Winnetka

Having come from the sea, the lake is strange to me. A thin strip of sand, and over it, a great sweep of willows and pines. No white crust or scent of salt. The sky silent of bird cries.

They allow this little strip of land for public access at thirty dollars a day. To both sides the beach continues, but signs warn against trespassing. Private docks built of gathered rocks extend from where they connect to their quiet estates.

The boardwalk is littered with the slender, careless bodies of the local adolescents—salon blonde, Vineyard Vines, David Yurman. Sipping root beer or beer and playing Lucy Dacus from their phone speakers. I’m taking pictures of the blush-pink sunset over the lake, but increasingly my attention is drawn to them, the lords and ladies of Winnetka, inheritors of so much ease, an endlessly bountiful and increasingly rare way of life.

It makes me laugh, how they style themselves after the coastal New Englanders. The bundled hydrangeas just beginning their bloom, the swinging wooden signs, white hammocks, seashell windcatchers, blue and white striped linens. As if stepping into the neighborhoods of my childhood.

I can’t help wondering where this wealth comes from, shuttered behind topiary and wrought iron gates. One estate has a hill sweeping from the covered deck to the lake, half-scalped to allow for backyard golfing. Another has pillars like an institution and a set of wooden doors as its entry. One has hired a band for the night, amber light and music spilling from cracked windows. The smell of beer in the air, and the caterers, shadowed such that they are barely visible, moving new trays of food from their truck.

It makes me sick with desire for a while. I window-watch, imagining their lives from what I can see through rectangular panes. A young girl reads at a desk while her mother, slender, light hair in a low ponytail, irons a shirt. In the next room, a man—Father? Brother?—sits at a table. Or muted laughter from a dinner party, the fluted women’s voices and lower baritones of the men, laughs that punctuate the air like birdshot.

There are no streetlights. No one is outside—Everyone is shut up in their great houses.

*

Oak Park

She’s old, older than 63 should rightfully be. Her hearing is half gone. She dresses loudly and speaks without much care for manners, with the air of someone who, for her career, learned to ignore manners, which were too often in service of keeping her quiet. Yes, she says, she was a lawyer.

We wait for the rest of the story. It’s coming, we can almost fill in the gaps with what she tells us of her life. That she lives in River Forest, that beautiful, tree-lined neighborhood we walk to remind ourselves of what wealth can get you, those ivy-covered walls and hydrangea-shaded walkways. That she writes letters to the Theatre Editor at the New York Times. That she takes day-trips to New York to see her favorite plays—once, Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut. She is an opera fan, her husband an orchestra-goer.

She was in employment law, UVA. Which side? Well, which do you think? One pays for a house in River Forest and early retirement. In-house at AT&T, she says, and smokes a pretend hookah. She laughs at herself to deflect. It almost works.

I leave dinner a little stunned, and with her phone number. She wants to ring a cowbell at the race I will run in a month. My boyfriend finds her house on Zillow immediately. Modest, relatively—1.7 million. Comfortably-sized. Retirement, I remind him.

If you can’t be an artist, be a patron. Absolution of all sins. I think about what it takes to buy a life like that, and whether I could do it. Whether I want it, truly. I can’t say. It is difficult not to want what you are surrounded by and yet can’t have.

*
Austin / West Loop

On a Thursday we run from Oak Park to West Loop. 8 miles on the dot. Our path is straight, following the Green Line all the way.

Fascinating, the way the neighborhoods change. The brick-and-cobble streets give way to flat, cracked pavement. The shade vanishes, as though the trees are shrinking back, withering into themselves. The detritus of warehouses, current and abandoned, and former life, houses sliding into their foundations. Endless, inescapable sun.

But no one bothers us as we run—not the kids sitting outside the convenience store, not the old men playing dominoes. No comments are made that I run only in a sports bra and shorts.

It’s the openness of everything that makes the difference. The wealthier a place gets, the more it closes off—with trees, with flower bushes, with grates and gates and long driveways. Here, the houses sit on the street, the grass is yellow and flattened, the trees have been cut or never planted to begin with.

The shift happens quick. The pavement turns dark and perfect, like hammered steel;. The buildings rise. The air sharpens. There is still the sense of warehouse land, everything too expansive, as though a rot is being forcibly kept out. But now the apartments go for $3,000, and the girls are wearing Miu Miu.

I look at the hands of other girls, other women—thin, graceful hands, with narrow nails, long nails, polished and unchipped, beringed, moisturized, youthful. Each is a mark of my own failing at girlhood. I spend $150 dollars on a nail set for a festival and waste the rest of day hating the color I’ve picked, the length, the shape, the foreign feeling.

No one holds my hand for very long. I had a terror for a long time of holding hands, or shaking them, fearing they would go clammy or oversoft. I had a teacher who stood at her doorway and shook every child’s hand, looking into your eyes with her own glass-cut gaze, the skin of her palms dry and pleasurably textured. I would hide in the hall until the bell had rang, perpetually late just to avoid such searing contact.

*

My fears make it difficult to live well. I cry without thinking, short bursts, like summer rain. I am moved by the smallest things.

I understand when I am making myself strange to people who would otherwise love me, or like me at least. I see their care and goodwill recede. I make the wrong expressions at rare times, and my sadness is always visible. It is exhausting to be around a person who is sad so often.

Cut-outs and herbs. How simple to recall a feeling from years ago.

I worry I have not led my life well. That those who professed esteem in me have realized it was misplaced.

*

In the morning I read, by chance, Frank O’Hara’s “River,” and all day the first lines marched through my head, an incantation, a ward against the dread of the day: Whole days would go by, and later their years,/ while I thought of nothing but its darkness/ drifting like a bridge against the sky. At work I whispered it to myself before meetings, on walks, and my heart hurt less, and things were easier.

*

Revisions

Rilke was wrong, beauty isn’t terror,

Beauty sustains, beauty is the small anchor

To which I lash myself in absence of my own footing;

What the eye pauses upon, what remains of dreams,

What follows the flashing light, what constitutes the afterimage;

If cold then the cold of a hand against my nape,

If dark then the dark of an eye against mine.

Walking will do you a lot of good. I wondered why happiness was so hard won in the before place, why I felt such dread at driving to a coffee shop or grocery store. Driving gives an errand or diversion the air of undue effort, importance. To drive somewhere is to take up so much space in the world, to emit your noxious smoke, to wait at red lights and indicate and merge between other great space-takers, after which you will have to park in a place that was once verdant but is now cement or pavement, more space you have taken up. 

I feel so light in the world when I walk to somewhere. My footsteps make no imprint; even in rain, their damp mark will dry with the next sun. The wind moves around and through me as it moves around and through the trees, the buildings, the streetlamps. I am an intermittent obstacle, easily forgotten. 

Cornbread biscuits with mulberry jam and whipped butter. I carry a warm fistful back to my apartment. Or I sit outside the sports bar and make the gestures of youth over gin and tonics. Or watching the rain sluice down the windows of the cocktail bar, cut through the wet heat—this bar which should have closed half an hour ago, but keeps its lights on for the ten of us sheltering here.

I have been here a month but am already affected by change. I mourn the Betty’s Pizza and Pasta beside my building. I go for one last dinner at Ciro’s, where I had my first here. 

I walk the red brick streets and imagine them dusted with snow, the windows salt-stained. I imagine the people in their wool hats and knitted scarves in place of their t-shirts and shorts. Iced coffees will become hot chocolates—I can already taste the sweetness of the blistered marshmallows, to which I will bend my head. 

I go for long runs through the quiet residential streets, marveling at the hydrangeas and rose bushes and bright-colored birds. My breath makes its own wind in my ears. 

Walking will do you so much good. Leaving work, I have salt in my eyes, a heaviness that infects my behavior and thinking. Running the crescent to the ice cream shop, where I eat a strawberry sundae and counsel a new friend, I feel it lifting off me vertebrae by vertebrae, the way you rise in yoga. I imagine my great fears and try not to flinch. I want not to think myself into error, into terror. 

Flowers on the table perfume my apartment. Cat-safe, delivered to me as a token of love, which I remember as my cat sniffs around them, rubs his tufted body against their silk. His hair floats through the air, golden in the fading light, as he sheds his winter coat. I find it on my collar, in between my teeth.

I still measure who I am by the company I delight in, or reject. On a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, money exchanges mouths as I am nearly sick. I watch the waves swell and surrender, horizon to the glittering city. A man speaks birding to me.

Lately I have wanted to be kinder than I think, or more judicious. It bothers me that to those I speak my mind, I may seem careless or cruel or unfeeling. I know no one who has such purity of thought and action that the two are linearly connected, but perhaps there exist some; I think I want to become them, unless it requires a simplicity of thought. I will never want to be simple. I would rather be misconstrued.

But I think about the love in being understood, rather than tolerated. My cousin talks to me about the woman he will marry, her strange writings, her difficult vocabulary. It mirrors the way men or family have spoken about me as well, as though I were a creature to be deciphered or humored, as though my pleasures had no context. I believe they thought of this as a compliment of my intellect; really, it is a series of shallow cuts. Behind my receiving smile, I am begging like a dog to be taken seriously.

Such a fever, comparison, and how relentless. When I am measured up against someone else, it brings forth a familiar heat, a latent anger and hopelessness at being nothing or no one singular, simply a variation on someone more deserving of admiration. It makes me want to take drastic actions. I consider a visible tattoo, or dying my hair red, or starving myself to bones. I consider quitting my job and ending my lease to work as a dishwasher or barista. I despair at likenesses found between myself and others, especially those whose impression has been placed over me. It makes me want to reject or deny myself that which I have wanted for years. 

To suffer this, I walk myself senseless. I walk until white blisters form on the contours of my feet, which I know are wider than a girl should be owed. I walk to breathe a moving air that carries nothing with it to upset or remind me. I walk to play in my head scenes of a story which has often comforted me—Persuasion, 1995, whose grain and music-less sound places me in a world whose resolution I already understand. I walk with girls I have just met to exchange new conversation, belonging only to us, and to forget my other associations, what waits for me out west. I walk with empty hands to save them for what I might pick up along the way—a coffee, a book from a sidewalk library. I walk myself to know and love where I have chosen to live, and to take into me a measure of its small but ceaseless change. 

There are perfect things in the world, I’ve seen them.

Louise Glück’s “October.” It does me no good, violence has changed me. Late afternoon light. The small thunder of the train overhead, whittling its way through the silver city. Children on their too-big bikes, looking behind to see if their friends are following. Sunrise. Lines of an Emily Dickinson poem recited by my lover, laughingly, which remind me of who I am: Are you Nobody, too?

My window is the length of me. I go to sleep to the decline of day and wake as though the whole world is trying to enter me, become me. My cat asleep on my white chair, which I wheeled down Chicago streets with a new friend, new to me.

June efforts quietly. Lisa Olstein.

I remember true things about myself. I cobble together a syllabus for a writing mentorship I have agreed to, reading poems and stories I had forgotten had moved me. I am moved again.

This is life, now: Morning walks for cornbread biscuits halved by blackberry jam and whipped butter. Drinks under light rain. Smiling into a flash. A glass of orange wine, orange light on a newly dear face. Long, quiet runs. Watching the stars through a stranger’s binoculars.

My apartment is infected with light. The sun reaches every corner.

I still tear myself apart for my decisions, my failures, even the ones that haven’t happened yet. This is normal. This is always. The wounds knot themselves together quicker now.

A day like a day in summer.

The world still turns; poetry is still being written. Everywhere the machine of imagination continues to turn, even as other machines are made to replace it.

How do I tell you, artist mine, that our hearts are the same?

And I take a full lunch when I can get it, for walking or reading. What sticks in the mind makes a sort of boundary of the self, by which I know myself. I keep the lights on like this, when I feel every day of my twenty-three years.

There is no way to make what you feel exceptional; everyone has known what you felt, or will know; take comfort in this. But reading creates a necessary distance from the world which lingers for a little while after, which makes life bearable when otherwise it would be not. And if you can remember it, you can call up that distance like a protective measure, cast yourself into that old magic for a moment.

Robert Hass. And the days churned by,/ navigable sorrow. Agha Shahid Ali. When I go off alone, as if listening for God,/ there’s absolutely nothing I can win of light. John Ashbery. Fine vapors escape whatever is doing the living. Talin Tahajian. Foxes/ wear the voices of the dying. Reginald Shephard. You are like me, you will die too, but not today. Tracy K. Smith. Living, dying, deciding. Li Young-Lee. Was it me in the other/ I loved when I loved another? Ilya Kaminsky. like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am/ pecking/ every which way at astonishment. Louise Glück. You saved me, you should remember me.

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All life is accommodating indignities. 

The way you look at me chips my nail polish. I am less of a person for that tone of voice. 

When I am tired, my eyes ache as though I have been crying, or will cry. The cursor blinks, a black interruption. I have no words that say anything of meaning.

Once I knew how they came together. I knew how to make music out of language. My mind is misshapen. 

There are contacts that press the cornea into the right shape for seeing. For the mind, there are long books, and little time.

I say I will bear it another year. I have barely borne it one. 

Why do I idolize you, my arrow man? You aim where I do not seek. I like the way you gesture, the way you speak. 

The sun scours. From manicured lawns, hydrangeas perfume the air. 

I have learned the contours and diction of wealth; I have seen the path forward to it. It is endless shade. It is the tolerated intolerance, engaged like a weapon. It is the second sort of power, besides intellectualism, but by far the stronger.

I trespass on silent estates, the only sign of occupancy their perfect maintenance. I theorize their lives. I place myself in their windows, their kitchens, their bedrooms. I eat off the good china.

I am a jealous, violent creature. I have forgotten how to throw a punch. 

I watch the men of my life levy cruelties against the women, easy speech, a latent laziness. I feel the knife cut of casual speech from the men I love when they speak to me. Why do the smallest words bear so much importance? I wear them as little bruises on the heart. I keep a hard thumb against them to remember the pain. 

It does not matter what hurts you if you do nothing about it. This is another indignity. 

I am conscious of everything I ingest. That I desire anything out of the world, that I accept it into me, is proof of some base failing, a gluttony. 

I have made all the right motions towards happiness. When does it come? 

Still, it is summer. Verdant. Strangers wearing wet pearls in their hair as they walk past. I want to kiss everyone; I want no one to speak to me. I have moved halfway across the country for a deliverance that remains yet ahead, my own mirage. What I wanted, I must understand. was less a change of place than of person. What I wanted was to be someone else. 

I see myself in mirrors and want to die. I see myself in true images and want to die. I am told I am not what I thought I am and want, etc.

By candlelight, coming to an understanding. You think you are nice but you are not. You think you are beautiful, you think you are a girl, not. 

Crying, and lacking pen and paper, you write on your arm:

YOU MUST ASSERT YOURSELF AGAINST THE EROSION OF DIGNITY!

Amended, after some dramatic thought:  YOU MUST ASSERT YOURSELF AGAINST THE EROSION OF DIGNITY AND SELF!

I am a nobody in nothingland. I am a nothing in nobodyland. My hair is frizzy. There is no God in this place.

Beside girls who are more successfully girl, I feel like a man. I play the role, I open doors, I put down my card. I lower my voice. I want to remove half my flesh from my body. I will place it on the scale, where it will swing in imbalance against a bird. I won’t see it settle.

When I feel I am a girl, or I want to be one, the opposite. My voice rises. I care how I smell. Still I feel my failures at it; I am sick at the effortless beauty of others, the way E. tucks her hair behind her ear, the way A. tilts her head. I want to crawl into their bodies. 

My most made-up self recalls someone’s ordinary. Every morning is an unmonstering. 

I want my smile to be something of importance to someone. I desire platitudes. I want to be loved by virtue of being in a room, the way some girls are, have always been. I have not been girl enough for this. Each day my tenuous hold on it slips.

I am who I am. This is what you say. Martel, Ian Hoolihan. 

Some days I feel I am falling very far and very fast, and that whatever sense of self I had has been effaced, violently, as though sanded. It stings. I grasp at anything, even the most ridiculous and unfounded, things I know barely to be true about myself, if only to hold them as barriers to my colonization. 

I take a long walk to nowhere. When it rains I imagine the artifice sloughing off, leaving the self, which is nothing, or else it is the self sloughing off, which also leaves nothing.

Rituals keep me sane. I write nonsense. I kiss my cat. I sleep so as not to think.

To be told who you are to yourself, which is not what you had known yourself to be, is as bad as seeing an image of yourself which was not how you imagined yourself to look. There is nothing to do for this. You cannot start again. You consign yourself to certain mediocrities. 

It is nice to dramatize yourself. It is wonderful to make a spectacle. 

Be alive! More than that, be happy for it. In whatever state you are. My god. It is all you can do.

May; spring turning slowly to its lateness. In the mornings, variegated birdsong.

I leave my window open all day. My cat perches on the sill, watching the world out of his reach. His ears twitch with want. He has learned not to try, ever since slamming his little body against the screen in response to a particularly tempting sparrow. But he spends hours at his vigil, the tip of his tail flicking, a vestigial memory of his hunting days.

We have become each other’s world. He follows me from room to room; he tucks his body into the crook of my arm or knee, or nestles against my neck. I know when he has found his position by his deep inhale and sigh. He snores when he sleeps, which is almost always. When I wake him, he yawns. His teeth click against each other like a latch.

I know his moods and movements. I know where to scratch under his chin or at the soft top of his head to make his eyes close. I know when he is upset at me, when he is tired, when he is bored. I know when he wants to go out or eat or sleep. Intimacy is simple; it correlates exactly with time.

I love lilies, but I never buy them. Tulips, also. This is for him.

It is the season to love and fall in love. This can be person, animal, object, habit. It is the easiest month to develop sentimentality; the warm weather opens you to everything.

I write again. I take walks, long, time-wasting ones, and watch the birds and trees and sky. I run almost every day. I have learned to pace from my run club, and distances that were impossible a year ago become my easy runs. I read at every lunch break. I have stopped caring if this makes me strange or antisocial; it makes me happy; it keeps the other muscle of my brain from atrophying.

I made the ask to move as I do many things—without real conviction. Deferring the decision to someone else. If no, then no; it was not meant for me. If yes, then, well.

When the answer is yes, my life whirlwinds away. What I had imagined idly now becomes imminent. I hunt Zillow for apartments after work. I take stock of my apartment, imagine what I will have to discard, what I must keep. I tally what I have not yet done and the time I have left, and find them disproportional. My evenings become an exercise in circumventing regret.

Options open to me that had not ever been in my imagination. I Google for part-time Master’s programs late one night, just for something to do. I apply to one that evokes an old dream. I get in a week later, even before I have dusted it off.

After rain, I go for a walk. The late slant of light burns through the landscape. Every blade of grass wears a wet pearl. I watch the lotus flowers budding on the river, the beaver slicing through the water’s dark silk. A rabbit pauses in the field; the sun against it creates a perfect golden outline, which it carries forward as it runs.

Revelations. I have made for myself a life, belonging to no one else. A direction I set alone. I make and use and misuse my own time. I reap my consequences and my joys.

It is a wonderful and terrifying thing. I develop my own desires, my own unreasonable asks of the world. I think little anymore of what I am meant to do, or should.

I am less afraid, also, of burning through the currency of youth. I used to believe everything of worth should be done before thirty, when I was young enough still to be beautiful and precocious, to some degree, and therefore more worthy of admiration. But my desires eclipse the years that I have to do them.

At nineteen, I was afraid of twenty-one; at twenty-one, I was afraid of twenty-three. I have been all of them now, and I have never felt so old that what I desire is no longer possible.

Youth is silly, also. As I write, I am increasingly aware of my failings, my lack of experience, my inexactness of language, my ungainly phrasing. I was worse in years prior; I will be better in the years to come. Elegance and precision are earned. There are things I write now that I could not have written earlier, and things I have tried to write now that will not come to me until later.

I take each year as it comes. I do what I desire; what is available to me; what I can. I learn what I want out of the world, and how to ask it, and pursue it, and ask, if necessary, again. When I die, it will not matter what age I’ve done the thing. Only that I’ve done it.

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Is it that I miss the city, or I miss what I felt in it—happy?

This is injudicious. I have been happy before and since. Incandescent, even.

Like these recent months. Mouthing poems in the library. Lying in the nightgrass, shirts soaked with dew, watching the satellites move like stars. Orange wine and endive salad. Drinks in a red bar, enfants rouges in Enfants-Rouges.

Yes, I’ve been happy before, and since. But I have to look for it, now, when once it was so close to me I hardly thought about it.

Walking up Butler, a little rain in my hair, watching lovers and friends in the beer gardens and cafes and bars. Drinks with an old professor over crusty bread and strong cocktails. Watching the college girls lean into their lovers and friends. Laughter like the chime of many bells, a constant ringing.

Later, sun, like a benediction. My dear friend in the city where I first met her. How the light through the window haloes her brown hair, touches it into gold. Her laugh, which I remember like my own name. Remembering how we turned to the other first whenever the weather was warm, to read outside or walk the long, sun-studded streets.

I marvel at everything. Nostalgia is my master—everything I say is a reminiscence.

The dogwoods are in bloom, sentinels of the quiet streets. Here, where I used to run, to walk to this friend or that, the tea I used to drink, the park I cried in.

Even meeting friends is a kind of reminiscence. An attempt to place ourselves back in the heart of our friendship, when we were steps away from each other, when our cares and worries mirrored or were at least tangential. Their faces jeweled and beautiful to me in the waning light. Repeating the actions of our friendship, revisiting the same restaurants and cafes, the strawberry blintz, the hummus and muhammara. Recalling something of the old magic.

My life tunnels on past the city; I feel its pull, even here. I feel the difference of myself.

We talk of returning, my girls and I, of settling back in the city of our youth and beauty—but I know in my heart we never will. What we were in the city for those precious years will never be replicated. This is why they are precious. We have already become new people; I see it in us; we are almost strangers to our old selves.

My lonely city, surrounded by its rivers and mountains, its fortress of nature. Preserved in its oddities and loveliness. Its steep streets and perpetual rain. If I return it will only ever be like this, a glancing blow, so as to not disturb its preservation of a life I will not live again. My youth in amber. My first becoming.

Rue la Perle. In mosaic, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, someone’s idea of a joke. A Parisian idea of a joke. 

Zinc-topped sidewalk tables, each with its own ashtray. An enforced leisure in that the waiter, blonde, twenty-ish, will not take your order for almost half an hour. You should, like the others, take the time to smoke. In lieu of smoking, you listen and watch.

Above your head, a grated window to the kitchen. You can hear the hiss of oil in the pan, cracked eggs, tinny music from some radio. A shout, Hallelujah!, accented such that half the word goes missing. A drunken revelry that would be too early for this time of day anywhere else. 

Three girls have taken seats a few tables over. They have artfully tousled buns and too-large clothes and no makeup except for colored lips. Cigarettes dangle between their thin fingers. They make a performance of lifting them to those bright lips, then purse, then the quick withdrawal. 

An American photographer is trying to impress them. He is sixty or so, showing them pictures on the great camera dangling from his neck, trying to get them to follow his Instagram. He talks of his adventure in New York. Making art of the real world, real life. It doesn’t get more real than New York. Still, hard to make the mythos of New York attractive to Parisian teenagers. They smoke and smile at each other, half-mocking. He goes on gesturing, gesticulating. 

Two older men watching this spectacle, drinking neat glasses of port. Nobody with anything better to do. A cloud goes over the sky, blots out the springtime sun. The girls go on smoking.

-

My home for these two days is tucked behind a cafe in the 1st Arrondissement and up four flights of the narrowest stairs I’ve ever climbed. The light fixtures are on a timer—once they are turned on, you have thirty seconds to ascend or descend the full length before being plunged into blackness. 

My host is a Korean woman in her fifties, five foot nothing, with a charming Korean-French accent to her English. She arms me with a list of restaurants to go and not go, which coffee shops sell frozen food, and which supermarkets have the best fruit.

My room is so small that my head brushes the ceiling in places. It consists of a table with kettle and tea bags, a twin bed, a bathtub, a toilet, and a sink. In its whole it is no larger than my kitchen back home. The ceiling slopes with the roof, and half of it opens into a skylight. The sky through it is a great rectangle of blue and dashed-through grays, cut at intervals by the flight of crows and city sparrows. 

I love it. I stare into the sky and feel absurdly close to it. I enjoy the sparseness of the place, life reduced down to its bare necessities, the cleanliness and removal of all unnecessary luxuries. I take my bath on my knees. 

I love even the dangerous descent of the stairs, the great mirror on the second-floor landing where I take a few rushed pictures of myself before the timer runs out. I wear makeup as I haven’t in months, dress up in a way that feels ridiculous in my everyday life. I run the blowdry brush through my hair until it falls in silly waves. I feel my own silliness, taking so many pictures of myself, and think of the quote from Schitt’s Creek, the late great Catherine O’Hara: Take a thousand naked pictures of yourself now… Believe me, one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, ‘Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!’

-

The same heels that took me around New York, that take me to and from work, now carry me through the streets of Paris. I like their little metronome, the way they strike and echo. 

In my extravagance I book myself a dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, elevated French dining. I walk in at 7:30 only to be the second table in the whole place—the other table is occupied by a couple in their 70s. Early diners: the elderly and les Americains. I eat with appropriate shame. 

I bring a book with me: Don DeLillo’s The Names. If I was strange for eating so early, not to mention alone, I am even stranger for this. 

Plates descend and are removed with a clinical quickness. The waiter, once, apologizes for his poor English—it is so ridiculous a thing to apologize for that I laugh. I’ve arrived in this city armed with nothing but Bonjour and a tenuous grasp of schoolgirl Spanish. I should be apologizing to everyone I speak to.

When I finish dinner is when dinner begins for Paris. I watch lines slowly start to form at the openings of bistrots. Men and women smoke over amber beer glasses. They tip their heads back when they laugh, they push away loose curls of hair with graceful hands. Lamplight turns golden the contours of their faces and conversations.

I walk by, in love with my own loneliness. Above, a beam of light sweeps the city from the Eiffel Tower. I’m headed there to make the turn of the hour and see it sparkle. It is delicious to go through a new city like this, walking its streets and alleyways, wet from its rain. I pass the Arc du Triomph and watch the circles of cars as I once saw on Rick Steve’s. Everything looks like a dream.

I pass by a man with his dog. A tiny, playing thing, it runs circles around his legs and bites and the air and jumps, and he laughs and spins and splinters the night with his childish joy. It makes me smile the sort of smile that hurts.

On the banks of the Seine, already couples and birthday girls have gathered to take their pictures at the right time. A girl in a hijab poses for a picture; her face in the moonlight is so beautiful that I stare. Next to her, a man takes test shots of his wife, who is wearing a sleeveless red gown despite the chill. 

Against the river’s black and silver, the lights from the tower look like a scattering of stars. The image shudders and severs as boats pass by. On the deck of a large cruise ship, an elderly couple smile nervously into a selfie. The husband checks the photo, smiles, kisses his wife’s hair. 

At 11 on the dot, the Eiffel Tower sparkles. There is a ripple of gasps, even though this happens every hour, every night—hardly a phenomenon. Still, it takes the breath away, regardless of its simplicity, the obvious performance of it. The mythos is what moves you.

-

The Louvre is a ten-minute walk from my Airbnb. I wake early, dress myself in the gray dawn through the skylight. I watch myself in the mirror as I line my eyes, pat blush on the apples of my cheeks and eyelids. These days, it is so rare that I make myself up like this that the finished product feels not-me, or like an old self I shed a year ago. The working life is about efficiency. Most mornings, I do little more than comb my hair and rub out the dryness in my face with moisturizer. Spending thirty minutes curling my hair, another ten getting the angle of my eyeliner right—these are the luxuries of time. 

The Louvre’s grandness is very different from the Eiffel Tower; it scorns attention where the Eiffel Tower seems to beg for it. It is so massive, so old, that it needs no embellishment. 

The Mona Lisa, too, understates its own importance. A tiny thing affixed to the far wall. I see it over the heads of fifty other people. 

A good story, told rightly, can make the smallest things great.

After, lunch in Bistrot Richelieu. I read in the sunlight through the wide bay windows and sip onion soup.

By writing this I create a record of my own memory, so that when even pictures fail to help me recall, I can read this and relive it.

The sun has moved well into the west by the time I make it to the Notre Dame. Sunlight paints the stone surface in gold filigree. The line moves quick; within minutes, I am in the hall. Some sort of ceremony or mass is occurring. Sixty-odd people sit in the pews, while we stand at the back and snap pictures and whisper.

It’s not grand, really—it looks more like the cathedrals in Pittsburgh than, say, la Sagrada Família. But I like its plainness, which speaks to its age, its original purpose. The brief minutes I am allowed to spend inside feel like I am intruding on a different world, some spirituality and shared belief I have no part in. Then I am outside again, among the tourists and the pigeons and the music of evening conversation. 

Sunset; dinner in the bistrot next to Shakespeare and Co. A long line of girls in wool coats extends out of its door; girls eager to linger where a hundred famous writers have lingered.

There is a table of Americans in the bistrot. They speak at enough decibels to render any other conversation impossible. I find myself grimacing apologetically at the exasperated waiter, especially when they knock a glass of red wine into their entrees. 

Dinner is a bread basket with salted butter, a flaky goat cheese tart with pesto, and a pair of creme brûlées. The bread is shockingly good. I tear at it, animal-like. 

To my left is a French family celebrating someone’s birthday. They speak in low, fluted voices, and they send angry eyes at their American counterparts.

I leave full and happy; the waiter calls me “beautiful girl.”

Now the dregs of my last night in Paris. I extend it as long as possible. I walk to a famous cafe serving mountains of whipped cream with their hot chocolate, then on to a tapas bar, where I meet my former coworker. We laugh and sip at egg-themed cocktails, exhaling out someone else’s smoke with every other breath. It is an incandescent way to end a weekend. When at last I take the late train home, I can still feel the heat of happiness under my breastbone.

Sick to my heart in some strange way, I have pho for dinner alone. I like that the bowl is bigger than my face. The steam laps my skin. I had a facial last week, which was an oddly similar experience. My hair will smell of lemongrass.

At the table next to me, an older couple. They do what older couples do, greeting the young waiter like an old friend, who smiles tightly and laughs his customer service laugh. They order the Vietnamese tacos to share. The lady wants a pineapple slush. In the lamplight, they do the crossword together. One hand in another.

As the daylight lengthens, I take more walks. I linger a few minutes longer each time, going a little further, before returning to whatever obligations wait for me in the office. Cars pass me in my walking. Determined strides to nowhere. I stop only to watch the tree swallows chase each other, their bodies a flash of blue brilliance. They collide and burst apart like atoms.

The object of a run club is less to run than to share an experience of some difficulty or intensity, which serves as kindling to a relationship. We spend more time talking on the porch outside the coffee shop than the run itself takes. We all of us are loathe to leave, or make even the first motion to leaving. We defer the day by staying.

My cat sleeps on my mother’s chest for the first time. She pets him with hesitant, wondering hands, and sings him a baby’s lullaby she never sang to me.

I eat the food that reminds me of people I miss when I miss them. Japchae, oolong with boba, guava and cheese empanadas. I taste as they taste; I feel their same pleasure.

On one gray wall of my apartment I have hung no decoration but one: a framed drawing of a woman in the nude, lying facedown on her couch in repose or depression. I have lain like her a hundred times. It is the chief pleasure of living alone. When thinking of moving, I looked for places with roommates, tried to remember that old life, but found it was not a life I ever wanted to return to. It is so rare to have a place wholly to myself. I want it for as long as I can have it.

I love to be alone. I plan a weekend in Paris: dinners to eat precisely what I desire, the walks I will go on only until I weary, the sights I will see as I want to. Nothing else. A delicious selfishness to factor no one into your life but yourself. Of course, I still want friends, family, lovers and companions. But it is good to have moments, or days, to myself.

I wonder at times why I like what I like. S and I stand for over an hour in a restaurant, watching the diners with hungry eyes, waiting for someone to leave. When someone does, there is only one free seat. S keeps standing as we eat. Why do this? Why not camp out for concerts and wait in line for sample sales? Why spend $600 at a tasting menu on a random Monday? I think about what I remember of joy, and what I remember that brought me joy. The odd and novel meals I have stick in the mind as few other pleasures do.

You miss where you are only as you leave it. Yes, I’m missing it. It helps that it’s spring, and the world is desirable again. Events I remember from my first weeks revolve again. What was new and remarkable now familiar. I watch the dead trees reflower into what I remembered them to be. Lovely to leave here as it was when I first grew to love it. Ambered in my mind.

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I want badly to believe in love.

Restaurant week at a French spot in Princeton, sat between two couples in half a seat. Picking at my chocolate mousse as they laugh at secret jokes, half-finished sentences. Commenting on other diners while they wait for their drinks—If we’re ever like that, we should kill ourselves, and Oh God, she looks like a flamingo!

The statistic is 50% of marriages end in divorce. It’s too clean a number for me to put much stock in it, but it’s a signal for a larger theme: Marriage is hard. Spending your life with one person, happily, without exit, is a rarity rather than a requirement. It made me, once, look at every couple as a pending end, trying to deduce what would make them break.

Now, the opposite: I wish everyone happiness.

This is optimism rather than a change of heart. I still look at certain couples and see the cracks, the emerging but unspoken flaws. The trophy girlfriend telling her Instagram followers “if he wanted to, he would.” The dumb, golden retriever boyfriends. Moving in with his parents after three months, quitting your job after the engagement. These are bad signs—things often turn for the worst.

But I want to believe they won’t. Out of a self-protection, maybe—wishing bad things on strangers, even predicting them, regardless of their likelihood, feels cruel. It invites a cosmic sort of vengeance. I have no stake in these relationships, besides; it costs me nothing to put my reservations aside, assume nothing but the best.

And I like watching people in love. Love is such an odd trick of the mind; it takes very little self-convincing. There are socially prescribed patterns, rituals, actions that encourage and enforce love. Flowers on every date. The man pays. Your chair pulled out, your bag held. A confirmation text eight hours before the date. Height, weight, facial symmetry. Income. Distribution of responsibility. Boxes that, once checked, one can announce themselves in love and loved with reasonable evidence.

There is a kernel of truth to that. Levels of effort which are difficult to dedicate without preexisting care and interest. Litmus tests of someone’s inner emotions. These can change, though, or lie. A metric relates only what is actually measured, not always what it is meant to measure.

I think of this watching Love is Blind, fascinating to me for how easily a person can convince themselves of love, then renege. Everyone calls them liars, manipulators—true in some cases, not so in others. It is easy, I think, for the attention to skip over small issues and land upon that which corroborates and encourages an existing desire, or a desire to desire. Love and its pressures make us fickle, hasty.

No, I love watching people in love. Sitting on the Spanish steps, every other eye turned to a mild Roman sunset, I watch as a boy lifts a girl onto a railing, tilts his head up to kiss her. They are utterly engrossed in each other. A thousand sunsets do not matter; the rise and fall of empires mean nothing. They are, in the moment, each other’s world.

Love changes; people change. How you love and what you love in a person cannot rightly remain the same, but in that case, might we be able to convince ourselves to love anyone? If the conditions under which love began change, the love should go—when it doesn’t, it is by some concerted effort or magical thinking, which might invalidate the idea of love altogether.

The point being intention, and choice. You choose towards someone; you know you can also choose away. Even if social pressure removes the possibility of an exit, you do not have to feel anything you do not feel. And to an extent, you determine what you feel, and about what, and what it means for your relationship.

This is true of any relationship: family, friends, coworkers, classmates, strangers. To be human is to seek relation.

I read love poems knowing nothing about love. I felt them deeply as though I did. I felt them deeper than I did in love. I wrote more, too.

It is a subject iterated upon since before the human, since the love that created the human. It is a story told a billion ways. Why do we keep telling it? Because it feels novel every time, regardless. Like something worth documenting.

We try to ascribe a science to it. A healthy skepticism. Hormones, genetics, evolution. Valentine’s Day was created by holiday card companies. Of course Ghirardelli wants you to give chocolates to your lover. All this has truth to it, all this plays a role. And yet, something else persists. Organic, sourceless.

Something lovely, sometimes, in the silliness love brings you. The concentration of your attention on one person. Worries that did not exist before, but also new joys. Terrible things as well it brings—sorrow, distraction, injury, humiliation. And with very little way of knowing for sure beforehand what sort of love you have let in, if love at all.

And yet we do it; we fall in; fall out; we meet; we seclude, we embrace; reject. Such an oeuvre of first-hand accounts from which to build a decision theory, and yet we repeat every mistake. We suffer every consequence for the hope of happiness. We undergo every trial.

As if to love is part of the human condition. An access to the right sort of life, a way to be singular even when not. To connect. Like I said—the desire to desire, of desire. More powerful, maybe, than the desire of anything else.

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A late lunch with friends. Apple pancakes. Catching a glimpse of myself in the glass buildings, looking for once as I imagine myself to look, and happy about it. Sun and relative warmth after months of oppressive cold. The hard click of my Mary Janes on wet pavement.

As I type this, my cat’s cheek on my forearm. His soft sighs.

Over orange wine and lotus root, P says, You know how lucky you are to have a purpose? How disappointing that you keep saying no to it.

How many times have I cried to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth? And again, with S, my tears pooling darkly on the bedsheets.

At the orchestra, five rows from the front, I close my eyes to be moved by its live rendition. And find myself distant from it by a hair. Why does a tinny facsimile bring me to tears, when the real thing passes through like another woman’s pleasure? I’ve become so sensitive to every emphasis, the length of each note, that any deviation breaks the connecting thread.

Like listening to two audiobooks of the same story, to which I’ve listened maybe thirty times, but feeling them differently from each other. One is the same inflection, tone, pace as I remember from age eight, age ten, smuggling my headphones under my sheets like contraband. The other, though the same words, is entirely strange. Like another story altogether.

Nothing feels the same twice over. You can never get anything back in full.

I turned a hatred of circumstance into a hatred of place. Easy mistake. Things become clear, or else you reverse them, when you leave.

So many seasons of my life I long for again. The summer morning commute through the goldenrod fields, Wretch by Stevenson on loop. Chicago in August, half-drunk and beautiful in a bathroom mirror. Hill runs through Shadyside in the fall. Skipping full-tilt down main streets, emptied by the late hour. Wandering New York until the sky goes pink. A hand stretched in front of me, too afraid to yet hold it.

I’m a clever girl, I know when my rope runs out. So much of beauty is just youth.

How much of my life would I give to be incontestably beautiful?

I know I was once a decent singer, or else enough people lied to me about it. I know I am now a poor singer, but no one will tell me if I am out of practice or if this has always been the case. I live in so much delusion of who I am to other people.

I describe writing these essays as oiling the gears, or doing recovery exercises. My capacity for creative thought diminishes as my capacity for endlessly optimized productivity grows. Everything is a way of thinking. I was a student once; I have left that. An artist, rarely now. A worker all the time.

What is the use, I ask myself, in complaining about the same thing, if you will never make the decision to end it? Well, complaining is a sort of blood-letting. It keeps the unbearable bearable, which is not always a good thing.

All my life is a blood-letting. I count the months until my deliverance, which is neither guaranteed nor probable. So much goes into ensuring I wake up every morning. What I couldn’t stand a year ago becomes normal. Disturbing to realize I could, with time, condition myself into anything. What am I, then?

Things come to me when I stop looking for them. Cosmic irony.

Disappointments I defended myself against months before they came still crush. Steps I took in a direction I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, if only to delegate the decision-making to someone else. In this way, a rejection is a readjustment of my life. Proof that I was wrong to desire it.

Every decision is a life I could have lived. I imagine them nightly, my desire growing, the white space filling. Rendered technicolor. So that every life feels as real as my own, like it might happen tomorrow, with the right morning.

Denied, they don’t disappear easy. They stick and jam. The afterimage remains in the back of my mind, even as the possibility disappears, even as my life drives forward with its petty realisms.

I could have been this. I might—with some work, some effort, conviction—still be. But there is some relief in the rejection: one less possible life in my mind. One less what-if.

*

I’m at work on a Saturday, the sun just rising through the big bay windows as I’m given my instructions. “Everyone picks up trash.” The warehouse, with which I have typically very little to do, needs help. So: Twenty Ivy League graduates and myself will be counting inventory.

Surreal work. I sift through a sack of loose bronze screws, mouthing the count as I set them aside in piles of 20. Getting into the 500s, 600s, 800s. My fingers shiny with an unknown gloss and grime. My nails darkening.

Rare that I ever commit myself so totally to one thing like this. My work usually involves ever-present multitasking, a balancing act of thirty to-dos and follow-ups, all with shorter timelines than they deserve. But this requires my whole and complete attention. My eyes track every screw as I lay them aside; I touch them with more care than I show myself.

Rare to commit. In anything, ever, except maybe writing—even that is far between. Stumbled into without warning, like when I sat in the elevator bank of the math building for three hours to write and rewrite one poem, my eyes smarting from the screen glare, the day closing to night outside.

I imagine I would be farther in life if I had convictions. True, as well, that this sort of puttering around will only put me farther behind as the lives and desires of those around me crystallize. I wail to those I love about the same indecisions. I have enough shame for it to keep me up at night, but not enough to change.

*

Thin-skinned enough that a song makes me cry. I listen to it in bed. Saltwater wets my lips. I’ve booked tickets to see it live, in some attempt to relive or revive the memory that made it so dear. A memory I shared with a friend, whom I asked about it months back, hoping she might be equally or at least somewhat affected by it as well.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did that happen?”

Ah, well.

I remember it, at least. Colors flashing against a stone facade, the carved gods and angels and Carthaginian columns. The song through rigged speakers at either end of the lawn. Leaning back against the white painted wood, her perfume in the air beside me—early days of friendship, maybe a month. Late days of summer. The nights getting chill enough for me to wish I had worn a sweater.

How could it be nothing to her? But then I’m sure there are memories in her mind that have slipped mine. Fascinating what sticks and doesn’t. What retains its meaning over the years.

*

A rare warm day thins out the white overlay on the world, so that dried grasses peek through the snow. The sun a sleepy orange on the horizon. Light skidding across the surface, like tossed marbles. A drive I could make forever, for the destination never to come.

Not winter I will miss so much as seeing the world so changed. The black silhouettes of birds against the sky, an oblique cut.

*

I wish I knew what I was. I make commitments with one self who lives and dies in a day, and who means nothing to the next.

Happy to spend day on day with myself because of such changing. Incapable of constance. Longing for a seachange even when I am happy, or believe in part that I am.

At the same time, desiring a definition for everything. A glossary even of light. For someone to pick up my strings and direct me rightly, guide me forty years forward into something resembling success and contentment. And then to a good and painless death.

Summer of my first job, the end of do-nothing summers, though I didn’t think of it like this. Freshly nineteen. Driving past the sun-spackled farms and estates, white colonials in their fields like silent, shining gods. Jack Gilbert summer. In love with my own usefulness, desperate to prove it.

Almost four years later, making a similar sort of drive. A very different sort of girl. A winter sunrise pinking the horizon line. Cotton-white snow over fields I still remember golden and green in the days I first came to know them. The fences capped in white. Frost stars speckling night-dark windshields. 

My hands reddening from the hour spent knocking the ice from my car. My thighs red from running in shorts. The kind of cold that makes birdsong visible.

Still the same latent desperation from all those years ago, the need to prove something to someone. Never satisfied. The smallest comments make imprints in the soul. And still, the enduring fear that whatever I do is nothing more than footprints in sand, swept clean in the making.

Thinking of A., a secret hand pressing to her lower stomach. Two days before she was gone forever. Difficult to understand that this was the way of it—difficult to reconcile how people appear and disappear out of your lives, how you learn to talk around their memory. You have to stop thinking of people as people in situations like this. It can kill you.

Money is a useful measure along which to make decisions. It always exists; it facilitates easy comparison. Easier to optimize for money than anything else—happiness, fulfillment, impact, etc. A number is larger or smaller than another, unless it is the same.

Jealous of the easy way other’s names sound in the mouths of those I admire. Understanding by the way their eyes skip over me that mine is not yet in their memory. 

Almost a year. So much and nothing to show for it.

What were rows of round gourds and peaches and pumpkins are obliterated into white. The farmer’s wagon emptied out, its red curtain paled by the salt and frost.

My father sends me a picture of the snow, coming halfway up the window glass. Dilk you would have jumped in and done snow angels in elementary days.

Many things I would have done in those days. Easy to develop a bitterness towards the season as I watch the snow accumulate on my car, in the parking lot, thinking of how I will get to work tomorrow. But I loved it once. And I still—between my fears, my consternation—find it beautiful.

In every job I work, I submit for my name the shortened nickname I adopted young for its ease, the way it rolled off the tongue. Its wrongness still strikes me when I see it in messages, emails, placecards, nametags. The name of a girl who lives and dies in a day. 

How the change of three letters creates the separation necessary to live. That I can leave myself behind every night and still be myself.

I leave work singing to myself in the cold and dark, the song taking the shape of cigarette smoke. The long walk from one self to the other.

Crying in the bare circle of trees, whose foliage was once rich enough to hide a daily secret I used to keep. The crust of salt on the side of my shoes. The same sadness in the eyes of B. and S., which I see in my own eyes over the bathroom sink. I try now not to look anyone in the eye—I want to see less than I do, know nothing of it, let the surprise strike me sideways. Absorb the loss as I have learned to do.

M. whose eyes are glassy enough that I can’t tell if she’s crying. Her slim hands and red cheeks, like a doll, object of so much of my affection. I would kill to see her unsad.

My girls torn asunder by terrible men. Terrible even too gracious of a term. Losers, men of weak constitution, of too much youth, too little thinking. A hundred effacements of dignity made with the best intentions, which do not make them hurt less.

My cat thrusting himself into my arms, in front of the blue screen that occupies so much of my attention, unable to understand that there are places he is not wanted. The hush of his slow breath always in my ear, he who will not be apart from me, who wants to lay his cheek on my hand. The warm weight of him pressing down my pillow. I am his whole world; when I leave, it is ash clouding out the sun, it is a night that will not end until I return.

S. pressing a white book into my hands like a benediction, little treasure chest of my writings, precious to precious few people. Tears in his eyes that should be mine. Little angel of sincerity. I still think of his cheek in his hand, the porchlight silvering on his skin. Eyes like strong tea, without artifice.

On the phone with my father in the airport, early to a very delayed flight, telling him my heart. Him becoming privy to this secret, but also the four incongruous strangers who sit around me—unwitting priests to my confession. Their strangeness comforts me. I speak my heart into an air that won’t remember me.

Five flickering futures in my peripheral vision, dreams I keep alive to distract me from my life. Attractive to me because they aren’t what I am doing right now. How you spend your days is how you spend your life. But all my days are dark with dreaming. The doing means very little.

There’s a Youtube series I like to watch when I’m feeling particularly hateful. It’s called Trainwreckords—clever—and as the name suggests, each video in the series covers a particular album widely considered to have ended the career of its artist. Notable inclusions are Katy Perry’s Witness, Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods, Robin Thicke’s Paula… Also, Liz Phair’s Funstyle.

I’ve never liked Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake or Robin Thicke, so I take a distant pleasure in the merciless dissection of their respective careers. Liz Phair is a different story. I was late to her seminal debut album, Exile in Guyville, for good reason—I wasn’t born yet. But I found it in college, at the peak of my tortured artist phase, and loved it so much I wore a shirt with the album cover (Liz Phair mid-moan) and took a train to Philadelphia to watch her perform the entire tracklist.

My memories of the show are blurry: a small venue, average age mid-forties, Liz herself smudged indistinct by the stage lights, and her voice barely audible over the audience’s singing.

She was 56 during that concert. When Exile in Guyville was released, she was 26.

And it deserves all of its flowers. Every song is a masterclass in off-kilter storytelling, incising character studies, all with the unsettling phrasing of a Plath poem. She intentionally falls off beat, misses rhymes, trails off. But there’s no doubt evident in her singing, no second-guessing—she has the scornful confidence of someone aware of her own youth and brilliance. And it sold.

Funstyle comes some 17 years later, in the form of a surprise online album sold for just six dollars and marketed as the album that lost Liz Phair her agent, her management, and her mind. It’s a bizarre clash of genres and messy production, interspliced with spoken skits that satirize and rage against Hollywood and arts management. It’s a jaded, bitter album. Gone is the untouchable girl-genius; in her place is a woman shunned by the industry that once adored her because she refused to mimic herself.

To be clear, it’s not a good album. And not just because it isn’t Exile in Guyville 2, Electric Bugaloo, which is what her management—and, perhaps, audience—had been begging for. It’s an album without direction, full of vitriol and revenge fantasies. It has none of the prescient introspection of her debut, nor even the mainstream flavor of her later pop records. It’s confused.

But what breaks my heart is that she believed in it. In interviews, she states that she thought she’d discovered something new, really broken through—the way it must have felt making Guyville. She was shocked that her management disagreed. But then, they were only after money and popularity; what did they know? And when she refused to scrap the album, they dropped her.

And for the next eleven years, she didn’t release a thing.

Then, 2021. Soberish comes out. And there it is, what we’ve been waiting for all this time: Guyville part 2! There’s the guitar, the frankness, the bald sexuality. It’s Liz Phair just like she was at 26, almost. If you squint, it’s like all the years in between never happened.

The music world heaves a sigh of relief. 4 and 5 star reviews pour out of every corner; Pitchfork gives her a strong 7. And in her interviews, Liz acknowledges the different reactions to this album and her last, and suddenly she’s speaking about Funstyle like it’s a distant lapse in judgement she regrets and would really like to move on from, thank you.

But she believed in it. Once.

It wasn’t that she was forced to put out bizarre, directionless music. She didn’t suffer a psychotic break. If anything, Funstyle is more proof of her early brilliance and confidence, the sheer audacity to drop a project like that. And Soberish is the sheepish damage-control, the return to the tried-and-true. She’s a scolded dog, a burned child. And when Exile in Guyville’s 30th anniversary rolls around a couple years later, she dutifully goes on tour, performing her old hits mixed in with some new work, and a nineteen-year-old girl in the audience can barely tell the difference.

This isn’t about Liz Phair. I mean, it is, but only in the narrowest sense. It’s about how fickle talent and brilliance really are, at least in how they’re defined by your observers. You aren’t promised universal applause. How many authors publish instant classics, then spend the rest of their career trying to recapture that magic? How many actors suffer through failed project after project for another taste of the A-List?

I wrote a poem when I was seventeen called “ganesha”. I only wrote free-verse, lowercase poetry back then. It was part of a series of mythological poetry of which I was very proud. “ganesha” was one of the easiest poems in that series to write—one of the easiest poems I have ever written. It took me about thirty minutes at my family’s dining table, and I never revised a word of it from the original draft.

It starts like this:

before the elephant head,

i was a boy.

I was proud of this beginning. I knew I’d written something good—not remarkable, but good, especially for a high-schooler. And a couple months later, it was picked up for publication by Muzzle Magazine. There’s an audio recording of a teenage me reciting it.

It then went on to win a Scholastic Gold Medal, and got me some awards from the National YoungArts Foundation, and a finalist position for the Periplus Fellowship, and first place at my university’s writing awards. I was nominated for a Pushcart. I taught a writing conference workshop on “The Poetics of Mythology”. It became my calling card: the poem I submitted for every award and position and recited in every reading. I still get messages about it almost six years later.

I’ve written poems I love and am proud of since, but none with the impact of that poem. Sometimes, I read back over it, remember my own self-pleasure in the cleverness of the beginning and closing lines. I’ve tried, shamefully, to write copies. They all fall flat; magazines reject them without so much as a kind word.

I worry, fearfully, that I had hold of some rare magic all those years ago, with which I was lazy and careless and ungrateful, and now that magic has left me forever.

Most of me knows that isn’t true. Talent isn’t a lightning strike; it can be nurtured and called upon with practice and diligence. But it feels true sometimes, especially when I’ve slaved over a poem for weeks, read it back so many times I can recite it from memory, and submitted it to fifty magazines I’m sure are the perfect fit for it, only to get… nothing. I share it with friends, who smile and offer thin praise, and yet I still believe in it, I’m still convinced I’ve written something incredible. But as time goes on, that conviction wanes.

There’s a handful of poems and stories like that rotting away in my files. Works I adore, that I’m sure I’m looking at with a critical eye, but that have received no traction with anyone else except myself. It makes me doubt not only my craft but my ability to gauge good writing. Have I been deluding myself all this time? Did I just get lucky?

Did Liz Phair think the same?

I stopped submitting for a time. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d prided myself on developing something of a thick skin after years of literary rejection, but the blows were starting to sting. Instead, I just read and wrote. I had to believe I was capable of both producing great work and recognizing it. And I didn’t want to write poems mining my religion or my upbringing anymore; I wanted to write work on any number of topics that would be well-received because I was just that good.

I haven’t quite gotten to that level of ubiquitous approval. I’m actually far from it. But I was published in Frontier Poetry and The Yale Review for poems in completely different styles from “ganesha”; I was selected for Best New Poets; I was nominated for the Pushcart again. All for work that was dramatically different from what I’d written six years ago, but also a year ago. Work I believed in.

And one morning, out of the blue, a magazine I had submitted my mythological poetry to responded…six years later. They loved my poems and wanted to publish them. I opened the attachment I sent them and read through the suite of poems: “ganesha”, and a few others that were never published.

No, thank you, I wrote back. These poems are no longer available.

The reply came minutes later. I’m sorry to hear that! We still accept previously published work, however, if you’d be open to that.

I didn’t respond, but the truth was it didn’t matter whether or not those poems had already been published. I’d written them six years ago. They were no longer representative of my work, or where I wanted it to go.

I wonder what would have happened if Liz Phair hadn’t given up on Funstyle. If she’d reminded herself that she did know how to make good music, that she still knew what it was to push the envelope, and had just tried a few more times. Iterate and revise. Return not to the content that had made her popular, but the mindset. Maybe she would’ve created something incredible.

I’d rather flame out terribly writing the work I believe in than make pale copies of my old work. I’d rather develop constantly in a direction no one else agrees with than never develop at all. Easier said than done, especially when faced with the kind of amplified disgust and rejection that Liz Phair faced up under. But it’s about living the kind of honesty that makes your work worth doing. There was a time, early on, when Liz Phair must have been the only one who believed in herself. And out of that came Guyville. When that time came back around, what would have happened if she hadn’t given up on herself? And when it comes for me, inevitably, what will I have the strength to do, or not do?

ganesha

before the elephant head,

i was a boy. curtained in sweetwater

& dead skin—the dogs chasing me

in concentric circles, in two halves

of the mango, i had teeth back then

& dragged them in lines. i had

tasted of my body, a tributary

of the sky (& not,

as i had thought,

dressed in rivulets of the sun).

like a boy, i never learned to swim.

like a boy, i held a spear

& replaced my eyes with twin coins,

blinking with sun. i was a wish

half-made. i was half-earth

on my mother’s side. they said

figurine, said false idol,

dregs of the candle—

meaning, of course,

that my time was nearly up.

i would die by drowning,

they said. my skin sloughed off,

my ribs inverted, each vein

celestial in collapse. in the end

i did not die by drowning.

they took my head.

I Sodi

Manhattan royalty. I’m in the city visiting a friend, but I leave her just for this. I start my full-time job in a week, which means I can make a 5:30 p.m. Monday evening dinner reservation. Alas, no more. 

I get a seat at the bar. I’ve brought a book, Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. I try to read, but I’m distracted by the woman next to me, who is reading something—can it be?—even more niche and esoteric. Something slim and French, like Bardot.

My appetizer is fried artichokes. It’s a mound of thin, crispy artichoke leaves, heavily salted, and very one-note. 

The woman next to me says, “Oh, I love that book!” 

We talk for a bit. She tells me about her book, full of internal dialogue and sexual perversion, and how she loves walking into I Sodi for dinner after a tough day at work. 

She’s a corporate lawyer. Something human and labor rights related, and she works for Cisco. I tell her I’m thinking about law, which is true, just like I’m thinking about a PhD and an MFA and med school. She’s excited. We exchange LinkedIns. She says, “Message me when you’re ready for an internship.” I say, “Of course, absolutely, thank you.”

My main is cacio e pepe. The pasta is spaghetti, disappointingly. I prefer a bucatini or tonnarelli. It’s also unbearably salty. I get through it with sips of my gin and soda to soothe my tongue.

The woman asks if she should get dessert. I say yes, which will always be my answer to that question.

Dessert is a rhubharb tart. It’s small, grainy, delicious. Rhubharb makes me think of the Market Basket strawberry rhubharb pie my father used to bring home, which I would sneak slices of at 4 a.m. while studying for my Chemistry tests. I gained twelve pounds. 

Mistral

Mistral is a Michelin-adjacent fusion fine-ish dining restaurant at the heart of Princeton’s downtown. It’s the first restaurant I visit when I move.

It’s my most attended restaurant. There are weeks I go twice or three times, always by myself. The bar is warm and full of talking. The small plates are delicious. 

I’m there again, reading something—The Sound and The Fury, I think—when the man next to me asks how I find the food. He’s clearly a regular; he’s given a free beer when he pulls up a bar stool, and he’s nursing a bowl of Szechuan wings that I never heard him order.

We chat. He went to Princeton, he tells me, but always allied himself with the “townies”. Then we talk some about the ivory tower, what school never teaches you, etc. It takes him a while into the conversation to tell me that he dropped out. “I’m happy, though.” 

He worked at a natural grocer. Now he’s a carpenter. When I tell him I just moved, he offers to put together a desk for me. We spend some minutes looking through wood samples.

Eats and drinks this time around: French 75, rice paper chips with Szechuan seasoning, bao buns, key lime semifreddo. It always changes. 

LumLum

I go to LumLum with my New York roommate first. Then, three days before I move out, I go again.

I’m a changed woman. I’ve had a miserable internship and a beautiful summer. I get a bar seat under the AC, which dries the flood of sweat I’ve been carrying around the city. 

Their pad thai comes with a delicate fishnet of egg laid over it. It’s perfectly sauced, hot, spicy enough to restart my sweat glands. 

Not reading today. Just eating. Also, thinking on the summer, which I leave behind with a sort of relief and desperate sadness. I am glad to never go to work again. I am glad to never live in a prison-cell dorm with cockroaches and a barely-functioning fridge again. I will miss New York terribly.

Dessert is mango sticky rice. This is the first place I ever had the stuff, and I am ruined forever. The mango is soft, deep orange, bleeding its honey into the milky coconut rice. I take bites of only a few grains at a time, just to lengthen it. 

A year later, I come back with friends. The food is good, it’s always good, but the season for mangoes has ended, and there is no sticky rice to be had. Only my memory.

Kalaya

Fishtown is the only part of Philadelphia that can still be called Philadelphia and also be within reasonable driving distance of my job, which is to say, about an hour and fifteen away.

The streets are ridiculously narrow, worsened by the uninterrupted lines of cars parked along the sides. The matchbox houses and apartments press together like sardines.

It’s raining. My reservation is at 8. I leave work at 7, and I have to do some dangerous driving to make it there in time. There is, thank god, parking nearby. I try to pay, can’t figure it out. I’ll just make it quick.

The place is almost empty. Green, to evoke the tropics, maybe. I’m at the bar.  The bartender is white, blonde, moving fast. I ask her for recommendations. She says, “How much spice can you handle?” I think, bring it on, white girl.

Bird-shaped dumplings, cut chili for a beak. Delicious, sweet, a little spicy.

Then, red curry. Steaming rice. I down two glasses of water and order a mocktail. I want to ask if they have milk behind the bar, but I’m too embarrassed.

This is the farthest I’ve driven for a dinner. I’m recognizing that my love of dining out is more than just a love of convenience. I like a plate constructed like a painting, and the odd ceremony of restaurant etiquette. There are meals I remember forever.

Emmett

Another Fishtowner. Emmett is a “Best New Restaurant” on some list or other, and I go again after work on a Friday. The sky is darkening as I walk. I pass by a couple arguing on the street; the woman is screaming and striking out at her man, who has thrown up his hands. I pass by a cat in a warm yellow window. 

Emmett has a tasting menu. They put me at a table, not a bar seat, which I’m grateful for. The food is off-kilter: sesame madeleines with curry butter and strawberry jam, gnocchi in cheese foam, date cake flavored like sticky toffee pudding. My waiter wipes down my table and replaces the cutlery after every meal. He’s kind; he doesn’t ask why I’m alone. And if it’s clear I’m struggling to finish my food, he gives no indication that he realizes.

When I leave, I take a paper packet of Emmett-branded matches from the host’s stand. I trip on my skirt outside the door, skin my knees on the pavement. A homeless man raises his head to watch me.

The couple has stopped fighting. They sit on the curb together, smoking cigarettes. The man’s shirt is gone. The woman is leaning her head on his bare shoulder. She might, I think as I walk by, be asleep.

Veselka

Another restaurant I went with a friend first, another during my hot New York summer. Walk-ins only. I come back as a farewell the last week of my internship.

They seat me in a tiny corner, shoved up against a stack of menus. A solo diner is the wet dream of busy restaurants. I know what I want without opening the menu, and the waiter comes in seconds.

Cold borscht with dill and hard-boiled egg and cubed cornichons. A dollop of sour cream. Four pierogi, two potato and cheese, two mushroom and sauerkraut. Served with caramelized onions and sour cream. Two latkes. Applesauce. Finally, a blintz, as fluffy as a fresh pillow, with farmer’s cheese, strawberry preserves, chopped walnuts.

For fifteen minutes, I’m in heaven. I could pour the borscht over my head. I ordered a pint of it to my dorm in a moment of weakness only a couple weeks ago. I’ll miss it more than the city. 

Veselka is a place of efficiency; lollygaggers and dawdlers beware. As soon as I’m finished, my plates are whisked away. Then I, too, am gathered and swept out the door, to be replaced by another singleton waiting their turn. 

Café Boulud

For this I venture to the Upper West Side, which I have studiously avoided for years. I’m early to my reservation and get off the train a stop too soon. The Madison and Park Avenues spin my head counterclockwise; my nose stings with the perfume of wealth. Lines of designer stores, impossibly clean Manhattan streets, Burberry scarves and fur coats and Van Cleef. 

I walk into Café Boulud behind an older couple, dressed in spotless wool coats and leather gloves. The husband doesn’t realize I’m coming in after him, or maybe he can’t imagine that I would. The door almost hits my face.

I’m a little shabby in my knee-length puffer coat and jeans. My hair could use a wash. I wear no makeup. It embarrasses me to ask the host to charge my phone for me, but he is gracious, and offers to take my coat besides. I decline.

I forget a book, so I people-watch. It’s Sunday brunch. Entire families are here, men, women, children. The men are often older than the women. The women are skinnier. Everywhere, impeccable blowouts. Fresh manicures. Children in church outfits or private school uniforms (isn’t it the weekend?) swinging their legs on chairs too high for them. 

The two women next to me have the light music of Delhi accents. One says she has a standing weekly reservation here, that’s how much she loves it. The other says she prefers Maison Close.

Mushroom velouté. Poured by a waiter over little dollops of colored cream and mushroom caps. Warming and delicious for the first few bites, but I get tired of it quickly.

A gay couple on the other side of me. They hold hands over the table; one rubs his thumb in slow circles on the other’s.

Buckwheat squid ink pasta with a sauce of confit tomatoes. My plate is entirely too large. The pasta is mostly flavorless, and the buckwheat cuts at my tongue when I chew. I push it away. 

I’m watching the controlled chaos of waiters and hosts rush around the room, checking in on every table, resolving their butter shortage for the multigrain bread, sweeping up used and fallen cutlery. 

The waiter brings me the bill. I say, “Oh, I wanted to look at dessert.” I see him eye my unfinished pasta, but he brings me the menu anyway.

A behemoth of a dessert: banana ice cream, rum caramel sauce, caramelized bananas, brown butter crumble, and a mountain of whipped cream. I scrape my bowl clean. It is, I marvel, one of the greatest man-made creations I have ever seen.

The pasta is forgiven. Danny boy is forgiven. I walk back into the cold still buzzing from the sugar, the taste of banana and caramel on the back of my tongue.

Flavia’s Cucina Romana 

There is a well-known, highly recommended French restaurant in Asbury Park called Pascal and Sabine. I booked a reservation, cancelled, and went here instead.

Flavia’s is trashy Italian. They put me at a small table in near-center of the restaurant, so that waiters keep bumping into me as they pass by. My own waiter might be a hopeful actor of some sort, because he greets me with theatrical projection. He has a man bun and the air of someone who knows he is handsome. 

It’s funny, therefore, when he can’t remember the menu, which he is trying to read to me like a Shakespearean monologue. The effect is ruined every time he pauses to check the menu before launching again into his dramatic reading. 

The cacio e pepe resembles an alfredo. I can’t get through half. The waiter is delighted when I ask for dessert, because he gets a callback to read out that section of the menu. This time, he remembers the items. His performance is so over the top that the table next to me is glaring at us, and I almost want to applaud.

The dessert is a tiramisu that might be storebought. I eat a few bites and think wistfully of my cancelled reservation at Pascal and Sabine.

Flavia’s is the end to a full day alone at the beach. I drove over an hour from my apartment, walked the boardwalk, got a psychic reading, bought a box set of Lord of the Rings, read a little, had a beer, waved to the Costco meme man, and ended up here. I leave full, mostly satisfied, although that has nothing to do with the food.

Win Son Bakery

New York again. Walking around LES alone, nothing planned, just walking from park to park and reading. This time, it’s The Lover, Marguerite Duras. It’s beautifully written and disgusting, as all the best books are.

I want the egg and cheese on a scallion pancake. Everyone wants the egg and cheese on a scallion pancake. I wait in a line that extends outside, order, then have to sit outside for it to be ready.

I take my prize to a garden I passed by on my way here. It’s gated, with iron benches in a circle surrounded by vines and overgrown plots and great green trees that droop overhead. A boy is writing in a notebook, pausing every few minutes to stare hard at a bush or tree. A couple on another bench laugh at a private joke and press their faces together.

The sandwich is underwhelming. The scallion pancake is incredibly oily. The cheese is too mild, overpowered by the tangy sauce. But it’s hot, filling stuff, and I finish it as I finish The Lover. This is my lover for the weekend, my sandwich. As disappointing as weekend lovers often are.

Ravello by Toscano

My 22nd birthday. It’s a well-rated Italian place within twenty minutes of my apartment, and I dress a little too well for what it actually is: a hole in the wall joint shoved into a strip mall. 

The host says, “We were wondering who would book a reservation for one.”

I still bristle at this question. What’s the problem with booking a reservation for one! What’s the problem with eating alone! Give a girl a break.

He leads me to my chair. The only other people in the place is a ten-top of drunk, white-haired retirees. They laugh so loud their wine glasses shake.

“Your birthday today?” The host asks. “Why not have a glass?”

I think on it. Why not? “Yes please.”

“Sorry,” he says, “we’re BYOB.”

Entree is some nondescript pasta dish, but what strikes me is the portion size, which might feed a family of four. I pick at it with my fork. 

I have a book with me, thankfully, but the raucous laughter from the other side of the room makes it difficult to concentrate. I’m embarrassed in my white corset and flowery skirt. I look like I took a wrong turn for the opera.

The host, who I’m realizing is also the only waiter, notices my rapidly cooling plate. He takes it away silently.

I get through a few more pages before he returns. In one hand is a takeaway box, probably with my extensive leftovers, and the other carries a plate of cheesecake. There’s a lit candle in the center of it.

“Happy birthday, sweet girl,” he says, and sets it in front of me.

It doesn’t make up for all of the night. But, I think as I take a bite, it might make up for some.

Butterjoint

Butterjoint is inconveniently located, which is my excuse for not going once in my 3.5 years of college. But it’s where I go on a warm May Sunday, walking with purpose down the length of North Craig as my graduation commencement continues without me.

Graduating early takes some of the oomph out of the event. When I submitted my last assignment on December 12th, 2024, I got nothing for it except a CMU-branded champagne glass and some watery hot chocolate. My diploma arrived weeks later in the mail. I knew I’d have to come back in May for the actual ceremony, but by then, I’d be two months into my full-time job, and graduation would seem like a thing of the past.

The actual graduation ceremony itself was surprisingly lovely. Bagpipes played us into the hall. I had spent years hating the sound; now, I found myself close to tears. And my family standing in the crowd, applauding wildly, as though my college career had just now come to an end, and not six months ago.

Yes, it was lovely, receiving the handshake and the picture and the fake diploma. Hearing my achievements read out from a script I had submitted. Smiling awkwardly at professors I’d adored and lost touch with. But I was a working woman with limited PTO, and my parents had no interest in sitting through a four hour commencement, so as the class of 2025 listened to speeches by Sal Khan and turned their tassels, I had lunch at Butterjoint.

A wonderful brunch spot. Pierogi, golden brown on the bottom, topped with caramelized onions and sour cream. Crumpet with butter and berry compote. A weak mimosa—good, because I had a five hour drive ahead of me. Then, for dessert, vinegar pie.

The Midwestern meets Northeastern peculiarities of Pittsburgh have charmed me. I love its yinzers, its Polish cuisine, its cobblestone roads, its sheer hills, its terrible rain, its steel bones, its brick houses. I miss it to this day, a phantom of an old joy just west of me. A capsule of my youth.

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A sharp breeze across the river. The long European shutters and wide balconies, on which I’ve watched beautiful women smoking cigarettes and drinking their coffee. Tuscan architecture like a fresco at an Olive Garden. The tall, tufted trees. The broad baked roofs, golden walls.

Thin-skinned ravioli in butter and sage. We rip pieces of cold bread and sweep up the sauce. Rich red wine sits on every table; a woman tucks into her second glass and a steak for breakfast.

A string of bad coffees, tourist traps. My brother’s face souring as the morning goes on. He is holding the place up to his image of Brooklyn, the silver kingdom, and finding it lacking. I say, Well, obviously. All the Italians moved to New York.

I find myself half-turning as we go down the streets, watching beautiful girls in their wool coats and leather gloves and laughter. Jealous of that easy beauty, longing for that kinship—these feelings remain the same, even as the countries change.

Little dogs in their sweaters and puffed jackets, shuddering in the wind. Tucked under a jacketed arm. One brought into a coffee shop; as his owner orders, he strains and bucks at the leash, staring desperately at the spackle of sun on cobblestone outside.

So much cobblestone. I stumble more times than I’d like to admit. The heels I brought stay in the suitcase.

Wandering the halls of the art museum, marveling at how much work can be produced around the same subjects, the same faith. Mourning a little the loss of patronage. A thousand renditions repeated on themselves: Madonna with Child, Madonna with Child, Adoration of the Child, the Annunciation, the Beheading of John the Baptist, Madonna with Child. Then, with no fanfare: Caravaggio, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo.

You expect not to be impressed by art you have seen in pictures and textbooks and Things to See in Florence Youtube videos. You will be. Half for the notoriety, for the understanding that you are witnessing something that had endured long before you and will outlive you. Half because it’s brilliant.

Children chatter in rapid, stumbling Italian, flick crackers at pigeons bobbing their oil-slick heads and burbling.

A girl sits on a railing, her boy between her legs, and their faces draw together. On every corner is a couple kissing, brushing the other’s hair out of their face, stroking the other’s skin. Never mind the sunset over the hills, never mind the chapel splitting the sky. However long art and architecture endure, the fervor of young love will outlast it.

Dinner at a little place with the polish of a Manhattan bistro. Watching the chef plate our dishes at the pass: spinach gnudi on a bed of bright, acidic tomato sauce; gnocchi in gorgonzola cream with fermented pear; tiramisu in a clay pot.

Hot chocolate that coats the back of a spoon. So rich my tongue is heavy after one sip, and I taste it in the back of my throat for hours.

The train to Rome. I say aloud, Not faster than the Northeast Regional, and my father laughs. Images of the Tuscan landscape unfurl, interrupted suddenly by the blackness of tunnels, so that we press our faces to the glass greedily to take in what we can. The gathering of towns at the points of cliffs or mountains. Dirt roads along which small cars trundle like beetles. Broad estates rolling away into the horizon, studded with short, gnarled trees. I imagine their lives, this countryside royalty. The rich living and drinking they must do.

Rome is tighter, brighter. The current goes by quicker. Incredible how ruins emerge from the corners of modern construction. The Trevi Fountain comes to life suddenly in a circle of buildings, brilliant in a strike of sun, then vanishes as you move on. In the gift shop of museums, old stone foundations stand alongside keychains and themed calendars. History laid across the present like a filter.

I drink three cappuccinos a day to keep awake. I develop a taste for the cloud of warm milk, then, later, the bitterness.

Wandering the Coliseum and the Roman Forum, I touch exposed stone every chance I can get. Incredible to lay a hand where a thousand hands have laid, where the ancient teeth of chisels are still visible. I watch sun and cloud pass over the half-standing buildings, old apartments and temples and gathering places. How many times has the sun passed this place over? How many empires have come and gone?

Today, rivers of people move around the place, touching, talking, laughing. In a million years, these people won’t be here. But these ruins will remain, one notch we’ve made on the world. Proof of existence.

I share a room with my brother the whole trip, the longest we’ve spent in such close quarters for years. We watch what comes on the little TV: Italian-dubbed Friends, old Trump speeches, Chinese documentaries. It’s an hour into one of these documentaries that we realize it’s propaganda, and we nearly lose our dinners laughing. We stay up later than we should; we order French fries and ketchup to the room.

I feel, for at least a week, like a little sister again. It’s nice to step back into it.

At our last dinner, we sip Chianti in a four-table restaurant just outside the Vatican. Its stone walls rise into the gathering night. Strings of Christmas lights line the thin, winding streets, and stuffed Santas hang off ladders from apartment windows. The streetlights are amber, no harsh fluorescence, and their steelwork is of gargoyles and angels.

We share plates of cacio e pepe and confit artichoke and nutty alfredo and panna cotta, trying to speak low. Importance attached to the night, as it’s our last night, and so our last dinner. I eat slow, to lengthen the magic of it.

I imagine what it is to live in a place like this. Walk out of my small apartment into the Vatican, dinner or a light lunch that might be the best meal of someone’s life, a steady diet of red wine nightcaps and strong coffee. Watching the sun go down over the yellow and pink buildings. Alive among so much history that it becomes everyday. It’s the sort of mild dreaming I do often, with no real intent behind it. Still, I think. What if?

A year ago, I was desperately sad. I’d graduated; I didn’t have a job offer; my relationship was going south; my appointment for antidepressants had been postponed; I’d been rejected from the one MFA program I applied to; and I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself.

I still don’t, really. It’s been a year of kicking things around, trying them out. I moved, took up a job I thought I’d hate. I adopted a cat and spent a month frantically figuring out how to care for it. I took karate classes and painting classes and Pilates classes and didn’t continue any of them. I gained weight. I lost weight. I made friends and lost them. I spent too much money on frivolous things and not enough on important things. I cut my hair. I drove to Maine. I drove to Chicago. I bought furniture and sold furniture and bought it again. I had a break-up.

Despite all that, 2025 was one of the happiest years of my recent life. I like my job. I live alone in an apartment to myself. I spent rent money on a couch that my cat tears up with his claws, and I let him, because I adore him with all my heart. I got into another relationship. I got off the antidepressants. I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years. I ate at restaurants that changed my life, by myself, and loved it. I bought a diamond necklace. I joined a run club. I applied for graduate school.

All of a sudden, the world was open to me. It was wonderful and terrifying to figure out living with myself: getting pulled over for the first time, servicing my car, changing my license, comparing credit cards, hosting a dinner party, navigating health insurance, taking my cat to the vet, investing. I made so many mistakes and so many frantic calls to my parents, who were always patiently on the other end of the line to answer my silliest questions. I cobbled together a life over the last year that is, for the first time, becoming my own.

My writing practice slowed, and at the same time, my Substack grew. I was published in The Yale Review and Meridian, two dream journals, and nominated for a Pushcart for fiction for the first time. I participated in a reading for the first time in two years. I was shortlisted for a fellowship with the first poet who ever inspired me.

My job has become most of my life, but I’m getting good at it. I had truthfully never thought I’d find work outside of writing worth doing. Now, however, I enjoy it so much it scares me.

A year ago, I had entered the year dragging myself across the line. I had no goals, no aspirations, no hopes except to be a little happier, or at least less sad. Now, I have ridiculous and grandiose dreams the likes of which I haven’t had since middle school. I have Plans, capital P. Some of them may not happen this year; some may not happen at all. The thing is to try.

I’m not sad to be older. I’m glad for however the time passes. I used to impose personal timelines for my achievements, impossible ones, and tear myself apart for missing them: novel by 16, marathon by 18, PhD by 25, etc. Of course, none of it happened. But no more of that. I want only to make use of my time this year, however I can—to wake up with something to do, and go to sleep with something done. Even if it’s almost nothing to anyone else. All that matters is what it is to me.

Every hour of every day, in my hand, a little rectangle of luminous crystal. Porthole into a million other lives, which are not so much lives as pictures of an ideal life pasted over the opening for my viewing pleasure, for my manufactured envy.

It’s clever, the machine. It can tell the images you pause the longest at, the lives you want to look into the most, and it will feed you a reel of just these lives, stoking the flame of desire or hate. Desire and hate, often.

These days, videos of beautiful women making fat sandwiches, elaborate salads. “Marry me pasta.” French butter, Swiss alpine cheese, Calabrian chili. Glasses of pale gold wine. Immaculate manicures. Marquise or princess cut diamonds, pavé bands.

Captioned like this: “When he says he’ll be home in five.” “Paying rent.” “When he’s had a long day.”

Van Cleef rosettes around slender wrists. Cartier cuffs. David Yurman. Aritzia coats, Burberry scarves, $80 blowouts.

“Taking care of yourself is the best form of self-love.” Snail mucus moisturizer. Red light therapy. Birthday Botox. Keratin treatments, rosemary oil. Microneedling. Eyebrow darkening, lightening.

Q&As on their stories that make my blood boil, even as I watch them in entirety.

What do you do for work?

Stay at home wife. Stay at home girlfriend. Used to be in marketing, in communications, in real estate. Content creation.

How long have you two been together?

Eight years. Eight months. Since college, high school, last year.

How did you two meet?

Frat sweetheart. Party. Bar. Hawaii, Spain, Switzerland. Hinge.

It isn’t tradwife content in the most direct sense. These women have stylish slickback buns; they’re modern; they don’t wear bras in the house. No farmstead, no flock of children. They’re young, mid-twenties most. They summer in Rhode Island or Maine; they ski in Aspen. They are often grateful to God.

Grateful to their husbands, their boyfriends. Grateful to live the “soft life” they were made for. Grateful to be with such a good man that they never have to worry about the bills or the stock market, the Pats or Bears; grateful that they picked just right, that other women might be broken up with or divorced and left destitute, but they won’t.

What’s worse is that for some, it’s true. They’ll be beautiful and unworried, and their husbands will love them or tolerate them, and they’ll have children and send them to private schools and drop them off at the in-laws or sleepaway camps during the holidays. They’ll grow older and keep their diet and Botox and be praised for never letting themselves go. A facelift at forty will lengthen their lease on beauty. They’ll have grandchildren and grand Christmases. They’ll die in Dior pajamas.

I watch these women in the mornings before work, when my body is already bone tired, or over a lukewarm takeout dinner, or on the weekends as my laundry piles up on the floor. When I work ten hour, twelve, fourteen hour days, or when my eyes smart from staring too long at the computer, I think of them. Their beautiful, moisturized hands. Their crumbless counters and dustless floors.

I deride them, and in the same moment I love them. I hate what they stand for, what they represent. I want to be of them. I hate their falseness, and I believe in their beauty. I suspect their romances as strongly as I want them to be true.

One woman says she met her husband the summer before she was to start college. She chose him over college, moved across the country from Hawaii to North Carolina, and became a wife a year later. Now she’s twenty-three, effervescent, and when she cuts her husband’s steak, every slice is perfectly pink.

No, I don’t want to give up my Bachelor’s degree. No, I don’t want to quit my job, to have nothing to my own merit. No, I don’t want to be dependent on someone for my whole life. But also, yes, I want to love and be loved by someone enough to be dependent on them and never be afraid of it. I want to spend every hour of my day doing the kind of cleaning and ordering and maintenance that I usually rush through at midnight on Sunday. I want to get coffee at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and browse the expensive boutiques and perfumeries. I want to have brunches, lunches. I want to go for three hours walks in the sun.

I hate them, these women, because they give me a crisis of identity. There’s a part of me that wants the shared city apartment, the paired wedding band and engagement ring, the date night dinners I never pay for, the credit card bills and rent and taxes I never see. And there’s a part of me that wants the one-bedroom to myself, praise and accomplishment at work, the balancing act of managing my finances, the methodical creation of the life I want to live.

It doesn’t help to tell me they’re lying about it all, putting up a front. That you never know what’s going on behind the scenes. That they must be secretly miserable, or that in a few years they will reap the consequences of such public happiness, either through abuse or divorce or family tragedy. Commenters on their posts will echo these refrains with a kind of violent glee. Prophesizing future suffering like a horde of black-hearted oracles.

Because as much as I hate these women, I want only happiness for them. I want to know it’s possible, and true, and real. That it could be possible for me, if I were a different sort of person, if I had lived a different sort of life with different beliefs.

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The feeling comes as soon as Selvi hears the piano. First, a dulling of senses, like a door to the world has just been closed. Numbness in the fingertips. Then high heat in her face and neck, to which she presses the cool backs of her hands. She leaves her cleaning and goes to the kitchen, takes a cucumber from the crisper, holds it to her forehead.

She stands like this long after the piano ceases. At length, she hears the gargle of the toilet, her husband’s heavy step on the stair.

He stands at the entrance to the kitchen and looks at her, cucumber and all. 

“Good morning,” he says.

She throws the cucumber at him.

He catches it neatly in the air. “Don’t start.”

“I am not starting,” Selvi says.

Her husband does not respond. He does not even look at her meanly, so that she can be provoked. He only sets the cucumber down, crosses the kitchen to the pantry, withdraws a box of cereal.

She watches him pour the cereal into his bowl. Morning light comes in through the window above the sink. It gives his thin, straight figure its own yellow halo. Through it, she can see, just, where his shoulders have begun to stoop.

“When are they coming?” he asks. A little milk dribbles from his mouth. 

“Afternoon.”

“Both?”

“Ashwin at noon, Yamini at five.”

“Neither of those are afternoon.”

“I’m sorry.”

She can hear him chewing slowly, swallowing with a soft grunt. The older he gets, the more of these noises he makes. 

“The children?” 

“Yamini is bringing the baby.”

Just saying it gives her a happy little thrill. 

“And Ashwin?” 

“Well, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t say anything. 

“I don’t,” she says. 

Her husband only sighs. 

Ashwin arrives as she’s making lunch. She sees his gray car pull into the drive. 

He’s a foot taller than her. Her face goes into his stomach when they hug.

“All alone?” she asks. She looks again at the car to be sure.

“You could sound less happy about it,” her son says.

“I am not happy.”

He gives her a look and steps around her with his suitcase.

“Where’s Appa?”

“Sleeping.” She closes the door behind him, wipes her hands unnecessarily on her towel. “I am just finishing lunch.”

He is not looking at her; he is fiddling with something on his suitcase.

“You go up and get settled,” she says. “The food will be ready in five, ten minutes.”

She watches him heft the suitcase over his shoulder and head up the stairs. She wants to tell him to take it slow, he will hurt his back, but she is afraid to nag. 

Half an hour has passed by the time she sets the stew and curry on the table. 

“Ashwin!” she calls. In Tamil, “Come down!”

She sits at her place at the table. Picks a shaving of coconut from the curry with her fork, sets it on her tongue. This one she has done well.

“Ashwin!” she calls again. “Ranga!”

Now, noises from upstairs. The angry rush of the bathroom faucet. The open and shut of a drawer. 

Selvi blows out a breath and watches white steam rise from the stew, the curry, the rice. 

Her husband is first down. He has changed into a pressed shirt and black pants, and his thinning silver hair has been meticulously combed to the side. He sits at the head of the table.

“Looks very good,” he says.

“It’s cold,” she says.

They both look at the food, which is still steaming.

Ashwin comes down. His hair is wet, and it drips onto the collar of his shirt. Already a dark circle has formed at the nape of his neck.

“You should have dried it before coming,” Selvi says, before she can stop herself.

“I meant to, but you called.”

“So, it’s my fault?”

“Sit,” says her husband to Ashwin. “And take food, you must be hungry.”

Ashwin begins ladling food onto his plate.

“You should have more rice than that,” Selvi says. 

“This is fine.”

“How is that fine? One, two spoons?”

“White rice is linked to diabetes,” Ashwin says, “did you know?”

“That’s all nonsense.”

“It’s not. There are studies—”

“Indians have been eating white rice for longer than diabetes was discovered, don’t listen to all these studies. And don’t talk like you are some kind of doctor.”

“Selvi,” her husband says sharply.

Ashwin turns away from her. To her husband, he says, “I’m meeting with the director next week to discuss extending my contract for next season.”

“Really? I thought you were going to move orchestras.”

“I was, but the boys have really been taking to their school, so I’d hate to move them.”

Her husband shifts in his seat, straightening a little. A severity is descending on him, she can see it.

“Staying too long at a lower tier orchestra can be detrimental to your career in the long-term.”

“It’s just one more year.”

“One more, then two, then five. It creeps up on you, Ashwin.”

“It’s not just me I have to think about—”

“Of course it is. Take a year away in another contract, the boys will hardly miss you, but the impact will be enormous. You will meet all the right people.”

Selvi sighs loudly.

Ashwin glances at her, then away. Her husband doesn’t even look.

“Complacency is death to the pianist,” her husband says. His voice has lost none of its command over the years. “Especially ones like us. My name will only go so far for you.”

“Yeah, alright,” Ashwin says. He pushes at his rice with his spoon. “I’ll talk to Francine about it.”

“Francine!” Selvi says. 

Their faces turn towards her now. Blood in the water.

“It would have been so nice to see her today.”

“Amma.”

“And the boys. But I suppose they are all too busy.”

Her husband says nothing.

“Francine’s on deadline,” Ashwin says. “But even if she wasn’t, you can’t blame her and the boys for not coming. It’s not like you’ve been very hospitable to them—”

“Hospitable? I give them beds, I give them food, what hospitable?”

“You treat them like they just wandered in from the street. Your own grandchildren.”

“They are not my grandchildren.”

“The children of your son are your grandchildren, Amma.”

“No, no,” Selvi says, “you can’t just fling a word like that around, you can’t just scoop babies from who knows where and call them your children, they aren’t even Indian—”

“Selvi!” her husband says. 

Her mouth clicks shut. Then she says, “Fine, of course, I’ll shut up. Who wants to hear me talk? I just make food and shut up and everyone else goes on doing what they like.”

“Amma, please, don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true. You all just want me to keep quiet.”

“You know that’s not what we mean,” her husband says.

“You are another thing,” she says to him savagely. “You keep mum on all of this and leave me to be the bad guy.”

Her husband sighs. He is always sighing, her husband, he is always so tired. And old. Enough of your yelling, Selvi. No fighting today, Selvi. Leave me alone, please, Selvi.

You know that’s not what we mean. 

It is her habit now to sleep away the early hours of the afternoon. She lies alone in the big bed, keeping carefully to her side. 

Yamini will be here soon. And the baby. A little girl, a perfect little girl, with all her fingers and toes. Things will come to balance again. No, now the scales will tip—towards her. It will almost make the forty years worth it. 

Like this she lies. The day goes on. She is almost asleep, halfway dreaming about the baby, when the feeling comes again.

There is an overpracticed quality to the playing that tells her it is Ashwin. He is good. Not prodigal. Secretly she’s happy for it, because the feeling is never so bad when he is playing. It would be terrible if he was as good as her husband. She would never forgive him.

She knows the piece, too. One of Satie’s Gymnopedies, she can’t remember the number, but she does remember young days spent sitting by her husband’s knee as he practiced, humming the notes to herself, trying to commit it to memory. 

Once, she was proud of this recall. 

The low music grinds away at her. She lies very still, unblinking. It’s too early to move; Yamini won’t be here for hours still.

Then the music stops. Changes.

The grinding becomes a sharp, direct pain. Heat begins in her neck, a stiffness settling in her limbs. The music has become smoother, cleaner, with flourishes here and there indicating a sophistication Ashwin has yet to reach. Her husband has taken the seat.

Consider what I’m saying… consider my feelings…

We’ll try again, I promise…

Selvi is out of the bed. Her blood beats dully somewhere in her. She is sweating, feverish.

The baby. She has to get ready for the baby.

She makes the bed, goes to splash some water on her face. In the mirror, her face looks older than it is, than it should be. Puffy, just beginning to line.

The feeling crawls through her. She goes to the landing. The music rises up to her like smoke.  

“Ranga!”

It stops. Silence rushes into the vacuum, blissful silence, like a cool cloth laid against her forehead.

“I am,” Selvi says, “trying to sleep.”

Her husband emerges from the living room, rubbing a hand across his chest. From up here, she can see the shiny patches on his scalp. 

“It’s the afternoon,” he says.

“I’m taking a nap.”

“Ashwin needs to stay in shape.”

“Then let him play.”

Her husband only looks at her. So many years later, he’s well aware of how little she can stand his playing. 

“I’m demonstrating,” he says.

“You’re showing off.”

He laughs. It makes her angry, that laugh. 

“You are,” she says.

He smiles at her. Says nothing.

Selvi is on the porch when Yamini arrives. A taxi labors into the drive, idles. A thin woman steps out. Young still, black hair loose around her shoulders. Takes after her father in looks, but Selvi has always believed they share something in the set of their jaws, their stubbornness. 

They hug. Selvi feels the bird bones of her daughter’s back under her fingers. Then Yamini turns away, towards the taxi, and opens the back door.

There lies the baby. Strapped into her car seat, sound asleep, cheek pillowed against the black padding.

“Oh!” Selvi says, and reaches out.

“Let’s go inside first, Amma,” Yamini says, scooping the baby up. “You have to wash her hands before you touch her.”

“I’m not dirty.”

“I’m not saying that.”

Selvi, injured, says, “I didn’t do all that when you were born.”

“Well, it’s good practice.”

“All made-up rules.”

“Amma.” Yamini gives her a look. “Can you at least let me into the house before we fight?”

We are not fighting, Selvi wants to say, but doesn’t. Her children have become strange to her these late years. Small things she says become evidence of some abiding mistreatment. And they are nothing, really, just small corrections, conversation mostly. A mother’s speech.

Her husband is on the porch now, in his evening attire. Yamini is smiling at him, and it is the same smile as her husband’s, recognizable as soon as she was born. 

“Let me have the baby,” Selvi says to Yamini. “You can go hug Appa.”

But Yamini and the baby are already going forward, onto the porch, and Selvi’s husband wraps the both of them in his arms. He kisses the top of Yamini’s head. Then the baby’s.

Ashwin comes out, holds open the door. The three of them go in. Selvi turns, watches the lights of the taxi fade down the road. Then she goes in.

Everyone takes dinner separately. Yamini eats with the baby in her room. Ashwin and Selvi’s husband remain in the living room, stooped over the piano. And Selvi eats in the kitchen.

The baby upstairs is like a hot spot she’s constantly aware of, hovering just outside her vision. She wants to hold her. It will all be okay when she holds her. Selvi was too late to lay claim to her own children, but she has learned. 

A distant music floats through the house. Ashwin again. It’s Badinerie, Bach. Traditionally on flute, she knows, but fun on piano, lively. 

Selvi rises, puts her plate in the sink and runs a little water over it. She soaps her hands and scrubs them vigorously. She has no germs, no matter what Yamini says. She isn’t the danger to worry about.

The music grows louder as she leaves the kitchen, then fainter as she climbs the stairs. Yamini is sitting by the crib, murmuring something to the baby, who kicks her fat legs in the air.

“She is so lovely,” Selvi says. The words sound strange in her mouth, although the meaning is entirely sincere. “She looks just like you.”

This is not quite true, but it is what she has to say.

“Thank you,” Yamini says. “Did you wash?”

“Yes,” Selvi says. 

“Then come sit here.”

Selvi comes forward. It is odd to take orders from her daughter. Motherhood has given her an authority she did not have before, that she does not really have now. But to bring it up would be to fight again, and Selvi is tired of unpleasantness.

The baby coos softly. Little pigeon. Her hair is so fine, laid over her scalp like long grass in a field. Selvi touches her small nose with exaggerated care. See how soft I’m being. See how you worry for nothing. 

“It’s odd,” Yamini says. She pushes a stray lock of hair from her face. “I felt so young before giving birth, and I feel so old now. I thought I was too young for it. And then I wasn’t.”

Selvi could cry. “Yes,” she says, “yes, this happens. It happened to me, too.”

Yamini nods. “With Ashwin.”

No, Selvi almost says, before him. She catches herself in time.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never been so worried for someone or something like this. Like, all my love is just fear. So much could go wrong.”

Selvi touches her daughter’s arm. “The fear is good. It keeps you sharp. It makes you a good mother.”

“You were afraid too?”

“Yes. So afraid.”

“What about?”

Selvi hesitates. “I had dreams. Nightmares. That someone comes into my room and steals the baby from my arms, snap, like that. That I wake up empty and not a mother.”

Yamini blinks. “Oh. That’s terrible.”

“You don’t dream that?”

“No, mine is more… baby falling sick, baby getting hurt. Nothing like that.”

Selvi feels alien again, for a second. 

“Well,” she says finally, “I suppose everyone is afraid of different things.”

The door creaks. They both turn.

Selvi’s husband stands there, tall. He is not physically large, especially with age, but his presence takes up so much space. 

A familiar dullness and heat begin to press in on her.

“Appa,” Yamini says warmly, “come, the baby just woke up.”

“You should wash your hands first,” Selvi says.

“Just came from the bathroom.”

Yamini says, “That’s fine. Come in.”

“No.” Selvi’s hand goes out in front of her. “No, he can’t.”

“Amma.”

“Did you have dinner? You have to have dinner.”

“I did,” her husband says. 

He is looking at her, his pale eyes, his calm face. She is suddenly terrified.

“Have some dessert. Chai.”

“It’s late for chai.”

“Amma,” Yamini says, “relax. What’s gotten into you?”

Selvi can’t say. But her husband cannot walk into this room. He cannot take the baby. That is all she knows. 

“You’re being selfish,” Yamini says. 

“No.”

“You are. You can’t just pick and choose which grandchildren are yours alone.”

It is a double jab, and Selvi feels it. 

She is being crowded out. She is being intruded upon. She stands up, too quickly, and sways. Her husband steadies her with a thin, age-spotted hand. His touch is like a brand.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“Amma…” 

The feeling is here, in full form, even though no one is playing the piano. With the baby here, it sits right under her skin. She has to go. To stand it, she has to go.

She wanders the house as night comes down. The halls steadily darken. This is their family house, but it still feels not quite hers. She has only been here seven years; before that, she and her husband moved depending on where his orchestras were located. It is odd to be somewhere without a fixed end. 

Somewhere, Ashwin and Yamini and her husband are together. Somewhere, they lean towards one another and whisper and collude and laugh. They will be talking about her. Silly, simple Selvi. Selvi who takes everything too seriously. Selvi who cares too much about her children, who just wants to see them happy, who is punished for it.

The only being who has not passed judgment on her is the baby. The feeling kicks at her skin. She feels desperate, low on time. She has lost enough children to her husband. This one has to be hers.

From the living room, the piano sounds. This is an old ritual, a post-dinner playing. It is Ashwin playing Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, playing it well, and she can hear Yamini laughing, the tenor of her husband’s approval. But it is a slow song, not fit for the evening, and presently it is exchanged for a terrible rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Ashwin is laughing now too, not even trying to keep up with the pace of the piece. Her husband says something stern. This was his party trick in the early days of their marriage. She remembers sitting in salons, folding her girl’s hands primly over her skirts as he settled before the piano, lowered his own magician’s hands to the keys. 

Selvi, having circled back to the kitchen now, looks up. Directly above her is Yamini’s room. The baby.

They will wake her if they are not careful. But when are they careful? Ashwin plays loudly, with abandon. Their voices rise to dominate the music. They laugh as if they are alone in the house. 

Selvi is the only one with care. She is always the only one. 

The piano continues. Selvi, still looking up, leaves the kitchen, begins the slow climb up the stairs. Silver light comes in through the high windows, pooling in patches on the landing. Her body passes through them, in and out of the dark. 

The baby lies in her crib. She is asleep, little thing. She has no fear of music, no hatred yet. 

“You are of me,” Selvi says quietly. She touches the baby’s cheek. “I remember you. You came back to me.”

Carefully, she lifts the baby from the crib. She stirs, turning her little head this way and that. Selvi makes soft shushing noises. It has been a long time since her days of true motherhood, but it comes back to her quickly. The nurses called her a natural when she first became pregnant, the way her body glowed with it. 

She was less graceful with Ashwin and Yamini—painful pregnancies, both. Who could blame her for being distant when they were born? They were so much of her husband when they were born, so much of his decree. She felt she lost them as soon as she had them. 

But the first one was hers, as this one will be hers. Proof of self. 

The night goes blue outside her window. The music has changed. At first she ignores the feeling of it, but the knowledge comes to her with the music, a presence walking itself through the house to find her.

I’m not ready… I can’t…

But I want…

Consider my…

I will do everything, let me keep…

We’ll try… I promise…

Her husband at the keys again. A song whose name he never taught her, but which she remembers with a certain weight, like the weight in her arms now. She remembers it all. Leaving the house a mother, returning not. She would have wanted silence, even as it condemned her. Kindness from him whom she hated, care even. But no, none of it. 

She had been so warm, after the surgery. Dead heat of summer, imprinted on her with the loss. Long windless nights and days of loss. And worst, that it did not even feel like her loss, because she had not chosen it, had not acted upon it willingly. Even her grief she could not call her own. And through it all, her husband at the piano, feeling nothing she was feeling, knowing nothing of her at all. The man she had given her life to, playing away another.

Selvi stands. The baby in her hands. In the moonlight she feels very young. Her skin might be the skin of a little girl’s. Her desires, too. The baby coos, moves in her swaddles. Selvi’s hands around her tighten.

It feels like a new life, which she might mark with any action. She holds a little world to her chest. Her family, the piano, the laughter which goes on without her—these are very far away. The baby quiets; around her, the night blues. Her hands make motions witnessed by no one but herself, belonging to no one else. A woman who has nothing will do anything to own something—any cruelty, any loss. Yes, Selvi thinks, looking down at the baby. Her hold tightens. Anything at all. 

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