In August I ran a half marathon, watched AOC start freezing her eggs, and swam all five Great Lakes in one day. At each one, I wrote a piece of flash fiction, influenced by something she said—“What if you’re happy in every scenario?” Here that is. Happy summer and whatever comes next xxx

I

On the rippled sand floor of Lake Eerie my husband and I shuffle out to open water. The moon stands watch, reluctant to let the warming horizon relieve her of her post.

Nicholas used to complain that we dragged him here every season until they put the Halloween candy out. His father and I would race each other while he paced up and down the beach, detecting metal treasures.

On the last swim of his life we planted toy cars underneath the sand and ate candy corn for breakfast, his small tongue stained with the sun’s rising.

Ten Halloweens since, and still, we swim. This morning we’ll go until our muscles are water-weary. Don will help me take off my cap so it doesn’t pinch. I’ll dry off his freckled shoulders with our shared towel. Then we’ll take our walk, heads bent together over the shoreline, eyes squinted, looking for the same thing.

II

At the beach in St. Catharines, the willows weep for me.

I cry, too, but in the confines of my own home and at the most innocuous things.

Freezer-burned breakfast sausage links. The pair of water rings left in the medicine cabinet by our toothbrushes. A perfectly ripe peach. A chip in the back door’s paint. Boiling water for a single tea. The tan line from my wedding ring.

Morning storms gather in the distance, dogs play fetch, and the shore collects seaweed. Lake Ontario doesn’t send its condolences, but it does offer a quiet companionship, a cold embrace.

III

The sign says No Swimming.

I say Yes to the call of the open water, the lick of the lake floor’s long-tongued grasses. My scrunched toes amble over the algae-slicked stones, bargaining with nature to part itself for me.

I’ve always struggled with authority but I take the water very seriously. Submit to its rules and whims, obey the currents with reverence. When my feet drop off from the bottom, I am pliant. I offer myself up for the taking.

The Coast Guard cuts through, interrupting the water’s and my agreement. If hit, their vessel would kill me, and it would be my fault (No Swimming). I consider letting it. Why defy authority if it leaves you lonely? Only the fish here know me.

I say No for now, but one day I want Lake Huron to be my resting place. I hope the Coast Guard has nothing to do with it.

IV

You are Lake Superior. The Greatest of the Greats. And I swore I would never be that kind of parent, but you have buckled my knees and broken every altar I ever worshipped at.

I am a glutton and a thief. I will steal you away to this beach, walk you to this deserted boat launch, and sit amazed while you practice skipping rocks. I will make every summer as long as possible. I will lather your perfect skin in sunblock and watch you freckle underneath it.

The brilliance of your first sand castle, the vastness of your curiosity, your changing. You take my breath away by existing.

V

At the deadliest lake we arrive after dark, teeth chattering.

The striated sky whispers of our smallness. A star shoots and I wish for love truer than blue.

When it’s time, we take each other’s hands and wade past the white caps, into the danger, into certain death. That’s love, too.

The elderly couple across the aisle shrugged at me in unison. They murmured their understandings over one another.

The man, closer to me, stood up. “These trains go so fast,” he said. “You can’t control it. Earlier, the bathroom wouldn’t open at all.”

“Oh, yeah…” I replied, reticent to start a longer conversation.

It had already been quite the morning. My friend, Kalindi, and I were on our fourth seat change of the three-hour trip. My water had spilled in the bottom of my weekender bag, soaking the leather and all its contents. I’d strewn my soggy belongings out across our hard-earned quad of train seats to dry for the rest of the journey’s duration. I was tired. But that’s always the excuse, isn’t it?

“Are you from around here?” the man with glasses and sun spots asked me.

“No, sir. I’m from Alabama,” I said, steeling myself for his surprise.

“Oh, Alabama. Wow,” he said. “We’ve never been to Alabama. We’ve been to Georgia, and South Carolina…” he looked over his shoulder to his seated wife for confirmation.

“We went to the plantations in South Carolina. Where they had the slaves…I found that very interesting,” she chimed in.

I nodded noncommittally and backed into my seat, still facing them but tamping any continued conversation. If I couldn’t handle idle chitchat, I definitely couldn’t tackle the politics of slavery tourism and the American South’s fraught history.

“Well, have a nice trip,” the man eventually said to me, returning to his seat.

I breathed a guilty sigh of relief.

Kalindi rejoined me from the bathroom and, in true Kalindi fashion, re-struck up the conversation. I don’t know what she said, and I really don’t need to. It is just so Kalindi. She’s magnetic.

And thank goodness. She’s the reason I really got to know Jacques and Gladys.

“How long have you two been married?” she asked.

“Too long!” his wife said from behind the train seat’s headrest.

“She doesn’t let me say,” Jacques explained. “It shows our age.”

By the end, we found out they’d be celebrating their 62nd wedding anniversary the next day.

They met in school. Gladys had a Colombian boyfriend and Jacques was learning English. She popped up from her train seat to add that it was post-war: “He was desperate!”

They have two grown-up daughters, Christine and Brigitte, and a granddaughter, who just had her first birthday. They were on their way to Brigitte’s apartment for the weekend, where they were going to help her get settled, put up a shelf. Jacques had brought along his toolkit.

We talked about the importance of traveling and how it teaches you to put things in perspective. “Everyone loves their country, and I do too, but Americans are the only ones who believe theirs is the best country in the world,” Gladys said. “People are so quick to judge people from other places, but you don’t know until you go there.”

She told us about her book club and about her penchant for getting into arguments. “Sometimes I think people don’t like having me around because I can’t help but say something. But I can’t stand injustice,” she said, her eyebrows bunched together behind her sunglasses.

This wasn’t a woman I needed to educate about the realities of American slavery, it became apparent.

She doesn’t cook, she said. Jacques is her personal chef. “I told him who I was right away, take or leave me.”

He said he gets tired in old age. Sometimes they just go out to eat.

I told them I think they’ve earned it.

Several times, when both starting to talk, Jacques would stop and touch her elbow; apologize for interrupting. I felt a surge of tenderness for this couple, equally yolked in animation, and so respectful of one another.

“What’s your favorite place you’ve been?” Kalindi asked them.

“So many places,” Jacques said. “She just got to go to Peru. I am from Bordeaux…”

“Do you like wine?” I interjected.

“Yes! I’m a wino,” Jacques said.

“What makes a successful marriage?”

“You cannot give up at the first sign of struggle,” Gladys said. “Of course there are things someone cannot overcome. There are certain cases where you need to break up, because that is just life. But you have to know that life will be hard and you cannot just give up at the first sign of problems.”

Jacques nodded.

“Jacques, what is your favorite thing about Gladys?”

They both tittered, embarrassed.

“Probably something he cannot say,” she laughed.

“She is very smart…smart lady. Good with money.”

Gladys squealed at some truth or inside joke that was beyond us.

Jacques slowed down, his mouth pinched in thought. “And…I cannot say the rest.”

We let him off the hook. And somehow, we never asked Gladys. I guess what she loved about him was obvious.

“Young people never want to talk anymore,” Jacques said. I felt quietly incriminated. “Usually everyone is just on their phones, head down. But it is so refreshing to speak with young people.”

When it was time for their stop, Gladys made off down the aisle and Jacques refused our repeated offerings to help with their luggage. He watched his wife get safely to the other end of the train car, then took his time removing each of their bags from the rack. We danced around one another in the swaying cabin.

I stepped to the side, reluctantly allowing the old man go down the stairs alone, at his request. As he passed, he dropped his bags and enveloped me in a hug. “Have a nice trip,” he said again.

I was so glad we had kept talking.

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I take the same trip every year. California at the end of July for Pedal the Pacific.

I’m getting to the age—or, to the point in my PTO balance—where I’ve started to wonder if it’s really worth it. Like Jacques and Gladys, there is so much I want to see, and only a finite amount of time to do it.

Also like Jacques and Gladys, I am tired. Heck, I almost didn’t even want to talk to them. There’s something really relaxing about doing the same things, leisurely. No pressure to explore or cram in the itinerary.

I love sitting on the beach. I love reuniting with my friends. I love interacting with strangers in a way that is meaningful and easy. Pedal the Pacific does this. We’d need a whole other Substack post to talk about Rebecca at Windansea Beach.

Mine was never the family that vacationed in the same place. We never really vacationed, period. But I’m starting to see the draw.

In some ways, this trip is different each time I take it.

Or, at least each time I take it, I am different.

Often, when asked for a dinner recommendation by a friend or visitor, I draw a blank. Have I ever been anywhere? Do I actually live in New York City? The saturation is disorienting; the amount of options causes decision paralysis. I am the poster child for ordering the same thing from my regular restaurants because I like what I know.

But last night I was reminded of something simple I’d forgotten: the joy of trying a new restaurant with people you love. Sharing food, splitting a bottle of wine, co-creating an experience. And taking the memories with you to-go.

My friend Natalie was born 25.5 years ago on December 29, 2000. The proverbial short straw of birthdays, every year she’s stuck between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. A few birthdays ago, before I met them, our friend group started celebrating her at the halfway point.

This year:

Lilly’s automated Resy text to our group chat read.

the birthday girl said.

So, our plan was set.

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Our call time being that awkward window after work where it doesn’t quite make sense to go home first, I decided to kill the couple of hours before our res by making a return at REI. In the most intimate show of friendship one can exhibit, Lilly joined me.

We suffered the sweltering intestines of the Subway, navigated the crowded sidewalks of SoHo, then queued in the stuffy sludge of the REI checkout line. An older man with the words “Jeff” and “Yosemite” on his nametag processed my exchange with a level of care and diligence that made me emotional about the flagship store’s closing.

Lilly used to live in the area but had never been in. My coworker uses the storefront as a landmark-compass: “REI is south of Houston.” I’m a member and can count on two hands the amount of times I’ve visited.

Standing there on the other side of the counter from Jeff, looking around the lofted ceilings, I had a melodramatic thought: None of my future returns will be made in person.

From the mournful errand we made our way to the west side so Lilly could smell the water. At Hudson River Park, we trudged through the grass despite the rumored threat of NYC ticks. Once Lilly had scribbled a note in her card to Natalie, I read aloud a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Two blocks from the restaurant, Lilly and I could see Natalie and Renée waiting on the corner to be seated. We waved from afar until they noticed us. Inside, we sat near the windows at a circle table so we could see each other’s faces.

Our server, Jamie, explained the menu: everything is shared plates and it’s a “rolling kitchen.” We began the negotiation of what to order with a philosophy of more is more. Perused the wine list, debated glasses or a bottle, and got the bottle: crisp Friulano grapes.

There were sweet cherries tossed in cilantro, apricots on a bed of feta, labneh doused in strawberries. We questioned the etiquette of how to de-skewer a lamb kabob and passed the mismatched dishware around again and again: ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the presentation, taking each first bite together, and savoring the taste.

Natalie opened Lilly’s gift: a copy of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, just in time for the new movie adaptation which we’ll inevitably see together. I asked her about her reflections on being halfway through 25, and she said what already know. Job, love life, adulting: she’s doing really well. We ordered both flavors of soft serve for dessert and they brough them with lit candles sticking out the top.

Around the circle table and with the threat of our elbows bumping into our wine glasses’ lips, we decided we should do it again.

Lilly opened her Google calendar and started inputting all of our half-birthdays. Mine’s next.

There are a million different New York Cities. Patti Smith and the Chelsea Hotel, Andy Warhol and Studio 54, my older coworkers and their stories about the The Jane. There is so much I’ve missed because it pre-dated me and so much I am still missing. I can’t do it all, and not all of it is for me. My kids will never see REI SoHo. I hope my kids just get to see Yosemite.

But I am here now, in a certain time, of a certain age: when the Knicks were winning and the World Cup was here and there was the looming threat of ticks.

On the whole and the half of it: I think there’s so much to celebrate.

When I moved to New York City, I told myself it would be for a year or two. It’s been two and a half now, but I still only just got here, really. New York and I fall in and out of romance, but I always love it. I love it because, deep down, I believe it proves something about me.

New York takes grit. It is prohibitively expensive and logistically complicated. You need a job to get an apartment, but you can’t get a job if you don’t already live here. And living here comes with fees. First month’s rent, security deposit, and a cut for the broker. Money orders or wire fees and also one to cut the keys. The hidden costs and inconveniences are a perverse hazing ritual with which none of your new neighbors sympathize. They’ve been there before and have probably had it worse.

Forget A/C. Do what everyone else does and suffer for a few months, then purchase a window unit. But you can’t install it yourself. That’s written into your lease. You’ll have to schedule someone from the leasing company to come out and do it, poorly and sweating onto your duvet cover because your bed touches three of your bedroom’s four walls. Oh, and that’ll be a $100 install fee.

When winter comes, the leasing company will send a notice about “conserving energy,” mandating that you remove your A/Cs and close up your windows. When you don’t comply because you have nowhere to store your A/C unit or the dried bird shit atop it, you will incur fines. $50/each. The leasing company will not respond to your inquiries about, in keeping with your lease, the possibility of a $100 re-installation fee. You will eat the fine to avoid the threat of any future sweaty servicemens’ bodies.

In the spring, the leasing company will send out a memorandum about composting. Something like, Compost or else! (More fines). Your roommate will buy a tiny bin and the plastic baggies and everything. There will be signs in the stairwells to enforce it. Weeks will go by. You will start setting aside your banana peels. There will be fruit flies and a slight smell, but there will never be any specialized bins on the street. Eventually, you’ll give up. The banana peels will be reintegrated with the rest of your garbage. More fines never come, but there will always loom the possibility.

If you don’t have a doorman (you don’t) your packages will likely get stolen. This, too, isn’t the fault of the leasing company. As a solution, they will send out a notice reminding you not to buzz anyone in whom you do not know. They will also reiterate the fine print of your lease, which recommends that you do not have packages delivered here, to this address, your home. It’ll all be very helpful.

There are stairs. If you are lucky, (you are), just two or three sets. It’s only a problem when you have multiple suitcases or your mom comes to visit. Rides to the airport are considered a good deal if they are $75, but they’re almost never less. You will pay a cabbie and experience nausea in the backseat. Or, you will take the train; the better option entirely if you can manage the Subway steps with your bags and the heat.

When you get back from your trip, you’ll have to wash your clothing. That’s an ordeal. The laundromat doesn’t take coins anymore, so you have to purchase a reloadable card. If the card is misplaced, or worse, forgotten at home, you will wind up buying another rather than walking back to your apartment and up the steps to retrieve it. Of course, then you’ll just have two cards. You’ll never combine them.

Against your best intentions, with this flawed card system there will be remaining balances you inevitably forfeit. But if your balance on any of the given cards is too low on a day that, say, the credit card reader on the reloadable card machine is broken, well then, you’ll just need to take out cash.

All this to say nothing of the rodents and freak accidents and literal human shit.

New York is magic. I do believe that. It is an attitude. It’s an age. It’s a sensibility, and those who have it are stronger than those who don’t.

But what of those who have it and choose to let it go?

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The other day I caught up with a friend from college. Two hours on the phone, no dead air. She still lives in our home state but expressed that she was considering moving closer to family, back to her hometown. She said it like a confession:

“I just feel like if I move home, what if I never leave? And then it’s like I’m just one of those people who stays forever. I’ll see my classmates from high school and have to be like, ‘No, I’m not that person any more.’”

I get it. She’s talking to the girl who ran so far away from her high school identity she wound up in Manhattan. What I told her and what I do believe is that being near your loved ones is a precious, finite gift that cannot be priced or replicated.

And the thing is, if I had anything worth moving home for I probably would, too.

In the case of my coworker, it’s hard be around—to sit so close to—someone who doesn’t love it here. And when they leave, it’s almost a relief. It’s also an objectively beautiful thing when someone follows their arrow, even when it shoots in a different direction than your own.

I think I belong in New York City more than a lot of people which, admittedly, makes me feel strong. But I don’t think I belong here forever, which is a hard truth to juggle. When will I leave? I don’t know. Will I ever be a “real New Yorker?” I’m not sure.

You can work so hard and you’ll still never earn it. New York isn’t yours. It is everyone’s, all at once.

But for now, as much as I want to convince myself I don’t, I belong. When I stop in at the bar on the corner on my way home, the bartender knows me. They’ve started serving breakfast and she gives me a free bagel. We wave to each other through the windows every time.

I see the neighbor I’ve passed for a year smoking on his stoop or on the sidewalk or across the street. His roommate works night shifts so they’re always out when I’m headed to work. They’re moving now. I ask if he’s staying on the Upper East Side with his roommate and he says no, he’s moving to Paris.

We agree we love the neighborhood but the train is a disaster. We part ways. Someone has to stay.

New Yorkers are better than everyone except for the people who have a reason to leave. I’m still looking for mine, but no matter where I go next, I’ll always be wondering what’s happening in New York City.

I have been to the church with a steeple
and the church of smoke and mirrors
and the church of nature herself.

One year I spent Easter at a friend’s house
and the Bunny found me there anyway.

All my eggs were always in the basket
of my mother’s magic. She died for me
and didn’t wait three days to rise again.

In Manhattan I don’t go to church but
I’ll try anything once.
Quaker silent meeting,
spin class cult,
hot yoga rebirth.

Today at the Dimes Square “Devotional Listening” party we sit in a circle
and rock back and forth, people puddling
over the scuffed hardwood floors.
It means something different to everyone.
I’ll try anything once.

I’ve tried all the denominations:
Presbyterian Veggie Tales
and Methodist ashes
and Catholic hymns.

For my high school boyfriend
I switched churches,
for a man I met last year
I tried to love religion again.

I was a child of God
but I am a woman of myself.

They beat the drums
like the preacher beat the pulpit
like I used to beat up myself.

The Easter Bunny could find me anywhere.

I deserved chocolate eggs
and marshmallows covered in
colored granular sugar
over a bed of pastel crinkle cut.

Now I deserve to stretch my legs,
cradle a warm drink,
and regret being hard on my mother.

But I am devoted.
I have a religious belief in myself.

When I die will I be invited to the good place?
What would I say if I was?
Heaven knows
I’ll try anything once.

The way he held the board under his arm, the swell of his pec muscle.

He kept throwing it down in front of her stretch of beach, skimming, then toppling over himself for her to see.

She was meant to be reading. A book she didn’t remember from high school English class, returned to in hopes that she’d learned something since. She quit it momentarily.

Sitting up on her towel, she pulled an orange from her bag. It was still cold from the fridge, packed in a plastic baggy with a folded napkin. She peeled it in one go, making a neat pile with the spiral of freckled skin.

Biting the wedges away from the whole, she watched him from behind her sunglasses. He pretended not to notice.

It was the confidence with which he ran, kicking up the gulf’s backwash in his wake. Dropping the thin, slick piece of wood and bounding onto its back, pumping it over the surface to keep it moving. Then, inevitably, falling. Again and again over the frothy remnants of waves.

Ever so often, he would prop the board in the sand next to his big toe, panting, searching for some pattern in the water that told him to go. Before, she’d averted her eyes, boring into the lines of her AP Lit. Now she watched him. The rise and fall of his chest, the pleasing size of his nipples, the slight muscular swell in his stomach.

Eventually he’d see some sign she wasn’t trained to and shoot off running. This, even when she’d still held a book-sized excuse, she couldn’t help herself from watching.

He’d bend at the middle and pedal the air with his palms, fighting the elements for balance. Sometimes he’d just eat it, rolling in the swash, board streaking out from beneath him.

She did break her eye contact then, giving him privacy to get his bearings. Hand through his sopping hair, chain hanging from his neck, pendant slung between his shoulder blades. He’d collect his runaway board and make his way back up the slope of sand.

Was she approachable? She tried to make her body language say open. Folding then unfolding her legs, checking her stomach. Straightening her spine and leaning back onto her hands. The angle pinched her wrists.

“Hey,” a man’s voice cut in. “Got any trash I can take?”

The blond guy manning the line of chairs and umbrellas for rent. “Oh, no thank you…” she said, wondering if he was also a lifeguard or something. “I have a bag I was going to put it in.” She held up the sandwich baggy and tidied her orange scraps, willing him to leave them. She didn’t want her skim boarder to see her talking to another man.

“Alright, let me know if you change your mind,” he said, returning to his post, smiling.

Was he flirting? Had her body language been too open?

Unrelated, she needed to believe, the skim boarder started to leave. He walked along the ebbing water down the beach. She watched forlornly. Stopping at an abandoned backpack, he toweled off his shoulders, checked his phone. Proof that he had been showing off for her? But his belongings were perilously close to a rock jetty…

Fine, so be it. His confidence, his nonchalance. Two could play at that game. She stood up from the remains of her orange, stretching her limbs and letting down her hair. A thought of herself as a siren. She shook her head. It was just the rocks. But have him notice me, she thought.

She refastened her messy bun, picked up her book, flipped onto her back. She really had been reading. She wanted him to know that. Holding the hardback above her head, she used the disappointing pages to block the sun’s offense.

Main character was whining. Yes, yes. Had she heard the sand shift near her head or did she imagine it? She saw the stride of sturdy legs in her sunglasses’ reflection. He was back. With another board. This one had a bigger fin. She flipped onto her stomach to appreciate it.

It was another chance to say something. Or, maybe he would. Surely this wasn’t a coincidence. Were the waves in front of her towel really so great?

He performed his routine again. Run, throw, skim, slip.

Couples walked by. A mother holding her son’s hand, two women wearing American flag bikinis disturbingly out of season, an older man…and his wife? Yes, they were together. He just walked at twice her speed. But when he stopped to ask the skim boarder a question, the woman hovered behind him.

The other woman, the young one pretending to read on her towel, stared at a hanging indent, straining to hear them. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t the only person in the skim boarder’s audience, envied this old man’s brazen ability to stop him.

Could she do the same thing? “Hi, excuse me…you know, this whole thing has been very distracting,” she imagined herself playfully saying. She’d swirl her finger to encompass him, then point to her book. He’d apologize, ask what she was reading. She’d have to fess up to her ninth grade syllabus, but hey, love came at a cost.

The intruder sauntered off, leaving his wife two steps behind him. Her man kept skimming. But his heart wasn’t really in it.

Did he live here? She herself was just visiting. The two of them and the umbrella-peddler-slash-trash-enthusiast were the only ones on the beach remotely their age. Surrounded by snowbirds and a few off-season tourists. The calm before spring break.

It was a fluke. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. There was an old friend’s wedding that night. She’d passed on the bride’s offer to bring a date.

But maybe she should still say something, she thought. As an act of good faith. An exercise with the Universe, or Cupid, or The Powers That Be, whoever they are.

He paused, leaning onto the tip of his board and watching the small surf. Was this their chance?

He unsheathed the plank from its place in the sand, the absence leaving a dip. Walked past her towel and back to his belongings, not giving her a passing glance. She watched covertly as he packed up his bigger, finned board with the first, his towel, his phone. Then, he left.

They’d never shared a word.

Well, she didn’t live there anyway.

This time of year, I am usually busy making love’s case to others and to myself. I’m its most ardent fan and believer, but every now and then still find myself in that shaky position of doubt.

This year, though, I don’t think love needs me to come to its defense. I think love speaks for itself <3 I hope your weekend is chock-full of it. xxx

This year
Is marinated in retinoids and 2% acids and expensive creams
With skin of a newborn baby
Unblemished and wholly lovable
Even if yet unmoving

This year
Blushes and winks with promise
Like an early New York night
The stranger in a good sweater at the bar, waiting to be approached
And myself
In the bathroom mirror, summoning the nerve to go

I want
Someone to be on my side
And at it, if I’m specific
When night hums to morning

I want
What everyone does
For someone to know the scent of the lotion on my face

Just maybe not this year

At first, eyeing them through the backlit glass, I thought I might need to ask if they were still seating. It was 8pm at a diner in Midtown Manhattan. I wrenched open the metal door, vacuum-sealed by the wind.

The hostess got up from a table, seventeen or so and still laughing at something her counterpart had said. “For one?” She asked.

“Yes,” I told her, windswept and breathless.

She led me to a skinny booth. I shirked my coat off onto one side, unpacked my notebook and pen, and sidled into the other. I was asked if I wanted anything to drink before I’d even taken my seat.

Coffee en route, I opened to a blank page in my notebook. Just a hop skip over and down from the diner where she’s rumored to have written much of her album Melodrama, the veil between Lorde and me was feeling particularly thin.

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I’d come from AMC Empire 25 (read: Times Square) having just seen David Freyne’s Eternity, harboring the prolonged sense of good feeling and enlightenment I sometimes do when I interact with art that resonates.

Globe lights were lining the booths against the windows and being reflected back to me in the dark panes. The hostess with thick, braided pigtails returned to her seat across from a busboy waiting for business to trickle in. They resumed their flirting while a server came to collect my order’s details.

A man and woman seated across the aisle from me were filling in a crossword between bouts of laughter. They had an age difference that kept making the game more funny. “This one is so easy. Not for you, but for me,” the woman said, coming down from one of her head-thrown-back spells of cackling.

My food arrived too quickly. I hadn’t written a sentence. Rearranging the tiny tabletop, I reached for the filmy plastic bottle of ketchup, sacrificing a clean hand for the condiment. I shook it once and my grip slipped. The butt of the bottle smashed into the sun of my over medium egg. I had to donate my only napkin to cleaning it.

A puffer-clad family came in with two kids—one walking and one asleep in a stroller, her mittened hands glued to the sides of her legs. Her tiny feet twitched as the older brother asked questions in a child-like cadence. When the waiter approached, the boy inquired as to if they had a kid’s menu. They didn’t.

The pats of butter wouldn’t melt into my toast. I scooped the ketchup-bottle-infected runny egg onto it anyway, shoveled the mound into my mouth, and watched the hostess. I couldn’t help myself.

She had returned to the checkout counter and was using the mirrored wall behind it to pin her braids up over her forehead, forming a crown. Then she reached into a bag and extracted a lump of yarn. Bending down to feed her ankles through it, she wriggled the strip of fabric up over her jeans. It was about the width of a scarf.

She stood at the mouth of the counter, modeling. The busboy watched as she explained what it would be, the threaded loops’ potential. I realized how obvious I must have been at her age. The indiscretion of young love stuck me. I’d never stood a chance.

The movie fell heavy on the moment, overlaying like a sediment. At the gates of her afterlife, the main character had been forced to choose between her first love and the man she’d spent her entire earthly life with. To me, the film was about the exploration of “what if.” But first love…it’s intoxicating, isn’t it?

I noticed a large party coming through the cold weather vestibule’s fabric awning outside. The hostess didn’t. She was posing in her phone’s front camera, propped atop the counter. When the customers cracked the interior entrance, she scrambled to pull the stringy crochet project off her body, yanking it down like she was taking off her pants. “Sorry, um. Right this way,” she popped back up, blushing.

The overhead speakers were playing early 2000s radio hits but kept pausing to run advertisements. My pen was running out of ink. I accidentally drew an “n” in a way that looked like my grandmother’s script.

In front of me, I heard a woman ordering a glass of white wine. Once the waiter retreated, she and her husband continued a conversation that sounded like a fight. “Normally I wouldn’t have done that, but you know me.”

Inconveniently, the man was facing away and spoke in a deep voice that was indecipherable to me. I had to believe that he did. Know her, that is.

“Look I’m gonna be honest. I have good genetics, I wear makeup, but I don’t do that…” She sounded very disturbed. I wondered to whatever in the world she could be referring. “I’m sure she did,” the woman agreed with her companion. “It’s like the year she gave me—what was it?—the silky pillowcase.” This sounded nice enough to me.

“Why would she ever think I would wear that shit?” The white wine drinker continued vehemently. “I’m grossed out by the notion of my tits being out—it’s disgusting.” I began to suspect someone had gifted her lingerie.

The hostess had returned to her station. The busboy came to clear the crossword puzzlers’ table next to me. The two of them were engaged in silent conversations over the booths’ glass partitions, both laughing their way through the restaurant, practically floating.

A few days earlier, in the lazy stretch before the new year really begins, one of my friends had gone around a circle imagining the “perfect day” for each of us. Mine was set in New York, and aside from meet-cute-ing my soulmate in a bookstore, it looked a lot like this. Later, after the exercise, she said the driving force for me was interacting with strangers.

Heaven is a diner, I think. I could spend the forever of my afterlife in a booth just like that one, 24-hour breakfast. Whatever comes next, whatever’s after this, I hope there is really good people watching. I do think I’d love someone one to commentate it with.

The feeling I took from Eternity was that “what if” is fruitless. First loves are haunting, and for so many years I held, white knuckled, to that familiar story.

Sitting in that booth cemented it: that parallel universe doesn’t exist. And as much as my mind loves to fill in the blanks, it never really did. That timeline ended long ago, and even if we ever met again—if my first love was sitting across from me, splitting the booth in Heaven—we wouldn’t have anything new to say. Those lives have already been lived.

When I was little, begging my mom to leave a restaurant, I never understood why she was so insistent on me letting her finish her drink. I would tug at her pants leg, whine for attention. Now I can’t leave so much as a sip of my third diner coffee. I get it.

Other creators who read the stars are saying 2026 is going to be The Year for Pisces. Something about my moon finally moving out of Neptune, I think. They promise this in contrast to what 2025 was supposed to have been: “a really tough one” for Pisceans.

Numerology says this was a Universal “9 year” (2 + 0 + 2 + 5 = 9) symbolizing completion, transformation, and endings, while the next one will be a Universal “1 year” (2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1) representing new beginnings.

This morning at breakfast, my mom said her group chat of 50-something ladies was discussing how 2025 was The Year of The Snake—of shedding old habits—while 2026 is supposed to be The Year of The Horse. “Meaning you charge forward?” I guessed.

“Exactly!” She nodded enthusiastically. Google corroborates, saying that the Fire Horse symbolizes energy, action, and potential breakthroughs, although the Chinese New Year doesn’t technically start until February 17th.

I receive-accept-claim all these good tidings, and I feel like I should whisper when I say this, but 2025 was… probably the best year of my life. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit that this is true for almost all of them.

If sex sells, then contentment is a dying business. I recognize that “Local Girl Found Happy” is a yawn of a story. But! I defend: Each year I learn so much more about myself, the world around me, and how I want to relate to it. I throw my bleeding heart onto the plate—the shiny surgical tray—of life and, miraculously, it continues to beat.

Call it a glass half-full, overflowing… it’s semantics. I don’t care if it’s gauche, I skew optimistic.

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While south for the Holidays I sought out a haircut for its being half-priced compared to those in New York. Sitting in the vinyl salon chair with my legs sweating against the seat, my hairdresser and I had an hour to pore over the details of our lives and mentalities. Standing above me in the mirror and splaying my split ends between her fingers for inspection, she remarked, “I am the happiest person I know.” I laughed kindredly.

It’s not because I am uncritical, I’m not whitewashing. I recognize the stretches of time that are less than ideal and I weather the discomfort of them. But at the end of a year, I can’t help waxing romantic. I look back over the calendar’s expanse with pride and awe at my having gotten through it. Smarter, more self aware, more seasoned.

From the TikTok mystics, like everything, I take what resonates and leave the rest. At large, 2025 wasn’t really “a tough one” for me. In fact, when my mom asked over her gluten free pancakes and my traditional breakfast if I wanted anything new for 2026, I told her, “Not really. I want it to be just like 2025.”

It’s a very rewarding and scary place to be: not in need of New Year’s Resolutions.

It’s not that I don’t still want for anything, but more that the things I want, my dreams, are already in motion. I have invented a life I love, and I am—have been—actively working toward my goals. It is all well under way; I don’t need to set a new course or reinvent the wheel. I just need to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s working.

Still, I am susceptible to the idea of a manifestation, to the posture of “releasing” to the Universe, to the practice of ritual in general.

So I wrote 13 wishes, or, intentions. I prefer that word, because while I can’t read the stars—have to rely on translations from the mystics—I do know the contours of my own heart, my mind. I believe I am the maker of my own Universe, in the sense that I control the ideology.

And my stars, my personal cosmology, comprises making many goals, setting regular intentions, and impressing myself with my capability in achieving them.

So at the end of this year, I am not optimizing. I don’t need to radically change, I am satisfied with and actually extremely proud of who I am, who I continue to become. Because of this, most of my 2026 wishes, while grand, are just hopes—ambitious belief—that my current work ethic will come to fruition.

My personal constellation of beliefs *also* says that sharing goals makes them more real, infuses them with an alchemical propensity for coming true. So in that fashion, in line with my beliefs…

My 13 wishes, some 2025 reflections, and an excerpt from my novel, Good News:

Some of these will be easier to accomplish than others. You’ll notice I repeated a goal from 2025—you’re reading monthly Substack post 12/12 for this year right now. Some, on the other hand, just the thought of starts me shallow breathing. I’m looking at you, marathon. You can’t say I don’t love a challenge.

This year, inspired by my dear friend Lilly, I added one song to a playlist every single day. My Song of The Days spanned radio hits I’d heard over the speakers in the supermarket, house played at the gym, and soundtracks to movies I saw with friends. Each of them, random as they are, hold memories—phases of my year.

Sometimes, I gamed the system and sourced a song to describe a specific facet of my day I wanted to remember. On days I forgot, I racked my brain for something significant and backlogged them—much of my search history is variations of the question: “What number day of the year is it?” “How many days of the year have there been as of today?” to double check my work.

My 2025 playlist is currently sitting at a running time of 22 hours and 44 minutes. It was a really fun exercise, but as a perfectionist, also a lot of work. Next year I might demote the practice to making a monthly or (inspired by my pal Chloe Stringer) zodiac sign based playlist. For that, I’d need to learn more about the stars, so we’ll see!

In 2025 I set out to read 40 books. I am currently at 39 books read, having finally finished the 870-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and just picked up Tuesdays with Morrie.

Despite the nearing deadline, sources say the reader is still optimistic about her chances of success.

For posterity’s sake, I have catalogued my 2025 reads for recommendation, separating them into columns of Need-to-Read, Neutral, and simply put, No. They are organized in a rough order, with the top of the Neutral list leaning furthest “Need-to-Read” and the bottom closer to “No,” but in the end are all ranked by their personal staying power, then weighted slightly by popular opinion. What can I say, I’m not impartial.

A few months ago, I created and started telling people a lofty goal of finishing the first draft of my novel by my 26th birthday. If you’re not a reader of the stars and my aforementioned zodiac sign means nothing to you, that is February.

For reference, most novels are anywhere from 70-80k words, or 250-320 pages. I am currently at 85,047 words, ~300 pages, and only about halfway finished with the story.

Messy as the process is, sources close to the author say she is still planning on her success.

Below is a snippet of my character Delilah, who is a high school sophomore navigating life in the Bible Belt south. Under financial and religious pressures, in the righteous pursuit of being “good,” she ditches her unbridled best friend, Lacey, and starts dating the church’s poster child, Miles Peacock. Confronted with the complications of first love—with only the God she starts to betray for a boy on her side—she is forced to question her beliefs.

I hope you love her as much as I do. Happy New Year, and thanks for being here <3

“Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the saying, Christians should ‘be in the world, but not of the world?’” CJ asks from his spot back up on the pulpit, the boys having rejoined us and done most of the heavy lifting to set all our chairs back into parallel lines. The sanctuary is perfumed with their Axe body spray, their hairlines clinging with dewy sweat.

Across the rows ahead of me and in my peripheral vision, I see a flutter of hands under the dimmed house lights—Virginia’s among them. Predictably, the rest of our group is non-participant.

For just a moment I’m compelled to join her, to fib; it does sound sort of familiar.

I don’t, though, because lying is a sin. Also because, as Mom says, it’s more complicated than telling the truth.

She’s right, of course. She always is.

Often when I tell a lie, I regret it the moment it comes out of my mouth. In the first place, it’s typically over something stupid or seemingly inconsequential. It almost feels like an accident, but of course, once it’s out there, it’s irreversible. That’s actually how I ended up at camp.

***

When Lacey and I finally made it down to the dock—her ruched bathing suit bottoms creeping deeper into the crack of my butt, the thong of my plastic flip flops rubbing the space between my toes with every step—the rest of the group had already gotten in and out of the water, were toweling off and circling up for truth or dare.

“Sup, sluts?” Walt said endearingly, nudging Dawson to scoot over. They adjusted themselves on the sun bleached wooden planks to make us a seat, their wet swim shorts leaving behind boxy impressions of their butt cheeks.

Lacey paused before the opening in the circle, kicking off her worn-in leather Rainbow flip flops and pulling her too-big tee over her head to match everyone else’s level of clothing. I watched her regretfully before following suit—stripping down to mine.

Covey was flaunting his new driver’s permit, temporarily issued paper copy as it was, for the whole group to see. The thin, folded printer paper wriggled in the wind between his thumb and pointer finger, and I imagined the bay water seeping from his pruny pads and soiling the document, leaving spots. Or worse, it slipping from his grip entirely, falling between the slats in the dock or blowing into the water below. Covey wasn’t at all concerned.

“I could give you a special ride if you ask nicely, Sellars,” he said by way of greeting. The other boys chuckled in support of his double meaning.

“Yeah okay, with your Mom in the passenger’s seat,” Lacey rolled her eyes. If Covey had ever successfully flustered her, she’d never shown it. I, on the other hand, always fell straight into the traps the boys built, despite them never really being set for me.

Their typical banter landed with special force, I realized, without the protective barrier of clothing between us. Maybe it was just my spending so much mental energy on positioning my half-naked body at the most flattering angle—holding my shoulders back, keeping my spine straight—that kept me from focusing on their quick, dirty wit. My usual, albeit shoddy, defense mechanism of catching onto a joke and feigning nonchalance was failing me. I felt my flush move from my cheeks to my flat chest, painfully aware of every exposed plane of my budding body.

Walt leaned toward us. His boyish baby fat—hanging on well into his teenagehood—gathered over the elastic waistband of his Aftco shorts, but he seemed completely unconscious of it. “Okay Lacey, truth or dare?”

“Dare,” Lacey answered automatically. It was the hot choice, I realized, but I was awed by her ability to make it so quickly. I was already creating a private pros and cons list for both options. Like when during a class read aloud, rather than listening to the lesson around me, I secretly skipped ahead to practice my impending lines. No one was asking me yet, but I was still preparing: Which was scarier, completing a dare or telling the truth?

I decided it really boiled down to what was being asked, or rather, who was doing the asking. From the boys, I was more inclined to choose truth. They were less creative—never understood how to wield that card to its full potential—whereas my girl counterparts and I shared a special knack for weaponizing honesty.

Dare was something different. It involved action; it was inherently bodily. Steeling myself into a poker face and choosing my words wisely was one thing. Having to stand up—in the bathing suit bottoms with the ruched center, no less—and perform some humiliating act at one of the boys’ direction was another entirely. I didn’t think like them, could never predict what they’d come up with, but my imagination of their imaginations was enough to scare me off the possibility of ever finding out. I’d have to leave that honor to Lacey.

After only a semblance of a beat, to give the illusion that he hadn’t had it predetermined, Walt said, “Okay hot shot, I dare you to kiss Covey.” His eyebrows lifted in punctuation of the absurd statement, and the circle broke into hushed giggles in reaction. We should’ve known that with Walt, there would be no soft ball to get us started.

He knew, just as well as everyone else, that Lacey and Covey hadn’t kissed since our last week of freshman year, when Covey told her he wanted to be single for the summer. The Daves boys had been about to leave for Charleston, South Carolina to spend the first half of the break with their grandparents. Covey said he didn’t want to do long distance; Lacey said he didn’t know what he wanted, and was sure they’d be back together come the fall.

Fall was quickly approaching—though the heat wouldn’t break until October—the Daves boys were back, and Covey was sitting suspiciously close to Virginia; they were passing dew droplets back and forth between their touching knees. Lacey knew all of this, heard the awkward chuckles around us, and felt the threat of embarrassment in Walt’s challenge, but she was never one to relent. “Been there, done that,” she waved her hand dismissively.

“Doesn’t matter,” Walt said, “dare’s a dare.”

“Alright then,” Lacey rolled her eyes, “Covey, pucker up.”

I chose it from a place of hunger—as an imagined vehicle to get me from where I was to where I wanted to be. I turned 25 this year, you see: I feel a newfound urgency to realize my dreams.

Subconsciously, I think the word came from an optimization driven, TikTok-ified belief: that I could formulaically streamline my life—I just needed to grind, to “lock in.”

And it was all going fine. Naturally, there were ebbs and flows, but a byproduct of exercising the muscle of routinely showing up is that I no longer flagellate myself for missing a day or two. It wasn’t groundbreaking but there was progress, little by little.

Then, in October, I enrolled in a Financial Wellness course that shook things up.

Referred by a friend and former boss, I met the leaders of Wealthkind, a financial education company focused on teaching women to reclaim their financial stories and create their dream lives, originally for a prospective job. Because of scheduling constraints, the available role didn’t end up being a fit for me, but I knew after one meeting I wanted to work with them in some capacity. I joined the October cohort.

Here is what I learned:

#1 - I was dreaming too small

One of the most powerful things the Wealthkind course asked me to do is conceptualize my goals and share them—to think big.

I am no stranger to big dreams. Spoiler: I’ve spent the last year writing a book. But, ever since moving to New York, I’ve felt like my future is a sprawling canvas—full of possibility, but completely blank.

Wealthkind introduced me to the term “Rich Life,” coined by personal finance educator Ramit Sethi, to describe a life that feels rich in experiences, in fulfillment, in financial peace.

When sitting on a Zoom call with ten other women and asked to put it into words—to articulate my Rich Life—I realized I hadn’t put much thought into the particulars of what it could look like. Beyond the book, what then? If and when I achieve that goal, what will it afford me?

Listening to the women in my cohort share their dreams, I scribbled these notes:

• Work optionality: build a beautiful life working ~20 hrs/wk

• Own a home + vacation home I live in seasonally and host my friends/family

• Live abroad

As my peers continued to share, I was reminded of forgotten ideas of my own, emboldening me to dream bigger:

• OPEN MY BOOKSTORE COFFEE SHOP!!!!

  (How could I forget my dream?)

• Monetize my Substack ♥

Simple as it was, this exercise floored me. I was shocked to remember a goal I never even consciously let go of. Is that how it happens? I wondered. You just get caught up in living, in the conquering of more immediate dreams?

There was an alchemic property to the practice of naming my desires and sharing them out loud to a room of people who were welcoming—believing of my capability.

#2 - I can start now

Delana, one of the founders of Wealthkind, talks about her long-held, if unnamed belief that a partner would come along to save her—from her loneliness, but also financially.

I don’t think I ever subscribed to this train of thought exactly; I’ve been begging my grandfather to teach me about investing for years, have done the ugly work of paying off my credit card debt. But, in taking the class and talking about saving for our futures, I realized I had been subconsciously waiting for someone else to come along with a “plan.”

Still single as I am, if I want to be a homeowner in my lifetime—especially in this economic climate—I should start saving now. The thought had never occurred to me: I don’t have to wait for a partner for the next steps of my life to begin. I can purchase real estate with friends; with my sister, who I want to live near all my life long.

This realization had a sweet dual purpose, pouring over into my personal life. If I know what I want for my life and am actively working toward those goals, it doesn’t matter as much when partnership finds me—I will never be behind. I already have all the components I need to create my rich life.

#3 - I am seeking alignment and practicing accountability

In the course, we talked very little about adhering to restrictive budgets and much more about hitting benchmarks—maintaining target percentages for our categories of spending. For example: 50-60% of income on fixed expenses like rent, utilities, groceries, and transportation.

We also spent time reflecting on purchases that felt good rather than shaming ourselves for the habits that gave us hangovers. Acknowledging moments when money brought me joy helped me identify my values, and to start conceptualizing a spending code of ethics that is values-aligned.

For instance: I realized that of my largest spending category, drinks and dining out, I never regretted the expenses that were made for quality time or special experiences with friends. What made me itch were the GrubHub bills I could’ve easily avoided by going to the store or being more resourceful with what food I had at home. I wasn’t willing to pay that price in the name of convenience. Some people are—that’s what makes values personal.

This self-temperature check with alignment hasn’t just transformed the way I view money, but also my time. At the beginning of the year, when I chose the word discipline, it was related to my writing life and to exercise. I was coming off a year of finding a form of movement I loved and wanted more of. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I make it to the gym twice in one week. It’s a different season of my life, and the truth is, right now I want to write more than I want… anything.

It is unbelievably fulfilling to know that and to make my decisions accordingly. Just last night, I bailed out on my sister (sorry, Emma) for watching the Iron Bowl together (Roll Tide). It didn’t feel good to miss quality time with her—my fomo brain was tossing around the word “tradition”—but I had 2,800 words to write to meet a major goal of 30k this month, and I’d barely started this Substack post.

Lately, I am relishing in the ritual of making goals and then keeping my promises to myself.

At the beginning of the year, I had a version of that I would’ve called “discipline.” It fell in the family of 75 Hard and No Spend November—extremist programming, unsustainable to me.

Then I found Wealthkind and Delana said something in one of our classes that stuck: People who are smart with money don’t have to work that hard at it. They find systems that work for them and let their money grow passively; they’re not checking their bank accounts all the time, riddled with attention or worry.

It’s the same lesson I learned last year about exercise, just wearing a new suit: I need to make it easy for myself. Somehow, in the distorted haze of New Year’s Resolutions, I mistook my attitude as needing to be to grind.

I’d like to take a gentler approach. Not in a tradwife way, with soft resolve. But in a mindful, calculated one, keeping my eyes on my dreams and my faith in hand—with knowledge that it is all already coming.

I believe my dreams are inevitable, they are headed for me—barreling now—because I’m finally ready. I’ve proven I can handle them. I’m accountable.

This approach also leaves room for the mystical, unpredictable, alchemic quality of the Universe. I am not Sisyphus, climbing a mountain that has no end, rolling the rock by myself.

At my back, there’s a breeze. God-the Universe-Mother Nature sends a helping northern wind. They—all my deities—conspire to help me.

You can find more information about Wealthkind here.

If you are interested in taking the course I did, the code “FRIENDS150” will give you $150 off enrollment.

They also share free resources right here on Substack—read ’s INFLOW.

I wasn’t home so my roommate, Reese, saved me one and passed along their message: Register to vote (for Zohran Mamdani).

“Cool,” I said, biting into the layer of powdered sugar dust. Our household was already planning to, but I appreciated the gesture.

The next time, Reese ran into one of them in the stairwell—he was drunk, returning from a concert; she was commuting home from her side hustle of catering, carrying a box of leftover flower arrangements.

She gifted him a vase and invited us to a picnic in the park that Sunday, where she said a bunch of people from the building would be. He stumbled into our apartment and scribbled some notes so he would remember the details the next day.

“Oh, our neighbor invited us to the park on Sunday,” he said over the graveyard of bottles and cans my friends and I had left strewn about the apartment.

“Wait, what?” I laughed, collecting the empties. “When?”

“Last night.” He went to the table to consult his notes. “Yeah, I don’t know. I was coming home and she gave me flowers and said they were doing a picnic at Corlears with people from the building.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” I said. I had always believed in the importance of being a good neighbor, but come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually been one. “Who is this girl?” I laughed, impressed.

He squinted at his chicken scratch: “Um… ‘Mayla.’”

I was starting to think this person was actually a sprite—a benevolent creature I’d never actually get to see. This was my chance; it was now or never. “I’d be down… if you want to go on Sunday,” I told him, studying the flowers.

“Okay, yeah. Let’s do it.”

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When Sunday rolled around, Reese and I realized we weren’t actually sure where we were going. We had the names of a park and our neighbor, along with the hope—dwindling inversely with our growing social anxieties—that we’d find them somehow.

On my way home to meet him, I ran into a gaggle of girls thundering down our walk-up’s stairs. They were wearing cowboy boots with a poodle skirt, tiny tops, and reusable grocery bags full of clanking wine bottles. “We’re going to show up and it’s just gonna be us—” one of them joked to the other three through an open smile.

I recognized them immediately: the building’s sprites. “Are y’all going to the park?” I asked, stepping out of their way in the hall.

“Yes!” they chorused. “Are you coming?!” the leader asked.

“Yeah,” my dimples deepened at the serendipity. “My roommate and I were gonna head over in a few.”

“Oh, amazing! Here, let me give you my number,” she said. “I’ve been telling so many people to come and haven’t even given them a way to get in touch. I invited this poor guy in the hallway the other night…”

“That was my roommate,” I laughed.

“Oh, perfect!” She handed me her phone and texted her name once I’d programmed my number. “I’m Mayla, by the way.”

So, she was real. I said I was Madilyn and that we’d see them soon.

“Guess what?” I said, breathless from the stairs; letting the metal door clink closed behind me.

“What?” Reese said from his place on the couch.

“I met the neighbors,” I said triumphantly. “They are so nice! Mayla gave me her number—she’s going to drop a pin once they find a spot.” Our relief was palpable. We only debated whether or not to bring chips twice.

Setting out with a bottle and a half of wine, no chips, and a blanket to sit on, we followed Mayla’s pin like we were playing Pokémon GO. When we got down to the water, we looked across the expanse of grass under the Williamsburg Bridge and saw them clustered on a blanket of their own. They waved us over.

They were Mayla, her current roommates Freya and Ellen, and her hometown friend and previous roommate, Maya. Together, we realized, we made up the same corner of three floors of our building—all our fire escapes leading right up to the other, with Reese and I sandwiched right in the middle.

“Do y’all care if we use your fire escape to climb through to each other’s apartments?” someone asked.

“Be our guest,” Reese and I agreed. My opinion didn’t really matter—the questionable, rusty structure hangs outside his window.

We ate homemade cookies made by Mayla and got acquainted; lamented the increasing price of our rent; asked one another if they’d gotten the notice from the leasing company about removing our window A/C units, too. Eventually, two more neighbors—Addy and Blaire—came to join us.

When faced with the banality of re-introducing ourselves to the group, someone suggested we go around and say what we do, then rate our contentedness with it on a scale of 1-10.

“I just started as a barista,” Addy said. “I’m new to the city so it’s super fresh, but it’s a cool place. I’d say like a 6 or 7?” She turned to her roommate, looking to evade the spotlight. “Blaire’s a model.”

Blaire picked up: “Yeah, it’s pretty chill. I’d say like a 9.” Okay, intrigue.

We continued around the circle. “Have you ever heard of a Waldorf School?” Mayla asked. She was a kindergarten teacher, go figure. She also moonlights as a caterer, if you’ll recall—9 or 10 for both.

Freya works at the UN or somewhere of equal importance. 7 or 8ish.

Ellen and Maya are students at FIT and NYU. School is a 10, but Maya’s money job—working at a dog clothing store called “Wagwear”—leaves something to be desired.

I told her in the moment that I was going to have to write that down.

Reese gave them his spiel of working as an analyst for the largest nonprofit hospital in the city. “So I’m looking for new jobs…” he said, giving them a 3. I tried to hold space for the person who asks me how my day was everyday—with whom I trade all the trivial office dramas. It’s a tiny gift in a group setting, I think, to know someone’s answer before they tell it.

When we got to me, he guessed my rating. “I was gonna say 7 or 8,” he said. “Yeah, I was thinking an 8 or 9,” I told him, but my positivity levels are known to be nearing toxic. I turned to the rest of the circle. “I’m an Executive Assistant to a CEO of a small asset management firm,” I filled them in. “I’m also a creative writer,” I added, then had to concede that through my company sponsored 401k program I am invested in BlackRock. I contain multitudes.

They challenged and listened. We kept having to pause our conversation periodically to admire the moon; talked until it carved itself a spot in the night higher than all the skyscrapers.

“Okay, if the world was ending… like, America was going to shit—” (oof, really asking for a stretch of the imagination there!) “—apocalyptic situation… where would you go?” Mayla asked.

We all went around sharing our abstract, off the cuff contingency plans, clobbered together from watching the first four seasons of The Walking Dead and our comfortably distanced, pop-culture-level understanding of The Handmaid’s Tale. “Maybe… the south of France or something,” “Thailand—somewhere on a beach,” and “back home to Belgium; to my family,” were all floated as possible answers before Mayla and Maya shared theirs.

“I’d probably go down to Costa Rica,” Mayla shared. “Well, my family lives down there now. They have a Waldorf community… and their own source of water.” So that’s why she asked the question. We all laughed at the obviousness.

“First, I would get upstate to a car,” Maya said with an air of sobriety. “Then, I would drive to Minnesota and pick up my entire family.” It was obvious she’d thought through this before. “And after that… I’d probably just start heading south until I got to Mayla’s.”

Her friend nodded in agreement. “Yeah, and we’d have to go pick up—”

Oh, so it was a joint plan. “Wait, can you pick me up, too?!” I enthusiastically volunteered as tribute.

We walked back home together and parted ways with our new friends on the stoop so they could smoke.

We exchanged numbers and started a group chat; introduced ourselves by texting our names and unit numbers. We all agreed it would be nice to have someone to ask to borrow sugar from and that, out of curiosity, we should organize a grand tour of each other’s apartments.

Reese and I climbed the stairs, let ourselves in, and both said how glad we were that we went.

It’s ironic—Mayla’s icebreaker question—and I’ve been thinking about it since: our world does feel increasingly dystopian and apocalyptic. I don’t have to catalog the horrors; we’re bombarded with them everywhere, everyday. To save myself from turmoil, my base-level survival tactic is often to dissociate.

But every now and then I meet someone like Mayla, who when talking about the disturbing ethical implications of BlackRock genuinely pronounces it “Black Hawk,” and I remember there actually are remarkably good-natured, strong-willed people left in the world.

I do not know what this late capitalistic hellscape holds for us tomorrow, but I re-learn this lesson all the time: mutuality is the only way. I will be the first to admit I don’t want to come up with a contingency plan. My coping mechanism tries to ignore the fire as it’s melting the walls around me. But dissociation—isolation—will never save us. And I don’t want to just survive.

Knowing my neighbor, offering mutual aid, and building strong communities are not only the single shot we have at seeing past all this, they are what makes the day-to-day worth living.

And you know what’s interesting? The people who are good at giving help are practiced in asking for it, too. I could learn a thing or two.

Like the sprites said: Vote for Zohran <3

“No thank you,” I said without really considering. I didn’t, historically, eat them.

“Okay,” Remy shrugged and continued to eat, slurping the juice from the holes her teeth were making before it trailed down her arms.

“Actually—” I took it back. “Maybe I do want to try.”

“Have you never had a peach?” she asked in horror.

“No,” I shook my head. “Well, I guess a long time ago. But I never really liked them.” I reached for the dripping fruit with trepidation.

“Be careful, there’s a pit.”

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I was a strawberry and banana kid, full of opinions. Being a picky eater: bad. Apples: good (especially Fuji). Carrots: good, but only the cooked kind. Squash: okay. Broccoli and green beans: good, with a superiority complex on the side.

My mom taught me to “eat the rainbow” and I took the assignment very seriously. Blue, though, eluded me. I couldn’t cosign the textures of blueberries, nor their sister black- and raspberries.

Purple grapes were easy. Melons, too—I loved watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew. Pineapple was a nonstarter, left to the tastebuds of my sister.

When it was spaghetti night, she preferred our plastic jars of RAGÚ sauce with ground beef; I protested to have it over meatballs. Mom would often make both so we could all be happy. In my youth I specialized in tiny wars: Did you eat the leftovers? Why are you wearing my shirt?

A babysitter I adored told me once, after I’d made a show of screaming at my sister, to “choose my battles wisely.” I remember it feeling like a riddle. How could I discern which offenses were worth fighting?

Miraculously, the militance with which I operated in my own home evaporated when I entered others’. Above all else, I was palatable. My preferences were never prioritized over being a courteous guest. I shuddered at the behavior of my childhood friends who refused a vegetable or made a host change their dinner plans. Being “picky” was the worst taste of them all.

“Wait, it’s so good,” I said, mouth pooling with peach juice. My friends all laughed—they already knew.

I brought one back to the city in a Ziploc bag as a souvenir. Then, several days later, still shocked, I texted my life’s witness, my sister:

We never ate peaches as kids right

Like i recently discovered i love them

As in this past weekend

To which she replied that she definitely did. With mom, in fact—she has many vivid memories.

I was doubly shocked.

Part of me thinks my sister and I tried to differentiate ourselves from one another by disliking the other’s favorite foods. More difficult for my mom maybe, but for us, just another tiny feud. She’d make us try everything—“take at least two bites.” But by that point we had always already really decided. And under the careful rules of my world, nothing ever needed to be tried again.

If my adolescence was built on certainty, my early adulthood has been, more than anything, characterized by changing my mind.

In my 24th birthday Substack post I wrote:

I love this idea: that I am mysterious to myself, that there will be so much to uncover. This isn’t to say I don’t know who I am; of that, I become more sure everyday.

It means I am curious and surprising; I can try a mandarin orange for the first time since childhood, suddenly pick up a preference for hot sauce, or reach for dried pineapple and decide: you know actually, I love them. I was wrong. Or, my taste has changed.

Like when my mom and aunt allowed a sputtering eight-year old me to taste their red wine, aerated with hours of their conversation and laughter, and promised one day I’d love it—I really have come around.

I was a strawberry and banana kid but I am a fuzzy peach, mandarin orange, raspberry eating adult, with a full-bodied cabernet to boot. My tastebuds are proof that my opinions—however strongly held or physically felt—change. The bumps on my tongue say I am a continuous, recurring mystery.

And like when you burn your tongue and are suddenly scalded to awareness: the obtrusive truth is there are so many things you still have to try! And then retry for good measure. Tastebuds, after all, regenerate every 10 days—I am curious, I am brand new every fortnight; every morning.

For myself, I know I’ve still got to try vichyssoise and really listen to the full discography of Fleetwood Mac.

There was a pop up flea market I had been passing every Wednesday on my morning commute for weeks. I never stopped for my being perpetually late and not particularly caring for anything I saw they were offering.

After my peach renaissance on the Long Island Sound, though, I stopped and bought five just to be safe.

Sitting at my desk and biting into the first of the batch, I recounted my new self discovery to my coworkers and marveled at the fruit in curiosity: the juice pooling in its soft flesh, the spiky pit staring back at me. The sheer novelty of it! I wished I’d tried it sooner.

When one of our colleagues walked past, Marguerite told him my news.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought she was looking at it kinda funny.”

I know my own tastes, but I also know enough to question; inspect them.

When I was younger, I think I was accommodating but not very experimental. I realize now that there is a difference between trying everything once—cultivating a lack of “pickiness”—and abundance; indulging in the fullness of experience.

I can’t be sure where my stories come from or if they’re even really true. My sister has a different version. Mine ripple, dim, and mutate with time.

As for tastebuds, some of it is genetic, but it’s all inherited, no? Whether I like cilantro or not; which recipes have been lost or passed down; my preconceived notions of who I am or what I like, what I was exposed to.

My mom always said I had champagne taste; I think that’s true for stories. I want them to be expensive—to cost something—but I don’t care much for etiquette. It doesn’t much matter what spoon I use to shovel life’s contents into my mouth.

I know now that I’m meant to taste every single thing. With tongue—sloppy, unsure, seeking.

I still eat the rainbow, but no longer on bare necessity. I see it in multiplicity; it reveals itself in all its different shades.

“Consider this a virtual introduction 😊!! You are both the offspring of two of my favorite people in the world, which makes you two of my favorite by default!! 😊🤣”

Needless to say, we were off to a really strong start.

The sender was my mother’s best friend, Lee: a larger than life woman who built her empty nest alongside my mom’s, with a bald determination to enjoy herself—and with an open invitation for my mother to join her. Both single, postmenopausal, and with big, frizzy, bottle-dyed red hair, they’ve accompanied one another through their middle age ever since—to all the events their friends bring husbands to.

When Lee heard I’d be moving to New York City, she jumped to tell me she knew someone there I should meet. He was Simon: the son of her late friend from another state, marriage, lifetime ago. I was in no position to deny myself a friend, acquaintance, anything, so when she offered to connect us I readily agreed. I was still surprised by the word “offspring,” though.

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To our credit, Simon and I took the earnest introduction and played it pretty cool.

I still had a couple of weeks until I landed in the city, and he had upcoming travel plans, so we traded vague “I’m always down to meet new people”s and “let me know when you get settled”s before agreeing on getting coffee sometime in the near future.

Then, what’s more, we actually followed through. When the day finally arrived it was with scattered rain. My roommate’s mom was in town and taking us to brunch that morning to meet her family friend, a fellow New Yorker. Everyone in our lives—I realize now—was making an effort to help us get settled.

I texted Simon to let him know my timeline; we’d not yet decided on a firm plan:

“Heading to brunch now so I’ll keep you updated, but we’ll be in Kips Bay/Murray Hill area and I’m living in LES so I can pretty much meet you wherever! Lmk if you have a convenient spot near you or where you’re coming from and we can figure something out :)”

I was already out in the rain, after all, and I didn’t know enough about the city to suggest anything that was worth his commute. Better to let him decide, I’d thought.

Sounds good! I’m in Hell’s Kitchen so anywhere in midtown would be ideal if that works

I hadn’t been in New York long, but I knew enough to know that Midtown Manhattan was a horrible suggestion.

That works! Do you have a spot in mind?

Bluestone lane is pretty good we can try there unless you have something else in mind

So, we were going to the Midtown Manhattan location of a national chain.

No that’s great! Which location?

Is this okay?

He sent me an Apple Maps pin that literally had the words “Times Square” in the address.

Yes!

I said and gave an ETA, obviously.

Our being around the same age and of opposite genders, there was a natural ambiguity to what we were embarking on when we agreed to meet. It was, essentially, a blind date—whether romantic or not, we were yet to see.

Romance not yet out of the realm of possibility, though, I’d done a customary Google search to find out what I was working with. A private Instagram’s profile picture revealed a brunette guy with circular framed glasses—nerd, I thought. His LinkedIn page confirmed it. We could work with that.

I pulled the heavy coffee shop door open, wet humidity frosting the glass. I wiped my feet on the mat, umbrella dripping at my side, and saw the side profile of someone who resembled the photos I had found of Simon on social media. Here goes nothing.

“Simon?” I said to the shoulder blades of the stranger.

He swiveled where he sat on a metal bar stool at a high top. “Madilyn? Hi.” He smiled nervously.

“Hey,” I said, once he’d slid off the stool to face me. It would be a no-hug greeting.

We made our way to the register awkwardly, weaving between the tabes and chairs, too aware of each other’s bodies—like when you follow the hostess through a restaurant and she has to walk in slow, stilted movements on behalf of your trailing party. “So what do you like from here?” I asked, eyeing the menu.

“Oh, I don’t really come here that much.” He said. Then why did you make me? I thought. “Lately I’m trying to get off coffee, it kind of hurts my stomach.”

“Oh, okay…” I said, turning away from him to cough into my elbow—I was in the final stages of getting over a cold.

“What can I get you, miss?” the aproned barista asked cheerily.

“Um,” I said, clearing my throat. “I guess I will just do a latte? With cinnamon, if you have it.” I began pulling out my wallet.

“No, I’ve got it,” Simon said.

“Oh, are you sure?” I asked. Surprised and slightly concerned, because on my part, this was feeling less romantic by the second.

“Yeah, of course,” he said to me. Then, to the barista, “Can I get a chai latte?”

Steaming paper cups in hand, we found seats at a high top by the floor to ceiling windows, the opposite side scattered with beads of rain. Outside, people were avoiding puddles and fighting the wind with their umbrellas, but—to Simon’s credit—inside it was fairly quiet.

We shed our puffer jackets and started talking about our respective college experiences, comparing notes: mine at a football school, his at an Ivy. Conversation flowed easily, if not in the style of an interview.

About five minutes in, someone came to the edge of our table, loitering wordlessly. Since we were at a high top, our eyes were all level—Simon and I avoided the newcomer’s, but tried to communicate with ours silently.

After several beats of uncomfortable silence, the man said, “Are you talking about college?”

Simon and I looked at each other quizzically, visibly uncomfortable. The man didn’t appear to be unhoused or asking for money, but my mind—in its already socially anxious position—couldn’t slot him. “Yes,” we said reluctantly.

“Are you in college?”

“No…” Simon started.

“No, we graduated,” I said. Was he trying to sell us something? I felt an itch in my throat and avoided the urge to scratch it with a cough.

“Oh, are you 22?”

“No.” I uncomfortably croaked, trying then to be as short as possible. I registered that something wasn’t normal, but my mind was scrambling to figure out how to navigate it alongside Simon, who was only less of a stranger now that we’d been presented with someone more strange.

“Oh, are you dating?”

We both avoided each other’s eye contact and fumbled through the answer: “No, we just met.”

“Are you going to date?”

I spoke over Simon this time. “I don’t know, probably not. We just met.” I felt guilty for friend zoning him in the first ten minutes, but I figured answering in negatives was the easiest way to get this guy to leave. I then erupted into coughs.

“How do you know each other?”

Well, we don’t. My Mom’s best friend was his late mother’s best friend, I thought between gasps of air. “We’re family friends,” Simon said over my hacking. I really needed to go get some water, but I didn’t want to leave Simon alone with this man, and I had the vague worry that if I left my bag it could be stolen.

Then, just to Simon, the man asked: “But do you want to date her, eventually?”

I cut him off before Simon could answer. “What are you doing, dude?” I asked, through the wheeze of a smoker.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole,” the man said, completely changing his tune. “That was a rude thing to say. I should not have asked him that. I’m sorry.”

That was when I finally realized he was neurodivergent. But by then, the train was already bent on crashing.

“I just don’t have any family friends my age,” he continued. “I don’t have women… I don’t know a girl that’s a family friend that’s my age. I am—my family is Chinese and we had family friends, but they are white… they are American, and they were two and three, and I was six and my sister was seven, but we don’t speak any more. I don’t know what I should do. Do you know what I should do about that?”

I had already resigned myself not to reply—to at least let the man pick up on the awkward, unwanted silence—but Simon, taking pity, responded: “You should reach out to them.”

“I don’t have a phone any more, I had to sell my phone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said without much feeling, eyeing my phone on the table and hoping he wouldn’t ask me to use it.

He continued. “Yeah, I used to have ten laptops, but then they all got taken because I was watching porn—sorry.”

That was enough for me. “Okay! We just met. Do you mind?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry,” he said before scurrying away.

Simon and I looked at each other in awe, our eyes having doubled in size. My throat felt like sandpaper. “I’m gonna go get a glass of water,” I rasped. “Watch my phone, I guess,” I tried to joke.

When I returned with a tiny paper cup, the man was still within earshot, directing his random inquiries at someone else. Thus, Simon and I attempted to pick up our conversation where we’d left off, both of us only half there/half processing what the hell had just happened.

When the gentleman finally left the premises or was escorted out, I brought it up: “I’m sorry, that was crazy?”

“Yeah, I’m not very good at handling those sort of situations,” Simon said.

“Typically I am,” I said. “But I don’t think I handled this one very well.”

He said it had been one of the craziest things he’d seen in the city so far, and again, I hadn’t been in New York City long, but I was certain there were crazier.

Still, I was thrown by the random encounter, and by mine and Simon’s inability to right it for one another. With a close friend, I could talk through and metabolize the most bizarre of things—“that guy was an asshole” suffices for most—but, with Simon, we didn’t know each other. There would be no shared understanding of what just happened, no closure.

It’s not like we had absolutely hit it off in the first place, but we trudged on through the rest of our meeting like that: unable to ever fully shake the perturbed spell that man had brought over us. We asked each other about our jobs, our roommates, our respective neighborhoods—but, at least for me, the unsettled nature of that encounter kept coming to the surface, like an intrusive thought.

On the bright side, when I told him I was living in the Lower East Side, Simon said he had a childhood friend who lived in the area named Zoe—who was super fun, always throwing parties, and who he thought I’d get along really well with.

When we parted ways, still accompanied by the rain, it was with the ambiguous agreement to see one another again, in one of these group settings.

On my way home, slightly lost in the Times Square train lines and battling the rain, I sent a voice memo to my best friend: “He was really fun. Well, I was really fun. He was pleasant to speak to. But I’d see him again, you know, if he invites me to hang out with his friends.”

He never texted me again.

A year went by—a New York minute. I’d found and lost friends, joined two book clubs and a gym. I’d built a life for myself. My 25th birthday was approaching.

Winter again, February in New York City was proving difficult to coordinate a place big enough to hold all the people I wanted there to celebrate. All my dreams were, honestly, incompatible. I cared most about having a nice dinner at this quaint, rotating set menu spot in Brooklyn, but had aspirations of going to karaoke afterwards. The problem was, asking thirty-ish people—many of whom did not know each other—to show up to a private karaoke room did *not* seem like the vibe. You had to ease them into it, right?

My ingenious solution was an 8pm dinner in Brooklyn, a 10pm meet up at a random games bar in the LES, then midnight karaoke to follow. Quite the ambitious itinerary. (We were, in fact, late to every reservation.)

At the expensive dinner place, gratuity included, we accidentally double tipped. The games bar had no record of our reservation. To the karaoke place—which had called me the previous day to tell me they were double booked and would stick us in a smaller room with a round of free shots to compensate—I unexpectedly showed up with my full party. We sat on each other’s laps and sang too loud to hear each other say goodbye. I didn’t realize until after we closed out that we’d been overcharged.

The next morning, I was riddled with hangxiety. Why did I have to do so many expensive things? Why wasn’t I born in June so thirty people could just, I don’t know, come to a picnic?! Why didn’t I make enough money to just cover the difference—why did this come down to complex math and Venmo requesting people, on my birthday of all days?!

I sought comfort at my gym, not to workout, but to see the people that frequented the Saturday morning class—a few of which were with me at my party the night before, but apparently had been far less imbibed.

I walked in smelling like alcohol and regret, wearing my—recently gifted—Juicy Couture track suit and toting an obscenely large Dunkin coffee. We chit chatted and used the white boards to work out the math problems of my bank account.

“Wait, do you know Simon?” my friend Zoë randomly asked, eyes glued to her phone.

“Who?” I asked.

She flipped her phone around and I saw it—a photo of me at my party, replied to by that tiny profile picture of the guy I’d met at the Times Square Bluestone over a year before.

We cackled as I told her the story of Simon and I meeting, the sheer awkwardness of having to navigate that situation with him. Knowing both of us better than Simon or I knew each other, she affirmed me the ways he couldn’t. We marveled at the miracle of it; that he failed to introduce us but we found each other anyway. Invisible string theory.

In the months since, I’ve seen Simon several times—through events coordinated by Zoë. We small talk, we catch up, but we’ve still never brought up the weird interaction of our first meeting.

Zoë, me, and the Universe herself, though… we laugh about it all the time.

The first time we hung it, in my college apartment with the tall, dusty ceilings, we jimmy rigged it—as my mom would say—by hanging L-shaped corner brackets and balancing the piece atop them with heavy duty mounting tape sandwiched between. Stepping back to assess our work, my mom shook the shelf and concluded it wouldn’t fall. Then she uncharacteristically added that, more importantly, it wouldn’t noisily bang against the wall. “Mom!” I recoiled at her insinuation, then changed the topic quickly with pink in my cheeks. She insisted I was old enough now. I still wonder when I made the switch.

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In an in-between place that wouldn’t allow holes in the wall, I sourced cinder blocks to balance the shelf, draping the stacks of concrete in yards of Joann’s fabric to conceal my craftiness. I loaded the teetering structure with all of my books, then only the ones I really loved as my collection grew—to this day, I bookend them the way my college roommate’s mom taught me to.

Rotating knickknacks and bric-a-brac clutter the empty spaces between the books; objects that don’t have any utility or fit anywhere else, but which I allow myself to keep—to ascribe outsized emotional significance to—because they are tokens of my life. I keep the ticket stubs, allow the candles to collect dust. This is my resting place, I say, I’m making a mausoleum for myself.

I was only taking suitcases and my cat, so when my post-grad roommate started plotting out the contents of his U-Haul, bound for New York City, I asked if he could squeeze in two of my biggest things: my area rug and my beloved headboard bookshelf.

Comically, the rug which lived under my bed in every other room I’ve slept in now stretches the entirety of our apartment’s living room—it’s the only one in which it fits. My headboard, though, is the perfect size, but terminally overcrowded; I can’t squeeze a bedside table along its side.

Maybe this is what made it crash—at first it was just a slide. The shelf itself is light, and the building was erected in 1900. I’d used the mom method unthinkingly. After a year and a half, it started to creep away from the wall, I noticed with curiosity; the double-stick tape was slipping, but the L brackets held. I pushed it back, continued sleeping peacefully.

One night, lamp lit and retainer in, I leaned into the headboard and felt it give. My perfume samples rolled to the floor, my pillows caught dusty photo booth strips, and the L-shaped brackets pulled from the dry wall, making powder. Photo evidence tells me it was approximately 12:19am.

Tomorrow’s problem, I went to sleep—and given the circumstances, still rather soundly.

It’s ironic, because in all my waking hours I’d been feeling it for weeks: this low-grade, incessant, humming restlessness. A symptom of being on this side of 25, I suspect. (Dramatic diagnosis, seeing as I turned it less than six months ago, but alas).

My pre-existing conditions were as follows:

A) Being a product of the American South
B) Inhabiting a body gendered ‘woman’
C) Feeling like, against all better logic, something always has to be on the horizon; I constantly need to be striving

Points of possible exposure to Restlessness:

A) Romantically, meeting someone near(!) what I’m looking for but not quite right. Letting this drag on slowly and painfully, etc. etc.
B) Professionally, getting promoted—okay, great, but—through a slow, arduous process that catalyzed questions of “What am I even doing here?” and “Do I really want a ‘career’ like that?”
C) Personally, my two best friends from high school announcing a pregnancy and engagement within a week of each other*
*Objectively, really top notch news. I love you guys.

It was all just the perfect storm. I came down with the bug. A bad case of Restlessness, capital R.

The side effects:

A) Paranoia, i.e. Am I where I’m supposed to be? Am I doing the right thing?
B) Comparison: THEY are THERE with THOSE THINGS! (Notably, typically not places or things I truly desire, at least not in the specifics.)
C) Wanting to do something crazy to shake things up. Ex: get bangs, break my lease

What I’m saying in loosely lifted medical jargon, really, is that I’ve been infected with the swelling possibilities of my mid-twenties.

I feel it, like a tumor under my ribcage: the pressure of my potential, and lodged against its side, my heart, my dreams—the fear of squandering them.

Everyone I know is either getting married or promoted. On this side of my twenties, I’m meant to choose: be a wife or build a career. The truth is, I want both, and more still. But the timeline is paralyzing.

After several nights of sleeping under my fallen headboard, I walked to my local hardware store, determined to re-hang it and to do it right this time. “How can I help you, miss?” a man greeted me over the counter.

“Hi,” I said with thick sincerity, blinking my eyes the way I do when I want someone to want to help me. I fished the props out of my bag: an L-shaped bracket with a single, drywall caked screw hanging from it. “So, I had a headboard hanging on two of these things,” I said in mild embarrassment, holding the L upside-down and against my hand so he could picture it with me.

“It was just, like, balanced on top, with mounting tape to secure it… it’s not very heavy, and it was working fine for a year and a half, but it recently fell. So, I’m thinking I need some longer screws? And maybe a few washers? And maybe another one or two of these, if you have ‘em,” I finally finished, swinging my metal “L” in a flourish.

“Ma’am, this is a locksmith store,” he said in response.

“Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry,” I blushed. To my credit, he did still want to help.

“You’re fine,” he laughed, “you can go to 90 Delancey Street and they’ll have everything you need. But, is it in studs?”

“I am sooo sorry,” I continued, for obvious reasons.

“No, you’re fine, but is it mounted in studs?”

“Oh, studs? Um, no. No, I guess not,” I said, feeling sufficiently dumb now—not just the kind I was putting on for his help.

“Well, if you just measure 12 inches from the corner you can find one. Then, you could hang it with what you have now,” he gestured to my L. “You wouldn’t even need new stuff.”

I was still stuck on the locksmith bit. He had to explain the studs to me several more times, I regret to admit.

When I got home, employing the toolbox of my aforementioned post-grad roommate, I cleared away the bookshelf and started to drill. 12 inches away from the corner, as instructed: nothing. I sought the handy post-grad roommate’s counsel. He said to move over an inch and a half and try again: no dice. I went on like this for several more inch and a halves.

“I wish I had a stud finder,” he said, laughing with me in my project of Swiss cheesing the wall. The floor below—along with all the miscellanea I have no choice but to store under my bed—was covered in white dust.

“It’s fine!” I said over the noise of the cordless drill. I kept going. “How will I know when I hit one?”

“Oh, you’ll feel it.”

I lifted the shelf back up onto its L-shaped brackets, replaced the heavy duty, double stick tape. Stepped back, admired my work. Even shook it all a bit, just to test.

I dusted the books and discarded some of the trinkets, but kept most. I turned on my lamp and turned back the covers and felt, again, at home. Despite all the incessant, distracting noise, I stole a bit of sleep. I felt a morsel of peace.

I don’t know when I woke up and wasn’t a kid any more; when time became something I was no longer trying to rush. How my mom can, in one turn of phrase, switch from protecting me from sex to encouraging me to get some. A collection of imperceptible changes that amount to “When did I become old enough for this?”

It would be so much easier if I had a stud finder for the expansive, blank wall of my life; a little machine that would beep for me when I get close. But I don’t! And in the process—of building my life, of inventing it for myself—I am left with a lot of tests and pilot holes.

But the project is never in vain. I am making something sturdy, I’m decorating the shelves to my liking. I’m following my creative whims and learning my own tastes. It is not time wasted, and when I feel restless, I’m being reminded of what anchors me.

Last week, in California, I had a reunion with old friends that I didn’t know how badly I needed; conversations in which we made it to the meat of what we’re feeling/moving through within the first fifteen minutes. We all bore our hearts, then, when thanked for sharing said, “It’s you guys—what do I have to hide from you?”

I told them about the Restlessness, and it naturally started to shrink. I really missed New York—I could see with the perspective from that other coast—and all things considered, I’m inordinately lucky. They listened. I was challenged and held; filled to the brim, and reminded that my career and love life are not the only signifiers of progress—that devaluing my female friendships is not only an ingrained, ugly habit, but a really foolish mistake.

With the recalibration of their love, of some time away in the sun, I feel a renewed resolve to sit in the restlessness—little r—and to allow the discomfort.

My room is too small—the rug we lugged here won’t even fit. And that’s fine except that I have no flat surfaces besides my headboard, and I use the corner of that to hang my bras, their cups stained with sweat. My dating life is shit and I don’t know what I want to do with my future—or, I do, but I’m not sure how exactly I’ll make it happen yet—or, I am, but I’m scared shitless over it. I feel it all the time: the pull to have something figured out. I want so much and I feel so in the middle. There is nothing over the horizon but this—wanting.

It’s excruciating, but I’m fighting the paralysis. And, I think, when there’s nothing new around the bend—no big relationship or career news—then I can direct my gaze inward. I peek beneath the drywall, inspect the bones. I’m practicing trust in myself; in the timing of my life. I’m learning to find the studs.

In doing so you are saying to the Universe, shouting to the Ticketmaster gods and beyond, “I will have fun! And damnit, if I have to, I will do it by myself!” All at once you are betting that the experience of that concert will be worth any potential awkwardness of being alone, and you are putting a lot of belief not only in the artist’s ability to entertain, but also in your own ability to enjoy—both of which are not necessarily in your control.

In my case, I bought the ticket months ago, on a whim, because who can plan for June when it’s only November, but why would you live in New York City if not to see an artist you love when they pass through on tour?

I think purchasing one ticket is a defiantly hopeful act, but it’s safer than buying two.

With one ticket, you have the mental safeguard of leaving plans “tentative,” can feel superior for your having solo plans on a Tuesday night in the distant future, and secretly hope that in the meantime you can rope someone into joining you.

Inevitably, in the coming weeks, the possibility of securing a companion dwindles in direct correlation to the amount of time left before the event. But, with only one ticket, you still feel a sense of security, of nonchalance: if better plans arise, you can just forfeit the cost. For the small price of $39.50 + the affiliated fees, you can wash your hands of the whole thing. It was a fun idea, after all.

Two tickets? Well, you’d have to sell those.

I’ve been a victim of aspirational one-ticket purchases in the past. This isn’t to say they were negative experiences, just that my expectations outsized the results. I offer two case studies:

1. Moon Taxi: Varsity Theatre. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. October 2023.

It was in the dragging months before my move to New York. I was looking for work, living with my father and my cat in a town of 6,800 people, without any connection to anyone my age. A band I knew was coming through a nearby city—why not? I thought.

I bought a single ticket, sans any hope there’d be another. If I was going to be alone, I might as well do it with live music.

I stayed with my PawPaw for the night, drove myself to the venue mortifyingly early, and bought myself a Blue Moon. I labored for far too long on what part of the floor to stand, eventually landed on a spot next to a boy/girl group of college students you could feel the sexual tension dripping from, then spent the entire opening set watching them—trying to decipher who was with who—and nodding along wordlessly to the band. I finished my beer, all too aware of my empty hand.

In the interim between the opener and the main act, I complimented one of the more approachable girls or her me, and we chatted until showtime—what a relief. Numbers were exchanged with promises to see each other on the coming college game day. That never happened, neither of us really wanted it to, but I was thankful for the lowbrow company.

2. JP Saxe: Webster Hall. New York, New York. March 2024.

It was in the thick of my honeymoon phase with The City; I would’ve gone canvasing door-to-door by myself just to spend time with Her. I bought the ticket because I had to; I’d never seen him—the only artist to ever surpass Taylor Swift for most-played on my Spotify Wrapped—perform live. His 2021 album Dangerous Levels of Introspection undid any semblance of healing I’d accomplished from my high school relationship. By 2024, the guy all the songs were about was married, but I still loved them the same.

I showed up to the venue a little late, took romantic photos of the marquee sign, tried to find a spot in the densely packed crowd. I had a massive, flimsy plastic beer cup in one hand for emotional support, my phone glued to the other—texting someone I’d just met, wishing it wasn’t too soon to have invited him, but thankful for the excuse to introduce myself as someone who goes to concerts solo.

There was a couple next to me, so drunk on each other’s love—lust—attention that they kept bumping into me with it. They were swaying, staring into each other’s eyes, and passionately encroaching on the already limited personal space of everyone around them. If I were watching it from another five feet away, I would’ve found it endearing.

At some point, with the shaky hands I’ve always had, I held up my phone to take a video of the stage—my beer-cauldron hand steadying the glued-to-the-phone one. “Hey,” the lovebird slurred, “some people are trying to see, here.”

Please note that I am a person who, when she drove a motorized vehicle, would think about someone honking at her for calendar days after it had happened. So, as you can imagine, I took this comment to heart. My beer was glued to my side for the rest of the night, until I finally found the bottom of it and set the empty on the floor—only to be crushed by the couples’ swaying feet, still captivated by one another’s close faces. Some people are trying to see, alright.

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That brings us to earlier this week, when my most recent one-ticket purchase came reaping. It was for Ashe, an artist I’m sure I found the same way most everyone else did: from her 2019 hit single “Morale of the Story”—vulnerable, compositionally creative, and a tad sad. My bread and butter.

I soon listened to her entire discography and decided I loved everything she touched. Dabbled in her 2021 album Ashlyn, drank up her 2022 Rae. Didn’t think much more about her until a post showed up on my feed in June of 2024, announcing her third studio album, Willson. Upon a closer look, I noticed the announcement came after over a year of silence on her socials and a cancellation of her previous tour.

It wasn’t just her third studio album, then, but a comeback one. I was intrigued.

When Willson was released in September, I listened dutifully and liked it well enough. What was more compelling than the music was the branding. A red-gingham-clad Miss Americana, joining Niall Horan onstage as a special guest and making music with Suki Waterhouse, this version of Ashe was sexy and angry and distinctly back on the scene.

Perhaps most intriguing to me was that smack dab in the middle of all this simultaneous career progression was an engagement announcement to John Canada—the drummer from the Alabama-born band The Brook & The Bluff—who, before the post, I hadn’t even realized she was dating. All this news emerged in quick succession and served to show how little I truly knew about the artist personally.

What has always resonated with me about Ashe’s music is her messy honesty—much of which in her early work focused on her divorce—so seeing her reemerge from a health sabbatical with 12 new songs and a fiancé was… a pleasant surprise. It was also just really genius, satisfying marketing that she made three albums titled after her given and family names before getting married and possibly changing any of them.

When she announced her tour would be a trilogy—performing all three: Ashlyn, Rae, Willson—I knew I had to go. It was her Eras Tour after her Reputation album. And again, the branding.

Two weeks before the start of her tour, Ashe posted a carousel on Instagram cataloging her boundaries—titled in the screenshot of her Notes App, “The Trilogy Tour ~take care of each other~ handbook.”

Spanning general advice of “drink lots of water” to addressing requests to sing “Ryne’s Song” about her brother who passed away, it was an interesting read, especially in the context of the Chappell-Roan-adjacent conversations the industry has recently been having about artists’ boundaries.

Ashe’s comment section was an outpouring of support, but as a fairly regular concertgoer and (I would like to think) a generally respectful/considerate person, I was left wondering how much of what she listed was common sense, and for those for whom it wasn’t, if writing it all out in detail would change their behavior. In the context of her cutting her last tour short, I couldn’t help but think it read as sort of fragile. I respected the intention, but questioned the execution. I was ever-more curious to see this comeback.

To up the ante even more, the day before my show, Ashe and Finneas—artist, producer, and Billie Eilish’s older brother—announced their formation of a band, The Favors. I had a sneaking suspicion we might be seeing him in New York.

The night of the concert finally arrived. I had an impromptu post-work happy hour, which was just as well, because attending a concert alone off the dual buzz of three free dirty martinis and gossiping with your coworkers was preferable to eating a hurried dinner before buying yourself a beer at the venue. The martinis and gossip were so good, in fact, that I was running late. I actually highly recommend it.

It meant I unintentionally skipped the awkward bit about deciding where to stand, about what to do with my body when I didn’t know the opener. I didn’t wait in a line, just walked right through the metal detectors and joined the edge of the crowd, unknowingly straddling the imaginary boundary that designated standing room from a thoroughfare:

3. Ashe: Brooklyn Steel. Brooklyn, New York. June 2025.

“Miss, you can’t stand there,” the man wearing a shirt that said “SECURITY” told me—something about VIP or fire code or some other rule I couldn’t quite hear—over the music. It was one of my favorite of Ashe’s new songs, and I’d already missed the beginning. Briefly, I resented that he and all the other self-important security men were there, attending the concert for free, and didn’t even recognize the significance. But then, of course, I obeyed.

Ashe was also there, in the flesh, wearing a candy apple red dress with the best blowout I’ve ever seen flowing in the manmade wind of electric fans set at each corner of her stage. When she got to the bridge, she stepped away from her microphone, stopped singing, and the crowd took over—forming a chorus of her words back to her. For just a moment, in the buzzing, romantic, liminal space of having drank three martinis and rushed to Brooklyn for a concert—I wished I could have fame like that.

I ran with the fantasy: a crowd who loves you, who picks up when you drop off at the microphone. With hair that’s the sexiest thing about you—defying gravity—standing in front of fans that blow as well as fans that cheer for you and thinking wow, I’ve really made it.

But, even in my warm and fuzzy state, I quickly remembered that I can’t sing like that. I hoped—like I so often do in the presence of moving art—that I could write something instead.

I’m lucky: that brand of jealousy only lasts a moment for me. It quickly alchemizes to a kind of hopeful gratitude. Seeing good art, being in the presence of a good artist, reminds me that art can be made, that it has to; it’s possible and vital. Being in a crowd, witnessing and holding a candle for someone’s dreams coming true will always be an honor. It makes me feel like I’m getting closer to my own.

Perhaps it was the martinis, or my projecting my life experiences onto all the songs, but I was so struck with emotion. At some point, Ashe prompted fans to hold up their signs and started reading them aloud. She read one which said someone was attending the concert in memory of their best friend who had recently been lost to cancer. “Awe honey,” Ashe said—emotion caught in everyone’s throat—“how long ago?” “April? Oh, so this is recent,” she said, allowing the audience to listen in on her half of the conversation. “I am so sorry for your loss,” she said, “fuck cancer!”

She called forward her guitarist, and they sat together at the front of a riser, center stage. She said she couldn’t sing “Ryne’s Song,” but she had another one she’d like to dedicate to her brother and to all our loved ones we’d lost. “Life is short y’all, hold your people tight,” she said before playing “Love Is Letting Go.”

At this point, I was sobbing, because I’m not an animal(!) and I thought I was being rather casual and dignified about the whole thing, but the security guard who had previously reprimanded me for standing in the walking path wordlessly leaned over and handed me a tissue, so, how’s that for irony?

It was a really beautiful night, and Finneas did end up making an appearance. They played their new song, “The Little Mess You Made.” I can now say I was in the first ever crowd to witness The Favors on stage <3

It is interesting to live in this cultural moment when an artist’s right to establish boundaries is up for debate—crazy to think there is virtually no precedent for the conversation at all. Even I, when presented with an example, struggled to form my own positive opinion.

I suppose fame addles everyone’s brains, even the fans.

It is ironic—shameful, even—that I could experience envy for the red dress, the blowout, the fans and hold criticism for how she handles it in the same hand.

I caught on video a moment of dialogue between Ashe and the crowd, and I think what shines through from it most—from my entire concert experience and the months of speculation that led up to it—is her humanity:

“You know, there was a very real chance that I was never gonna come back on the stage again. Um, and… there were two things that got me back up here: one was… extensive therapy! So much therapy. And truly, truly, the second thing is I missed you so so much.

Thank you—thank you for being here, thank you for caring. I know that it wasn’t promised that, you know, after all this time I would come back and you would be here, and it just means the world to me. I just want you to know how grateful I am.”

She ended the show on “Moral of the Story;” the song that started it all, and she made no disclaimer about who the song was about, how much she’d changed since making it, or how she was now engaged to be married to someone, I’m sure, who is so much better. She just sang it, her song.

I was struck by it: how someone can be so ardently, wholeheartedly, and completely something—in love, a wife, a touring musician—and then cease to be anymore. How you can change your mind and change it again, and still make art about that; how you don’t owe anyone a disclaimer.

I think there should be more room for artists to advocate for themselves. Ground rules should be the norm not the exception. If that were the case, spectators to the conversation—like me—wouldn’t think twice or feel the need to form an opinion.

In her Instagram carousel handbook, Ashe used the word “dehumanizing.” At the time, I thought it was a tad dramatic. Now, I’m recognizing a pattern of only women expressing concern or adding to this larger “boundaries” conversation.

I think of times I have engaged in performance, namely, when I waited tables for three summers at a touristy beach restaurant. There was a thin line between flattery or a mutualistic exchange, and dehumanization or the diffuse feeling of sexual harassment—crossed quite expeditiously any time a stranger I was serving touched me.

I still have a particular sore spot for when in crowded restaurants or bars a man I don’t know touches the small of my back to get by. It is, if not directly, then at least in the family of the word dehumanizing.

Inherent in any performance is a level of distinction between the real person and the act, but before they were performers, these people were artists. And if we, as fans, want them to continue making art, their humanity is of utmost importance.

I am really glad I attended this concert alone. I belonged there, and it mattered so much that it was just me. There were no rude fans, just overzealous security guards, and I didn’t buy a single beer but I did feel extremely dehydrated from all the martinis.

And I know it was just my flair for the dramatic, but walking home in a hoard of the Brooklyn crowd to the Grand Street station, I thought that it felt like a pilgrimage of like-minded souls. I didn’t need to worry about checking maps. I knew exactly where I was going, and I got coconut water to rehydrate on the way.

It’s compulsive. I can’t help it. I remember the anniversary of the day I met someone just as well as the one they left. Songs are portals. Entire neighborhoods—street corners—dog breeds belong to certain memories, forsaken people; I evade them all. Except the songs.

I still feel the contours of specific times in my life; when pressed too hard they feel like bruises. It’s a rather embarrassing affliction, really. For everyone else, time is a healer; for me, it is a curious and powerful reminder.

There are gifts, too. The dull aches evidence how vibrant my experiences were—so loud they left an echo. My still caring, even long after my counterparts have presumably moved on, affords me a crystallized self understanding, a humble honesty. I dwell, I lament. I sap everything I can from the time spent. It’s never in vain.

But when I feel the change in the air, I remember who I was the last time. A breeze brushes the baby hairs from my face; the veil between all the versions of myself feels so thin.

In some ways, I am still grieving for that believing girl. In others, I feel vindictive. In all: protective, prone to self-advocacy—an indication, I think, that I really am healing.

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Last summer I experienced what I’m still reluctant to call heartbreak. For our purposes here, we’ll call it heart-crack. I spent hot, hedonistic days overcompensating for the disappointment. I made bad choices and I still stand by most of them.

I also found my gym—moving my body for the first time in my life in a way that I really loved; marveling at myself strengthening. I fell back on friendship. I was never alone; a host of women caught me in good company. I wrote less. This always happens when I’m falling in near-love or coming out of it; it colors everything I could say—most of which I’m not ready to yet.

It’s been a year now, and I’m still not sure what to say. I think that’s the problem with situationships: you don’t feel the right to grieve them. Without labels, you can’t assign—validate—the loss. Besides, writing about an ex, no matter how ambiguous the relationship, is just so gauche, no? But, this isn’t really about him; it’s about me. You’re reading an entire publication dedicated to my personal essays, after all.

It was a summer of survival, I joked. I threw myself into dating, kissed strangers out of necessity, continued seeing someone I wasn’t interested in because I needed to pass the time. I had a lot of fun. It was my first New York summer, my first Pride Month! But it all occurred in the negative—in defiant contrast—to this looming disappointment. I was overcompensating, and it colored everything.

Now the air is changing again. Suddenly, I remember summer so well.

Like every year, I feel it—the frenzy of seasonal change; the ardent, foolish hope that things could be completely new. Somehow, I still believe it: this summer will be different.

I know now about the bodega that blends fresh fruit into ice drinks, cash only.

I’ve discovered a new love for coconut water, Vita Coco Pressed if possible. Liquid Death iced teas, Trader Joe’s green tea flavored mochi ice creams. I’m dabbling in Swedish candies, fruity over chocolate.

The outdoor dining structures are coming down, new scaffolding ever going up. My heart is forever a construction zone.

It’s been a year since that random, embarrassing, disappointing heart-crack and I’ve found nearer-love since, but sometimes, when the humid, hopeful summer air hits me just right, when I turn a random street corner or hear a certain song, I still feel it.

I am struck by how much I’ve changed and how much I haven’t.

I’m still the person who when given the opportunity will dive in head first, despite my better judgement. But, that judgement is a bit finer-tuned. I have my own best interest at heart, even if I’m still prone to romanticizing it. I see every glass I’m given as half-full, and when it’s all drank up I mourn it by myself—I man the graveyard, even when the tombstones don’t have names, no labels.

That’s okay. I wouldn’t change it. It’s the cost of living as me, and I pay it dutifully.

I still think this summer will be different. It’s inevitable, it has to be; that’s the nature of things. But I don’t think it means I have to be. I’m starting to come around to the idea that the problem was never really me xxx

Portals to last summer:

Summers are spent with the smells of lawn clippings and honeysuckle. Winters without a heavy coat. Tea is served cold, sickeningly sweet. Strangers are few and far between, but they all wear a smile.

Recipes are passed down. Prejudices, too. Redlines are maintained, education underfunded, history selective. Tradition overvalued, unanimity assumed.

I found out Donald Trump will speak at my alma mater’s 2025 commencement ceremony from an Instagram post.

The day before, I discovered the Pope had passed away via an X Pop Base notification about JD Vance.

These feel like the latest in a lineup of increasingly bizarre, dystopian news events spanning back almost a decade now. With each installment, the threshold for the absurd inches higher; I become less shock-able, more numb.

I’m not alone in feeling this way, I know.

My peers ran to the comments, reposted to their Instagram stories, shared petitions. I sat back and watched, unsure of what I could say that hasn’t already been said.

On a weekly basis, I oscillate between so much disappointment, anger, fear, and helplessness. Social media activism feels performative, talking to my friends doesn’t feel like enough. The result is that I often don’t do anything; I dissociate.

My silence isn’t complicity, but I know it doesn’t hurt their cause. So, although it feels nearly impossible to articulate all of my thoughts, I think I need to try.

Next to sugarcane and cotton, I am a product of the South.

Every generation of my family I can name hails from Louisiana or Alabama. Inhabitants of Cajun bayous and backwards backwoods, victims of the unachievable American Dream and shrinking middle class, successfully angered and incentivized by inciting politicians —these are my family. This is where I come from.

It’s hard to explain, even to myself, how the shift happened in me. It was 2020, and months of digging up the roots.

Young, rightfully angry, and determined to assert my differing identity, I rejected—rather heavy-handedly— almost everything I’d ever known; tore down the plantation-style columns of the houses that built me, burned bridges, locked myself in my ivory tower.

The University of Alabama was my site of revelation, my safe haven of progress, what nurtured my anger and offered activism instead, where I found like-minded community and belonging in the chaos.

With the help of my professors, I named my experiences and put them in their appropriate sociopolitical contexts. I began to conceptualize my circumstances as symptomatic of larger systems at play, and to understand my role in them.

And eventually, after significant damage had already been done, I started to hate my origins less. I started reconstructing my bridges.

Much like with the University itself, which was built with the labor of enslaved people whose fingerprints are still stamped on the buildings’ bricks, I realized you can’t so easily separate the present from its not-so-distant past.

We are, after all, still an institution funded by the physical labor of Black bodies. Now, they are just donned in football jerseys and celebrated; fingerprints replaced with plaque-adorned hands and feet decorating different cement —we call it the Walk of Fame. “Built by Bama,” indeed, but also responsible for its building.

It is a tangled, fraught history; a contested identity we all share.

There are the sorority mansions and the Machine, yes, but also the diversity of our student body, the breadth of our talent, interest, and heart.

Mostly, from my time at the University of Alabama, I learned that multiple things can be true at once.

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The University of Alabama faculty and staff are not represented by Donald Trump. The 2025 graduating classes —full of the bright, ambitious, curious minds of our future— are sorely misrepresented by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is and always has been a figurehead of the 1%, of egregious wealth and pompous, arrogant power, and his attendance at this year’s commencement ceremonies reflect the stronghold his office has on Alabama’s administration, nothing more. It is merely a confirmation of what we’ve always known: power pools at the top.

These proceedings can cause us to lose faith in our authority figures, but we cannot allow it to rob us of our faith in one another.

It is the smoking gun of my privilege that it took me until 2020 to become a politically conscious person. It is one of the big breaks of my life that I had the cushion of Alabama’s campus community to make a crash landing on.

The dissension this decision has caused captures Alabama in all its contradictions; every step we make forward seems to be cursed with two steps back. And at different points in my life, I have been on both sides of the argument.

All I can say is that growing up in the South I believed in and deeply trusted the people around me. I still love them, and I understand where they are coming from; I know all too well how easily anger can be misdirected.

And still, I know the South can change; I am living proof of it.

I keep coming back to something a fellow alumnus I have never met said, via Instagram stories reshared by a mutual friend:

“The administration may be allowing this but I want to note that Alabama will forever be the place where I was taught, by deeply compassionate and honestly overqualified professors, to see the world in a broader and bigger light than my own, where I developed deeper empathy and where I began to believe in a better world.

“They might think the south is their safe haven, but that’s because they’re scared to lose it. The south is the forefront of our revolution, and there are people fighting every day for it. Sad to see UA will continue to be on the wrong side of history. F*ck Donald Trump.”

—@exxtratrestrail, asterisk mine

When the 25-year-old Hinge match I’d been texting for a month cancelled on me again for his very important work in IB, I wasn’t really disappointed, just felt like the whole thing was a waste of a hair wash. I replied:

Ah no worries, my friends are going out for St. Patty’s so it all works out. Lmk if and when you want to raincheck!

Which, looking back, was perhaps too nice. But it was true: I was grateful to have other plans, and I wasn’t surprised. He’d done this once before.

So I pivoted; I got ready for a night with the girls. And as I pulled a “Kiss Me” trucker hat down over my freshly blow dried part, applied tubing mascara to my eyelashes, and stepped out onto the sidewalk, I felt that almost imperceptible charge in the air —when the gust from a closed door opens an unexpected window. Possibility.

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I saw him before he saw me. From across the room of our second bar, seated in a small circle booth which I was guarding religiously despite its not being coveted by any competitors in particular.

Still, I was dutifully holding down the fort while the rest of my friends played pool. At some point, he had joined them.

“Who is that?” I asked Nat, who was keeping me company. Her eyes tracked my gaze. She didn’t know, but he was cute, we agreed.

“We’re having a lot of fun over there,” Sarah came to tell us, pool cue in one hand, sweating Downeast cider can in the other. “You guys should come over.”

We reluctantly agreed. I’m not all that good at pool, and also, need I reiterate the false importance of guarding the circle booth?

I resumed my spectatorship from a nearby barstool, and not very subtly, I suppose, because at some point the mystery man and I locked eyes over the fuzzy pool table green. He silently waved. I smiled, caught. My hand mirrored his.

He was called Tim: the same as my two least favorite of my Mom’s exes. -2

He was Canadian. +1

He was also visiting NYC from Austin. -5

See, it’s just that as a rule, I don’t really do that any more —go for people who aren’t available. Who aren’t real, viable options. I’ve been there, done that… more than I care to admit.

My favorite genre of romantic prospect, historically, has been someone who is: Perfect, but.

But, they just got out of a serious relationship. But they’re leaving for the summer. But they’re not completely over their ex. And, most recently, an impressive all three!!!

In the end, despite the fact that the onus should fall on the person who didn’t know what they wanted —the one who wasn’t ready but tried anyway— the only blame I can really make stick is to myself. The signs were there all along, and I ignored them in favor of hope. It doesn’t make me at fault, necessarily, but it does make me a willing accomplice. And a foolish one, at that.

So it’s with all this available information, and my prior experience, that I filed Tim —the Canadian visiting from Austin— into the mental category of Not a Possibility.

But of course, reader, that’s not where he stayed.

What can I say? Chance was in the air. Everyone gets to be good at pool once.

We ended that first night at Joe’s Pizza, a whopping 10 blocks down and two avenues over from where we started at a random bar called, not unironically, “The One Trick Pony.” We bought $40 worth of pepperoni “dollar slice” pizza for four of us, paid in hastily withdrawn ATM cash.

Tim had to pee, and I told him to go in an alley but not to get a ticket.

When he came back, I very smartly asked if he had washed his hands. He laughed, bought three waters, and handed one to a homeless man outside, along with a slice.

I don’t know how we all got separated, but somehow he and I ended up sitting on two stools near a wall ledge —feet propped on the bars of each other’s seats, sandwiching our knees— while our friends engaged in deep, drunken conversation in the center of the room. It was here that I finally thought to ask him how old he was.

“Guess,” he said through a mouthful of greasy cheese.

“Hmmm… 28?”

He shook his head with a small smile, like he was keeping a secret.

“What?! Older??”

“Yep.”

“Thirty,” I said in disbelief.

“Older.”

“32…”

He pointed up with his thumb.

“What! 33?” I gasped.

We continued on like this: me counting up by intervals of one, in complete disbelief, until we arrived at 37.

“Thirty-seven,” I repeated in shock, tried to let it sink in.

“Thirty-seven,” he owned it.

I spent every night with him for the rest of that week.

It was a whirlwind of a week. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you there was also a hell of a comedown.

I broke my rule. I went for someone who is unavailable. Or, at least, I let them go for me. And it was so… great.

He was surprising and challenging and smart without condescension. And, all the rumors are true: he was also, really, so very nice.

I’ve always been suspicious of age gap relationships; wary of any dramatic imbalance in power. But I was surprised to find how easy it was to fall into step with him; how much he knew and how little it actually minimized my personal wisdom.

In fact, I found Tim on more equal footing than most men I’ve dated. I think it was something about his quality of being fully formed.

When meeting someone my age, there are so many variables between us; so much, independently and together, that is left to be settled. My instinct is to accommodate. I can easily —ardently and in good faith— be swayed to someone’s way of thinking: their preference for strawberry over grape jelly, their unwillingness to adopt a label.

At the time it always feels like an act of care. I do it easily; I’m happy to. It’s not a cost. In fact, it often feels very true to me, in line with my beliefs. I want to be easy, I want to be flexible; open. It’s only after things end, and the rose colored glasses are replaced with latent clarity, that I remember: I have always been someone who reaches for grape. My malleability was wasted on someone who didn’t care to order both.

The stuff I’m made of is solidifying, for sure, but there’s still molten matter at my core. It was really refreshing, for once, to crash against a solid surface.

He’s cultivated his personhood; it’s sure, steady. He doesn’t have much to prove, which begat an easy authenticity in me.

It could be measured in our double and triple texts followed by another one ten minutes later, because we’d had a new thought. It was me calling to ask the plan rather than sitting around waiting for a text, despite our not yet having spoken over the phone. I send as many emojis as I want, because he’s a millennial. I’m not so worried about being chill, whatever that has ever meant, and because it’s never given me a single thing in return. I feel rather freed of the shackles of a situationship because… has he ever even had one?

At some point during the week, in one of my truly manic voice memos to my best friend Sally —sent desperately from my open mouth, stuck in its shit eating grin in NYC, to her pinging inbox in LA— I put it this way:

“It’s like… I understand now why older women call it ‘taking a lover.’”

I laughed my way through the end of the sentence, but in another, I said:

“I feel like my judgement is getting much more grounded when it comes to romantic prospects; I’m not even all that into him yet, I’m very curious about him, and like, pleasantly surprised… and I think that’s kind of what I meant by ‘taking a lover,’ like, being a solitary, set human being, being concrete, being set in stone… and then allowing someone else to pass through, but you remain. Oh my god, I’m using Biblical terms.

Maybe it’s idealistic, but I think of older people, and older romance as being, like, ‘I don’t need to change you, and I don’t want to change you. You’re a fully formed person, and I am too, and I choose you, or, I delight in you and all your quirks, and you’re okay just the way you are.’ And that’s how I want to be received by someone else.”

So, there was an ease with which I matriculated these unexpected life lessons; the chaotic thrill of my week with an older man. I learned so much in such a short time, and I knew —even as it was happening— that no matter how it ended, the experience would be net positive.

My incessant need for control and assigning meaning or knowing the ending took a small break. I was allowed to just have it, I decided, this unlikely experience.

“It was like… someone was touching my body the way—and not in a sexual way—I mean, just like, giving me the passive physical touch that I have always wanted… and I was like, woah this is crazy!

He was just running his hand up and down the side of my entire body, like down to my ankle. And—sorry I’m being crazy right now—but, anyways, I just had to externally process that because it was crazy, and so fun and sweet.

Takeaways are… 37 was fun, that was really fun. I think I should do more of that.”

Considering my voice was getting shrill just recounting some of these details to my best friend over voice memo, I do acknowledge that this is typically the sort of thing I’d just write in a journal and never revisit.

But, it all felt very moving to me. Not just on the surface, either; I’m talking tectonic level shifts. I am learning so much.

And I’ve read so much vulnerable, sexy, uncomfortable, good stuff lately. It made me think: heck, why not.

I’m still talking to the Canadian.

And I’m still looking for the real thing.

I want such unfettered adoration poured over my head, tucked against my breastbone, wrapped around my ankle.

I’m not sure The One Trick Pony is where I find it, but, how would I know if I never tried?

I went to Mexico on a whim, because after over a year of living in New York I’m finally relatively financially stable, and also because in January someone I’d only just met asked me if I had any trips planned soon and my long, awkward pause before having to say “no, actually” resulted in an bitter cocktail of feelings for me, comprising surprise, disappointment, and —my least favorite— embarrassment.

I’m always on the go! How did I not have something planned? It’s a combination of things, I think.

1. I live in New York City. It’s Disneyland for adults. This was my dream for so long, and I’ve just wanted to be here. There’s still so much to do; so much to explore in my backyard —not to mention the labor of building a life here in the meantime.

   1. I also happen to really love the life I’m building. On the day-to-day, I don’t feel any desire to pause it; no need to escape. That’s pretty sweet.

      1. I do, however, need some sun.

2. Again, I live in New York City. Do you know what a pain it is to get out? I’ve only recently mastered taking trains to all three airports. What a barrier to entry! Or, to exit*

   1. In some ways, without my notice or consent, I think I’ve become a… *shudder* homebody. I hate packing. I hate unpacking more! I hate missing out on what my friends are doing here. I miss my cat after one night away. These aren’t reasons enough not to go, but they do factor into my attitude about going —much to my disconcertion, it’s just not as easy as it used to be for me to drop everything and enjoy it.

It’s all of these competing factors that led to my waking up from a nap on Super Bowl Sunday and exchanging these texts with my sister:

In my defense, I had just woken up from a nap, but yes, my sense of geography could be better.

This would be proven as we met people from all over the world, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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My sister had booked herself a hostel, so I followed suit. She said it was safe, had great reviews, etc. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go.

After arriving at the Cancún airport at 10pm, the humidity draping us like a sheet, my sister and I dodged dozens of offers for rides —a chorus of “Taxi, chicas?” ushering us through the parking lot while we looked for our bus. About the taxi option, Emma, whose Spanish is stronger than mine, had aptly said she knew enough of the language that she’d be aware of our getting scammed, but not enough to argue it. Onto the bus we went.

Once at the Playa del Carmen bus terminal, we debated getting a taxi from there, but ultimately decided to walk. It was half a mile. “We’re New Yorkers!” we reasoned. It was completely fine, and kind of funny, as we wheeled our suitcases through the booming PDC nightlife spilling onto the cobblestone streets.

Sweat on our upper lips, we climbed the hostel steps and checked into our little cubbyhole bunkbeds, complete with their very own privacy curtains. We went out for our obligatory first night of vacation drink, and when I returned for a shower in the community bathroom, brushed my teeth with bottled water (fearful of Montezuma's Revenge), and finally tucked myself into the thin sheets, I thought “wow, maybe we should have splurged on a hotel.”

Here again, I surprised myself. When did I jump traveler tax brackets? I camped for six weeks in 2018; for three in 2021. I’ve stayed in hostels that didn’t even have privacy curtains! Who am I? When did I become someone who needed luxury?

It had been a while since I had experienced the particular brand of discomfort traveling internationally and on a budget doles out —since I’d felt like a stupid American. Truthfully, it’d been since 2020.

When the world as we all knew it ended, I was studying abroad in Sevilla, Spain.

I’ve just consulted the archives of my blog that had to die after 2020, when that version of myself was put to rest, too. Sure enough, I didn’t know how to articulate the loss then, and I don’t have better words now.

In both instances, my instinct has been to minimize the pain by reminding myself of how much collective loss the world endured. “People died, Madilyn,” my archaic, pointless, People Are Going Hungry in Africa logic reprimands.

My higher self, the one who defends us now, replies: “Well, grief isn’t a competition babe, and this still sucks no matter how you cut it.”

It’s true, I’ve spent most of my time since we got that awful news glass-half-full-ing it. It is already such a trope to go abroad once and never get over it; I couldn’t double down and make an experience I didn’t even fully get to have my entire personality. Wallowing wasn’t going to change a single thing, I told myself.

So I grinned and beared it. I took my consolation prizes: seven weeks in Spain and a host of amazing long distance friends to visit one day, when the world reopened.

Contact with my host family naturally petered off, became more infrequent. We’d FaceTime during lockdown, and afterwards, I’d cry for longer than the duration of the call. It was so frustrating to not be able to communicate with them, to feel my Spanish atrophying.

In the fall, I dropped my Spanish minor; too bitter to keep conjugating in an American classroom when I’d been dreaming in Spanish, translating like second nature the semester before.

I tucked the dreams away: my hopes of living abroad long-term, my belief that traveling in short bursts doesn’t cut it for me, my desire to immerse myself in different cultures, head first —all tabled for COVID-19.

I moved on. I had other adventures. I found new dreams, and I accomplished them. Reminder: I live in New York City!!!

And like with most things, time did heal. I don’t really think about it any more… until.

On our third night in the hostel, a Dutch guy entered our room and started making his rounds, introducing himself. He was Luke from the Netherlands, and he’d just arrived from Cancún with a group of others he met at the Mayan Monkey Hostel a few days before. They had all agreed to follow each other to Playa del Carmen, and were going out to a beach club that night, he said. He and my sister exchanged Instagrams.

When we arrived to the place, we met the whole cast. There was Max from Frankfurt, Germany (not to be confused with Frankfurt, Connecticut, which is a place that doesn’t actually exist but which I suggested when he said “Frankfurt” in a thick German accent, nonetheless). Stupid, geographically inept American, like I said.

Glyn was from North Wales, another place I’d have been pressed to point out on a map (not any more, I’ve Googled it, duh) and which I didn’t previously know was distinguishable from South Wales, but he told us so, in a very nice accent.

Kai was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama of all places and currently attends my alma mater there. Small world! It only took us about ten minutes to put together that I was also his Intro to Women’s Studies Instructor two years ago… freakishly small world. He made a big point of telling me I had given him a B minus. I thought he must have deserved it.

After one night in Playa, the boys were off to Tulum and trying to convince us to come. Emma was all for it, and while I hesitated (again, who am I?!) I eventually gave in because, well, they weren’t going to be staying in a hostel.

It was a really funny 48 hours we knew them.

Some were like us, on vacation —or in Kai’s case, on The 2025 University of Alabama Academic Calendar’s Spring Break— and some of them had been away from home for weeks. Max, who was on month four out of six of traveling, at one point mentioned he was afraid he had lost his travel diary. This was really bad, he said, because if he didn’t write things down he’d forget them.

It struck me in its simple truth. I had just been asked about my other travels, and when trying to recount my first trip abroad to them, struggled to remember names of the smaller cities I visited; the particulars of our itinerary. I’ve lost so many details of my travels, I suddenly realized, to my faulty memory. They still feel shiny and vibrant, as a whole, but time has rubbed the contours smooth.

Max said he mostly wrote about the people he met. At this point, he must have dozens of characters. He said he’d written a page and a half about one girl he met because she was “just so interesting.” They fought like an old married couple. I wondered allowed what I would be worth. “Maybe half a page for me?” I joked.

He told me all of this in his funny English, me supplying words when he couldn’t recall them: “When someone hunts something and it is a predator, that is…” “Prey,” I said.

I felt a secret sense of pride that I knew all of the words, and then another wave of guilt that everyone knew my language while I knew none of theirs.

When my sister and I were all showered (avoiding the hostel bathroom we were returning to at all costs) and awaiting the taxi Glyn had called us in his impressive Spanish —again: stupid, monolingual Americans!— I told the group I would spend my bus ride back to Playa writing them down in my Notes App. It’s so smart, I thought. I will never forget them or the trip as a whole, but I’d like to also keep the specifics.

I showed Emma in the dark of our bus ride back. “Awe this makes me sad,” she said.

“I know,” I agreed in surprise, “I am kinda sad.”

“Did you not think you would be?” she asked, surprised by my surprise.

“I don’t know… no, not really,” I said. “I’ve met a lot of people like this and have had to let them go. I just didn’t think…”

The next day, when I had lugged my suitcase up and down the Subway stairs, rolled it over the lip of my apartment’s doorway, greeted my cat, showered off the travel, and finally crawled into my fresh sheets, exhausted, I opened my Messages to watch a series of videos my study abroad friends have recently been exchanging in the otherwise rarely used group chat —two minute updates on where we are living, what we’re up to, etc.

I played the most recent from Becky, who I have barely heard from since March of 2020. She’s in her fourth year teaching high school Spanish in her hometown in Rhode Island. She’s getting married in December, to a man I’ve obviously never met but who seems made for her. I mean, they were born 19 minutes apart in the same place.

She lost her grandmother this time last year, and they are in the process of buying and remodeling her house. Becky always spoke of how close they were, and as I watch her talk through my tiny screen I begin to cry. It all comes back to me: this funny, larger than life presence I crossed paths with and had the pleasure of spending time alongside once, for a short while.

How could I have forgotten? The pure joy that drips from her voice, pours from every opening on her face; her openness! The girl who was moved to tears in a cathedral in Córdoba, just by its sheer beauty. The girl who would prompt our group with introspective questions we called “Becky hits blunt moments.” It’s been five years now.

The two feelings crashed down on one another; in my state of emotion, the timelines converged. These people, these absolutely marvelous characters I have met. All the stories I have heard and made and all the ones I’ve lost.

The vital discomfort of traveling; the surprising lessons you learn when you go. The sheer importance of it. A forgotten commitment of mine.

I’ve just returned from a five day trip to Mexico and five years ago I was sent home early from studying abroad. In both cases, I didn’t have enough time.

There’s still so much I want to see, so much to do! And part of me still believes short trips aren’t enough. The reality stands, I have a 9-5 that I kind of love. But Mexico surprised me. It reminded me, recalibrated me to some of my core values, my dreams, that I’d quietly forgotten.

And I met some characters along the way.

My study abroad friends still say once every six months that we need a reunion. My host Mom dutifully messages me happy birthday every year. Who knows! Maybe the people we meet don’t all have to just make guest appearances. Maybe they can be recurring characters, too.

Now, I’m going to go redownload Duolingo.

Signed, a girl who studied abroad once xxxx

She didn’t know she was saying something profound when she said it, but then again, neither did I.

Here was this woman almost a decade my senior, whom I sit next to nearly everyday —bearing witness to the ups and downs of her characteristically disappointing dating life, on her quest to become a wife and mother when nearly all her friends have already achieved these milestones and moved away from the city or onto the next chapters of their lives— saying the person who nurtured her self confidence best was someone she had no real possibility of a future with.

And perhaps that was part of it, right? “He was like heroine,” she said, her eyes half glossed over in memory.

I laughed, but she doubled down. “No, seriously. It was intoxicating. He just didn’t care about anything; he was so free.”

“It actually makes sense,” I said, “it never even occurred to him to be self-conscious, which means you didn’t have to be either. His confidence, his easy self-assuredness, made room for you to feel that way, too.”

I continued: “It almost inspires you to be like that, no? Like, if we were that uninhibited, then everyone around us would have permission to just… be themselves,” I said, instantly animated by the thought. I still am.

Suddenly, it clicked to me: why a beautiful, comparatively young woman might spend her shrinking time with an older bachelor. He made her feel good. And not by way of compliments or presents; he made her feel free.

Of course, money was a part of that. Relative fame, too. And even I’ve found that relationships which are doomed from the start possess a certain glamour —in anticipation of their dreaded, inevitable end and in hindsight, too. A crash you can’t look away from, can’t stop, and wouldn’t even if you could.

Star-crossed as they were —with money at their disposal and fame in their corner— I still think there’s something there; that these were all just tools in a bigger, accidentally sacred occurrence.

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A few months ago, when the 27-year-old who owns and trains me at my gym was still just getting to know me, he asked: “How old are you, again?”

“Twenty-four,” I said, almost challenging him to call me too young.

“Twenty-four…” he repeated my answer thoughtfully. “You know the thing about twenty-four? That’s about the time you stop caring what people think.”

I laughed and nodded, agreeing, but also wanting to think it through further.

Emilio could see the contemplation on my face, I suppose. “No really, you’ll see,” he said in that air of belief he has about things that do, typically, go on to come true.

(Maybe that’s the calling of a trainer: speaking and assisting possibility into existence. It’s no coincidence that he’s one of the most loyal readers of this Substack.)

In the months since, I’ve thought a lot about what he said, in relation to me. I’m not sure that I really care any less about what people think of me, in the sense that my desire for validation has somehow shrunk. But, I do think that as I become more myself, my desire to follow my dreams —to fulfill my purpose regardless of the cost— has started to remarkably overshadow it.

A few weeks ago, on Zoom with my weekly writing group (heart still swells just saying it), I was externally processing My Feelings™ about turning 25.

My peers, 27-35 respectively, all commiserated with me on the existential quality of aging. My main question was, has been, is: “When will I feel like an adult?” The results of my surveys have, so far, been inconclusive.

“I’ve heard thirty is when women lose their self-consciousness,” the one who’s not yet thirty but no longer twenty-five offered.

The thirty-somethings agreed. “Yeah, and it sucks,” Kerri said, “because now I have all of the confidence but not all of the hotness. My body is deteriorating!”

We all laughed. (Let the record show: Kerri is still, objectively, very hot.)

This conversation has stuck with me, too. They’re all in conversation with each other, really. Not least of all the man making the benchmark 24 and the women calling it 30(!)

They’re echoing this aha moment I had over my coworker’s age-and-fame-gap relationship: I don’t want to wait any longer to feel that freedom. And dammit, I want to take everyone with me!

My coworker stumbled upon this miracle accidentally and briefly, but if we could bottle up and sell the feeling of self-acceptance her old bachelor boyfriend unknowingly gave her, we’d be richer than him. Better yet: we’d pass it out to everyone as a precious gift, for free.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? It sort of already is, free. I don’t need anyone, any age or elapsed number, any claim to that elusive idea of “adulthood” to be free. If I’m waiting for someone to give me permission to achieve my wild and daunting dreams, I’ll never find them —that’s an age I’ll never be.

But instead, if my flagrant protest of self-limiting beliefs could encourage the people around me to sigh in relief, to usher in self-confidence and belonging in themselves, well, then, I’ll be <3

I have these conflicting beliefs:

1. Time is a thief

2. I’m still so young

Is it too soon to say I feel the contents of the hourglass slipping?

I’m in the middle; my mid-twenties. And I feel the bottleneck pressing in on me. Who am I going to be? What will I come out as on the other side?

It’s ironic that we’ve constructed this slow, claustrophobic middle just to get back to where we started: the sand pit. Our inner child; our forgotten bravery.

We’ve all somehow unwittingly agreed that the human condition is to not know better until it’s too late. Or, to have known something —been born with it— and then carefully unlearn it in contact with the outside world. Only to then return to it, this simple, freeing truth, once we’re finally old enough to get over ourselves —to remember.

But I’ve always been stubborn; I reject this. I want to be confident while I’m still really hot. I want to drag my childlike wonder, my defiant self-belief, with me through the cluttered quicksand of my entire life, all the way to my triumphant grave.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned, I was born yesterday. And I see it now, clear as the Monday afternoon I was born: this sublime state of permission.

My coworker experienced it by proxy; under the unsuspecting, welcome shelter of her lover’s umbrella, earned with age. Her self-doubt ran right off his water repellant material. She called it heroine.

The kids have a word for that too; they call it magic. The bachelor’s sensible, retractable umbrella is a mushroom fountain in a municipal kiddie pool.

Under it existed a different world; the curtain of water creating a noisy barrier between you and all the rest. If you cocked your head just right, you would never even hear your mom say it was time to go —perpetual summer.

Imagination was the only rule: tiny bodies were governed by the law of boundless possibility.

Press your sunscreen covered spine against the mushroom’s concrete stem, play mermaids. Stick your small fingers out to its edge, feel the rain on your skin.

No one else can feel it for you, but if you do it first, they just might follow you in <3