted through the square, tiny bursts that brought with them beauty, sadness, all emotions in-between. Jazz here, some violin there, even the occasional drunk tourist, their symphony of slurred shouting translating a song of unbridled confidence only cheap beer (or several) could provide.

Of course, Krakow, you know all about songs. Yours has been a tune of tragedy. A ballad of beauty and grief, sharing the same abode, and somehow living in it, fully.

This is because beneath the charm of the café lights, beyond the amber glow glancing off medieval walls, there is a heaviness here, too.

I visited Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, moving slowly through rooms where history refused to be contained in the dog-eared pages of my school books. The horrors leaped from grey imaginings to technicolor realities, photos and stories of real people, of true passion.

Here was where accounts I had read stopped feeling abstract, crossing that until-now safe and sterile line into horrifying intimacy.

I saw suitcases. Photographs. Names. So many names.

And then there was Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Or I should say, almost. I thought I could do it. I really did. But standing there, even before entering, something inside me simply said no.

I had this deep awareness of my own limitations. Maybe even a respect that froze my footing. I knew some places are not meant to be checked off like items on an itinerary. There was no part of me interested in “getting through it,” maybe snapping some photos to post about the experience. The gravity of the place felt so enormous to me in that moment, so deeply human, and I could not force myself across that threshold.

So I didn’t.

Somehow, Krakow, I felt you understood that.

I sensed you are not the one who expects, or tolerates, performative grief. You strike me as a soul that carries memory the way older people carry pain in their joints. It’s a constant ache. You hold that pain, and it goes with you.

I see you.

You have seen. So much.

You have earned my awed silence. My reverence, upon reflection.

Put pen to paper, let it bleed through

Mea culpa, words have failed me

Mea culpa, are you steady?

Athens ruins, Aussie desert

Little traveler, tiny hazard

Each step takes me further away

Yet somehow closer, awake

Learning, home is here

Growing, home was there

Mea culpa, words have failed me

Mea culpa, are you ready?

It has been some time since I last wrote you

Put pen to paper, let it ring true.

Mea culpa, words have failed me

Silence, appreciation, peace, was necessary.

Before I arrived, I’d heard the whispers … of thermal baths, mineral springs, centuries of soaking. Words like “restorative,” “healing,” “spa.” I had visions of something adjacent to a Beverly Hills fantasy, complete with cucumber slices, hushed voices, plush robes, maybe a woman named Svetlana gently pressing lavender oil into my shoulders while I drifted into a higher plane of existence.

What I got instead … not that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, there’s her geography.

Budapest is two cities, pretending to be one. Or one city that hasn’t fully made peace with her split personality. On one side, she’s Buda … elevated, composed, all rolling hills and castle views. She knows she’s the pretty one.

On the other, she’s Pest … flat, buzzing, a little chaotic, definitely louder, definitely the one who stays out too late and makes questionable choices she just might regret later (and certainly which only she will understand).

And in between these often at odds women? The Danube. Wide. Beautiful. Succinct. The great, harsh, beautiful divide.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time not fully understanding where I was in trying to reach her. Crossing bridges with purpose, only to arrive somewhere that felt … wrong. Too quiet? Too polished? “This can’t be it,” I’d think, before realizing I had, once again, defected to the wrong side.

Budapest, she’s not a city you navigate. She’s a city you negotiate with. I did not want to be forced to choose. Which side of her I desired to dwell within. To live, and move, and have my being … neither felt perfectly true, yet for some reason, I began to believe I was not allowed to have both sides of her … at least not to be present in each at one time.

That Danube. It felt so vast. Such a great divide.

And that was just the geography. Let´s get back to the baths.

Now, I had been told—told—that these were a must. A Budapest essential, if you will. “You haven’t experienced the city until you’ve soaked,” they said, with the serene confidence of people who had clearly survived whatever I was about to walk into.

No one mentioned the nudity.

No one mentioned the logistics.

No one mentioned … the woman.

She appeared without warning. Large. Imposing. Built like a battle axe with a dragon to slay. She took one look at me … the confusion, the hesitation, the thinly veiled panic … and decided, instantly, I was hers.

What followed cannot, in good faith, be described as a massage.

A series of firm, unapologetic decisions made on my body without consultation, limbs were moved in directions I had not previously explored. Muscles I didn’t know existed were introduced to a level of aggression that felt … educational. There was slapping. Actual slapping. Not sensual. Not even kinky.

At one point, I’m fairly certain she lifted me off that table.

And the entire time, all I could think was …. this is not Beverly Hills.

There are no cucumbers here. No ambient flute music. Just steam, tile, the faint scent of sweat, and the distinct feeling that this woman was just getting warmed up.

Somehow, I made it through that massage, and emerged … better?

Not relaxed, exactly. Maybe rearranged. Like my skeleton had been gently, but firmly, reminded of its responsibilities. My backbone, in particular.

Ah. There it is.

Budapest didn’t pamper. She recalibrated. And made me realize, her two parts are not separated halves. The Danube was not the great divide.

Though she appears a city that splits herself in two, she has somehow found a way to encompass it all. It is in her name. What she now calls herself

Budapest.

She built the bridge … there are many bridges connecting it all, in fact.

And I think she kept a piece of me.

And I don’t get the sense she’s in any rush to give it back.

I am not bothered.

I am busy building my own bridges.

I’ve been ruminating lately on the peculiar cruelty of closeness. How the people we love most are often the ones sliced open by our sharpest edges. Not because they deserve it, and not because we intend it, but because intimacy makes us unguarded, and the unguarded self is not always the gentlest one.

There’s a special kind of damage that occurs in familiar spaces, a slow erosion caused not by grand betrayals but by small, incremental, unthinking moments. Maybe it is a thought spoken too quickly, a tone too sharp, a silence held a beat too long, leaving the listener…lingering… dangling… spinning in that vacuum space. It is the kind of carelessness that accumulates like dust, imperceptible until one day it coats everything.

It startles me sometimes, how callous love can become when left unattended. We say we would die for the people we love, and yet we leave them to starve for even the smallest crumbs of kindness. We withhold words in moments where their nourishment is needed. When we do speak, we offer terse critiques, when tenderness is the cure.

I think about the quiet violence of unspoken things, how silence has teeth, and how withholding can feel like a door closing slowly, quietly, until you realize you’re on the wrong side of it entirely. Emotional famine doesn’t just happen one day. It creeps up, fastidiously siphoning off all. And by the time you feel the thirst, that well is dry, and something that was once… well … has withered.

It saddens me how love can become careless. How someone who once reached for you with tenderness can suddenly retreat into the shadows of their own mind, leaving you fumbling in the dark for a warmth of connection that no longer reaches back. We talk so often about the words that hurt us, but rarely about those words withheld. Those uttered assurances that should have steadied us, but were never supplied. The balms that would have softened the blow, but were never offered. Silence can fracture as surely as any stone thrown.

But yes, about those words. The ones that wound, landing like acid, instantly corroding our confidence. Eating away at us with excruciating exactness. And afterward comes the silence, because after a blow like that, there is nothing left to say, and even less left to hear. There is only the ringing ache, the hollowing-out, the awareness of a self suddenly unstable on its foundations. Love shouldn’t feel like that, yet sometimes the people we trust with our most fragile truths turn them into artillery.

I know of this weaponry all too well, the last thing the one I trusted and loved most in the world once saying to me: “YOU are not enough for me.” The pain and obliteration that ricocheted from those words, echoing off every wall of defence I’d ever built, sending them crumbling instantly, cannot be confined in letters. The words were chosen carefully, then launched at a target that had spent nearly a decade trying to believe she was worthy of, or good enough for, someone “like that,” who “could have anyone”. The bullet hit the bullseye, inflicting a pain, and betrayal, that knows no bounds.

And yet (what a blessed, hopeful little word), these years since have given me time to heal, and I’ve been thinking. There is the possibility, however faint, that such pain might be less punishment, and more revelation. (Or at least I am learning to try to see it as such). To approach the ache lingering in the aftermath as not simply devastation, but an invitation to instruction. Some kind of strange, absolutely unasked for, curriculum written in scar tissue, one that could teach where misalignment dwelled, where warning signs were ignored, and where we handed over the softest parts of us without being sure they would be held with care.

I think, maybe, also, it can teach us what not to become, what not to repeat, and how not to wield silence like a noose, or intimacy like a weapon.

Again, I am still learning. I don’t know that love becomes easier, but I do think it can become clearer. I also do not claim to confidently know the exact lesson buried inside all this rumination. But I have learned a few things on this little bumpy and beloved road of my wanderings thus far. Love is not measured by passion or intensity, but just might be (a bit) by how little harm we allow ourselves to inflict while feeling it.

I am learning what it means to be deliberate with my affection, to be mindful with my words, and to stop treating the people I love like the safest targets simply because they stay. I am learning that love deserves better than our reflexes, and so do the people we give it to. I am hoping, by recognizing the weight of my words, tending the spaces where silence could harm, and holding steady the parts of someone the world has already bruised, I can do, be, and love, better.

All the pretty things,

Sparkling in the sun.

All the petty things,

Rusting in the rain.

We, the things being.

Only are dictates.

Dear Serbia,

I’ll admit, I came to you with low expectations.

In my mind, you’d arrive wearing a tracksuit. Gold chain, buzz cut, that slinking stride I’d seen in too many lazy Balkan caricatures on the big screen. Whenever I’d think of you, wondering what it would be like upon our first meeting, somewhere in the back of my head, Sacha Baron Cohen quipped, “Very nice.”

I cringe admitting that now. What an unforgivable and limited cliche. The unattractive, somehow beneath-me-box I let the world around me trap you in.

Even my time spent in Croatia did you no favors. The neighbors I adopted there, and still love deeply, revelled in your maligning. Theirs is an intensity of ire that sent chills down my spine. I did not then, and only am beginning to now, understand the deep scope of pain, the bereft rage that crosses borders. Bred by Balkan history, marred by memory, of dark, deep wounds inflicted by ancestral ghosts long gone.

These scars remain.

Again, I apologize for my ignorance. What a disservice to the truth of you. What a wasteful neglect of the beauty of these bones beneath.

And those big screen stereotypes? Mea culpa. The joke is on me.

You, Serbia, are no parody. No one could step into your skin and pretend. You are grit, humor, hunger, and history, poured into human frame, leaning back in a cafe chair, smoke swirling from the cig you’ve relied on all these years to steady your hands and keep the day, and life, moving forward.

There is a steeliness to your stare. A flash in your eyes that wordlessly conveys you are ready to face whatever comes next without flinching. But there is also a strange softness to your gaze. That same but different flash of your eyes that strikes like lightning when you laugh. A rare moment when the tough exterior softens to reveal the whimsy of the real. That inner child that has been hurt but rallies without fail.

And speaking of rallying. That laugh. It is like a battle cry, bubbling from deep in your belly, gaining momentum as it rises until, at last, it erupts into a full on guffaw, guttural, unrestrained, and infectious. When you laugh, everyone around you laughs too.

There have been moments, seated at a bar or quietly walking by a cafe, when I have heard a great sudden boom from this belly of yours. It is shocking, so much so that one can’t help but giggle at their own momentary paralysis, trying to find their bearings as your jovial bellow echoes through the air.

Looking at you now, I see. Laughter is how you breathe. Levity is your sanity. Your comedy, the antidote for life lately. I remember the first time you told me about Perica, that mischievous schoolboy who swore he didn’t write The Bridge on the Drina. You told me with such glee, taking such pride in the absurdity.

I laughed before I even understood why it was funny. You shook your head, patted my arm. “You’ll get it later,” you promised, only halfway believing it, because your humor is a language in itself. One that can’t be translated, only absorbed, as if willing it to run over me and somehow provide the warmth and sustenance it has served you with for so long.

I remember one of my favorite days spent with you. That day we stopped by that bar, which happened to also be a barber. A few whiskeys in and it sounded like a perfect fit. (Because what could go wrong, pairing scissors with alcohol?)

Some hours, and several sips later, this foreigner who went in for one shot came out with a style so short she could feel every breeze in the Balkans on her nearly bald noggin. As we walked back to our flat, passing the window of my favorite cafe, my reflection caught me off guard. I felt naked, but in a way that did not embarrass me, surprisingly. It just felt free.

Serbia, this is just one story among so many. You have a way of stripping people down, of eliminating the “extra” we have all added to enhance. There are no pretences allowed in your presence. You do not waste time on charm, or pander for applause. You look me dead in the eye and tell me the truth, even when it’s inconvenient. Especially when it’s inconvenient.

And then, of course, came the day I mentioned my time spent in Croatia. At first, I thought it was just football banter. You smiled that tight smile, the one that says careful now. I laughed, said something about rivalries, and you took a long drag on your cigarette. “Rivalry,” you said. “Sure. Let’s call it that.”

That’s when I learned that with you, history isn’t history. It’s still living, still deafening, still taking up space in every room, even when no one utters its name. You don’t forget, and you don’t forgive easily.

I have learned, over time, that this rebelling against reconciliation is not because you are bitter, but because memory is part of your DNA. That double-edged sword of years seen, and survived. You wear remembrance like an heirloom and a scar.

Serbia, how to describe you? You are not the type to whisper over candlelight or make grand gestures under the waxen moon. You are no Disney prince, bringing me roses of crimson red. You are the man who hands me meat, and says, “Eat.” To you, utility is affinity. I am learning.

What first appeared as cold is actually fire beneath granite. You love deeply, loyally, and with a fierce stubbornness that borders on holy. And those rare moments when you finally do say something tender, after days, weeks, maybe months of sarcasm and shrugging, it lands on my parched heart like the glory peal of a cathedral bell.

I see, and am at least beginning to understand now, Serbia. You are the kind of man who may not say “I love you,” but makes sure my glass is full and my plate is never empty. It bears repeating… you are chaos and history, humor and heartbreak. A maddening dichotomy of sharp edges and soft center.

I am learning.

Always,
Me

Something in me feels unkempt…
in a world of folded linens and filtered light,
Tidy… curated… chicly aloof.
Old fashioned, but not antique,
more hillbilly than vintage chic.

You are symphony
with notes creating harmony,
I am cacophony.
Your flutes trill, and harps soothe.
I am the kazoo.

Facing myself in the glossy pane,

Life reflecting, without disdain.

I see you, little Leo lioness…
a tangled mane of moods,

I was never meant for polish.
For the kind of quiet that costs too much.
I am made of clatter, of cups that chip,
of laughter that arrives too loud,
too earnest to be elegant.

The world loves its marble statues,
its muses that never misstep.
Here am I… mud-smeared grace,
unholy hymn half-hummed,
a prayer without Amen.

There is something holy
about being undone,
about the curtain un-hemmed,
the hair that won’t behave,
the bruise that proves
I’ve been touched by the living.

I have tried to be curated…
to match the painted rooms,

The shades of restraint,
to arrange my thoughts like flowers
that never wilt.
But my beauty breathes best
when burning.

Something in me resists completion,
like Heathcliff refusing the grave.
I am storm and stillness, reckoning
windows rattling,
teacup trembling,
learning to love
the sound of my own thunder.

No one ever tells you what happens after you finally become whole again.

Everyone talks about the breaking. The leaving. The rebuilding. The montage of strength where you cut your hair and buy the plane ticket and prove to yourself, over and over, that you can do the hard things. They don’t tell you what happens once you’ve done it.

When I first set off, I wasn’t chasing adventure. I was chasing oxygen. He had broken something so fundamental in me that I didn’t trust my own shadow. So I made a promise to myself … that I would learn how to stand again, on my own two feet, propelled only by the strength of my own legs. That one day, way down the road, I’d be able to meet my own reflection and know.

Quietly.

Firmly.

That he was wrong.

And for years, that promise was the compass. It pointed me everywhere and nowhere at once. I built a life out of motion, out of proving, out of the sheer ferocity of independence. I became fluent in solitude, competent in chaos, capable of carrying myself through anything. And little by little, I did it.

I became enough.

But no one prepared me for what came next.

For the strange stillness that arrived once the fight was over. For the way peace can feel almost… alien, after so long surviving on adrenaline and purpose. I’ve spent years perfecting the art of self-reliance, and suddenly I’m standing here. Whole. Healed. And unsure what to do with my hands.

I don’t need saving anymore. I don’t need to prove a damn thing.
And yet, I feel this quiet ache, this pulse of possibility in every direction. It’s not longing, exactly.

It’s curiosity.

It’s standing beneath the fig tree again, surrounded by branches heavy with futures. Love. Creation. Companionship. Roots. And realizing that I could actually reach out now. That nothing is stopping me except the fear of wanting again.

Because wanting is vulnerable.

Wanting means admitting that independence, while sacred, isn’t the same as connection.

So here I am, at this precipice. Not broken. Not lost. Just… ready, maybe, though I hesitate to say it out loud.

The door is flung open before me. The figs hang heavy overhead.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m not running toward or away from anything.

I’m simply standing here. Steady. Enough. Whole. Trying to decide which sweetness I might dare to reach for next.

A door is flung open before me... all I have to do is take one footstep.

I would be more than well.

I would be held.

I think on the Sylvia Plath fig tree analogy, and sense the paralysis taking over me:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

A door is flung open before me... all I have to do is take one footstep.

I would be more than well.

I would be held.

The paralysis of the fig tree is not lost on me.

But I am a porcupine.

I think I might rather stay free.

I wrote recently about AI, about what we are losing, and since then I’ve had so many conversations about it. One in particular, just yesterday, floored me. Someone was trying to convince me that AI can “help” me “create” art “better”… and friends, again, I was floored.

And I have thoughts….

I did not realize it would be so polarizing. That one little AI post that simply refused to board the bandwagon. But goodness, people were PRESSED.

“Because here’s the thing”!!!!……

AI is nonsensical word salad on a proverbial plate. And my nostalgia runs deep here, for the old ways. You know, when writers actually.… well…. wrote.

It astounds me when I hear people touting AI’s ability and “legendary” use in helping them be “creative.” In essence, when boiled down to the very bones and crux of it all, my issue is this: AI cannot “create” anything new or inventive. It is simply impossible in its very DNA. The holy grail of the algorithm is to mimic, to copy, to regurgitate what at one point some actual human guided it toward… a real, skin and bones, skeleton meat-suit wearing man or woman.

So, when I think of the artists and writers that have revolutionized this world through their creativity, it is those who broke the mold, who stepped where no mind had yet dared to step. The wonky, weirdly disturbing, melting masterpieces of Salvador Dali that almost buckle under the weight of their own sadness and surreality. The haphazard (literal) splash Pollock made when he poured the absolute chaos of his messy, brilliant mind onto canvas. The whirled artistry that Van Gogh grew, then extracted, from his tortured brain, to gift us with beauty in a whimsical rendering of what we might see when we gaze at city streets lined with sidewalk cafes, or venture our gaze upward at a starry evening sky.

No one had thought to bring life to canvas in this way… yet. That is what made these artists distinct. That is what made what they made actual art. They created, from nothing but what lived inside them, born from the brick a brac collected along their life journey from birth.

I see this is a mirror into these artists as humans. Their art is not just what they put on paper or canvas. It is a literal portrait of the way they moved through the world, the way they filtered their everyday existence through a uniquely human lens, and translated that into a language that is universal, but conveyed with a dialect only they could speak. Their work is a road map of their existence, of their evolution both as humans and as artists, charted in real time.

I think again to Van Gogh, how he used pointillism for his self-portraits. The thousands and thousands of dots, seemingly meaningless specks when separate and standing alone. Yet they made complete sense, with rich context, when seen as a whole — when you step back and see the big picture.

And I thought, Isn’t that how we all are? Each of us made of single tiny dots of experience and memory, each moment a touchstone gathered throughout our days and years, coming together to form our whole and unique (oddly amazing) human self.

And then, when we humans (actually) create something drawing from those dots, that… THAT is art. That is unique. That is something no one has ever done before. This is because it is literally impossible to replicate even a single dot — one moment, one lesson, one fragment of lived experience — that has shaped us, taught us, or grown us.

Not one single dot.

Let´s bring this contrast home.

AI has no dots. No lived experience. No days where everything collapses at once and you learn something you never wanted to learn. No joy that cracks you open and changes the way you see the world. No heartbreak that leaves fingerprints on how you move through the rest of your life.

AI cannot map existence, because it has never existed. It can only shuffle and reshuffle what has already been said, already been painted, already been written. Already been lived.

It can mimic the style of Van Gogh, or Pollock, or Dali, but it cannot know why they painted what they did, or how their inner storms bled into their work, and made them so goddamn, painfully beautiful. It cannot know the sleepless nights, the strange obsessions, the ordinary moments that built, brushstroke by brushstroke, the labor of being into extraordinary art.

And so, when I see people holding up AI creations as art, I can’t help but see it for what it is: clever replication, perhaps, but hollow. It is the costume without the actor. The echo without the original sound. It may look convincing at a glance, but the soul… the dots, the human fingerprints that turn creation into art … is missing.

No matter how polished, AI will always fall short of art. Art is not just an arrangement of words or colors or notes. Art is the human soul, with all its suffering and joys and sorrows, breathing into art from existence, blazing its own unique trail in real time, turning their lived experience into something we all can recognize, but never… no, never, truly replicate.

I have been feeling the transactional state of society this week, mostly due to one glaringly rare interchange where it was absolutely not felt. How “odd” it struck me (albeit welcomed) made me sad. To be surprised, by sincerity.

Most days for us all, I would wager, our days and breaths are filled with who I call “FREE WITH PURCHASE” people. I often manifest to the universe: May I not be one of them, and when I (humanly) veer toward the red zone, course correct me with such reminders, please, of such sincerity, like this encounter today… and how I, too, want to be that rarity.

And on that note… I am off to a whole new, wild and rustic world come winter… or summer, depending on who you would ask.

Things are whispering…

I want this to be a clean response to the tug. A refusal and a roadmap all at once. The tug is real and it has a shape. I am learning to recognize its bones now. It looks like compliments that are calculated. It looks like kindness offered only when it benefits the giver. It sounds like the small voice in my head that says you owe, you must reciprocate, you must earn, you must perform.

I do not want to be one of those people who hands out care only to receive in return. I do not want to become a ledger that measures my worth in favors traded. I want to feel and to give without calculation. I also want to be honest about how hard it is to learn that.

Here is what I am practicing when the strings start to pull.

I notice the pull. I name it. When a compliment curdles into a request, I pause and say the obvious sentence to myself: that was conditional. Naming it somehow strips away its power, at least partially. The feeling becomes an object to examine, not a command I must obey.

I create a small, unnegotiable ritual that is mine and mine alone. For me it is running in the early light, before the rest of the city wakes. My breath steadies amid the silence. The bones of the buildings are indifferent to my internal accounting. That indifference is a mercy. I am reminded I do not need a public audience to validate the things I do for myself.

I practice refusal like a muscle. I am learning…. Refusal is not aggressive. It is a boundary. A simple no, or an honest delay, keeps me from trading my peace for someone else’s convenience. If I must respond, I do it on terms that respect my time and attention.

I am learning to choose recipients deliberately. To give the real things to the real people.

There will always be those who measure.

“Let them… And let them go” has become my new mantra.

I am learning to unsubscribe from reciprocity as a default, reminding myself that is different from being ungrateful. It is, instead, choosing that my default posture is openness, not bartering.

To cultivate this truth awareness, I am learning to hold small ceremonies for myself that are not performative. A cup of coffee at sunrise. A short note to someone with no ask. A moment of silence before answering a message.

Tiny repairs to the places where strings tend to loop back in.

Finally, I am learning to forgive the self that was once entangled. This learning comes by degrees. I slip into old contracts. I feel obligation like a phantom limb.

And then, I apologize to myself, correct gently, and move back toward the people and practices that do not need to invoice me for affection.

There is a strange comfort in seeing the marionettes and their honest strings. They announce what they are. People rarely do. That is why the rare, simple act of sincerity hits like sunlight. It is uncommon, yes. But it can be cultivated.

So I will keep running, keep noticing, keep choosing without asking.

If I falter, nudge myself without spectacle. If offering kindness, doing so plainly. If accepting it, accepting it without tallying.

These days, my goal is not to be perfect. The simple goal is to be untethered more often than not.

This, I truly believe, is how we all heal the small, transactional wounds. That is how we make room for sincerity.

For succor, without strings.

This morning, after my peaceful early morning run, I was feeling wonderful! The streets were quiet, the sky was soft, my lungs (and spirit) were full, and I arrived back to my flat carrying that delicious sense of calm strength and renewed clarity I seem to get only when the world is still half asleep. Then I got to the elevator.

The doors slid open slowly to reveal a mom with her wailing baby. Going down, ironically… And this was not just a little fussy cry. No. This was the kind of full-body, red-faced, ear-splitting siren that makes you wonder if the child has been possessed by a demon, or at least swallowed one.

The mom looked at me and smiled. She even giggled, as though we were sharing some *cute* private joke. Meanwhile, the baby continued to pollute the mere-moments-ago-idyllic air with its vocal terrorism. And then, I realized what was happening. She was holding my gaze. She was waiting, expectantly. She wanted me to coo. To lean over the pram. To murmur something glib about how sweet or adorable her little alien was.

And I did hesitate, readers. For a solid moment, God help me, I did. I genuinely tried to mine deep (DEEP) into the depths of myself for that universal “DAWWWW, so cute” reflex.

Alas, I came up empty. Call it mother-nurture constipation… or maybe even that biological clock was never tickin´, but … I cannot lie. Not even to appease someone.

Or at least I won’t, not anymore.

And the fact is, I decidedly did not think that kid was cute. What I actually thought was please, for the love of peace and oat milk lattes, just shush, you spawn of shared-smiles-over-awkward-silences-Serbian-suckler.

Now, before anyone clutches their pearls in horror or absolute emotional upheaval, let me be clear. I do not hate children. I am not some baby-bashing monster. I just… don’t feel it. I don’t get that gooey swell in my chest when I see a stroller roll by.

My heart does not melt when a baby smiles, slobber-first, at me. If anything, I marvel at the puddle of puke and drool dried on its onesie, and the inevitable trail of abandoned toys, cheerios, etc. tossed in fury or who knows always trailing behind the pram …. much the way one might marvel at the slime tracing a snail’s path.

I am fascinated, a bit horrified, but relatively unphased in general.

I am, in this respect, a porcupine. Or maybe just Switzerland.

I am neutral. I am not throwing shade at your kid, but I am also not signing up for the fan club. Your baby may indeed be adorable (to you, for sure), but I am unmoved. My ovaries remain still, and silent. My face just cannot share that wink and a smile in that elevator with you. My vocal chords, similarly (the surly rebels) refuse to fake the squeal.

I am a porcupine.

I am Switzerland.

Not Germany circa 1933.

BETTY:
Did you hear?

FRAN:
Mmm?
Oh… yes.
Marianne.

BETTY:
Such a shame. They found her last night. Sleeping pills, they say. Peaceful, supposedly.

FRAN:
It’s just so sad, isn’t it?

BETTY:
Well, she hadn’t been back here in… what, twenty years?

FRAN:
Not since her father’s funeral.
She wore that black dress… with no sleeves.

BETTY:
Mmm. I remember.

FRAN:
Well, she always did walk a little sideways through life.

BETTY:
That’s what they say about people who read too much. They get ideas.

FRAN:
She used to sing so sweetly in the youth choir.
You’d never know it was the same girl.

BETTY:
They said she was island living, or maybe abroad? I can’t keep track.
No church to speak of.
Just yoga and farmers’ markets.

FRAN:
I heard she gave readings. Poetry.
At a wine bar.

BETTY:
Did you put it in the bulletin?

FRAN:
Mmm hmm.
Such a terrible thing.
Truly awful.
Well... she always was a little different.

BETTY:
Lord, yes.
Asked questions in Sunday school.
And not the right kind.

FRAN:
Mmm. Such a waste.

(Sip of coffee. Napkin dab.)

BETTY:
Anyway, we’ve still got to pick hymns for the picnic.
And someone needs to tell Carol that “Onward Christian Soldiers” is not a solo.

FRAN:
And we’re low on folding chairs again. I told the deacons last Easter.

BETTY:
Anyway.
Yes.
Very sad.

FRAN:
I mean… didn’t she know she could’ve come to us?

I came to Iceland with Great Expectations. The kind of expectations Dickens himself might have approved of, had he ever traded foggy London lanes for fjords and volcanoes. I was already in love with the place long before my boots touched basalt.

Imaginings of this mythical land filled my mind. My ideations were ethereal, otherworldly. Elven. A country where everyone most certainly had silken, ice-blond hair, Viking ancestry, and at least one elven encounter they routinely bragged about over a pint at the local pub.

To say I arrived in Iceland already half-smitten would be an understatement.

To say Iceland demands your attention is also a woefully subdued assertion. Seizes, like the wild Viking sword-wielding shield maiden she is, would be more accurate.

There are the waterfalls. So many waterfalls. From Gullfoss to Skógafoss, and not to forget Seljalandsfoss, I meandered among these magical cascades, where fractals of light became a kaleidoscope of prismatic color, beams of brightness tossed out like rainbow confetti whenever the sun bothered to show.

Never one to be accused of being passive, on day two, Iceland presented me with a ring that was an absolute stunner. The Ring Road that is, a grand looping ribbon that weaves itself around the island, past glaciers, lava fields, and mosses so green you feel Wicked (and that is a very good thing).

Iceland also gave me a ticket, another way she became my one and only. It was for speeding… at 4 am… when I guarantee you I was the only one on the road, minus an elf or two. Funny how Iceland is all about being wild and free, until this straight-edged American feels the need for speed. (I think I was going like 5 over, to be fair).

While we are griping a lil bit, what really got this Speedracer´s panties in a bunch is the irregularity. Iceland, like any lover, is full of quirks that make you grin and grimace in equal measure.

Take her humor. Nothing is too sacred to joke about. In fact, the bleaker the punchline, the bigger the laugh. Let´s just say she is not a lover for pearl-clutchers. Even her sagas somehow, while chronicling blood feuds and betrayal, crackle with dry wit. My favorite is from the tale of Gisli Sursson, who after spearing his nemesis was met with the man’s last words: “hneit þar.” Roughly, “you got me there.” Imagine being run through with a spear and going out on a punchline.

Respect.

That gallows humor seeps into daily life in Iceland. You see it in the museums. Where else in the world do you find an entire museum dedicated to whale penises? Rows of jars, filled with whales´ junk, meet your museum-hopper gaze in a gloriously loud and proud way. While tourists try to stifle laughter and nervously fidget with their informational pamphlet, only allowing themselves to steal nano-second peeks at the maritime pee pees, locals stroll through as if they’re at the Natural History Museum, casually observing ores and minerals. Even taking time to stop for a lil snacky snack in the onsite cafe.

Penis waffles, anyone?

Tight-laced Aunt Gertrude could never…

Clearly, Iceland favors the bold. The naked. The unafraid. Which, coincidentally, describes Icelanders in hot springs too. Clothing optional is not just a suggestion here, it’s an understood, with not even a single raised eyebrow. Iceland shrugs at the things the rest of us prudish prisses from the Mainland obsess over.

And honestly, after a soak in one of those steaming geothermal pools while snowflakes drift down around you, nudity feels like the most natural thing in the world. The prudes of the planet can clutch their pearls. The rest of us will just be over here, stewing like happy lobsters.

As for the fare, Fuck Me, Iceland… and not in a welcomed way…

Let´s just say Iceland did not woo me in the kitchen.

Fermented shark, called hákarl, is definitely… a choice. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it cuisine, but more like Loki’s prank served on a toothpick. Locals tell you to chase it with brennivín, their caraway schnapps, which only adds insult to this slap in the face of gastronomy.

The horror continued, as Sheep’s head served whole is indeed as horrifying as it sounds. And while I respect the survivalist spirit that birthed these traditions, my taste buds were begging to be put out of their misery.

I will also forever question the first person who looked at rotting shark meat and thought, yes, dinner! Then there’s harðfiskur, dried fish that happens to be among Iceland’s favorite snacks. Served with salted butter and “enjoyed” while watching a movie, I was told it’s a healthy alternative to popcorn. To which I say, just kill me now.

And yet, salvation exists in this hellscape of fermented and dried fuckery, and it’s name is Skyr. Thick and creamy, it is Iceland’s answer to yogurt but smugly superior. Yes, Skyr somehow redeems all. Without it I might have mutinied. With it, I forgave everything.

Luckily, one glimpse of a Viking jawline alongside flowing flaxen hair, and all crimes involving inedible Icelandic fare are forgiven. There is something about Iceland and its people that is wild, and wild makes me weak in the knees.

Which brings me to the elven ones. Icelanders call them Huldufólk, or the Hidden People. Most common of Iceland’s elves, they are said to look just like humans, only taller, thinner, and unbearably beautiful. So, basically Icelanders 2.0.

But don’t let that beauty fool you, there is a bite underneath, and a refusal to be tamed. Maybe it is the fairy in me, but feral not only does not scare me, it quickens some sense of familiarity. It’s like the world is a melody, and the notes that throw a wrench into the system and introduce a cacophony of sheer chaos must stick together. Eventually, maybe, the world will stop bristling at the off-sounding notes, and begin to hum along, because Iceland hums…

You feel it in the lava underfoot, in the sagas whispered through the wind, in the knowledge that elves might still be hiding in the rocks and the locals are not entirely kidding when they warn you about them.

As a fairy myself, I am not scared. In fact, I think I may have met my mystical soulmate, waiting in the wild all along.

God and I are taking some time.

That feels odd to write, but maybe not so odd when I remember what relationships are actually like. They stretch, they strain, they knot themselves up. Sometimes they even break. Mine with God has been unraveling slowly, like the hem of a dress tugged at for years until the thread finally gives way.

I was raised Southern Baptist. Which meant faith was not simply a belief system, it was a stage, complete with costumes, a script, and much applause (but only if you deliver your lines well and remain on cue).

Sundays began with pressed dresses, patent leather shoes, hymnals carried like accessories, and a sanctuary that smelled of coffee in styrofoam cups.

After service, there were potlucks that could feed a small nation. Everyone brought their best casserole, their flakiest pie, their secret fried chicken recipes whispered down like family heirlooms. Conversation moved just as quickly as the food line, equal parts small talk and surveillance. “Prayer chains,” we called it. Really, it was a green light for gossip, sanctified with “please keep them in your thoughts.”

Yes, them. Bless their hearts…. and you…

“Bless your heart.”

These three words could encompass my childhood and hold the world within their power trifecta. The trio could mean sympathy, or mockery, or be a neat way to end a conversation without appearing rude. Southern code, wrapped in Sunday manners.

It was a culture of rules. Good girls won the prize, and I was a very good girl. I followed the rules carefully, recited the verses, prayed when told to, trusted the story. God was the Father who had a plan for me, one written for my good. I leaned on that idea like a child clutching a parent’s hand.

Then life tore through the neat script.

The Father I believed would protect me did not. Not when danger pressed close and robbed me of my purity, not when betrayal split my life open and robbed me of my nest, not when pain of things stolen stalked me so closely I forgot what light felt like.

The plan, the one that was supposed to steady me, shattered. I also splintered… then became silent.

To this day, so many questions remain.

There are things I will not write here, things that stay folded away, perhaps for your sake, perhaps for mine. What I can say is that it was enough. Enough to unmake the girl who tried so hard to be what she was told.

She is gone now. In her place is someone changed. Someone less willing to nod along to tidy truths. Someone who gives space to her doubts rather than shoving them into corners. They no longer whisper, they echo, rolling through the room like a storm that refuses to pass.

This is where I find myself. Living in a landscape of questions, holding on to honesty only.

When I speak to God, which I still do, sometimes… it is nothing like before. My words are not polished prayers meant to impress. They come out raw, without artifice, or apology. These conversations do not resolve themselves neatly. They trail off, uneven, like unfinished sentences thought better of mid-breath.

Yet they are the truest exchanges I have ever had, and for now, I feel at peace leaving them at each pregnant pause … these honest words.

I guess because I see honesty as everything truth breeds.

So, if I follow honesty, truth can never escape me… eventually…