The morning sun wakes me. The birds sing, the nonnas do the same. I dress quickly and head down the two flights of stairs in between stone walls until I reach the narrow street my apartment is tucked away in. I say buongiorno to the neighbors I’ve already grown familiar with in my short time here. They love that I could string some words together to speak to them in Italian. More so, they love how much I love their little island. They take pride in it. “Hai sentito? Ha detto che le piace stare qui,” they shout up to my upstairs neighbor who is peering over her balcony trying to listen to our conversation. “Brava” she says in approval. They smile and tell me to keep coming back.

I wish them a beautiful day — “ci vediamo dopo” — and head down the street. It’s not yet nine, but the sun is already melting into the cobblestone streets. I find myself in the open stretch between the marina and the cluster of colorful buildings that steer fishermen back to shore on a smoggy day at sea. I walk into the first caffè I see, squeezing my way through the men gathered at the bar.

“Un caffè e un cornetto naturale, per favore.” The man at the counter nods, sets down a plastic cup of water, and slides over a saucer for my order. Around me, the room buzzes—cups clinking against porcelain, the low rush of the espresso machine, the occasional burst of steam warming milk for someone else’s cappuccino. I eat my cornetto while I wait, then drink the espresso quickly while it’s hot, taking small sips of water in between. Like everyone else, I don’t linger. I finish and step back outside, making room for the next wave of people pushing in for their morning caffè.

Outside, a mercato has just opened across the street. I walk into the smell of ripe fruit warming in the heat and pick up a few figs and flat peaches for the day. “Un euro e cinquanta,” the owner says. I repeat it softly after him as I sort through my coins and set them on the counter. “Grazie, buona giornata.” I’m nearly out the door when I hear one of the customers say to the owner, with some surprise, “Un’americana che parla italiano.” I smile to myself and keep walking, pretending I didn’t hear her.

I make my way down the strip of Marina Corricella. It’s already full. Fishermen scattered everywhere. Some on their docked boats, others in their boat houses sanding the old wood down. Landing nets lie wet on the dock from a sunrise catch. Kids run through the streets, already salty and sticky from sweat and the sea.

From the street, I hear the orchestra of sounds distinctly. Scooters buzzing. Conversations carried from balconies about nothing and everything. Fishing boats creaking. Waves splashing against the dock. Children jumping fearlessly into the water. Church bells chiming. It’s all so very Italian. Not the loose scatter of international voices that so often follows a beautiful place, but Italian—fast, melodic, full-bodied, ricocheting off stone and sea. It rises from balconies, from fishing boats, from children racing down sun-warmed steps.

It wasn’t what I expected. Procida was not empty. By midday the beaches were full, the marina alive, the caffès turning over as quickly as they always do in summer. But the life around me did not feel arranged for outsiders. It felt domestic, internal, almost self-contained—as though I had stepped not into a destination, but into a true Italian summer.

That essence carries onto the coast of the beach. Italians line the sandy shore comfortably close to each other. They lie half in the water to cool their skin, half out of it to deepen their bronze. They open the baskets packed with fresh tomatoes, panini, cookies. They feed their children and grandchildren as they run in and out of the water. They share with the families beside them. They swim deep out into the blues fearlessly, as if the water were as familiar to them as home. They greet friends they didn’t expect to see. They make plans for dinner together. And they wait to watch the sun to set before carrying on with the rest of their summer night. Everything feels lived-in, inherited, known.

Foreigners feel like a rarity here, and are quickly found out. I had arrived hoping, in some way, to disappear. Not into the crowds, but into place. But here, I couldn’t melt away like I typically do when I’m alone. Instead, Procida made me visible. On an island this small, it’s easy to notice what is unfamiliar to it. And there was something strangely relieving in that. The island did not bend toward me. It let me come close, but not too close. Not every beautiful thing opened itself fully. Through its ballad of sounds, it did so just enough to let me in, but not completely. I listened more than I spoke. I heeded every gesture, every rhythm, every sound.

The miracle of Procida is not that it is slower than the rest of Italy in the summer, but that it has not been translated. It’s not that no one goes there; the crowded shoreline at midday makes that clear enough. No, the rarity is that it still seems to belong, unmistakably, to the people inside it. In a region where beauty has so often been translated for the world, Procida still sounds Italian. The island does not feel hidden so much as unadjusted and unrehearsed. It has not rearranged itself for foreign eyes, and that is part of what makes being there feel so real, so untouched by the rest of us.

In its tenderness, Procida remains so fully itself. The summer unfolding around me belonged first to its locals, and to the families who return year after year from other parts of Italy. To the rest of us, the few of us, it offers something that feels rare lately: the chance to be let in without being centered. And with that comes guidance—not to consume it, but to move gently inside it; to bask in what is still raw and real and beautiful, and not be the reason it disappears.

There is intimacy, too, in remaining slightly outside of something.

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I’d always seen her youth. That was it. She would live forever. Even in her sickness, even when her body began to deteriorate, she was still her. Still full of life. Her soul was forever young. After years and years of the beauties and the hardships of life, she remained as soft as she would have been in her childhood.

But that softness, it could not be mistaken for weakness. Her strength, her strong-headedness, her steadfastness and her nurturing nature carried generations. And she did so, so gracefully. She had a joy for life, and a joy of watching the life she created flourish.

My whole life up until the moment it all changed, I never thought of a world without her, never even fathomed what that might be. And though realistically I knew this would happen, and always did, as goes the way of the world… I didn’t really know. It never crossed my mind as something that would happen.

Then one day I looked at her, and nothing had changed from the day before, or even the month or two months before. But all of a sudden, she had aged. She became this person that wouldn’t live forever, not here at least.

It’s hard to reconcile with death, with the idea that in this life, in this world, you’ll never to get to touch them again. To smell their cooking before you’ve even walked in through the front door. To kiss their cheeks until they become rosy from your lipgloss and their giggles. To feel their buttery soft hands holding yours. To be stunned by their wit when so often, they would simply watch with a smile and without a word.

For days now, I’ve felt still, stuck, frozen in a way. Fixating on the time. Was it 3:27, or was it actually 3:23. Maybe 3:25. My thoughts not being able to move past the moment. The moment her body leaned into my arms, the moment her pulse was but a ghost beneath my fingertip, the moment her soul left the vessel that carried her and all of us.

While the world slept, I had sat there the hours, minutes, seconds leading up to the catalyst that would shift us all. Holding her cold hand trying to warm it. Kissing her fingers that turned everything she touched, into love. I watched her inhale, holding my own until the exhale followed. I was hanging on to every breath until there was nothing left to hold.

She passed on. A death in this world, but a birth in the next. The earth hasn’t stopped crying since. But the heavens… they are rejoicing at the birth of an angel.

She’s arrived home. And into the loving arms of Jesus who has embraced her with his warmth and healing. And into a heavenly reunion with the love of her life. And together they look down on the generations they created.

And there she will live forevermore.

x

About trauma specifically. How we bond through our hardships. How we form connections, even romantic ones, built entirely on that. Two people finding each other in the dark and deciding the dark is what they have in common.

And that beckons the question: why.

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Is it the false attachment? The familiar patterns of relating we learned before we knew any better? The misplaced emotions that feel like companionship? Or is it something we’ve simply confused with—the intensity of shared pain with the intimacy of shared truth?

It’s been circling in my mind.

We tend to believe that connection through hurt is depth. That if someone has seen your wounds, or worse, shares them, that means they’ve seen you. That the rawness of it, the weight of it, means something real passed between you.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

Pain is loud. It takes up space. Not the good kind. And it announces itself in a way that joy rarely does, in a way that interests and passions and affinities and dreams almost never do. And so we mistake the volume for substance. We mistake the intensity for intimacy.

What we’re actually doing, when we reach for each other through the hurt, is connecting at the wound, not underneath it.

And still we chase it. We ask to relive it. We hold onto the past and beckon it forward, time and time again, when everything in us should know better.

Why do we do such a thing rather than move forward?

I think because the hurt is familiar in a way that forward never is. Moving forward requires a version of yourself you haven’t met yet. And there is a grief in leaving behind the one you know—even if the one you know was built inside someone else’s damage. Even if the one you know was never really you at all.

So we stay. We find others who are staying too. And we call it connection.

But wounds, as it turns out, are not the most honest part of us.

They’re the most visible. They’re the most immediate. But they’re also the most defended, the most performed, the most shaped by everything that happened to us before we had language for any of it. A wound is not your truth. It’s the scar tissue that formed around it.

The real question—the harder one, the one that requires more than shared suffering to answer—is: who are you beneath the battle scars?

What do you love that has nothing to do with what hurt you? What do you want that isn’t just the opposite of what you lost? What makes you laugh, think, come alive… not in spite of the pain, but entirely independent of it?

That’s where real connection lives. In the passions and the contradictions and the specific, almost embarrassing things that make a person who they are when no one is asking them to be brave.

There’s a comfort in bonding through hurt—I won’t deny that, I can’t deny it.

But comfort is not the same as depth.

And staying inside shared pain, mistaking it for closeness, is the most convenient way we keep ourselves from being truly known. Because it lets us believe we’ve gone deep when we’ve actually just gone heavy. Weight is not the same thing as meaning.

Misery loves company.

But what misery rarely survives is someone asking: what are you like when you’re not in pain?

That’s the real question. The one that cuts through the surface and asks not for your scars but for the person who carried them—and who they are now that they’ve set them down.

Melody

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And then there are months like this one, where it all seems to speak the same things back to me… Faith. The ever presence of it, though never steady. And the testing of our faith, only to find that it is in those moments where we are asked to trust more.

Faith under pressure. Faith in absence. Faith in longing. Faith returning.

An edit of the things I read, watched, and listened to this month… all of it, somehow, connected.

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And then there are months like this one, where it all seems to speak the same things back to me… Life. Death. The legacies we build and leave behind, and the question of what any of it is really meant to mean.

An edit of the things I read, watched, and listened to this month… all of it, somehow, connected.

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I want to preface this by saying that every piece I’ve ever written has been close to my heart, but this one is particularly special.

There are moments in life that make us question everything. Question good versus evil. Question the existence of God. Question the existence of peace or whether love even exists.

This is one of them.

Life took me and my family into something loud and frightening, and heavier than anyone should know how to carry—yet it’s something that now passes almost as an afterthought, something we still can’t quite make sense of.

And although two decades have gone by, I guess this is my way of understanding it a little bit better, or at least try to.

Maybe one day I will tell you the full story, until then, here’s a snippet of how I caught a glimpse of my culture, the hard way.

When I was a child, we spent most evenings gathered around the dining table just off our kitchen—one long room with two large balcony doors at the back. The table sat in the middle of the space, and directly across from it, was a small television no larger than sixteen inches against the wall.

Sometimes it played harmless background noise while we ate dinner or finished homework, reruns of Home Improvement or Golden Girls. Other times, my dad would have the news running. It wasn’t Canadian news stations or even American, but Middle Eastern stations, usually Al Jazeera, LBC or something of that sort. The thing with those stations is that they were anything short of modest.

I must have been about six or seven when I first saw a dismembered body in a war torn area on the screen. Destruction all around. Collapsed buildings. Blood stained skin as people cried out for help, cried out for lost or killed loved ones, or simply crying out for God, begging to grant them some sort of mercy. The first exposure was something unbearable. I would have recurring flashbacks of the images that flickered on that small screen. The heartache, the pain, the suffering.

At the time I couldn’t understand how my dad could allow it. How something so violent could exist so casually in the background of our evenings while his young daughters sat there watching. Absorbing.

But the truth was that for him, it was never shocking. It just was. It was what he grew up watching, what he was exposed to. And, it wasn’t always through a screen. Explosions, injury, death. An accustomed chaos.

He had enlisted in the army at a very young age, while still a teenager, albeit he lied about his age when doing so, determined to serve his country, and the things he saw… what he experienced… they’re still unknown to me. To all of us really.

After some time, I became numb to what I saw on the news as well—as if it was a movie, as if it wasn’t actually someone’s reality. I was too young to understand. Too young to fully grasp what I had seen.

The summer of my ninth year, my family and I had joined my dad in Lebanon. Our home was in the north. Way up through the winding roads that wrapped the mountain. The roads had no barrier that separated you from the steep fall yet the cars drove recklessly and quickly despite it.

Through the eyes of my young self, everything had seemed bizarre… disparaging. Like nothing I had ever seen before. I had grown up in the suburbs and was blessed with security and the surroundings of the better end of the middle class. Here, there was mostly rubble. Old homes built from beige sand bricks that no one had the money to maintain let alone improve. Children ran around in worn out sandals with dirt on their feet. It was a new world—rather an old one—but one I didn’t know existed.

Even here, amongst the poverty and hopelessness, we were still blessed, driving up to our three-story home with its gated entrance and long driveway uphill. The house was tall and square, built by my father, my grandfather and my great grandfather, from the same beige sand rocks that most structures were made from. The front entrance was shaped into an arabesque arc that sheltered big wooden doors. Greenery hung beautifully down the balcony of the home, decorating the front. My fathers touch. To the right, a beautiful garden filled with flowers, lemons, olive trees, tomatoes, cucumbers, mint… all planted and grown by him as well. Beside the garden were stairs that mounted the side of the home, leading up to the second floor’s patio, and onwards to the roof.

It was grand, beautiful, and historic. My ancestors’ roots pulsating through the structure and the earth that it was built on. The inside of the home was darker than the outside. Large stones formed the walls and very few windows gave way to natural light. It felt like a cave, and in a way, I guess it was exactly that. A sanctuary, a safe haven, an asylum from the chaos outside, not that there had been any real chaos in that moment, but there was never really any peace.

I hold few happy memories of that trip, not for the lack of them, but more so from the overpowering distressing memories that superseded them. Nonetheless I’ll recount both.

The summer of 2006 was spent mostly meeting the family I didn’t know (and might have preferred not to). My dads side—isn’t it always? Running around the streets with cousins, some close, some far. The first real crush I had developed on a young blonde boy who barely spoke English. Watching the same music videos over and over on the same channel that had nothing else to show. Eating delicious food that I would only appreciate in my later years. The fireworks we would buy and set off from the roof of our home, and consequently set off the neighboring car alarms.

Even as a young girl, I still saw all the flaws in those happy memories—my cousin who was so clearly a pathological liar (literally, not figuratively). His very off-putting father, who wore one too many rosaries around his neck, as if excess could make him sinless. The separated bedroom that my aunt kept from him. The electricity that would go out for hours through the day, sometimes mid shower, sometimes mid music video. Despite all the oddities, everyone seemed to always be in high spirits—it was a Lebanese summer, it was hot, and it was the year of the FIFA World Cup.

Every night, we would have people over, cooking chicken or lamb or some other farm animal on the outdoor stone oven my father had also built. I’d watch my dad and uncles laugh and argue over glasses of scotch. My mom, my grandmother and my aunt sitting idly sipping on their arak. During the day the kids would run around the yard of the house. Running up to the flat roof, always sure to stay away from the edge. The men my father employed would come in and out of the house, working, or bringing reptiles in to scare us, only for my grandmother to yell and chase them out. Some days we’d drive to Beirut, or small towns further south, and my dad would take us to visit landmarks. We were all too young to appreciate any of it, but old enough to remember. Regardless, they would end up being memories we’d have tucked in the very back of our minds, overshadowed by the events that would lead up to our last few days in Lebanon, and our voyage back home.

It was the twelfth of July when the first airstrike was dropped.

I remember the whole house shaking. Doors loosening from their hinges and flying open. The sound of glass rattling. We were far, but then again, not far enough to not feel it. Days went on and we all grew weary. People were evacuating Beirut and filling the streets of our village. Staying with families, friends, finding anywhere to shelter while their homes were potentially getting destroyed. Apartment buildings began to overflow. Still everyone played in the streets, kicking a ball around or lighting fireworks simply because.

I remember sitting on the roof of our house, the one I loved to look out on, the one that had the perfect view of the country, the mountains, the ocean, the villages below. And I remember looking out into the same view I dreamed into, watching it slowly turn into a nightmare as the airstrikes fell from the planes above and erupted in the distance once they hit land. I remember a beautiful sunset sky turning fiery, deadly. Still, I think, how could that have been real?

I remember calls from my family back home, trying to figure out how to get us back to safety if there were air blockades and no one could get out. I remember my mothers panic as my dad remained calm and still through it all. “It’s nothing” he would say. “It won’t get to us.” Of course he was right, the tragedies would be isolated, but the sounds, and the trembles of the earth would echo to the mountains.

I remember my parents rushing to baptize my newborn brother in the old stone church before my dad would send his wife and four children on a long voyage out of the country. I remember that small church feeling like it was the last shelter we would meet before we drifted off into the unknown.

I remember the crowds of families at the port frantically boarding ships that would help us evacuate a war-torn Lebanon. I remember my dad staying behind, not able to leave our generational home for the chance that it would be broken into and taken over.

I remember the cries and screams once we set sail, whispers of threats to bomb the ship that we were on. I remember being the only passenger not bothered by the rough seas while the captain took unruly turns trying to navigate the commands and torments from air forces above.

I remember docking in Cyprus after fifteen hours, or was it longer? I remember everyone rushing out of the boat that had been just as unsafe as Lebanon, if not more. I remember waiting in what seemed like a refugee camp, everyone sitting on the floor, waiting for news on how we would fly back home.

And then, I don’t remember anything at all.

Memory has a strange way of protecting us. Of weaving moments in on themselves until they disappear somewhere in the back of the mind. That year, and the years that followed, the memories would disappear and return again, sometimes in the night, sometimes in the light of day. For a long time I thought they had simply faded. But they hadn’t. Pieces of sound, flashes of color, the feeling of the house shaking beneath my feet. They were waiting for me to grow old enough to understand them, and to understand something I hadn’t when I was a child sitting at that dining table watching the news flicker across a small television screen.

The images I saw then were never just images. They were the world my father had come from. A world where explosions and evacuation routes were not extraordinary events, but familiar ones. I had watched it through a screen, thinking it was distant, thinking it belonged to someone else’s life, or that it simply wasn’t real. That summer, I learned that distance can quickly collapse.

The calm in my father’s voice that night wasn’t indifference. It was familiarity. He had lived in a world where the ground could shake without warning, where entire summers could turn in an instant. To him, chaos was not extraordinary. It was part of life.

I began to understand what my culture meant—not the version we inherit through food or language or music, but the inheritance of survival and steadfastness.

It is a culture that learns how to forget.

Not completely. But just enough. Enough to wake up the next morning and cook breakfast. Enough to laugh loudly with friends, to argue over nothing, to gather too many people around a table and celebrate every ordinary day as if it might be the last peaceful one for a while.

It’s the rhythm of a place that has learned, over and over again, how to live alongside the possibility of loss. How to live when uncertainty is never far away.

Lebanon has always lived between two worlds. Between celebration and destruction. Between the fireworks of a summer night and the fire falling from the sky.

And though it may feel jarring to lean into joy when so much can disappear in an instant, how could you not?

How would you survive otherwise?

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This month passed by faster than usual. I caught myself pausing halfway through, unsettled by the feeling that my days were beginning to blur together. So, in an attempt to slow things down, I’m trying to take notice of all the small things… the ones that make even the most ordinary moments feel meaningful.

Curated for me and you—an edit of the things I read, watched, and listened to this month, along with a few moments and ideas that stood out along the way.

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There are moments in life that leave an ache. They aren’t meant to resolve.
And they may leave without closure.

But that’s simply how it’s meant to be. They exist briefly, fully, and then they’re gone. Unfinished, but complete in the way only real life can be. Like fragments from a dream.

These pieces live there. They are offerings of that kind. Fleeting, intimate, unresolved.

Read them slowly.
And leave them untethered from ending.

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We had spent the day chasing salt pans simply to see the way the sun glistened against their surface. It wasn’t particularly beautiful, but the idea of their density was. Painfully beautiful. How something so confined, held so much weight. It felt metaphorical… at least it did to us. We came to realize that neither of us were keen on confinement. Or structure… or being held in place. The heaviness of that very idea propelled us in the opposite direction. And that sparkle of sunshine against those salt flats… well it was our hope. For something more freeing. A life more freeing.

Before the sun would make it’s descent, we got back into that rusty old truck and sped down the street that had brought us inland.

We were chasing freedom.
Chasing the horizon before the sun disappeared beneath the water.
Chasing a moment we knew would slip away if we didn’t catch it.

It was nearly too late but we shifted that car in park, jumped out and climbed the rocks that separated us from sea.

I slipped off my dress letting it fall to my ankles before either of us could catch our breath. The water was still warm from the days light and waiting to touch my skin. And so I jumped into a sea so calm and so clear, it could have been made of glass.

He stood there staring at me for a moment. As though I had shattered the very idea of being held back.

I was freedom.
Too impatient to wait.
Too eager to slow down.
And always ready to take off.

Without ever taking his eyes off of me, he stripped the clothes off of his body and dove in after me.

Together we swam into the only thing that ever made sense to us, the sea.

Peaceful, and intense.
Calm, and powerful.
Right here, and ever-moving.
Everything and everywhere all at once.

We had made it. Right in time for the air to begin to cool, to watch the sky change, and to feel day turn to night.

He never touched my skin. He didn’t have to. The water connected us. Flowing around our bodies the way air flows in and out of our lungs. We were breathing each other in. Holding onto the inhale just long enough, until we couldn’t hold anymore.

Right before the sky had completely gone dark, he pulled me out of the daze I was lost in, and onto dry land so that we could take it all in.

The sky… the sea… It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Greys that melted into lilacs and peach hues. Barely a cloud in sight but the setting sun was subdued against the backdrop of cool pastels. It wasn’t loud, or bright, or painted in the colors that drew crowds of people in. But it was magnificent.

So we sat there in silence at first, until the words we held onto in our minds were freed by the weight of their emotions. That moment, despite it’s impermanence, was frozen in time.

A life free, a life at sea, a life in love, in every sense.

We left it all right there. Talking until the sun had disappeared and turned the ether into an indigo sky. That’s how I knew I’d remember that sunset long after I forgot his name.

It wasn’t ours to have. Neither were we.
I wasn’t meant to stay there. I wasn’t meant to be something he held onto.

Like the sun, this moment would come and go in our minds. Leaving us with nothing but a memory to hold, and salt-stained skin that moved with the sea.

Melody

This is the first piece in a new series called Untethered From Ending—fiction-adjacent moments living somewhere between memory and imagination.

Future pieces in this series will be shared with paid subscribers.

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I truly used to be the most timid person.
I would avoid going out if I knew there would be a lot of people there.
I would stay cooped up at home if my closest friends weren’t free (and I’d be miserable about it).
I’d avoid living life or doing the things I actually wanted, simply because I had no one to do them with.

…and then one day, I said enough.

I was single, lonely, and honestly tired.
Tired of waiting for someone to make me a priority, or for someone to give me confidence, or for someone to take my fears away and hold my hand through life.

And so I did it for myself.

If you’ve been living in the shadows, waiting for life to finally happen for you…
If you’ve been watching other people live the life you secretly want for yourself…
If you’ve been standing in your own way, blaming circumstances, timing, people, anything, instead of looking inward…

This is for you.

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I had just gotten out of an awful relationship—one that robbed me of my early twenties. It was one of those relationships that isolates you from everyone and everything. It was one of those relationships that puts you down, breaks you down, strips you from your confidence, your sense of self and leaves you questioning your worth.

You know the kind.

After four years of unhappiness, and the final two spent convincing and preparing myself to actually leave… I did.

Then came the months of shock. Untangling every unfair moment, every harmful and hurtful word, and the deep deep loneliness that comes from being in a relationship like that.

Time passed, and though leaving felt freeing, it revealed a strange emptiness. Not clarity, but the absence of myself: my confidence, my worth, my appetite for life.

The loneliness after of the loneliest relationship had settled in, and I simply decided that I didn’t want to live with that kind of hollowness anymore. I decided I wasn’t worthless or filled with fear. And I decided it was time to take my life into my own hands.

So I did the wildest, most liberating thing I could think of.

I booked a ticket to Italy… alone… as one does.

Having no one to travel with, no one to go on dates with, no one to call up whenever you feel lonely—is one of the greatest blessings you will ever receive.

This is how being alone became the thing that truly set me free.

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But when I arrived, I realized my going to Tulum wasn’t random. There was a pull I couldn’t explain just yet… one that made the whole thing feel strangely fated.

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I always find myself unfolding the places I visit. Land, energy, people. They all intertwine beautifully together, like a story that feels incomplete when one piece is missing. But one is always the catalyst. One creates the invisible tapestry that dictates how a place is experienced.

Is it the land that pulses to bring the energy to life? Or is it the people that animate the land, feeding it with their culture, their spirit, their rhythm? Think of the way Italy is moved by its people and their passion, or the way Spain’s character is woven together by culture.

But Tulum felt different. Its energy was intoxicating. Its soul felt alive—not just in how it moves, but in the way it listens. It grounds you, pulls you into the earth, and makes you feel the kind of magic it’s made of.

I felt it in the salty ocean that moves with the moon—strong, then still, but always breathing life into you. I felt it in the jungle’s greens, where every sound beckons you to be present. And I felt it at Vesica, which holds all of it at once. A sanctuary built around a turquoise cenote, it’s tucked away from the noise and feels like stepping into another world. The energy there is quiet and reverent, the kind that invites you inward rather than outward.

At the centre of the space, the cenote sits like a heartbeat, like the core that holds everything together. Its cool crystal water glimmers beneath the sun as butterflies and dragonflies skim its surface. Linen drapes flutter in the breeze. Built from raw woods, beds circle the cenote blending into the lush greens of the earth. It’s curated and ethereal without feeling designed.

While most people think of Tulum as a place for nightlife, I came for the day life. For the sanctuaries that calm you and the spaces that recenter and balance you. Vesica was exactly that.

What struck me most wasn’t the opulence and luxury of it all, though there was care in every detail—from the staff’s gentleness to the fresh juices offered the moment you arrive. It was the intention. The feeling that everything there was created to restore you, and bring you back to yourself, not entertain you. A true sanctuary, not a scene.

After Vesica, something shifted. I rebalanced, softened enough to truly be present, and Tulum began to reveal itself through synchronicities that become unmistakable when I finally learned to listen.

You see, the land speaks. But it speaks through its people. And the more you’re held by its culture, the more you notice they’re all speaking the same language.

Not Spanish or English, but a language from the soul. They share the same message, the same wisdom, the same blessings. As though they all know a secret I had to hear through crossing their paths.

You don’t have to look far to find Tulum’s true spirit. Intimate cacao ceremonies are held as offerings to visitors, locals, and the earth itself. Creating moments of unity and connection, you can feel the land speaking through the hands and voices of the people who care for it.

For many here, these ceremonies aren’t performative. They’re a way of listening. A way of remembering. A way of softening back into something older and wiser than ourselves.

That wisdom that comes from Tulum’s land is carried through its people. There is a kind of presence that often passes us by. An understanding of faith and love and connection to each other but also to the greater—to the realm of magic we may not always fully understand but yearn to.

And it’s all held by the earth, by the water, by the air and fire. It’s all of these worldly elements that creates the world we live in, but that creates us as well. That’s where the deep rooted connection stems from. In that we are all one with the earth because we are created by the very same elements. Elements are celebrated, cared for and worshiped rather than forgotten. Elements are the driving force of connection.

But it’s not just the rituals that offer deep-rooted moments of connection. Sometimes it’s in the woman who cooks from her home and builds a restaurant out of her garden, or the man who runs the local café and asks you what you’re writing, or the old friend you somehow run into on the other side of the world that came looking for the same clarity.

Tulum’s beauty is that the sacred isn’t reserved for temples or ceremonies. It spills into the everyday because it echoes through you, from the land and the ocean. From conversations and divine meetings. It finds you wherever you are. It listens to your soul and gives you what you’re looking for, only ever asking for you to listen in return.

On my last day, a woman shared a word with me that I had never heard before: apapachar. It means to soften, to embrace, to heal with the soul. To hold yourself when no one else can. To wrap your arms around your own heart.

It’s a word that doesn’t translate easily, because it isn’t meant to. It isn’t something you define, but something you feel. Care, presence, love. All at once.

She embodied it more than anyone I met. Softness, warmth, the instinct to nourish. To think I almost turned back on the beaten and bumpy road that led to Chez Cocco, where Cocco opens her space to cook for whoever wanders in. But something drew me in and toward her, just like Tulum did.

Her home-cooked meals tasted like they were made with love, and her sweet dogs and cats curled at my feet as I ate. It felt less like a restaurant and more like being invited into someone’s life.

As she spoke with me, I realized that this was the language everyone in Tulum had been speaking all along. It was the language that the land speaks to them through every element. The land that wraps its arms around them—softens, embraces and heals their souls. Apapachar.

And the wisdom the land shares is beyond life experience or passing time. It’s felt in a way we can’t see, touch, or explain. It’s intuitive to the core.

So I left Tulum with more than sun and sea. More than clarity, or a travel guide, or another place visited. I left remembering how to listen. To myself. To others. To the land beneath me. And I left with something I didn’t have the words for—until she gave me one.

Melody

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But this year, when I sit to think of the past year, what stands before all the wondrous things that have happened, is my faith.

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I remember walking into a chapel years ago in Rome. I didn’t truly believe back then, I only knew that there was something greater. I was drawn in by the art, the history, the commemorations, and the weight of it all.

I sat at the pew, bent my knees before the altar, and closed my eyes in prayer. Out of respect, out of habit from my childhood and Sundays in church, out of comfort. And behind my closed eyes, Saint Gabriel appeared before me. It was just a flash, and though I didn’t know what he looked like, I knew it was him.

The feeling was transcendent. An overwhelming moment that caught me off guard and moved me to tears. An affirmation of a presence I so often questioned. God’s divine messenger, letting me know he was with me and that he heard my prayers.

Years passed and I held onto the belief I had found in that chapel, but I couldn’t name it, or maybe I didn’t want to. Something inside me stopped me from doing so. A higher power, I would say or the Universe... but it felt incomplete, at least within me. Not incomplete in that I couldn’t feel His presence, but incomplete in my own faith, and how I leaned into it. How I put my trust in the greater.

But this year, I found God, truly. Or maybe he found me. Lost and looking for answers. Lost and looking for something to ground me, to anchor my values and beliefs in. And so I asked for Him. When I wrote, I would ask for Him to help me find the words. When I was scared, I asked for His protection. When I was seeking to find my way, I asked for Him to lead. I took the trust that I held within myself and the stubborn hyper-independence and hyper-reliance I held onto so tightly, and I gave it away.

To have found God was to have let go of my ego—and to realize that I am not, in fact, alone, as I so often have believed. It meant releasing the pressure I put on myself to do everything on my own, and trusting that His plan is good. Better than good.

I learned that I could never truly grasp what awaited me—what He was ready to fulfill for me—if I kept clinging to what I thought was meant for me. I learned that stillness was not inaction but while I waited (and learned patience), He was moving mountains. And when the trust in myself wavered, my trust in Him never did.

Though His presence had always been there, this year I learned how to listen. When I speak with Him, He answers. He answers in flashes of lightning that light up the darkness as I pray, eyes lifted to the midnight sky. He answers in the shivers that make their way down my spine—a knowing that he’s listening, placing his hand on my shoulder to let me know he’s near. Like an ever present being that holds me the way I hold Him. And just like that, my prayers don’t feel like stranded words anymore. Instead, they’re grounded and rooted in something that is flourishing. Finding God hasn’t removed fear from my life, nor has it removed the drive to keep working towards my dreams. But, it has changed who I reach for when fear arrives, and who I call to when the direction has shifted.

Despite the many blessings in my life, both the ones I share and the ones I keep to myself, the final month of this year was one of the most difficult. It pulled me out of my comfort and safety and stirred a kind of fear that left me shaken.

When there was nothing left to do but pray, I leaned into the faith that had strengthened me in the months past. And He answered. He answered in the gentleness and kindness of strangers, in guiding me safely, in carrying me to where I needed to be, and in granting me the things I prayed for so deeply. I know now, that I don’t have to look too closely to find signs of God. I just have to be open to receiving. Because He is all around.

And so, as this year comes to a close, I don’t look back searching for proof or permanence that I’ve done more, achieved more, seen more... Instead, I set my ego aside. I put my faith before me and I look back with gratitude for the losing, the unlearning, the surrender. For the moments that broke me down, shifted my trajectory and asked me to trust that which lives outside of me.

I don’t know exactly where the next year will lead me. But I know I won’t walk into it alone. This time, I enter it with a faith that has settled into my bones—one that steadies me as I step forward the same way I pray: present, still, and held.

Melody

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The first frame is my favorite.

Not because of the view or the stunning backdrop. Not for the colors of the sea, or for the crowds, but for its simplicity.

Three chairs against a white wall, aprons draped over them like a pause in someone’s day.

I imagine an abuela and abuelo there, maybe with their daughter or son, maybe a grandchild.

She’s just stepped out from the kitchen after a morning of cooking, passing down her most-loved recipes, he’s returned from tending the garden or errands in town. They sit together, looking out at the same view that has me in awe.

Maybe they gossip about the neighbours, maybe they bicker over something small, or maybe they sit in that easy silence that only comes after a lifetime together.

I wonder if they see the beauty that I do, or if it’s simply become the backdrop of their days. I wonder about the lives they’ve lived, and if they reminisce the way I know I will of these days.

It’s a simple frame, but it tells a whole story. It tells many stories. Where life and slowness and presence intertwine to become a life well lived. Despite the magnificence that people travel far and wide to see, it’s a humble life. There is no pretence, no facade. It simply just is.

I think about other lives a lot. Not in envy, but in a curious way.

It is a wonderful thing to leave the familiar behind. To hear the world, taste the world, feel the world and see the world in a lens that feels a little more undone and a little less polished.

It’s an unlocking of the senses in a way you’ve never done before. The familiar of your day to day is washed away by the unknown. You’re suddenly pulled out of the routine that causes everything to blend into one, so much so that you can’t tell days apart.

Your perspective becomes that of an old digital camera.

The perfection of it remains, because it simply is that. And at the same time, it is imperfect, blurry. Your view, once pulled out of the cycle you’ve become so accustomed to, is shaken up. The reality of these lives that feel so far away, are as mundane as your own life back home.

All it takes is that single frame with three chairs against a white wall with aprons draped over them. And you realize that you found someone else’s familiar. You found someone else’s day that seems extraordinary to you, but to them, it simply blends into every other.

We yearn for what others have, others yearn for what we have. But it’s simply all perspective. Life isn’t the perfectly captured picture. It’s the grainy digital camera that offers a different point of view.

And something about these small, ordinary moments makes me think about the shape of a life—how our days stretch and shrink depending on the season we’re in. How in our twenties, everything feels like a beginning. How at forty, we’re searching for meaning in the middle. How at seventy, we might look back and see it all as one long thread of ordinary days we didn’t realize were extraordinary at the time. Maybe that’s why scenes like this move me. Because they collapse time. They remind me that no matter where we are, we’re all just living through a series of “everydays” that eventually become the story of our life.

At our firsts breath and in our oldest age, in our purest innocence, or after we’ve been dealt every hand, when life has yet to begin, or when it’s coming to an end.

Be it skyscrapers that touch the clouds or mountain views that descend into the sea, we’re simply all the same—waiting for the next thing to that will set tomorrow apart.

Melody

The island whispered before I found the words to praise it.

To think a place like this exists in the world.
To think that God blessed us with such wondrous sights.
To think we get to see and feel all this in one life.

Mallorca is infinitely beautiful in its in-betweens.
It is one thing, all the while it’s the other.
It is disappearing and having it all.
It is the silence and the sounds of nature.

Mallorca feels like letting go, and letting God.

Narrow and winding mountain roads—where the only thing you see ahead is a descending cliff—until the next path opens to a medieval town that transports you.

Hidden trails curve through the bushes, lined with bouldering rocks and sudden drops, only for the next turn to reveal coves and glass waters as far as the eyes can see.

You swim into blues that feel eternal and nearly empty, but when you look beneath the surface, you meet the life that moves around your legs.

Downpours, thunder, lightning and flooded streets turn to clear as clouds pass to reveal skies that radiate in sun.

Desolate and bare open space, until the next mountain bend leads to fullness—to crashing waves, to strangers standing in awe alongside you.

Quiet and calm and asleep before the heartbeat of the island wakes to the pace of intuition, and the chiming church bells urge you to rise again.

Disappearing to the sounds of sheep and goats and horses, just before man’s creation appears in clusters of sandstone buildings where nature’s sounds are broken into a village hum.

Through silence and sound.
Through storms and stillness.
Through mountains and sea.

Some places remind you that heaven touches earth.

When words are lost, listen closely—
and let the island whisper them for you.

In a language of awe.
In feelings of devotion.
In the perfect space before, after and between.

Just like letting go, and letting God.

Melody

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Mallorca’s beaches aren’t just places to swim, but they’re portals to something that feels so cinematic and surreal, you can’t help but stare in wonder. The island is desolate and bare with endless open space until all of a sudden, you climb down a rocky path that leads to turquoise dreams as far as the eyes can see. From humble fishing towns to hidden coves, from medieval mountain villages to ports that spill into glassy waters, each shore feels like its own world.

And to think I’ve barely scratched the surface of this island and all it holds. To think I only got to experience a slice of the divine waters and postcard views in the meeting of cliffs and sea. But here’s everything I know so far—the beaches that took my breath away, the hidden spots worth the climb, and the ones I’ll return to again and again.

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There are those you see eye to eye with and those you disagree with. Those that are similar to you in some ways and others in none.

There are Christians and there are Muslims. There are Jews and there are Buddhists. There are those that are spiritual and those that are atheist. There are rights and there are lefts. There are men and there are women. The young and the old. The rich and the poor.

And with all that, there is everything in between.

The one thing that stands true in the midst of it all, is that they are all human beings. All souls.

Not one better than the other, not one superior or inferior.

The differences that create us, are what make us beautiful.
The respect and acceptance of those differences are what make us even more beautiful.

We can argue, and we can debate. We can speak our minds and we can stand for what we believe in. We can change our minds and agree or change our minds and disagree.

All of it is what makes up the world, from countries to communities and families.

Now, you can choose to live your life one of two ways.

One that is

Glorious
Wonderful
Joyful
Beautiful
Loving
Kind
Genuine
Empathetic
Sacred
Accepting

Or one that is

Miserable
Hateful
Angry
Ugly
Loathsome
Mean
Insincere
Callous
Profane
Rejecting

No one that walks this earth is perfect.
You can waver and you can feel lost. But that only means you can find your way back again. Again and again and again, you can CHOOSE to live a life that is good.

You can pray to be the best version of yourself, to be unwavering in your goodness so that you can hopefully send that energy back out into the world. To weave the tapestry of your life with threads of love, kindness and empathy. Reveal that in your soul, and unto the world.

In times of unsteadiness, you can pray to be guided back to solid ground in hopes that it can bring the world some peace, bring others some peace, bring your soul some peace.

The value of life, the value of a soul, is immeasurable.

It is a blessing, to be brought into this world and be given an opportunity to have a purpose. And to LIVE that purpose, is an even greater blessing.
To be able to touch lives, to provoke discussion, to catalyze change, to inspire, to heal, to love—it is holy work.

And when a life is lost—

A life that embodied purpose, standing for what he believed in, freedom to speak openly and debate differences with words and not violence

A life that encouraged discourse and dialogue that was meaningful, especially with those that differed from him

A life that spoke with courage and conviction and passion despite the uproar

And a life that challenged and invited us all to speak our truth, despite our
differences

It matters not if you agreed with him wholly or partly, or not at all.
It matters not if you shared his values or not at all.
It matters not if you liked him or not at all.

All that matters is that it was a life, a soul.

A husband, a father, a son, a friend and a holy spirit. Because all spirits are holy.

Now, you can choose to be a person with a spirit that is

Glorious
Wonderful
Joyful
Beautiful
Loving
Kind
Genuine
Empathetic
Sacred
Accepting

Or one that is

Miserable
Hateful
Angry
Ugly
Loathsome
Mean
Insincere
Callous
Profane
Rejecting

I will pray and send love your way nonetheless, because that is the kind of person I choose to be. And in times where I waver, I will pray to be guided back to steadiness.

It takes many kinds of people to make up the world. Which one will you choose to be?

— for Charlie

Part I : Opposite Directions

We had been set up by two of our friends. We had never heard of each other, our worlds had never collided, not that we knew of at least.

The first time we met, it was the dead of winter. A windy and grey January day where I would have much rather been hiding under my sheets at home. I almost wanted to cancel, but I knew I just…

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Seven hours between airports.
Two hours to make it onto solid ground.
Three more through rocky roads.
Twelve hours altogether.
But the feelings it conjures within you—well that’s worth every mile.

Arriving in Nosara isn’t just about reaching a destination. It’s about returning to a rhythm your soul forgot it knew.

One of the world’s five Blue …

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