We are in the dog days of summer. August. It comes in like a rush, and I think, what have I done so far with this summer? Every year, without fail, I think: have I made enough use of what summer has to offer? If it were up to me, I would swallow summer like a burst fire hydrant and make every second count. Unfortunately that’s not how life works and it turns out I’m often tired.

I worry I haven’t been out enough, in the streets, going to barbecues and street parties and spontaneous flights of fancy that push me to throw caution to the wind and dance on rooftops and swim in the East River at night (ew). Have I had enough ice cream late at night? Have I even been to look at the river lately? Mamdani posts about the free events available in every borough, and I screenshot it and then stay in a 10-block radius, close to home. That endless stream of social engagements is a version of New York that has been a fantasy to me for as long as I can remember. Friends remark how busy I seem and I tell them they’re wrong and I need to get a life. In reality I’m pretty sure everything is fine, but most of the time my brain begs to differ.

I am a city rat. I love a beach and a mountain. Of course I do; I’m not a monster. I’ll never say no to a beach or a mountain. I’m even very often pleased with a simple hill. But generally I spend most of my summer in a city. This makes me feel better than other people, like I’m harder, tougher, faster, stronger (™️ Daft Punk c. 2001). I’m superior. I hold a slight air of condescension about the people who leave for weeks on end to their country homes or to Greece. Somehow it’s always Greece. I’m not even jealous. I’ve been to Greece. I know what Spanikopita is.

I like staying in the city during the summer. Though it’s muggy, and it smells, and there are cockroaches and the rats seem bolder, it’s also quieter with fewer people. Last week was the 11th anniversary of my liver transplant and I almost always write something about it. This year I feel bored with writing about it, so I’m writing about staying in the city instead. The day before the anniversary, I travelled up to 68th and York, where it all happened. It wasn’t a pilgrimage. That would be grim, even for me. I had to see my doctor, and he’s just across the street.

I don’t feel particularly contemplative this year about the years that have passed, one after the other, like a deck of cards I’m trying to set on fire. Each year burns brighter than the last. With each passing year, my life has changed in ways I could never have imagined; I am taken to places I never thought I’d go, and I see myself differently, new again somehow. Luckily, I am less maudlin than I used to be. Luckily, I have never lost my sense of humour. Freakishly, I feel younger now than I did then. The thing I have really learned over these eleven years is that I was never as honest as I am now, mostly with myself but also with others. I get to have a fresh start anytime I want. I may suffer, I may have pain, and it may even be a major feature of my time on this earth. But that’s just human. It doesn’t make me special (everything else does, though). And I also get to have all the other things, the good things, too. I don’t have to treat my life like a life sentence. I get to have fun. I didn’t know that for too long a time.

I don’t think having a liver transplant bequeathed me as much wisdom as I used to think it did. I am finally humble enough to say I don’t know anything and I’m willing to learn more. This year I drove to the beach with my friend in the early morning. We talked on the beach until we felt brave enough to get in. I said a prayer in the waves. I’m always praying for change. I often pray for the proverbial firehose to take hold of my life. As we were leaving the beach, I turned back to use the shitty showers for use on the concrete boardwalk to rinse my feet from the sand. I pressed the button and it sprayed out at me horizontally, drenching the dry shorts I’d just put on. I didn’t really like that but then I thought, well it’s good to get a little drenched sometimes. Still, maybe the firehose would be surplus to requirements, and a little exhausting.

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During my time in Bali, I briefly dated a half-Australian, half-Indonesian man who was 12 years my senior, and somehow much less mature than me. When we dated, he had a shaved head and was probably the most handsome man I’d ever been with. Relatively soon into our months-long entanglement, which in today’s world we’d refer to as a situationship, he told me he was dating someone else. We stood on the beach at a popular bar people frequented on a Friday night and he told me he liked her more than me, but he’d still be willing to see me, on the basis that I didn’t require much of him. It didn’t feel great, but I was willing to compromise on account of his great beauty. He was not very intelligent but that didn’t matter to me; he’d now entered me into a competition to win his heart (or at least his attention). I did not win and it fizzled out naturally, thank god.

Years later, at the very end of 2019, I visited Byron Bay in Australia and ran into him upon my arrival, suitcases in hand. He had grown long, gray hair to the middle of his torso, rippling out in soft waves. Years of surfing had leathered his skin, and though his beauty hadn’t faded, he was now in his early 50s and our age difference was glaringly obvious. I couldn’t believe it. I tried to remember his name as I dragged my suitcases across the gravel to my friend’s bungalow. Something with a G? Something generic. He cycled toward me on a retro baby blue bike and recognized me too. We said hello and exchanged pleasantries, tried to catch up on seven years in five minutes, an impossible ask. He had returned to Byron; the money he could make was better than in Bali. Staring at him, taking in what the years had done with him, I felt grateful for his preference for the other woman. We pretended we would get a coffee during my visit and parted ways. I never saw him again.

Bali was full of people who couldn’t quite decide on what they wanted or who they were. There were unapologetic entrepreneurs full of moxie and determination who had moved to the island to surf, and felt hemmed in by the constraints of the successful businesses they built. Europeans missed the seasons, the efficiency and complained about corruption. The few Americans who were there judged the Europeans for their arrogance. The Australians had an opinion about everyone and everything. I didn’t quite know where I fit in, I questioned my existence and direction every day and struggled to feel like a “real” person, or much of a person at all. I’m sure I complained (I loved to complain), but I lived like a tornado, barely stopping, gorging on what the island had to offer.

One morning I sat at Warung Ocha, eating my daily breakfast of scrambled eggs and cigarettes, avoiding my ratty kitchen and wondering what was to become of me. I took a phone call with a supplier who delivered more bad news about a delayed timeline. There was a friendly, bubbly Indonesian woman who sat at the next table, also at a laptop, also smoking cigarettes. She struck up a conversation with me. She heard my phone call and was curious to know what I was up to on the island. I told her about my work: the delays, the mistakes, the lack of access to fabric. She seemed genuinely distressed on my behalf. She told me she owned a boutique just up the road, had gone to fashion school, was from Jakarta, and had great relationships with suppliers. Did I need help?

This woman was the miracle I needed; had she come to save me? I told her I did, in fact, need a lot of help. I was in deep over my head and I didn’t know what to do or how I’d complete the project. It was then that we decided to meet the next day at the same place, same time, to go over how she could help me. I wasn’t wary of her offer; I was desperate to find someone as helpful as her.

Thus began a series of events that I like to think, in retrospect, I had no control over. It was fated in a way, like a dream: the excitement and possibility swept me up in its undercurrent. Suddenly this woman was my new best friend, and then even more suddenly we were starting a business together, and then even more suddenly we had ten clients. It started with a couple of boutique clients in Australia and the UK, and we then grew to receiving orders from, impossibly, Diane von Furstenberg. Then, somehow we had an office with three floors and many staff. It was a whirlwind, and of course there were many steps in between our first meeting in a warung and the office with three floors, but my life was such a blur and my decisions so guided by fear that I barely remember any of it. I started working six days a week to keep up with the stream of work coming our way, and everything was thrilling — and yet, my bank account was still close to empty most of the time. I barely went to the beach, preferring to drive my motorbike all over the island to source material and find new suppliers.

Together we created Texas’ first collection of dresses, and a few handbags. Many, many mistakes were made. But we did it, and she got her first wholesale orders, and we went into production. I felt like a real grown-up; I woke up every day and went to work on my little motorbike. I made decisions, organized photo shoots, sent emails, and made sales calls. Slowly I started to feel more like a real person, or at least I pretended to be. I was, at least on paper, a “boss”. I didn’t feel like one, and I wanted to sabotage it. When something good happened, I wouldn’t believe it was true. Then mistakes would inevitably occur because that’s part of garment production. I’d think it was all failing and panic.

Despite my daily impulse to burn it all to the ground and the endless chaos, my life in Bali also turned into a sweet reverie, an adventure, and most importantly: my own. After the three months in my dusty palace were up, I found a much better house with two small bedrooms off the main stretch in Seminyak. I cherished it. Some of the most formative moments of my life happened in that little home down a tiny little gang. Some of the happiest, too. I often wondered whether it was foolhardy to have willingly decided to move so far from everyone I knew and loved. There were very few people in their 20s, and I hung out with people mostly in their 30s and 40s. I often felt lonely and worried. Or like I was hiding from something. Later, with time and age, I’ve realized that I’ve spent much of my life feeling lonely and worried, even when there has been little reason to. We worked hard. My business partner was eight years older than me, but she often told me how wise I was. I never quite trusted what she saw in me, but I was willing to try and to fail. I wanted to see what could happen.

People have always told me how wise I am, likely on account of me being a good listener. I always balked at the idea. I was such a good listener in my youth mostly because I was afraid to speak. Now it’s just habit. During those years, though, I did become wise. I did learn lessons and become more of a person and sometimes it feels like another woman lived it. At least I have the dresses, the bags and 800 bangles for DvF to prove it was me. Plus, all those blurry BBM photos.

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When I was 23, time stretched out into long days and months. I didn’t experience time the way I do now, days slipping through my fingers like they’re nothing. Three months seemed like an eternity to live in my decrepit little house. Still, I muscled it out in my crumbling palace and hit the ground running. I had no real contacts for garment production on the island except for a few leads from my friend who had left for Sydney. She put me in touch with a few Aussies who made t-shirts and dresses. At that time, Bali was the land of distressed t-shirts (with or without slogans emblazoned across them) and flowy dresses. Lots and lots of jersey. Lots and lots of rayon.

Demographically, the island was teeming with Australians. There were two distinct groups of Australians in Bali: the bogans and the more sophisticated types, usually from Sydney, Melbourne, or Byron Bay (who usually had money). Both types have a compulsion for nicknaming everyone they know. A name as simple as John becomes Jono; Simon shaves off the n to become Simo, Dave, Davo, and on it goes. The best Australian slang I came across during my time is the word “seppo” for Americans, as in “septic.” As in, full of shit.

I had already been exposed to far too many Australians for my young age because, as a teenager, a group of my friends used to go to a bar in London called the Walkabout, which was predominantly frequented by fit Aussies and Kiwis who were in the UK for work experience on a six-month or one-year stint. Most of the men were at least five to ten years older than us, and we’d often spend a Friday or Saturday night trolling the bar, trying to bag and befriend them. They were loud, drunk, hot, and a little annoying.

According to my Australian friends, some left and traveled the world to learn more about it (as isolated as the continent is), while others did not, or only went to Bali and wore Bintang singlets the whole time. That seems entirely too simplistic for me, but it’s from the mouths of at least ten to fifteen Australians I knew 15 years ago, so do with it what you will. I’ll never forget making my way to Sky Garden one night, a five-floor bar in the heart of Kuta, the most touristy part of the island by far. I was on my way to the bar on my motorbike and witnessed a man dressed head to toe in Bintang gear and pissing and throwing up at the same time on to the street. This sight encapsulated the energy of a certain type of Australian who loved coming to Bali a few times a year. Many of these holidaygoers arrived on the island to get pissed and get sunburnt. I'd love to say that was the first or last time I’d see something like that, but it wasn’t.

There were also the British, French, a Spaniard here or there, a German in the surf, and the Italians with a pizza place near the beach. There were a lot of white people calling themselves expats building businesses off the backs of the Balinese, many of whom were happy for the business, having had a tough few years after the Bali bombing in 2005. Still, it all felt a little new-age colonial, and still, I participated. Very few of the Europeans on the island seemed to make an effort to learn the language, except for people who had been there for years. I found this off-putting and bizarre, and immediately signed up for Bahasa lessons. I quickly learned that if I didn’t learn the language, I wouldn’t be able to work effectively. And I had a feeling it was unlikely I’d gain the Indonesians' respect. Plus, I had nothing else to do because I didn’t have any friends.

The language school I went to was a five-minute bike ride up the road from my house, a small house with a courtyard with sweeping palms in front. I went twice a week. The class was taught by a beautiful, effervescent trans woman who laughed easily and always wore heels. She loved me and was impressed by my swift progress. She would say “Kamu bisa bicara bahasa sudah baik baik saja”, which meant “You already speak so well”. I loved being teacher’s pet. I always left the class with a boost to my self-esteem. I love learning languages; they come easily to me, and I love the feeling of speaking a language in another country and being understood. It’s like a magic key to another world. Bahasa has no gender, no past, present, or future tense, and I found that even if I made the smallest effort to speak it, people were so thrilled that they’d chat right back, which immediately improved my language skills.

Armed with basic Bahasa, more confident on the bike day by day, and plying myself with well-made coffee and as many cheap Marlboro lights as I could buy, I faithfully showed up to my “job” each day, setting up shop at a restaurant two minutes from my house called Warung Ocha. I would arrive for breakfast (scrambled eggs with toast and a flat white), open my laptop, and sit for hours at a time to “plan”. The Aussies with whom I had been put in touch were shirty about where they did their production. It is an age-old tradition in the fashion industry to gatekeep. I had already experienced this in the many internships I did for prominent stylists, designers, and magazines, where I didn’t learn anything about potential career paths, how to get hired, or even what stylists and designers really do. Mostly, my bosses ignored me until I was needed to pack a return, request a look, or attempt to blag a return of fifty t-shirts, forty pairs of socks, and a mountain of underwear to the Gap or H&M.

The Aussies made buckets of money from the aforementioned t-shirts and dresses, and were not particularly interested in helping a girl with gashes on her leg build her little production empire. I got no juice out of them. People were so secretive about all this because they feared that if they gave their good contacts, production would back up and their orders wouldn’t be made. It’s fair: the Balinese are island people, and island people don’t operate on Western time. They are not psychotically attached to outcome after outcome and season after season. They build altars in every one of their establishments, all over their homes, and offer blessings each and every day. They are on the Island of the Gods, and they know it. Prayer song reverberates through the island and Hindu practices and festivals are celebrated throughout the year. They treat their land and their lives with reverence and appreciation. The westerners who have come in, especially over the past 25 years, are not as respectful as they could be.

I was first put in touch with a seamstress who was lovely and too busy to work with me. There was another woman who had a label and was extremely knowledgeable about producing clothing in Bali. She let me pick her brain, but if I wanted to use her suppliers, I’d have to pay her for her services, which was expensive. Texas didn’t want to pay for that. She wanted to start slow and steady, which really meant cheap and cheerful. That made it exceedingly difficult for me to do my job or get meaningful help from anyone. She wrote me an email during my second week, reporting that she had read a book about fashion that said you’d need $100,000 to start a label properly, followed by a “YEAH RIGHT.” This was her response to my suggestion that we work with this woman; she didn’t answer it head-on, but her silence was enough for me to realize I was the only go-between she was willing to pay.

Luckily, there was yet another woman who had recently landed from Melbourne with her husband to start a label, and was learning how it all worked herself. She has since become one of Australia’s most successful designers. She helped me find fabric and even some seamstresses she worked with, specifically a woman called Ayu, who told me she might be able to make some samples. I would send and receive novel-length emails with Texas about what was available and report on my progress. The problem with moving to a country I’d never been to was that I had no advanced knowledge of what was available. Texas had a dream of creating a line of cotton shift dresses. I very quickly learned that Bali was not the ideal place to do this. High-quality cotton was in short supply, and the available cotton was shockingly expensive. I had unwittingly entered myself into a very stressful situation.

During the day, I would troll the island’s fabric shops for a material that was barely available, driving into Denpasar, the main big city, on a moped I was still learning to drive. Because I was such a rookie, I bought pieces of fabric we would never end up using and wasted money I didn’t have. I packaged up the fabric samples and shipped them to Texas, in addition to emailing the bad photos I took on my Blackberry. Bali was 12 hours ahead of Texas, so I would often Skype with her in the evening to give her progress updates. I was coming up nil. I panicked but pretended everything was fine and lied about how well things were going, even though they objectively were not.

In my first weeks, I found out that if you decide to use a certain fabric for a sample, it may not be available later, once, say, you place an order or sell the collection wholesale, because it wasn’t consistently in stock. I then found out that almost no one knew the measurements of American sizes, and many suppliers only worked in sizes S, M, and L. That no one knew the standard seemed mildly disastrous. I was suspicious of what I heard about almost everything because I got such inconsistent advice. Surely, someone must know the standards for US and UK sizing. No, they kept telling me — they didn’t. That was my job.

I relayed my findings to Texas. In an email, I wrote: “I’ve gone through the two crew neck dresses you sent and have sort of put together what the measurements could be, but I am just going to give them to Ayu, tell her we want a happy medium between the two patterns, and see what she comes up with.” “Sort of put together” would not have inspired confidence and is not a sentence written by someone who knew what they were doing.

I had been tasked with an impossible ask: to make an entire line of dresses in three months, when the experiment between Texas and me was scheduled to end. Having been there a month with no progress, a few trips to the beach, and two surf lessons in which I cut my leg open with the fin on the surfboard I rented, it was clear I’d need a miracle to make this happen.

I guess I have to write a part 3 :)

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I was having dinner with some friends about a month ago, and someone shared a story about a bad rat situation they had while staying in a sublet in Brooklyn. Everyone in New York has a rodent story if you stay long enough. I lived in an apartment in Gowanus in my 20s, and little mice would boldly run through my bedroom. The landlord did next to nothing about it, but I’m sure I barely complained because I wasn’t really aware that you could request anything from a landlord in my 20s.

Then I remembered a better, more dramatic rat story than little mice running through my bedroom. I moved to Bali when I was 23. I hate telling people this because I know that it immediately makes people think I’m a toxic wellness millennial who went to heal myself in Bali. That’s not far from true, though the opposite happened: I worked six days a week and eventually ended up nearly dying. I decided to go because I was impulsive and reckless in my 20s, liked an adventure, and passionately hated my poorly paid PR job. I also wanted to escape the endless cycle of partying I was in in London. I arrived on the Island puffy, bloated, and white as a ghost.

My friend convinced me to move there for a job, which turned out to be less of a real job and more like indentured servitude. She had moved there after we finished university to join her much older boyfriend who had recently built a hotel that was just getting off the ground. She told me she had the perfect gig for me, and I could get in on the sweet life they were living. Was I really planning to sling wine and Christmas pudding from Waitrose to the Daily Mail for the rest of my life? I hadn’t really thought that through; I was just trying to get to Friday.

The perfect gig was being a garment producer for a Texan woman who dreamt of being the next Tory Burch. I would work with her remotely to materialize her vision. I have always been ahead of the curve: this was pre-Zoom, pre-WhatsApp, pre-Instagram, and pre-speedy download times. The line I produced eventually sold to Neiman Marcus and other preppy retail outlets in Texas, where she lived. Think Lilly Pulitzer meets Tory Burch mashup for Texan housewives. The deal was that she would pay my rent and $400 a month to produce the line. Though Bali was indeed very cheap in comparison to London or New York, $400 a month was not enough to live on.

The friend who convinced me to go was prone to hyperbole. When I told her what the terms were, she wrote back over BBM, because it was 2010.

She said: “Dan* nearly fell off his chair when he heard how much she’d pay you. That’ll go so far in Bali. You’ll live like a king.” Dan was her long-term boyfriend and soon-to-be husband. I’d never seen him react enthusiastically about anything at all, even-keeled as he was. If I had known then what I know now, I would have asked for live video footage of him falling off the chair and receipts from their daily spending over the previous three months.

I looked around my dusty flatshare in Stamford Hill, replete with browning carpet and heavy curtains on yet another dark January evening, and decided I had to do it. I was impatient for change, and I believed the move would save me. I was becoming way too close with my drug dealer and I never even wanted to work in PR. Vanity Fair had recently written an article proclaiming “Bali is Back” on the cover. Obviously, whatever Vanity Fair espoused, I subscribed to because I was 23 and it was 2010. What was there to lose? And so it was that I was hired to produce an entire line of dresses with no experience and no real knowledge of how to even make a dress.

For the next two months, I spent every day of my 45-minute commute from Stamford Hill to Soho on the Victoria Line plotting my escape and negotiating with the Texan lady with cash to burn what the “job” would entail. It was the blind leading the blind; neither one of us really knew what we were doing. The Texan lady was only 26, I just thought she seemed older because she already had a baby. I could barely take care of myself, much less a child.

My friends found a three-bedroom house just off Jalan Legian, right in the heart of Seminyak. It was 30 million rupiah for three months. I had to pay 10 million rupiah upfront. That converted to $1,000 for three months. We transferred the money sight unseen. I was to share the house with two couples and, my friend assured me, we would be one big happy family. Then, she reported, with two weeks to go until I was scheduled to leave for Bali:

“Bad news babe. We’ve run out of cash and the hotel isn’t making us enough income. I’ve got to go to Sydney for a nannying gig.” Every so often, my friend would nanny for an unbelievably wealthy family whose source of income was unclear. She was always paid in cash.

Then, with a week to go until my departure, I heard the second couple had found a better place up the road in Canggu, which, back then, was more relaxed than Seminyak and had better access to surf. My friend sent more apologetic BBMs:

“You can have the house to yourself babe! It’ll be so fun. And it’s such a fab house. We’ll be back in max six weeks.” They wouldn’t return for six months.

“Well, if they have better access to surf”, I thought, “I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that.” I pretended I was cool with it, which I barely knew how to do in 2010—queen of sulking and passive aggression as I was. My friend knew, but dealt with it in the English way, making the best of what was turning into a bad situation (for me). And anyway, I couldn’t really fault her for needing to make money.

I was terrified to be on my own when I’d been sold on the commune. I’d never lived in a house before; I was a city girl through and through. Still now, if I ever have the good fortune of staying in a house, there will come a moment in the night when I am certain someone is coming to murder me. It is the law of being from a city. The dream of one big happy family turned into one little baby white girl cosplaying seasoned garment producer with no experience, contacts, or language skills. I had never even been to Bali before. It is a miracle that I somehow figured it out. Mistakes were made.

Luckily, my friends didn’t leave before I arrived, so they had a couple of weeks to show me the ropes, get me on a motorbike, and be there when I got into two accidents in the first two weeks. I didn’t have a driver’s license, so I got a fake one made. I rented my scooter from Simon Go For It, run by a portly Balinese man with a big smile. He happily handed me the key and barely glanced at the fake license.

Here, I should note that the prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the mid-to-late 20s in human beings. The first accident was a few days into learning to ride the bike. I was trying to turn around on Jalan Legian when the bike just fell and me with it. I was barely going 5 miles an hour. The people around me helped, in the friendly Balinese way. Then they laughed at me enthusiastically, in the friendly Balinese way.

The next time was a little more dramatic: I was following Dan down a winding road, and it started to rain heavily. He was speeding ahead, and I couldn’t catch up. Dan wasn’t that into me showing up from London, and later on, I found out he thought I had a “bad vibe”. I was surprised at that assessment because I had recently learnt how to meditate. I veered left when I should have gone right, and the bike slid down the muddy path we were on, scratching up my legs and leaving me with a wound that took weeks to heal at the height of monsoon season. Wherever I went, Balinese men would catcall me: “Accident?! Maaf,” meaning sorry, usually followed by a warm belly laugh. They were used to idiot 23-year-olds getting in accidents.

Eventually, my friends left, and I moved into the house I was to live in on my own. It felt like I was entering Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion from Great Expectations. It was a beautiful old Balinese house surrounded by lush green gardens, owned by a mysterious French woman who seemingly never returned to Bali but kept the home, presumably to generate passive income. I do not exaggerate when I say that the entire house was caked in dust, despite the French woman’s pembantu (housekeeper) arriving every day to clean. The house just generated that much dust. It seemed not to have been lived in for some time, and no matter what time of day it was, the house was dark and cool. I immediately understood why the other couple decided to make a run for it and forfeit the three months’ rent.

I had my run of the house and could choose any bedroom I wanted. Both the downstairs bedrooms were musty and smelled like mildew. The beds were damp and smelled like they might be moulding. I sat on one to see how it felt. It was mildly damp and dust emerged from the mattress when I sat on it. I decided the upstairs bedroom would be mine because it was less musty and seemed to have good airflow, especially given the gaping holes in the roof.

I was petrified during my first night in the house. The sounds of the Balinese tropics raged around me, and every so often, what sounded like the scratches of a huge, predatory animal reverberated through my room. My bed was covered with mosquito netting with holes in the most essential areas, so I was bitten endlessly by the bugs in my room. There was an industrial-sized white bucket next to my bed to catch the rain during the wet season. I would have to empty it when it really rained (which it did often), because it would get so full.

When I had to pee, I would awkwardly untangle myself from the netting to run to the bathroom, racing there so as not to rouse the scary people I was convinced were surrounding the house, poised to murder me. Instead, all I found were full-size bearded dragons and tiny geckos scaling the bathroom walls, some of the least murderous animals on the planet. I never quite got used to the massive lizard that stared at me when I showered, but I came to love him and appreciate the company. Every night I lived there, I was convinced I might die in the night, but each morning I woke, still alive.

It was almost impossible to buy good wine in Bali, so I started stocking up on Bintang beer. I would go to the local Warung by myself to eat dinner, because, as I said, I’d moved to a country I’d never been to and knew next to no one. I’d drink a couple of beers with a Nasi Goreng (fried rice), which cost about 26,000 rupiah ($3), and drive my moped home. I’d then drink another couple of beers so I could sleep in the dusty, hole-pocked home.

During the first week of living in my beautiful, decrepit refuge, I discovered a rat lived on the (dusty) TV from the 90s. Sometimes another one was in the kitchen, where I was supposed to cook. I realised that the rats were probably the animals I heard on the roof every night. The roof with huge holes in it. I henceforth spent as little time as possible downstairs at night, gathering everything I needed so I wouldn’t have to enter rat city until the morning, when they’d ostensibly cleared out. I mostly used the kitchen to cut limes, fearing rat juice might be present. Sometimes I would have to come downstairs for water during the night, and I’d hear them scatter. I was trapped in rat city and poised to meet my destiny as entrepreneur girl before “Girlboss” had even entered the chat.

TO BE CONTINUED

*Names changed for anonymity

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What is February meant to teach us, as a month? Is it meant to grind us down into meat for spaghetti or build us up into freshly baked bread? Has anyone been able to make anything this February? Judging by all the emails I have in my inbox, lots of people are creating things all the time and one thing’s for sure. They want me to know about it. I’ve been able to make a few things myself, including but not limited to a mildly improvised anchovy pasta, an elaborate Ottolenghi curry replete with obscure ingredients, and a lot of soup because I’ve been constantly on the verge of getting sick. NOT because soup is my personality. It’s not. I have also been able to make my bed.

I hear shouts from the streets below my apartment: the rantings of a crazy person, the shrieks of delight from kids playing in the snow, or both. The days slowly, very slowly, get longer. And I notice. There is a promise of spring in the air and I immediately regret that I haven’t done enough with winter’s stillness. Typical. I go to dust off my red writing desk that mostly houses clothes I have yet to fold and other detritus. The one my legs won’t cross under, so I never sit at it. I drove to Bushwick last year to pick it up from a Facebook Marketplace vintage furniture dealer with good prices. He looked so much like a Facebook Marketplace vintage furniture dealer I nearly suggested he go to central casting. I tried to strike up a chat (maybe a friendship?) with the guy, but he wasn’t interested. I made a joke he didn’t laugh at. I asked him a question about the other pieces in the warehouse-cum-studio-cum coworking space. I wanted to know how he got into the marketplace game, but I think he needed to get back to selling furniture, maybe writing a novel or painting a blank canvas. I don’t know, he didn’t want to tell me. He makes good reels and has a distinct schtick. I still think about whether he makes a living from the furniture.

The point is I didn’t write at the desk this winter and I think it’s only fair to blame him for luring me in with a good reel. There was another blizzard in New York this weekend, and although it didn’t stop me from trudging around the city, it does feel like this winter will never end. There’s more snow slated for later in the week. But I don’t want to talk about the weather. All anyone ever wants to talk about is the weather, which is frighteningly dull. I’d rather talk about what February really means.

Here are some widely known facts: it’s a short month and it leads us into March. We have that love holiday in between (Valentine’s Day fyi). Some days it’s so cold that it’s painful to have any part of your body exposed to the elements. And then of course, there’s all that liminal space in the 28 days. It’s also, in my opinion, having done no research whatsoever, one of the most mystical months we have thanks to Leap Day. I could do an entire post on how great Leap Day is. I’d like to interview everyone born on Leap Day and find out what their profession is, whether they’ve been able to have healthy relationships and if they want to have children as a result of being born on a day that only exists every four years. Then I would like to turn it into a book called The Truth about Leap Day. There’s also pancake day, otherwise known as Shrove Tuesday, which is my favourite day of the year because you get to eat pancakes for dinner. Sometimes pancake day is in March, so February doesn’t really own it. I know it’s a religious day for many, but for me, it’s just about eating pancakes for dinner.

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I love the way the snow looks falling out my window, which has happened quite a few times this winter, not just in February. I feel like I’m up in a watchtower, looking down on Gotham and over the river to Brooklyn. I am continually surprised by my choice to live so high up, given how much of an aspiring tree hugger I am. My plants are a bit crooked-looking, and I wonder if that’s happening to me, too, because of living so high up. My money plant died and I’ve tried to not make too much meaning out of it. I look at my laptop, then back out the window, and feel happy I no longer live in Brooklyn. I do not regret my time there, but I do not miss it at all. I much prefer looking out at it.

I then look to all the apartments around me and think of a Beatles classic you may be familiar with. It goes, all the lonely people, where do they all come from? I don’t think Eleanor Rigby is even in my top ten favourite Beatles songs, but anytime I look at buildings in New York with lights on in apartments and then take my gaze to others with lights off, I think of that lyric. Then I think, what lyrics do other people think of when they’re looking at occupied and empty apartments? And do they? Who is thinking of a Nas lyric when they look up at the 20th floor? I’m sure someone is. I hope no one is thinking of a Taylor Swift lyric because that would make me sad. I would definitely approve of a Bad Bunny lyric coming to mind. I’m sure some people even think of a line from a poem or a novel they’ve memorized. Remember when Beyoncé sang Blackbird (two iis) on her country album only two short years ago? Must be something to be Beyoncé.

The Beatles did make some good music. Have they had enough recognition for that? Probably. Why do people like to argue about music? Is it because we have nothing better to think about? I’m sure February is a month when a lot of musos get into arguments about bands and songs and who is the greatest, because there’s extra time to sit inside. Coincidentally, Yoko Ono’s birthday is in February. She’s 93.

In February, I think about what I should be spending my time thinking about, which seems counterintuitive. Shouldn’t I just let myself think? No. Because even though the days are getting longer, and like I said, there’s a promise of spring, I know I’m on winter’s borrowed time, and soon spring's intoxicating fumes will enter me, and I won’t be able to think as clearly, if at all. I decide that I haven’t been thinking about enough, or much of anything. I pick up the novel I’m reading and laugh at one of the lines. I think how great it is to read a novel. I must read every novel. I’ll have to solve the internet addiction first. I reset the constraints on my app-blocking app to curtail my use. It doesn’t work. My friend tells me her app has her breathe in and out before she is allowed take a break. I feel annoyed that mine doesn’t do that. The next time I go to take a break, my app actually does ask me to take a deep breath in and out, which I’ve not noticed once in the 18 months I’ve had it. Still, I decide February is for reading and pining, and wearing the same snow boots every day for three weeks.

I spend nearly an entire day inside on a snow day and by day’s end I’ve decided it’s a good idea to send a few friends voicenotes of me singing Alicia Keys songs. Only one friend responds, singing back, as I hoped she would. I consider sending a few more friends some of my singing and asking them if they think I should record an album of Beatles and Alicia Keys covers. I decide not to because that would be embarrassing. Instead, I write it in a Substack. What’s that line about being able to start over at any time? To never give up on your dreams, even when you’re 50, 60 or 100? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s saccharine and vaguely heartwarming.

I don’t know what February’s all about either, and I don’t think I want to. I have a few guesses, though, which I’ll list here.

It’s about poetry and cabin fever, half-watched movies, and circuitous, pointless Substacks. It’s about endless pieces of toast and pancakes. It’s about trying every different way to cook a sweet potato and thinking about telling the internet about how good sweet potatoes are in a four-minute diatribe, and deciding against it because that’s not the best use of my time.

It’s about convincing a friend to smuggle bagels for me from another friend’s bagel shop in London because I think they’re better, and I miss my friends. It’s about postponing a gym membership for three more weeks, until the mountains of piss-laden snow melt. It’s about meeting a friend in a blizzard to take a walk because what the hell else are we supposed to do?

It’s about empty shelves in Trader Joe’s because mania takes hold of the best of us, and people seem to need a lot of meat for a day spent inside. It’s about feeling smug about wearing heat tech, as if I’m the first person to have discovered heat tech. It’s about saying repeatedly to each other: “It’s not that bad out, no it’s really not that bad.” And then remarking how psychotic it is to be a New Yorker. It’s about sitting inside having a conversation for four hours because it’s too cold to do anything else.

It’s about the world getting worse all the time and continuing to live in it. It’s about a miraculous visit to Miami and remembering that warm-weather clothes do exist. It’s about a lot of time on the phone to replace human contact, which doesn’t work. It’s about dreaming of love, short skirts, and swimming in the public pool near my house. It’s about watching live music or a play and thinking, wow I think life might be worth living despite it all. It’s about dancing inside with your coat and scarf on, because who has time for the coat check.

It’s about crying and saying “Why am I crying about this?”, which I say so often it must be as dull as the weather, and my friend replying “Crying is good, I love crying”. I whimper: “Me too”. It’s true, I do love crying. Maybe February is just about crying and then thinking, well, at least spring is coming.

Here’s what is in the top ten of one of the most famous bands to ever exist in case you thought you were coming here for underground info. I dare you to listen to Abbey Road from start to finish and tell me you don’t feel something.

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It is January, and life feels boring and monotonous. I have a routine. I am in the routine, and it feels dull and lifeless. That is my bad-attitude perspective, and, of course, sometimes exciting things happen. I feel a slight thrill. But these thrills are few and far between. I am seeking something more. I look for tiny miracles everywhere I go, and they do appear, as if by magic. A surprise pops up to greet me and I think, “Ok, I can make it through January.”

In the morning, I wake, do my morning practice and eventually make it to breakfast. I have shaped my days around what I’m going to eat next for as long as I can remember. I am almost always thinking about eating even when I’m having other really deep thoughts. I have adopted the habit of eating an apple in the afternoon as a reward for making it so far into the day. Sometimes, if I’m feeling absolutely insane, I pair it with cashew or peanut butter.

I slice the apple into eight pieces, but I do it imperfectly. I cut my apple like a cubist. Anything can be art if you want it to be. I drop the pieces into a clear, small bowl my auntie gave me, which I use exclusively for storing lemons and apples. She uses the same receptacle to store lemons and I once commented that I liked the system. It is good practice to comment on the things you like in people’s homes, because they might gift you an exact replica at a later date or even give it to you right then and there.

I do not enjoy eating apples the way they do in films. I don’t like getting the apple skin stuck in my teeth. I prefer to prepare it as I might for a child. I am not as tough as Brad Pitt. I usually then sit down at my kitchen table to engage in this afternoon ritual and settle into whatever particular obsession I am paying attention to that day. I don’t read a book which would likely help with the rumination, but I do stare into space. I look at the way the sunlight hits the building across from me and I wonder how many other apple eaters there might be in neighbouring apartments. Are they eating theirs like a man? (Brad Pitt).

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The crunch of the first bite tells me whether or not I’ve picked a good one. Winter is technically a good season for apples but you have to pick wisely and I’ve not been picking good ones. This is where the peanut butter comes in. If the apple is a little sad, the more peanut butter the better to mask how sad the apple is and we get through it together like a team.

I prefer a Gala because Gala is similar to the name of my friend’s dead dog. She also told me once that she likes Gala apples (my friend, not the dog) and I trust her opinion. She has lots of them (opinions, not apples). I live far away from her and have for a very long time, but we are in touch nearly every day and it comforts me to know that. Like the daily apple, it’s something I’ve come to rely on despite the fact that our lives could not be more different. The ritual snacking reminds me of her and the period of our lives when we had time to discuss our favourite apples. Sometimes we still find time, the same way we find time to communicate each day. I’ve received multiple texts from her over the years saying, “Is there anything better than an apple with almond butter?” I can usually think of a few things, but I just reply, “No, nothing.” She loves snacks.

I feel it necessary to point out at this juncture that picking a Gala apple is not a melancholy memorial of a dead dog who wasn’t even my dog nor was his name even Gala. It was Gawa. It is about the memory of being in my friend’s back garden on the outskirts of a mid-size Swiss city, when things were so simple and somehow felt complicated. It is jaw-dropping to realise that the most pressing question back then was what we were planning to wear that night and which group of boys we could fraternise with. The steep walk down to the bus to go into town and the even steeper one on the way home. The meals her family cooked for me, pasta and milanesas and really good cheese and always a salad. The empanadas that casually lived in the freezer. The dark chocolate that came out at the end of each meal, and the discovery that a family could have an entire drawer dedicated to chocolate. The alfajores that lived in the cupboard below it, and the temptation to eat more than one. Her family had a restraint I was not familiar with. It is the memory of the clean smell of my room in the basement and the wooden single bed I slept in so well, my suitcase next to it with too many clothes spilling out. It is her brother ambling around their living room, then a three-year-old, watching cartoons with us before dinner. An apple can bring back so much, if I let it.

I return to the apple. The burst of sweetness is enough to temporarily satiate my sugar addiction. As I dollop the peanut butter on, I think “Healthy fats! Well done!” and I feel pleased that I’m getting protein in. And if the apple is crunchy enough, it is an odd, delightful burst of sensation. I don’t know why I don’t let myself experience this more often. Nature gifts us with such bounty and we act like it’s trivial. We make pies and crumbles with the gifts and act like it’s nothing.

When the apple eating is over, I am deflated. It all happens so quickly. Despite all the articles I’ve read about chewing your food slowly, I never remember to. Who has the time for that? Actually, I do. I grieve the broken ritual and force myself to return to my laptop. I consider booking a workout class. I don’t. I go back to the cupboard to eat some chocolate chips (dark, 72%) and turn the kettle on. I always feel clandestine when I eat chocolate chips, like I’m not allowed to. Is this from childhood? Isn’t everything? One thing’s for sure. It is January, and I’m eating an apple.

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Sometimes when the moon is full
I walk down the street
Open my mouth 
wide
So it can fit
And see if I can swallow it 
it looms down on me
if i lift my arms up
maybe I can touch it
maybe even taste it
lick it, if I'm lucky

What does the moon taste like? 
Is it served hot or cold, 
With butter or oil?
Grilled or fried, even boiled?
Might be kinda bad boiled
Why not try to eat the moon?

I raise my fingers to the sky
but don’t quite reach
I look around to 
see if anyone saw me try

But
If the moon exists
Then why can’t I and
Why can’t you ask me to dance 
On a Tuesday in October 
When the weather is too
Beautiful to give up 

And I thought, just then, 
That maybe things would turn out 
Just fine

I don’t know why I get the impulse to write poetry. Impulse is the operative word because it just comes over me; it’s not planned, nor is there any real agenda. I’m not sure if anyone knows why they have an impulse to write poetry. I haven’t canvassed all the poets in human history to know for sure, but it does stir something in me that helps with the task of being alive—that could be enough of a reason. No one who writes poetry is in it for the money, that’s for sure. It’s also embarrassing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really help your case if you say that it’s embarrassing (even in your own newsletter). It’ll still be embarrassing even if you tell people you know. But I get more comfortable being embarrassing every day because it’s just part of it. I learn more all the time.

I often start series on here and then abandon them, but I thought I’d bring back 5 things I learned this week because it’s Scorpio season, which is very much my season, and because I learn things every single week, not just the weeks I write about it. Scorpio, they tell me, is about going to the bottom of the ocean depths, dying, and then rising anew from the ashy ocean floor that you set on fire. Scorpio is a drama queen. I’d know. And so I let things die all the time and resurrect them with newfound knowledge and appreciation for the darkness. Somehow, I am always examining new dimensions of darkness to try to eke out a little light. Herewith:

1. It is extremely easy to make your own peanut butter cups, and they taste about 5000x better than anything you can buy in the supermarket (empirical, fact). I used this recipe from my favourite baker, Ravneet Gill, who writes for The Guardian. Her flourless chocolate cake also bangs.

2. I can return to anything, at any time. I’ve recently returned to a creative practice I thought was dead in a ditch. I am getting so much from it, and it’s fun to think that I can change or drop something for years and then return to it renewed. I’m redesigning pieces from my now-defunct jewelry line (which I started 1000 years ago with my friend Gilly) and plan to sell them. It’s fun to think about how to tweak pieces I designed over ten years ago and breathe new life into them, as well as what makes sense to let go of.

3. If I ask for a surprise in the morning, I swear to god I’ll have received one by the evening. They may not be earth shattering surprises, but they’ll be surprises nonetheless. I’ve asked for a surprise every morning this week and so far, so surprise.

4. Watching friends build things gives me fuel I sometimes sorely need to keep going, and when I choose to pay close enough attention, they are everywhere I look. This week, in particular, I had the opportunity to witness my friends achieve a significant win for their business, a bagel shop in London called Papo’s. Their classic bagel was named most ordered item on Deliveroo WORLDWIDE. It made me incredibly proud. I think to myself, I can’t believe I get to be friends with people like this. Who graft, who sacrifice, working quietly and consistently for years. I feel it too for my friends who perform, make art, send me their illustrations, their music, the newsletters they’re starting, the scripts they’re writing, the businesses they’re building and selling, the shops they’re opening, the movies they’re making, the books they’re writing, and the ideas they have. It makes me think, wow, you really can build something with time, dedication, and showing up. Which brings me to…the thing I learned is that showing up is pretty much all I have to do. Some weeks that feels extraordinarily difficult. Others, easier.

5. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself on a full moon is clean your house, throw out a bunch of stuff you no longer need, dust your bookcase, and take a shower. No need to make a ritual more complicated than that.

Plus, the weather in New York this week has been too beautiful to give up. We have a new mayor (big up ZM) and there’s an air of tentative hope in the streets.

Nora x

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It’s been raining in New York this week and I remembered a note I had written myself about 6 months ago that says “substack on umbrellas”. I wrote nothing more than that. The inside of my notes app is filled with wild genius and groundbreaking ideas. And umbrellas are finally relevant after a long summer (relevant is used here loosely). And I’ve been thinking, as I do every time it rains, that I must buy myself an umbrella.

When it rains my whole personality changes. I am the wistful, wandering poet I was born to be. I am a woman who uses the word “galoshes”, I don a spiffy anorak and am reminded of school trips to museums. I think, well, nothing more to do with the day than enjoy the rain, and I am tempted to cancel all plans.

Despite thinking every time it rains that I must buy myself an umbrella, I rarely do. I think it is a monumental waste of money and I think the people who do keep umbrellas on hand, or even multiple umbrellas, are frankly, suckers. Or perhaps it’s just that there are different types of people in the world: those who manage to hold on to umbrellas and those who lose them.

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No matter what, I will always lose an umbrella and therefore I don’t see the point in owning one. If I owned two, I would lose both of them. Earlier this year during a visit to London (obvs) I gave in and bought myself an umbrella — I didn’t bother taking off the £5 price tag. Within weeks it was gone. I could have bought a coffee and half a pain au chocolat with that £5. Each time I leave the house with an umbrella I think “Wow, I am really quite a grownup and I know how to take care of things, including staying dry.” And then later that day, once I’ve gone to my destination and dutifully left the umbrella there by accident, only realising when I am already at home do I think — “Owning an umbrella is for chumps”.

I’d love to know if anyone has managed to stay in possession of an umbrella for longer than six months or even a year. How do these people manage to remember everything? They must be very good at life. But then, in my more philosophical moments, I also think (when it’s really pouring) that having an umbrella is very useful for shielding one from the rain. It’s ideal to have rain protection like this to keep you from getting wet.

Don’t get me started on rain shoes and wellies. Though I very much see their point (in a way I just can’t seem to get on board with for umbrellas), I also think there needs to be a total revolution in how we design these shoes beyond what I could only call really ugly.

And since my commitment to living without rain gear is steadfast, I think it’s really one of the only parts of my life in which I manage to be footloose and fancy free because I just don’t actually care if I get wet! Look at me, I am free! I am drenched with rain water and I am now getting sick and my shoes are completely wet but I am also free. You, over there in your rain gear, you’re sensible and dry but you are not feeling the pain of the elements and I feel sorry for you.

So I just thought you might like to know my outlook on umbrellas, and perhaps it can help you have a think about what it means to own weather-appropriate clothing, and whether it means you’re living your life fully, or if you’re a sucker. Some might say I’m a sucker, but I don’t mind. My clothes will ultimately dry, and my weeks-long chestal cough as a result of walking a mile in the rain will clear. And I will have written a poem about what the rain feels like on my head and maybe it will become a worldwide hit like Natasha Bedingfield had with the words “feel the rain on your skin”. The sky’s the limit without an umbrella, the rest is still unwritten.

Nora x

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I had a Discman and alternated the rotation between Alanis and The Lion King soundtrack, which were worlds apart and straddled my desire to be a kid still and my wish to be grown up well before my time. Music was one of the first obsessions I carried into adulthood; the obsession with my bottle (which I finally quit at the age of 4) thankfully stayed in my childhood. And I was never really one for stuffed animals, so I didn’t take that into my adulthood like some people do. I only wanted to have a teddy bear because it seemed like other people (kids) liked them so much. Some of my habits as a kid were less because I was a kid and more because it seemed like what I was supposed to like as a child. Music, fortunately, is a universal, intergenerational thing.

The song on that album that really captivated me was, predictably, Ironic, even though I didn’t know what the word actually meant. But Alanis was going to teach me. I went to a British school in Hong Kong that was more international than British, and my two best friends were Hong Kong Chinese. We’d sit together at break time, listening to the album, not a clue what most of the lyrics meant, enthralled nonetheless. We sat on the concrete steps of our school with separate Discmans on our separate headphones and pressed play at the same time, listening to the album over and over. It was the era of MTV, and videos were king — a bygone era that at the time seemed like it might last forever. As with everything else, it was ephemeral and more short-lived than we ever could have imagined. This video is cemented into my memory, one of the greats of all time.

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I wanted to be Alanis, and I imagined myself embodying the different characters she played in the car. My 8-year-old brain initially had trouble understanding that it was all the same Alanis, and I wondered how she had so many identical-looking sisters. I longed to drive down an open highway, talking to the different voices in my brain, and wear cold-weather clothes — winter was a distant memory now that my family lived in a subtropical climate.

I had recently been introduced to air travel, and it was thrilling. Most of my travel in my young life was around New York City in a small blue hatchback, the subway or a yellow school bus. As Alanis belted out Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly, I could hear the implicit judgment in her voice and I was right on board. I didn’t fear flying and I definitely didn’t fear death — when my plane crashed down I’d think it was nice, too. I was happy to fly halfway across the world and identified with her rock star archetype; maybe touring the world would be in my future, too. For years on long haul flights I’d think of that lyric, imagining the man who was afraid to fly and what he looked like.

There have been pieces written over the years about how some of the points of irony missed the mark and wouldn’t hold up in a court of language. To those people, I would say that maybe you should try writing a gigantic global hit at the age of 22 and get every detail right. Maybe she didn’t get it exactly right, but it hit deep for almost every kid I knew.

The line “it’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” really fucked me up. How painful must that be? To endlessly need to scoop when you what you really need is to cut? I was right there with her. I had no idea what Chardonnay was but I knew that having a black fly in it was quite a terrible turn of events, and though I also didn’t quite understand what death row is — it sounded bad and a pardon two minutes too late was even worse.

I don’t know if at 8 years old I was really familiar with how things could blow up in your face in the same way that Alanis was at 22 but I’d certainly try to identify. I find it sort of quaint how naively we consumed these lyrics — cynical as they were, and nodded our heads: Life really does have a funny way of sneaking up on you, I’d think. And yeah, those traffic jams are really bad when I’m already late, I’d agree. But I didn’t know anything, I was 8.

Though I’m less inclined to play Jagged Little Pill from start to finish these days, it’s an album that I know every single lyric to and has changed texture over time, once I could finally understand what some of the stories really mean. It’s mystifying to me that it’s been 30 years since this record came out. That’s what my parents must have felt like about The Beatles or Led Zeppelin when they were my age, with an 8-year-old belting out Ironic in her bedroom (interspersed with The Circle of Life, of course). I guess it’s kinda…ironic…that life just keeps going and eventually, well…you know.

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One morning in the summer of 2024, I woke up at 6:42 am to reggaeton blasting outside my window and the grating sound of a tow truck. I rolled over, having only finally fallen asleep at 2 am. Insomnia was my constant companion and fairweather friend that summer. I’ve since given up trying to come to any conclusions about it; it simply is. It simply walks alongside me. I walked out to the living room to turn the kettle on. Then back to the bedroom.

I peered out the window. “Fuck.” I bellowed to no one. The tow truck was in the process of towing my car. I ran to the bathroom, barely grazing my teeth with a toothbrush. Chucked on a pair of shorts, period on blast. I ran out to the tow truck; mine was one of three cars left on the street. Still half asleep and shaky. The guy driving turned down the blaring music. Did he know it was 7 am?

“Hey, hey - I left a note on the car - it’s dead, it says please don’t tow - it won’t switch on.” I took the most pleading tone I could muster at 7 am.

He looked at me like I had two heads. Or was it pity in his eyes? A braless woman in her late 30s wearing an oversized Shelter Island t-shirt?

“Can you give me a jump?” I said.

“I don’t have cables.” He replied.

I scanned my brain, hoping words would emerge, hoping it would come online. Then: “Oh! I think I have some.”

I ran to the back of my car. Shit strewn all over. I’d been meaning to go to Goodwill for months. Why is there a pillow back here? What are these papers here? Why is my life such a mess? Why do I have a box of champagne flutes and a cowboy hat?

I found nothing amidst the mess, so I rounded the car to the back seat. There it was—the jumper cable set my mother sent me from Amazon the last time this happened.

I took out the contraption, hands still shaking. They were not traditional jumper cables; for some reason, a USB cable was attached, presumably for charging. What the fucking fuck. In my fugue state, I didn’t notice that it had been charged.

The man inspected it suspiciously: “Looks like you need to charge it.”

I looked expectantly at the guy. He didn’t sign up for this. He was just there to tow some cars. He shifted back and forth on his feet and said, "I’m gonna have to get going”.

I said, “Isn’t there anyone else with jumper cables around here?” I gestured at the workmen, the tractors, the DOT NYC trucks.

He shook his head: “They all parked far away, even if they do have them.”

I suddenly felt old and self-conscious that I didn’t brush my teeth for long enough. Did I have bad breath?

We negotiated: “Can I go charge this?”

He took mercy on me and said, “Yeah, I’ll tow the other cars. Stay in visible sight though.”

Then he said, “You’re not gonna get a fine, I just drive it to another street and leave it there.”

Oh. He could have led with that.

Relieved I could eat breakfast before dealing with heavy machinery and a dead car battery, I said, perhaps a little too quickly: “Let’s do that. Can you tell me where you park it?” I am a woman attached to routine.

“Yeah, come back here and I’ll tell you where it is.”

I ran back inside to put on a bra and a different top. I had to rid of myself of the pyjamas that had been publicly outed immediately.

Later on, once I went through the 10,000 things I do before entering the world, I walked down my street in search of my car. The tow truck man had disappeared and I was on my own. Three men from the halfway house around the corner sat on the stoop of a house on Classon Avenue, like they always do.

One said, “Hey sunshine, you look good today.”

Another: “Yeah, you look beautiful. I love that shirt you got on.”

I elicited a quiet thank you, but didn’t look at them. Best to keep it moving. Inside, though, I was happy for the attention, even if it was from homeless and potentially schizophrenic men. The tow truck guy made me feel like I was a granny in a house dress.

The guy from the bodega who cleans the street stood sweeping further along the block.

I said, “Hey, how are you?”, like I always do. I clasped the jump cable contraption like it was going to save my life.

He said what he always says: “All the better for seeing you, baby.” And then “I looooove you.” That was a new one.

I replied, “Have a good day.”

“Oh, I will.” He said it in a menacing tone that I didn’t want to think about any further.

I was so attention starved that all the creepy men in my neighbourhood somehow helped remind me that I’m still hot, there’s some sex still in me, somewhere

I needed a coffee before I could figure out where the battery was on the car, and how the fuck you start it. As I waited at my local, the schizophrenic man with the long hair walked by. The previous week, he had grunted at me, “I don’t give a damn, fuck you,” because of my stupid graphic tee from 2016. On this morning, he smoked a cigarette, muttering to himself, “I’ll be with the aliens and the Mormons on another planet. I’ll be fine.”

Is this the apocalypse? Do I need hard skills?

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I walked to the car, flat white in hand. First things first, figure out how to get the hood open. I went to the front of the car, and despite tugging at it desperately, it didn’t open because I don’t know anything about my car. I’m not afraid to admit it. I YouTubed it. This was going to be long, so long.

Finally, I wrestled it open. It then occurred to me then that I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. I returned to sit in the car, and the dashboard flashed at me. It didn’t look good, that flashing - not one bit.

The tow truck parked my car at a diagonal in a NO PARKING ANYTIME zone. He hated me.

First, I read the manual to the USB jump cables. It was the worst thing I’ve ever read, so I switched to the car manual. I googled how to locate the battery on a Subaru. I texted my best friend: “Are you awake?” Because she was on LA time. She would definitely know where a car battery is. Why am I such a girl? I won’t last one minute in the apocalypse. I’ll be dead by dusk. I think to myself, “I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I’m a strong, independent woman. I’m not a little girl.” I stepped out of the car and back to the front to locate what I was almost 100% sure was the battery.

As I set to work to probably botch the job, someone walked past.

“You good? You need some help?” Came a voice from behind.

“Actually, I do. I have no idea what I’m doing.” Relief coursed through my veins.

He helps me, he does it for me, he shows me what to do. I’m a damsel in distress.

“Turn on the car,” he said in a southern accent.

It doesn’t switch on.

“Try again.”

It turns on. That easy. I thanked him profusely.

He said, “Come on out so I can show you how to do it for next time.”

He explained some facts, figures, scientific car things, but my brain stopped working like it always does for technical instruction. I focused mostly on his accent, the sing-songy, friendly way he talks. I wonder how he learnt about cars. I wonder why he’s in the city. I didn’t listen to the words.

When he stopped talking, I said, “Thank you so much, now I know for next time.”

I don’t, though.

“Ok then, well, you have a good day sunshine”, and he flashed me a cheeky smile with a gold tooth. “You take care.”

It was the guy from the halfway house I didn’t look at twice.

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I’m happy we have now arrived at the end of August. This month is full of grief for me, and it always slips through my fingers in meaningful, melancholy ways. I can never quite land my feet on the ground, and I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve got an anniversary in August that I usually commemorate with some piece of writing. This year was 10 years, and I didn’t know what to say. Ten years is a mouthful. It feels pretty heavy rolling around in your mouth. This year I wanted to live it more than I wanted to look back, more than I wanted to remember. Which I suppose is a good thing.

One of my wisest friends and favourite writers reminded me this week that the end of the summer is confusing for many — much like January —it’s a transition period. Everyone is trying to squeeze all the juice that’s left in summer’s promise. The light in the sky diminishes, and we all know we’re on borrowed time. A permeating sadness pervades the air. Today was the last day of early morning lap swimming at the public pool that changed my life this summer. I probably went less than ten times but it swiftly became my religion. I was unprepared for the news and I nearly started crying (lol). Everyone clapped when we got out of the pool and I couldn’t understand why. Then I overheard another swimmer explain what was going on to an older woman who also had yet to hear the tragic news. I will have to find a new religion now that it’s September.

Before we close out the month, I want to share a piece of poetry I wrote over a year ago and have yet to share. I try my best to spare the world from my poetry. But a Friday at the end of summer seems a good a time as any to break a (perhaps wise) habit. Here goes nothing :)

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Oh body, my body
After Walt Whitman

Oh body, my body
You little minx
You and I have been through it for some time now, haven’t we?
Our trip not nearly done

How much more life you have left in you babe?
50, 60 — oh, dear god 
seventy years? (no)
already sick of each other’s shit
At sea for what feels like centuries
And yet —

Can’t get enough of each other
An old married couple
squabbling, nagging
Attached at the hip
(my hip)

A long 37 years together
Day in day out
But then again
a mere moment

What was it like when this 
body was
Two years old,
A tiny burst of energy
Low to the ground
Forming language
Not yet sure what these limbs could do

Or where these organs are
Or how my blood flows

she grew 
with it came growing pains
Aching in the same limbs
— it felt like those little legs
Might not be able to handle the growth
Much like every bit of growth I’ve ever endured
— a bitch

This body of mine
My faithful companion
My extraordinary machine
a patchwork quilt of magenta, flesh and bone
It’s been cut open
Like a can of sliced peaches
The contents emptied on to a metal slab and replaced for parts
Can I still see my body as sacred even in the patchwork?
The crevices and the craters and the mark where
the catheter used to live

Can I love the bits that have had to be mended 
and repaired
Reupholstered repeatedly
How many times can you sew up skin before the skin disintegrates?
If someone takes a scalpel to your torso and they’re watching the
France Morocco match at the same time
One eye on your innards and one eye on the goal
Does that mean that the likelihood of connecting your heart back to your pussy again diminishes or does the testosterone in the room work in your favour?
What does it take to find your sex again when the highway of your torso has been split in two?

Last night I felt for the lump that lives above my solar plexus,
always late on rent and making messes in the entryway
I placed a hand on it, as I do most nights
And I willed it to disappear
Poof, into thin air like Cinderella's shoe

I begged it to dissolve into particles
So I could be restored and sold for full price instead of
placed in the bargain bin
at the consignment store
I inched my hand further down 
felt for the numbness
My belly still hasn’t come back online, maybe it never will
The outage is county-wide 
and my sacred body is the land of no return

But here we are, you and me
And despite the daily gripes
And repeated attempts to renegotiate my rental agreement

There is nothing as sacred as
My broken body

Nora x

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Some ways to combat the grief?

Donate to the Gaza Soup Kitchen and the Sudan Solidarity Collective.

Listen to this song:

Or this song:

Watch Cardi B at her trial, better than any comedy show I’ve seen maybe ever.

From Kat:

What a delight to chat with Nora about celebrity sightings, storytelling, and how we make meaning out of the mundane and mystical experiences of life. What else would you like us to chat about? You know we love to talk!

Join me for The Reset: A 3-part Creative Writing Workshop starting August 5th. Sign up here:

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From Nora:

I love to think about why I insist on compulsively making meaning out of what happens in my life, and I love talking to Kat about anything, but especially stories and why we tell them. It feels like every week there’s something new I get to make meaning of, and it fuels me to keep going in both life and work. I don’t have anything to sign up for except for this Substack, which you should send to everyone you know. Also, Kat’s class - you won’t regret it, and I would know. Tell us what to talk about next time!

x

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Someone recently told me I’m like Marmite (you either love me or hate me). Tragic, since I’ve historically wanted everyone in the world to love me with an undying blood oath. But Marmite has no choice but to be Marmite, and I have no choice but to be me. And I love pop music ok!!!!!!!!

K-Ci and Jojo - All My Life

This song came out when I was eleven, topped the charts worldwide, and stormed into my little heart. It was the peak of the music video era, and I spent a considerable amount of my time watching MTV and The Box both at my friend’s houses and at home. It was also a time when it would be social suicide to miss Top of the Pops on a Friday night, because you’d have to know what to talk about at school on a Monday morning.

There was nothing as good, at that time in my life, as the high from a new music video. We had to wait days, sometimes a whole week, to get to see the music video we loved most. In the in between, it lived in our imagination. Back then, a new music video felt like a portal, shaping how a song lived in your mind. This is now a relic of the past. What a world to grow up in.

In the video, K-Ci and JoJo wore white gloves and sunglasses, spliced with emotional B-roll demonstrating “what love looks like.” Extremely late ’90s. They didn’t go on to have endless hits, but this one stayed with me, embedding its lyrics into my soul and creating a monster of expectation about what love was meant to be:

I will never find another lover
Sweeter than you
...
Close to me, you're like my mother,
Close to me, you're like my father,
Close to me, you're like my sister,
Close to me, you're like my brother...

Ok boys, so we’re supposed to be your absolute everything and play the role of mother, father, sister, and brother? Cool, ok, that seems achievable. As I listened to it over and over on my Discman, I thought how my next task was to closely study my friend’s families to be like a brother or sister, considering I was an only child. To get love, you also have to be a sibling? Got it. I could not imagine being someone’s mother or father, but I was willing to try. The solution, I decided, was to make this song a part of my DNA so that I, too, could one day be someone’s everything.

Around this time, my grandmother came to visit from New York and took me on a solo trip to York to see the cathedral. She was a relentless traveler, even into her 90s, only slowed by COVID. She was also mildly grumpy my entire childhood, and despite liking me, she usually wanted to talk shit about the rest of the family, so even as a kid, she was best taken in small doses.

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The previous year, I’d received a voice recorder for my birthday because I loved singing (despite being very bad at it). I was an alto in choir, but desperately wanted to be a soprano. It left me with the impression that music teachers took pity on small children who wanted to be singers and let them be altos because their voices might blend in with the rest of the group. If a song is a painting using chiaroscuro, the alto is the shadow, adding texture but never light. Still, I persisted well into my teens with the notion that I had some morsel of musical talent. Surely my undying love for musical artists could count for something?

At multiple junctures during the two-hour trip north, bored out of my mind, I would abscond to the (very loud) space between the cars to record All My Life on my voice recorder, playing it back to catch my mistakes (of which there were many). I’d sing from memory, botching the lyrics, fellow train passengers interrupting me every few minutes to go to the toilet. I sang every part because I didn’t have any backup singers on the train, nor did I have a Jojo to my K-Ci. The sound of the train was the backing track to my a cappella version, which alternately screeched at various intervals. I did this with other songs too - the Spice Girls featured heavily, as did My Heart Will Go On.

As an eleven-year-old at a girls’ school, the concept of love was alien. What I did know came from music, film, and TV, which made for a world of trouble, misinformation, and a heavy dose of heteronormativity. K-Ci and Jojo praise the Lord above in the following line, which I could probably remember to do:

Said I promise to never fall in love with a stranger,
You’re all I’m thinking of,
I praise the Lord above...

Great, so don’t fall in love with strangers. Except I didn’t know any boys besides cousins and friends’ younger brothers, all of whom were at least 3 years younger than me, and gross. How was I meant to fall in love if it had to be with someone I already knew? I pined for a kid I met once in the Adirondacks but had no way to reach him, so I just obsessively listened to his brother’s band’s CD, which he’d given me. I also pined for a neighbour who’d been in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, even though I barely saw him (and didn’t even remember what he looked like) because he was at boarding school. But he was one step up from a stranger, and also, Leo.

The next verse told me:

And all my life,
I prayed for someone like you,
And I thank God that I finally found you...

Ok, so all I had to do was pray. But how old were these guys? Upon further inspection during my weekly study of the video, they seemed to be some indeterminate age that grownups usually seemed to be. I figured I’d be praying for an eternity. I longed to know what the correct prayer was to find a love that would make my face glow and pick me up when I’m down, as they describe in the bridge: “You're all that I’ve ever known when you smile my face glows, You picked me up when I was down.”

The only prayers I was familiar with were the Lord’s Prayer that we recited each day at assembly, the Hail Marys I learnt as a small child, and the Serenity Prayer. Those didn’t seem like love-attracting, life-saving prayers to me. I thought if I sang the song enough times into my voice recorder and got the notes exactly right, I’d manage to crack the code.

Still, I had questions, ones that still haunt me today. The question wasn’t whether I needed to find an undying love that was my everything and provided every need that a mother, father, brother, and sister do (a bit creepy, actually). Even then, I knew I needed someone to love so I could “turn my life around”, just like K-Ci and Jojo had. The message was clear.

My questions were many: Did K-Ci and Jojo love the same woman? Did they love each other? Did they find identical versions of love, separately? There’s only one woman in the video, waving at them adoringly: is she the one they prayed for? Did they pray together?

Sometimes the questions I have go best unanswered. And odds are, I’ll never know. I know what your question is, though: Where’s the tape? Sadly, lost to history and multiple transatlantic moves, so we’ll never know how good I really sounded.

Stay tuned for more crucial missives about my musical tastes soon.

Nora x

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I’ve just returned from my best friend’s wedding. I think it’s a little embarrassing to call people your best friends in public in your 30s (though I still do it constantly and with no hesitation). At one point during the holiday, I lovingly called her “friend” and she swiftly corrected me, and I am henceforth legally required to refer to her as such. It’s good to be loved.

I had the honour of officiating said wedding, and it was a pretty good ceremony as ceremonies go. Some early reviews: “Nora crushed it,” “You smashed it”, “If I could get married again, I’d have you do the ceremony,” and “Do you do that for a living?” These are all reviews from some of my closest friends and potentially inebriated wedding guests, but I’m putting them on my website nonetheless.

The bride and groom were not at all precious about what they wanted in there, so I had free rein to go as esoteric to full weirdo as I wanted. I erred on the sensible side since the groom is German (though I don’t know if that requires sensibility, considering how much the Germans I just spent a week with seem to like house music and quirky clothing). Still, I only went as far as to mention the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and quantum physics.

One of the concepts I made reference to was a Lojong Slogan from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which I’m currently studying and weaving into my meditation practice. It goes:

Slogan 2: Regard all dharmas as dreams; although experiences may seem solid, they are passing memories.

Traditionally, this has to do directly with a meditation practice, but I don’t meditate for the sake of it. I meditate because it helps me in every part of my life. Never do I feel that experiences are passing memories more than when I’ve just been to a wedding. There’s so much anticipation, planning, worry, and excitement. And then it happens in a flash of a camera bulb. The pictures I forget to take, the bad ones I do, the flying emotions around the room, the stilted conversation with a friend’s colleague you’ve never met, or the cousin who doesn’t know anyone. The dance floor at 3 am, in this case, all of us belting out My Love is Your Love by Whitney Houston, whilst a friend whispered in my ear, “I love you”. It is fleeting, it is precious, and it is terrible and it is fun and it is complicated, and for me, it reminds me that we’re going to die. That may seem morbid, but it helps me to remember I’m going to die so I don’t stop living.

But I also notice the dreamlike quality of my experiences and my thoughts when I spend extended periods of time with my closest friends, who I don’t see as much as I’d like to, or when I run into someone I love in the street or at a restaurant, or when I’m in another country or when I’m in a plane or when I’m driving home from a wedding at 3 am cross-eyed praying for the radio to come on because I don’t want to look away from the road and it spontaneously turns on without me doing anything, keeping me awake. And I also see it in the transition from moving out of these bigger events that feel so concrete into the more mundane day-to-day experiences of our lives. The daily life stuff, the routine — that feels more solid to me, but it’s just like anything else. Every moment of my life is a passing memory, and they are but dreams.

When I think about this in detail and with a sharper focus, I start to feel a little shaky. It makes me want to make the moment count. It makes me want to make every dream a firework of pomp and emotion and a big fat life. That’s not how life works, though, and I think if I lived like that, I’d likely be a shell of a human being. I don’t want to be a psycho trying to make every moment count, but I would like to show up to my life looking at it as a dream. Understanding that it all passes. As my teacher Leila puts it, the proposition is to let it be as shifting, changing, soft, and vaporous as it really is.

That’s it for now :)

Nora x

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We are back for another conversation on creativity with and . This time we’re talking about writing shorts, screenwriting in general, and Kat’s upcoming classes, Screenwriting Basics on June 25, and Write Your Short Film from July 2-30 this summer.

We talk about how Kat got started with screenwriting and her background in theatre, her experience of screening her short film Celeste in Spring for the first time in front of a live audience, and the lens she teaches from in her workshops. Kat emphasizes a non-hierarchical approach in her workshops, believing that stories naturally emerge from us when we make the space and time for them to do so. In her classes, she encourages writers to connect with their personal experiences — we all have a ton of crazy, compelling stories that are worth telling. And Nora just wants to say: TAKE THIS CLASS YOU WON’T REGRET! I love writing with Kat and have learned a great deal from her in our collaborative work.

A note on the recording: since Kat lives in Ojai, it’s mandatory for her to have excessive wind chimes going at all times. They’re a little loud on the recording, but they’re having the time of their life.

Enjoy,

Kat & Nora x

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The earliest memory I have of drinking coffee was when I was maybe 11 or 12. God, I loved it. I loved it so much. It was a receptacle for sugar and milk, which I loved more than anything. Well, maybe not more than anything. It felt grown-up, and I was dying to be a grown-up. It was a super highway to adulthood. I remember tentatively pouring myself some coffee from my mother’s morning batch, which she tentatively allowed. It wasn't as if I was encouraged to drink it, but my parents couldn’t say no; I was a wilful child aka a monster. I was hooked, and that's when my coffee habit took hold.

The first real coffee experience I fucked with out in the world was at Caffe Nero which felt very sophisticated. I got really into ordering a mocha and a cinnamon pastry after school at Caffe Nero on the Old Brompton Road: really subversive stuff for a pre-teen on the mean streets of West London. The mocha is surely the adolescent of coffee drinks if ever there was one. I felt just grown up enough to get a caffeine high, but held on to childhood with the sweet injection of hot chocolate. Around the same time, I looked forward to returning to New York in the summer because there, I could order a “regular coffee” at the bodega (which means you get it with milk and two sugars). I’d pair it with a bacon, egg, and cheese and enjoy my simple little life, having unlocked one of the secrets to living well.

When I was 16, I moved to France, and it gave me license to drink more coffee than any 16-year-old probably should. I would go to school, have an espresso. Go to lunch, have an espresso. Finish school, go and drink more espresso. I don't even know how I ever slept at that age, I was just drinking espresso like it was my job. I was the oldest 16-year-old in the world, well-worn in my teenage skin. This habit continued well into my 20s. I watched the film Coffee and Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch that year, and I made much meaning of how I, too, spent a lot of my time drinking coffee and smoking cigs. It coincided with a minor obsession with the Wu-Tang Clan, and I became fascinated by Jim Jarmusch and how he convinced so many people to be in such a strange film. I felt that Jim gave me permission to continue on the right path, littered as it was with artists I admired.

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I had an exchange with a friend the other day in which I told her I used to drink 12 coffees a day. She replied, “That’s disgusting”. When I used to drink 12 coffees a day, I was living a pretty disgusting lifestyle. I was 21 and living in Paris with a chocolate-making alcoholic. I loved how romantic it felt to live with a chocolatier and how much free chocolate I got to eat as a result. My mattress in the room I rented from him lived on the floor, and we had a Nespresso machine in the kitchen just a few short steps away from my bed.

It was so easy to slip a Nespresso pod into the machine and press that little rubber button; it kept my hands busy and my mind focused on all the coursework I endlessly procrastinated. The Nespresso machine mostly encouraged me to send manic G-chats to various friends in other cities and incessantly search for electro nights out. At any given time, huge slabs of dark chocolate were strewn across the trunk, which served as a coffee table in the living room, next to an overflowing ashtray, empty espresso cups, and wine glasses from the night before. In Paris, I subsisted on espressos, Marlboro lights, red wine, and dark chocolate. When I moved out, my clothes smelled of stale cigarette smoke for months.

For a long time, I felt that there were few things better than a coffee and a cigarette. I still feel that way. My daily coffee feels like a saving grace in a world on fire. I am in the business of hyperbole, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that some days I feel like it saves my life. A ritual to look forward to each day. There were a few years I lived with considerable asceticism, because I was physically sensitive and I thought I had to repent for having had my life saved. One might say I had a small case of survivor’s guilt. I wouldn’t say that necessarily, but one could if they were in the business of saying such things. I no longer care about getting a “clean” high (Matcha’s imperfect promise) or worry about contracting a caffeine addiction (I’m already addicted to it :) hehe). Maybe it’s about claiming a recklessness that I feel necessary to fold back into my life. I was trying for so long to be good, not to do anything wrong or bad, and that included diet choices that might adversely affect me. It didn’t help, and it made life dull and boring.

It’s certainly bizarre that the entire world has become so hooked on caffeine that there’s a coffee shop on every corner of every major city. There are even whole personalities people can adopt for the way one drinks coffee (I’m looking at you, scale-toting pour-over maniacs). Perhaps we love it so much because we haven't got much ritual, and it gives us a sense of community and belonging. You get to know the person you order your coffee from, they know your order — you feel connected in some small way. You buy coffee beans, and someone asks you how you’d like the beans ground. They imagine you with your French press in your pajamas; you understand that you’re both human and love the same things. We may all just be psychotically ingesting hot bean water at the end of the day. But damn, what a magnificent feeling it provides.

Here’s a cute lil song you can drink a coffee with this week:

Nora x

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