Okay.

Okay, how long has it been?

Sixteen years.

The girls at Joe and the Juice are serving chisme and side eye. While I judge the two to my right for judging everyone else, a British family on vacation sits down to my left, drowning out the gossip I’m trying to overhear.

Inside the men are speaking Portuguese. Upstairs they speak Hebrew and Arabic while touring a unit in a building where the price will not drop below three million. The Israeli says he’ll think about it, the Lebanese man says I don’t like it and leaves.

The girls scroll fast with their thumbs as they talk, one in English and the other in Spanish. The prettier one has something rude to say about a mother walking by with her stroller. She rolls her eyes and she scrolls. Fast fast fast. The other chimes in from her phone, her feed, “Her sister had kids back to back and from one day to the next she posted THAT SHE GAVE BIRTH. I heard her podcast. I don’t know why I even listened to her stupid ass podcast.”

It’s hard to hear because of the construction and because of the brits. The girls get up. Now that they’ve left, I’m bored. I give the British sisters the same condescending look the Venezuelans gave me.

I open my phone to see that Hailey Bieber has dyed her hair the darkest it’s been in a decade. Under that, a child being ripped from his father. Under that, a tribute to Preston Gerber from an ex girlfriend of his I don’t follow. I put my phone away.

I hate Brickell.

I hold grudges for a very long time but never forever. There was a time in my life when I got so used to being uncomfortable I think I began to crave it. You spend enough time alone and you’ll begin to wonder at what point you became so drawn to shady energy, or if it was always. One day you think you’re a certain way and you build all this evidence. I’m not creative. I don’t finish things. My handwriting is ugly and I didn’t finish The Bell Jar.

I made myself a promise to stop complaining about having to clean and maintain the things I’ve prayed for. To be grateful that every day there’s something to clean, clothes to wash, mouths to feed. So far I’ve broken it a bunch. I’m not always nice and I’m not always grateful. I hate when people don’t do what they say they’re going to do which really means that I hate it when I don’t do what I say I’m going to do.

I abandoned The Secret History for a year before deciding, for reasons I can no longer defend, to finish it. I enjoyed the first hundred pages and then the small administrative pleasure of checking it off my goodreads. Grazie was right, I should’ve gone with The Goldfinch.

I have a new routine, I’ll tell you about it later. It’s very good and healthy. I used to dream of doing things like this. I used to drive around and imagine everything I have.

Last night my friends came over for dinner and the candles dripped onto the linen table cloth and no one asked me a single question about the move or my wedding and it was perfect. Perfect to just laugh and cook and be my worst self and not catch up. I’m done catching up. Catch me next year.

My brother doesn’t take days off but I do. They’re determined by my cycle and how much I accomplished the day before. My cycle runs my life, it always has, the only difference now is that I have a diagnosis. I plan, and cancel plans, for it. And when I’m kind to my body and order a virgin cocktail at the Delano on day one, I’m rewarded. I find a hundred dollar bill on the floor.

On my on days I go very fast and on my off days very slow. The stainless steel french press sits next to the bed, ready for refills. The boys leave and I turn on cable tv, this is important. I flip through until I find Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations which I watch for one hour and scroll on my phone during commercials. After the hour I turn the tv off and open my laptop. The house is clean and the laundry was folded yesterday. I will not workout, I will hardly move. I am so happy. I am full of screens.

On her Keeping-Up-with-the-Kardashians-inspired-reality-show, Earle Meets World, Alix Earle, Ashtin Earle, and their friends have drinks in New York, discuss their newly developed frontal lobes, and make fun of Sally for going to confession.

Alix spends most of the show crashing out over her ex boyfriend and Alex Cooper. When she is tempted to take the bait from the older, more established blonde media millionaire who has publicly challenged her to a fight, she puts her head down instead. She secretly works on a new business. She leans on her family. Her reputation is out of her hands either way. Either way, she’s rich in assets and in family, but not quite in health. She tests positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation, along with her sister. It’s important for young girls to see this and never envy her. It is important to see the cost of a life lived publicly, including the regret of disclosing sexual indiscretions on Call Her Daddy.

The two younger sisters resemble season one Kendall and Kylie. The little brother, Thomas, is nine years old. He’s in the room while his sisters talk about their likes, views, breast implants, and their parent’s infidelities. Thomas loves dinosaurs and is still wearing baby pjs. He drew a penis on the headboard of his bed but it was by accident. His father paid for one of Alix’s double ds and jokes about it at dinner with his ex wife, her boyfriend, the woman he cheated with, and all their children. I can’t help but find it all strangely wholesome.

I love people that are flawed and insane, not calculated and malicious. I love people that value honesty over image, people over perceptions. I love families run by women, but not without men.

I tell Marcello you’re my leader and I’m the boss to which he responds I’m the sergeant you’re the president everything’s on me but you make the final call. This is why we’re getting married, I think to myself on the way home. I have spent more time thinking about my marriage than I’ll ever spend on the wedding. And don’t get me wrong, I love weddings. I just think I’d rather be a guest than the host. I’d rather be a wife than a bride.

Alex is in the air force now and over the summer we could only communicate via letters. We were on the phone recently, speaking casually about the military, global conflicts, family gossip, and religion. I tell him that what I love most about Catholicism is the mysticism. The incense. The rituals. The rosary. The saints. So basically all the pagan parts, he says. And when I went to Barnes and Noble looking for Meggan Watterson’s Mary Magdalene Revealed I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Turns out it was next to the religion section, one copy tucked in the bottom corner of new age.

I take the book to the nail salon and I’m freaking out because they are coughing in the back. I used to enjoy doing my nails, now it’s a chore I resent. I resent the pressure to have them done and I feel guilty that I don’t enjoy something that takes two hours and a hundred dollars from me.

“Choose your color” gets me every time. I’m always shocked offended and panicked by the question. I hesitantly went for OPI’s Vampire is Buff. The girl that did my hands was different than the one that did my toes. They both gave me a second chance before the polish went on and I changed my mind both times. It felt like a revelation. I say thank you for asking me if I was sure because I wasn’t but now I am. I go back to my book and I’m smiling, I’m elated. I’ve finally FINALLY learned what I like.

That’s crazy she says when she hands me my coffee black, only my mom drinks her coffee like that. Yes thank you I say, thanks so much.

Prior to the third century, converting to Christianity was illegal and often punishable by death. In 313 AD, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity across the Roman Empire, setting in motion the imperial forces that would determine which Christian texts were true and which would disappear.

Some fifty years later, the Bishop of Athanasius of Alexandria wrote his thirty ninth Easter letter, listing the twenty seven books that would eventually become the New Testament. He warned Christians against the apocryphal books circulating alongside them, texts that had been respected for three centuries.

In 1896, at an antiquities market in Cairo, German scholar Carl Reinhardt purchased an ancient Coptic codex from an antiquities dealer in Cairo. Inside was a fragmented account of Mary Magdalene speaking with the risen Jesus.

An Egyptologist, Carl Schmidt, had translated the text from Coptic to German, and it was sent to a printing press in Leipsig in 1912. Before completion, a water pipe burst, destroying it all. The salvaging process was halted by the first world war, and Schmidt died in 1938 before being able to return to Leipsig.

Meanwhile, in 1917, parts of the same text were found in Egypt, in Greek, and slowly but surely Mary’s words were revealed. The first print edition was published in 1955, the only gospel written by a woman.

There is no shame, no fear mongering, no evidence that she was ever a prostitute. The goal of the human experience, according to her gospel, is to become undivided (ihidaya in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke). In order to reach this fulfilled state of unification, one must transcend seven “powers”: darkness, craving, ignorance, longing for death, enslavement to the physical body, false peace of the flesh, and the compulsion of rage. Interestingly enough, St. Teresa of Ávila wrote of seven states of being that exist within us. Ávila’s Interior Castle was published in 1588 while Magdalene’s gospel sat in an urn in a cave.

If we think of His resurrection as the ultimate act of love, I’d like to imagine he came back for her. His first word was her name. What if love is more important than salvation? What if it’s the whole point? And why why must the emphasis be that Mary of Nazareth, his mother, was a virgin and Mary Magdalene was a whore?

Subscribe now

After examining these matters, Peter said, “Has the Savior spoken secretly to a woman and not openly so that we would all hear? Surely he did not want to show that she is more worthy than we are?” Mary 10:3-4

“We have the issue of worth that runs deep, 2000 years deep. And we have the issue that as women we won’t be believed when we tell the truth.” (Watterson)

When my son asks me if God is a man or a woman I say both and neither. He double checks if Jesus is is his son I say yes God is Jesus’ father, but San José was his dad. He gets it because I have two moms and so does his father.

He’s quiet for a bit, processing. I don’t sugarcoat much for him. Like where we lived in México? Yes, our town was named after him.

Mexico and the Catholic Church are inextricably intertwined in their misogyny, magic, and corruption. Home to the most miraculous of healings and the most horrific of crimes, both demand a certain tolerance for contradiction. Fear, a feeling. Faith, a choice. Choices are more important than feelings, the priest says.

God creates Dinosaurs

God destroys Dinosaurs

God creates man

Man destroys God

Man creates Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs eat man

Woman inherits the earth

I like my toes blood-red and my fingernails skin-sheer. The whore and the holy, undivided.

Read more:

The economics of my school were clearest in the student vs faculty parking lots, and for the first time in my life, I was no longer surrounded almost exclusively by Cuban Americans the way I had been inside my Catholic parish bubble for thirteen years. Our grandparents left their wealth, degrees, and material possessions, assimilating quickly into 1960s Miami, making us too American for the rest of Latin America and too Latin outside of South Florida. American, nonetheless, all of us.

Soccer became my first love, but football was my first meditation. I never understood the game because it always put me in a trance. All sounds, no faces. I pavloved myself into stillness with the NFL jingle, the cadence of the announcers.

Football meant September, special grilled wings from Sports Grill after mass, and dragonflies in the morning on the field where we played capture the flag. As September approaches I crave my father’s house on Sunday. And guess what, I can finally have it, because I live down the road from him. It’s only fitting that the last post I’d write in Cabo would be Senior Year.

I have a feeling this will be the year I finally fall in love with football, having spent the last two months watching Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen play it every night. Friday Night Lights premiered in 2006 and ran for five years, capturing everything I feel most nostalgic about — fall, being seventeen, Tuscan real estate, and no botox. Dillon, Texas has been a kind of holding place for me in between the life I left and the one I came home to.

Everyone’s wondering what I’m going to do now. It’s harder to disappoint people when you’re eighteen thousand miles away from them. Still possible, just harder. Except when you forget an important birthday. Birthdays don’t wait for a crash out to end. I missed a lot of birthdays this summer.

What a luxury to cry all over Los Cabos. At El Ganzo and Leo’s salon, outside pilates when I told Michelle and in the car on the way to everywhere and on my terrace looking at the moon, waves crashing. Every time I run into a friend and share the good news and bad news. Everyone is so happy for us and it makes it harder. Makes it harder to leave.

When I close my eyes I take the elevator down to S. I drive past Villas de Mexico, out of Campestre, over the bridge and into Puerto Los Cabos. To our right there are cows and horses, the big cross, the marina, the Sea of Cortez. To our left, my baby’s first school and the hardest goodbye of my life. I have perfected every detail of the drive in my mind. I play it on repeat so I won’t lose it and when it gets to be nighttime, and our friends are about to ring the doorbell, I cut the dream off so I don’t cry.

I had this visual of touching down on the tarmac and feeling the humidity and crying happy tears and everything clicking into place, immediately. I dreamt of what that Wednesday night would feel like since we made the decision to move to Mexico five years ago. I was two months pregnant and no one knew. It was easier then though, to move, because it was always going to be temporary. It was always going to be between one and five years. And when the lights of my city flickered from below and we braced for the (Saturn) return, all I could think was what have I done what have we done…

We landed in MIA, our luggage did not. Freddie died. The car I bought was a lemon. I got called a beaner on substack by a user called “Bad and Blonde.” I was too tired to care, so we laughed instead.

The diamond sat in the safe for a year. Everyone in town knew how long he worked on designing the band. It was the most precious summer of my life. Time stopped with the World Cup. I put a lot of pressure on the final because I negotiated with chance that if Spain won, everything would be okay. We’d get the apartment and the preschool and the cats would be fine, there’d be a solution. We spent every night with our friends, and the lingering goodbye made us closer.

He asked me to marry him on the beach before dinner, on a Saturday, on the 4th of July. Mateo took the box from Lucia’s purse and she captured it on film. It was better than I ever imagined it’d be. It feels better than I ever thought it would feel as an adult but exactly the way I hoped it would feel at thirteen.

I’m surprised you guys chose to leave, it seemed like everything was falling into place.

In Mexico I learned a lot about my mind — I started to write. I leaned into my 12th-house stellium, my 8th-house moon. My inclination to celebrate taboo, death, and rebirth paired well with the particular Mexican instinct to find humor in life’s darkest moments. Baja isolated and nurtured us during the hardest moments of early parenthood. I returned to my faith because the country made it easy to, a Catholicism colored by mysticism, not shame. Austin, Texas became my preferred layover because the live country music would bring tears to my eyes.

I know, now, when it’s time to leave. The party, the friendship, the job, the country.

I’m near all the stores I grew up going to. I like all the same shows I watched when I was thirteen. I left a much bigger piece of my heart in Mexico than I did in Brazil. I got a better car, Mateo got the last spot at the school, and my building is a Tuscan dream, built the year the Dillon Panthers won state.

I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday, the one in Sunset Place. And while the rest of the mall has turned into a haunted liminal space of Miami’s millennial youth, the books are still there. Words always remain. Most things have changed since the early 2000s but in my house and on my tv and at the bookstores, it’s 2010.

Clear eyes. Full heart. Can’t lose.

Read more:

Last month in Miami, I told the girls (lifelong friends (twenty plus years)) at our sleepover that I feel like I’m only justnow actually processing everything that happened four years ago. The baby. The move. The move more so than the baby. Because the baby was never hard, the move was. Mold poisoning was. Launching a magazine in another country was. I still feel guilty that the move made the baby seem hard.

We’ve had friends since we arrived because we live in Mexico and everyone is lovely beyond words. At first I didn’t have the space for it. Two years ago I had to uncomfortably vocalize that I wasn’t capable of being a friend while navigating motherhood, surgery, and trying to live on two coasts at the same time.

Friendship gets weird after pregnancy. Socializing in general is strange in your 20s. Stranger when there’s a pandemic then you have a baby then you move I think. Everything and everyone got a little weird. I for sure got super weird. I don’t feel guilty for that. I’m thirty now and life feels like senior year. It’s felt like this since March. March-graduation is always the best.

3/3/26

Let me set the scene. I was carried to bed last night after falling asleep during love story and continued sleeping until six forty am no alarm. I put a twenty minute timer and woke up to a cup of tea followed by a cup of coffee and didn’t lift a literal finger until Mateo came to give me hugs and get dressed for school. I’m going to miss you so much he tells me. Me too baby. If I have a bad day you’ll tell my teacher and get me? Yes baby. That’s our new routine he says. Yes baby.

Lay in bed. Pray. Take a long silent bath. Cut up fruit. Kefir. Medicine. Jump on the blue couch in our room with the big blue blanket to edit my novel. Marcello is back from drop off and presents me two itineraries. I choose.

Work out for twenty minutes at the gym. Make breakfast and gossip with our cleaning lady. Sit on terrace. Text Kristen back forth back forth back forth back forth. Yin. He pulls me up from the floor and we kiss and then he holds my body still because I’m seeing stars and he can tell. Slick back my hair. Stop at the beach and watch the whales.

We’ll pick up our son in a bit. I’ll make tacos tonight.

As part of my coursework with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) we frequently did an exercise called the Circle of Life check in. It was basically rating different aspects of life from 1-10 on a regular basis. Things like finances, joy, home cooking, relationships, spirituality, health, education.

In the year leading up to my tumor, for example, I would score a 2/10 on social life, a 1/10 in physical activity, 9/10 creativity, 9/10 career, 9/10 home cooking. The secret is they’re all equally important. Cutting out movement and community was detrimental to my Health.

Now I have everything I wanted a year ago (new home) (pilates studio(s)) and gained the thing I didn’t know I needed most, something I took for granted for twenty years. Socializing is different from friends. Socializing is what I needed a break from. Social life is easy and fun.

Now I have Friends the way it was in college. Un grupito. Two live across the hall, like the show. More come in and out. Between the four of us on the top floor there are eight cats and one tortoise and one child. We share food and tea and coffee and right now also a vacuum cleaner because ours broke. And unbeknownst to our four year old, we’ve been running an underground Catan ring almost every single night after bedtime since March.

There are potholes on the highway on my way to the ranch. I sit up tall and straight with my chest up to the steering wheel to try to anticipate the holes. I lower the music to see better. The ranch sits on the beach next to a cliff on the pacific. It’s a horse sanctuary which means the horses are very happy and very free. The horses seem like they have a perfect circle of life score. The ranch is owned by a Spaniard and ran by French girls and there’s bossanova playing on the speakers. They’re running it in exchange for food and housing. They’re young and sexy and super French. They drive us up the cliff on ATVs and don’t need saddles.

We break for lunch and I sit across from Sofia and Ines while our waiter makes out with a customer at the Koi in San Lucas. Cabo San Lucas is way more sexually charged than San José. I don’t come here for anything except Costco. The energy is kind of insane not in a good way. I steal a used book at the coffee shop and then another one. The inspo for the shoot was Thelma and Louise. I’m just trying to stay in character.

And I didn’t want to tell you any of this because I’m still a little weird and paranoid. Because privacy. Because I’m happy and I don’t want you to take it. As my life gets so busy and finally full in the place where I physically live, it’s harder to show up so fully through the phone and two thousand miles away. Whatever. There’s always something to complain about.

Holy Thursday

The best time of year to be in Miami is December, and then April and May.

Within three minutes of deboarding our second flight we make it to la carreta at miami international just in time to order the remaining croquetas. One for each of us, except our three year old eats them all in arrivals.

It’s almost midnight and it feels good to be out of the desert. I love the humidity, the trees the huge ones down old cutler and coral way. I miss these trees and the grass. The grass here has tiny wild flowers that the fairies tend to. But the trees. The ones at the house on 87th street, dante fascell, matheson hammock, gables by the sea. The trees here are the witnesses to my life. Here is where I unearth feelings I forgot existed and that can always go one of two ways.

Every time I leave home to go home I do a craniosacral session with Eli. She said this trip would be good, fun. Last time I went she didn’t say that, last time she said to protect myself.

Alfredo picks us up to drive us to the airport like he always does. I pray the rosary on the way like I mostly always do. Alfredo’s family owns some of the best land in San José near the marina. He is fighting with the government to get it back because they gifted it to someone else. Last year when we realized at the airport we forgot the stroller Alfredo sped back to our house to pick it up for us.

We get to security when multiple group chats on my phone start going off. A shooting at FSU. Photos. I put my sunglasses back on to cry in the line of the bathroom.

I have friends whose siblings were in both the Parkland shooting and now, today’s. I remember driving home from Gainesville that night because I wanted to see my little sisters. Even when I was home in the same bed I’ll sleep in this weekend, I could not calm down. I remember being in the bed and I could not calm down. Even though we were all in the same house and everyone was safe. That was seven years ago.

Now the wallpaper is different and I like it. This weekend I am seeing all my siblings and we’re going dancing.

Good Friday

This year Semana Santa falls on the 64th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, and my dad’s copy of Didion’s Miami is on the counter. I ordered one for him the second I finished mine — orange on the cover, my favorite color, with her face on it. His is cooler, manlier, somehow more him and mine is more me. As if book covers are divinely assigned, a game the angels play with each other and with us. My father’s name is Angel and so is his father’s and when I read this book I think of them.

This trip is nice because I have a packed itinerary and no agenda. When Marcello and I first moved in together we lived on the other side of the park that my mother’s parents live next to. Ita used to bring me coffee and croquetas from the gas station across the street and once during lockdown she came over and I put an Elvis and Sinatra duet on the tv and she danced like she was seventeen again in Brooklyn, in my living room with her mask on.

She made tortilla because it’s Good Friday but she bought croquetas from Gilberts, which I’m glad I ate the ones my dad brought this morning because I hate the croquetas from Gilberts. The croquetas from Gilberts and Publix are the worst. My favorites are from the shell gas station on 7th between 57th and le jeune, the one across from their apartment which is weird that she went to Gilbert’s and not there.

After putting Mateo down for a nap my mom drives me to La Canastilla Cubana down the street. Think satin-trimmed blankets, tiny shoes, pastels, spiritual protection.

I have a baby shower tomorrow night so I’m picking up an azabache (Cuban evil eye repeller), Augustin Reyes’ violetas, a rosary for my sister and a new one for myself. A couple years ago we started a Sex and the City podcast but now she’s teaching at our old Catholic school, so I’m being supportive buying the rosary and scrubbing the internet of one more thing I never finished. The cashier writes everything down on paper and I pay in cash and it feels like the past. Actually it feels like Mexico.

My mom tells me the store used to be huge. Hialeah in the 90s when everyone had in person registries can you IMAGINE? As we’re leaving she asks me if I want to go to Target and I say no let’s go to the cemetery.

We go up the elevator instead of the stairs and get confused and disoriented. We’re the only ones here. Her brother Miguel has Polaco written on his tombstone, or whatever it’s called in the mausoleum, the drawer. Dora Llaurado Masood Homsey, Abuela to my mom, Madre to me, born in Aleppo in either 1927 or 1929, we were never too sure but the drawer says 27. They’re next to each other, five rows up out of six. I have to pull the giant staircase on wheels from another aisle on the other side of the building and we get it as close to her as possible and take turns climbing up. My mom starts to climb the rolling staircase and I am bracing for crying but then she starts being funny and yelling at them like normal and slapping her tio abuelo’s drawer. We sit on the floor across from their wall and gossip about our family. I ask her why polaco and she tells me in Cuba they called madre la polaca. That all the Arabs or anyone from “far” were referred to as polacos.

It always rains on Good Friday, at least in Miami. On our way out I told her to do an Our Father with me. I need to apologize for eating the ham croqueta and for the fact that I’m about to eat the chicken vaca frita from Sergio’s that one sister is not eating because it’s Good Friday but the rest of us are. In the middle of the Our Father the security guy comes in and screams SE VA A CERRAR EL MAUSOLEO. He tells us the main gate is closed to use the other gate or to wait for him. I lose my place and we have to start from the beginning. Once in the car we can’t get out of any of the gates and start loser lapping the cemetery. On our third loop I can’t find the security guy and bang on the glass window of the mausoleum which is now locked too and he comes out of his office and starts laughing and then I start laughing and he tells me in spanish that he’s getting in his car and will open the gate with us.

The Heat win right before we get in the car to go to my favorite bar which is huge because I have the type of family that screams at the top of their lungs during games and there are seven of us not including boyfriends and girlfriends and now, Mateo, who covers his ears, too loud.

When we get to Ball and Chain there is no line to get in and plenty of room. I split a shot of patron with one of my sisters and chase it with a margarita. The place opened in 1935 and you can feel it when you dance. This isn’t a place where you should get away with just talking. You must dance. And so we do, with the ghosts of Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong. Where Havana vanities come to dust.

Your Miami is so plastic and mine is so romantic. Mine is made of Cuban tile.

Holy Saturday

Leaving Grazie’s baby shower we see bunnies running across the lawns. Things like this happen in the key. Not quite a real place, but if the mangroves could talk. The mangroves in Key Biscayne have more gossip than the trees, especially on a night like tonight, Easter eve.

Easter Sunday

I am never the last one to get ready but today everyone is YELLING at me. I woke up late, exhausted.

I skipped mass and prayed the rosary instead. The one I just got at la canastilla. I tell Marcello to tell them to start the egg hunt without me. Doesn’t work, the yelling continues. Everyone everywhere is being yelled at. I walk into the living room with an attitude and barely notice my sister standing with her hands behind her back as I say hi to my mother, her mother, her boyfriend’s mother and then it hits me. Her left hand pops out and everyone starts screaming and crying. She’s getting married, the first of the five.

Mateo does the egg hunt alone and no one notices because we’re opening champagne bottles and toasting and crying. The crepe maker is set up in the backyard and more family starts arriving. Every time I turn my head someone new has arrived and it keeps getting better and better. In the middle of the party Mateo comes up to me in his Ralph Lauren button down and says there’s too many people here tell everyone to leave and put my pjs on. I tell him there’s nothing I can do about the people in the middle of the party but that we could go put his pjs on.

Today was perfect.

Easter is the best.

I wrote this a year ago. Abuela was there. The first thing she asked when my sister showed her the ring was “Cuando?” (When?) It’s almost as if she knew she wasn’t going to be there. She was buried holding the rosary I bought at la canastilla. The wedding is in two weeks. I’ll be home soon.

He’s six years older than me. He jumps out of helicopters for a living. Not to entertain, to search and save. He introduced me to Before Night Falls, Kabbalah, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2, apple cake, hookah, Coney Island, the Russian bathhouse in Brighton beach, Amores Perros, Y Tu Mamá También. He taught me how to catch lizards, taught my son too.

He lights candles for me when I’m worried and celebrates my mediocrity, my choices, my lifestyle. I once gave him my car and he once gave me his apartment.

I need to call him back to tell him what my grandfather told me when I was in Miami last month.

Both of my grandfathers are revolutionaries. Rebels. Fighters. Fathers. I’ve written about my father’s side but never my mother’s. Never about the arabs in New York. Never about how madre cleaned a house in Brooklyn where the mafia showed up and knocked on the door. How she opened the door and they shot the son in the face. Never about Pupi.

Pupi carries around his passport in his shirt pocket. He’s been in the United States sixty seven years and never learned English. The Italians helped him in New York. Eventually he made it to Miami where he’d never need it.

Pupi is the youngest of six children. They’re all dead, except him. When his twin died, he changed his birthday back to June 8. My whole life it was July 8. The day before Sara’s. Apparently there was a mixup in New York: junio y julio. He never corrected the person at immigration. He does things only a gemini would do. We should’ve known. We thought he was a cancer.

At Mateo’s baptism Pupi recited the second half of the Our Father in latin, then told the priest he met my grandmother when she was eighteen and he was forty. Keep that to yourself the priest said.

He used to be an altar server in Cuba. He tells everyone many times. When he tells me the story about how he told the priest that he was an altar boy in Cuba and recited the prayer in Latin, I tell him I know, I was there, it was yesterday. I used to be altar server, too. I used to stuff unconsecrated Eucharists into the pockets of my jeans.

I beg him to tell me things about the revolution. How he joined the underground groups to help aid the rebels in the mountains. How he’d hear about fulano or fulana going up to the Sierra. He thought about it but he couldn’t do that to his mother.

When he recalls being captured imprisoned beaten and tortured the pain he still feels is for his mother. How she cried and suffered and worried. When I ask if any of his other siblings participated in revolutionary activities, he says no, just him. And then the script flipped as it often does in revolutions. Revolutionary values became counterrevolutionary. He had to hide, again.

His friends set him up in Jamaica and then the arabs set him up in New York and he brought everyone else over one by one. And he never got a ticket. He has a perfect record and a blue passport and blue eyes.

He asks me later if I was recording him when he told me those stories. No, I lie. Good, good, good thank you.

He’s scared of everything now, especially the doors. The doors must be locked and checked every hour on the hour. I was not like that until this summer.

Pupi is ninety-six. Pupi loves music. He became a musician in his sixties. Plays the congas at the club and at home. Pupi is the backbone of the band. I thought covid was going to kill him because it kept him home from the club but it didn’t. No one in Miami stayed home anyway.

I had no idea exactly how deeply he was involved in the urban movements to topple Batista. People nowadays don’t care too much about what happened in 1959. I’ll tell Alex, he cares. He’s the only one that gets me like that. He’s the only person I can call to talk about Frank País.

We were the first in our family to return to Cuba. Separately in 2016, and then in 2018 together, with our mothers. We were supposed to return in 2020 with more people, in March, but well, you know.

There were years where I’d avoid his call because I was frozen. Overwhelmed with the relationships that asked too much of me, avoiding the ones that nourished me for free. Now I call him in the car.

Our names are the same and so they mean the same thing: protectors of humanity. “Defenders.” We defend the people that we love and protect each other’s dreams.

And so how’s the guitar? I love music just not the music the world loves now he tells me. His friends listen to music you need vitamins1 to enjoy.

I think me and you are on this planet to keep the past alive I tell him. Write that down he tells me.

My mother is his godmother and he is my son’s godfather.

And I am the prettiest girl in the whole wide world who everyone loves.

Read more:

The father chose the child’s name. The mother wore Vara Vintage and Manolo Blahniks.

B&W photographs by Unique Design Studios. Shoutout Martha, Maddie, and Mel, the best in Miami. The film color photos were taken on a disposable camera and developed at Palm Film Lab on Coral Way and 57th. The reception was held at La Carreta with lots of Cuban coffee and croquetas.

These photos will be printed, slipped into a chunky album, and labeled with handwriting that’s barely legible. For my grandparents who kept everything, for my son, for the record.

I’ve mostly had a healthy relationship with food, minus the years I did Miami Swim Week. It’s been five years since my feet touched a runway. I’m glad that I’m the kind of person that tries a bunch of things and I’m glad that I’m the kind of person that walks away from a bunch of things.

This has been sitting in my drafts because I felt weird about how you’d feel about it. The feeling passed. I’m quite pleased with me lately. Everything seems to be falling into place.

Since my last post, I’ve taken things up a notch. Athlete mode. Division I. That’s what I told my boyfriend during our annual meeting.

And while we can write down, announce, and proclaim who we want to be, we’re still who we are. So when Marcello came home and told me that Warren’s brother cured his mold symptoms with a three day water fast I said that’s bullshit.

That night, I prepared for my first fast.

I was already in it when I told my chat (yes I use AI for my health anxiety, unfollow me sue me bite me I don’t care) about my plans to go 72 hours without eating. I didn’t tell it that I secretly wanted to BEAT Warren’s brother and go longer than that. This was its response:

Got it. Let’s get concrete and grounded for a second. A 72-hour fast is intense, especially given your recent health stress, meds, sensitive stomach, and nervous system load.

To which I replied I am feeling good. I am open to not being so strict i just want to give my body a chance to see how it feels since ive never done anything like this before. I just scheduled a lymphatic face massage sunday at 12:30 which helped so much on dec 28 with my sinus when i did it. I am open to breaking fast after? or even before. what do you suggest

And so we created a plan: A modified intentional physiological pause.

“A fault this body has is that the more comfort we try to give it the more needs it discovers.”

—St. Teresa of Ávila, The Way of Perfection, Chapter 11

I reference her often because of a string of synchronicities that followed me to Brooklyn two years ago and continue to unfold. A Spanish mystic and writer, she dealt with chronic illness, intimately familiar with the body as both vessel and burden. Favorite color orange. Founded 13 monasteries. I have 13 tattooed on my arm. I gave birth on the 13th. I digress. She was an Aries.

My plan to not complain about what I’m about to do is to not tell anyone and to stay as far away from my family as possible during:

January 9th (Day 1)

My last meal was last night around 6pm. Filet mignon, grilled peppers, endive salad. Today I had a green juice and some black coffee. Just a few sips. Easing into this.

Mel is on her way to the hospital, to deliver her second child, first son, and I am so excited. I won’t sleep until he’s born and she’s okay.

Mateo is on my lap as the wind roars through his bedroom window. In one week we will wake up in Miami. I try to memorize every inch of my four year old’s bedroom. The one he never sleeps in. We are surrounded by his stuffies while we have a cuddle party. I am so devoted to him I can never get anything done. I’ve been thinking lately that I don’t want another child.

I am trying to search for fasting in the index of The Way of Perfection but I am also in a rocket ship in space making wishes on shooting stars. Mateo wishes for Raichu the evolution of Pikachu.

I was deeply disturbed by my dreams last night. Something horrific that happened somewhere between Dadeland and the palmetto. The giant red snakes on miller.

By 10:30am I am starving. Marcello makes arepas and I lock myself in our room trying not to smell them.

I wouldn’t be able to do this without him. He hired two women to come clean the house and cook for us so that I wouldn’t have to cook food I can’t eat.

At 1pm, my energy surged. I placed a $150 Brandy Melville order at 1:09pm and three minutes later booked a lymphatic facial for Sunday. The food I didn’t cook smells so good I light a candle to smell something else.

At 2:30pm I started creating calendar invites for our upcoming trip and sending them to Marcello, some to Sara. I look up the menus of the places I want to try and then realize that’s a terrible idea so I stop.

It’s 4 now, I’m doing laundry and my lab results came back. I’m not sure what anything means but my cholesterol is excellent. It just gets better and better. After I had Mateo it was through the roof and my doctor wanted me on medication as soon as I stopped breastfeeding. I’m grateful I listened to myself and not to him. I love my doctors but they’re not always right. Not even close.

My head is starting to to feel a little weird and I’m cold. The first day is the hardest, they say.

January 10th (Day 2)

I woke up enraged. The cats scratched one of my favorite dresses. I watched My Oxford Year followed by one episode of Sex and the City and then People We Meet on Vacation.

It’s noon and I’m crying because chat thinks it’s time to quit break.

“At ~42 hours, breaking is completion, not quitting.”

And yeah I didn’t sleep but neither did my best friend and I don’t think Warren’s brother broke 42 hours in. The plan was SIXTY hours. My plan was seventy two. Seventy three to beat Warren’s brother. I don’t even know Warren’s brother. I didn’t even want to do this.

I had a little coffee, I’m feeling better. I would love to make it to 48 hours.

I prepared the broth at two. I made it to 44 hours. It’s fine because I like numbers and forty four is beautiful.

And at some point between breaking down and breaking the fast, a perfect baby boy was born and Mel is okay. That’s all that really matters. Maybe I do want to do it again (a baby, not the fast), one day. Not soon.

Tonight I will say a little prayer that we all sleep good. I’m done suffering for the year, life’s too good.

I wish I could say I woke up one morning and took radical responsibility for this goal but the truth is I’m inherently lazy, genetically skinny, and hardwired to choose pleasure over progress. Unfortunately it took a health scare, because the tumor of 2024 just wasn’t enough!

The cough (and the crying) started in September, in Miami, exactly one month1 to the day of losing my grandmother. It only affected me at night, which gave me just enough daylight to lie to myself.

I began to overindulge: eating a tub of Cold Stone’s birthday cake remix that triggered the worst endometriosis flare I’d had since before surgery, half-assing my mold detox, drinking wine or beer wherever and whenever possible, shutting down the possibility of dreams with delta-nine.

Towards the end of the month and into October I started baking with Mateo and hiding mental breakdowns. The biscuit craving came from binging Yellowstone, which completely destroyed my otherwise frail and crumbling nervous system. I thought I had detoxed with Sweet Magnolias but I still have nightmares about scenes that don’t exist. I don’t regret it because I loved it. I often love things that hurt me, and that has to end.

Grief crept in on a Friday in November. Nothing crazy. I put on one of her necklaces and said nothing about it out loud. So when the memories of that week popped up at lunch, I felt quietly validated by the other side.

There was the massive dragonfly, in traffic hovering. And when the necklace unclasped and fell into a public toilet my son yelled MAMI YOU HAVE TO GET MAMA YEYA’S NECKLACE. I said Baby, that’s so gone.

I began to replay her funeral the way I replayed the secret video, the one I took quickly at the burial because I didn’t think it was appropriate but they looked so handsome when they carried the casket. The thing about funerals is you’ll have eight hundred interactions and remember, truly, three. It’s the same conversations, with everyone, once you’re in the nodding smiling mode. But one moment still hugs me.

When my abuela died, I… Maytee put her hands around her neck, closed her eyes, and shook her head softly, it never goes away.

En solo un momento
Es solo un momento

The martinis didn’t start until the end of November and it was a short lived affair that crashed and burned in a week, the week we went to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving.

I hopped off the plane at LAX, and immediately had an asthma attack. I don’t have asthma.

I ordered a super extra filthy martini at dinner and chalked the attack up to “silent reflux” after manically googling my symptoms. I even scheduled an appointment with a gastroenterologist for after the trip to confirm my self-diagnosis.

Pura gente loca en LA — coming from the girl that dropped $450 on vitamins at Erewhon. Either way the martinis were delicious. The carpaccio melted in my mouth like butter. The Caesar salad so cold and crisp and I kept saying this is the dinner of my dreams! And who cares about the crazy man harassing us... How’s the Justin Bieber rigatoni? Delicious? Yummy. Good.

My feet hurt the whole time because the dermatologist cut three holes in my right foot and I refused to wear anything but leather boots. I didn’t mean to bring chaos to Beverly Hills, but it followed me home with a vengeance that was no match for the fancy supplements.

The cough ramped up and a few days after getting back to Mexico, I woke up at three in the morning to the sound of myself wheezing, chest tight. I downloaded four episodes of Sex and the City, threw some blueberries in a ziploc, and drove myself to the ER.

The doctor said I seemed fine, my lungs seemed fine, and no sign of infection. Probably reflux. Tylenol for my strained muscles and some cough medication that didn’t work.

The gastro started me on a PPI and other reflux medications to help get me out of the crisis. He referred me to an ENT who wanted to rule out a bacterial infection and prescribed me antibiotics and an inhaler. He referred me to a pulmonologist who I would wait two weeks to see.

By this point I had cut out alcohol, tea, dairy, gluten, carbonated drinks, citrus, garlic, onion, sweets, and late-night eating due to the reflux suspicions. The only thing I refused to renounce was coffee. And then I got worse.

The antacids don’t seem to be helping but I take them diligently. I cannot lay down without having an attack yet I push through yoga classes and buy a pilates package. I spend the first two weeks of December crying in the car, and at the kitchen table, and during yoga. At night, I cough so hard that I pee myself, over and over and over again. I sleep with as many pillows as it takes to keep me fully seated, and wake up around four or five, choking.

Mid-December, on a weekend trip to La Paz, another asthma attack from walking two blocks uphill. No inhaler. Seated oceanfront at an incredible restaurant, I try to not die and also smile and feel grateful to be in such a magical place with my family. And with the check the waiter placed a dirty martini with three olives on the table and I looked at Marcello and at the martini and back to Marcello and then at the waiter and thought what kind of sick joke is this?

The Friday before Christmas I peeled off my gel manicure while I waited for the pulmonologist to review my chest CT. It’s not reflux. It’s something else. Something we need to confirm with more bloodwork. But it’s going to be okay and it’s going to ultimately help everything, because everything is connected.

And after the first dose of the new medication and ditching the rest, I can sleep again.

Now that I can sleep I can notice what shifted. My skin is glowing. My body looks different. My cycle is painless. My dreams are processing repressed fears. And I didn’t expect to achieve all this while targeting a cough.

And I’m not upset that the homeopath and the osteopath and the gastroenterologist were wrong. Each of them sent me on a path of making different choices. Small ones, simple ones, often hard ones.

Like finally taking responsibility for creating an environment that’s conducive to my healing. Relajate my tennis coach tells me over and over. I have to re-learn to loosen my grip. I had been avoiding the idea of taking classes for the past four years because I didn’t want to be yelled at. Marcello tells me you’re an adult now, no one is going to yell at you. And my backhand is still good. I’m going to make it better. Everything is already better.

All the things I did just to become inhabitable in my body and in my mind:

• Stopped eating at 70–80% full, an experiment that built self-trust and helped my body feel safe

• Welcomed rage and stopped tiptoeing around everyone else’s nervous system at the expense of my own (giving in to get along creates rage and suppressed rage creates health problems)

• Stopped eating after 6 pm (yes I went to bed hungry and fantasizing about breakfast)

• Prayed out loud every night with my family

• Paired every Western medicine appointment with an energetic healing (craniosacral therapy, BodyTalk, acupuncture)

• Stopped consuming scary or triggering media (clicking “not interested” on Instagram posts or taking it a step further → settings and activity → Suggested content → Tap Sensitive content → Choose Less. Same for political content.)

• Detoxed from my big three: lemon, onion, garlic (there is something to be said about briefly removing what you never question)

• Lymphatic drainage!!!!!!!!! (specifically face + abdomen)

• Lost interest in how I’m perceived by people who are obsessed with being perceived as “cool”

• Cut out dairy and gluten completely (except for one or two arepa cheat days)

• Ate extremely boring foods long enough to crave how they made me feel

What I ate:

• Scrambled eggs with a sliced banana on the side

• Oatmeal with water, frozen blueberries, flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, and 100% pure maple syrup (trace minerals & antioxidants)

• Chicken without rice, topped with salsa macha, some grilled peppers, cucumber and avocado salads

• Spicy green soups multiple times a week (usually lots of zucchini, broccoli, bone broth, a jalapeño) topped with olive oil, parsley and an entire potato cubed and fried

• Sardines with gluten free everything crackers, hummus, parsley, ikura and salsa macha (Sardines are crazy… Sardines are basically an anti-depressant for your gut)

• Green apples with almond butter

• Cucumber with olive oil and salt

• Beet salads (nasty)

• Hummus and carrots

• Pomegranate seeds (buy the entire fruit, no pre-cut anything around here)

What I drank

• Water (ugh)

• A tiny watered down black cup of coffee a day

• Agua de jamaica (hibiscus tea made at home in huge batches because I chug it)

• Golden milk lattes in the afternoon (organic blend of turmeric, ginger, cacao, cardamom, clove, black pepper, and nutmeg from the local market) with almond milk

• Lots of lavanda matchas from the new matcha place that finally opened in Cabo

Choosing joy that feels familiar and nostalgic to my inner child:

• Tennis lessons

• Taylor Swift’s End of an Era docuseries

• Chicken Soup for the Soul

• Finally bought Wuthering Heights to read before the February film release (big Nicholas Sparks tween)

• Nick@Nite

• No substances

The power of routine, responsibility, and nervous system repair:

• Bought a vibration plate and started a new morning ritual I look forward to that wakes up stagnant energy and helps move stuck emotions

• On that note, QIGONG with LuChin

• Accepted the fact that every single day it’s up to me and no one else to make myself feel good

• The day before I ended up in the ER I bought a 20 class pilates package that I committed to even if that meant keeping a rescue inhaler next to the reformer

• On top of almost daily 9 am pilates, I prioritized somatic, yin, and restorative yoga to help my body release trapped emotions and grief

• Felt the grief I wasn’t allowing myself to feel, because it could be worse, because I should be grateful (there was a full week period where I couldn’t get through my meditations without sobbing so I leaned in and did them back to back to back to cry harder) (eventually it stopped)

• Processed the year, month by month, pen to paper (nearly forgot that Flu A almost took me out in February)

• Nasal rinses, multiple times a day, using a neti pot with distilled water and non-iodized salt (Huge, if you have kids get the NeilMed sinus rinse and thank me later)

• No alcohol. Not even on noche buena or Christmas (when out at dinner I’ll order a suero: mineral water with lemon in a salt-rimmed glass.)

Deseando menos:

In The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Ávila defines interior mortification as “proceeding gradually, not giving in to our own will and appetites, even in little things, until the body is completely surrendered to the spirit.”

Restraint didn’t shrink my life. It gave it back.

That being said there is a time and place to put in the work and there is a time and place to put it down. Take me always, with a grain of salt. Because Franky, my dear, I don’t give a damn.2

Read more:

Let’s begin, in order.1

1. Soy Cuba, 1964

   We begin at the boiling point. The why. Gorgeous. The cinematography. The music! La Habana! Shot by Soviet and Cuban crews, you will be delirious by the end.

   

2. Memorias del Subdesarrollo, 1968

   This is my personal favorite and I’m not sure what that says about me but maybe you can decide and let me know. An abandoned intellectual, huffing and puffing aimlessly around a Havana he no longer belongs in2.

   

3. Retrato de Teresa, 1979

   A working mother begins to confront the Revolution, exposing the undefeated machismo and small betrayals that defined domestic life by the 70s. We don’t talk about CDRs3 enough — about what happens when your neighbors start snitching for free.

   

4. Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas, 1991

   Alice in Wondertown turns the Revolution into a surreal satire and somehow survived censorship. Then again most people were probably preoccupied with the lack of toilet paper on the island.

   

5. Fresa y Chocolate, 1993

   A classic. Most people’s intro to Cuban cinema — the unexpected friendship between an artist and a revolutionary. If you’re intrigued but intimidated, start here.

   

6. Conducta, 2014

   Devastating. An award-winning look at the children and teachers navigating a society stripped of its moral compass.

   

7. Todos Se Van, 2015

   This one hurt my inner child of divorce. One parent loyal to the Revolution, the other desperate to leave, you can imagine how that might complicate a childhood.

   

8. El Acompañante, 2015

   This movie. THIS MOVIE. During the AIDS crisis of the 80s, HIV-positive patients were quarantined in military hospitals, each assigned a “companion”, often a disgraced soldier or athlete. The Companion walked so Los Frikis could run.

   

9. Before Night Falls, 2000

   There is a reason a film like this could never have been made in Cuba. If you’re an artist in any capacity, this is a must watch. Adapted from the memoir of Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright Reinaldo Arenas4. Javier Bardem the man that you are.

   

10. Los Frikis, 2024

    Punk rock a lo Cubano. The last film I watched at Sunset Place. I appreciate Adri Arjona’s commitment to the accent, something so many actors fail at. I may be making this up but I think she was the only non-Cuban in the cast? Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’d love to know what films you’d add.

Read more:

Do you want to hear about the $900 Michelin pigeon? Or how I forced several veterinarians to look me in the face and promise me it is impossible that I contracted rabies? A recent cartel threat? The r@pe dream?

Well forget it. My lips are sealed. It’s negative and crude. I never want to speak about it again. The only thing I’ll clarify is that the pigeons were not native to Miami, but to Oregon or California, or both, where they lived off an exclusive olive diet. Yes I regret it. It happened on the eclipse.

There have been 13 earthquakes in the past twenty four hours.

The weather changed. Everyone’s back. I finished Yellowstone. Fell in love with Turkish Netflix. Got kicked off my dad’s Netflix, again. I love you whatever you do don’t kick me off the phone plan please :) I bought my own Netflix. Continued on my Turkish endeavors. Lauren’s new song came out and I play it on repeat.

For his fourth birthday, my son was gifted a thousand-piece Pokémon puzzle by a classmate. We turn on the story box in his room, dance it out for the first two songs, and then assume our positions on the floor while the story portion of Lilo and Stitch begins, our cue to get to work. I’m starting to learn their names, the language. He tells me to count in Arabic, then Portuguese, unimpressed that I can’t in French.

I’m off tiktok. I don’t miss it. I’ve been thinking about the old way of doing things. Not ancient like Bacchic rituals. Old recent like flip phones, Something’s Gotta Give, matches, politeness, pizza parties, puzzles. Cowboy morality and frontier delusion.

We invite our friends over for the first time which forces me to leave the house for the first time in five days to get the special wine the one from San Miguel. We order too much pizza and laugh so hard I have to squeeze my legs together and the next morning even harder when I remember what happened.

When I see multiple missed calls minutes apart from my sister, my mother and her mother, I assume they’re all together and start with my grandmother but they’re not, she’s home. I begin to interrogate her about her aunt the one who died in Guanabacoa from tuberculosis in 1959. The one she named my mother after. The Turkish show convinced me I’m carrying her fear. She died at my age and lived by the sea away from all her siblings (three sisters and a brother just like me). She was the tallest. She died in September.

I want to know her birthday but she doesn’t know her birthday but that she’ll call Syma tomorrow and ask. Call her I said and then hear a shriek through the phone. DIANE KEATON HAS DIED. Diane Keaton and my grandmother are the same age.

My sister calls Marcello and she forgoes a greeting to tell me YOU DIDN’T ANSWER ME AND I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT I JUST FOUND OUT I HAVE A BLEEDING DISORDER AND PROBABLY YOU HAVE IT TOO. Add it to the list! I yell.

Mateo calls our wired headphones his cable dogs and drags them all over the bedroom floor. I delete the apps I block out the news. I sleep with the cable dogs next to the bed in case I wake up at 3 and need to hypnotize myself. I go to the homeopath and the osteopath. To somatic yoga and yin yoga and body talk and craniosacral therapy. Pablo Palma said it was my esophagus, not my lungs. Eli told me to try on trust like a costume. Turns out it was, also, my spleen! The spleen is full of worry.

Massage the spleen. Infiltrate the dealer find the supplier. All this is very important because when done back to back to back to back everything can change. I swore I was done talking about this.

I text with Lauren back and forth, about our spleens and our fears, while she’s at rehearsal with Cimafunk. I tell her I’ll call her on Friday after my akashic records reading.

A man asked me for a ride last Thursday. I said what and he asked again, with a smile. I said no. He felt very friendly. I thought it was absolutely insane of him to ask me in a dark parking garage and ruminated over it while I drove down the mountain. I wasn’t always so spoiled and scared. I tell my friends over and over I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. No one here knows who I was. Que siempre salí solita.

That I’ve seen political instability I lived across the park where the girls were attacked in the South of Brazil, ten years ago. I still walked twenty minutes to the gym every night to take a hot shower. I still went out to dinner once a week, alone. Somewhere nice. Sometimes, the nicest. There is a difference between study abroad and foreign exchange. There is a difference between immigration and exile. Exile and expat.

Silvana Estrada’s newest Tiny Desk came out this week. One of the best I’ve seen. Real music. Marcello grew up with her, in Veracruz. I need her and Lauren to sing something together. That will surely heal my spleen.

Fast forward to minute 11 to understand the perpetual terror only a woman knows. To put this fear into words is one thing, to do it like Silvana is to conjure something very powerful and very old. The song becomes an invocation. The song helps me love my fear and let her go.

Si me matan
Cuando me encuentren
Que digan siempre
Que digan siempre

Que fui cantora
Viviendo sueños
Que como todas
Crecí con miedo

Y aún así
Salí solita
A ver estrellas
Andar los días

Y aún así
Salí solita
A ver estrellas
Amar la vida

Also I ordered a knife on amazon.

Read more:

Good for him, when I heard about the beautiful home in his future, the one he’s paying for himself, the one near us. It shocked me as soon as I said it, the sincerity of it. The lack of reaction in my gut. I was over what this guy did. It’s not so much what he did, it’s what he said and how we found out about it.

Not to fret, plenty more where that one came from.

It is of the utmost importance, having an enemy. It is equally important that the enemy is not family, that’s something else. Fighting with blood is one of the great sorrows in life. I’m talking school, social-network, work related frenemy type enemies. No physical threats. Like my brother would say, algo light.

Enemies remind us that we are alive. It is better to be mad than to be sad. It is better to have an enemy than a flat tire, a jury duty summons, or a tiny cut on your finger near the nail. Better than a broken heart. Better than a grave to visit. Better than a diagnosis to deal with. It is better to have an enemy than to go no contact with a sibling.

In (Western) society, where pop culture has become both the mirror and maker of the zeitgeist, everybody needs someone to despise. Rivalry as currency; comparison as culture. Every Taylor needs her Charli, every Nicki her Cardi. Because having a nemesis is fun. It’s all part of it, if you want to be a part of it. You’d be remiss without yours!

Anyone can fight a stranger at a bar, or more modernly in the comment sections of (insert) app, but it takes stamina to have an enemy. The type that takes public shots at humiliating you, or worse, beating you at something. The kind that happens slowly, over years. The best kind of enemy is one you admire in some way. Otherwise it’s just bullying. And this isn’t about that. I’m talking about the former friend that now copies you. Because you’ve never copied anyone.

Our enemies, if chosen strategically, sharpen and inspire us. They teach us how and when to fight and how and when to stand down. They reveal what’s important to us — what’s worth defending and what deserves release. And in the process, hopefully, nudge us to get to know ourselves better. It’s nice to have one you don’t think about too much, only when you need it. Only when they come up.

Mine came up last week after realizing I had been poisoning myself with peppermint tea. Both from the modeling industry, both unnecessary. One I unfollowed, the other I muted. With one I lit the bridge on fire. I’m feeling more neutral about the other. Then again I still have the text saved.

And another thing about a good enemy, they’re not forever. Most of the time, they’re not even mutual. Memory should never be as mean as impulse. Neutrality is victory.

The only substack I kind of regret and cringe at is this one.

The agent that triggered me for so many years — she had a point.

The same fire sign as me, strong-minded, big presence. But unlike me in my early 20s, she carried a calm, grounded confidence. She already knew who she was, half a decade into motherhood. Meanwhile, I was convinced I was onto something when she called me to complain about mental health five years ago. How insensitive of her to not coddle to the collective. How ignorant and simple of me, to deny her the small grace of venting. Level One of personal growth: you read The Power of Now and suddenly you’re doubling down on your newfound new age truth — mistaking awakening for arrival, enlightenment for identity.

Last week and five weeks in to a relentless cough, post poisoning myself with the tea, I thought I’d write all about what the homeopath said about the Bougainvillea and what the osteopath said about my esophagus, and how the mold detox is going, and the endo flare ups. But I’m sick of it. It’s keeping me sick.

Because now, I agree with her. I’m so SICK OF WELLNESS.

The protein, the mold, the courses, the castor oil, the hacks, the rituals, the grounding, the peptides, the red light, the blue light, the sunlight, the detoxes, the supplements, the steps, so many steps, so many serums, so many lists. The adaptogens, cold plunges, lymphatic drainage, tongue scraping, sleep tracking, dry brushing, green powders, hot girl walks, lemon water with Himalayan salt not regular salt.

Shortly after that realization, a text brought me face to face with what I consider the Great Big Betrayal of 2021, and my stomach didn’t turn. I’m past it, I responded, and for the first time in four years I meant it.

The shift was quiet, like a click.

There’s something I wrote in my notes six months ago, in the old house. In my old life. It was a Monday, during our regularly scheduled nighttime routine when I overheard Marcello tell our three year old in the shower: You keep going back to weak Pokémon. You have to fight stronger Pokémon to level up.

There are Pokémon, to my knowledge, that have three evolutions. Most evolve twice, others only once. Some never do.

It’s rarely about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who are you. It’s about letting people say whatever they want, without making it about yourself. It’s about what you see in the mirror. They’re there to remind us to look.

So long live the stupid feuds! It is the best of times and the worst of times. And for those far from neutrality, mute them until you turn 30. Then and only then for the love of God, grow up.

I am twenty two years old in the hair and makeup chair about to walk for Roberto Cavalli. Twenty two is not young in fashion, but it’s not quite old either. The older girls were probably, at the time, the age I am now. It takes some of them months, even years, to warm up to me. But there are a few who keep an eye out from the beginning. I make note of this and try to be that for the girls who are younger, teenagers still.

Ana has kind eyes, from Spain. She fosters animals and things like that. She twirls my hair backstage and says don’t let them do to your hair what they did to mine.

There were nights where my hair would go from slicked in a tight bun on the top of my head, to pin-straight in a low pony, and back down in tight curls — all within the span of a few hours. After Cavalli, I began to refuse castings for the jobs that paid good money to cut and dye it. I began to obsess over losing it.

I refused to do my hair the days I wasn’t working. I didn’t want to waste my makeup or a good outfit. I stopped going out, saw what nightlife did to a couple older girls — their skin, their hair. I spent my nights in a candlelit yoga studio in a warehouse in west Kendall practicing yin, kundalini, restorative, and ashtanga. I was desperate to preserve what made me beautiful, the thing that kept me young. I was desperate to feel good. If only I knew then how much more damaging stress is than heat.

Beauty has always been as important to me as meaning. There is a Brazilian girl on the internet with hair so long and gorgeous my mouth physically opens in horror and envy every time I see her. I don’t know her name or anything about her other than she has a boyfriend or a husband that’s not as good looking and she likes to put outfits together. I scroll away from her and her perfect hair every time.

I like to hurt my feelings and I don’t know how to undo that. I’m always trying to undo something. I’m impatient and inappropriate yet somehow intelligent enough. I’m conspiratorial but in a “could the Egyptian underworld lie under Kentucky” kind of way which probably takes away from the intelligence aspect but at least I’m pretty. I took Tylenol while pregnant. I took more Benadryl than Tylenol though and everything’s fine. I once had perfect hair.

It was everything to me. Not because it was thick, it never was. It was just so easy. The color, the length, the way it naturally dried sometimes pin straight and others slightly wavy. The way I could mold how the front framed my face with my right hand. All throughout high school and college I had it down to my waist, long and free. Back then it resembled the Brazilian girl’s from the internet.

The pandemic comes and goes and next thing I know I’m a mom. I spend months love drunk, the highest high, nose to nose with my tiny creation. Nothing compares to his delicate newborn fingers working a single strand of my hair as he soothes himself to sleep. The bliss, in some ways similar to the euphoria I’d feel stepping off the runway, is not even close. I experience the complete opposite of baby blues and the comedown comes hard right around my birthday.

My hair begins to look weird when it air dries and frizzy when I try to blow dry it and I especially think it looks horrible for this shoot that I cherish in retrospect.

I am twenty five living in a new country when it begins to fall out. By Christmas I have bangs that were never cut, until I take a pair of scissors in my grandmother’s bathroom and cut them myself out of sheer desperation. I go to the salon first thing in the morning to fix the mess I made. By that evening my body begins to ache. Everyone gets covid and Noche Buena is cancelled, again.

I am twenty six when I order the scalp massager, the shower filter, the hair masks. I bathe in homemade rosemary water and add oils to my shampoo. At the Headspa in Miami, Damy tells me she sees a lot of new growth. I see it in Cabo at the salon in the mirror when Leo blow-dries it. He says to keep cutting it regularly but I don’t. I only cut the bangs until I get sick of those too.

All the while my son cannot sleep without rubbing it together. I worry he’s breaking it. I try to replace my hair with a doll and it doesn’t work.

“My hair, my hair,” he says with his newly found voice. His hair because I am his and he is me. I tell him a thousand times a day that I love him, that he’s the love of my life. Every now and then he pulls it so hard tears spring instantly. One day he says it back. Te amo mami.

I am twenty seven when we put Mateo in pre-school. He gets sick all the time. I pull him out a month later after back to back strep and bronchitis trips to the hospital. The following week they find a tumor in my ovary; a month later, stage 4 endometriosis when they cut me open to remove it. I am twenty seven when I truly learn how much worse fear is than stress. At night, Mateo tells me to turn around, to reach my hair easier than when we were face to face. I begin to mourn his independence. I can’t fall asleep without his tiny grasp.

I am twenty eight post-surgery when the results from oncology come back, benign. The best word to exist in the English language. A few months later when, a side effect of the anesthesia, my hair begins to fall out all over again. I find a Naturopathic doctor from Canada in my town, and she finds me to be riddled with mold. I begin to suspect our house is killing us. At night I turn around and ask Mateo to grab my hair. I watch ASMR videos on TikTok of head spas and hair play and fall asleep like that.

I am twenty nine years old. He is about to be four and he tells me that none of the other mamis have hair like mine. I miss him when he’s next to me and I watch him play and eat and sleep, in awe, every single day, and it’s never enough.

Hair is easier to grieve than time. Easier to mourn than my youth. Easier than facing the fact that my baby will be my baby forever, but he isn’t a baby anymore. When I look back at the photos of my long perfect hair, there’s nothing to trade. I have now, everything she ever wanted. When I see the photos from the years I hated my own reflection the most, those are the ones I’d step back into in a heartbeat — just to have him so little again.

The old house, the mold house, the one steps from the beach, is behind us. When we drive past it on the way home from school he says he misses it because the ceilings weren’t so high.

My scans are clear. My hair is growing. Having recently asked Roberto to cut the absolute bare minimum, I was left with a just below shoulder length situation. It’s the healthiest it’s looked in years, very nice, not for me. So last month in Miami — Miami which is all hair and lips and ass, where average doesn’t cut it let alone normal — I wear it up and no one really notices how short it is. Until they catch me slipping, catch it down. Did you cut your hair? NO I scream.

All summer, my mornings and evenings on the terrace have been marked by the company of seven, two adults and five cubs. I like to believe the mom and dad are in love. From below they watch our family and from above we observe theirs.

Everyone left at the end of July. Nature’s quest for balance ensures the shoe only drops when it needs to, which means not every time but sometimes, definitely. There was somewhat of a haunting and a delayed shipment of Holy Water. There were things I did to return the energy. There are things I do to protect the house.

I’m waking up early only for half the month. I have to be careful with this because if I fall asleep too early I will wake up at 2am. I’m reading several books and watching several shows. I’m taking baths I’m in the sea I’m at the pool. I’m running a little. And if the gym is empty, and it mostly is, I will do ten minutes of Qi Gong before anything else.

I like to plan for the year at the end of the summer. I write down everything I want and everything I need to do and the dreams that I remember. I write down the places we went and the places we’ll go. I prepare a curriculum for myself for when my son is back in school. My year always begins in September. I was a student before I became anything else.

Mateo went on a crusade against vowels. First banning O from the alphabet. Then why is E a letter? TELL ME. I DON’T KNOW WHY. I don’t know either.

The internet has been on and off which has preserved, by force, the nostalgia I’ve been trying to curate. A 2005 summer, more or less. The first movie on the new couch was the blackberry movie. 97% on rotten tomatoes. It made me want a palmpilot for Christmas and, also now that I think of it, animal crossing for the switch.

And if I did nothing else all summer besides the things I do all the time let it be known that I went to the dentist and the dermatologist and then back to the dentist to have my bottom retainer removed and replaced. I saw my surgeon after a year, we hugged and redid my scans. We moved out of the mold.

There’s always something to heal from. You try not to get too wrapped up in it. You try to not play the victim. You’re feeling so much better. You find a note from last March that described, delusionally and in detail, the home you live in today.

The weird things all happened within three days of each other, while everyone was leaving, and like all bad things, they came in three. I told Kristen that the roach on my face felt demonic. The roach was the second thing that happened. It was after the roach and before Mao leaving that I ordered holy water on Mexican amazon.

My boyfriend took me to the beach to calm my nerves like they do in Italian novels and it worked, every day, but only until 2am. I was chill about everything. My grandmother died and my favorite cat ran away. We’re what, three months into my Saturn return.

On the days we didn’t make it to the beach, we walked to the pool. And I was thinking about Mama Yeya and about Mao and how I wanted a sign. But there were so many butterflies and so many dragonflies that I began to doubt them.

Suddenly we were face to face with the foxes. I wanted to take a photo but it wasn’t that kind of moment, it felt more like a dream, where photos are forbidden. I wrapped Mateo around me because I could feel the big fox getting territorial over the baby. We stared at each other and I asked them where Mao was. No answer. While we swam I was hit in the back by the biggest dragonfly I had ever seen and it sent a vibration down my spine.

I rage wrote the fiction piece because I was upset and watching too much vampire diaries. I slept for three hours and meditated for one on the blue couch (two DIs).

Beside the floor-to-ceiling window next to our bed, the blue couch looks out over the pool and just past the palms, the Sea of Cortez — always sparkling and loud. And when I close my eyes and take a deep breath and exit my physical body and enter a meditative state I picture myself pregnant. Thirty eight weeks pregnant. Pregnant as F$%!.

I like to sit on the blue couch and roll open the blinds and get sun on my face and read a Kristin Hannah novel and watch the butterflies at eye level.

July and August are the best months to read Kristin Hannah and get sun on your face. Last summer, The Great Alone, The Women, and The Nightingale, now, The Four Winds. I use historical fiction as an antidote to the world is on fire. And it might be, but it always has been, and it’s also in many ways, the best it’s ever been. Reading reminds me. The feeling I conjure while reading Kristin Hannah is similar to that of being 38 weeks pregnant.

But no, I’m not pregnant, although my doctor was like chop chop if you want another. I hate being told what to do and I’m not trying to bore my brilliant surgeon with the details of the dream I had of my daughter five years ago. Or how the year before the dream Juana la Cubana en La Habana told me I was having a boy and a girl. I can’t assume she’s into that. I’ll spare her my certainty because I love her and I need her respect.

And I could tell she was impressed by the connection I have to my body, the conviction I had to stop the birth control pills another OBGYN was pushing last summer. Last summer when I first started this substack. August 6, 2024 when I wrote everyone’s favorite piece.

This August 6th I grabbed one of the cat carriers and Mateo asked me what I was doing with that and I said we’re going to go find Mao.

This August, two cats, no tumor. I try to convince myself losing Mao is the price for getting everything I wanted a year ago. Good health, a new home. The other shoe.

The night she left I ran up and down the pitch black stairwells of the construction site. There were cockroaches everywhere. Howls and meows and shadows and whispers. Mateo was asleep which meant Marcello and I had to take turns leaving the house to look for her while the other two waited, confused as to why they watched their mother jump off the balcony.

She made the landing that wasn’t the issue. But she took off once Marcello found her downstairs, inches away from fighting the big black cat, the one who’s been taunting her, tempting her. The one who told her to jump. Did he kill her that first night when I woke up to the yowling at 2am?

We walked the golf course for an hour. We ran into friends that I could barely look at in the eyes without crying. Everyone here who knows me knows Mao. Halfway through Mateo looked at us and announced loudly I think Mao is in trouble. I think we’re never going to see her ever again.

Marcello could sense my defeat and took the empty cat carrier from my hands. I didn’t want to let go. He said ok let’s go this way we’ll check in that covered garage and walk through the pool to go home. The moment I said her name the garage erupted in screeching. Bats. Mateo started crying and I couldn’t hide my fear. That’s it we’re done.

And on the stairs by the pool behind a building next to ours, I saw in my periphery what I thought was a tail. I chased the shadow to a dried up garden hidden from my terrace by a wall, and there she was. LEEEET’S GET MAAAAOOOO my son yelled from the steps.

And that night, at 2am, I heard a bang and a commotion and I flew out of bed to break up the fight. Only none of my cats were fighting. Mao was sound asleep on the table. It was Runt, full body slamming himself into the sliding glass doors because the big black cat was perched on the balcony like a gargoyle, staring into my home, staring at her. I rubbed my eyes because what I was seeing was not a cat. And I was not scared I was only filled with rage. Then relief, because he’ll never get in. The next morning I told the foxes what I happened and they nodded at me.

Light wins.

The AC was a luxury. You were there again, tight jeans and a black crop top. She hoped for your sake that you’d been fired but understood how such a tiny waist and such shiny hair would warrant a second chance. She liked this place. She put what happened last time in the past where it belonged, and made sure to have cash for the tip you didn’t deserve.

Hasn’t anyone ever told you women are more generous? They take less. You assumed she was just visiting, passing through town like the men you play coy with. The ones who play too much with you, with their sunburnt skin and butchered spanish.

She tipped those that came before you better than the Americans tip you. They always remembered her favorite sours. And up until that night she had never even analyzed it. You. She wasn’t looking for you, just something to drink. And by trying to make things hard you made them too easy.

You watched her walk in and you did it again. Closed the bar with a rope and a Be Right Back sign. Slipped into position at the sushi counter next door where like clockwork you ordered the snow crab and ate it messily. You licked your fingers like you were being watched.

She waited for you to finish your food. Approaching the roped off bar, she played the fool, turning from side to side in attempt to find you, you tiny little thing. And just as she watched you lick your fingers and your lips she caught in her periphery the glance, the smirk, and how you hid, feet away from her, in your phone.

For two hours you sat there scrolling.

And for two hours she sat watching you. Getting hotter, thirstier.

And like last time, she had the manager approach you and ask if you were ready to go back to work. You weren’t.

And she thought to herself, such a pretty girl. And you thought to yourself dumb bitch.

Only you forgot about her too fast. You never even looked up.

You didn’t see her follow you.

Up the stairs and into the stall.

Her, who’s thinner than you, taller.

For the amount of times that you looked at her, you never saw her eyes.

She never meant for this. She really had such a bad day.

She continues to read the Friday morning paper. “Drained of blood… animal attack.”

I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to be doing and waking up at five or six and if I go out to dinner or stay up late I’ll sleep until 7:30 but not a minute later.

We have mint, rosemary, and Spanish lavender and I know the lavender is bad for the cats but so far nothing has happened and I plan to replant it somewhere else. What did happen is that I saw a coyote at 5:51am and made all the cats go inside even though he was far and even though we’re up high.

Mateo asks for stories about cowboys and pirates and I mix bits from Home on the Range and 1883 and Peter Pan. For the first time in my life, I’m not at sea level and I love it.

The kitchen is always clean because I’m always cleaning it. The floor is clean because you sweep it. I love the wooden chairs you brought home unexpectedly. And the way the sunlight filters through the pergola and the wind moves across the terrace. Our building sits perpendicular to the sunrise and sunset protecting us from the blazing summer sun.

The summers I’ve learned to dread for the past three years by the beach are over. There is something new and old about this summer, and there is something about a summer on the west coast in the mountains.

My father was the first person to show me California — Los Angeles, Laguna Niguel, and then fifteen years later and not long ago when we met in San Francisco and drove to Napa Valley. I found a book in the house at the top of the mountain in St. Helena about the early days of the valley and I wore these pajamas and read it on the terrace.

Last week, when I got back, Marcello gave me the book he’d picked up in Edmonds after I had to leave Seattle early. He asked the woman for the best lore of the area and came home with a 1961 memoir about a mother and her children who spent their summers living on a boat exploring the coastal waters of the pacific northwest in the 1920s and 30s. It’s the 50th year anniversary edition and the introduction by the original Canadian publisher and close friend of the author gave me goosebumps.

Two weeks have passed. Two Sundays ago I was in Miami and we were about to watch The Birdcage (!) and cold stone was on the way and it hadn’t happened yet. We hadn’t watched a movie all together since Napa, Bottle Shock (so good).

At the wine shop there are always one or two bottles of my favorite cab from San Miguel de Allende left and I always take them home. I drank Pinot Noir by the glass and I lost at chess and you won and when we got home I kept staring at myself in the mirror and I felt much older than I looked.

I keep telling people we’re going to invite them over for dinner. In the past week I have called a mother at Mateo’s school by the wrong name and had a run in with someone I couldn’t name but have known now, for years. I got in the car and told Marcello I think I ran into someone we know but could it also be that we met at some point another family that looks just like this one? His voice was so different.

At the graduation a beautiful woman came up to me and said do you remember me and I said yes and she said did you move and I said no and then yes and I looked down at her belly and said congratulations and it didn’t occur to me until the second she was walking away that I went to tour her house about a year ago. She was moving for more space, to try for another baby.

Like the bitch at the party that says so nice to meet you to people she knows she’s met before. I now say good to see you so if that doesn’t apply because we’ve never met, that’s also happening and I’m sorry.

There are files taking up the space where I could have kept you. I think my subconscious is trying to be less of a hoarder. Memories, parts of lots, and I play them on repeat like the shows that I watch and the music that I listen to.

Like the night we met and then the next, the first date at Lagniappe and how I moved to New York five days later. How on his first day of school he crawled onto the desks in front of everyone and roared.

I remember everything about being in the hospital, both times, and I remember perfectly the day we came home with Mateo and how it was raining and we didn’t speak in the car because we were so scared and he was so little. I think that was the best day of my life.

So at any given moment during office hours, unbeknownst to my small surf town, I am very busy. Documentation as preservation. I’m reorganizing the files and winning the arguments and making lists, so many lists all the time while I drive around and get down and do commerce and participate minimally and get back in the car. I’m editing the material sitting on my laptop at home while I drive, and planning dinner, and forgetting milk.

And I want to remember everything, this, when I’m 96 sitting on the terrace near some sea, maybe in some mountain. And for when I’m 96 reading this in print, I want to remember that I’m on the terrace and it’s July and windy. When Marcello and Maalem get back we’ll go in the pool. And as I type this Mateo is three years old and sitting on top of me with my laptop on his lap and yesterday he graduated from kinder uno.

His first last day of school was celebrated beneath the full moon on a tiny stage framed by rows and rows of mango trees and after, at home, with blueberry juice in a champagne flute.

His teachers are the first women I hand my son off to, the only women, besides the ones in my family. They know this and they adore my son and we hug and cry at the end because we’ve shared something sacred.

I’m bonded to them and to this little group of tiny humans that somehow ended up going to preschool together in La Baja, the absolute southernmost tip of California. So I don’t mind that I’m trying to keep my eyes on his blue jeans and in doing so make a fool of myself for saying the wrong thing or not remembering. I’m invested in his world, his first real introduction to society. So I’ll sacrifice how I’m perceived, because it doesn’t really matter.

The morning after feels like the morning after a concert or the Christmas bazar or field day. Mel asked if I was ok and I said no and then yes. I watch the footage all weekend, beaming. I can’t believe I have a lifetime left of these firsts. I didn’t think it would feel this good. This time I’ll remember it all. I will remember that he channeled dinosaurs for courage again and how I kept saying over and over and over they’re so little.

I’m no longer scared of the things that I used to be scared of, but now there are new things to fear even though many of them are only in my phone. It helps to consume old Winnie the Pooh and old SpongeBob episodes and at night I look up commercials from twenty years ago. When I delete Instagram I can turn back time so I do now and then, but especially in the summer.

I like trying things and changing my mind. I started something new today, and this time I’m going to finish because I made a very important promise and I’m fine with it taking a long time. I like having the candle lit and the cold coffee next it because I love the smell of both.

And I didn’t like it when you insisted because it had to do with my son and something was off and why did your voice change so much I remember it deeper. I told Mel years ago about the off feeling and maybe that’s why I deleted your face. And maybe you didn’t deserve that but maybe you did and what I do know is that I don’t need to question my gut for your feelings.

I haven’t slept it’s six forty five and I’m pretty sure the TSA agent just fell in love with me. It’s the necklace he says. Life doesn’t feel quite real, in general, but especially in Delta. In Miami, Delta is a ghost town and she is everywhere.

I find a little Sergio’s window for breakfast in a healthier looking airport cafe bodega where there are no customers only employees. The woman preparing my cortadito calls me corazon, mi amor, and chica, just like Yeya. Coworkers greet each other with kisses on the cheek and lots of flirting. I want them to kiss me good morning as well but they don’t and it’s fine I cry anyways, later. She tells me she spent four years on the other side and she’ll never go back. There’s no going back. Four years ago doesn’t exist anymore and neither does Sunday morning. The other side she’s referring to is gate D. Before that, Cuba.

The extended family said goodbye at the cemetery which was mostly okay except for saying goodbye to Yeyo but I swallowed it back and got in the limousine. He said he had to go home to take out the dog but it doesn’t make sense to just go home after. It’s different for us. Our family consists of seven not including significant others so getting home just means gathering around the kitchen island. Alone time doesn’t happen until late. Lynette ordered arroz con pollo the way Yeya made it, watery, the way Annette, the oldest, likes it.

My hands shook while I poured the salad dressing into the bowl and Sara took over. Gabi changed into her pjs and Fleetwood Mac played in the background at the perfect volume which was not loud at all. In the stillness of remembering what you had

And what you lost
And what you had
Ooh, what you lost

When the doorbell rang for some reason I went running as if I knew. He said the traffic was too bad to go home and let the dog out, that the dog would be fine. Of course the dog will be fine and the traffic was too much I told him. Come in sit down let me get you a beer.

My dad read aloud what he had prepared in his notes and then came the letters she had written for each of us that no one knew about. There’s writing and then there’s writing and this family knows how to write.

Standing at the gate an older gentleman compliments my necklace and says his wife loves butterflies and how he wishes she was here to see mine. I thank him and tell him it’s my grandmothers. In the bathroom in Atlanta the girl behind me taps me on the shoulder to tell me I’m so pretty.

Sadness doesn’t look good on everyone, but for some reason it does on me. Madre used to tell Alex about Sara in broken English: cookie so funny, Alexa so sad. Anyone who has ever fallen in love with me did so when I was sad. Meredith Grey always made sad feel normal and fine and I loved what I saw of Seattle. I’d love to go back when no one is dying.

I know it’s her speaking through all these interactions, getting me through these three flights, getting me home. I know it’s her saying hola mi flaquita preciosa.

I was wrong ten days ago when I said the next time I was going to hug him was after his mother died. I was wrong to think I could plan how I would say goodbye and I was wrong to worry.

The Friday night before I left Seattle we heard what sounded like a domestic argument followed by a gunshot. I could hear Marcello’s heart beating from across the room as we avoided the windows and gathered ourselves. Before he could say what we both know it was I said wow what a firework and our son repeated it nervously. As if he knew it wasn’t a firework. He is three and this is the first time I’ve flown alone in six years.

I was in and out of Miami before anything could go wrong. I only really make sense as a person in Miami. This is becoming more and more clear.

It’s Thursday and nine of us are on flights, some headed back home others away.

It’s better this way. Everyone needs to recover. I hope Sara ends up going to the keys. Kristen and Cris and Andrew will be there. She was there everyday. She said goodbye every day for twelve days.

Life tints a little, permanently, after death. Temporarily, reality becomes surreal, almost extra special, to compensate for the extra pain. After a death the really good moments are perfect and the time in between the perfect and the horrible changes color.

It was a Monday when they put me on the phone with her so she could hear my voice one more time. I was walking Mateo to our room to take a nap and then suddenly I was hiding from him on the bathroom floor breaking out into hives. Mami why is your face like that? On Thursday the hospice nurse had her children gather around her and I sat in a restaurant in Seattle. They said she wouldn’t make it through the night.

She was asleep, on morphine, when I arrived Saturday evening. She heard me and she tried to move. I wrapped my rosary around her hands, warm and real. I kissed her forehead and read her poems. I whispered secrets and promised we would be okay. The next day I went back with Sara and spent the day watching her breathing become more labored, watching my father and his brother and sister reach levels of exhaustion and desperation while still managing to laugh when something was funny. It was a good last day.

At the funeral Katy told me that there is no reason to worry when you have faith.

For the amount that I spend worrying one would think I’m an atheist. I hope I know better now. I hope the download loads. I try to have so much faith and sometimes it feels like I do but I couldn’t handle it when the priest went rogue at the wake about AI. I didn’t believe in him when he tried to shame us. I can’t with the constant guilt and fear that comes with my Catholic faith and yet I am a product of it. She didn’t go to mass and neither do I.

She was a poet. If you’ve been following my substack you may have noticed I’ve been writing about her all year. As if she’s been preparing me. Still nothing can prepare someone to grab a cold stiff hand or to watch a coffin lower into the ground. Nothing could prepare us for the reality of losing the best part of a family so big that her absence broke something in everyone, and we all watched it.

I’m trying to view this grief as a gift which is not hard but even then it doesn’t help with the knot in my throat or the loss of appetite or the insomnia. I’m taking three planes to get back to my son and maybe I won’t cry as much in the desert.

My mom told me on Monday night as I watched 1883 in her bed and ordered an Alex #2 and tuna tar tar from Akashi that this was the first time I was with her alone since becoming a mom. It felt nice to be just a girl again. It felt weird to not feel any guilt.

She gave me the gift I wasn’t willing to give myself, a time machine.

She was waiting for me.

Death shouldn’t happen in June and neither should bombs. Only births and baptisms and bridal showers and plans made six months before, in winter.

My mother sends a link titled funeral and cremation pre-planning to the group chat with me, my sister, and her mother. I am sitting at my new vanity in my bathroom slash office, about to draw myself a bath with lots of epsom salt and no essential oils.

Samaya is staying with us for the weekend, in town for a cousin’s wedding. It’s Saturday afternoon and she’s there now. My in laws are in town and we had a huge arepa brunch with prosecco and took naps and went in the pool. It feels so good to have my house filled with people I love so much. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

Every second alone and especially at night I get itchy all over.

In Miami, my grandmother is dying. It has been eleven days of hospice. She stopped eating on Tuesday. I want to hug my father and I know that the next time we do will be because his mother has died and I’m taking Mateo to swim class and processing that while I clap and cheer him on. He is swimming so well and he asks if we are proud him and we are so proud of him.

When I was in the fourth grade, I wanted Natalie Phillips to be my teacher because she was the most beautiful woman I had seen at my school but I didn’t get her and it bothered me. I never knew her. Then one day, in February, a month where it seems death is more appropriate than it is in June, Sister Margaret or someone of similar ranking came into our classroom to tell us that she had succumbed to her brain tumor and died. I had never spoken to her but I cried the entire mass in an all consuming obnoxious selfish kind of way. She was only 25. I was eleven.

I looked up her obituary online because I had no idea what month she had passed I just knew it wasn’t June.

Most comments are from February 2008. Messages to the family. The recent ones are directed to her. The recent ones are written by the women who should’ve never have had to bury her.

Carmen tells me that grief is just love and I’ll leave it at that for now.

Before leaving the house to go to Michelle’s baby shower, I stand on the kitchen table to announce to my testosterone filled apartment the cosmic implications of this two year transit and the three boys and the three cats look at me and nod and smile and support my speech.

When I get to the hotel where a friend of mine ended up in random room with Elon Musk one new year’s eve not long ago and not in a good way, everyone is happy and it’s 10am. The elevator door opens to take me to the rooftop and I expect the man inside the elevator to get out but he doesn’t. He’s holding two drinks and he says he can’t get to the roof. I notice him pressing and unpressing the button and I tell him you keep unpressing the button as I reach over him to press the light back on. He says I must be his good luck charm and I roll my eyes under my sunglasses. Men.

It has been a month since we got back from Miami and we brought Marcello’s brother Maalem home with us for the summer. Maalem looks like a movie star and slices avocados into roses and adores my son and I adore him. He is 19 and motivated and does backflips on the sand and has Marcello waking up every morning at 6:30 to workout and goes to work with him and they come home inspired and excited to my spiraling, hopefully temporary, madness.

At first it was amazing, but then three weeks later and during my luteal phase, I realized that as much as I don’t want to admit it I am feeling jealous and lonely and left in the dust and moody and controlling and crazy. And it’s one thing to feel like this every month alone but another thing to feel this way while trying to be cool. A cool mom and a cool host and his older brother’s cool girlfriend.

But manic is not cool so I hide in my room and make everything worse for myself. Because there was something horrible that happened to a boy my son’s age on TikTok and my entire algorithm poisoned me to the point that I got so scared of the people on TikTok that I made my account private. And then I considered never writing again. And all this is happening while the boys are getting strong and doing business and playing on the nintendo switch at night in the living room.

And after five years of begging Marcello to share his feelings, he finally does — on the second night of my cycle — by hesitantly admitting I’ve been negative lately (I know) and should be more grateful for what I have now instead of what I’m waiting for (EW I KNOW). He brings up the not so nice text messages I sent the day before and I tell him a cockroach jumping out of Mateo’s bath toys to attack us would ruin even my happiest of days. Mel agrees with me that freaking out over the roach is not a good example of me being negative. Mel used to kill the cockroaches in my room in college. Of course I freak out but I know he is right and he knows I am right and it’s not a competition but sometimes I just want to fight.

I feel good this Saturday morning because I spent an hour getting ready and I am relaxed and know I look beautiful and am excited to have a glass of champagne and chitchat with the moms I usually avoid. I love them and now that it has been three years I know that they love me but they don’t know me and I don’t really know them. That’s how I prefer to keep things for now.

The thing is there is no alcohol at this baby shower which is a major culture shock because Miami would never but nonetheless I enjoy their company and after three cups of coffee we are all trembling. Breakfast is lovely but once the games begin I take it as my cue to leave because I’m not the kind of person that can play games sober.

As I approach the elevator guess who’s joining me for a second time with two new drinks, man from elevator round one. He asks me how my event was and I say it was nice, it was a baby shower. He goes oh so you live here? He’s from Vancouver and tells me that his daughter is getting married, today, which immediately disarms me. We stay chatting for a bit outside the elevator and I tell him that I hope he has a beautiful weekend and congratulations and he says thank you and have a nice day. I’m already walking towards the door when he turns around and yells across the lobby actually I hope you have a beautiful life! and I love men. More than that I love the intimacy of not really knowing someone, but wanting them to be happy.

If I were a man I’d be completely insufferable. Quick to anger, passionate in a way that’s worse than romantic, and arrogant. I’d be the worst male lead you’ve ever read about and I’d get into physical altercations over stupidities. But I’d be handsome. And tall. If I were a man and you are a woman I’d ruin your life. And if I were a man I’d never have endometriosis and all the studies on health would be done in my favor not that it would matter because I would feel, physically, the same way every day because my hormones would regulate every 24 hours. And maybe I would never ghost the people I love whose messages caught me on the bad days.

So when Marcello says I pick a fight once a month, he’s right. I crave this fight the way I crave the carbs I devour the week before the fight.

It seems to be trendy to hate men. I see it mostly online, mostly from girls who haven’t yet become mothers (BUT WHO HAVE EXPRESSED THE DESIRE TO BE ONE DAY- so relax). I smile because I know they will have boys. And hopefully those boys will become the men that teach them to embrace what it is to have a man in your life. Because there’s nothing worse than a bad man, but there’s nothing better than a good one.

I think I had this preconceived notion that the village had to be women. Women and children. But there’s a reason this summer it’s me, Mateo, Marcello, and Maalem. They’re not overthinking everything the way I am. They’re not scared of everything like I am. They’re laughing and singing and fighting pokémons and making me hot coffee in the mornings and telling me that they love me.

I’ve lived most of my life dominated by estrogen, so maybe it’s time to lean out of that and into the boys. Maybe this has nothing to do with me at all. Maybe it has everything to do with my son who gets an entire summer at a crucial age with the side of his lineage that I am not really a part of but nonetheless play a crucial role in.

If what I want is to thrive in divine femininity, there needs to be divine masculinity. And that requires total surrender and trust. Good luck bitch!

I keep trying to free myself from that mindset, but I’m stuck in the part of the shallow where everything crashes. I can see just ahead that everyone else is swimming peacefully. I’m so close but I keep getting water in my nose and sand in my eyes.

And since I needed a sign, some sort of reminder that I am not nothing, I was gifted my favorite dress from my favorite boutique.

Who cares- No listen to me. When we first moved here I remember looking at the price tag and not trying it on. I got the DM in April, from the new Miami location but I didn’t have time to pass by. Tell me how I end up in the Cabo store with the owner picking out the dress I’ve been staring at for three years. On the way home I looked at Marcello and said that felt like a forehead kiss from God and he said no I know. Next thing I know we’re planning this photoshoot with my son, for Mother’s Day.

And that was just the beginning. Marcello absolutely crushed it. I’m talking a hand-drawn cards, Spanish for Saturday, English on Sunday. Spa treatments. Coffee in bed. A beach club with the best smash burger in Baja.

At barre, I was gifted a rose and the Uruguayan woman next to me shared the rest of her mate with me. ALL this and

1. I still managed to squeeze in being a huge brat and had a meltdown over warm Prosecco and overall control (moving on)

2. Nothing could have prepared me for the preschool

White tablecloths, hand made bracelets, mini personalized wooden cutting boards with charcuterie, and what I think is a virgin sangria. We’re told to convey to our children, using only our gaze, what they mean to us while a coldplay song plays a little too loud. Across the room, our eyes meet — Mich is about to have her second baby, and Kate is three months postpartum. They’re crying so much that it hardens and softens me. They have children.

I can’t surrender until Mateo melts into my arms because he’s so heavy but such a baby and I realized how hard this is on me and how fast. I leave feeling very grateful and very devastated that I’m not in infancy anymore and I haven’t been in a while and the heaviness of that reality attacks me in the shower after the event.

Kids know where they end and their mothers begin. A baby does not. On one end the separation is seamless and on the other it’s a rip that never fully heals.

Mateo is saying words properly even the ones he had his own special perfect names for. Like rocket ceci: chocolate chechis. Now it’s just milk. Now when I ask him about rocket ceci he doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.

Life is happening all around and everyone’s so casual about it but it’s huge it’s the biggest thing. Everything happening. My grandmother’s 90th birthday and how I couldn’t be there, but I chose the poem. Every time I say bye for years I have braced myself for the possibility of the final goodbye.

She reads me her poems and I sob in the car, every time. Last month I couldn’t with my son at my feet. So I didn’t even let it fully arrive. I kept it casual so that maybe it would convince me that it is, but it’s not. None of this is.

Three years is fast.

But May is long.

I’ve been, in addition to losing my mind waiting, reading shitty fiction and watching shitty tv. A friend of mine has reached radical self acceptance and I wonder what it feels like. I went to three barre HIIT classes last week and hurt my knees. I spoke about my health negatively and woke up sick.

I rented dear john to feel 13 again and it worked. I watch and re watch greys anatomy but never finish. I never finished one tree hill or desperate housewives. I rarely finish shows especially long ones and especially if I love them. I rarely finish anything.

I am glad I didn’t publish my thoughts on the girl’s trip to space that I wrote on the plane. Restraint is key.

We were up late watching american paul. I love it because their father Greg is insane and because these people are not scared to make mistakes and be honest and be crazy. I love watching siblings fight and make up and be very successful. I love seeing the man and woman that created these siblings and piecing together why they are who they are and from whom. Logan wanted to have a boy, but it’s a girl. Everyone’s nervous because it’s scary to protect a girl.

When it comes to protection how much of it is our responsibility and how much of it should be left to the powers that be? God, spirit, universe. Choose your plan, but “have a plan”. More important than a plan, have discernment.

If my early twenties were defined by the reckless yes, then my late twenties have been a continuous lesson in the power of no. I’ve always known when to leave the party because I’ve always had a curfew. I haven’t always known when to say no. Now I do. Now it’s better.

When we launched The Miami Native, a production company reached out about translating the essence of the magazine, of Miami (of being a girl from Miami), into a podcast. The call was full of energy but chemistry is not the same as alignment. At the time, I was doing the sex and the city podcast with my sister, the magazine, a copywriting job at an agency, and recovering from the surgery that was most likely the result of trying to juggle so much. This was all one year ago — I hadn’t even heard of Substack.

Anyway I get a DM from this guy who I met through that production company asking how I feel about mediums and psychics. I’ve only ever been to Santeros (Pupi in Miami and Juana la Cubana in Havana) which are neither, but also kind of both. My gut whispers at what cost, but I’m intrigued and listen to the soft pitch on being a guest on this new podcast hosted by a medium. When I click on the instagram he sends me I can see a clip of a friend of mine who had already been on the show. Perfect. I send it to her and ask what the experience was like and if she thinks I should do it. She answered immediately and said wait what the post is unavailable. Immediately no. Early 20s Alexa would have said yes.

The more that I say no and the more that I rest the more I receive and one day, mark my words, I’ll be in the same room, at the same time, as Theresa Caputo and she’ll know what to say and I’ll let you know. It’s all just a matter of time. In a few days my life will never be the same.

Beware of a man with a muse. I’m cynical because I spent seven years behind their lenses. They’re not all terrible, but it only takes one to kill you.

When it comes to women haters I will only give three examples because I mainly want to discuss the third while still throwing shade at the first two. I’ve ranked them from most to least promiscuous and I’m only talking about men (women are not exempt from being diabolical but I simply don’t have the time right now so I’ll leave it at this — if she tries to convince you to chop all your hair off, run). Moving on. Bad boys. H8rs!

Naturally, these types blend and blur — hate, like most things, exists on a spectrum.

1. He’s sexually omnivorous — sleeps (or “has slept”) with sex workers, racks up partners, probably juggles girlfriends and a wife while attending mass on Sundays. He judges women for any level of sexual activity, and when he hits rock bottom, he goes full brothel. Could be physically dangerous but not always. Either really ugly or wickedly handsome. Will weaponize your secrets, hobbies, and interests.

2. This one is trickier. He talks about women constantly — idolizes dream girls, hyper-fixates on celebrities, romanticizes the unattainable. Has sex, not often. Never commits. He thinks your body is his choice. He’s bitter and always slightly heartbroken that love never lands on him. Mala copa. Is good friends with #1.

3. The most dangerous of them all — jealous. This man hates women because he hates himself. His relationships with women are tense, possessive, and almost always asexual. Will also use your secrets and weak spots against you. He might be gay, might not be. The point is: he wants, desperately, to be you *cue Sam Rockwell’s recent WL monologue*.
   He crowns one woman his muse at a time — and begins the quiet work of destroying her. He wants control of her beauty. Her confidence. Her brain.
   He’ll call you darling, dear, or more modernly — babe. Tell you you’re a super star, so that you’ll work for free. He’ll be obsessed. Evil eye wrapped in compliments. But you’ll feel safe. Because he won’t try to sleep with you. And he doesn’t seem like he’ll hurt you.

   But he will.
   He’ll do it in ways the others don’t. He’ll do it by shrinking you. Ignoring you. Gently, repeatedly, until you are small enough to manage.

   You know — bloodsucker, fame-fucker, Olivia Rodrigo’s words not mine.

   I’m talking Max from Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage.
   I’m talking Andy Warhol.

   I’m telling you that Andy Warhol killed Edie Sedgwick. Not physically so much as abstractly. He crushed her spirit and when someone crushes a woman’s spirit she either gets herself out of it or is as good as dead.

Edie wanted to be an artist. New York made her a model. Andy made her an actress — so he could direct her. Whatever role she played, it was always under him. But in truth, she stood beside him. To make him look better. It feels good to be adored.

Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post was named after her great aunt, a Gilded Age socialite whose famous 1897 painting hangs at The Met. Born in California with old-money East Coast roots, she moved to New York after college and met Warhol, 15 years her senior, in the spring of 1965. As it often goes, the ones with the brightest light have already been to hell, and Warhol clocked this instantly. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he recalled his first impression of her: “So beautiful, but so sick.”

When a woman is reduced to being the source of a man’s inspiration, something essential is stolen from her: the right to be seen as a creator, perhaps even the willingness to create. Her identity becomes secondary, flattened into his. Into his brand.

Edie Sedgwick is remembered not as the artist she once aspired to be, but as the tragic, glittering “Superstar” of someone else’s vision. After meeting Warhol, she seemed to shrink her own ambitions, playing the part he cast for her. New to the city, he sipped her dream right out of her heart and demoted her into his muse, featuring her in a dozen of his films, unscripted, plotless, often intoxicated. Their public stunt as power duo was intense and short lived — like the most toxic affairs usually are.

It was through the hazy lens of underground cinema that the mainstream began to notice her singular style: the black tights, chandelier earrings, iconic leopard coat. Being a fashion it girl, of course, didn’t threaten Warhol. He could handle her image. Her interior life was another story. It was in his best interest that she unravel.

At Warhol’s Factory, which opened just a year before Edie would first walk through the doors, New York’s misfits, muses, models, drag queens, drug dealers, heiresses, and downtown nobodies came to hang out, get high, and immortalize themselves through screen tests. The kind of scene Eve Babitz and Joan Didion captured in Eve’s Hollywood and Play it As it Lays. Babitz actually dedicated her novel to "Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey who I'd do anything for if only they'd pay," alluding to the casual exploitation Warhol cultivated enabled by the decade’s drug culture. Babitz has been likened to Sedgwick, surviving the scene like Jacaranda Leven.

Edie finally fit in to a group of people as messed up and fabulous as she was. Only they were the wrong people, perfectly curated by Warhol to create an environment of mutual destruction, a world where beauty burned fast, and everyone was collateral. By the following year, Edie would be spiraling into heavy drug use, falling asleep with a lit cigarette.

But Edie's downfall wasn’t just cinematic — it was familial. Edie’s sister, Alice “Saucy” Sedgwick Wohl wrote a recent biography, As It Turns Out, featured in The New Yorker. She disputes parts of the more famous 1982 biography, Edie, and makes one thing clear: she didn’t particularly like her sister, admitting they didn’t speak for years and that “Edie wasn’t merely a victim of the big, bad art star.”

Wohl even dismisses some of the well-known allegations of sexual abuse against their father (a nasty man with a nasty nickname: Fuzzy), though she does note a psychiatrist once advised their parents not to have children. They went on to have eight.

So let's get things straight. Her sister hates her. Her father molested her. Within 18 months (and right before meeting Warhol) one brother commits suicide and the other dies in a questionable motorcycle accident. It seems Edie was wired to believe that those who loved her most, should hate her, should hurt her, and would leave her. No wonder she wanted to die.

When it makes sense that someone would want to die because maybe their dad abused them and their brothers just died and they were pumped with antipsychotics as a child it doesn’t really take that much to crush their spirit. You cannot recreate spirit.

Perhaps, by humiliating Edie, Warhol was attempting to absolve himself of the Catholic shame he could never seem to escape, by transferring it. But her freedom was never his to take, and he would spend his life chasing something he could never conjure. You see the thing about feelings, they can’t be faked. And the thing about shame is that no one can take it from you, not even the priest who instilled it.

Edie Sedgwick didn’t belong to Warhol.
He belonged to her. Like a parasite.

Edie’s magnetism was addictive and Warhol was starving. Warhol, an August Leo, behind the sunglasses and silver wigs was a man who always saw himself as awkward and ugly. Insecurity does not look good on Leos.

She was fearless, he was full of it. There’s a reason she was in front of the camera and him behind. She spoke for him, as if she was him. “Edie’s hair was dyed silver,” Warhol says in an interview, “and therefore I copied my hair because I wanted to look like Edie because I always wanted to look like a girl.” He used her like a shield, hoping that those who experienced Edie’s magic would only associate it with him. So people would look at him and feel her.

Seven months after meeting, Edie and Warhol appeared on the Merv Griffin Show. By October 1965 the two have now warped. Crash imminent. Warhol’s dedication to the act of being too cool to care may be hailed as art, but I see past the eye rolls and gum-smacking façade. She takes the seat closest to the host, Andy leaning away, mute. He goes on to give some one word answers, denies any emotional connection to his work, yet all the while seems terrified to be labeled, to be exposed. She’s the show, he’s the credit.

“What kind of emotion can you put into a Campell’s soup can?” Edie says, protecting him.

There is a scene in Factory Girl at a flea market where Warhol’s admiration gives way to irritation. He’s throwing lazy jabs about her wealth and ignoring her. When she calls Bob Dylan’s work meaningful, his ego evaporates. Silent treatment. Abuse abstract, like his art. Meaningless.

This isn’t about Bob Dylan (should I get into Bob Dylan?). Alright let’s get into Bob Dylan. Whether or not they were a thing, there was a something and it happened in 1965 shortly after she blew up as Warhol’s superstar. It is alleged that Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat and Fourth Time Around from his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde are about Edie. Pretty sure he denies it. Hi Bobby you tell me.

At 23, Dylan was protesting with a harmonica. He wasn’t scared of pain, of being ugly. The type of artist Warhol wasn’t — real. A 1964 profile in The New Yorker recalls Pete Seeger remarking, "Dylan may well become the country’s most creative troubadour—if he doesn’t explode." Although Seeger was 45, he wasn’t much older than Warhol at the time. I wonder who Bob Dylan would have become without Seeger, and what Edie Sedgwick’s life might have looked like without Warhol.

In 1962, just three years before the three would somewhat intertwine, Edie Sedgwick was in a New England mental institution, Andy Warhol was printing his soup cans, and Bob Dylan was writing an unreleased song called Cuban Missile Crisis.

Anyway, according to her sister (the one who hates her), Sedgwick's life began to unravel after she cut ties with Warhol. She ended things by crashing out at dinner. She accused his films of humiliating her. She stormed off with Bob Dylan.

Rumor has it that one of Edie’s brothers claimed that she had been pregnant with Dylan’s child and then he married Sara. Ah sorry Bobby it’s just chisme. Either way, hurting a woman doesn’t make you a woman hater, leaving a woman doesn’t make you a woman hater, not saving a woman doesn’t make you a woman hater. What I’m trying to say is that Bob Dylan isn’t a woman hater. Not all men are and just because a man doesn’t choose you doesn’t necessarily make them a narcissist either. Bob Dylan is a super star, and super stars are usually lovers. I digress.

Edie’s survival would require sobriety, which she managed to briefly accomplish during her time at Cottage Hospital back home in Santa Barbara. But she wasn’t strong enough to truly face herself, let alone save herself. Within the year of her release from rehab, she married fellow patient Michael Brett Post, and relapsed shortly after, dying from barbiturate intoxication, an addiction that apparently began during her residency at the Chelsea Hotel, where she mourned her failed relationships with both Dylan and Warhol.

Following her death in 1971, Patti Smith wrote a poem titled “Edie Sedgwick” which was included in her 1972 poetry collection Seventh Heaven. The poem begins by highlighting that "Everyone knew she was the real heroine of (Bob Dylan’s) Blonde On Blonde" and continues:

I'll never dance

with her no never

she broke down

like a baby

she suffocated

like a baby

like a baby girl

like a lady

with ermine hair

oh it isn’t fair

and I'd like to see

her rise again

Ok let’s wrap it up. I take pleasure in how un-chic and un-cool the Andy Warhol Museum TikTok account is. A 2022 video begins with the trope: Did you know that Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick were a power couple in the 60s? The video has 1,240 likes and 20 comments, one of which reads, “power couple? he killed her.”

In response, the museum put out another video where a creepy older man denies it all, insisting that because she chose to be there, she couldn’t have been a victim.

Interestingly enough, the comment with the least likes is from an account called “Edie Sedgwick Community” whose bio reads: superfans is the oldest active FB forum dedicated to Edie & the community. I get it, no one wants to hear the ugly truth about a *power duo* when they’ve made a fantasy their entire personality.

But I guess thanks to the community, Edie’s legacy does surpass Warhol’s abuse after all. She was the fashion It Girl of the ‘60s. We love her. And she loved Andy. If only she could see his obsession was lethal. If only she knew the cost of being a muse.

She was an Aries, like me.

Today is my birthday, 29, the age she never lived to see.

Read more: