This morning I let my thoughts wander as I cut sweet melon.

Lena texts me about twin beds pushed together, so limbs can intertwine. Let the juice run over your fingers, sticky with it’s sugar. I wonder how America Lost The Romance. I picture mattress emporiums and AC units turned on high. Slide the knife under the rind. I decide it’s because the conqueror’s dream is that of an individual. It doesn’t include joining beds to hold each other in sleep. The blade slips and slices through the phantom limb of my computer. Into my hand, which is always outstretched, always trying to touch you, once again across the sea.

This morning, all I can think about is love.

The symbolism of romance.

How love feels in different parts of the world, and the body.

I get far outside of myself by going deeper, deeper, deeper in. Everything starts seeming an act of love or an act against it.

I make coffee at night so it’s cool for me in the morning - love.

I turn down the pages of books and sleep naked, with the windows open - love.

I try to watch my thoughts and not let them spiral into the different realities, I try to stretch my body and eat real food and only think about today. That’s Love.

I want to be everywhere. I want to go home which is anywhere, as long as you’re there, as long as we can sleep together. With or without romance, I go crazy. The presence and absence both make me sick, both make me distraught, both make me human. I am existing in an ever present limbo. But if the limbo is constant, doesn’t it become balance? Doesn’t it become the driving life force?

I make lists of love. No one’s forcing my hand but I feel it move anyway. No one asks me to dig the hole deeper but I can’t help myself.

Fresh fruit in the morning. Dog eared pages. Sleeping with windows open. Not letting myself down.

Freeze sweet melon for three hours. Remove when ice crystals form. Picture your lover as the juice slides down your hand, your lips. Let the stickiness of the sugar satiate you. Pretend that this hunger can be satiated.

I haven’t spent 10 days with myself in over a year, and the silence of solitude settles over me like sweet milk.

I think about loneliness and fear and the understanding we all have with our own brains. I relish the feeling of not speaking for hours. I wear no clothing and stand face up, looking into the sun.

I am at times fearful and fill the space with odd tasks and facetime calls. I tell myself to keep a diary;

When was the last time you spent many days alone?

What does the first word leaving your mouth feel like?

8.20

I have a bit of a long, listless day and enjoy being naked and feeling the breeze carry itself out from before the sea, over the salt and the land until it reaches my body.

I have been dreaming in the waking way, where you worry about being rested the next morning. I do not know if I am even conscious during the worryings. I dream of the old things and the usual ones. I visit an old friend in a cabin a long ways off and get a ride to a train station. I make up with the unfamiliar for the millionth time, who still has blonde hair. The woods are the ones I know, green, and rich, and holy. I wonder about going back to that godly land and if it will still feel that way, and if I am ready if it doesn’t. The winds whip around this island and the cars and motorcycles and waves follow suit. Each bend is blue. I know my way of driving and so I do as I know, keeping the windows down and the music up. Usually I drive very fast - it’s my way - but I hear my lover and my mother in one ear, and then the other, so I keep my foot on the brake and parry the gas.

Around 5pm I start to feel really odd so I pull myself together and take myself to town. She and I talk on the phone for a time. Old warmth, and new, and the danger of romance. My nails are getting too long and I have trouble typing and can’t fasten my necklace. I think a lot about love and buy sweet rice from a restaurant that sells it through the doorway. It is overly spiced with something I cannot identify but tastes good in large spoonfuls interspersed with cold water. I eat it standing in the kitchen, naked again, staring at nothing but life.

8.21

I wake with a kind brain and feel the celebration of myself. Hallelujah. I am still intertwined in the book I finished yesterday and feel the blue tendrils of watermelon sugar wrapped around me. I think about the differences. It’s a new year and what do I know?

8.22

Wake up feverish. Expulsion of energy, sure. I drive to a Holy site because it’s my first day Here again and I want to touch God.

The church is beautiful, carved into the rock and painted white, with a blue door. The door is marked with a cross that lets the light pour in, the ground around encases the small stone room so you can hear only footsteps and shadows. Above the military plane’s usual deafening drone is soft and far away. This is a rich silence. I sit for a long time.

God and Jesus and the Saints Nikolaos and Hermolaus and many other Holy figures are pictured in wood with rings of gold, and I look at their faces and for a moment their holiness is mine. There is only a small stone bench to rest on and it presses my spine forward, encouraging the devotion.

There is a reply in the shadow of light that the empty cross carves out and it moves over the wall before disappearing. When I close my eyes, the cross is burnt into them, the bright light that came through imprinted on my cornea. It is dark in there, quiet, and cold. People walk circles around the space and I feel all seeing and invisible. My ears ring. I enjoy being a kind of guardian and opening the door for those that try to get in. The lock is sticky and sometimes unyielding. I say “Yassas, English? The door is hard to open. But come in.” I let in a woman and watch her draw a cross on her collarbones and kiss the image of a saint very softly. The air hums gently. I watch a man and his son do the same.

I’m not worried about praying the way I used to be because God and I have been on very good terms these days. And anyway, God is forgiving. For now it’s enough to be grateful for the sanative way God has slipped into my soul this past year, unifying my beliefs about the universe and energy and enveloping me into something that feels akin to that gold halo.

8.23

I am a mirror but not a sponge. I am a mirror and not a sponge and definitely a chameleon. Mirrors and melons and chamomile tea. I cut some up for breakfast. I drive to the ocean and walk straight into the waves. Everything about the ocean enchants me. I love the black cape of seaweed that lies on the floor like some encroaching darkness. I love the salt and miss licking it off of my lover’s skin. I love the stars caught on blue crests, and the soft waves of sand rippling over the bottom, and the galaxies interlaced on the shore. The shell planets, the minuscule whisperings of stone, and glass, and land.

Going back into the sea I stand for a moment before letting my legs go out underneath me. I drop abruptly and feel the cool take my head. I stand and am overtaken by the feeling that if I don’t make my way home now I might never be able to, I will have to drift here weightless, until the sky falls dark. The feeling vanishes by the time I reach the sand.

8.24

Here are some artists I think make beautiful and important work;

Pavel Pokidyshev

https://swgallery.com/list-of-artists/surrealism/pavel-pokidyshev

Donna Huddleston

Aigana Gali

https://aiganagali.com/

Samuel Richardson

https://www.samuelrrichardson.com/8082767-kitchen

Holly Lowen

https://www.hollylowen.com/works/7tlgxsy6o66apjl9ix953lxq11c2q5

Micah Ofstedahl

https://www.micahofstedahl.com/availablework?scrollToProduct=the-observer-1&page=3

My lover came to the island and we lost ourselves in some insanely perfect, sunswept days. Naked and swimming, kissing and singing, hair long and wet and wild. I keep studying and am now in the next stage of attempting to put some of the invaluable information online (tik tok link here and instagram portal here if you want to learn more about my journey healing myself from mold sickness and sharing about building biology) anyway today I fell into great gratitude and thought my thought flow might be nice to share. So here it is, an August gratitude list.

I am so grateful for the miracle it is my body.

I am so grateful for the actions of every cell working together in divine perfect harmony to make sure that I can live and breathe every day.

I am so grateful for the miracle of breath.

I am so grateful for the silent work that my body does so that I can experience the joys and pleasures of human life.

I am so grateful for the forgetfulness that accompanies the human experience so that I can get through my Days without consistently and constantly touching the raw thread of life but simultaneously, I am so grateful for the raw thread of life and when I do touch it.

I am so grateful that I can find God in the mundane.

I am so grateful for the beauty of detail, that makes every single object however big or small on earth fascinating and interesting.

I am so grateful for the pleasures that are only possible on this planet.

I am so grateful that every day the sun rises and sets.

I am so grateful that every large lesson and small lesson that we get to learn over the human lifespan is replicated or represented in nature.

I am so grateful for nature.

I am so grateful for the human body and the ability to touch, to feel, to breathe, to move.

I am so grateful for the ever present shifting and for change.

I am so grateful that things do not stay the same, and I am so grateful that sometimes they do.

I am so grateful for love.

I am so grateful for human emotion, and the capacity to feel.

I am so grateful for the five senses, to be able to feel both emotionally but through my fingertips, through taste, through sight, through smell and sound.

I am so grateful to share the experience through language.

I am so grateful that I was taught to write and to read.

I am so grateful for social media and the phone and the ability to have platforms that allow me to connect with people all over the world, that makes staying in touch easy, that provide the most amount of education and entertainment available at my fingertips that has ever been in all of human existence.

I am so grateful for the large in the small aspects of earth, for the endless infinity of the ocean and the sky, for the small delicacies of plants and sand, the tiny enormous cosmos that can exist, above and below and in between.

I am so grateful for mirroring, for the ability to see myself and others, for others to see themselves in me, for us all to see each other. And not only in other humans but in nature, in art, and the indescribable things and intangible experiences that even with our vast and detailed language (another thing I am very grateful for) cannot always be expressed.

I am so grateful for modern inventions. For pain relievers, medicine, healers, and for ancient practices that have been passed down and new practices that we have learned.

I am so grateful for the spread of information and knowledge and culture.

I am so grateful for education.

I am so grateful that I can read and write.

I am soo grateful that I was taught to write in cursive.

I am so grateful for clothing and the amount of feeling in color and detail in the many kinds of cloth, and how accessible these different cloth sensations are, and how many clothes we get to own.

I am so grateful for friendship.

I am so grateful that we care.

I am so grateful that I can make art.

I am so grateful for water and for wind.

I am grateful for the different lessons and experiences that come with each stage of life.

I am so grateful for my family.

I am grateful to have been brought into the world through the selflessness and love of others who are brought into the world through the selflessness and love of others,

and I am so grateful for how long and short human existence has been, and that no matter how impactful my life, or how non-impactful, I am still here and get to experience it.

I am so grateful for the capacity to heal.

I am so grateful for the power of the mind.

I am so grateful for the ever present presence of miracles.

I am so grateful that every day offers an opportunity for change.

I am so grateful that we can help other people.

I am so grateful for God,

and I am so grateful for the many ways in which people have found a way to talk about or to God, the universe or spirit or magic or religious figures or Gods.

I am so grateful for the way that we try to make sense and also have to accept the senselessness of this beautiful planet.

Really I am so grateful for the sheer miracle that is Earth and the fact that we forget every day. I think if we remembered that we would not be able to be here, we would not be able to get anything done, but I am grateful for the moments in which you pause from the incessant busy making and take a breath and notice just how incredible that is - that the body breathes without any encouragement, without being asked to, that it just does, and how incredible it is that the air is clear and yet so filled, and that we all ingest it, and water, and soil, and life, and the overlapping life cycles, the endless birth and deaths, the absolute depths of feeling and the overall acceptance that has to accompany each one, how important it all is, and how non-important too, and I am so grateful that everything can be meaningful and nothing has to mean anything, that God can be found in every stone or you can look at the whole world and shrug and be like, that’s just what it is.

I am so grateful for choice,

and I am so grateful for autonomy.

I am so grateful for the stories that I have read or listened to.

I am so grateful for watching my skin change as I age, and for scars and for memories.

I am so grateful for photos.

and I am so grateful for the many many ways in which we have decided determinedly to capture and try to convey the essence of human life, and the different things we all find pleasure in and and also the same things too.

I am grateful for gratitude, to be able to recognize and return to this practice, as a saving grace, or as a simple enjoyment.

I am so grateful when I feel God enter my body as a body the same size,

and to be able to watch birds fly,

and to be able to pray, for others, and help people when I can.

I am grateful to have my life stretch out ahead of me,

and to get to be here, the best party of all time

and I am even grateful for the depths of anger, pain, sadness and fear that I felt that have taught me to expand.

I am grateful that everything can be a learning opportunity,

I am grateful that things can start and begin even though it’s painful or sad or confusing.

And I am so grateful for language, which I think I already said. But it’s simply amazing to get to express.

Right now I am looking at such an interesting golden flower that is mid bloom and it has the most unique growth pattern and if I wasn’t sitting here in this very moment I probably would’ve never noticed it and maybe the days would’ve passed and it would’ve bloomed into something more recognizable and I wouldn’t have stopped to appreciate it as I am this very moment. And I am so grateful that I noticed.

Adieu xx

My best friends are living in my house in Los Angeles. It is not only the most selfless and helpful show of love, but keeps the cord between us impossibly strong. We are family, tethered through our many years together and now, their walking of my dog. We keep missing each others calls. I am 10 hours into the future. They are, like always, the best part of my past.

These casual articles are fun. Less meditations, more flow of consciousness. I just want to share it all with you.

Anyway, welcome to my new work space:

I wish I could transport the sound of cicidas.

Oh, wait.

What I am:

Wearing:

I got this light blue cotton night gown at the friday market in my (now ex, cry) French village. 28 euro. Made to be lived in. Perfect.

My sister and I spotted this necklace last night, strolling the island at sunset. Very simple. White stone cross on thin wire. 10 euro, will live on my neck for the foreseeable future. Sublime.

Eating:

The γιαγιά running our air bnb speaks absolutely no english and I no greek, but we chat anyway and she stocks our fridge with bread, juice, cream and homemade marmalade. Like all good Greek grandmothers she has a sixth sense for hunger, and on our first day gives us another great kindness: lunch. Potatoes and chicken soaked in tomatoes and olive oil, thick slices of bread, mild white cheese. We eat under the bougainvillea before walking to the sea.

This morning I make a large pot of coffee and divide into three glasses to chill. Jules buys unripe nectarines and eats them in bed.

Listening:

Hold on by John Lennon. U by the Hellp.

Reading:

The Whistler by Ann Patchett. 120 pages in, have shed tears thrice. Absolutely recommend - she never fails.

Watching:

The Industry. I’m pretty torn. I’m on Season 2, which means Season 1 was good enough, but all the characters are fully unlikeable. Rob is the best at this point which means he’ll probably do something despicable soon. We’ll see if I finish the show, but at the moment it’s not looking too good. What is up with TV these days? I also watched the two episodes out of the new House Of Dragon and that was a complete waste of time. Give me an attractive character to root for who doesn’t die, I’m begging. And enough with the CGI dragon-burning-people scenes. Coming from someone who loves dragons. Blah.

Thinking:

Lauren Sands on Substack shared these incredible illustrations for The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy by Padraic Colum, 1926.

They are all incredible and very inspiring, this one in particular grabbed me.

THESE BOOTS! Lili Curia. 470 pounds (brutal) Nothing more to say except for be mine, please.

A summer staple, this excerpt from Adrienne Rich’s Contradictions:

No matter where I go, all the wonders in the world only - at best - hold equal to the love of friendship. I miss you beauties. Ta Ta :*

Alright. That is all. Off to study and send some texts. XOXO

PS. As I prepare to hit post, Maria appears with handmade flan. Jules and I melt into a chorus of Ευχαριστώ (thanks so much, pronounced efcharistó polý)

God Bless The Greeks

On Monday, after a weekend of dancing and holding my friends as close as the skin allows, I get on another flight.

Since the start of this year I’ve flown to Paris thrice, to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, home to Los Angeles, back out to the East Coast. I don’t know how I’m doing it. I download an app that crosses lines over a globe so I can watch myself moving, moving. Without realization or intent, this liminal space has become a great comfort.

You may have heard that France is undergoing a record breaking heat wave. Our village house has never heard of air conditioning, which finds me sticking my head under the bathtub faucet every hour, drenching my emerging curls in an inefficiently icy flow. I am jet lagged, exhausted, and covered in mosquito bites. I am also deliriously happy to be out of LA, freckled, sticky from sweet peach juice, lemonade, and apricot sorbet. My sister and I lie listless in the heat, throwing various limbs over the arm of the couch. The light stretches forever. It’s officially summer again!

The last days of June pass loosely. I spend most of my time thinking about my lack of monetary success and how excited I am for my next flight. I spend the rest of it thinking about love.

Love is strange and messy and the most human thing ever. Or maybe the most universal. I haven’t made my mind up about this yet. Sometimes I think gravity is actually just love, and we mixed our language up. The whole planetary orbit all pulled together by the sound of your voice. I picture the apple, falling to kiss the ground. Seed once rooted in soil; remembering, remembering. Gravity is defined as “the force of fundamental attraction between all things that have mass or energy.” Yeah, I think. Love.

I’m fundamentally attracted to it all. The plane takes off and my head leans back, eyes closed. I feel the molecules that make up this 5’4 brunette body respond to the sudden departure from Earth.

I’m always floored that we’ve figured this all out. There is an atomic wave surging through me that even after all this air travel, I still can’t identify. Recently (meaning always) I am like WTF at the whole human thing. I oscillate incessantly. The great zoom. In and Out, in and out.

It’s hard to articulate all the levels at which I experience this but I’m going to try.

We are in Paris, it is raining, the cobblestones are painted red by the bar lights and the air is thick with memory. The detail in every surface, the imaginary zoom in to every individual molecular structure that forms the cobble-stone-under-foot-the-cloth-wrapping-bodies-those-limbs-themselves and I can almost see the separation of atoms making up our lips, their intermingling as we collide. Oh our beautiful, awkward, fleshy human things! We are so tiny, so giant, so individual, so collective. How can this all be one at once?

I see us as if through a microscope, my neurons firing, the miracle that is the working human body, every single breath. So much labor going unnoticed. It’s another great gift of the mind that we don’t think about breathing. When you take mushrooms or do a good breathwork session or just fall into the right alignment, you remember, and the miracle that is the human body+life is just overwhelming, the gratitude and amazement is too much to bear. So thank god that we forget, and breathe easy.

On one of my many flights above the globe I picture all of the individual stories colliding, the atoms making lovers meeting for brief eternities, moments of ecstasy, binding their souls together for the forever that is our average 80 years. And then the overlap of the fact that this has been happening forever. Google tells me there’s been about 11,000-12,000 generations of humans. Google tells me that my friends have been falling in love again. Sometimes the synchronized harmony of love and destruction are so obvious that you remember that none of this is really Us. The longer I live the more I truly believe it. We’re all at the mercy of something much larger. Maybe the stars.

Online platforms have let me see a lot of love. Different stories and expressions of romance. Oh, this inexplicable thing that quite literally moves the world. It’s simple and extraordinary. Love, making life worth living.

Such a big part of the whole process is letting go. Places, people, items. Recently I’m obsessed with the remembrance that we don’t take anything to our grave. The connections you make and experiences you have are the most enriching and important element of life. Not the product or the physical item. The more ephemeral, intangible things. I think this is why sex and music and kissing and swimming and dancing and dreaming are always going to be the foundation. They’re always going to be the floor of happiness, or peace. I Love My Designer Peace.

All this is to say that I’ve made a lot of art and all of it’s lost now and it makes me sad, until it doesn’t. I’ve loved a lot of people and almost all of them are still on Earth. Our stories are not unique, all things crumble, everyone loses, and so the gifts we are given (salt water, the sun) have to be loved deeper than ever. It’s all temporary and infinite. Connect to everything, attach to nothing. Of course, I’ll always be learning.

The next Monday, I travel from France to Greece with a red light bulb wrapped in bubble tape. It’s an item of devotion from my lover and while the bulb is physical and quite fragile, what I am really carrying is a reminder and memory of our most intimate embrace. I think of the last time we reconnected. Late winter on the Seine, a single red rose and my thick wool coat. Oscar lay several paces away, face to the sun. Love surprised me and found me with no location shared. Later, in our air bnb tucked under the eves of the 6th arrondissement, he takes the toothbrush out of my mouth without warning. He brushes his own teeth for a moment before putting the bristles back between my lips. All this, after we haven’t spoken in months, makes for an oddly erotic moment. We let Oscar sleep the jet lag off and slip into the hallway. Our lips graze each other’s necks and jaws and collarbones with an increasing, insatiable ferocity. The rest of the world ceases to exist. We don’t let our mouths meet, we breathe deep and ragged, impossibly hungry. An hour passes like this. We are only made aware of the existence of time through the chiming of church bells, calling the rise of the evening. We ease down six flights of stairs and into Parisian streets. There is a nectar like honeydew or passion fruit in our pheromone laced saliva.

Though the sky is clear, it starts to rain.

I’ve been downing an obscene amount of these c2o coconut waters. Must be the CANNED one and served ice cold. Half the price of harmless harvest + found at gas stations/delis means my addiction has been easy to support. Only flaw is the lack of closeability.

Ideal drink line up: 2 cocos, a spinach-heavy smoothie, and a strawberry milk. MEOW!

Wearing

I kicked off this year with an insane trip to Mongolia (more on this eventually) where I purchased this Gobi cashmere cardigan in the most striking green. I have been obsessed and living in it ever since.

A few years ago on a farm in Upstate New York the most darling vintage Betsy Johnson black and white gingham sundress found me. She was hanging casually among wool jumpers and old jeans. Now missing a button and running threadbare she is definitely in need of some TLC, but continues to serve as the perfect summer sundress. I paired her with the cardigan and a woven straw bag for a bike ride and stroll around central park with my lover.

After spending an obscene amount on green juice I was having to kiss the idea of new shoes goodbye when by the grace of God and good fortune I found my grandmother’s old Ferragamo flats in a garage box. Her old clothes are some of my favorite closet staples.

Reading

I just finished everything I know about love by Dolly Alderton. It was the perfect beach read. It was recommended to me by a best friend and I will be passing it on to another!

I picked up Whistler by Ann Patchett (one of my all time authors) and I’m looking forward to being carried through the rest of June with that.

Watching

Succession. No notes. Obsessed. Also hellloooo Sarah Snook?!

Hello / Adieu

Every month of 23 brings with it new and unusual growth patterns, equal parts and beautiful and self-alienating. I turn 24 at the end of the summer so I’m trying to reflect and enjoy these last few months. 23 has been an epic threshold, with so many lessons solidifying into lifestyle. I continue to surprise myself with the choices I make and places I go. I am still learning to not take everything so seriously. I think that the key to a happy, healthy life is honestly just to chill the fuck out. I turn to gratitude lists and my support system in times of anguish, try to remember 99% of everything ever is hormonal, and treat my body with love and kindness.

This spring marked the first time in 5 years that I spent longer than 2 weeks in my hometown. Los Angeles is a dreamy wasteland and I have cycled through so many feelings these last 3 months. I won’t raise children here and there’s nowhere else I would have rather been raised. I think it’s a common cycle - the city raised child craving the country, the country raised child returning to the city. I am endlessly grateful and in love with the memories, experience and community this sprawling desert has gifted me. I also miss seasons more than I know what to do with.

I deleted instagram two weeks ago for only the second time since I downloaded it at 13. To be honest I feel IMPRESSIVELY better. Social media is one of my strongest, most destructive vices. Morning panic has decreased, screen time is down, and I feel lucky to be myself again.

For the rest of the month I’m going to try to take my vitamins, pack light for an approaching two month holiday (I am unemployed and following my parents around and trying to pull my weight under the guise of doing manual labor on a mid-renovation house) ((I have invited half of my entire contact list)) Pray I actually employ some discipline to study and refrain from eating ice cream thrice daily.

It feels so good, stupidly good, his skin on mine releasing a pure chemical response that I can’t argue with because it is so animal, or so human, whatever - it is just so real. I try to let the waves drown out repetitive thoughts and lean my head back against his chest, staring straight into the newborn sun. I’ve never been here before and it scares me. I used to think I was no longer afraid of heartbreak because I knew how to make a home in the depths and anyway - it was always good for the art. But I don’t really make art anymore, and I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing.

On the boat it is evening and the ocean is lit up all clementine. I am slightly faint and lie on the stern with my arm draped over my head. I have been very hormonal and swollen and placing tiger balm patches on my stomach at regular intervals. Love hovers over me, windswept, with comforting big hands. Suddenly he rises with the increasing waves and lifts a thumb up. Another boat has neared us to make sure we are alright. They steer away at his sign, their impact lapping us into a gentle oblivion. He stands looking into the fading brilliance. His face turns incredibly solemn and he says with resolution “People are kind.”

My natural disposition feels like a disappointment in this heavy WASP environment. I am a good chameleon but I am not in medical school. I have been feeling odd because everything that used to make me, me feels very far away. I think a lot about the endless work of being a creative, about my parent’s consistent morphing, about the wildness of the West Side. Years pass sweet and indifferent. I get lost in my own curls. We are all culminations of moments that often seem inconsequential, memories you don’t make with the understanding of their becoming. Their unique evolution into unreachable touchstones of time. I close my eyes to come home to the hills of the Palisades, all burnt into asbestos and rubble and ash now. There is a dusk that still exists there - in the echoes of my old heart, when the air was different. All ours.

I receive a text from the publisher and remember that warm night on Sunset. The jasmine in the wind. The realization I had; that she figured out how to sell hope.

And we all bought blue copies <3

The next morning he and I play on the private courts and at the end of our fourth match sit to drink water in the shade - which really means take long gulps and trickle them into each other’s mouths. I could flirt with this man forever. We are always trying to nip each others tails. Two identical men in mint pullovers approach us to say that the courts are for paying members only. They are prep incarnate and try to be cool by telling us to just wear tennis whites next time, so no one will notice our trespass. They say they would never interrupt a game. The universe winks at this one, I watch the heat bead slow. I play in tiny skirts and his moms shirt and wipe the sweat off his forehead with my finger. Not surprising either of us, I lick it clean.

Love and I live in salt; our tears, our sweat, the sea.

I spend a lot of time looking out the window and rinsing sand out of my hair.

He and I comb the sea shore to find small stones that look like entire galaxies or birdsong and design a future home based on their colors. We step over crab shells and grab each other wherever we want to, try to dig up the larger rocks from their sand. We kiss over seaweed and the unfathomable future. I feel so in love it is hard to stand.

Sometimes I honestly cannot believe the amount of time I spend with this man. There is so much shared intimacy. It is still early in the season and we are the only ones swimming. We stand in cold Atlantic water and stare out at a fading sun. It is shrouded in clouds and a heavy, dark pink. I am obsessed with the East Coast and find it impossible to leave. We spend all morning in bed pretending. We sit in the car for a long time, I leave my bag unpacked. Even though we both know the answer, I still flip the coin.

I am warm from wine and want to kiss forever. The seaweed in the cold swell that would usually make me shiver instead feels like mermaid kisses. By some miracle I am absent from the usual dreams and present in the lapping stillness. Waist deep, I am thinking we should make a list of our inside jokes and I should probably delay every flight I can. He is laughing in the kitchen, saying he should be more responsible, and I am laughing too.

The evening we leave is that clear golden of early summer and the air is warm and salty. On the ferry with the wind in my hair I think about how you can look at things one last time and come back again anyway. I pull his warmth around me and watch the island fade away. Above - the gulls, still circling.

I am wishing the days had a little more reliability to them and this is where the five year plan comes in. I did the impossible and went to art school for five years and never picked up a nicotine habit. I did the impossible and wrangled a painter’s acid brain into getting an architecture degree and a life path. I have very clean, long, pink nails these days. I am taming the animal and showing up for work in normal girl clothes. I am honestly feeling fucking crazy, living back in the city for two months now. I am thinking about a one year plan. I can’t live here and I can’t live anywhere else. I am thinking, do I move back upstate? Do I never leave the island? I have family in Hawaii, maybe a foreign jungle would feel good. Maybe my favorite author needs an assistant and I need a truck. The cage was left open and the coyote of my Californian brain is roaming, yipping through the open spaces of Echo Park. I am hungry and need to shed human skin, need to create, I need to devour my lover who’s a whole country away from me. At least it’s not an ocean - I can cover land. I can’t handle THC anymore and smoke imitation spliffs out the window, looking out into the illuminated night, letting whatever it is wash over me. My body feels too soft, my whole instagram feed is beautiful women working out. I take to the mat in the morning, sweat beads on my forehead and reminds me of his chest. It drips slowly down the valleys of my flushed and wanting face.

I, I, I, I. I am frustrated and know I should write more about other things besides my own life, or open one of the many books on my bedside table, or do another 55 russian twists. Coyotes don’t self philosophize. Coyotes don’t make life path plans.

At 19 I decided I wanted to make weapons. The metal shop taught me how to weld and also let things go. I found real meditation in the deafening groan of the angle grinder. I made many swords and later many sculptures and knew that steel was saving my life. Plus I enjoyed looking at tables and gates and seeing the welds and knowing how it was made, knowing I could make it. Eventually I got sick of the endless silver dust that coated my body and made my skin break out. I was creating for product, not process, and I wanted clean nails. My five year plan involves lots of manicures. I can be naked and feral and still coated baby pink. Right?

So I am thinking I am going to have to start over and I’m going to need to find a really good fucking online job. Know anyone? I need a trust fund or a proposal or the knowledge that it actually will turn out all right. Once they lay the tile maybe I’ll just stay there, tucked into the Sporades, where the light never leaves the Aegean sea. I invite everyone with the knowledge no one will come to visit. It is a flight and a ferry and multiple car rides away, and while I am loved deeply there is money and also facetime, and the promise of another summer always waiting. We ignore that we are getting older. I am constantly wondering if it’s all my fault. Am I taking things too seriously? Am I not taking them seriously enough? I don’t know what to do or what I deserve, I swallow desire and upset so that we can get some good sleep.

I didn’t pull my phone out in time. The tug doesn’t care about me and moves on. The girls are writing again. There’s a rebirth, and then a soundbath and fireworks and we’re all regurgitating the same thing, spitting up each other’s experiences.

I fucking love it. Try to lick it up off the floor.

I lie on the yoga mat and shake with contained life force. Blood flows through my chest and legs and palms and I vibrate silently, grateful for gravity. Yesterday I freaked out because I thought about love and death and children, and the passing of time and this brilliant, terrible gift. They’re keeping us busy and I’m grateful because when I stop for a moment the waves start crashing and I can’t believe we’re here again, to play another round. It’s so beautiful, and so painful. Complete reward coupled with a really hard time getting out of bed. The novelties have worn off and I feel the years on my body, even though I’m still really young. I drag my limbs into the sunlight to walk through my strange city. I am dreaming about having children with this man.

Everything is a rare and beautiful miracle. Reading and writing. Everyone I love, all in one room. I am obsessed with love, romance, sex and conception. I am obsessed with the way we fall for each other, in these unexpected and uncomfortable ways. But most of all I am obsessed with the complexity of the romantic relationship, with pregnancy and with birth. I think about men learning the intricacies of the female body, face to the womb, feeling the power of pure fucking feminine creation. Despite being the most human process, it feels completely alien, and nearly all of us go through the portal. This regularly blows my mind. I have been very present despite all the dissasociatives and have a hard time understanding how rapidly childhood and adolescence have passed. If I squint hard enough I can still remember how it felt to stand on 5 year old legs.

Be normal. Expect miracles.

I haven’t been thinking about the past much and I’m so grateful. But the other night I remembered:

It is very late and I am crossing Broadway. I spent the evening in bed with my girls giggling, watching something stupid on TV. It’s the early morning hours and it’s springtime, so the sky is as full of stars as the blooming trees that scent the air of apple blossom. I am crossing the street to my yellow schoolhouse. As I open my sole to that first step I pause. I know there is something special and awfully fleeting. I am too young to grasp all of this. I am too ancient to not listen to the pulse. I breathe deep and look up at the clarity. Everything opens, the sky swallows me whole and I am struck with understanding of the complete rapid rarity of LIFE.

Then (thankfully) the wind changes, my heart beats, and I scramble inside to the sanctuary of my studio apartment. It’s draining to touch the raw cord. It’s also what keeps me alive.

There’s been a lot happening. I host girls in my house and let everything sparkle. We make strawberry cake frosting and wear pink magic. There are jellyfish and champagne, and lots of beautiful people draped over the balcony. We throw an event for our favorite author, another Los Angeles angel spouting prophecy and loving stone. There’s so much driving, but I turn the music up and keep the windows down. It’s not so bad when the streets open and my friends fill the backseat. Everyone’s really gorgeous and bringing flowers, wrapped in last night’s tinsel and expensive soft clothing. My boyfriend is back home and swimming in every body of water he can find. I see him from across the country with the California sun on my face and wish we had already hacked teleportation. I think about a big truck and a dotted red line crossing state after state so I can get to his smile.

I don’t know if I really wish I had more autonomy over time. I am kind of freed by the personality of each new dawn. I usually feel like the day has it’s way and I’m negotiating. If the wind decides I won’t have the words, I accept it. I have always struggled to make a schedule. I have always loved to face the rush. Underneath the frustration of future desire, there is the steady hum of trust. It is a purple buzzing that is best heard alone and at night. Nestled in my red lit room, several miles from the sea, I lean my head back and listen.

When does a lesson turn into a mistake?

When has enough time passed over a mistake to turn it back into a lesson?

The mornings are the worst because I am Here again and haven't been dreaming recently, not since I got back to LA. My dreams are reserved for the air of foreign places, long nights where the accumulation of time alone builds up into wonderful fantasy and I get to revisit people who won't talk to me anymore. All of whom have blonde hair.

Memory: the long stretch of asphalt before us, wet from the spring rain. You pick me up from work and we don't touch the whole car ride. I look out into the blackness and really want to hold you. On my college campus I have you pull over and slide across the front seat to sit in your lap. We are still teenagers and I haven't really been eating and I fit very snugly, like your legs are the palm of a hand. Everything is very wet out and the streetlamps hit the dewdrops and scatter light a million different ways. It is like a little blue galaxy that we travel through in your little red car, heading for certain impact. Wrapped around you I say something like, “You don't love me anymore and you need to know it. It's okay. Just tell me.” And I make him tell me he doesn't love me until we are both crying. Then we go back to my dorm room and have sex and fall asleep, and he leaves without waking me - though in the morning I remember watching his back leave the door, illuminated by the hall's light.

Without a doubt I have always been a romantic. Plus it was a beautiful fall that year. I had freedom never before tasted and the time to fall in love; hard, fast, dangerous. We sat on a hill smoking in a purple dusk, and you pulled your jacket around my face to hide my light from the wind. I froze time and thanked God as dry leaves crunched under foot, the lighter’s spark hung suspended, I saw us from outside and above, heaven opened, and then it all kept moving.

Even now the memories are so delicious and soured by pain that I feel scared looking at them.

I stand somewhere very cold and far away and watch these brilliantly lit scenes. I am always in a black leather jacket and the faux fur, ripped tights and wild hair. Lots of eyeliner. You are tall and gangly and blonde like a star. I fall too fast. I do not know at what point the beauty of the experience outweighs the devastation of that soul rip-ripping pain. I do not know how to measure what makes it worth it. I count on my fingers, well-I-won-campbell-in-the-war-and-i-won-bela-and-i-won-that-summer afternoon where after 5 years of friendship we burned our names into cherrywood. Out of that heartbreak I got my whole life so I've never regretted it, not really. Plus I think part of me was grateful and relieved to get the pain over with. I knew that it would never happen again, not like that. I knew that I had lost a naivety. But the breaking of it meant that I was protected from it breaking for the first time, again anyway. I had known it was coming.

Memory: driving over the river to Kingston for the first time, it's the beginning of fall. I am watching the steel eat the water as we enter the sky and I can't stop remarking how beautiful it all is. I am astounded and overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of this place. You are looking at me, your eyes are very young and dancing and your mouth is agape, and you are looking at me like I am the air.

When does a lesson turn into a mistake?

When has enough time passed over a mistake to turn it back into a lesson?

This April my little sister takes my place on the Amtrak and writes about leaving old love behind, just like I did. Just like I do. She loses her wallet and rolls around the blue walls of a Soho hotel room, accompanied by a friend and the fleeting fearlessness of those final teenage years. The past is a mirror distorted by feeling, and time does nothing better than smooth over open wounds.

The train in summer is full and still, and together we glide over green water. I nurse heartbreak and watch the trees blur together. I have visited the country and am no stranger to its sweetness. I have watched houses and mountains pass me around the world. For a long time, I thought I was always running. But really, I think I just forgot that I have tickets booked for the future already. Breathe, breathe. No matter where you go, an early summer sky is the same.

Endless forgiveness from Los Angeles angels has saved my life more times than I can count. I was turned inside out by heartbreak in the spring of 2021. I lost my mind and moved into my own apartment. The rest of my life started without me noticing. I spent some glorious years seriously involved with the changing of the seasons, with the windows open, with the car driven too fast. The end came quick and breathless. I got lymes and spent a week feverish. I continued to engage in a love affair so tumultuous it started to reopen the old scars. I left the ferry from that island and swore to myself, never again. But I’m a great liar, and 6 months later find myself here again, sleeping restless in the hills.

How do you leave what makes the light blinding? After so much life experience I have a hard time tearing myself away from something that makes it all feel like the first time. Exhausted, exhilarated, kissing in the shadows on sunset boulevard. I’m arguing with the universe, asking for one more April before I really have to grow up. I remember the single tears falling on our respective cheeks. Licking them off and looking out to the Southern Sea. I keep my hand out the window, lift it up and watch the air part around my fingers as the heat from the city melts into the sky.

Gabe picks me up in Ella’s Tesla and we coast smoothly through the hills. Through my sunshine stupor I am jolted by the variations of my reality. A week prior I am horseback, bleeding, freezing, unshowered. I close my eyes.

The dry heat in Los Angeles makes me dizzy. I love the incessant documentation the city has consented to. How many people have written, filmed, and photographed this coast? Los Angeles is an old diva, a fading star constantly relit. The city has always supported documentation, but also secrecy. There is always a private patio, a spot to hide away, the hills. I walk around my neighborhood and look at the blue mountains, the bougainvillea, the loquat trees. Everywhere feels like somewhere else, and also totally its own. The more places I visit, the more beauty I ingest, the less impact reality has. This is a positive thing, I think. I fly from Kazakhstan to Turkey and spiral on the plane. You know they’re introducing star link wifi so we won’t have to think so much? So I can keep scrolling 75,000 feet in the air. But for the time being the liminal plane of offline air travel still exists, and calls me into its crazy.

I spent a lot of years renouncing this city. I spent a lot of time burrowing into the vast silences of upstate trees and open fields. I wondered if I’d ever return. And now, I have.

Revisiting a city is the same as any ex-lover. Time helps you forget the things you love best and when you come home again, they hit so much harder. Sequins and tulle under spotlights. The warehouse rave for a shoe company. My friends and I, the only ones dancing.

Together we are actual earth angels, we gather around private bonfires and sing praises for our beloved, we write down what we need to release and what we want to call in. I turn the bend and step over a shadow. I spend a lot of time watching myself. I don’t want to fail, and the visions get held so clearly. But things are moved and flow autonomous to my own, an ocean current I dip in and out of, a stream of orange sunsets I get to swim alongside.

Walking under the palm fronds I think of Los Angeles before it was named, back when it was a large desert under impossible blue. I think of horses cresting dunes and seeing the mirage of the city as it is now, the glittering sprawl stretching all the way to the sea. My hands resting on leather seats feel the mane, gripped fully. Lena and I talk of a shared fantasy as we cross the tunnel on the PCH that opens into the sky. A vision of driving off the coast, letting our cars roll past mountains and into the Pacific. Salt comes up the dashboard and swallows our knees, the sensation is blinding, suspended impact and the plane hasn't crashed. There is a brilliant moment. We keep driving.

On the phone, before we see each other again for the first time, you tell me: “From I to we, we can turn illness into wellness” 

In the study of building biology, air exchange is a priority. The lessons tell you that for a healthy human mind and body you must have fresh air. The lessons tell you that cross ventilation does this most efficiently, that pulling opposing doors and windows open makes the air play. Staleness is a sickness that requires the wind. To avoid ailment you must prioritize change. 

Lying next to you in the dark mountains I feel my body like the house that it is. Our emotion sweeps my shutters wide open. The wind of feeling is raw, and I brace myself before succumbing to the wildness. I see my form outlined in orange light, the four windows flushed wide open. My bare chest and back burn ember. Through the cross hatching I watch my own heart and it’s steady, routine pumping. The ghusts of different feelings sweep through me. You turn over in your half sleep - distant howling, fanned flame flickering - we breathe out. 

The need to write comes as smaller wind. It is an intangible thread I am asked to grasp, hold on to, and spin into story. When it comes I have to seize it, even if that means the blasphemy of grabbing my phone in church.  

I have been praying up and down the coastline of southern France and Italy. I touch down in these cavernous halls and sit in the silence. Today’s haunt is made of dark stone by the sea. Christ hangs stretched in between two windows that frame the ravenous blue. 

I have been in these melting days where I do not worry about money or time but only our love. Secretly this is wonderful for nothing else is ever as fun to worry about. I debate every eye raise when the energy shifts. We argue in soft voices and hold each other through the night. Our swelling navels, rising to pop. The stone, the crashing sea. That unassuming nature that follows the most profound. 

I spend a long time in that church. I let the salt send goosebumps over my woolen body. I lick the sweat off his neck and chest, using yesterday’s swim as an excuse to inhale his scent. Far away the light burns red, the flame never dimming. The ventilation of soul is proving not much different than cross hatching. In the night of my breast, the wind quiets down.

The best writing is always the in between sentences and the long silences. I introduced the audience and made everything harder. This is my pattern - a burst of intrigue followed by self induced hibernation. I keep telling you I’m an animal. And my sweet tooth is insatiable. I return to thinking of The Glass Essay by Anne Carson and The Texan by Charles Bukowski, the combination of which seem to sum up my soul (undesirably).

When I was in high school I played volleyball and soccer. My school was next to a strip club and a park appropriately called Stoner and after class we would walk to the Church to run circles. I stayed the course and stared at the floor and recited The Texan. I knew all of it, every word. I looked at the church floor as it passed underneath me and thought, the ocean rushes in, the walls of the love parlor shake. That's what it still feels like to me, your eyes making my stomach warm, the whole of Los Angeles falls down and weeps with joy, I hang up the phone.

Small moments are always so big and demonstrative in their unassuming way. The smoke in the air. What remains important to write down? Do you think memory is like AI and has a chat-based platform inaccessible to the human language? Or do you think memory is just this: Us, here together. The salt-lick of your skin. English is funny with its dominance and difficulty. Humans are giants and clumsy, but our dancers are so clean.

Flashback: a light rain, a summer's eve, a low-cut white sun dress. The one with strings criss-crossing down my tanned back. The sky is very light, glowing with that contained clouded sun. Just bursting. And the grass is so, so green, verdant, lush with life. We stand screaming at each other, surrounded by oak trees.

I think memory has a shelf life and is also autonomous. I think I am remembering things I have already lived. The absurdity and absolute clarity of this is amusing. I've known I agreed to this all for a long, long time. So why do I keep forgetting?

Things like to change overnight and before you’re ready, even if you've desired them for years. Every personal lesson you endure or experience is reflected in nature and organic life. The seasons and cycles (both minute and macro) are direct reflections of these tiny, brilliant, all consuming human lives. We are but the universe experiencing itself, sometimes collectively, sometimes individually, sometimes animalistic-ally or cosmically or on a pure organism basis, regardless: We are here.

I know for a fact none of this was an accident. Lena credits me with a love so encompassing and ocean deep that it requires a California king bed, driven all the way over America. In those blurry moments of conscious sleep I sigh happily, thinking of my space between the angels. I picture myself racing along the channels and currents that run parallel to our electrical wires embedded in the sea floor, all of the glittering lines working in tandem to connect us before we had even met.

Current common sense won’t feel the same in 20 years. It's important to write down what feels obvious and stupid. Remember, you don’t want to forget the old dreams.

(RENAMING OF FUTURE DESIRES AS ’REMEMORIES’)

Almost everyone I love is in LA with long hair. All of my fantasies involve a bedroom window with my friends' laughter coming through it. All of my fantasies were born and realized. It's the future memories coming up again. See that feeling? When you tilt and get vertigo it's because of its happening to you. You’re beginning to remember.

And I felt the magic again. I think you can avoid killing yourself or at least wanting to if you keep feeling the magic. I walked for an hour and a half and on the way back the sun came through my hair and turned me all golden. I could feel it in my lungs and down my back and I remembered. When you feel the future like hope it all turns drenched in honey (the possibilities). I felt like I was beginning again, for the first time. It's kind of an intangible, indescribable thing. Just the right breeze. And I felt so grateful for the body and the mind and for God, for using me. The squirming newborn soul still alive underneath the compounding days. And the hounds, running. And the sky, so blue between the mountains. All this smoothing. I’m reassured by the realization; the romance is still real.

Memory; summer’s backseat, feet out the window, your soft, scratchy voice.

Most of my dreams revolve around big hands and crashing waves. I’m happy the dreams stay these days, I don’t lose them easy and slip back into them without serious attempt. Early mornings are so hard and almost everything hard is good good good for the soul. I think that winter saved my life. I think everything saves my life. But seriously, that pink sky. Those snow covered branches. Oscar and I, stumbling over the ice. The deep, moaning, whale-like cracking.

It’s January 28, 2026. 13:37 PM. What is the future of today, tomorrow, next month? I am oddly comforted by knowing it’s not promised. Maybe I won’t see next week, next month, next year. This should sadden me, but it does not. I am obsessed with Earth and will choose to play again every time. And I’m not that reckless. I am still scared of the steepness of the hill on the blue run. But this green planet, the light pouring in. I speed up.

I sold my car to ride horses. Well, to be specific I sold my car to go to Mongolia and ride horses in freezing weather. Everyday this reality gets closer. My attention span is short and requires things like months of preparation. Months of promise. I’m trying to play by the rules of this place.

I keep dreaming about people I don't know, celebrities who have infiltrated my consciousness. I'm looking for meaning in places I shouldn't again. Second day in a row waking up to internal music. Yesterday was Danny’s song and today I’m Your Man, by Mitski. My mom hates anything that takes (from Leonard Cohen) but she listened for me, and I listened for the howling, whipping winds.

Most of my habits, thoughts, routines etc. all circulate around the little saviors. I guess we respond better to God in the mundane. Thats all that writing is anyway. Thats all that repetition is, anyway. If I brush my teeth and I wash my face I will feel closer to source, and I will feel clean.

I think that for animals it is pretty disastrous to need to feel this clean. I have a very full bureau of products promising me salvation and a couple actually deliver. I have been coating my face in various substances for over 10 years.