I once had a friend who would casually reminisce about the various penises she’d encountered in her single days. Often over dinner amongst friends. With her husband sitting right there.

We’d laugh at her lack of filter, even as we nervously stole glances in his direction to see if he seemed bothered.

Look, I’m a die-hard feminist, and I love a woman who’s not afraid to be sexual and proud of it. But this wasn’t just about her, right? There was also the comfort of her husband to consider. And, perhaps, the dinner guests.

Behind closed doors, most of us agreed it was a tad too far.

If I’m being honest, though, I was in no position to judge.

I’ve been a chronic oversharer my whole life. TikTok would have me believe it’s because I have trauma. Fair enough. But I don’t think that tells the whole story.

When I was a kid, I was deeply ashamed of what was happening at home. Alcoholism. Divorce. By the time I was eleven, group therapy was already a regular part of my life.

At some point, talking openly about the difficult stuff stopped feeling shameful and started feeling like the antidote to shame.

In real life, it manifested like this: If I told you the embarrassing thing first, you couldn’t discover it later. And sometimes, if I told you mine, you’d tell me yours.

Also, there’s a certain thrill in taking a social risk and hoping the other person meets you there.

Eventually, oversharing became a shortcut to intimacy.

I grew to hate small talk, preferring to jump into the deep end fast.

This carried into my adult friendships, where we tended to dispense with the pleasantries and get straight to whatever was actually going on. Problems. Sex. Relationships. Family drama.

Privacy? Definitely more of a loose suggestion than an actual boundary.

I didn’t realize quite how unusual this all was until I dated someone from one of those WASPy families where feelings were apparently meant to be stored in a cool, dry place and opened only in case of emergency.

When sharing about my big feelings invariably became too much, he left.

And I’m 1000% sure this tendency of mine scared away plenty of other would-be suitors over the years.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to tell a man far too much about myself within the first hour of meeting him, especially if there were cocktails involved.

And let’s face it, there were always cocktails involved.

Don’t even get me started on the joy I felt when I discovered party drugs like ecstasy, which had the delightful side effect of turning everyone else into an instant oversharer too.

But as I grew older and longed to find a more lasting connection, I wondered how much was too much?

I understood on some level that dating required negotiation around disclosure. I was probably just more confused about it than most.

Which is why a recent piece by one of my favorite writers on Substack caught my attention. In The Disclosure of it All: How Much Should You Tell Someone When You’re Dating, writes:

“Everyone seems to be carrying around some version of the same question. How much do I tell you? How soon do I tell you? If I don’t tell you, am I hiding something? If I do tell you, will you decide I’m too damaged, too complicated, or simply too much?”

Her questions got me thinking about my own history with all of this. Because I hadn’t just wrestled with that dilemma. I’d tested it under some unusually loaded circumstances.

I already had plenty of unsavory family history to navigate while dating, and very little instinct for doling it out in socially appropriate increments.

Then something happened that made the question of disclosure much harder.

My boyfriend suddenly died.

And in the years that followed, my lack of a filter presented a much bigger problem.

When you’ve been through a trauma like that, it shapes everything about you in ways that are important to share. But when is the appropriate time to say, “Oh by the way…”

There was no obviously correct moment to reveal it.

Most of us eventually accumulate something like this. A family estrangement. A spectacular mistake. Some piece of history that feels too significant to hide and too heavy to casually drop between “What do you do?” and “Are we getting another round?”

If I waited three months, it would feel like I left them out of the central fact of my life. If I told them over appetizers, I’d just handed a stranger the emotional steering wheel.

But I didn’t realize that at the time, so I stayed true to form, and generally tore off the Band-Aid quickly.

What I discovered is that intimate disclosure doesn’t just reveal you; it reveals the listener, too.

Some men understandably recoiled. Others rushed in wearing imaginary capes.

For them, my vulnerability became an invitation to play rescuer. Suddenly I wasn’t a woman getting to know someone; I was a project. A damsel in distress.

These men wanted to ride in, “soothe me,” and peace out soon after.

Unbeknownst to me, my grief had become its own kind of filter, except it wasn’t screening for the people I wanted.

Eventually, I realized the loss was still too immediate to ignore and too tender to keep handing out to people I’d only just met. I needed to stop dating altogether and give myself time to heal.

When I finally ventured back out, I was in a much better place. But don’t get me wrong—I was still an oversharer—just with a vastly new type of material.

On my first date with my current partner, I committed what should probably be considered a first-date felony: I spent a significant portion of the evening talking about other men I was dating.

In my defense, I didn’t know I was on a date.

I also thought he was gay.

So there I was, happily running through my romantic escapades with my “new gay bestie,” completely oblivious to how any of this might be landing. No strategy. No carefully cultivated mystery. Certainly no attempt at editing.

I was gleefully giving him the good, bad, and very ugly.

It should have sent him running. Instead, he found my candor refreshing.

Go figure.

Looking at this whole tangle, I’m not sure there is ever a correct formula. We talk about “oversharing” as though there’s some universally agreed-upon line. Clearly, there isn’t.

The same openness that sent some people scrambling for the door somehow helped me connect with the person I eventually stayed with.

Turns out, “too much” is highly dependent on the audience.

Still, there’s something undeniably risky about putting yourself out there without knowing how it will be received.

Which brings me to a slightly paradoxical development in my life.

These days, I write personal essays on the internet.

I’ve joined all of you on Substack, adding my voice to countless others writing about messy divorces, addictions, sexcapades, fantasies, family dysfunction, and whatever weird thoughts keep us awake at 3 a.m.

The number of people who identify here as “overthinkers” is staggering. So it’s not entirely surprising we’re all enthusiastically posting our most intimate thoughts for anyone on the world wide web to discover.

Or is it?

A stranger at a cocktail bar might reasonably find it alarming if, within twenty minutes, you told him about your dead boyfriend, your disastrous relationships, and your emotional history.

But put a title above it, hit Publish, and suddenly you’re a memoirist.

Which raises another question:

Are those of us who write about ourselves just oversharers?

My dad seems to think so. He once told me reading my essays feels like reading my diary.

And, well... he’s not entirely wrong.

I write about intimacy, grief, bad relationships, questionable decisions, and versions of myself I could easily pretend never existed.

Depending on who’s reading, maybe that makes me honest. Maybe it makes me a feminist. Maybe it makes me an exhibitionist with a Substack account.

Or maybe I’m just the digital version of my friend discussing her old boyfriends’ penises over the second course.

Considering I’ve already published an entire essay about dick pics involving both an ex and my current partner, the evidence is mounting.

She had a dinner table.

I have a Publish button.

And I’m comfortable with those odds.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to give up shame, and there’s something liberating about putting the messy parts of yourself out there and discovering the world doesn’t end. In fact, more often than not, someone writes back to say, “Me too.”

That’s probably why I keep doing it.

So I’m curious about the rest of you. The writers, the oversharers, and especially those mysterious creatures with healthy boundaries.

Where do you draw the line?

How much is too much?

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Every woman has a mythology she inherited... and another one she eventually chooses.

Mine came from The Odyssey.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I’d been handed the wrong female role model.

Which is how I ended up calling my Substack Sea Hag Confidential.

Funny, they're making another movie about it. I'll probably skip it. I already know how it ends. Besides, this version is more fun.

How did we get here?

I was an English major once upon a time, and I read the Odyssey on several occasions. Why? Great question… one that we’ll explore another time. In school, I was taught that every great story is really a psychological journey.

What did this story tell me about mine?

The men’s journey made perfect sense.

Leave home. Slay monsters. Hook up with sea babes and sirens. Have an existential crisis. Figure out who you actually are. Eventually, return home to your perfect feminine other half. Become whole.

The women’s journey?

Apparently, wait.

Wait beautifully.

Wait faithfully.

Fend off a bunch of lusty suitors.

Maybe do a little weaving while you’re at it.

I took one look at Penelope and thought...

Absolutely not.

You know that girl.

The patron saint of #RelationshipGoals.

The original trad wife.

The woman who’s content to let men sail around the Mediterranean, hook up with goddesses, win glory and gold, and generally have the time of their lives while she waits patiently.

The girl sitting at home manifesting Mr. Right and posting “What’s meant for you will never miss you” quotes she found on Pinterest.

No offense to the Penelopes out there. Do your thing, ladies.

That was never going to be me.

I was far more interested in the women Odysseus couldn’t stop getting distracted by.

Circe.

Calypso.

The enchantresses with their own islands, their own strange magic, and absolutely no interest in reorganizing their lives around a man with commitment issues.

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This was the kind of psychological journey I was talking about! And it had zero to do with being a young, beautiful woman men thought of as “wife material.”

I didn’t want to be somebody’s other half. I wanted to be a whole… all on my own.

And that takes time.

Let's be honest. Those “women” were probably a few hundred years old by the time ol’ Oddeysius sailed aboard. They’d had several human lifetimes to cultivate their skills.

Meanwhile, we’re out here trying to become fully actualized before 30.

Nobody becomes a legendary witch on a gap year.

You don't earn a reputation in Greek mythology after one wellness retreat.

That's a title you earn after you’ve seen some things. And that’s something worth looking forward to.

People hear “Sea Hag” and think old, ugly, bitter, and alone. They’re not exactly known for their glowing skin care routines.

Guess what?

I’m not either.

But let’s be real.

Nobody was sailing across the sea to meet up with Circe because she had flawless skin.

They came because she had power.

I hear Sea Hag and picture something else.

A woman who’s stopped asking for permission.

A woman who isn’t terrified of getting older because she’s too busy becoming more interesting.

A woman with her own island to tend, her own adventures to chase, and enough magic that people inevitably wander ashore.

Some stay a while.

Some sail away.

That’s life.

I’m here to lean into my inner crone.

I’m interested in becoming more myself than more desirable.

The funny thing is, I came up with all of this before I met my partner, Billy.

We’ve been happily together now for almost nine years. We’re not married. We don’t live together. We each have our own rent-controlled apartment, and unless one of us wins the lottery, we’re dying with those leases.

Don’t get me wrong. We still share a life.

We just happen to do it from two different zip codes.

Turns out, finding love doesn’t require being young, virtuous, or abandoning your own island.

It just takes finding someone who’s delighted to keep sailing back to yours.

So if you’re busy trying to become somebody’s Penelope...

May I suggest taking a deep dive and becoming a magical creature with her own tropical paradise to share instead.

It's a much better mythology.

I didn’t leave the country until I was 32 years old.

I didn’t travel internationally by myself until I was 45.

What stopped me was probably the same thing that’s stopping a lot of you.

Fear.

Of getting lost.

Of getting scammed.

Of going solo.

Of something going terribly wrong.

Here’s the funny thing about fear, though.

It’s a terrible fortune teller.

At 54, my partner and I are steadily scratching countries and continents off our list. Most trips go exactly as planned. Others... not so much.

Costa Rica, for example.

If you’d asked me beforehand what I feared most, I might’ve said the mountain roads, the venomous snakes, or maybe rappelling down a 200-foot waterfall.

I would not have said, “Lobster.”

But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s start with fear #1.

What If the Airbnb Sucks?

It did.

The place was a renovated factory loft in downtown San Jose. The listing promised “exquisite views of Central Avenue,” surrounded by museums, theaters, restaurants, coffee shops, and parks.

It had hundreds of glowing reviews.

Here’s the reality vs. expectations.

There was one towel, but countless cockroaches.

By evening, the neighborhood emptied out. All the businesses nearby were shuttered, and suddenly the streets felt eerily quiet. There was no place nearby to eat.

The biggest headache, though, was finding a place to park the rental car.

The street was a no-go. Every lot seemed to come with its own set of rules. One wouldn’t allow overnights. Another had some other restriction we couldn’t decipher, and when we tried to leave, the attendants hussled us for full payment even though we’d only just driven in and out.

We bounced from lot to lot, tired, jet-lagged, and increasingly convinced we’d made a terrible mistake.

I can’t say it didn’t sour our first 24 hours, and could easily have set the tone for the rest of the trip. But we kept an open mind about Costa Rica and the city itself.

The funny thing is, we ended our trip back near where we’d started. This time, we stayed in an inexpensive little boutique hotel that couldn’t have been more different.

For just $45 a night, I wasn’t expecting much, but it was delightful.

Parking was easy.

Inside was a courtyard full of tropical birds, fish, turtles, and lizards. Bright murals covered the walls. Someone was cooking dinner in a tiny kitchen that smelled like someone’s grandmother lived there. The whole place had the welcoming energy of an elementary school science classroom if it decided to become a sleepaway camp.

Same city. Completely different experience.

If there’s a lesson, it’s ‘give it a minute.’

On to fear #2.

What If We Spent Too Much?

Next, we were off to La Fortuna and the grand, central volcano, Arenal.

The town itself was cute, but touristy, so we’d opted to stay at properties closer to the national park.

We’re not luxury travelers. Mostly because 5-star resorts are out of our budget. But also because I’m the kind of person who struggles to spend hundreds on a room I’m mostly just sleeping in.

I’d rather put that money toward another destination, another experience, or another plane ticket.

But before our trip, two names kept coming up.

Nayara and Tabacón.

Every photo looked like a desktop screensaver. But the prices made me slightly nauseous.

Fortunately, a friend was letting us stay for free at her Airbnb later in the trip. (Huge thanks to Jasmine, whose generosity gave us permission to live a little.)

So we did something we almost never do. We splurged!

The moment we arrived, I knew this wasn’t just paying for a room.

A cold tropical drink appeared in our hands before we’d even checked in. Someone whisked us away in a golf cart through the meandering and immaculate gardens.

Then we opened the door to our suite.

I honestly think we both stopped breathing for a second. There was a private deck tucked into the jungle. An outdoor hot tub. A massive shower built for two. And rose petals leading to a bottle of champagne and birthday cake waiting for Billy’s fiftieth.

Fantasy Suite, anyone?

It felt less like checking into a hotel than accidentally wandering onto the set of The Bachelor.

And somehow, just like on that stupid show, there was no one else around. Ever.

At Nayara, we’d float up to the pool bar with a perfect view of Arenal Volcano and have the place entirely to ourselves.

Dinner felt equally surreal. A glamorous dining room with plush purple velvet couches. A live band performing reggae and afrobeat fusion. Impeccable service and food. And just us; it’s as though we’d rented out the entire restaurant.

That night, a rainstorm erupted just after we’d collapsed into the tumble of 800-count sheets on the four-poster bed. As the jungle disappeared behind a curtain of water so heavy it sounded like applause, we looked at each other and started to cry.

For a moment, it felt impossible that life could get any better.

The room itself became a destination. So much so, neither of us wanted to leave even though we’d planned an exciting day of zip-lining and waterfall rappelling the next morning.

We sadly parted ways, waving goodbye to the tiny gecko on the wall outside we’d named “Lit’l Buckwheat” and headed for our jungle trek.

Talk about fear, I choked down plenty of butterflies trying to convince myself the rope would hold, and it was safe to fling myself backwards down the slippery 200-foot cliff gushing with water. But I did it!

Billy was even braver, springing down the rock ledge like he’d been doing this his whole life.

They clipped us to the Zipline and whooooooosh! The cascade of water faded into the distance as we effortlessly glided away.

The last bit involved canyoning. One of the people in our group sliced her leg on the sharp rocks and needed medical assistance to get down the mountain. The activities weren’t without risk, but we’d persevered.

After adventuring all day, we moved to Tabacón, where we soaked every sore muscle in what may be the most spectacular hot springs I’ve ever seen.

I actually asked the woman at the front desk whether she thought there were better thermal pools anywhere in the world.

She smiled bashfully. “I don’t think so. No”

Naturally, we decided then and there that our new life mission was to find out.

Not five minutes later, I wandered barefoot through one of the warm lagoons, kicked a submerged rock at exactly the wrong angle, and broke my toe.

Seriously? I’d been Lara Croft all day long, and the shallow pool got me?

For the rest of the trip, I hobbled around with two of my little piggies taped together. It hurt so much I couldn’t even handle the weight of a sheet over my foot.

Also, totally worth it.

Years later, what sticks with me is the epic volcano.

The hot springs like something out of Fantasy Island.

The sexiest rainstorm ever.

That bill? It’s disappeared with time.

The experience didn’t.

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Fear #3.

What If the Roads Are Dangerous?

Yep.

They were.

When I pictured driving across Costa Rica, I imagined winding roads through cloud forests, mist hanging over volcanoes, monkeys swinging through the trees. Basically, a tourism commercial.

Reality had other plans.

The drive from Arenal to Puerto Viejo took the better part of the day, much of it spent crawling behind endless lines of semi trucks on narrow two-lane highways.

Thank God for themed playlists.

Remember that scene in Swingers where they’re all fired up for Vegas?

“Vegas, baby!”

Then it immediately cuts to them (hours later) sitting silently in traffic, the excitement completely drained from their faces.

That was us.

Costa Rica, baby.

At one point, we pulled into a roadside restaurant just to stretch our legs and reclaim a little optimism. We ordered two margaritas, took one sip, and the bartender casually handed us a bill for sixty U.S. dollars.

She didn’t have to explain.

A subtle glance toward the intimidating-looking guy lingering near the kitchen told us everything we needed to know. The gringo tax had been applied. We paid, left, and sulked about it for the next couple of hours.

By the time we finally rolled into Puerto Viejo, we were road weary and a bit underwhelmed.

But the next day we visited the Jaguar Rescue Center where an entire crib of orphaned sloths reached for me as if they’d found there long lost mommy. My heart exploded.

As we explored further, the warm, breezy Caribbean was winning us over.

At a club, I watched Billy learn to salsa and bachata on stage with a group of strangers. The sweet rum drinks went down easy.

But when we got back to Jasmine’s place, I realized I’d left my grandmother’s scarf at the sanctuary.

The next morning, we drove back to the Rescue Center in a hurry. I remember being devastated that I might have lost something sentimental, and irrationally annoyed I’d cost us an unnecessary errand.

As soon as we pulled in, one of the staff recognized us.

“Your tire...”

“Tire? No. I left my scarf.”

They pointed toward the passenger side.

It was nearly flat.

Oh!

Suddenly, yesterday’s impossibly bumpy ride made a lot more sense.

They retrieved my scarf from lost and found and told us the nearest auto shop was hours away.

We looked at each other.

Then we thought about the roads we’d just spent days driving.

Those narrow jungle highways.

The steep drop-offs.

The shoulders that seemed to disappear into ditches.

Had I not forgotten that one small thing, we probably would’ve had a blowout… or worse.

Sometimes the thing that feels like bad luck is the only reason you avoid a much darker fate.

Fear #4.

What If You Can’t Trust Anyone?

As expected, the tire soon gave way.

Thankfully, there was a spare.

Getting it onto the car was another story.

As Billy wrestled with the tiny factory jack, grunting to lift the SUV high enough to remove the wheel, I did what every anxious traveler does: I started looking for ways to keep us safe.

I dragged one of our suitcases in front of the car, tied a reflective safety vest around it, and silently prayed no one would plow into us.

After nearly an hour in the baking tropical sun, we were sweaty, frustrated, and starting to panic.

Then a pickup truck pulled over.

A man climbed out and walked toward us.

“Is this your bag?”

Every alarm bell in my body went off.

“Billy!” I called out.

The man pointed toward the suitcase.

“You shouldn’t leave it out like that. Someone could just grab it.”

Someone like you, I thought, feeling my fear rise.

Then he stopped and continued to explain.

Apparently, it’s not unheard of for thieves to slash the tires of rental cars, follow the tourists until they break down, then rob them when they’re stranded.

Fantastic.

Having thoroughly terrified me, he instructed me to put the bags out of sight, then promptly crawled under our car, helped Billy finish changing the tire, and refused every attempt we made to pay him.

Across the road, the owner of a tiny fruit stand had been watching the whole ordeal unfold.

We’d passed his little shack every day. Sometimes he worked while his wife cared for their tiny baby. Sometimes they switched places. Their infant often slept in a makeshift cradle tucked into the corner while they sold fruit to passing cars on the dirt road.

A few minutes later, he came jogging towards us carrying fresh coconuts for everyone.

He wouldn’t let us pay, either.

We made a point of stopping at their stand every day after that.

Travel has taught me that two things can be true at once.

Yes, there are people looking to take advantage of tourists.

There are also people who’ll spend an hour sweating beside a stranger’s car or hand you the best coconut you’ve ever tasted simply because you needed a little help.

Fear #5.

What If TripAdvisor Was Right?

Looking back, the clues were there.

The experience was called Tarantula Way.

Our guide was known throughout Cahuita simply as Snake Man.

He’d moved all the way from Austria to Costa Rica because of his obsession with reptiles and amphibians. Everywhere we went, locals waved and shouted his nickname.

This man had found his calling.

I, meanwhile, had apparently lost my mind. Somewhere between booking the tour and arriving, I’d invented an entirely different experience in my head.

I pictured a pleasant nighttime stroll along a well-maintained trail. We’d shine our flashlights into the trees while Snake Man pointed at frogs, spiders, and the occasional snake from a respectful, non-life-threatening distance.

Reader… that is not what happened.

Instead, we met outside Cahuita National Park after dark, then followed him in our rental car down a lonely stretch of highway until he pulled over in what appeared to be... nowhere.

No visitor center.

No trailhead.

No other people.

Just jungle.

As we stepped into the brush, he casually mentioned that every footstep deserved our attention because anything beneath the leaves could be venomous.

“Oh,” I thought. “So this is how it ends.”

He hadn’t told us to bring flashlights, so Billy and I used our phones, sweeping the beams nervously over every inch of ground before taking another step.

I was truly terrified. Our guide acted as if this was just a normal Tuesday.

To be fair, Snake Man lived up to his reputation as a reptile whisperer.

Within minutes, he was spotting creatures I’d have walked right past: frogs no bigger than a thumbnail, tarantulas, sleeping lizards, tiny crocodilian-looking caimans tucked into the water’s edge.

Then he stopped.

“There!”

Curled on a branch was a yellow eyelash viper. One of Costa Rica’s most venomous snakes. In fact, one of the most venomous snakes in the world. Especially the little ones, like this.

Before I fully processed what was happening, Snake Man had gently lifted it onto a stick and handed the stick to Billy.

Billy instinctively accepted it.

Which is how my boyfriend ended up eye-to-eye with one of the world’s deadliest snakes on his fiftieth birthday.

The viper began slithering toward his arm as I fully imagined the strike, the collapse, and the skin melting to follow.

Each time it advanced, Snake Man casually nudged it back with another stick. Seeing my face drain of color, he smiled reassuringly.

“Nooooo, Wendy,” he cooed. “Relax. Relaaaaaax. You’re with me. You’re safe.”

Safe? Ha!

An interesting choice of words.

Eventually, we wandered deeper into the jungle until we reached his family’s home. Think Cabin in the Woods.

If the snakes don’t kill ya….

I thought I’d enter a Texas Chainsaw-style tea party. Who knew what to expect! Instead, his busty mother greeted us with cold beers while a semi-feral raccoon wandered around like it paid rent.

By this point, our phone batteries were nearly dead, and I’d seen enough.

After the beer had settled my nerves, Snake Man checked his watch.

“We still have about an hour left.”

“Nope,” I said. “We’re done.”

I had absolutely no interest in spending another hour antagonizing venomous snakes before hiking back through the same jungle path in the dark.

Looking back, it remains one of the most adventurous or foolish things we’ve ever done, depending on how you look at it.

It also stands as one of the funniest stories we tell.

Whenever either of us underestimates a risky situation, one of us inevitably slips into an Austrian accent.

“Nooooo, Wendy... Billy… you’re safe.”

Turns out everybody has a different definition of what that means.

Fear #6.

What If the Food Makes You Sick?

Or, in Billy’s case...

What if it kills you?

On Billy’s actual birthday, we headed to KOki Beach Restaurant, our favorite spot in Puerto Viejo.

As the sun slipped toward the horizon and we waited for our table, he climbed into an oversized peacock chair beneath a giant tree strung with warm amber lights. He looked regal.

It was one of those evenings that makes you think, Yep. This is exactly where we’re supposed to be.

When we were finally seated, I looked across the table.

“Well, birthday boy. You’ve officially reached the half-century mark.”

“No small feat,” I added. “So let’s hear it. What’s your fifty-year-old wisdom?”

He thought for a moment before answering.

“You never really know what’s coming. So you have to roll with the punches... and appreciate every moment you’ve got.”

Solid advice.

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and we cheers’d.

Our server eventually wandered over. Then wandered away. Then forgot our appetizers. The entrées took nearly forty minutes. By this point, we’d had several drinks and were absolutely ravenous.

Finally, the food arrived.

Billy wasted no time. He took one enormous bite of lobster.

Then stopped.

His eyes got wide as he slumped over strangely in his seat.

My head swiveled towards him quickly. I’d worked in restaurants for most of my life, and I’d seen a lot of people choke.

“Can you breathe?” I asked him.

Without making a sound, his eyes welled with tears as he shook his head no and gestured towards his throat.

For the second time on this trip, I imagined watching my lover die before my very eyes.

Then instinct took over.

I shot out of my chair just as another diner rushed over from a nearby table. Together, we gave Billy the Heimlich.

After several failed attempts, a rush of total helpless dread rushed through me.

This can’t happen, I told myself, giving one more tremendous pull against his solar plexus, and boom! A chunk of lobster rocketed across the restaurant.

Billy inhaled.

The entire patio exhaled.

As waves of relief began to wash over us, we let out slightly hysterical little laughs—the kind people make when they’ve just come far closer to disaster than they’d like to admit.

I’d spent the entire week worrying about jungle roads, venomous snakes, rappelling down 200-foot drops, and whatever fresh adventure Costa Rica had in store for us.

Turns out...Lobster was the deadliest by far.

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Later that evening, back at our glam Treehouse, we looked at the little bag of mushrooms we’d brought for his birthday celebration. Neither of us was remotely interested anymore.

Instead, we properly celebrated Billy’s birthday the old-fashioned way, christening every room in the place.

Spent hours soaking in a wood-fired hot tub overlooking the jungle.

Then stayed up half the night listening to howler monkeys lose their minds while rain hammered the tin roof.

I’ve heard recordings of howler monkeys before. But nothing prepares you for hearing them in the wild. It’s less a sound than something primal. Ancient. Somewhere between a dinosaur, a banshee howl, and the Earth itself clearing its throat.

I’ll never forget that jungle.

Or how grateful I was to be holding Billy tight after coming so absurdly close to losing him.

The next morning, we wandered into a little café, still holding the mushrooms we’d brought from home. After everything that had happened, neither of us felt compelled to tempt fate again.

The young Costa Rican working behind the counter looked like exactly the sort of person who might appreciate this unexpected gift.

“Really?” he said, his eyes going wide. Then came the grin. The kind usually reserved for lottery winners and children on Christmas morning.

“Knock yourself out, my friend,” we laughed. “That’s the good stuff. Straight from California.”

Frankly, after the week we’d had, they belonged with him more than us.

Besides, no psychedelic journey could possibly compete with the one Costa Rica had already given us.

Fear #7.

What If Something Goes Wrong?

Something always does.

And really, that’s beside the point.

Most of the things that keep us from traveling never happen. The things that do happen are usually the ones we’d never think to fear.

Lobster?

I mean... who saw that one coming?

I’m not here to tell you travel makes you fearless.

It doesn’t.

But it does have a way of teaching you that control was always mostly an illusion.

That’s why I keep traveling.

Not because nothing goes wrong.

But because so much goes right that I never could have anticipated.

Fear is a terrible itinerary. Curiosity is a much better one.

The Question

Can a dick pic be beautiful?

It sounds ridiculous even writing that sentence.

But I’ve got an answer.

First, let me set some context. I’m old enough to remember a world before the internet, before smartphones, when choosing a potential sexual partner didn’t come with a pre-show trailer.

But here we are.

These days, opinions are split, and it definitely matters who you ask.

Among younger people, sending nudes is almost… ordinary. Not scandalous. Just part of flirting. For many, especially those whose prime years of sexual exploration coincided with the pandemic, it even became a kind of lifeline.

For them, the conversation has shifted from “Should we?” to “How do we do it safely?”

But for many women out there, dick pics are still viewed as the plague.

The joke is: No woman has ever been sitting at work thinking, ‘You know what would make my Tuesday? An unexpected penis.’

The criticism isn’t really about penises themselves. It’s about consent. More often than not, the sender is forcing intimacy that hasn’t been invited. Which is often exactly the way these things go down.

The sex-positive crowd doesn’t disagree on the issue of consent. They’re asking a different question altogether.

Something like: Why is everyone so horrified by genitals?

We obsess over breasts.

We normalize shirtless men.

Why is a penis automatically obscene?

They argue the shame is cultural, and we should shed those puritanical instincts in favor of seeing nakedness not as something lewd, but simply as part of being human.

For my part, I never would’ve thought I’d have a horse in this race.

But then I fell for one of my oldest friends. And shortly thereafter, received my first-ever beautiful dick pic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s important to understand that Scott and I had somehow pulled off the impossible: we escaped the friend zone after nearly twelve years as platonic cohorts.

Sure, there had been a few near misses. Kisses here and there over the years. One semi-serious play while I was dating someone else. Mostly, a strict hands-off policy for much of our friendship.

Why? For one thing, his longtime ex was a very dear friend of mine. Girl code demanded I keep a friendly distance.

For another, I’d had a three-year-long relationship with one of his best guy friends.

We belonged to one of those friend groups where the lines between friendship, romance, former romance, and chosen family become blurry. Trying to explain our social dynamics would require a whiteboard and colored markers.

Still, I had this sense of loyalty that kept me from crossing that line.

Besides, we’d been friends for so long it was hard to imagine becoming anything else.

At a certain point, can you ever really see each other differently?

Here’s the truth: something had always been there. Nothing dramatic. More like a subtext that kept getting louder over the years. By our mid-forties, those old relationships had begun to feel safely in the rearview mirror, and we found ourselves in remarkably similar places.

Both single.

Both hoping we hadn’t already had our shot at the big love.

We’d spend lazy Sundays commiserating on bar stools over long brunches that lasted hours. Many late nights talking about everything and nothing till the sun came up.

The emotional intimacy had been there for years. Eventually, the latent attraction and timing caught up with it.

Then came the harder question: what would happen if we acted on it?

I’ll admit, our first time had all the erotic tension of a gynecological visit, because all I could think was “Oh my God... Scott’s looking at my #@%$* right now.

But first times can be weird with anybody. And there was too much between us to let stage fright jitters ruin the show.

Thankfully, over time, the script flipped, and the sparks between us grew into a proper fire. From then on, we became spectacularly bad at getting anything done, constantly derailed by that intoxicating early phase where your stomach flutters, your brain goes offline, and your body has other priorities.

Not so uncommon when you’re with a new lover.

Entirely uncommon when your new lover is also one of your oldest friends.

So when one day, Scott sent me a dick pic, I can’t tell you how excited I was to receive it. And I’m as surprised writing that down as you probably are to read it.

Because let’s be honest. Penises have had a rough run, aesthetically speaking. They don’t generally inspire comparisons to Botticelli. And the selfie versions are usually far worse than the real deal.

But this pic wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing; it was tasteful.

Almost editorial.

Done in black-and-white.

A close-up set against a dark backdrop.

Not explicit so much as intimate.

Though admittedly I hadn’t asked for such a thing, there was nothing aggressive about it. In fact, it was quite playful, just like its sender.

The finishing touch was a tiny Post-it, carefully placed over the main attraction, with one handwritten word: “Wendy.”

It was saying, “This exists because of you.” So it felt very personal, and that was the charm.

The Post-it was proof enough that this photo wasn’t sitting in his camera roll waiting for the next willing recipient. This one was for me. And he’d taken time to make sure it was done right.

There’s a joke that women spend twenty minutes composing a nude. While men will take one from below while sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and call it good.

Women have been taught to curate their bodies forever. Men, by comparison, have received almost no aesthetic education.

But Scott had styled his. It had lighting, composition, and even a captivating narrative. He approached it like an art director, not an exhibitionist.

Or, more truthfully, a bit of both.

So yes. I was delighted.

But here’s where the story takes a turn.

Jump Scares

Just as our hot new romance was barreling towards couples’ getaways, cohabitation, and even talk of marriage, Scott suddenly passed away.

In his wake, leaving behind this strange little artifact of a very specific moment between us. Something that felt oddly sacred, despite the decidedly unsacred form it took.

What do you do with a photo like that after the person dies?

The answer might seem obvious, but it was complicated.

Even though Scott and I had been friends for so long, I only had a handful of pictures from our years together. Even fewer of us in that stage of love.

So this pic had special meaning to me.

It’s strange to admit to having an emotional attachment to a dick pic. Another thing I never thought I’d say. Nonetheless, now I was carrying around a dead boyfriend’s beautiful nude. Not really sure what I was supposed to do with it.

Two years later, I was still stuck in limbo. So the people in my life started suggesting it was time to “get back out there.”

They meant well.

Unfortunately, “out there” usually meant resorting to dating apps.

There, the conversations followed a depressingly familiar script.

“What are you looking for?”

Translation: How quickly can we stop pretending we’re here to get to know each other?

I wanted to answer honestly.

“My boyfriend died.”

It turns out that’s an absolutely terrible opening move on Tinder.

Looking back, going on the apps was an extraordinary choice for someone who was still having active conversations with a dead person. But I was just lonely enough to try.

Then came the unsolicited dick pics.

Somewhere between smartphones and swipe rights, we’d entered some dystopian reality where men collectively decided the penis should be introduced as a jump scare.

Not one.
Not two.
Enough to start recognizing patterns.

Bathroom mirror.
Flash on.
Cropped face.
Zero artistic ambition.

Every one of them was asking to be looked at. None of them felt like they were meant for anyone in particular.

One night, after yet another stranger proudly unveiled himself with less tact than a back alley flasher, I did something I should have done the first time it happened.

I replied with Scott’s.

“What the fuck?!?” he wrote back.

“What do you mean?” I replied innocently. “I thought we were sharing dick pics.”

“I thought your profile said no dick pics.”

Right.

So he’d read that part.

And sent one anyway.

“Funny how that works,” I wrote. “For the record, that was my boyfriend. And he’s dead.”

“Oh, my God. I didn’t know,” he answered sheepishly, as if that changed anything.

Of course he didn’t know. There was no way he could. To him, I wasn’t a grieving woman. I was just another profile. One more stranger to ask, “You up?”

That exchange more or less cured me of online dating.

Once I’d calmed down, I realized it wasn’t entirely his fault. He was participating in a culture that had somehow convinced men this was normal.

Then again, I wasn’t exactly behaving normally either.

So I deleted the apps.

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Plot Twist

After that, I decided there had to be a better way to meet people and get out of my depression.

When my birthday rolled around, I decided to try something different. I got dolled up and headed to a daytime dance party.

I was dressed as a gold lion because, why the fuck not? It was my birthday. And I’m a Leo.

He was wearing eyeliner, denim cutoffs, a muscle shirt, wedge sneakers with animal print, and cat ears.

He ran straight up to me and said, “What’s your name? You’re fabulous!”

We were instant friends, dancing together for the rest of the afternoon. Having silly photo shoots all day. In the pictures, it looks as if we’ve known each other for years instead of mere hours.

I immediately recognized him as part of my pride. What I didn’t quite get was that he was into me from the go.

His long, shapely legs were clean-shaven, with a hint of glitter. He smelled like vanilla cupcakes. Most of the friends I’d come with were gay, and I simply assumed we’d picked up another one.

To tell it straight, I thought this pretty fem man was my new gay bestie.

Over the next few weeks, we sent texts full of unicorns and sparkle emojis. I found myself laughing more than I had in a long time. It wasn’t that my grief had vanished. It simply wasn’t the loudest thing in the room anymore.

We managed to see each other once or twice with mutual friends. But it wasn’t until October that we finally put a proper hang on the books, just the two of us.

I got tickets to an artsy variety show I loved where it wasn’t uncommon for people to get creative with their looks.

It was Halloween month, so I asked, “Should we dress up?”

“Duh!” he cutely replied.

I was used to overdoing it in the costume department. Most people humored me. Even Scott used to joke that any invitation came with the risk of me arriving in full regalia—which I knew he sometimes found embarrassing. A bolt of nerves ran through me as I went to answer the door.

Lo and behold! This new guy looked like he’d been waiting his whole life for someone to match his energy. In fact, we couldn’t have been more in sync if we’d planned the whole thing.

I swooned!

My new best friend and I were off to a great start, I silently mused.

Over the course of the night, I was about to learn an embarrassing lesson: appearances tell you very little about someone’s gender expression, sexual orientation, or romantic interest.

As he began talking about an X girlfriend, I said, “Oh! So you date both men and women?”

“No, Wendy,” he said with a little smirk. He’d known for a while that I’d gotten the wrong idea. “I just date girls.”

I felt my face flush.

Later, when he started gently rubbing my leg during the show, I finally realized what was going on. By then, we’d already built a fun little friendship. Now we were just adding a sexy new twist.

It took us four months to finally sleep together. In today’s dating culture, that’s practically Victorian. Then again, it had taken me nearly that long just to realize our “friend hangouts” were dates and my new bestie wasn’t gay.

It does make you wonder what else we’re all missing in our collective sprint to the bedroom.

There was something delicious about letting the anticipation build. Every lingering hug lasted a little longer. Every goodbye felt like it was daring one of us to make the next move.

I suppose there was also something about the slow build that reminded me of Scott. Whatever the reason, it gave me the nerve to do something I’d never done before.

I asked for a dick pic.

At first, he was taken aback.

“Really? I’ve never done that before. Are you sure?”

“Yeah! 😈” I tempted him.

It took him a couple of days.

I assumed he’d decided against it.

Instead, I received the second beautiful dick pic of my life.

Pretty. Pink. And wrapped in black lacy panties with a little bow. I’d never seen another quite like this. And I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.

Women have been expected to be beautiful forever. Men aren’t allowed. So in sending this, he’d exposed something more vulnerable than his body. Somehow the bravest thing in the photograph wasn’t the nudity.

I suspect more people reading this will be scandalized by the lace rather than the penis. That seems to be the current culture we’re living in.

But to me, his photo was both a confession and an invitation. There was something incredibly confident about it. And I found that irresistible.

Nearly nine years later, I still do.

This feels like the point where I’m supposed to tie everything up with a neat little bow.

One of the dick pics already beat me to it.

So I’ll simply answer the question I started with.

Can a dick pic be beautiful?

Against all odds...

Yes.

Second Honeymoon

We were supposed to be headed towards our “second honeymoon.”

Instead, I boarded the plane with his best friend.

Scott had died just two weeks before we were meant to return to Mexico, to a pristine stretch of Caribbean coastline where, a year earlier, the first spark between us had finally come to life.

But that first trip wasn’t meant to be romantic. It was a lifeline Scott had thrown me because he knew I’d just had my heart crushed. So he invited me to join him and a loose collection of his festival friends on a trip to the Mayan Riviera.

They all seemed to move through life on instinct, adventure, and too little sleep. Scott fit effortlessly into that world.

I didn’t.

Fresh out of my breakup, I was in a different headspace and unsure I’d fit in with his crew. Sure, I liked to party on occasion, but I couldn’t hang with the rock-star antics of most of the group and, truthfully, I didn’t want to.

I think most everyone else agreed and wasn’t thrilled I’d come. They all had years of shared history with Scott and with each other that I didn’t. So when it came time to divide up rooms, I was the odd woman out.

That feeling lingered throughout the trip.

One night, someone asked, “Who here hasn’t slept with Scott?”

I was the only person who raised my hand.

Everyone laughed.

That was Scott.

Men loved him. Women loved him. Friendship, attraction, sex... the lines between them were always blurrier around Scott than they were around me. A part of me envied that freedom.

If I’m being completely honest, somewhere over the course of that week, I started wondering what it might be like to cross that line myself.

Scott had slept with all of his other close women friends without damaging those relationships. Why not me?

That question was still following me the afternoon we headed to the beach beneath the Tulum ruins.

Everyone took mushrooms that day except me.

Scott took more than anyone else and spent most of the afternoon stretched out in the sand, somewhere far beyond conversation. The rest of the group eventually wandered off to explore.

I offered to stay behind and babysit.

That had become my self-appointed role on the trip. Everyone else disappeared into altered states. I made sure nobody wandered into traffic, burned the place down, or drowned.

For hours, Scott barely moved. The only indication he was still on planet Earth was the occasional grin spreading across his face beneath a trucker hat that read, BORING.

Eventually, the drugs loosened their grip.

He mostly just stared at me, smiling.

When it came time to leave, convincing him the beach was closing proved nearly impossible.

“The beach doesn’t close!” he giggled, completely delighted by the absurdity of the idea.

Technically, he was right.

We simply neglected to mention the heavily armed federales at the top of the stairs who seemed increasingly interested in the sunburned hippies refusing to leave the archaeological site after hours.

Eventually, we convinced him there was even more adventure waiting if he’d just leave the beach and head towards the ruins.

As I helped him up the long wooden staircase and we started walking back through the park, he reached over, lifted the brim of my hat, looked me squarely in the eyes, and said,

“You know... I did this all for you.”

Then he kissed me.

To this day, I’ll swear an actual bolt of electricity passed between us.

A few seconds later, he tore off toward the ruins, arms stretched wide, shouting,

“THIS is why we’re here, bitches! THIS is why we’re HERE!”

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Managing Scott’s ecstatic victory lap somehow became the thing that finally bonded me to the rest of the group. We were all laughing too hard to care who belonged and who didn’t.

It also left me with more than a few unanswered questions.

Did this all for me… that kiss…. what did it all mean?

Before I had much time to think about any of it, my phone buzzed.

It was an email from my ex, saying everything I’d been waiting to hear.

He admitted he’d failed me.

He said he couldn’t imagine his life without me.

He wanted another chance.

I didn’t even have to think about it.

Whatever had begun between Scott and me was probably just the schrooms talking. I folded it back up and tucked it away.

Mayan Riviera much?

I thought what happened in Tulum stayed in Tulum. But when I got home to the States, I had another email waiting for me.

This time, it was from Scott.

It wasn’t a declaration so much as a confession.

He wrote that somewhere on that beach in Tulum, he’d seen me as “a powerfully perfect feminine what-the-fuck.” He wasn’t sure whether it had been “drug-induced delusion or divine insight,” but either way, he’d fallen in love with me.

Then came the part that surprised me most.

He admitted that ever since we’d met years earlier, he’d quietly carried around the feeling that I might someday become his wife. Over time, though, he’d talked himself out of it.

And now? I was still essentially in another relationship, he wrote, and maybe we were simply too different in all the ways that matter.

He wasn’t trying to convince me we belonged together.

Then he wrote:

“...i’m making a bold assumption that this confession can just stand... it’s like a little sparkly elephant in the room that we could look at and maybe make into something, even if it’s just a cute kitschy lamp.”

He assured me that, above all else, he was committed to loving me as a friend. Then he added:

“...at risk of sounding cheesy, i really do believe the world we want is one where our hearts are guiding our creations. even if it means designing new structures and relationships to accommodate these desires. after all, this is why we’re here, bitches!”

That was Scott.

He wasn’t asking me to choose him.

He wasn’t asking me to leave anyone.

He just wanted me to know the elephant was there.

I was gobsmacked by what he’d said. But the timing couldn’t have been worse.

I was still hopelessly hung up on someone else. Scott was still living exactly as Scott lived: brilliant, magnetic, and a little too reckless for my tastes. Deep down, I think we both believed there were good reasons not to cross that line.

But I couldn’t completely erase the memory of the seismic bolt between us at the ruins.

So I wrote back and told him the truth.

I loved him too.

I just didn’t think we belonged together.

So the sparkly little elephant stayed exactly where Scott and I had left it.

I got back together with the spectacularly wrong man I’d been dating and even took him back to the same places in Mexico Scott had shared with me.

When I posted photos, Scott quipped, “Mayan Riviera much?”

That still makes me laugh.

Unsurprisingly, the trip was a total disaster.

Sitting on a white sand beach beside impossibly turquoise water, my boyfriend looked me dead in the face and said, “There are so many better things I could be doing with my time right now.”

The spell was finally broken.

Soon after I broke up with the guy and returned home, Scott and I went to brunch with mutual friends. As things wrapped up, one of them turned to us and said, “So, when are you two going to do something about this?”

“What do you mean, ‘this’?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“THIS!” she said, motioning back and forth between us.

We shot each other a knowing smile.

It wasn’t long after that, Scott and I stopped pretending there wasn’t something between us.

At first, we told ourselves it was casual.

For almost a year, we kept saying that.

We were friends. We were lovers. We were not quite brave enough to call it anything that might ask more of us.

Then something shifted.

After thirteen years of friendship, a year of pretending our bodies hadn’t complicated everything, and two months of finally letting ourselves fall all the way in, we booked a trip back to Mexico.

We called it our “second honeymoon,” a nod to the photographers on that first trip who’d mistaken us for newlyweds.

Back then, it had been a joke.

Now, the idea felt full of possibility.

“I wish we still had those pictures,” I told him.

He smiled.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me.

“We’ll make more.”

Like we had all the time in the world.

Then, just two weeks before we were supposed to leave, Scott accidentally overdosed.

For days, I couldn’t imagine getting on that plane.

Later, I couldn’t imagine not getting on it.

If I was going to fall apart, I couldn’t think of a better place to do it.

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Don’t Say No

I’d never really liked Bodhi.

Whenever he came into town, he and Scott would disappear into a haze of drugs and mischief, each encouraging the other’s worst impulses.

They would drop into each other’s lives without notice, then leave just as suddenly. They even had an unspoken ritual for ending a bender. One of them would simply “peace out.” Sometimes literally.

Scott had told me stories about Bohdi opening the door of a moving car, rolling out onto the pavement, dusting himself off, and simply wandering away without another word.

So you can imagine my surprise when Bohdi was precisely the person I felt most drawn to after Scott died.

As we packed up his apartment, he joked that Scott had finally pulled off the ultimate “roll out.”

Gallows humor has a way of finding grieving people. It was the first time I’d even cracked a smile since this nightmare had begun.

Somewhere between boxing up old cowboy boots, divying up who should keep what, and trying to decide which of Scott’s ridiculous treasures mattered most, Bohdi and I became allies. Whenever he found something he thought was extra special, he’d quietly hide it away for me so it didn’t accidentally slip away.

We were looking after each other because neither of us really knew how else to look after ourselves, and that felt good. So when he left, I was genuinely sorry to see him go.

He’d later tell me he was somewhere in the middle of nowhere when I texted to let him know I’d decided to take the trip back to Mexico alone.

He dropped everything, hitchhiked to the nearest airport, caught the first flight back to California, called me, and said, “I’m coming with you.”

I had a knee-jerk instinct to refuse. But stopped myself.

What would Scott do? I knew the answer.

And just like that, we had a shared mission.

Go to Mexico.

Find Scott in all the places he’d loved.

And carry each other a little farther down this path.

Neither of us ever said it out loud.

We didn’t have to.

What Would Scott Do?

That first night, we checked into the tropical-themed hotel that had originally been booked for Scott and me in Playa Del Carmen.

Everything about it was aggressively cheerful: pineapples, palm trees, bright colors. It felt like grief had wandered into the wrong movie.

After an unmemorable dinner on the main strip, we wandered back to this strange place.

Unable to sleep, we stayed up talking about Scott for hours, replaying stories we’d each heard a hundred times before, laughing until both of us erupted into tears.

Instinctually, we collapsed into an embrace.

The hug turned into full-body sobbing.

The sobbing turned into caressing.

The caressing turned into kissing.

And the kissing became one of the most emotionally confusing sexual experiences of my life.

For a few hours, grief loosened all the usual boundaries between us. We stopped trying to make sense of what we needed and simply let ourselves have it.

Pleasure mixed with despair. Tenderness mixed with total abandon—closeness to some tiny fragment of Scott we both psychically contained.

Looking back, it makes a strange kind of sense. At the time, it didn’t need to. As Scott had said, we were letting our hearts guide us. Even if it meant subverting social norms to accommodate these strange desires.

The next morning over breakfast, Bodhi held up a vial of liquid LSD.

A month earlier, I would have laughed and said absolutely not.

Instead, I held out my coffee cup and let him pour in a dose.

Somewhere along the way, my answer to almost everything became yes.

What would Scott want to do today?

That became our compass, spending the rest of the week in an altered state.

We splashed through the Caribbean like children. Wandered through our own “Fear and Loathing” moment in a fluorescent Mexican supermarket. Adopted a dolphin floatie with the same playful smile and mischievous eyes as Scott, insisting he’d somehow found us.

From then on, “Dolphin Scott” came everywhere.

One afternoon, I took Bodhi back to the cenote where Scott and I had swum the year before.

A twenty-foot ledge overlooked impossibly blue water.

I’ve always been terrified of heights.

I stood there for nearly two hours, willing myself to take the leap.

Families gathered below and started cheering me on. People literally counted me in several times. Children jumped. Grandmothers jumped. Everyone seemed to make the leap except me. I was frozen with terror.

Then I looked down.

Bodhi was waiting in the water, waving me in.

And somehow, so was Scott.

I jumped.

Then I climbed back up and did it three more times.

Slowly, I realized I wasn’t trying to recreate my trip with Scott.

I was finally having the trip I’d been too afraid to have the first time.

Scott had spent years trying to teach me fearlessness. Somehow, he finally succeeded after he was gone.

The next day, we rented a Jeep and drove deep into the Sian Ka’an Biosphere, where Scott and I had floated through the mangroves the year before.

The dirt road was little more than flooded ruts. Bodhi floored it anyway.

We tore through the jungle like we were being chased.

By ghosts, we certainly were.

Whenever fear crept in, I’d think nothing could hurt me more than losing Scott.

Once you’ve survived the worst thing you can imagine, the world starts feeling surprisingly generous.

I told Bohdi to go faster!

On an empty beach, we built “Scott” out of shells and driftwood. Seaweed for hair. Fossilized coral for his giant brain. An absurdly oversized stick for the anatomy he’d have insisted we include.

Then we took turns posing beside him while Dolphin Scott looked on approvingly.

We were usually vacillating between laughter and tears. Everything took on grand, symbolic meanings. We took Scott’s stick like a sword and sped away, chasing the sun.

That night, I took Bodhi to Scott’s favorite restaurant. An open-air place with a wood-fired grill where Scott always insisted the owner, Carlos, would eventually pull up a chair and drink tequila with him.

We set Scott’s picture on the table.

When the waiter came by, we asked if Carlos was there.

“Can you tell him Scott’s here?” I asked.

The waiter smiled politely.

“No,” I corrected myself. “Can you tell him Scott’s NOT here because he died?”

He looked confused, nodded uncomfortably, and disappeared into the kitchen.

We ordered more margaritas and waited.

Every time another server walked by, we’d ask again.

“Did you tell Carlos?”

“He’s coming,” they’d assure us.

One margarita became two.

Two became three.

The picture of Scott sat between us, smiling his knowing smile while we grew louder and less patient.

Finally, it dawned on us.

Carlos wasn’t coming.

Maybe he was busy. Maybe he’d gone home. Maybe the waiters simply didn’t know how to tell two increasingly intoxicated strangers that Carlos had no idea who Scott even was.

Whatever the reason, we were left sitting there with our grief, expecting the world to stop for someone it barely remembered.

It finally occurred to me that we weren’t really looking for Carlos.

We were looking for Scott. But we weren’t going to find him like this.

Bodhi drained the last of his margarita and grinned at me as if he’d just figured out the same thing.

“Give me two minutes,” he said.

He walked towards the parking lot and disappeared into the night.

When I heard the car honking, I ran for it.

We peeled away in the muddy Jeep, laughing hysterically, shouting, “For Scott!” into the warm Mexican night.

I’d never skipped out on a bill in my life, but somehow this felt right.

For our last stop, we checked into the all-inclusive resort in Cancún Scott had picked out, if only because unlimited margaritas were included in the rate.

When the front desk offered us an upgrade, Bodhi didn’t hesitate.

“Of course!”

The room, however, was missing the rooftop hot tub we’d been promised.

Under any other circumstances, I would’ve shrugged it off.

Instead, we staged a completely disproportionate sit-in in the hotel lobby until the exhausted manager finally relented.

It felt ridiculous.

It also was exactly the kind of harmless shenanigans Scott would’ve talked us into.

For the next twenty-four hours, we barely left that rooftop. Dolphin Scott bobbed around the hot tub while we laughed ourselves hoarse, toasted absent friends, and made grandiose promises.

I’d become a version of myself I barely recognized here, but somehow, I felt more alive than ever.

“Next year,” one of us said. “Sayulita!”

Scott had loved Sayulita.

“We’re going to be in each other’s lives forever,” Bohdi toasted.

“Best friends forever,” I answered.

Another Sparkley Elephant, I quietly mused.

Later that night, Bodhi fell asleep on the outdoor daybed.

“You’re incredible,” he mumbled before drifting off.

I kissed him on the forehead and stayed awake until sunrise on my own.

The sky over Cancún was thick with slow-moving clouds. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or grief. Or everything we’d taken that week. Whatever it was, the clouds began to move like a film projected across the sky.

I watched a version of Scott blazing over the heavens in a chariot made of stardust. I thought to myself, he’s off on his next adventure.

For the first time since he’d died, I didn’t try to call him back. Instead, I let myself cry for everything we were, and everything we would never be.

The next day, a very sweet but firm airport security lady confiscated the sharp stick we were still carrying around from the version of Scott we’d created on the beach. Before we let it go, she allowed us to take a picture.

We laughed about it repeatedly as we boarded our plane and lifted out of this almost dreamlike reality.

By then, I knew two things.

The trip that should have been the saddest of my life had somehow become one of the most beautiful.

And I had two people to thank for that.

One was obvious.

The other, I never would’ve seen coming.

Bohdi held my hand for most of the flight home.

Just as we landed, he quietly let go.

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This is Why We’re Here

And after that, he disappeared entirely.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t break my heart a little.

I couldn’t understand how we’d been so much to each other, promised so many things, and then... nothing.

Interestingly, one year later, I returned to Sayulita as promised. This time with Scott’s mom and a mutual friend.

Wouldn’t you know it, there was Bodhi.

He was still wearing the swim trunks I’d bought for Scott before our Mexico trip, then given to him after Scott died. The very same pair he’d worn throughout our adventure in the Mayan Riviera.

They were so filthy it looked as though, in the year that had passed, he’d never taken them off.

He’d somehow acquired a young, dickish traveling companion and several kilos of the cartel’s finest cocaine. The two of them had been stealing golf carts and racing them through the narrow streets of Sayulita like oversized children. Not so unlike something he and Scott might have done once upon a time.

One night, Bodhi organized an elaborate dinner for a dozen of us, only to realize afterward he’d forgotten to arrange a way home. We spent the next hour knocking on strangers’ doors trying to wake a taxi driver while Bodhi, by then thoroughly drunk, had become spectacularly useless.

It wasn’t that the Bodhi I’d come to trust had disappeared.

It was that I was finally seeing the whole person.

The beautiful chaos that had made him exactly who Scott loved... and exactly who could never be the steady friend I’d wanted him to become.

Toward the end of the trip, after enough tequila and powder had softened whatever wall he’d built between us, he looked at me and quietly said,

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t prepared to be who you needed me to be.”

Even though it was Bohdi saying the words, I could almost hear Scott’s voice.

For a long time, I thought that week in Mexico had been a promise.

Eventually, I realized it had been a gift.

Scott believed our hearts were capable of inventing relationships the rest of the world didn’t always have names for.

For one impossible week, that’s exactly what Bodhi and I did.

We were two people with exactly the same assignment.

To carry Scott.

To find him in the places he’d loved.

To become a little less afraid of living because we’d already experienced the thing we feared most.

When the assignment was over, so were we.

Sure, Bodhi had promised me a future he couldn’t deliver. But he’d given me a week I couldn’t have survived alone. And in the end, that was enough.

It had to be.

Because that lesson wasn’t only about Bodhi. It was about Scott, too. For years, I’d thought the tragedy was that Scott and I never got our second honeymoon.

Now I know the tragedy would’ve been never loving him at all.

Sometimes I still wonder what would’ve happened if we’d had twenty years as lovers instead of one.

We probably would’ve disappointed each other.

We would’ve had to reckon with addiction, ordinary life, and all the compromises that every lasting love demands.

Or maybe we wouldn’t have.

I’ll never know.

Before we ever had the chance to discover who we’d become together, he’d rolled out.

For the longest time, I thought that left our story unfinished. Now I think it simply left it complete in a different way than I expected.

Scott wasn’t just a love of my life.

He was one of my greatest teachers.

He taught me that fearlessness isn’t pretending death doesn’t exist.

It’s loving anyway.

It’s booking the trip.

Jumping off the ledge.

Kissing the person your heart reaches for.

The truth is, none of us gets forever.

Everyone we love will someday die. Or we will.

Grief isn’t the opposite of love. It’s the price of admission—the cost of getting to experience something so extraordinary that, one day, its absence will break your heart.

I used to think the goal was finding that “forever person.”

Now I think it’s to meet each soul as it arrives, receive whatever gift it came to bring, and love it for exactly as long as it exists.

Scott called it a sparkly little elephant.

A love that didn’t fit neatly into the categories we’d inherited, but deserved to exist anyway.

I think he was right.

Somewhere in the distance, I can still hear him running toward the ruins, arms spread wide.

“THIS is why we’re HERE!”

I was 8 months out of one of those soul-wrenching, completely toxic, and oh so passionate situationships masquerading as something real when I finally met him.

The rarest of San Francisco creatures.

The stuff of urban myths.

Yes… I’m talking about The Commitment Guy.

He saw me. Asked me out. Actually called when he said he would. And was living with me less than six months later. Not because he was some bed surfing fuck boy, or was looking for a cheaper zip code. He simply wanted to wake up next to me every morning.

That, and we had accidentally solved a very specific compatibility problem.

We both collected mid-century atomic-age furniture in shades of turquoise, orange, brown, and cream. Separately, our apartments looked like themed waiting rooms. Together, our collections formed a complete set.

What could we do? It felt meant to be.

He was tall, dark, and adorkable. I was blonde, restless, and still young enough to confuse chemistry with fate. We laughed at the same jokes. Had fantastic sex. Spent weekends haunting flea markets in search of some hideous lamp we knew we’d both find beautiful.

Other than the five cats between us, it all seemed remarkably promising. A perfect match.

Except we weren’t.

I’ll admit, at first, the differences felt charming.

He was old country and indie rock. I was EDM and Burning Man.

He smoked cigarettes. I smoked weed.

All his friends were getting married. Mine were exploring polyamory.

He dreamed of one day returning to the tiny mountain town where he’d grown up.

I couldn’t imagine living anywhere that wasn’t a city by the water.

He worked late at a bar and came home smelling like whiskey.

I was the daughter of an alcoholic who didn’t drink.

You’d think one of us would have seen the irony.

Why did I stay, you ask? Especially after our warring cats started spraying all over our tiny Mission apartment.

After years of avoidant men, mixed signals, and emotional scavenger hunts cosplaying as dating, I couldn’t bring myself to throw this fish back in the ocean.

He was kind. He was dependable. He loved me without making me guess. And each morning, I woke up to his smiling face asking me the same question, “Morning, gorgeous. What do you wanna do today?”

So instead of asking ourselves the tough questions like whether we actually wanted the same life, we moved into a bigger place, separated the cats, and booked a trip to Bali.

Paradise Found

These days, I think it’s safe to call myself a world traveler. But I got off to a late start. Not counting Canada—and we can hardly count Canada—I didn’t truly leave the country until I was 32 years old.

That might not sound young to some, but I had a serious case of Peter Pan syndrome and several years of emotional growing up to do after a chaotic childhood.

As a kid, I’d masqueraded as an adult. So as an adult, I was in no hurry to “grow up.”

I wasn’t married. I had no children, no house, no “big career.” Instead, I was learning to design clothes, working on my fire dancing skills, and still trying to understand how relationships worked.

It was 2004 when The Commitment Guy and I headed to a distant island in Indonesia. I was going to have a line of clothing produced. He was going to prove he could hang with my growing wanderlust.

This was long before Bali became a playground for influencers and digital nomads. It was also shortly after the 2002 bombings had thrust the island into the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

My dad wasn’t happy I was going.

Phil, who already dealt with travel anxiety, was giving an Oscar-winning performance as a good sport.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but to this day it remains one of the most remote and exotic places I’ve traveled.

Sure, the city of Kuta was already packed with Australian surfers and American fast food. Seeing a KFC and a Dunkin’ Donuts upon arrival in Southeast Asia felt vaguely dystopian, like a franchise-based lifeform slowly colonizing the Earth. But much of the island was still rural and undeveloped in those days.

Even Seminyak, where we set up shop, was still a sleepy seaside village.

For ten dollars a night, you could get a spacious room with a king-sized bed, a giant marble bathtub, and a tropical garden just a stone’s throw from the beach.

I was intoxicated by the place immediately. The streets were a corrugated maze of local shops brimming with Hindu and Buddhist statues, jewelry, and colorful garments. The roads buzzed with motorbikes. Offerings of flowers and incense appeared on sidewalks and ornate doorways. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be a ceremony, temple, or reminder that I was very far from home.

My boyfriend looked less convinced.

We’d gone there with a handful of my Burner friends. At the time, Bali was becoming a bit of a pilgrimage for our crowd. People like us went to have clothes made, chase some version of paradise, and return to San Francisco with suitcases full of treasures to sell.

My babe was not cut from the same cloth.

Truth be told, my friends only marginally accepted him into our group. And he didn’t have much more patience for them.

To him, Burning Man was mostly an elaborate gathering of leather-clad trustifarians with white-people dreadlocks, problematic feather headdresses, recreational nudity, and all-night drug-fueled dance raves.

Not exactly his scene.

Yet he’d already gone twice because he knew how much it mattered to me. Disappointingly, Burning Man had not “received” him the way I’d hoped.

He didn’t have the right haircut, clothing, or tattoos. I saw people I’d once thought of as cool treat him like he wasn’t, and it changed the way I saw them.

He also hadn’t taken kindly to my going around topless.

“Do you know how many men are gonna be jacking off to your pictures after this?!?”
”It’s not about the male gaze, Phil. It’s about my empowerment in my body!”

He didn’t get it.
Still, he’d tried. That was one of the things I loved about him.

Bali was no exception. There is no universe in which Phil would have made this journey on his own. Yet here he was, helping gather our fire toys and settling into his self-appointed role as Safety Officer, reminding everyone to bring their flame-retardant blankets before we headed to the beach.

Our first sunset in Bali found us spinning fire barefoot in the sand, glowing like little fireflies against the orange haze of a marmalade sky.

Before long, a small crowd had gathered. Then a few local fire spinners stepped forward. They descended on us in a whirlwind of questions and excited chatter.

Part of the fascination was our gear. We spun with Kevlar wicks that stayed lit far longer than anything they’d seen before. That and we’d spent years on the Burning Man “Playa” learning from some of the best fire dancers in the world.

They looked at us like rock stars. To us, they felt like long-lost members of the same strange tribe. We vibed immediately.

But I noticed Phil hanging back.

Whenever they asked where we were staying, he answered vaguely. When they asked what we’d be doing later, he shrugged.

The rest of us were practically handing out itineraries.

“It’s Phil’s birthday today!” we told them.

“Then tonight, me make party on Beach.” one of them suggested warmly. “ We play drums. You show us tricks. We’ll drink arak!”

“Just tell us when and where, and we’ll be there!”

But back in our hotel room, Mr. Safety Blanket was singing a different tune:

“We’re not going to the beach at night to get robbed by a bunch of hoodlums.”

Happy Birthday!

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! You sound like my dad.”

“Well, maybe your dad has a point.”

“Can bad things happen? Sure. But you can get a read on people, and I can tell these kids are harmless.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They’re fire spinners, Phil. They’re my people.”

“You’re people?” He rolled his eyes, “Omigawd, you met them three hours ago.”

“And you’ve already decided they’re criminals.”

“I didn’t say they were criminals.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I just don’t understand why you’re so willing to trust complete strangers.”

“And I don’t understand why you’re so afraid of them.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” he shot back.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re afraid of everything.”

The room went silent.

That landed harder than I’d intended.

Phil looked away, grabbed his cigarettes, shoved them into his pocket, and headed for the door.

“Have fun at your party!”

The slam echoed through the room.

For a moment, I stood there fuming. Then I slumped down on the edge of the bed, defeated, and stared out at the palms swaying outside our window.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in Seminyak, Phil had started wandering with no particular destination in mind. Just an urgent need to outrun the accusation I’d hurled at him, and the fear that there might be some truth to it.

He walked for a long time, chain-smoking while replaying our fight, following distant lights and unfamiliar sounds until he found himself near the water. There, he commenced a Charlie Brown-style sad walk down the shore.

At one point, he noticed a couple of guys watching him. He lowered his gaze and carried on, quickening his step.

Were they following behind him?

He glanced over his shoulder and picked up his pace.

They picked up theirs.

His blood started pounding in his head. The gap was closing. They were calling out to him, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying over the crashing surf.

Finally, animal instinct kicked in, and he broke into a sprint.

To his horror, so did they.

Swerving like a hunted animal, he gasped as he felt hands suddenly grab hold of his shirt. Panic made the world go black.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, the group was trying to convince me to forget about Phil and head to the beach for the party.

“I dunno, you guys, it’s his birthday, and he’s out there somewhere all alone.”

“Well, he’s the one who stormed out, right?”

I looked away, silently blaming myself for driving him to leave. “What if something happens to him?”

“What if you’re sitting in the hotel room feeling guilty while he’s out having a great time? He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

My conscience nagged at me, but I was in Bali. It was my first night on the other side of the world.

Eventually, curiosity won. I left a note for Phil and headed out.

We followed the loose verbal instructions the Balinese boys had given us earlier that evening, hugging the shore and crossing the crest of the hill. After about fifteen minutes, we started hearing drums in the distance, and soon emerged onto a beautiful protected cove.

The group cheered when they saw us. Some of them ran over and guided us toward a roaring bonfire. The air smelled of smoke, salt, and something sweet I couldn’t place. As I got closer, I saw something I couldn’t believe.

There was Phil, looking like a drowned rat. He smiled sheepishly, a cup of Bali’s potent moonshine in one hand and a small towel draped around his shoulders like a superhero cape.

“Omigawd! What happened to you?”

I was already halfway across the beach before I realized I was running.

“I’m OK,” he said.

Then he grinned, leaned in close to me, and whispered, “You were right.”

“What?”

“There was this moment I definitely thought they were gonna kill me…” He said loudly enough for everyone to hear, then dissolved into a fit of giggles.

My face still registered nothing but confusion.

“No, seriously.” he recaptured his composure, “I thought I was being followed.”

“You were followed!” one of the boys protested. “We were calling your name!”

“You were not,” Phil demanded, trying and failing to keep a straight face.

“We were! ‘Feeeeel! Feeeeel!’”

The others immediately started laughing.

“He started walking fast, like a scared chicken,” another boy chimed in, flapping his elbows.

“Nooooo, first I speed-walked. Then I ran like a scared chicken.”

The boys erupted.

At this point, Phil was holding court, and everyone was hanging on every word.

“When they started chasing after me, I thought I was gonna shit my pants.”

Uproarious laughter from all.

“Tell her what happened next!” the boys shouted, pointing at me.

Phil threw up his hands.

“What happened next?!? They tackled me into the ocean!”

“Birthday tackle!” one of the boys corrected.

“Birthday assault,” Phil countered.

The boys howled.

“They wrestled me into the water, dunked me several times, dragged me to this secret beach, got me drunk on arak, and somehow convinced me this was all perfectly normal.”

“It is normal!”

“It absolutely is not normal,” he shook his head, laughing to himself.

“Happy birthday Feeeeel!”

At that, several of them surrounded him, smiling broadly as they jostled him affectionately. Someone shoved a cup of arak into my hand, and moments later, everyone was raising their glasses toward the full moon and howling.

Even Phil.

So I howled and drank too. When in Bali.

Island of the Gods

“Wendy?”

“Yeah, I’m over here!”

“Where?”

“Over HERE!”

Phil’s voice sounded closer now, but he still couldn’t see me standing at the center of the circle.

A few minutes earlier, I’d only wanted to buy a hand-carved puppet and chessboard. Now I was surrounded by women and men, young and old. No one was touching me. No one was threatening me. Not exactly. But they had circled up, closed in around me, and were simply staring.

“Wendy?” Phil called again.

“I’m okay,” I answered, my voice a little shaky, though I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.

The day had started normally enough. We’d hired a driver named Wayan to take us around the island. He arrived in a passenger van large enough for all six of us, cheerful and punctual despite the fact that we were running late.

I’d already gotten into an argument with one of my friends before we’d even left the hotel.

“He’s only charging us thirty dollars for the entire day. For all of us,” I said.

“They expect you to haggle,” she argued. “That’s part of the culture.”

“The price also includes gas money,” I argued.

She rolled her eyes.

After I offered to cover her five-dollar share myself, she finally relented.

“You have to keep the prices down, or it’ll just keep rising.”

“Keep the prices down for whom?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” she muttered as she climbed into the van.

I wasn’t sure what principle she meant, but I made sure to hand Wayan an extra bill before we set out. He met this with obvious gratitude, greeted the rest of us with a warm smile, and pulled into traffic.

A little while later, he asked if we’d like to learn more about Balinese culture.

We all enthusiastically said yes.

For the next stretch of road, he became less a driver than a teacher.

He explained the daily offerings of flowers, rice, and incense that appeared outside homes and businesses every sunrise and sunset. He pointed out shrines in rice fields, beside storefronts, and tucked into family compounds.

Invisible spirits inhabited the world around them, he explained. Some benevolent. Some mischievous. The offerings helped keep everything in balance.

Then he told us about the rice terraces.

The irrigation system that fed them had coordinated farming across the island for centuries. Water flowed from mountain lakes through a network of canals, temples, and agreements between neighboring farmers. Even the landscape itself seemed organized around their spiritual ideal: harmony with the divine, harmony with one another, and harmony with the natural world.

As emerald-green terraces rolled past the van window, I found myself thinking that everything here seemed connected.

Religion.

Agriculture.

Family.

Community.

Even the landscape itself.

Then Wayan told us about the puputan.

“Balinese are proud people,” he told us. “And we have had to fight long and hard to defend our customs and beliefs from outsiders.”

Did I just imagine a nervous energy spreading through the group?

He continued.

“When it became obvious we could not defend ourselves militarily from the Dutch, our people made a choice that helped preserve our culture.”

We all leaned forward in our seats.

“The King and more than a thousand of his followers met the Dutch soldiers head-on, dressed in white robes, and committed ritual suicide rather than surrendering to them. When word reached Europe that entire families had chosen death over submission, public opinion began to change.”

The idea that entire villages choose death over submission to colonization was both chilling and inspiring in a strange way I couldn’t quite place.

The van fell silent.

Jezza swivelled around in his seat, took one look at our horrified faces, and cleared his throat.

“White robes are so hot right now,” he said in his best Zoolander voice.

“Oh wow.”

The rest of us groaned, then laughed nervously at the sheer audacity of the call back that had quickly become a shared shorthand among the group.

Just like that, the spell was broken, and we were back in the warm, familiar waters of American pop culture.

Reality television.

The Matrix sequels.

The Jackson trial.

“Mark my words,” Mandy quipped, “One day, Bubbles is gonna come forward, and the whole thing’s gonna unravel.”

I remember looking around the van and feeling strangely embarrassed. We’d traveled halfway around the world looking for something different, yet the moment we encountered it, we’d retreated back to this?

As the conversation carried on around me, I tried to imagine belonging to something so deeply that I’d be willing to die for it.

A faith.

A people.

A way of life.

What did I belong to with that kind of conviction?

McDonald’s?

MTV?

The collected works of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee?

When we finally arrived at Besakih, also known as Mother Temple, Wayan gave us a few instructions.

We’d need to cover our legs and shoulders. If we didn’t have a sarong and sash, they could be rented nearby. He also warned us that some people might insist we needed to pay extra fees for access, blessings, or unofficial guides.

“You do not have to give money,” he told us firmly.

While well-intended, that last bit put me on edge.

So when several people in the parking lot approached with outstretched hands, I hurried past them, rushing toward the breathtaking temple.

Stone guardians lined the stairways. They’d stood there since somewhere between the 14th and 17th centuries. Elaborately carved gates rose against the backdrop of Mount Agung. Everywhere I looked, there was something ancient and mythic-looking.

It felt like the kind of thing you’d only see in an Indiana Jones movie. But this was real.

By the time we reached the upper terraces, I was sweating from the climb and in sheer awe.

There, we met a holy man who offered blessings in exchange for a small donation.

I don’t remember exactly what ritual we performed; only the holy water, flowers, closing my eyes, and making a silent wish while the wind moved through the temple grounds.

What I wished for is lost to time.

I’d like to think it was something noble.

Relief for the people and animals I’d seen struggling on the island.

A greater understanding of this strange and beautiful place.

But if I’m being honest, it’s just as likely I wished for Phil and I to figure out whatever it was we kept missing in one another.

Twenty years later, I can still feel the sensation of being part of something mystical and sacred.

As I snaked down the mountainside, I noticed a shop selling local Balinese wares. This would be a perfect way to support the community, I thought.

I picked out a wooden puppet, delicately painted and adorned in ceremonial garb. She made me think of the royals who had made the ultimate sacrifice during the puputan. And a hand-carved chessboard. A game my father had taught me to play when I was just a girl.

Together, they probably cost only thirty-five dollars. To me, it felt like a bargain, especially for the craftsmanship of that quality.

But when I stepped back outside carrying my purchases, the mood shifted, and I became aware that people were watching me.

At first, it was only a few curious glances. Then more faces appeared. Before I quite understood what was happening, a circle had formed around me.

No one said anything. No one asked me for money. Yet there was an intensity to their attention that made me suddenly self-conscious. I looked down at the bags in my hands and wondered what they saw when they looked at me.

At home, I was a waitress. I made a decent living working in nice restaurants, but I wasn’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Most months, I was one unexpected expense away from being stressed about rent.

But standing there outside the temple, I understood something I hadn’t fully grasped before.

Wealth is relative.

Thirty-five dollars hadn’t seemed like much to me. Here, it clearly meant something different.

In that moment, surrounded by faces weathered by a life I couldn’t begin to understand, I felt as though I’d been caught carrying evidence of a crime. Not guilt exactly, but privilege. And it was heavy.

They knew something about the world I didn’t. And now, I would see them, and I would not be able to look away.

Just as I began grappling with what to do, I heard Phil calling my name.

“Wendy?”

“Here!“

He followed my voice, broke through the circle, and took my hand.

As we hurried away, I glanced back over my shoulder at the group still standing there.

My heart broke a little.

I lived in a city where homelessness, addiction, and mental illness were part of the landscape. By then, I’d become accustomed to stepping around suffering, compartmentalizing it, convincing myself there was little I could do.

This felt different.

These weren’t isolated people who had fallen through the cracks of a system. They were families. Entire communities living with a level of poverty and inequality I had never encountered before.

And for the first time, I found myself wondering what responsibility came with being born on one side of that divide rather than the other.

Mean Monkeys, Shroom Shakes, and Diarrhea

Three weeks is a long time to spend with anyone.

It’s also a long time to be far from home, on the other side of the world.

Strangely, my memories of Phil are sparse for long stretches of the Bali trip. I could blame that on the size of our group or the constant stream of adventures that had pulled us in different directions.

But I think something else was happening.

After the rocky relationship that came before him, I’d become protective of my independence. Giving myself to love wholeheartedly no longer felt romantic—it felt dangerous. So while Phil was trying to prove he could follow me into my world, I was making sure I still had an exit.

Sometimes that meant spending entire days with my friends.

Sometimes it meant wandering off solo.

In the first week, still jet-lagged, I’d wake before dawn and wander down to the beach alone. The air smelled of incense. Gamelan music drifted from somewhere in the distance. Fishermen pushed their boats into the surf as the sun climbed over the horizon.

Those quiet mornings became some of my favorite memories of the trip.

But paradise has a way of becoming ordinary if you stay long enough.

Meetings with our tailor consumed most days. Or rather, attempted meetings. Every afternoon, we’d stop by his shop hoping to see the latest samples. And with each successive visit, he’d smile warmly and explain why they weren’t ready.

A holiday.

A parade.

A birth.

A funeral.

It was always something.

Eventually, we started referring to this phenomenon as “Bali Time.”

Making ourselves available for appointments that never happened left us with long stretches of idle hours.

Rachel and I filled them by roaming the market stalls in search of bootleg DVDs. What began as casual browsing evolved into an unnamed competition. For two dollars, you could buy everything from cult classics to stoner comedies.

We collected them like Pokémon cards.

By the end of the trip, I had accumulated hundreds. I am not proud of this.

By the second week, the novelty of being on the other side of the world was slowly giving way to the reality of being on the other side of the world. Even the things that had enchanted me when I first arrived were beginning to feel a little exhausting.

Take getting lost, for example.

At first, it had felt adventurous. But one afternoon, after wandering farther than I’d intended, I found myself several miles from our hotel. Then I got turned around. That’s when my stomach decided to stage a full-scale rebellion.

Traveler’s diarrhea is practically a rite of passage in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, I was about to earn my badge.

Armed with nothing but desperation and a handful of Balinese words, I was forced to knock on the door of a family home and attempt to explain my predicament.

To my astonishment, they welcomed me inside without hesitation.

The bathroom consisted of a squat toilet, a bucket of water, and a plastic ladle. No toilet paper. No instructions. At that moment, it may as well have been the Ritz-Carlton.

When I emerged a few minutes later, the family smiled as though helping frantic foreign women through gastrointestinal emergencies was a perfectly ordinary part of their day. They even let me photograph their two children, who seemed fascinated by the strange blonde tattooed lady who had suddenly appeared in their home.

The longer I stayed in Bali, the more I noticed these small acts of generosity. Again and again, ordinary people shared what little they had with remarkable openness.

It was difficult to reconcile with my growing homesickness.

The place was wearing on me.

The people never did.

But by week three, the cracks were starting to show.

The exhaust from the motorbikes.

The smell of sewage baking in the heat.

The scary packs of half-wild dogs roaming the streets.

The skinny cats and starving kittens begging beneath restaurant tables.

The bloated, sunburned Australian tourists loudly demanding things they could have asked for politely.

The way shop owners constantly called out to us.

“Yes, yes, you can try. Yes, come in, you buy. You buy.”

I didn’t blame them. Tourism was their livelihood. Still, after a few weeks, I found myself longing for interactions that weren’t transactional.

The feeling of being out of place continued while fabric shopping with Jezza in Denpasar. I noticed people staring at us. At first, I assumed it was my tattoos.

Then it dawned on me.

We were the only white people around.

Seemingly for miles.

It sounds ridiculous now, but it was the first time in my life I’d ever found myself in the minority. I remember feeling self-conscious, then slightly embarrassed that the experience felt so novel.

By that point, nearly three weeks into the trip, everything seemed to be affecting me more deeply than usual. So when Wayan suggested another excursion to the southern coast, I was more than ready for a change of scenery.

As we exited the van, he gave us a warning:

“Be careful of the monkeys.”

Turns out, both Wayan and Phil were right. There were real hoodlums in Bali. Not the Balinese boys we’d met on the beach. The infamous troop of macaques at Uluwatu Temple.

Wayan’s warning had seemed unnecessarily dramatic until one of the larger males marched directly up to an Australian tourist and snatched the designer sunglasses from her face. The monkey examined them briefly, snapped them clean in half, then tossed them over the cliff.

I can still hear her squaking, “My Gucci sunglasses!” in her thick Aussie accent.

As the monkey sauntered off with attitude, Phil dissolved into laughter. For the first time in days, he seemed genuinely relaxed. Not politely participating or being a good sport. Just enjoying himself.

As the sun disappeared into the ocean, we watched the Kecak performance unfold against the cliffs. A hundred voices moved in rhythmic unison while masked dancers reenacted scenes from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic centered on the lovers Rama and Sita.

Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be another depiction of them. The fated couple overcoming impossible obstacles to find their way back to one another.

Meanwhile, I was traveling through paradise with a man who had crossed an ocean for me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was already halfway out the door.

I remember looking over at Phil; six-foot-five with soft curls, blue eyes, and the sort of face that made women smile when he walked into a room. Particularly here, where Balinese women would cover their mouths, flutter their lashes, and giggle whenever he appeared.

I could see him through their eyes.

Handsome.

Funny.

Kind.

And yet my butterflies were gone.

Most evenings still ended the same way. Phil with a Bintang beer in his hand, me quietly keeping count.

After the show, Wayan took us to Jimbaran Bay for dinner, a small seaside village with a reputation for great seafood.

Rows of tables were scattered across the sand, their lanterns flickering as the tide rolled in and out beneath a bruised purple sky. Fresh food arrived by the platter. Whole fish, grilled prawns, squid, and things we couldn’t identify but ate anyway.

As I picked at my dishes with a heavy heart, a roaming group of musicians approached our table.

Without warning, they launched into Bryan Adams.

Everything I do...

I do it for youuuuuuu...

I stared at them. Then at the ocean. Then back at the band.

“Isn’t it a little strange they’re singing American songs?” I asked.

“I think it’s nice,” Mandy said.

Maybe it was.

I still found it troubling. Just not entirely for the reasons I’d given.

The song was about devotion, certainty, and knowing exactly who and what mattered most.

Ever since my last breakup, when it came to love, I wasn’t certain of anything.

After dinner, Wayan drove us to a luxury cliffside resort so extravagant it felt disconnected from the rest of the island. Manicured gardens, winding pathways, koi ponds, footbridges, and enough marble to bankrupt a small nation.

At the edge of the property, a glass elevator descended the face of the cliff into a beach cave that had somehow been transformed into a cocktail bar.

Naturally, we rode down.

Inside, fruit bats the size of raccoons hung from the limestone ceiling while impeccably dressed Japanese tourists danced to EDM.

At one point, a young woman who seemed to like the way I danced placed her wrists in my hands and announced, “You control me now.”

Apparently, she wanted to be my puppet.

“Oh, no, thank you,” I tried to disengage.

Meanwhile, Phil, who had little interest in electronic music and even less in dancing, had already drifted toward the bar.

I couldn’t help but notice.

On our final day, it was finally time to collect the production we’d spent three weeks waiting for. Even Phil had gotten in on the action by then, commissioning a series of leather cuffs decorated with local Brahma bulls.

When the boxes finally appeared, we ripped them open like children on Christmas morning.

Then came the silence.

My clothing samples were a mess.

One vest had three different versions of a “small.” Seams wandered. Measurements changed from garment to garment as if several people had interpreted the same instructions in entirely different ways.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly what had happened.

After delaying us for weeks, our tailor had subcontracted much of the work elsewhere.

Then we opened Phil’s box.

The bulls looked less like animals and more like something a third grader might produce with a pair of dull safety scissors.

For a moment, nobody said anything.

Then Phil held one up, looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. Three weeks. Thousands of miles. Months of planning. And this was what we’d come home with. By that evening, we were a couple of hundred dollars poorer and firmly in a fuck-it state of mind.

Which is how we found ourselves sitting in an Alice in Wonderland-themed bar contemplating mushroom shakes.

In Bali, drug use is punishable by death. But somehow, mushrooms were completely legal.

Go figure.

We looked at each other, and it was decided.

Bottoms up!

The rest of the night is something of a blur.

I know we ended up singing karaoke with Balinese strangers who knew American pop music better than we ever would.

I remember the jungle breathing around us.

How the Barong masks appeared to come alive and hiss every time we passed.

The giant bats crossing in front of a huge yellow moon.

The sensation that the entire island had become sentient and was quietly amused by our presence.

Somehow, we ended up back on the same beach where Phil had celebrated his birthday.

I looked at him.

Really looked at him.

Was he the same man who had nearly skipped a party and survived a birthday baptism at the hands of strangers?

I wasn’t sure if this was just some vacation version of himself he was trying on, or if something about this trip had genuinely changed him, but I loved what I saw.

The sweet, adoring man who had made this journey with me.

Who had tolerated my friends.

Who kept saying yes to adventures he never would have chosen for himself.

I was filled with gratitude and affection.

For a moment, all the doubts, grievances, and future worries that normally crowded my mind drifted away.

As the waves rolled onto the shore, it seemed entirely possible that, like Rama and Sita, we’d found our way back to one another.

Maybe that was the mushrooms talking.

Or maybe it was paradise.

Either way, I believed it.

The next day, we climbed aboard a jumbo jet and flew home still in love.

What We Brought Home

Of course, it wasn’t long after that we broke up.

Over the next several months, Phil’s late nights at the bar increased. My resentment boiled over. And the distance between us grew.

He started a rock band and wrote angry songs about me.

I developed a crush on someone I worked with and ended the relationship before I did something I couldn’t take back.

The Commitment Guy and I were finished.

Bali had brought us closer in some ways. But it also magnified the differences we’d been trying not to see. Looking back, I still see the differences between us. But mostly I see bad timing.

I hadn’t healed from the broken trust of my last relationship. I was still searching for the next version of myself. And I just wasn’t ready for what he had to offer. We definitely grew while we were together, but we were growing in different directions.

Still, I don’t think either of us came home unchanged.

A trip like ours can shake things loose. It can expose parts of yourself you didn’t know were there. Leave you with questions that take years to answer. But the real transformation happens afterward, as you slowly make sense of what you’ve seen.

Twenty years later, here I am, still figuring it out.

It would take me another couple of decades before I willingly chose another Commitment Guy. Those are stories for another day, but this time, when I met him, I was ready.

These days, a small statue of Rama and Sita sits on my mantel. The great lovers of the Ramayana, who endured impossible trials to find their way back to one another. When I bought it, I probably thought it represented the kind of love I was searching for. Now it reminds me of something else.

The part that stays with me isn’t the reunion of lovers. It’s the path to get there. The trials. The transformation required to become the kind of person capable of actually loving another in the first place.

Not every journey is meant to last forever.

Some people arrive in our lives to walk beside us for a stretch of the road, helping us become the person who eventually arrives somewhere else.

Phil was one of those people.

And Bali was one of those places.

Going Home Again

There are currently millions of laid-off white-collar workers wondering what comes next. Six months ago, I became one of them.

Eighty-five résumés, three interviews, and zero offers later, I did what a lot of people do when they get scared. I started looking for an earlier version of myself.

We’ve all done some version of this when life feels uncertain. We call the ex we know we shouldn’t. We reconnect with the friend who has repeatedly disappointed us. We convince ourselves that maybe the thing we left behind wasn’t so bad after all.

We start looking backward. My version of this was a job.

After eight years away from hospitality, 5.5 years in a cushy remote marketing role, and six months of rejection, I found myself running back into the open arms of the restaurant industry.

When the offers came flooding in, it felt almost euphoric. After months of hearing nothing, suddenly I was wanted again. Better yet, I had options.

At first, I was genuinely excited to go back. Part of me wanted a break from the endless AI discourse, the constant speculation about what jobs will survive and what skills will soon be obsolete. A return to human-to-human interaction had real appeal.

But more than that, I missed the culture.

There’s something addictive about restaurant life. The adrenaline of a rush. The camaraderie that develops when you’re six hours into a slammed service and the only thing keeping the wheels from coming off is the group of people standing beside you.

And unlike most corporate types, hospitality people tend to show up as themselves.

There’s always a little polish, a little edge, and an honesty that can be hard to find elsewhere. You know who’s getting divorced. Who’s in love. Who’s trying to get sober. Who’s writing a screenplay, starting a side hustle, or barely holding their life together. People don’t hide behind professionalism in quite the same way.

At least that’s how I remembered it.

The fantasy was especially powerful because I wasn’t returning to just any restaurant. I was returning to the exact same space where I’d worked for 16 years. Back then, it was home.

And now? For me, it was a little haunted.

This was the place where we’d won a James Beard Award. Where family meal was something we actually looked forward to. The place we tasted wine every day, argued passionately about food, and built friendships that survived marriages, breakups, career changes, and time itself. Many of the people I met there are still among my closest friends.

Would I find the same this time around?

When I walked back into the space, it was hard not to imagine I’d somehow stumbled into a time machine.

I hadn’t.

While I’d continued to age, most of my coworkers were twenty to thirty years younger than me. While the restaurant occupied the same footprint, everything else had changed. The crew was new, the food was new, and the culture was very different.

We signed paperwork acknowledging that if we broke more than one of their paper-thin glasses within thirty days, we’d be written up. We spent pre-service discussing how to describe wine. We just weren’t allowed to drink any.

Day two, I stood at the line observing service while an absolutely phenomenal expo walked me through every menu item in painstaking detail while simultaneously orchestrating the flow of the kitchen. The whole thing felt like watching somebody conduct an orchestra while solving a Rubik’s Cube.

Have you seen The Bear?

“Yes, chef. Thank you, chef.”

I was living it.

This place had the food down. There was no complaint there. Before we were turned loose on the floor, every last employee was expected to know every detail and memorize polished little drop lines for each plate.

Oddly enough, tasting the food wasn’t part of the process.

They were also serious about the rules. What side you serve from. How you pour wine. How you fold a serviette. Where the cork belongs. How many minutes a task should take. Nothing is left to interpretation. And I suppose when you’re serving a $136 steak, that’s the point.

But what struck me was how differently they approached the people doing the work.

At my previous restaurant, there was an understanding that hospitality flowed in both directions. We were expected to take exceptional care of our guests, but management also invested heavily in the staff. We tried everything, repeatedly. Everyone from the kitchen to management, to front-of-the-house sat down together for family meal.

We were treated as valued professionals. The literal face of the restaurant.

This new place seemed to operate from a different philosophy. Everything was tightly controlled. Information flowed one way. Even the towels were locked away from the staff for fear that they’d use them all up willy-nilly.

Maybe that’s just how restaurants work now. Maybe I’d become hopelessly nostalgic. But by the end of my third day, I found myself trapped in a liminal space that had once felt like home but now had me strangely homesick.

It was becoming increasingly clear just how spoiled I’d been in the past. But we weren’t in Kansas anymore. And at nearly fifty-four years old, my body was feeling every hour of this experiment like it was ten.

Obviously, this was going to take some adjustment. But financially, I needed to make it work. So I put on my game face and buckled in.

What People Don’t See

People often think of hospitality work as entry-level, but it isn’t.

Servers don’t just work physically demanding jobs, balancing stacks of breakable objects like circus performers. We’re food, wine, and spirits educators, ambassadors, and experience designers.

It’s not just long hours on stage. It’s craft, polish, timing, negotiation, and sales.

It’s knowing top wine producers, grape regions, and the fundamentals of culinary technique. Knowing which Japanese whiskies are peated, and that bourbon must be aged in new charred oak.

As I dove back into this culture, I was reminded of just how sophisticated high-end service really is, even as the world at large continues to attach the stigma of servitude to the role.

So much so that when I pivoted into marketing, it was necessary to remove nearly two decades of restaurant experience from my résumé, even though both careers require me to understand an audience, map a customer journey, and use words persuasively to sell a product.

Need proof?

Five long days of training later, I found myself standing face-to-face with the Sous Chef, demonstrating I’d mastered my drop lines:

“Sakura Pork Rack with grilled black apples, Dirty Girl Farm spigarello, and spicy mustard jus...”

“Monterey squid and wood-fired octopus with sunchoke espuma and chorizo oil...”

“Lomachay with green garlic, sweet corn, and cordyceps in a pecorino fonduta...”

There were roughly thirty dishes in total, not counting desserts, cocktails, and wines from France, Germany, Spain, Hungary, and Italy, all requiring correct pronunciation and a working understanding of what was actually in the glass.

Then there were allergens.

Which shellfish are crustaceans and which are mollusks? Which seemingly vegetarian dish actually contains bacon, fish sauce, and brown butter? Which ingredients are hidden in a sauce nobody thinks to ask about?

At some point, you start wondering whether you’re a server, a marine biologist, or just a very underpaid food detective.

The next time someone dismisses restaurant work as unskilled labor, I’d invite them to spend a week learning the menu.

By the end of training, my brain felt nearly as tired as my feet.

The irony was that the deeper my appreciation for the craft became, the more frustrated I found myself with the operation around me.

I’d come from what felt like a golden age of San Francisco dining, and from one of its premier houses, where this craft was respected, well-paid, and an integral part of the city’s global influence.

Our servers weren’t “just order takers.” We were professionals with encyclopedic knowledge, extraordinary emotional intelligence, and the ability to make a hundred moving parts look effortless.

At this new place, making things look effortless was proving a challenge.

We didn’t have enough forks. We didn’t have enough glasses. The water filtration system was overdue for a change, leaving us with little more than a trickle during service.

The chef favored a minimalist aesthetic, so tables were set with only napkins. Once the rush hit, every piece of glassware, silverware, and plate setting had to be added on the fly. On busy nights, we’d spend ten minutes just trying to find a glass to get water onto a table.

Was I sweating from the stress, having a hot flash, or both?

The physical demands were something I’d expected. What I wasn’t prepared for was the constant, needless scrambling. They seemed to be making an already difficult job harder than it needed to be.

I couldn’t help but compare the present to the past. I’d seen what this very room looked like when it was firing on all cylinders.

This wasn’t it.

Seven days in, my respect for the profession had deepened, but my patience with this place was beginning to wear thin. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was backsliding into a life I’d already lived.

Only this version felt smaller, messier, and much less manageable.

Sisu

The next week, we got unexpectedly slammed on what should have been a slow night.

I was already internally outraged that I was waiting 15 minutes for the bartenders to put up two glasses of wine. We were out of forks again. The back waiters were stretched too thin to support the size of the sections they’d been assigned. Everywhere I turned, there seemed to be another unnecessary obstacle.

Still, that’s the thing about restaurant work. Guests don’t care about your operational problems. They care about their experience. So I leaned hard into the one thing I knew I could control: hospitality.

I smiled. I chatted. I tried to make the chaos feel seamless.

When a group of executives sat down at table sixty-two with accents that sounded vaguely familiar, I struck up a conversation.

“Finnish?”

“No, Swedish.”

“Ah, OK. My mother was Finnish, and I thought maybe...”

“Oh! We LOVE Finland! They stand between us and Russia. Do you know about the war between Finland and Russia? SISU!”

“Yes, actually. My grandfather used to tell stories about that war. And I recognize that word.”

In the war, the Finns had been severely outnumbered. Yet, according to my grandfather, they’d looked across the field of soldiers and said, ‘So many Russians.... where will we bury them all?’

“GRIT!” the Swede sang out.

The next day, I wasn’t feeling much sense of sisu.

These first two weeks back in restaurant work had my body feeling like I was the one who’d gone to battle. Every night, I limped home. Each day I lie on the heating pad, my back in spasms.

Actually, I couldn’t stop crying. I felt completely beat up, and I still had two more shifts to get through before I could catch my breath. Would I adjust, or was this my new normal?

Then, on the BART ride over, a friend I barely speak to sent me the sweetest message out of the blue. She’d been following my career journey on social media and could relate to how hard physical work becomes as we get older.

Then she added: “I’m half Finnish, and we have a saying: Sisu!”

My ears perked up. Why was this random Finnish concept suddenly finding me two days in a row?

Human brains are prone to looking for patterns, and mine is no exception. It gave me that strange feeling that it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Surely it meant something.

As I trudged up the station stairs toward the restaurant, I tried to summon the spirit of my ancestors. I had to push through. Find my fighting spirit. Get to the other side of this brutal reentry.

Courage against the odds! I told myself.

When I clocked in and headed to the floor, I hoped nobody could tell I’d been crying. I put on my best smile and went to work.

I tried to ignore my growing concerns about the operational bottlenecks. I led by example, jumping in wherever needed as fellow servers prepared for a partial buyout. I did my best to describe food and drink I’d never been allowed to try. And I told myself to stop comparing this new place to the old one that, for me, still haunted these halls.

I might have even succeded to get myself through another day. But then they came stumbling in.

Six feet tall and clearly on drugs. Dirty. Covered in scabs. A urine stain spread across the crotch of their filthy white shorts. You could tell this person had once been beautiful, but their life had taken a very dark turn.

I ran to get our GM.

The two of us turned the corner just as the intruder made a beeline for one of the guest tables. Large blackened fingers reached toward a plate as they cheerfully announced:

“Free strawberries!”

I managed to push their filthy hand away just as my manager tried to steer them, gently but firmly, from the horrified guests. The stranger bucked like a startled animal. Before I knew what had happened, both my manager and the interloper were on the floor.

As they’d fallen on top of each other, one of the table edges had punctured the back of my manager’s head. Blood immediately began pouring down his neck and onto the dining room floor.

The intruder spat and frothed. Kicking wildly. Security finally arrived, and a struggle ensued to get them out of the building while well-heeled patrons paying hundreds of dollars for dinner looked on in horror.

I rushed to the center island.

Extra towels were locked away and rationed out by management. Ridiculous. The old-school restaurant worker in me bristled. There was blood on the floor, and we were treating towels like state secrets. So I grabbed whatever I could find and started wiping up blood and spit.

Nobody came over to help.

I raced the bloodied rags to the back, trying not to touch them with my naked skin, and washed my hands with fervent intent for several minutes.

When I reemerged onto the floor, I noticed the stain was still visible. I motioned quickly to a back waiter to grab something to finish cleaning it.

The guests still looked shaken.

“Are you OK?” I asked, moving from table to table.

Not one of my coworkers had approached them.

Minutes passed. Nobody came to remove the ugly smear on the floor.

Again, I rushed to the back, grabbed paper towels from the handwashing sink, and finished the job myself while watching the back waiter casually making his way toward the coffee station.

As I washed god-knows-what off my hands, something in me snapped.

One newbie who’d been watching me from afar mouthed, “Are you OK?” Still, he’d never moved from his perch at the line.

This is a pooled house. That means we share all tips. What’s mine is yours, and everything is everyone’s responsibility. Yet nobody but me and my manager had done a single thing.

What was this?

Was I the only person in the room who understood that an emergency had just happened? Were people now so used to passively watching horrors on their devices that they didn’t know how to act in real time? Or was I the fool, rushing in to handle things for a restaurant that wouldn’t even provide a staff meal?

The whole ordeal crystallized something I’d been trying not to admit. This place and this work were no longer for me. I finished my shift, found my bandaged GM in the back, thanked him for the opportunity, and told him this would be my last day.

He nodded sadly and asked why. But he knew why.

Later, I realized I’d misunderstood the lesson. The sisu I needed wasn’t the grit to endure the physical pain of restaurant work. Swallowing my pride, pushing through exhaustion, or proving I could still do it.

The real challenge was holding on to the life I'd spent the last seven years building after I left this world behind: writing, content work, marketing, the uncertain path, the layoffs, the rejections, and the blurry future that had made me wonder whether I should simply go back to what I knew.

Standing in that dining room, cleaning blood off the floor, I got the reality check I didn’t know I needed.

You can’t go home again. Life goes in one direction. We all have to keep moving forward.

Today I interviewed for a content role.

I’ve been here before, and I know better than to pin my hopes on any one opportunity. But making it to that interview felt like a victory all by itself.

For the first time in weeks, I wasn’t looking backward.

Maybe that’s what sisu really is.

Not enduring the wrong thing for one more day.

Finding the resolve to keep evolving with this thing, even though none of us know how this story ends.

The Art of Going Anyway

“I found a great price on tickets. Wanna be my date for a wedding in Spain?”

First red flag.

This was too fast. He was too young. The “relationship” was too new. But… I’d never been to Europe.

And nearly two years after Scott’s passing, I’d adopted a new policy: whenever my first impulse was to say no, the answer had to be yes.

When you lose someone, you realize you don’t always get second chances.

So here I was, pricing tickets to Europe with a near stranger.

Look, I may be impulsive, but I’m not dumb. The trip was three months out, and a lot could happen between now and then. So I made a bargain with myself. If I agreed to this plan, I needed to be prepared to go alone.

Second red flag.

He introduced me to Cheap Tickets, one of those discount travel sites where you can book a round trip to Barcelona for only $625. At the time, both the airfare and the new romance seemed almost too good to be true. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when neither turned out to be quite as advertised.

Over the next few months, the layovers grew from two hours to six. And the guy who’d become quickly smitten lost interest just as fast, slow-fading me and inviting another more age-appropriate chick to be his plus-one at the destination wedding instead.

The tickets were non-refundable. Sure, I could have just taken the loss. But the commitment I’d made to myself was still intact.

So I went.

And yes, red flag number three: I was going to have to travel on the same flight as the douche-bag who’d dumped me.

Believe me, I tried to avoid him as much as possible. But when the six-hour layover in Chicago stretched to eight, I finally gave in to inertia and asked if he wanted to join me for dinner. Over spaghetti and a couple bottles of bad wine, I relented.

“Tell me about the new girl.”

By the end of the night, we’d found something as close to a friendship as we’d ever get. So much so, I even agreed to sit next to him on the final leg of the journey.

When he fell asleep somewhere over the Atlantic and started lightly cuddling me, I instinctively leaned in. Then I remembered this one wasn’t mine anymore. We weren’t together. So I gently shifted away and stared out the window into the dark.

Twenty-some hours after we’d left home, exhausted and half delirious from lack of sleep, we emerged from security in Barcelona.

“Do you need help getting to your hotel?” he offered, trying to make the situation less awkward.

“Nope. I’ve got this, thanks,” I shot back with more confidence that I actually felt.

“See you in twelve days then….”

After a quick hug, we went our separate ways.

Hostel or Hostile?

Hotel? Ha, no.

Traveling alone meant I could no longer afford such luxuries. Straight to my first-ever hostel experience I went.

I didn’t know any better, so I’d booked a co-ed room at TOC Hostel Barcelona. I also didn’t fully appreciate what music festival season does to the city.

Every June, Sonar floods Barcelona with music lovers, party kids, and twenty-somethings looking for a good time. Especially at places like TOC. Think spring break vibes.

I knew the festival was happening. I had a ticket myself. What I didn’t yet understand was how accessible Europe is in ways America simply isn’t. A cheap flight from London, a train from Paris, a bus from Madrid, and suddenly an entire continent can descend on the same place for the weekend.

As I checked in, there was little evidence of the mayhem to come. The sleek Scandinavian-lite interiors looked aspirational, and I was feeling happy with my choice. Maybe this hostel thing wasn’t going to be half bad?

Then I went to my room.

When I opened the door, the funk slapped me across the face first. It was midday, already a balmy ninety degrees outside, and the air conditioning was clearly off. The place looked like a cyclone had hit, and the stale air reeked of alcohol and sweat. A naked and clearly drunk man was stumbling around looking for his clothes. There was a girl already passed out in the bed assigned to me.

I was horrified, but too tired to care.

I took the only available bunk and promptly fell into a sixteen-hour stupor while a full-blown party raged around me in the closet-sized dormitory.

When I finally emerged from my catatonia, I marched up to the front desk and begged to be moved to an all-ladies suite.

Trust the Flow

Travel tip number one: ladies, if given the choice, never book a co-ed room.

The all-ladies suite was like night and day. Cool air. A sweet, fresh smell. The place tidy.

I even learned my bunkmate, a German girl with impossibly golden brown legs, was also heading to the Sonar festival that night. Although her English was only passable and my German non-existent, we agreed to meet up later and tackle the journey together.

Despite the shaky start, I was impressed with the hostel overall. So much so, I spent most of my first day there, sunbathing by the pool, meeting other travelers, and getting my bearings as I recovered from my Cheap Ticket jet lag.

Truthfully, I was also working up the courage to walk out the front doors and explore Barcelona on my own.

It had been one thing to say yes to adventure from the comfort of my apartment back in Oakland when I thought I’d be here with someone. It was another thing entirely to actually go outside and have that adventure solo.

But I had a ticket to Sonar. My favorite band was playing. And I couldn’t fly halfway across the world to hide out in the hotel.

That evening, my German showed up just when she said she would, looking fresh-faced and eager.

“Shall we go?”

Before leaving, I slipped one of Scott’s lucky dice into my pocket. I’d been carrying it around like a talisman for two years. A little reminder to bet on life and trust the flow, even when I had no idea where it might take me.

“You lead the way,” I chirped.

The journey took about 45 minutes and involved switching trains several times. Thank goodness for my German angel. If not for her, I’d likely still be wandering the tunnels beneath the city trying to find my way out of that maze.

When we finally ascended back to street level and the festival entrance was within sight, we shot each other excited looks. But just as we reached the front of the line and I was handed my entry bracelet, she was stopped by security because of a ticket issue.

Before either of us could fully process what was happening, my guardian angel was being whisked away in one direction. At the same time, security firmly instructed me to keep moving in the other. We managed only a quick wave goodbye before disappearing from each other’s view.

I would never see her again.

And just like that, I was alone once more, now roaming the massive festival. My only real goal was to see Little Dragon, but I had no idea where or when they were playing. So I just started wandering.

At some point, I spotted what looked like an alley leading toward a stage. There were only a handful of people milling about, but something told me to investigate. I walked all the way to the to the front without any obstacle.

And just as I arrived, the band launched into “Feather.”

You are airborne

You got silver rays

Will it ever float?

Will it ever soar along?

I burst into tears.

Here I was, feeling somewhat lost and maybe a little sorry for myself despite the brave face. Yet somehow I’d met a girl who appeared just long enough to get me where I needed to go. Then, out of a giant festival, I’d followed my nose straight to the stage of the one band I’d wanted to see. And they started on cue as if they’d simply been waiting for me to arrive.

Call it luck. Call it synchronicity. But it was exactly the kind of magic Scott had taught me to look for. The kind I’d been desperate to find since I lost him so suddenly. I felt like he was there with me.

As Little Dragon played a private show for me and a scattering of other randoms, I danced, crying happy and sad tears—a mix of grief, release, and gratitude. I felt like somehow, I was being taken care of. And for the first time since landing in Barcelona, I had a sense of confidence that I was on my path.

Out the Front Door

Travel tip #2: Take the free walking tour.

The next day, emboldened by my concert epiphany, I decided to take a free walking tour with New Europe.

It’s not normally the sort of thing I’d do, but it seemed like an easy way to get acquainted with the city, have a little company, and get the local knowledge.

The tours gathered travelers from hostels all over the city, shepherding us through the streets to the edge of the Gothic Quarter, where we were sorted into groups by language. I ended up with a couple of Brits, four Aussies, and, wouldn’t you know it, someone from my own Bay Area.

Back in San Francisco, we never would have met. He was a finance guy, the sort who probably considered “Greed is good” Gordon Gekko a role model. I was a bohemian girl with a passion for underground culture. But travel has a funny way of flattening social distinctions. Out here, we were just two Californians trying to find our way through Barcelona. And despite our differences, we had more in common with each other than anyone else there.

As our guide led us through the Gothic Quarter, we joked and chatted our way through the tour. He pointed out stone buildings still scarred by bullets from the Spanish Civil War and medieval squares where children now played, and witches had once been burned. Every so often, we’d stop to crane our necks toward the rooftops, searching for the unicorn gargoyles hidden overhead.

Barcelona felt ancient to me, a city that had survived plague, war, dictators, and centuries of reinvention. Yet here it was, full of music, tourists, lovers, and children chasing soccer balls. I thrust my hand into my pocket and squeezed my dice. There was something comforting about a place that had endured so much and kept going.

Strangely, the tour abruptly ended with no clear instructions on how to get back to our respective hostels. So “Gekko” and I decided to find our own way back together, stopping frequently along the route.

A sangria here. A mojito there. By the time we stumbled back to TOC, it was nearly sunset, and we were pretty tipsy.

We collapsed onto one of the communal couches and shared a sloppy make-out session. When he suggested we continue the adventure in the hostel bathroom, I got the ick, remembered this guy was not my kind, and retreated to the sanctuary of the ladies’ dorm.

Day one may have been messy, but I’d done it. I’d gone out into the city alone. Ish. Tomorrow I’d do a bit more.

The next morning, I discovered a new roommate had moved into our dorm. She was easily thirty years older than me and also traveling solo. I was instantly charmed. She was a reminder that adventure doesn’t come with an expiration date.

She asked where I was from.

“America.”

That answer launched a conversation that quickly turned political.

It was Trump’s first term. Looking back now, it feels almost quaint compared to where we’ve ended up. But even then, the warning signs felt obvious to me. As I tried to explain my growing fears about the direction of my country, I unexpectedly found myself getting emotional.

The woman listened patiently, a knowing look in her eyes.

As a Spaniard of a certain age, she understood something about the forces I was trying to describe. Not the specifics, perhaps, but the patterns. The way democracies can drift. The way people convince themselves things aren’t as bad as they seem.

When I finally ran out of words, she simply opened her arms and gave me a hug.

We would eat breakfast together each day for the rest of my TOC stay. A ritual I came to love.

Living Like a Local

Travel tip #3: If you’re staying more than a few days, live like a local.

In the months before the trip, after the dumb young guy had dumped me, I’d had time to ease into the idea of having my solo adventure.

One of the decisions I made was that I wouldn’t use up my twelve days racing between destinations. Instead, I would spend them in Barcelona as if I lived there.

And for me, that meant a few things.

Yes, I saw some of the major tourist attractions. I took a day trip to Girona, whose medieval streets and stone stairways served as filming locations for Game of Thrones. I visited the Dalí Museum in nearby Figueres. I toured the Picasso Museum, full of his early work before Cubism. I basked in the stained glass glow of Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia.

But my favorite memories weren’t of sightseeing. They were of day-to-day life.

I went to the gym.

Duet Fit was two doors down from TOC, and for a small daily fee, I could drop into classes. I took yoga, weight training, and Zumba.

Dance, it turns out, is a universal language. These classes felt effortlessly familiar.

In yoga, I could follow along simply by watching. But I loved the moments when instructors would approach me and start speaking rapid-fire Spanish, assuming I was local. I would capture what I could and nod along, enjoying that I got to belong.

One day, the instructor never showed up. So two other women and I plugged in my phone and taught the class ourselves. Years later, I’d become a certified Zumba and HIIT instructor. Perhaps the seed was planted here.

I moved.

In an effort to experience different neighborhoods, I changed hostels three times. My next home was Sant Jordi Rock Palace, a social hostel with a rock’n’roll theme, a rooftop pool, communal dinners, and bikes available for guests.

The bikes were my favorite part.

I’d spend entire afternoons riding around the city, mapping neighborhoods in my head, noting cafés I wanted to return to, and slowly building a relationship with Barcelona beyond the tourist attractions.

I also discovered LoveCycle, Barcelona’s bazarro universe answer to SoulCycle. Instead of yellow, the studio was all hot pink. The candles were replaced with neon. But the basic ideas were all there. The handsome instructor even split the class between Spanish and English just for me. I was hooked.

I got together with friends.

Before leaving San Francisco, I’d met a girl at a rave who mentioned she’d be in Barcelona during the same week. We opened a bottle of rosé, popped off our bikini tops, and spent an afternoon Euro-style sunbathing on the beach, comparing notes on our adventures. With each passing day, the self-consciousness I’d arrived with was starting to fall away.

And yes, I dated.

Turn and Face the Strange

Travel tip #4: Change your dating app location before you arrive.

Before leaving for Spain, I’d set my location to Barcelona on the apps. By the time I arrived, I’d already been chatting with several people for weeks.

One thing I quickly learned is that chemistry doesn’t always translate through a screen. The people I was most excited about online often disappointed me in person. The ones I felt unsure about sometimes surprised me.

Mostly, though, the dates gave me an excuse to see the city through the locals’ eyes.

Claude was a Frenchman living in Barcelona. We met at Les Gens Que J’Aime, a moody cocktail bar in Eixample filled with red velvet couches, antique mirrors, and enough atmosphere to make you feel as though you’d wandered into 1960s Paris.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Why do Americans always ask this?”

I was certain he disliked me. Instead, he asked if I wanted to meet the next day again. Over the following week, he became my unofficial guide.

One afternoon, we rode his scooter to the Bunkers del Carmel, where panoramic views stretched across the entire city.

“I want to see everything,” I told him.

“Then you will see nothing.”

He delivered this observation with such seriousness that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or argue. Before I could decide, he kissed me.

“Want to go see David Bowie Is at the Design Museum of Barcelona tomorrow?” he asked.

“Of course!”

By then, I was truly giving in to the serendipity of it all. There was something almost too perfect about wandering through an exhibit built around reinvention, transformation, and art as a way of becoming someone new.

Our last evening together was spent near the water. Basque wine and tapas at sidewalk cafes. Walking hand in hand along Barceloneta Beach, as fireworks exploded overhead.

“Sant Joan,” Claude explained.

If you’re not familiar, Sant Joan feels a bit like the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve had a baby. The entire city seems to be outside, as crowds of people collect on the beaches to drink cava around bonfires and enjoy the show.

Right time, right place, I suppose. But to me, it felt perfect. Even the wistful way he looked at me as we kissed our goodbyes. Our week-long romance was temporary, but it had been just what it needed to be.

That was the nature of travel. People entered your story for a chapter, not necessarily the whole book. In fact, that was true of life, and I felt it deeply in that moment.

Over the next couple of days, I spent a lot of time on my own.

I found myself at Björk Digital, a virtual reality exhibition built around Vulnicura, the album she’d made in the aftermath of heartbreak. Apparently, even my museum choices refused to let me avoid the subject.

I put on my VR headset, and suddenly I was standing on a rocky, desolate beach in Iceland with the Nordic fairy queen herself.

No one is a lover alone

Most hearts fear their own home

Near MACBA, I found a café called Kino and promptly became a regular. The walls were covered in celebrity mugshots, including Bowie’s. The gin and tonic menu read like a short novel. Most afternoons, I’d roll in with my vape, order a drink, and watch Barcelona happen around me.

There were moments I wished I had someone to share this adventure with. Definitely lonely times when I was the only person dining at a restaurant because I never got the hang of how late Spaniards eat dinner. But other days, I was happy to answer to no one but myself.

Soon after, I decided to meet up with Pau, someone else I’d met on the apps beforehand. If Claude introduced me to Barcelona’s romance, Pau introduced me to its quieter corners.

Our first date was at Audios Restaurant and Music Hall, a place known for its cocktails, tea, chic atmosphere, and listening bar where you could enjoy entire albums front to back.

That night they were playing David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Of course. By now, Bowie was the unofficial muse of my trip.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Turn and face the strange

He took me on long walks through the Gothic Quarter, through streets filled with graffiti and hidden plazas. We spent an afternoon wandering Montjuïc Cemetery among elaborate mausoleums overlooking the sea. He even serenaded me and the ghosts with a soothing song on his guitar. It was truly beautiful.

And on my final evening, we had dinner at El Jardí, a secret garden tucked away just off Las Ramblas. The kind of place where you can sit under the stars for hours, drinking something cold on a warm summer night, pretending this is your actual life.

As my departure approached, I felt myself growing melancholy.

The trip had been a welcome release from my grief. It had also distracted me from the smaller pains of trying to find connection when your heart is still so shattered from loss. But something about Pau made me feel safe enough to tell him about Scott.

After confessing my sad story — falling for my best friend after 13 years of friendship, only to have him die two months into our fledgling romance — I sighed, “Apparently, love’s not meant for me.”

He laughed.

“Wendy, what is this? Look around you.”

I took it in. The warm evening air. The garden. The mojitos. The handsome Spaniard sitting across from me.

“You’re drinking cocktails on a summer night in Barcelona with a beautiful stranger,” he said. “No?”

I couldn’t help but smile.

“Yes.”

“If you’d wanted that white-picket-fence life, you would have had it. You chose something else. And from what I can tell, it’s quite wonderful.”

To that, we clinked our glasses together.

He was right.

We stayed up until the wee hours, pretending morning wasn’t coming; cutting it close enough that I nearly missed my flight.

Scott would have approved.

The Last Red Flag

Back at the airport, dumb dumb was already there, looking strangely grumpy and old for someone so young.

“Well, look at you,” he said as I approached, “You’re positively glowing.”

“Am I?” I said coyly. “How was your trip?”

“Honestly? It was kind of a shit show. I got pickpocketed on the train and lost a bunch of money. The whole group was fighting half the time. And I almost got into a fist fight in a bar.”

As he droned on about everything that had gone wrong, all the mishaps and drama and dysfunctional group dynamics, it hit me.

I would have hated this trip had I actually gone with him.

As the plane lifted off, I found myself thinking about everything that had happened over the last twelve days. My German angel who got me to Sonar. The older Spanish woman who hugged me when I needed it. Claude. Pau. The gym classes. The fireworks. The Bowie and Björk exhibits. The cemetery overlooking the sea. All those people who had wandered briefly into my life and then back out again.

Ever since Scott died, being alone had felt like a curse I had to endure. But somewhere between the hostels, the wrong turns, the dance floors, and the strangers who became friends, I had stopped feeling abandoned by life and started participating in it again.

I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the entire flight home.

The next month, for my birthday, I decided to go to a daytime dance party by myself. If friends showed up, great. If it were just me, I knew I’d be perfectly fine.

Wouldn’t you know, that’s precisely where I’d meet the love of my life.

But that’s another story for another day.

Poodle Skirts and Boiling Tea

The first year in a new place will humble you.

Moving to San Francisco had been my dream, so I overlooked some of the less glamorous aspects. Like my job.

While in grad school, I was schlepping burgers at one of those fifties diners. The ones with mini jukeboxes on the tables, checkerboard floors, and menus built around fried everything. The kind of place that treated nostalgia like a condiment. Every night, I came home smelling like grease and ready to slit my wrists if I heard another doo-wop song.

The work itself was brutal. One of their claims to fame were these “fresh-brewed iced teas,” which in practice meant brewing every customer an individual pot, then hauling it out alongside a pint glass packed with ice. Not only was it a slow, laborious process, it was also wildly dangerous. Try passing eight pots of scalding liquid across giant booths built to accommodate men who considered a triple bacon cheeseburger a light dinner.

Also, it was a terrible idea. Customers would pour the tea over the ice, instantly melt it all, then need refills on ice five seconds later.

Tuesday nights were the worst.

Huge tables of plaid-wearing bears would roll in after their AA meeting down the street.

“Who wants a milkshake?” I’d ask, hopefully.

But it was always the same.

“Iced teas all around.”

I was twenty-five years old and already emotionally defeated by beverages. But the teas were the least disorienting thing about the place.

Straight from the Valley, still deeply square, I found my coworkers mildly shocking. One was fresh out of jail on a possession charge. Another talked openly about living with HIV in a way I’d never encountered before. Everybody cursed constantly, which, as an English Lit major with a stick up my ass, I found terribly uncultured.

The changing room especially felt like another planet. Men and women stripped down in front of each other without hesitation. Meanwhile, I performed complicated sweater maneuvers, trying to discreetly pull my polyester bowling shirt over my bra. Something the others found endlessly amusing.

One afternoon, a waitress announced to the room, “I have a date with a new guy tonight. And my girlfriend tomorrow. What should we do?”

“Your girlfriend doesn’t mind?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“Mind what?”

“The date. With the guy.”

She rolled her eyes.

“We don’t like to define our relationship.”

This sounds completely normal to me, now. But at the time, it felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a foreign country where everybody knew the customs except me.

The diner itself operated on constant low-grade psychological warfare. Management had a policy that servers were forbidden from asking, “How’s everything?” The idea was that questions should be specific.

“How’s the Reuben tasting?”
“Are the fries crispy enough?”
“Can I get you another Cherry Coke with your heart attack?”

If you slipped and asked the forbidden question, technically, the meal was supposed to be free. Customers knew this, so they were constantly trying to bait you into saying it. You’d approach a table and watch them set little conversational traps like they were running a sting operation.

And if you failed, Karen, our bitter, fifty-something, chain-smoking manager, would write you up.

In those days, the whole city felt like that. As if the world were full of unknown booby traps, I could accidentally set off at any moment. Like everyone else already understood the rules, while I was still trying not to spill boiling tea on myself while figuring them out.

But that first year, I didn’t mind as much. I looked around at my fellow diner servers with a kind of pity, convinced they were stuck there for life while I was only passing through.

After all, I was getting my master’s degree. I was headed somewhere.

But after I dropped out, the job and my life started to feel different. And I was forced to let go of some of my own pretense. So when a few of the servers offered to take me to a rave after work one night, I surprised them with a yes.

At the time, I was straight edge. Parties weren’t my scene. And I knew these places were full of drugs. But before too long, my nights were about making it through my shift, and my after-hours were full of warehouse parties.

My Jake Ryan

It was another hellish Tuesday night. I got hit with three six-tops in a row, all clammering for iced tea. I was already nearing panic mode when I felt something hit my shoe.

I look down. A kid at the counter is staring up at me, wide-eyed, a milkshake sliding off the edge of the table and onto the floor.

“Oops,” he said, laughing.

Strawberry ooze everywhere. My sock. My shoe. The hem of my skirt.

His mother gasps. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s fine,” I say automatically, already grabbing a rag.

I crouch down, wiping pink sludge off the black-and-white tile while the kid watches like it’s entertainment.

Of course, that’s the moment Grant Kincaid had to walk through the door.

Grant was something of a legend from my hometown. He came from one of those families that only seemed to exist in eighties movies. A stylish mother who ran an antique shop too good for Modesto. A mysterious father who was a ship captain and was rarely around. A gorgeous blonde sister with a reputation for being a slut, no doubt the consequence of other girls’ jealousy and ubiquitous male lust. And Grant, fresh from boarding school, all Abercrombie good looks, J.Crew style, and the confidence of privilege.

We’d worked together at a mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant, then spent part of that last summer after graduation orbiting each other. While I harbored my schoolgirl crush, he mostly treated me like a kid sister, ruffling my hair. I felt like Samantha Baker to his Jake Ryan. The slightly offbeat, intellectual girl, boys thought of as cute, while they dated blond girls with tans, longer legs, and better pedigrees. But I noticed, his hugs always lingered just a little too long.

We’d both left Modesto and ended up in San Francisco the same month, but that’s where the similarities stopped.

While I was sweating through my polyester bowling shirt, serving onion ring towers, Grant had landed at one of the most coveted French bistros in the city—Lola’s. The place was pure late-nineties aspiration. Men in suits. Women in black dresses. A wine list that read like a flex. The smell of dot com money, new and eager.

He got noticed almost immediately. Scouted by a modeling agency while serving Bordeaux beneath the soaring architecture of Lola’s dining room. A quick stint in New York, then back again—wooed with Armani suits and the promise of a GM position. A chance to join the sleek little aristocracy of San Francisco restaurateurs.

Socially, our worlds couldn’t have been further apart. Physically, though, we were only a few blocks from each other. So every so often, Grant and his crew would wander into our bar after their shifts, loosening their ties and unbuttoning their collars. Slumming it over a few beers while watching the game.

I spotted him the second he walked through the door and immediately ducked behind a pillar, my nervous system apparently still calibrated to Grant Kincaid. Catching my reflection in the chrome, I frantically smoothed down my hair and dug through my apron for my lipstick. After all this time, I was about to face him in a poodle skirt.

I avoided that side of the restaurant as long as I could, but when the inevitable cocktail order came in, I had no choice but to head to the bar. I tried to play it cool, stealing only glances in his direction. But he never looked over. Still, I couldn’t stop watching him.

He had this way of moving through a room that felt almost studied. Every look was intentional. His posture perfect. His smile warm, but controlled, like he knew exactly what it did to people. You got the sense he was always letting other people fill the silence while he waited for the right moment to disarm them with a laugh and a slap on the back.

When I had genuinely started loitering in the drink station, the bartender finally called me out.

“Do you know that guy?”

“What? Um… sort of. Why?”

“You keep looking over there.”

“Jesus. Is it that obvious?”

He laughed. “A little. But he’s doing the same thing. Every time you walk away, he checks.”

I felt my mouth give way to the hint of a smile I couldn’t suppress.

“Want me to send him a drink from you?” he asked.

“I’d rather you shoot me. This is already humiliating enough.”

“Chin up, Golden girl,” he said, “I already did.” Then nodding past me. “Oh, and don’t look now. He’s coming over.”

I turned, and there he was, suddenly right in front of me. Taller than I remembered, and closer than I was ready for. Narrowing his almond-shaped eyes at me with an impish grin.

“Wendyyyyyy,” he sang out, like we’d seen each other yesterday.

“Heyyyyy,” I managed, trying to smile away the smell of fries clinging to me. “What are you doing over here?”

He pointed at the TV and held up his pint.

“Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t expect to find myself here either.”

That got a real laugh out of him. Warmer than the one he’d been performing across the room.

“You look good,” he said, scanning me in a way that felt deliberate even as I clocked the irony of his tone.

I almost laughed. “Gotta love a poodle skirt, right?”

“You pull it off,” he grinned. I couldn’t tell if he meant it.

“What about you?” I asked. “Heard you’re running the show over at Lola’s now.”

“Something like that.” He said, setting down his now-empty beer, and crossing his arms as his lips curved into a tight smile.

Of course. Everything about him suggested things just… worked out.

“Funny,” he said finally, “We’ve been a few blocks from each other this whole time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Different planets, though.”

He took that in, glancing around the room at the neon, the sticky bar, the laminated menus.

“How is it?” he asked.

I shrugged. “It’s a job.”

He made an exaggerated sad face and looked at me with a mix of pity and amusement.

“What?! I like it here!” I demanded with too much gusto.

He kept examining me, unconvinced.

Just then, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Miss?”

I turn. A middle-aged man is holding out a milkshake at me as if it’s evidence.

“This is melted!” he says with a huff.

I glance at it. Well, it’s… a milkshake, dumbass, it’s supposed to be melted.

“It’s been sitting in the window for ten minutes,” he adds.

Of course it had. I’d spent half my shift eyeing-fucking Grant from the pickup counter at the bar.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, flashing Grant a look and slipping back into waitress voice. “I’ll get you another one.”

“And maybe this time, you bring it before it turns into soup!”

I nod, taking the tin with an apologetic smile plastered across my face, feeling Grant’s eyes on me the whole exchange.

By the time I’d put out that fire and headed back to the bar, he was already gathering his things to leave.

“Taking off?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Yeah,” he said, opening his arms for one of those classically long hugs and pulling me close enough to feel the outline of his six-pack through his shirt.

“Do you ever think about doing something else?” he says close into my ear.

“Like what?” I asked, pulling away.

He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice just enough.

“Come work for me.”

I blinked. “At Lola’s?”

“Yeah.”

I almost laughed. “Grant… I serve milkshakes.”

“And? You’re smart. You’re good with people. You’d figure it out.”

There was a hint of a smile there, and a challenge.

I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about wine. Or fine dining. Or any of that.”

He didn’t hesitate. “You’ll learn.”

My mind was racing with insecurity.

“I don’t even know if I’d fit there.”

That’s when he looked at me with seriousness in his eyes for the first time.

“You don’t fit here.”

I felt my face flush.

He softened it, just slightly. “I’m serious,” he said. “Come by tomorrow for a trial shift.”

“Trial shift?” I repeated.

“Gotta see if you can hang,” he replied with a wink.

And right on cue, the kitchen bell started going off behind me.

Once. Twice. Then nonstop.

“Order up! Order up! Jesus—who’s got table twelve?”

I closed my eyes for half a second.

Of course, it’s me.

Then looked down at myself. Sticky. Slightly stained.

“What time do I start?”

Burgundy and Other Foreign Languages

Think of all your firsts. The awkward ones. The clumsy ones. The just plain embarrassing ones. That was my introduction to casual fine dining at Lola’s.

I quickly learned that at work, Grant was my boss, not my friend. His demeanor was serious and aloof, at least in front of the staff. But not always.

He had me shadowing Raul, another guy he’d helped set up at Lola’s from our hometown. We’d all worked together back at the mom-and-pop Mexican place in Modesto. Incidentally, Raul was also the person I’d drunkenly lost my virginity to the summer after graduation. A fact Grant was well aware of.

When the coast was clear one afternoon, Grant wandered into the banquet room where we were setting up, leaned in close, and murmured, “Guess this won’t be the first time Raul’s trained you, huh?”

The two of them immediately dissolved into hysterical bro-code laughter while I stuck out my tongue and rolled my eyes. Despite the fancy suits and polished exteriors, these were the same Valley boys I’d known for years.

Still, Grant had given me a huge break, and hiring me probably did nothing for his reputation.

In wine class, our sommelier looked at me with equal parts disdain and dismay when I couldn’t name the grapes grown in Burgundy. Or when I reached for the wrong stemware for a bottle of Bordeaux.

The staff wasn’t much more patient.

As I rushed frantically to the POS one night, Jeremiah barked, “What now?”

“I need to order a martini,” I stammered.

“Okay… and?”

“And, can you help me?”

“Fine,” he sighed dramatically.

When I just stood there staring at him, he finally snapped, “What kind of martini?”

I blinked. “There are different kinds?”

Gin or vodka. Twist or olive. Up or on the rocks. Dry. Dirty. Extra dry. It was a completely different language, and I was treading water. Most shifts, racing around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying desperately not to look completely out of my depth.

Everyone here moved with this practiced elegance I couldn’t imitate yet. Even carrying plates looked choreographed. They all knew how to pronounce French wine names with the kind of theatrical confidence that made me feel like I’d accidentally wandered into a foreign film. Several were actually from France or Belgium.

Most people probably assumed Grant had only hired me because we were sleeping together. Which wasn’t true. But that didn’t stop the rumors. Or the occasional inappropriate remark from my boss.

“You know what, Wendy? You’ve got the best damn ass I’ve ever seen,” he remarked one night, just as the owner, Regina, swept up beside us in head-to-toe Chanel. Grant snapped back into manager mode so fast you’d think the comment had never happened.

Still, having the boss’s attention wasn’t always a bad thing.

One afternoon, some VIP clients ordered a thousand-dollar bottle of wine, and Grant sent me over to do the service. I buffed the glasses until they were nearly invisible, carefully placed the stemware beside each guest, draped a crisp white linen over my arm, and began to pour. Generously. So generously, in fact, that I didn’t even make it through all six glasses before running out of wine.

“Would you care to order another bottle?” I asked with a helpless little shrug, fully aware of Grant’s eyes burning into the back of my head. And let’s face it, probably my ass too.

Honestly, the whole thing was a bit of a shit show. I’d traded scalding iced teas for Bordeaux and stemware, but I was still overwhelmed, still scrambling, now just in slightly better lighting.

In my family, going out to dinner meant a night at McDonald’s. Similarly, my graduate seminars had not prepared me for the quiet panic of elite dining culture, where everyone else seemed born knowing the difference between arugula and frisée. Nobody cared what books I’d read if I froze every time someone casually mentioned truffle oil, duck confit, or a Burgundy I’d obviously never heard of.

Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t get fired.

By then, my life had started splitting in half. At Lola’s, I learned the choreography of wealth and sophistication. After hours, I was hitting the underground rave scene with my old friends from the diner, where nobody cared which fork you used or whether you could pronounce Châteauneuf-du-Pape correctly. Long strange nights that felt far more real to me than discussing tannins with finance guys.

Did I ever truly get the hang of three parties of twenty being sat simultaneously in the private dining room, all demanding wine recommendations and different glasses for every course? Not really. But like most things that start with meager beginnings, I slowly improved.

Of course, every tiny victory was usually followed by some fresh humiliation.

One particularly brutal lunch shift, I nearly tripped over a guest’s chair leg, dribbled wine down the expensive skirt of another, and then got thoroughly lectured by Grant afterward. As the managers drifted outside in their tailored suits for cigarettes and postmortems, a cute busser named Nick called me over.

“Hey,” he said gently. “We all have bad days.”

“Thanks,” I sighed.

“Let me take you out for a drink sometime.”

“Like… a date?” I asked shyly.

“Yeah. Do you like art? I’m an artist. I could show you some of my favorite murals in the city.”

I wasn’t sure I was interested. But I was absolutely certain I appreciated the kindness.

“I’d love that.”

Finally, A Home

About thirty minutes into the date, I knew Nick was not for me. But we were still having fun wandering through Clarion Alley looking at murals. So when he mentioned we were near his place and asked if I wanted to come by and check it out, I said, " Sure.”

What I discovered was probably my first taste of real San Francisco loft living. Not those fancy high-rises misleadingly marketed as “live-work” spaces. No, this was an actual warehouse basement being used as an apartment. Semi-legal. Totally unconventional. One hundred percent San Francisco.

I was instantly in love.

Thrifted furniture. Paintings and sculptures spilling into the living space. A little interior garden sandwiched between buildings, crowded with plants.

Nick told me his girlfriend, Lauren, had done most of the gardening.

“Girlfriend?”

“Ex-girlfriend,” he corrected himself quickly. “We broke up a few months ago, but she hasn’t moved out yet. Actually, we’re looking for a roommate if you know anybody.”

“Can I see the room?”

He showed me the rest of the space, then led me to the room they were renting out. Tall and cave-like, with cement floors, no windows, and a ladder leading up to a loft bed tangled among exposed pipes.

“Wow,” I said. “So cool”

“We’re having a party this weekend if you want to come by.”

“I’d love that.”

As he walked me out, I hesitated.

“Don’t worry,” he said, reading my mind. “I get it. We can just be friends. My situation with Lauren is kind of a mess anyway.”

But at the party, Lauren didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

She was icy when we were introduced and spent most of the night glaring at me with her big green eyes from across the room. Still, I was completely taken with the whole scene. Wine and music. Beautiful, artsy people lounging around this fantastic warehouse space. It felt like the San Francisco I’d imagined when I moved there.

Before I left, Lauren and I ended up face-to-face near the door.

“Just so you know,” I told her, “Nick and I are just friends who work together. That’s it.”

She relaxed almost instantly and said it had been nice meeting me.

When I got home, the glow of my evening faded fast. My roommates looked uneasy.

“Hey Wendy, can we talk?”

Uh oh. That’s never good.

“You’re nice and everything, but this isn’t really working out. We really want it to feel like family here. And that’s just not you. So we’re giving you thirty days to find a new place.”

They weren’t wrong. By then, I was deeply into the rave scene, spending most nights out until dawn, sleeping through most of the day. My roommates were tech bros with girlfriends. I was a single girl drifting through the city looking for somewhere to belong. We weren’t a match.

Still, it hurt.

Once again, I was uprooted. But this time, I thought I might already know where I’d land.

Lauren and I still joke that we talked for maybe fifteen minutes on the phone before she said, “So… when can you move in?”

Originally, Lauren was supposed to move out shortly after. But somewhere along the way, the three of us settled into something that worked.

We cooked together, smoked bowls late into the night, and made art. Went on a strange little adventures to Urban Ore or the hardware store. Dragged home discarded furniture and half-broken objects from the street for whatever project had taken over the house that week.

Nick still seemed to be pining for Lauren, while Lauren clearly wanted nothing more than attention from him, and somewhere in the middle, I became a kind of buffer between them.

At the end of my first month there, it was my birthday, and they baked me a cake and gave me a box filled with art supplies.

For the first time since moving to San Francisco, it felt like I’d finally found a home.

That lasted until Nick met someone else.

To be continued. If you’re new here, this is Chapter 3 of a memoir I’m writing. So great to have you along for the journey.

Looking for my Erotic Creature

Once upon a time, pole dancing was reserved for a thonged lady named after an exotic spice. But times have changed. This once-taboo art form is wowing audiences, from burlesque shows to dinner theaters, and even appearing as an exercise option at your local gym.

That increased visibility has drawn a whole new female audience, excited to watch and learn this serpentine skill, tempting ladies from all walks of life to give the brass snake a whirl. Including me.

A Google search brought me to S Factor, an establishment that had made the daytime TV circuit, with nods from Oprah, Martha, and Ellen. Couldn’t be bad, right?

The website promised pole dance training infused with yoga, ballet, Pilates, and striptease, but also “the awakening and cultivation of your own soulfully sexy erotic creature.”

Feeling wild, I schlepped my $400 bones across the counter, bought myself a pair of candy-red patent leather platform heels, and signed up for the level 1 eight-week series.

Somebody’s Gonna Cry

Who would have thought I’d be spending Saturday mornings in a dimly lit room bumping and grinding like a North Beach stripper? But here I was, along with a motley group of ladies, awkwardly following the 45-minute warm-up—a bizarre combination of basic exercises punctuated by random moments of hair tossing and self-groping.

Just past 10 a.m., and I’d already reached second base with myself several times.

As the music moved from fem-pop to hardcore rap, we attempted to lure our “erotic creatures” from their hidey-holes by moving our bodies as if treading through molasses. I wasn’t sure what I looked like, but it felt pretty strange. If the other ladies were any indication, I was sure my face was as red as the bulb illuminating this strange show, and glad we were engulfed in near darkness.

Our stocky, freckle-faced teacher, who bore a striking resemblance to Punky Brewster, snaked a hand down her body, slapped her ample ass, and cheered us on toward sex-positive self-approval.

“I want you to be open to a full range of experiences and emotions here, ladies,” she instructed. “Some women cry. This can be a very cathartic experience…”

Cry?

I looked around at my level 1 sisters. Who among us would melt down first? I tagged the girl in the corner, whose hair was as straight, coarse, and stiff as her hip grinding. Then I slapped my own ass on command, along with the others.

Yep. Now I felt really dumb.

Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Stiffest Of Us All

“…There are no mirrors in this room,” our instructor pointed out. “So we have to be reflections for each other. That means when you see something great, show your encouragement. We’re here to support each other. And when you see something that looks kinda weird… well, clap for that too.”

When the forecast called for weird, that was no joke.

Our S Factor walk, meant to be the sultry strut of a sexy jungle cat, looked more like seasick babies traversing the deck of a rocking ship. Learning our first tricks didn’t go much better. Names like The Firefly and Peter Pan summoned images of winged, fairy-like magic. But with each attempt to soar and flutter, we generally thudded, slid, and puddled around our instrument, shuffling away like embarrassed children.

Of course, S Factor anticipates meager beginnings. While the lack of mirrors is a common Yelp complaint, I’m glad the only reflections given were those offered by my humbled sisters, obligated to offer encouragement, if not condolences. Yet regardless of how often and thoroughly we train-wrecked each successive ring-around-the-rosy, our teacher yipped with excitement.

“You look amazing, ladies!” she lied.

And although nobody cried that day, Miss Stiff-as-a-Board never returned. I imagined her weeping silent, ugly tears in her car after class and enrolling in a watercolor workshop the next day.

Biker Babes Make The Best Friends

As the weeks went on, we added striptease to our level 1 accomplishments. Learning the finer points of taking off your dress in front of strangers might be the ultimate ice-breaker. After several weeks of intimate sessions with this small group of ladies, I felt a special kinship with them. Something like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants… or, the opposite of that.

During the break, emboldened by this sense of sorority, I sidled up next to the class loner, a brawny woman who looked as if she’d spent most of her life on the back of a Harley, and complimented her vast assortment of platform stilettos. She wore a different pair for every class.

The woman, who towered over me by several feet, nearly growled her disdain for me and my unsolicited opinions of her shoe assortment. I reasoned her “erotic creature” was some sort of terrifying bear and vowed to steer clear of her from here on out.

As class reconvened, our teacher announced excitedly that today we would begin lap dance week.

“Now, ladies,” she leveled with semi-stern conviction, “I’m going to require everyone here to partner up for this activity. I know some people feel a bit strange about this, but you need to experience what it’s like to actually have a real person in the chair when you learn these moves…”

I looked around at my choices: the clumsy blonde sorority girl with the long legs, the busty soft butch with tattoos. There were several ladies I’d actually pay for a lap dance in that room. And then I landed on Ol’ Mama Grizzly, giving me the scowl of death from across the room.

Anyone. God. Just not her.

Of course, no sooner had I made my earnest prayer, our linked names were rolling off the instructor’s cruel lips. Moments later, I was grinding on her lap, trailing my hair ever so lightly across her face, and using her body like a slide at the park.

The whole experience was a blind rush of embarrassment and terror. I was sure any moment she’d crush me with her massive arms. When it was finally over, I was grateful I’d escaped intact.

But after that day, when practicing our tricks, I found the grumpy grizzly had become a big, sweet teddy bear. Suddenly, I had a new pal offering constructive tips and assistance. “I’ll spot you this time,” she’d offer in her gruff voice. Had she not nearly doubled me in size, I suspect she might have even let me borrow a pair of her shoes.

Queen For A Day

Perhaps my favorite S Factor experience came the day our teacher asked for a volunteer—someone to sit in the chair and be the audience while the rest of the ladies performed the finale routine.

My arm shot up. And before I knew it, there I was. Like a queen on a throne, watching a room full of women do their best version of our sexy choreography, all for me.

Whether my classmates pulled off seduction or managed only unintentional comedy, the spectacle was enormously entertaining. As I watched, the entire group was instructed to crawl slowly toward me on their hands and knees. I leaned back in my chair and decided that this was worth the price of admission.

I mean, c’mon. How many people can say that an entire room full of women has given them a lap dance? Scratch one more off the bucket list.

Putting The Spin On It

So how’d it all turn out? After my eight weeks were up, I still knew next to nothing about pole dancing. As for my erotic creature? She still seemed more lost than found.

I’d come to suspect S Factor’s “gurl power” curriculum focused more on building self-esteem than the foundation of reliable dance technique. Each session provided scant time to perfect our tricks. Considering the lack of mirrors, classes of 8–10 ladies, and only two poles on which to practice, I wasn’t sure I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth in the dance instruction department.

Doing the quick math for level 2 and beyond, I wondered how many of my future children’s college tuitions I’d have to pilfer to actually learn how to twirl around the brass the way our instructors did. At these prices, I’d have to become a stripper to foot the bill.

But let’s face it. I’d never get the job.

That said, there’s definitely something profound about creating a safe place where we gals are encouraged to both growl and grope ourselves without judgment. Because beneath all the choreography and instruction, there was something else happening in that dark room. Something less about seduction and more about permission. Permission to take up space. To be seen. To be a little messy, a little too much, without immediately apologizing for it.

I may not have left S Factor as a fantastic pole dancer, but I definitely had an experience I’ll take with me.

So before you roll your eyes, get red-faced at the thought, or run to your next lesson, my advice is this: when you’re deciding among studios, make sure you check out the spot before you sign on the dotted line. To ensure you pick the best fit for your personal expectations and goals, it’s worth trolling through the sometimes loathsome whine-o-sphere of online reviews before committing. The popularity of this new fad means there are lots of options when it comes to pole dance studios, but style and focus vary significantly from place to place.

For some, S Factor was probably perfect. For me? Not quite a match. And that’s OK.

Takeaways

My stint as an amateur pole dancer gave me some new perspective. As products of this culture, we women wield a double-edged sword. We’re both praised and rewarded for our sex appeal, while simultaneously taught to regard our sexuality as something lurid, shameful, or entirely off limits.

Broadly, we’ve lost our permission to create, cultivate, and truly own our “soulfully erotic creature,” whatever that means to us. The process of reclaiming that power—whether within our relationships, through therapy, or even taking pole dance classes—can be awkward and even a little scary. But the effort is worthwhile. This kind of work can help us connect more deeply to ourselves and to other women. A double plus in my book.

Listen. The pros make it look easy. But ladies, I’m gonna give it to you straight. There’s a reason strippers are getting rained on by dolla dolla bills. The art of dance seduction and striptease takes guts, grace, and glamour. Pole dancing itself takes strength, training, and practice. So to all those badass babes out there working their magic on a pole, I tip my hat.

Did I emerge from those eight weeks a fully realized erotic creature? Not exactly.

But I did walk away with stronger thighs, a deep respect for women truly at home in their sexuality, and a slightly higher tolerance for my own awkwardness.

And honestly, that might be the more useful skill.

She Was… An American Girl

I didn’t grow up inside a culture. I grew up adjacent to the ones my parents had left behind.

My mother was Finnish. Her first language was not mine. In fact, it was barely even hers. She’d left her home country as a small girl, and what remained was closer to a child’s fluency than a native speaker’s. Still, she made a conscious decision not to teach me. Not because she was unable, but because she thought it would confuse me. I was meant to be what she never fully became, an American. As a result, I couldn’t actually communicate with my own grandparents. I was the only cousin who didn’t learn.

My father was raised Jewish, but at thirteen, he walked out of the synagogue a confirmed atheist. He loathed religion, said it was the source of most of the world’s calamities. I didn’t disagree, even then, growing up surrounded by churchgoers. But nothing replaced it, except maybe my father’s own quiet dread about the state of the world. I inherited the blood without the blessing. My cousins had bar mitzvahs. I had questions. But none of the rituals. None of the community.

In its place was suburbia. I grew up in the bible belt of California, Modesto. Strip malls, fast food, and TV. Clean, neat neighborhoods with tidy little lawns where children rarely played outside. I was a latchkey kid. An only child. The product of divorce after my mom succumbed to the alcoholism so prevalent in her family. Like many people of my generation, I’d been given a loose script for what it meant to be a person, assembled from thirty-minute sitcoms sandwiched between commercial breaks. Thirteen channels passed off as culture, but none of it could replace what was actually missing.

That began to shift when I came to San Francisco.

I moved out to the Avenues to attend grad school at San Francisco State. Back home, my professors had been vital mentors. My scholastic life was not just a passion, but my access to the world, an escape from the provincial valley. I’d happily go to campus and spend entire days there.

But I never found my place at SF State. No professors I admired or connected with. No source of inspiration. No comfortable place to read or friends to pass the time. It was known as a commuter school. People came for class, then left.

The Avenues were cold and foggy, rows of low buildings fading into gray. On the crowded train, Chinese men would fall asleep on my shoulder. An oddly intimate closeness that never extended past the ride.

I had imagined roommates as a built-in life, late-night conversations, shared meals, and some easy sense of belonging. Instead, everyone stayed behind closed doors. You could hear them moving around in there, but no one came out.

As the walls closed in, I wrote in my journal that I didn’t feel like a scholar or a master. I didn’t identify with my peers. I no longer believed I had talent as a writer. I was losing my confidence, my faith, and my enthusiasm for my studies.

But something else was happening.

“The truth is, there is a weakness inside of me,” I confessed to my journal. “And it grows. I’m terrified of my future.”

It was the “Kill Your TV” era. The late-Clinton drift, when everything looked stable but felt strangely hollow. Just before the digital implosion. Before we had a common enemy again after 9/11, before the internet rewired how we related to each other. Individualism had stretched to its outer limits; the idea was that you should do what makes you happy. We believed you could build a life entirely on your own terms.

Was that what I was doing?

I spent that first year feeling like I was still looking in at a world I couldn’t quite access. Surrounded by groups of connected people, little subcultures I didn’t fully understand but couldn’t stop watching. They all seemed to belong to something. And like me, they were hungry; for meaning, for connection, for something less mediated and more immediate. Underneath it all was an ache for family, whether anyone named it that or not.

At that point, I was estranged from mine. After months of panic attacks and a kind of generalized malaise I couldn’t quite name but felt acutely, I made a teary, desperate phone call to my father, telling him I needed to step away from school. “At least for a semester.” When that semester stretched into several more, concern turned into judgment.

For the first time in my life, I found myself truly alone. Not just physically, but structurally. Untethered.

San Francisco was full of people like that. Outsiders. People rejected by the mainstream, often by their families too—building something else in its place. Queer communities, artists, drifters, seekers, people assembling identity in real time. Chosen families instead of inherited ones. It was a place people came to find themselves.

I wanted that. So I went looking.

Somewhere To Belong

Some people go to church. Others find themselves in nature. Whether you touch grass or put yourself in the hands of some higher power, everybody needs somewhere to belong.

I found music. Not the kind you listen to, but the kind you become.

When I needed a sermon, I turned to deep house. When I needed to release, I went to a weekly drum & bass party called Eclektic. It was dark, a little dingy, and loud as fuck. The kind of place where you could dissolve into a hard, driving bassline, sweat out whatever the week had done to you, and disappear into another version of yourself.

They called it “jungle” for a reason. The music was dense, overgrown, and alive with rhythm. Lush soundscapes stitched over chopped breakbeats, reggae basslines humming underneath something colder and more mechanical. It sounded like the invasion of intelligent machines.

The style leaned future-primitive, urban with a tribal twist. Dreadlocks and stretched earlobes. Metal and bone shoved through flesh. Oversized hoodies and big baggy pants. Bodies dressed for motion. People there to move. Even the girls, some of the best breakdancers in the room, held their own in the cyphers, commanding space without asking for it.

I must have been giving off something chemical that night, because everywhere I turned, there was another B-boy trying to catch my eye. And each time one did, another seemed to materialize, like they could smell blood in the water.

I didn’t question it. I was living on the attention, and besides, it felt right. Like birds of paradise. Zulu warriors showing what they had. Let them bounce and twirl for me. Let me choose. If we didn’t have rituals, we could make our own.

I’d already spent so much of my young life in my head, overthinking, overanalyzing, trying to make sense of everything before I felt it. Somewhere along the way, I got tired of that voice. Now I wanted to trust something more immediate. I wanted to know someone simply by the way they danced.

That’s where I met him.

Animal Logic

Back then, love meant chemistry. If someone could light that fire, pull me out of my head and into my body, I trusted it. I was sure I’d know my perfect match not just in his rhythm on the dancefloor, but by the way he held my gaze.

His eyes were amber, like a predator cat. And they smiled even before he did.

We locked into each other almost immediately. No hesitation. No testing the waters. Just that feeling of falling into step with someone you hadn’t met yet but somehow already knew how to follow.

After a while, he took my hand and pulled me toward the edge of the room, where the music softened just enough to pretend you could hear each other.

“I’m Lance, by the way,” he said, like exchanging names was already just a formality.

He was a techno DJ freshly back from London and Prague, but looked like he’d stepped out of a different world entirely. Exaggerated, spacey sneakers with impossibly wide soles. Hair twisted into spikes. A hint of eyeliner. Around his neck, a choker made of salvaged metal.

I tried to seem nonchalant as we talked, but every time our eyes met, it felt like there was a second conversation happening. Quieter. Closer. And a little dangerous.

We kept trying to hear each other over the breakbeats, but the music swallowed half our words.

“Wanna get outta here?” he said, extending his hand.

We ended up at an all-night diner and found common ground fast—in the black hole of alcoholism we’d both grown up around, in music as medicine, and in this vague but urgent desire to do something meaningful with our lives.

“I’m just glad to be out of the burbs,” I said.

“Is that where you grew up?”

“Yeah. Modesto.”

“Oh fuck. My sister lives there.”

It all felt strangely aligned.

“Places like that are proof that it’s never good to be too comfortable,” he said with a shake of his head.

Something in me recognized that immediately.

“I’m done with this life of convenience,” he quipped. “I’m gonna get myself the hell out of this country altogether.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere I can get off the grid.”

As he talked about building community and creating something outside the system, I could feel myself leaning in. His ideas weren’t fully formed, but just coherent enough to spark the imagination.

I was already letting myself consider the possibilities, while staring at the silver hoop in his lower lip, wondering what it would feel like to touch it with the tip of my tongue.

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Come back to my place and smoke a bowl with me. I promise I’ll be on my best behavior.”

His eyes twinkled at me.

It wasn’t subtle. But I went anyway.

I Can Just Tell

I followed his taupe Civic in my white one, the absurd symmetry not lost on me even then. When we got to his neighborhood, he helped me find parking, an act that, in San Francisco, felt almost heroic.

Inside, he put on Portishead as we lounged.

His room was very clean, dominated by turntables and a simple futon, the only place to sit. On his shelves were books about self-help, quantum physics, and spirituality.

He slid onto the bed beside me and lit up.

“So, why’d you drop out?”

“I guess I was tired of learning about life through books,” I answered.

“What do you mean?”

“When you study lit, you learn about other people living in other times. If I’d studied art, I could have learned more about myself.”

“So why didn’t you go to art school then?”

“I dunno. My dad, I guess. He didn’t see art as a legit career, so…”

“And lit was?”

“Well, I was going to be a teacher.”

“And now?”

“And now, I don’t know.”

He let the air breathe.

“I’m writing a comic book, actually…” I admitted quietly.

“Oh yeah? About what?”

“It’s San Francisco, but underwater. Like Atlantis. But in a bio-dome. There’s this group, the Future Tribe, and they’re fighting these energy vampires—”

“Energy vampires?” he laughed.

“Yeah, they serve the Masterbot…”

“You’re kinda a nerd, aren’t you?” he said, smiling.

“So what? Nerds are the best.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t. So this is your plan then?”

“Yeah, it’s either that, or run away with the circus.” I threw up my hands.

“Think you’ll ever finish your degree? Sounds like you were really close.”

“Maybe. I actually just have one more class to go.”

There was a shift somewhere in there. Not abrupt, just a slow narrowing of distance. The conversation didn’t stop, but it changed tone.

“Well then,” with just a hint of firmness, “you’ve got to finish it.”

“It’s not that simple,” I tried to explain, “I’d have to write my dissertation. It’s a whole thing.”

“You can do it,” he said, his gaze steadily fixed on me.

Fuck. Those amber eyes.

“How do you know? You just met me.” I laughed nervously.

“I can just tell,” he said, as he started to stroke my leg gently.

“Oh yeah?” I held his gaze.

“Yeah,” he almost whispered, pressing his lips to mine.

Lost the Plot

What happened next moved with a kind of urgency that made it hard to tell where choice ended, and momentum took over. But it didn’t feel reckless; it felt right. Like we’d slipped into something already in progress.

Up close, it was all heat and rhythm. An effortless flow. Sweat, breath, bodies responding. That was honest. That was sacred. Not because it meant anything more, but because it didn’t pretend to be anything else. Each heartbeat was an incantation. Each moan, a secret we could no longer keep.

If there was a moment to slow down, I missed it. Or ignored it. Either way, I didn’t hesitate. I’d already decided that whatever this was, I was going to feel it completely.

Afterward, lying side by side, the room still humming faintly with music, he turned to me.

“That was…kinda amazing,” he said, almost surprised by it. “I really like sharing energy with you.”

Something in me lifted at that. I felt seen in a way that landed deeper than it should have, given how little we actually knew about each other.

“But I want to be straight with you,” he continued.

There it was, that flicker that told me we’d fast-forwarded the story and lost the plot.

“I won’t pretend I’m not promiscuous. My love life’s a mess, honestly.”

He trailed off as if there was a lot more to say, but decided against it.

“Obviously, I’m really attracted to you,” he confided, “but it’s more than that. I feel like I got a glimpse of who you are tonight. And, if you’re open to it, I’d like to continue enjoying one another’s company.”

I smiled, but something in me shifted. Not quite pulling back, but no longer all the way in.

Maybe I should’ve played the game more. Pumped the brakes. But instead, I’d gobbled up my cake in one sitting, and now there was a pit in my stomach.

And yet, no one had ever broken it down for me this plainly.

I felt it all at once. The doubt. The pull. The clarity of it. I was too far in to pretend otherwise, so when he asked me to stay, the answer came before I could think about it.

“Yes,” my body said. My mind caught up a moment later.

When I told him I was leaving, he didn’t push. He just nodded, like he understood something about me already. By the time I stepped outside, the sky was starting to lighten.

My head told me it had been exactly what it looked like. A good night. Nothing more. But something else in me refused to believe that.

The next day, I hovered around my answering machine, pretending not to care and failing completely. “Oh, blink, dammit!”

Thirteen long hours later, there was finally a message.

“I just wanted to say hello,” he said. “And that I had a really fantastic time with you.”

I saved it. Probably played it back more times than I’d like to admit.

Then I waited.

If you’re just joining, this continues from Chapter 1: “Meet Cute?”

A Weekend in Marrakech

Marrakech is everything I imagined it would be—vibrant, kinetic, and breathtakingly beautiful. There’s a sense of magic here, a feeling that something unexpected is always just out of view, tucked behind a carved doorway or hidden within a quiet courtyard.

The air is thick with spice and movement. Narrow passages wind through the medina, alive with carts, motorbikes, and pedestrians weaving together in a rhythm at once chaotic and choreographed. It’s immersive, disorienting, and impossible to ignore.

Life unfolds everywhere. Cats linger along sun-warmed walls. Shopkeepers call out from stalls lined with textiles, ceramics, and hand-worked metals. The artistry is astonishing. Days begin early and stretch long. And yet, there’s a joyful spark in the eyes of those who greet you, a fierce pride in family and craft.

Each day begins and ends in Jemaa El-Fnaa. The rhythm is relentless: fruit vendors calling out, henna artists reaching for your hand, the steady hum of a square that never fully quiets. It’s theatrical and chaotic, but undeniably alive.

And yet, just beyond the intensity, there’s calm.

One afternoon, we slipped into a tuk-tuk and let ourselves be carried through the city, eventually arriving at Les Jardins du Lotus. Inside, everything softened. Babbling fountains, lush greenery, and a slower, almost European pace that felt worlds away from the streets we’d just left.

Moments like that feel almost surreal, as though you’ve stepped into a hidden version of the city.

It’s tempting to chase the “must-sees,” but many of Marrakech’s most memorable moments aren’t marked or mapped. They reveal themselves more quietly, in a tucked-away palace, a shaded terrace, or a turn down the wrong street that leads somewhere unexpected.

On our last night, we stayed close to our riad, lingering in the quiet of its courtyard: a serene pool framed by ancient stone, rooftop tagines with sweeping views, a candlelit dinner accompanied by the soft strumming of a local musician. It felt like pure romance.

Marrakech is a city of contrast, steeped in art, intellect, and mystery, with centuries of history folded into its maze of walls.

It asks you to pay attention, to move differently, and step into a place carved out of time. And in return, it offers something that lingers well beyond the trip itself.

What Didn’t Make It In

I recently wrote two versions of the same trip. One was for a luxury travel brand. The other was for myself. They were both true, just not in the same way.

The assignment version came together quickly. Marrakech, as expected. Polished, legible, easy to fall into. The version that does exactly what it was supposed to do. It leaves things out.

Marrakech was indeed breathtakingly beautiful. But it was also hectic and harsh.

The air wasn’t just thick with spice. It was choked with exhaust, too. The kind that catches in your throat after a few hours in the medina.

Motorbikes don’t glide past, so much as threaten to clip you at any moment, whizzing by with inches to spare, making each beat feel like an accident waiting to happen. You learn quickly not to hesitate, because hesitation is how you get hit.

There are cats everywhere. Not just the charming kind you photograph, but the mangy, half-starved, sick ones you try not to look at for too long. We braced ourselves watching a kitten narrowly miss being crushed beneath a motorcyclist’s tires.

​​Yes, there’s joy, that spark in the eye, fierce pride. But at night, there are also women in full hijab lining the walls of the medina, cradling sleeping children as they beg. Voices follow you as you walk. “Psst… this way…”

Life here is not easy. People work from sunup to sundown. ​​You see it in the artisan shops, and feel it in the urgency behind every sale.

So you buy things you don’t really need.

You ask one of the shopkeepers what he does for fun after work.
He shakes his head, like he doesn’t understand the question.

“I go home and spend time with my family,” he says.

Jemaa El-Fnaa isn’t a simple market brimming with life. It’s the kind of place where you avoid eye contact and try not to piss off the angry guy with the cobra. Where you dodge bracelet-on-the-wrist scams and yank your hand away from henna ladies who aren’t taking no for an answer. Where even the fruit vendors don’t just call out but rather shout at you as you pass.

Hopping into a random tuk-tuk isn’t a quiet luxury, but rather an escape from the madness, until you’re suddenly weaving through traffic like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, part video game, part survival exercise.

We didn’t just adjourn to our hidden oasis at the end of the night. We bought cans of food for the stray cats near our riad, quietly letting our hearts break as they pressed against our legs, purring softly, as if to say you’re mine now.

Marrakech isn’t an easy city. It’s a magician and a hustler, steeped in struggle and beauty, artistry and faith. It pulls you out of the present and into something older, stranger, and harder to shake. You return home, but still wander its mazes in your dreams.

But none of that made it into the assignment version. Not because it wasn’t real, but because it didn’t belong.

That version had a specific audience. A specific tone. A specific kind of reader who wants to feel transported, not implicated.

So I made choices. I turned intensity into atmosphere. Sanded the edges into something like texture. Kept the magic, and lowered the volume on everything else.

I knew exactly what I was doing.

And to be fair, that version exists too.

You can step off a chaotic street and into a hidden courtyard with soft music, perfect drinks, and a slow, luxurious ease. That contrast is part of what makes the city what it is.

But the contrast only works if both sides exist.

My actual version kept more of that tension. It didn’t try to resolve the city into something neat or purely beautiful. It let things sit next to each other without deciding which one mattered more.

That version feels closer to how the trip actually lives in my memory.

Not as a highlight reel, but as something harder to summarize. ​​A place that’s magnetic and uncomfortable, generous and exhausting, intimate and overwhelming all at the same time.

But this is what the job is.

You take a place that doesn’t resolve cleanly and shape it into something that does. Something refined. Something legible. Something people with money can see themselves inside of.

And I did it.

I’d do it again. Although I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.
Or maybe I am. I just can’t afford to ask.

Most places don’t come packaged. They just hand you a series of moments and leave you to figure out what to do with them.

Sometimes you tell the story as it happened.

And sometimes you tell the version that sells.

911

The year is 2001.

I’m a 29-year-old grad school dropout, in a three-year live-in relationship with a drug dealer named Lance.

On 9/11—yes, that 9/11—he was arrested along with his father, in a Hollywood Video parking lot after our East Oakland grow operation had been raided.

The fact that it hadn’t happened earlier is almost hard to believe. A bunch of white raver kids coming and going from a deep East Oakland warehouse. Not to mention, you could smell the place from a mile away.

But what finally brought down our house of cards was a dog.

The police had been tipped off by a disgruntled neighbor whose pup had been bitten by my boyfriend’s father’s mastiff a few weeks earlier.

Lance’s dad and his slobbering mongrel had been living in a run-down motorhome parked inside the corrugated tin warehouse, acting as groundskeepers for the pungent green jungle hidden within.

Several months earlier, he’d come begging Lance for help, claiming health problems and a string of bad luck. In reality, he was a lazy freeloader with a drug problem and not a lot of options.

Lance’s most redeeming quality was always his compassion. So it came as no surprise that he’d agreed to help the same father who’d run out on him as a boy. I’d warned him this would be a mistake, but his belief in second chances and forgiveness trumped my skepticism.

Tensions between Lance’s dad and the neighbor finally came to a head when he refused to pay the vet bill for the dog skirmish—even after we’d told him in no uncertain terms to take care of it.

Not long after, his problem became our problem.

On that day in September, I was at our San Francisco warehouse loft, glued to the TV in disbelief, watching the repeated footage of the collisions, black smoke snaking from the towers.

That’s when I got the call. Lance and his father were in jail.

The bottom dropped out. But it wouldn’t end there.

In the weeks that followed, while the rest of the world was still reeling, I tried to pick up the pieces. I paid the bail. I even went back alone for that hateful mutt, left behind in the Oakland warehouse, without food or water, after the cops mowed down our farm.

Going through Lance’s things, searching for the warehouse keys, I learned something else: that the man I loved and laid everything on the line for had been serially unfaithful to me.

With strangers and friends alike.

For the entire duration of our relationship.

​​Anybody who has been through that kind of betrayal can tell you: it’s a special brand of hell. I felt Lance had led me astray in every way possible. My brief foray into the underworld of prohibition-era weed farming had led to utter disaster. My relationship was a scam. And now America was under attack on its own soil for the first time in decades.

Absolutely ruined, financially and emotionally, I left him and moved into a dingy basement apartment in the Mission, hoping to convalesce from the sense that the world I knew had completely come undone.

Private Idaho

I was wrecked in the months to follow. My life vampiric. Days were spent inside my dark apartment, cycling through fitful rounds of nightmare-filled sleep and tearful tantrums of regret.

How did I hide the truth from myself for so long?

Poor, sad boy. And me, the too-eager, drugged housewife. A slave to the bong, forever singing along with your tomorrow songs. I loved the life we did not live, but dreamed together.

We were already lost in some imagined jungle paradise, where we could harvest the gifts of the earth and sip on fresh fruit smoothies whipped up by the brawny house boy we “adopted.” He reads our I Ching between DJ sets and deep tissue massages, earning his place on our open couch.

Just another disciple of Lance’s gospel: that future-primitive island of conservationist revision—a heroic plight to save a dying world? Or just hedonism dressed up as purpose?

He reimagined us as stewards of the land, building a community rooted in soil and spirit, something sustainable. Off-the-grid Luddites. Renegades. The children of the underground, whose simple task was to raise enough money growing dope, to secure the sacred lands. Save the rainforest. Bring “the family” back together.

It passed for a plan. All the while, we were already falling apart.

​​We waited for the world to end, counting each minute in smoke rings. Watched the late, late, late show. Lived in our own private Idaho. We quit our day jobs and became outlaws, running drugs from Hawaii to the Atlantic. We grew marijuana in the ghettos of Oakland and threw pill-popping raves in spaces rented from the SFPD because we thought it was funny.

But at night, the silent drills in the walls kept us from sleeping. And by day, helicopters followed our van back and forth across the Bay Bridge. Or so you said.

That Christmas, you heard the click-clack footsteps on the rooftop. Not Santa, but the feds you were convinced would soon crash through the plate-glass windows where you stood, peeking through the slatted blinds all night.

You insisted you’d seen the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the mirrored windows of a black sedan tracking us down the highway.

I couldn’t blame you for being paranoid.

We’d seen back-alley bums and sideshow clowns strip down into uniform and arrest our grower friends. We bought big dogs for protection and never left a paper trail, as one by one, friends were picked off. Laws were passed, and the cops cracked down.

Outside, the war drums were beating, louder by the day.

Inside, we were all trying to remember how to love each other.

But slowly but surely, the after-hours underground scene in SF was being snuffed out.

​​Where was our permaculture paradise? Our post-civilization escape?

There, he’d be far away from old Mother Hubbard, drunk and on her tenth marriage. In Neverland, no broken-down father smoking bowls in front of a black and white TV in a rented shack on the shady side of town. No senile grandmother waving silver dollars in her gnarled claws at cabana boys. No pedophile grandfather stealing the family fortune. No niece and nephew eating McDonald’s nightly, watching Cinemax, in a house full of strange men, mirrors, and powder.

Sometimes he wondered why he’d come to this world at all.

So we dreamed of yoga villages in the jungle and prayed for a more beautiful sunrise tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I admired his resilience. I believed in his dream.

But where was our utopia now?

No Church for This

In the aftermath of the arrest, the revelation, and the breakup, I was still shell-shocked, overwhelmed with disillusionment.

Lance got a felony. I got away clean. But there was another cost I’d never prepared myself for.

I spent my days curled up, crying in bed. And my nights haunting the corners of SoMa’s remaining after-hours clubs.

The palpable throb of the bass seemed to jump-start my stalled heart. I felt resuscitated by the heat of bodies packed in close. Thick, hot air. The smell of sweat. The sheer volume was almost enough to drive out the image of you and me, kneeling, pressed close, foreheads touching in a prayer and promise of forever.

Almost.

The ghosts of us were relentless, so I sought out these dens like a black mass. I needed an exorcism, but I didn’t believe in God. I’d put all my faith in love, and my heart had led me astray. There was no church for this confession. I had lost my religion.

“Last night a DJ saved my life…” wasn’t just a song.

Music coaxed my body to bend and undulate. The beat invited my feet to stomp and soldier on. The weed let me turn my brain off and go where the music took me. Let the body lead. Let the tears stream down my face. Nobody knew me here. Nobody cared.

This was one of those nights.

It was a cold evening in mid-December at 1015 Folsom, around 2:30 a.m. At his pulpit, the DJ was leading the entranced and swaying crowd. I’d been dancing for hours, somewhere between waking life and dream state, when I finally stepped upstairs to smoke.

Lance’s arrest had made me jumpy. I was always scanning for security, for cops, for something going wrong—which is why I noticed her. I felt her before I saw her. Animal instinct ran up my spine.

Someone was watching me.

We locked eyes across the room just as a surge of bodies cut between us. When they passed, she was gone.

I scanned again. Nothing.

So I brought the joint to my lips, lit up, and inhaled deeply, closing my eyes as I held the smoke until it burned.

There we were again. Him and me. Brow to brow, the warm, sweet scent of his breath against my skin as he whispered,

“We are beautiful. We are positive. We are one.”

What the fuck was that dime store affirmation shit anyway, and why had I believed in it so much?

I exhaled.

Right into the mystery girl’s face, who seemed to emerge from my cloud of smoke, as if from a dream.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls

“Hi. Are you Wendy?”

“Who’s asking?” I stammered, feeling ambushed and paranoid.

“Sonia,” she said, leaning in a bit too close to be heard over the din of the music.

“Sorry, do I know you?” I said, stepping back, staring at her.

Face to face, this girl could be my twin. Pixie features. Short, spiky bleached hair. We looked like mirrored cutouts.

“Not exactly,” she said. “But I know who you are.”

My face went blank.

She paused.

“I dated Lance after you.”

Now I was deeply uncomfortable. I’d been roaming the clubs of our shared city for months, bracing for the moment I’d run into him. Not this.

What was I supposed to say?

“Great,” I muttered. “How’d that go for you?”

Despite my tone, she answered in earnest.

“Terrible. Really, really bad.”

She started listing the ways he’d hurt her. I couldn’t hear most of it over the music, but I didn’t need to. I’d lived it. I knew the story: the womanizing, the manipulation, the money, the charm.

It really was like looking in a mirror. I guess he had a type. Or maybe he’d been chasing my ghost with her.

White trash, sociopath. Lying freeloader with a hard-on and a sermon about forgiveness. New-age gigolo, draining the bank accounts of young, insecure women desperate for love.

Was I really so gullible? Was she?

I felt the old reflex rise up. I wanted to hate her. All of them, really. The women who came after me. The ones who overlapped. The friends who knew and said nothing.

And the others who’d barely waited for me to leave before taking my place in the same sheets we once shared.

But this girl? She wasn’t coming at me like that.

When she finished, I had to sift through a cacophony of voices raging in my head before I could find something worthwhile to say.

“I’m sorry you went through that,” I managed finally.

And I meant it.

“Yeah,” she answered, meeting my eyes. “And I’m sorry for what you went through, too.”

I had rarely felt so alone since the breakup. Regardless of his philandering, Lance was more popular than ever, and I was an outcast in the circles we once shared.

Before I could think it through, I reached out and hugged her.

She hugged me back.

You, or Déjà Vu

We were still holding each other when I saw him approaching from behind her.

Dark hair. Satyr-like features. The same tribal earrings, like the tusks of some wild beast shoved through his ears. A wave of panic surged through my body before my brain could catch up.

Lance.

My chest tightened, and the air left the room. I braced, as if for impact. This was it.

Then the image shifted.

Not him. Someone else.

Sonia turned, smiling, as the stranger kissed her pink cheek, and fixed his gaze on me with a kind of nonchalance.

“This is my partner, Scott.”

I met his eyes. Tried to steady myself.

“Hi.”

He barely nodded. Already looking past me.

My stomach flipped. Was it the mistaken identity, or the fact that I had a type too?

He gave a faint “what’s up” before turning his attention back to Sonia.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked her.

Feeling his impatience, she said her goodbyes quickly.

“Hey, I’m glad I ran into you,” she said, taking my hands. “Take care of your heart.”

“You too,” I said.

I glanced once more at the man beside her as they disappeared into the crowd. It was like watching Lance and me from a distance.

Who was this strange doppelgänger with the almost-familiar face? What was this sense that I did—or would—know him?

And that was the first time I met Scott.

The funny thing about meet-cutes is that they only become meet-cutes in retrospect.

Neither of us knew it then, but we’d just stumbled into something that would take years to unfold, and even longer to understand.

Are you doomscrolling before bed? Wondering why sleep won’t come while you’re wide-eyed and pounding the pillows?

Maybe you lie there thinking about what you didn’t finish, what you forgot, or what you could’ve done better.

For a lot of us, that’s what usually sticks.

Not because our days are actually bad. It’s more that humans are natural problem solvers. Our brains are wired to hold on to what went wrong. So it’s easy to get into the habit of trying to “figure it all out” at the end of each day. But here’s one thing I started doing that changes that without turning it into a whole thing.

Right before I go to sleep, I think of one thing from the day that didn’t suck.

Not something profound. Not some big gratitude moment. Just one specific thing, big or small. Maybe:

• a conversation that didn’t spiral

• five quiet minutes outside

• finally sending the thing you’d been avoiding

• or even just a really good cup of coffee

That’s it. It takes about 10 seconds, and you’re done.

You’re already going to bed. You’re just adding one thought before you do. And because it’s so small, you actually do it. Like brushing your teeth, it slips into your routine without effort.

I’m not going to tell you your life is going to change overnight. But here’s what does happen.

You fall asleep faster because your brain has something to land on instead of replaying everything that went wrong.

You don’t get stuck in that loop of trying to fix the day after it’s already over.

And the next day doesn’t feel like it’s failing before it even starts.

After a few nights, something else shifts. You start noticing those positive moments more often during your day, because you know you’ll need one later. It feels like you’re rewiring your brain in real time.

Suddenly, your days don’t just blur together. You can actually point to things that worked. Even if the world outside feels a little bonkers, you’ve taken back what you can control: your own perspective.

And the best part? You don’t need anything to try it tonight. No app. No journal. No complicated routine to keep up with. Just this:

Put away the phone and the self-judgment. When you’re lying there, about to fall asleep, ask yourself, “What’s one thing from today that didn’t suck?” Pick it. That’s it. Let that be the last thought you have before you drift off.

It’s the easiest habit I’ve found that actually sticks, because it doesn’t ask you to become a different person. It just gives your brain somewhere else to go.

That’s the theory, anyway.

If you’re reading this like, wait, WTF? Life hacks aren’t your usual lane. You’re right. This was a “try out” for a job I applied to—an assignment to write a persuasive piece about a healthy habit I’ve been using lately. Sales pitch. Mandatory.

You see, I’ve been out of work for four and a half months.

My nightly doomscroll isn’t just the horror of the global news. It’s LinkedIn, too.

Every day, another layoff post. Another “open to work” banner. Another headline about companies replacing people with systems that don’t sleep. This week alone, Oracle laid off 30,000 people by email. One of them was a friend.

And all I can think is, fuck, that’s 30,000 more qualified applicants I’ll be competing with for the tech scraps AI left behind.

Come afternoon, it’s rejection emails from jobs I’m more than qualified for. Or worse, the deafening silence from the ones that never answer at all.

By the time I get into bed, my brain is three seconds from total. Panic. Meltdown.

So, what didn’t suck today?

I’d had a chaotic childhood and grown up too fast. So as I barreled toward adulthood, finishing my master’s degree, I slammed on the brakes and gave myself what I’d never really had.

Later in life, my reasons grew more complicated. For one thing, I’d never wanted children. By the time I reached my late thirties and forties, many men my age already had them. So the pool of childless prospects skewed younger.

Then there was the fact that I was a young-looking woman more interested in chemistry and adventure than settling down. Love was definitely on the menu, but a traditional life was not.

So I lingered in the shallow end a little longer than most. I’m sure more than a few people had their opinions. But I didn’t care.

An older man dating a younger woman? No headline. It’s a tale as old as time. But when the script is flipped, people don’t quite know what to do with it.

In my cougar heyday, I was perfectly happy to shrug off public opinion. I’ve always had a soft spot for questioning rules that seemed to apply only to women.

But the gender double standard isn’t the most interesting thing about these relationships.

The interesting part is what happens once you’re inside one.

That’s where compatibility begins to fray.

This is the story of the first time I learned that lesson.

​​When It Still Felt Like a Sign

It was late Spring of 1997.

I was a twenty-five-year-old grad school dropout, working in restaurants to get by in the big city. A tangle of ambition and inertia, self-medicating a creeping sense that I’d stalled on a life I wasn’t even sure I wanted with a haze of hydroponic weed.

He was fresh out of his parents’ wealthy SoCal suburban home, wrapping up his freshman year. Nineteen, with a fake ID. All unfinished edges, moving through life with the confidence of someone whose father’s money could cushion any fall. Right at the edge of that kind of sure-footedness starting to crack.

He’d first caught my eye at a crowded after-hours nightclub. A few days later, I saw him again on Haight Street, sitting on top of a Guardian newspaper box outside a swanky boutique, taking a smoke break during his shift at Villains.

I saw it as a sign.

I walked up to him with all the confidence of a Xanadu muse. “Hi, I’m Wendy. What’s your name?”

He seemed a little taken aback, but answered, Vincent.

“Great,” I said, giving him a just-long-enough grin. “Can I get a drag of that?”

I blew a smoke ring over my shoulder as I walked away. “I’ll catch you later, Vincent.”

“Wait—” he called after me. “Lemme get your number.”

“Next time,” I said with a wink, and poof, I was gone.

The very next day, he walked up to me at a cafe in the Western Addition, laughing to himself a little.

“Okay… I guess this is next time.”

Digits were exchanged, and it didn’t take long before it felt written in the stars.

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Or So It Seemed

That first phone call did it.

It was one of those conversations where you can’t possibly say everything fast enough, and each answer opens into three more questions.

Remember, this was before social media and dating apps. You couldn’t stalk and scroll through someone’s life invisibly and decide what they meant to you. You had to find out in real time.

And what I found out floored me.

We were both lit majors with a love of writing and poetry. What were the chances? We geeked out on our favorite books and authors for hours.

The difference was that he was still in it. But I had just walked away.

I told him I’d left grad school just shy of finishing my dissertation, abandoning the future I’d been building toward for years because I didn’t want to study writers anymore. I wanted to be one. Teaching no longer felt like a calling. I wanted to make something of my own. I just didn’t know what that looked like yet.

Talking with him sparked something in me. He was still inside that world, and being around him made it feel possible again. Not the path I’d left, but the part of it I’d loved.

So when he asked if I wanted to come over, I didn’t hesitate.

We spent the rest of the night racing through each other’s minds and making out. In the morning, lips sore, brain on overdrive, heart aflutter, I invited him back to my place.

The night had been magic.

The sex? Not so much.

I wasn’t overly concerned. First times can be awkward, and I was still riding the high of that initial connection. Something about us had clicked a little too easily to dismiss.

But a week later, he told me he’d messed around with his ex, and that’s when things started to come into focus.

Six years doesn’t sound like much on paper, but at that age, it can feel like a lifetime. This brilliant, charming person I’d met and instantly connected with was still just nineteen.

My instincts told me he wasn’t ready for a relationship. That he still had things to figure out, lessons to learn, a version of himself he hadn’t quite grown into.

But then again… so did I.

In the end, I could forgive the girl. What struck me most was that he told me. Volunteered it, without prompting. There was something disarming in that kind of honesty.

So I did what I’d done before. I tried to negotiate the terms, suggesting we keep seeing each other, but leave things open.

He said no. Emphatically. Told me that whatever had happened with his ex had only made him realize how much he wanted this.

I should have known better. But I didn’t walk away.

And just like that, we were in it.

Summer of Love

Late-nineties San Francisco was a whole vibe; the tail end of something that felt like a second Summer of Love. All-night raves, colorful people pop-corning the streets, and a life you could still afford with a roommate or three.

Despite my misgivings after our shaky start, Vincent became my constant companion. Reading me to sleep at night from the pages of our favorite books. Waking beside me each day. Showering with me each morning. Gently folding himself into the soft fabric of my life.

It was easy to let him. Maybe too easy.

By day, we shared the mindless chores of survival. By night, we drifted through the city like urban sprites, taking love drugs at parties, sketching poems on bar napkins, making San Francisco our canvas.

We filled black notebooks with word lists that felt like scripture, borrowing our rhythm from Toni Morrison’s Jazz:

Rescue
Balance
Hunger
Crazy connections
Disorderly things

Like the ghosts of that city, we believed we were building a new kind of language. One made of beats.

I’d never had a relationship like this—part love story, part collaboration. People saw us as a “stunning couple.” I played along, even as something in me held back, waiting for the bottom to drop out.

Some days, we were two wayward geniuses on the edge of discovery. Other times, just two people helplessly falling in love. Not always in the ways I expected.

It still wasn’t fireworks in the bedroom. In my experience, younger men aren’t always up for the challenge of actually pleasing a woman. And this one was all thumbs and self-consciousness.

But slowly but surely, we were finding our rhythm. And then it happened:

“I love you,” he said, his eyes glowing like sunflowers against a cloudless blue sky.

I met his gaze, but I didn’t know what to say. Not because I felt nothing. I did. Something real that kept pulling me back in. But I wasn’t sure what I was in love with, or how long it could possibly hold.

Him.
This feeling.
The version of myself I got to be with him.

To me, he was San Francisco, the physical embodiment of its beauty, its sideways kind of magic, and its confusion.

All I knew was that we recognized something in each other. Not just romance, but resonance.

He pulled me closer, like it was already settled.

And I let him.

Underbaked Cake

​​It didn’t all fall apart at once. But things began to shift.

After a few too many weeks of bliss and late nights that turned into sunrise-watching mornings, reality started to creep in.

Vincent lost his job at Villains. Shortly after, his car died for good, parked around the corner from my house. A tense call with his parents didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse.

After that, he never really left my place.

Instead, he set up camp in my kitchen, presenting me with homemade pastries when I came home from work. The gesture was as sweet as his lemon curd, but it started tasting a little sour.

We still lived like middle-class kids who’d always had things. Thrift-store bohemians with college degrees and backup plans.

But now Vincent was selling dime bags and clothes to stay afloat, and spending his free time making confections instead of searching for work. Poverty wasn’t abstract anymore. It was a real possibility.

At first, there was almost something romantic about that. But the thrill wore off fast as I paid for everything: concert tickets, groceries, weed—even the pregnancy test that, thankfully, came back negative.

He somehow always had money for cigarettes, but never for fixing the broken car gathering dust in my neighborhood. And it was all starting to wear on me.

He’d say something about the perfect pastel tone of the sky, or the mellow ache of a classical guitar, and I’d melt into his gaze. But then I’d come home to find flour spilled all over the kitchen floor, and the doubts would creep in again.

“Vincent isn’t helping me get closer to any of my goals,” I’d tell myself, quietly rewriting him as the problem. But the truth was, I was already drifting when he came along. Now we were just doing it together.

And we fought.

Not constantly, but enough. Small things that carried more weight than they should have. The half-finished confections he left scattered across my kitchen. A trip he planned to LA. I saw irresponsibility; he saw his last stretch of freedom before school.

“Freedom?!?”

I came down on him harder than I meant to, then spent hours at work spiraling about us. But when I got home, there was a message on my machine:

“Hi, baby. It’s me. Just calling so you’ll have something when you get home… I’m gonna sleep at my place tonight, but call me when you get in. I’ll read you a story before bed.”

Something in me softened when I heard it.

How was it that this nineteen-year-old boy could sometimes be exactly what I needed?

The Last Straw

Like many couples negotiating tough times, we thought a change of scenery might do us good. Vincent didn’t have money for a proper vacation, so he offered up the family cabin in Tahoe instead.

This was a weekend of firsts. Not just our first time out of town together, it would also be my first time meeting his devoutly Catholic mother.

I told him confidently I had a knack with parents, but privately, I was terrified.

I gave all my best smiles and tried to share only the most appropriate version of my life.

She was polite at best, insisting that Vincent share a room with her while she offered me the couch. But when she caught me alone by the lake, she dropped the facade.

She told me her son didn’t need to be dating a woman my age—that he needed to be focused on his future.

She called me a distraction.

The words echoed through my head for days.

Back in the city, the tension followed us home. While I slogged through my go-nowhere waitressing job, wondering if he was bad for me, I was bad for him, or both, he baked. Cake after cake, making my kitchen sticky with sugar and butter.

When the contrast started to feel impossible to ignore, I decided I was tired of playing house. After another messy argument about finances and wasted time, he blurted out a worse truth.

He admitted to being in another compromising situation with a girl at a party. He promised he’d rebuked her advances, but confirmed the guilt had been driving a wedge between us for over a month.

By then, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, maybe I was even a little relieved.

His confession gave me a reason to finally end it. But it wasn’t the reason.

We’d built something beautiful together, but it wasn’t pointing anywhere. He was a nineteen-year-old acting his age. I was the one who didn’t know what I wanted. Or did, and was just too scared to actually reach for it.

He fought hard for the relationship, but I’d made up my mind.

The last thing he said to me before he left was that he was going to love me for a very long time.

Flash Forward

Palm Springs, decades later: my boyfriend and I booked a table at a hard-to-get-into restaurant on the main drag. Instead of mid-century curves and desert pastels, it was pure brutalist fantasy: soaring concrete, monastic lighting, the kind of space where you instinctively whisper, as if God himself were the maître d’.

Our waiter was tall, blond, and bearded, a Nordic warrior moonlighting as front-of-house. While scanning the menu, my eyes happened upon the fine print: Executive Chef and Owner: Vincent Monroe.

I froze. My Vincent?

The nineteen-year-old who’d once spent a jobless summer in my apartment baking cakes while I wondered why he wasn’t “doing something with his life”?

I showed the Viking an old photo of two cherub-faced ravers on my phone. “Is this your boss?” His laugh rolled across the concrete like thunder.

That night, between the duck confit salad and the bitter amaro, I took it all in. The staff’s precision. Their ease. The unspoken pride running through the room. Vincent had taken those long afternoons in my kitchen and turned them into something real.

Even at nineteen, half-feral and living off my groceries, he knew how to make people feel cared for. Back then, it was a scratchy late-night message on my answering machine. Now, it’s a dining room full of people moving with the quiet confidence he’s built.

I snapped a few photos, half amused, half in disbelief, and reached out on Facebook from our table.

“Wow. I’m at your place,” I wrote. “We ended up here by accident. I had no idea. I’m so impressed.”

He wrote back almost immediately. Polite, if not a little formal. Thanking me.

And then, almost as an aside—

“Funny thing,” he said. “That summer at your place… that’s when it really started.”

I realized, sitting there, that I’d been wrong about him. Or maybe just too early.

When does an age gap matter?

These days, I’m happily in love with someone my own age. We understand each other in a way that feels effortless. We share the same references, the same rhythms, the same sense of where we are in life. There’s a steadiness to it I didn’t even know I was missing.

Age isn't just a number. Sometimes it's a season of life. And seasons don't always overlap.

Some people meet you in the in-between. Vincent and I met there. Even if we weren’t meant to last, we gave each other something that stayed.

There’s something unsettling about a woman in her late fifties taking the stage and simulating self-satisfaction in a fur suit. Not because it’s shocking, exactly. Because it isn’t supposed to exist.

Last Thursday at the Midway in San Francisco, Peaches did exactly that.

A young pop star performing sexuality is practically a requirement. A visibly grey pop icon grabbing her stomach flab, shaking it at the audience, and daring you to look away is something else entirely.

But we didn’t look away.

If anything, the room leaned in. The girls, gays, and theys, including me, along with a pack of post-young, pre-old women in their 40s and 50s, cheered and egged her on.

This wasn’t new for Peaches. An electroclash provocateur and feminist performance artist, she’s been making work that pushes at the edges of what’s considered acceptable for decades.

But something about this show hit differently. The music was almost beside the point. What landed was her. Or more precisely, what she makes possible.

Overall, the Peaches Experience felt like permission. So when, in the post-show afterglow, my friends declared, “We’re entering our sleazy menopausal crone era,” it landed. As if Peaches herself had anointed us with one of her many phalluses.

We like to think the culture has moved forward. But standing in that room, it was clear we’re still fighting the same battles and negotiating the same rules we’ve lived with for centuries: Who gets to be sexual? Who gets to be visible? Who gets to take up space without apology?

We’re Not Supposed To Age Like That

There’s a quiet script most women internalize somewhere along the way. Be desirable, but not too obvious about it. Be sexual, but only in ways that are sanctioned, contained, relational, and never entirely your own. And above all, understand that this phase has an expiration date.

After a certain point, the expectation is retreat. To fade out, soften, and become something quieter. Elegant, if you can manage it. Invisible, if you can’t.

Watching Peaches, you might think she never got the memo. But she did. She just refused it.

Peaches has always worked in a space where discomfort is the point. When she released The Teaches of Peaches in 2000, the culture was already saturated with female sexuality, but it was still highly controlled, stylized, and largely performed for the male gaze.

You had Britney Spears playing Lolita, Christina Aguilera getting Dirrty, and Destiny’s Child offering a respectable version of independence and female desire. But you didn’t have anyone else doing exactly what Peaches was doing.

She treated sexuality less like something to perform correctly and more like something to poke at. She made it crude, loud, and funny. Not prettier, but definitely visible. And crucially, she did it without asking permission.

That matters more when you understand she wasn’t a 22-year-old ingénue breaking out. She was already in her thirties. A former teacher with something to say. Someone who arrived without that fragile phase of needing to be liked, with a body of work that wasn’t trying to seduce you. It was telling you where to stand, playing with gender in ways that felt deliberately hard to pin down, long before there was language to make it legible or marketable.

The Teaches of Peaches was less a debut and more an unlikely manifesto for a new era.

Why It Still Feels Dangerous

The culture caught up. And then it didn’t. Two decades later, what was always defiance feels more charged than ever.

In this moment of renewed scrutiny around bodies, gender, and autonomy, Peaches came out in a robe made of puppet-like prosthetic penises, then stripped down to the deliberately grotesque fur suit. Later, latex and a g-string with exaggerated, hairy nipples.

Her dancers followed in bodies and genders that refused easy classification. At one point, they appeared with giant vulvas perched on their heads, like X-rated muppets, absurd and confrontational at the same time.

There’s a moment where she talks about being “blessed” with full lips, and it takes a beat to realize she’s not talking about her face.

Each successive move carried a kind of wrongness that felt exactly right, making visible what’s usually managed or minimized. Not to shock for the sake of it, but to expose the rules themselves. Because the culture she was always pushing against didn’t disappear. If anything, it sharpened.

We are in a moment where women’s autonomy is a political talking point. Trans people are being positioned as threats to social order. The gender binary is being defended with a kind of urgency that gives away how fragile it actually is.

These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. They organize power. They determine who is legible, who is credible, who gets to move freely through the world, and who has to explain themselves at every turn.

If gender starts to loosen, other things loosen with it. Hierarchy becomes harder to justify and control.

Peaches understood this long before the language caught up. Her work treats gender as something flexible, expressive, and open to interpretation. Watching her now, you can see why that kind of fluidity reads as threatening to people invested in keeping the system intact. It also makes sense that so many who came after call her mother.

Calling All Crones

Driving home that night, I kept thinking about how easy it is to dismiss artists like her as fringe, niche, or something you age out of or grow past. But standing in that room, what I saw was a multigenerational crowd of revelers and rebels celebrating choice with the kind of joy that knows this space is not guaranteed.

It felt like a glimpse of what happens when people are given permission to exist outside the script. That’s why Peaches still feels so relevant. Not because she’s doing something new, but because she’s still doing something society hasn’t fully allowed.

Peaches offers a version of selfhood that doesn’t translate into disappearance, but rather freedom. If you’re no longer trying to be desirable on someone else’s terms, what else becomes available? You can be loud. You can be ugly. You can be strange, excessive, a little bit wrong.

Getting older as a woman often comes with a strange double loss. You lose proximity to conventional beauty, which the culture treats as currency. And with that, you can lose visibility. Attention shifts. Doors close quietly. You are no longer the thing being looked at.

But what if that’s not a loss, but an opening? The less invested you are in the system, the more you can operate outside of it.

Peaches has been operating there all along. Blackened teeth, greying hair, still out there. Refusing to be invisible. Demanding to be looked at.

This past weekend, I saw Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride. I went in knowing the film was bombing at the box office and had critics divided. But I wanted to judge for myself. Like most viewers, I found the film visually striking. The art direction is lush, the cinematography evocative, and the performances compelling enough to keep you watching even when the story starts to wander. Beyond that, opinions are split.

Some have dismissed it as an overstuffed experiment, arguing the film tries to do too much at once. A gangster story, a Gothic horror, a feminist allegory, a dark comedy, a surreal fever dream. In their view, the tones never quite settle, and the film collapses under the weight of its ambition. Others see those same qualities as the point. They argue that this unruly energy mirrors the story it’s trying to tell: a woman refusing to stay contained in the role that men wrote for her.

I could accept that the story feels chaotic. The real question was what that chaos was trying to reveal. Beneath the genre mash-ups and tonal whiplash, I saw a film wrestling with something bigger: authorship, ownership, and the long history of women fighting to control their own stories.

Resurrecting Shelley

One creative decision kept nagging at me. In a film that ultimately feels like it’s about women reclaiming their voice, why is the central character literally possessed by someone else’s?

The choice to tell the story through Mary Shelley seemed to overcomplicate the plot and muddy the character’s journey. Our protagonist appeared to exist in several forms at once—Ida, Penelope, and Mary Shelley herself—raving, fractured, and carrying what felt like centuries of rage and confusion. It started to feel a little contagious if I’m being honest.

What I didn’t realize is that this device isn’t new. The 1935 Bride of Frankenstein opens the same way, with the premise that Mary Shelley has more to say, that her story was never finished. Both films even cast the same actress as Shelley and the Bride, collapsing creator and creation into a single face. By adopting that structure, Gyllenhaal places herself in that lineage.

As we are introduced to Ida, she is almost belching out the words and thoughts of both women. That meta layer is vital to understanding this film. The creature is not only assembled in a laboratory. She’s assembled in the mind of the writer who is creating her, and the film plays like we’re watching that happen in real time. The Bride becomes less a character than a vessel, as if Gyllenhaal has staged a séance with Mary Shelley and is finishing what she started.

Once I saw it that way, the structure began to make more sense. This isn’t simply a new take on the Frankenstein myth. It’s a story about female creators. About voice. About who gets to own the narrative.

The Woman Behind the Monster

That question of ownership didn’t begin with Gyllenhaal. It began with Mary Shelley herself, because the original Frankenstein myth has always had a strange history when it comes to authorship.

Shelley was a fascinating paradox. She had advantages that most women of her era did not. Education. A radical feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. A philosopher father, William Godwin. Today, the internet might call that nepotism. But for Shelley, it created the rare conditions Virginia Woolf would later dub a room of one’s own; the social, physical, and intellectual freedom necessary for a woman to write at all.

Even with those advantages, people assumed the novel’s real author must be her husband, the poet Percy Shelley. Frankenstein was no mere horror story. It was a philosophical meditation on creation, responsibility, ambition, and the moral limits of scientific power. It asked questions about what happens when humans attempt to play God, and what responsibility a creator bears for the life they bring into the world. Readers refused to believe a woman, let alone an eighteen-year-old woman, was capable.

Although the authorship question was eventually settled, over decades and iterations of the story, you could propose that Shelley’s ownership continued to slip away. The creature she dreamed up—a tragic, articulate figure wrestling with abandonment and identity—became a cultural cliché. A Halloween costume. A Hollywood monster that, for most of its cinematic life, belonged to male directors and storytellers.

Seen through that lens, Gyllenhaal’s choice to resurrect Mary Shelley inside the story begins to feel less confusing and more intentional. The ghost of the original creator returns to haunt the myth that escaped her, continuing the story from an iconic scream.

​​The Bride as an Act of Refusal

​​As Maggie Gyllenhaal has said, “I can’t make a movie about the Bride of Frankenstein without consent being really on the table, because she fundamentally has no say in it.”

In the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride herself appears for only a few minutes. She has no voice. No backstory. No say in her own creation. She’s brought to life by men and immediately cast as the solution to a problem they created.

She awakens. She sees the creature standing before her. And she screams.

This has become one of the most iconic moments in horror history. But it’s not just the white-streaked hair that makes this one of the most recognizable images the genre has ever produced. It’s the rejection of patriarchy her scream signals.

The Bride may not speak, but she does the one thing no one expects of her. She refuses the role assigned to her. She rejects the arrangement entirely. With that howl, the Bride becomes a proto-feminist archetype: a woman created without consent who refuses to participate in the story men have written for her.

Gyllenhaal’s film begins where that scream leaves off. What happens if the woman who refused the role has to keep living inside the world that created her?

The Woman Who Won’t Behave

Gyllenhaal’s Bride is born rebellious, defined by a single phrase: “I would prefer not to.” The line has become a famous literary shorthand for quiet resistance, a refusal to participate in the system around you.

Everywhere she turns, someone is trying to define what she is supposed to be. When she refuses that definition, the world around her begins closing in. She is hunted, groped, and nearly assaulted. Lied to, manipulated, and gaslit. The message is constant: behave, belong, comply. When she refuses, she becomes a problem that must be contained. A nasty woman. A monster.

She is volatile and unpredictable. Equal parts seductive and feral, lashing out at the people around her. As her identity continues to implode, the story itself begins to fracture, too. Scenes feel disjointed. Characters behave like archetypes. The tone swings from dark comedy to violence to something almost surreal. The result is messy and disorienting. But it is also deeply rooted in the Gothic tradition.

Gothic stories are famously full of containment strategies for women. Marriage. Institutionalization. Imprisonment. Death. For centuries, women who resist social expectations are translated into something else: the “madwoman,” an archetype feminist critics cite as the embodiment of female anger, sexuality, and autonomy reframed as instability or danger.

Seen through that lens, Ida’s characterization and the film’s fractured tone begin to make more sense. Critics call it chaotic, disjointed, even incoherent. But a story about a woman refusing the role written for her was never going to sit comfortably inside a tidy narrative. As the film splinters, it mirrors its lead. The Bride becomes the woman who won’t behave, and the storytelling follows suit.

Why The Bride Feels So Timely

There’s a reason Frankenstein stories keep getting resurrected. The Gothic has always been a genre of cultural anxiety. These stories tend to appear in moments when the world feels like it’s changing too quickly to understand. The original Frankenstein was written during the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, when science was beginning to reshape society, and people were asking terrifying new questions about human power and responsibility.

Our moment carries its own version of that unease. Artificial intelligence is raising similar questions about creation and control. Political systems feel unstable. Gender roles are being renegotiated in public and often violently contested. Women’s autonomy is once again a political battleground. Who controls the body? Who controls reproduction? Who controls the narrative?

Frankenstein was always an act of rebellion, a story written by a woman about men trying to remove women from the act of creation. Two centuries later, Maggie Gyllenhaal revisits that idea, bringing a wildly female voice—emotional, nonlinear, and unapologetically opinionated—back into the myth itself.

Cinema history is filled with male directors like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Federico Fellini, whose strange, fragmented narratives are often treated as evidence of depth. Women rarely receive the same generosity. There are still remarkably few female directors working at the highest levels of the industry, and even fewer whose films are allowed to be unruly without being dismissed outright.

I’ll admit, when I walked out of the theater, I was a little baffled by what I’d just seen. But I also haven’t stopped thinking about it. The Bride isn’t a perfect film. But there is something undeniably bold about what Gyllenhaal is attempting. She takes one of the most famous monsters in cinematic history and reframes the myth not around a single character’s journey, but around all the voices that were never allowed to speak.

Once you start hearing that echo, you realize the scream was never just hers. It belongs to a movement that is still unfolding, and a story that is still being told.