The second time I visited Lisbon was this past summer, for an international writer’s residency named after the famed Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa’s seminal work: The Book of Disquiet. I lived out of a large grey suitcase in a beautiful hostel in the downtown Baixa-Chiado neighborhood for two weeks, sharing red bunk-beds with three strangers, who I grew to be quite fond of.

We reached the eighty day mark of our ninety day visa free stay in Morocco recently. In order to restart the clock, we decided to take a trip, marking my third and most recent visit to Lisbon, and the first time in Portugal for my boyfriend. We stayed in a small Airbnb in Bica with a treacherous stairwell that led up to the top floor, and a studio with pale blue ceilings and a hand drawn map of the world on the wall. The windows opened up to the street below which welcomed travelers and their wheeled suitcases, the many neighborhood dogs, and the man in the yellow building across from ours who vacuumed with his balcony doors open and played smooth jazz in the afternoons.

After all these visits, Lisbon feels like an old friend. I recognize a bend where a lazy afternoon once slipped into an endless night and walk by the restaurant where I had my first real taste of Brazilian açai. The memories of each trip to this country blur and bundle together until they unify on a central location, a smell, a dress, a scene. It’s my favorite city in the whole world, and from the top of the São Jorge castle, before the entrance over the dried up moat, I look out onto the city, onto the red rooftops, and see two brown dogs basking in their backyard below—the same two brown dogs I noticed a year and a half earlier for the first time. I’m happy we’re all still here together.

Bica is to the left—a little higher up, atop a few hills—of Cais do Sodré, the stop at the end of the green line, and the metro station I arrived at frequently for nights out, or to carry me by boat across the Tagus, or to lead me West to the beaches in warmer months. For a section, heading toward São Bento, the usual steep routes soften into a flat path forward. We walk until we find a small Japanese spot on Halloween morning. It’s funny to walk into a restaurant like that, and be immediately greeted with Portuguese.

But we don’t care what language they speak because the ramen is warm and soothing, and the broth heals our tired bodies. We didn’t get much sleep last night. In fact, we haven’t slept much at all since we arrived here, because it’s hard to desert the crowded streets and the lively parties that amp up in the early hours of day. We wake up to the sounds of life outside our window, belly up and groaning at the ceiling. We’re starved and grumbling for food, and we find so much in this flat little haven surrounding our place called Bica. Breakfast burritos and bifanas, banana bread and brioches. We forget our hangover and leave it at the door.

We’re on vacation! Every morning is the start of the best day ever!

The first class car was packed and hot, but comfortable, and we arrived easily to the famous city around noon, starting a long walk from the station to the port and hunting for food along the way. We settled on a spot in the middle of a square with open windows and doors, creating a seamless flow from the terrace to the indoors, and chose a green plush booth in the corner to watch the world go by. We ordered french toast and pancakes, lemonade, orange juice, a cappuccino, and tiramisu.

Casablanca has a distinctly more European feel than other cities I’ve visited in Morocco.

Although the souks are busier and feel even more hectic than the busiest Friday afternoon in Rabat—scooters wizz past and vendors selling tons of whole fish and meats send plumes of smoke into the air. Every sense is bombarded, affronted and laid bare. Two men walk by laughing and enjoying the afternoon; I watch as one leans into the other’s shoulder and whispers “tourists” while looking at us, the outline of the English word plump in his open mouth. Was it the jersey I was wearing that gave us away?

We arrived at the Hassan II Mosque in the mid-afternoon, one of the must-see tourist destinations in the city. The sun beat down on us. It’s late October, and I’m becoming desperate for cold.

The Mosque is incredibly grand, standing on a massive plot of wide open space and surrounded by stunning white buildings that overlook the ocean as waves crash into ramparts. We sit beneath the towering minaret and look around at all the action. Women walk around with pamphlets advertising henna designs, and visitors from all over the world speak in foreign tongues.

At this point, we’ve walked many miles—we’re craving a drink. On every street corner in Morocco you can find a stand selling fresh juice and watch the vendors crush and squeeze the fruits right in front of you. It’s not long until I’m drinking a kiwi juice, and we’re trotting happily along the bustling streets again. When we come upon a beautiful, shady park with a small field hosting a kid’s soccer match, we take a much needed seat on an empty bench and sprawl out beneath the cover of the pineapple palms.

A group of kids—three girls and one boy; seemingly too young to play in the official match—strike up a casual game of soccer on the concrete path in front of our bench. It’s great fun to watch them run screaming into the bushes after the ball. Many times, it comes right to our feet, and we kick it back to them encouragingly. The young boy begins to look over at the two of us, with a sheepish smile, each time he makes a big play. He watches us go when we finally stand and leave, almost an hour later, headed for the Medina.

It was a wonderful but exhausting day trip, having walked 31,000 steps by the time we made it back to our front door and collapsed into bed. The journey was a preamble to our official vacation: five days in Lisbon, the colorful Portuguese capital—my favorite city in the world.

Most people don’t arrive to the large, two-storied wooden boat docked against the promenade until the early morning. Three girls in mini-skirts man the entrance, passing out soft pink wristbands and ticking names off their fixed guest list. The style of revealing dress is uncommon in Morocco—it’s a modest Muslim culture. But once we cross the threshold onto the water, we’re not in Morocco anymore. We’re in France.

It’s an open bar below deck, and everyone’s drinking vodka et citron. The lighting is deep red and moody and the French students—ESSEC Business School students on exchange semesters in Rabat—lounge among the various couches and tables surrounding the DJ booth. The boat has the feel of a small but exclusive New York nightclub just before peak hours. People continue spilling in, flocking to refill their empty glasses.

I love the French attitude. The cigarette’s hanging between long, skinny fingers. Not showing up to the party until 1:30—and not going home until sunrise.

The venue gets pretty crowded around two, and we have to squeeze past people to get a spot at the bar counter. It’s not easy to find alcohol in Morocco, and it’s been a while since many of us have danced. The DJs stand behind an elevated booth and play French and Spanish songs. For twenty minutes in between, its America’s best hits from the 2010s: Katy Perry, Charli XCX (before she was famous for BRAT, there was the iconic predecessor: “I got this feeling on a summer day when you were gone…”), and some other sing-alongs that activated me—probably the only American in the room—and whose names I can’t remember because I was too busy dancing and drinking and singing along. Everyone in the room is bilingual. Many are multilingual. They slosh around, yet move effortlessly between languages.

In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time around French people—I’ve celebrated their birthdays, been to their Sunday family lunches and their backyard apéros. I’ve begun to slowly adopt their way of speaking and their culture—I love the beautiful, understated fashion, the charming cities, and the sharp humor. All the French people I’ve met are incredibly smart—wry—and have an air of earned sophistication. But boy, do I also really love the way they party.

We dance the night away until the alcohol threatens to do us in. This is standard practice.

It’s so loud we can’t hear ourselves think, but that doesn’t matter. We eventually stumble happily home, taking the thirty minute walk uphill from the river to the center, through the empty souks, the markets which are usually bustling with people. We fall asleep on the couch, the TV singing softly to us.

In the morning, my boyfriend rediscovers a conversation we had in the Notes application of his phone—passing the keyboard back and forth to each other. It went like this:

Him: we can go home now if u want
Me: yes I’m down je ne peux pas boire plus
Him: Ok, leave ur glass. Can u dance more?

I’m sure I know what my answer was.

I can vaguely remember the annual language listening exams we took in front of the library computers—the hush that fell over the white hallways of my small Montessori school as students wiggled into headphones, straining over the loud, crackling static to decipher recorded conversations between French teenagers Antoine and Sandrine.

Sometimes, we made crêpes, eating together in the big classroom, by the door which released us into the great green fields surrounding the school. We stomped barefoot through that grass in the warmer months, and during the Virginian blizzards, the hills were ours—we took to them in toboggans, racing down to the creek below. (I can’t remember if it was me or a classmate, but one of us once knocked a baby tooth clean out from the sheer force of colliding with a snowy bank. The violence of the sudden blood against the freshly fallen snow makes this a somewhat vivid memory.)

Every once in a while, we participated in a French comprehension competition: at the large auditorium of a local middle or high school, my classmates and I walked across the stage, receiving medals to be worn around our necks and a certificate noting our proficiency. Cake was served outside afterward, reward for the nerves of such a big room, full of all those big people.

I left that school a few years later, taking French less seriously the more time passed. Mr. Koffi, a gentle and soft-spoken man from the Ivory Coast, was the last good teacher I can place from childhood. By sixteen, I had given up the language completely.

Flash forward to year twenty-one and the French language is a beautiful melody I can just barely (not really) understand. Europe is magic and its lands call to me. I am an evolved American; the kind of American who loves her country but no longer believes in it, and I have learned to lower my voice in public.

In winter, I’m in Portugal. I travel through Spain and Hungary, visit Italy in April. I meet my boyfriend in the fall—tall, dark, and handsome, and as the universe would have it, French. I must learn the language in order to communicate with his family, in order to speak to him in his mother tongue. I think of the big stage of my childhood, the shiny golden medal and my toothless grin, and mourn the years lost.

Learning French is really hard and embarrassing. I don’t remember ever feeling that way as a child. It was just another subject, same as mathematics or history. Except now, as an adult, I’m intimately familiar with what social failure feels like. And social failure is an integral part of language learning. Complete and utter humiliation. Mistake after rotten mistake. An eyebrow scrunch and a mouth slightly agape: the universal look of incomprehension. There is nothing to do but face your inadequacy head on and laugh it off when and where you can.

Imagine you’re a frog basking in a murky pond, jumping from lily pad to lily pad. With English, or any mother tongue, the language is your support. You can just leap and the landing beneath will appear. You know this to be true in the way you know how to blink and breath—the movements require no effort or second-thought. Speaking French is not such a fearless action. At the beginning, you try to search for the landing, at least ensure you can see its timid green edges, before moving forward. There’s a real fear of falling, which is strange, because you’re usually so agile. But you need that lily pad. And if you can’t see it ahead, all that remains is the certainty of thrashing in the brackish water. The real breakthrough comes when you learn to swim, to pull yourself back up from the edge. But that takes time. You must first feel the water fill your lungs.

In an American classroom there are no stakes. Side conversations are held in English, even the lessons, depending on the seriousness of the teacher, can be taught in English. What happens in the classroom is an imitation of the language, which, like all speech, is constantly evolving. The uncomfortable middle, the murky water, the actual discomfort of the doing—speaking and getting it wrong but trying again anyway—necessary to achieve fluency is nonexistent for the American student learning out of a textbook. The feeling of ineptitude—of downright stupidity—in the right environments, can be the fire you need: I’m smart! I have thoughts and feelings and I must learn how to show you! There’s your sense of urgency.

The bilingual people in your life who don’t come from a two language household are truly and deeply courageous. And I’m looping myself in here, because I’ve been brave.

It’s scary to meet your new boyfriend’s parents, and it’s even scarier when you don’t speak their language. Over lunch with the entire family is where you learn you have a strange tic when trying to talk in French with your boyfriend in the room. His eyes are the only ones you seem to be able to look into—not the person you’re actually talking to—as if to ask, is this right? Am I okay? Only after coming out of the flushed daze of communication do you notice you were even doing it in the first place. Now you’re worried about the impression you made, which feels even more acute than the normal, first-time-meeting-the-parents anxieties.

Try a party, with a deafening base in a dark room. Try shouting a sentence you’re unsure of, one that feels all wrong in your mouth, into the ear drum of an acquaintance. This one really takes guts. Liquid courage results in varying levels of success.

It’s intimidating to join a French ballet studio in a foreign country, and when the little girl who dances in the class before yours comes trotting right up to you in her pink tutu as you’re putting on your ballet socks, you must manage through the conversation, because it’s not as easy to tell a child you’re still learning her language and can’t understand all the questions she’s asking. But she just wants to know your name and if you like to dance and if she’ll see you again on Thursday, and all of this, you can handle.

Actually, you learn, you can handle quite a bit. And this is the blissful reward of language learning: the clicking. The aha! moments. The days when French feels more like a blueprint—a map with dimension and various inner rooms of access—than an abstraction. It’s amazing to know your brain is changing, to know you’ve faced your fears, to keep surviving it all! One day, you’ll be sitting on the banks of the Seine as river boats go by, and the language will shimmer and ripple through you.

What a joy it is, beginning to belong to each other.

There are three other American’s in the class, adults who relocated to Morocco following a job or a husband, as well as one person representing each of the following countries: China, Hungary, Palestine, Argentina, Comoros, and Spain. The teacher is an energetic young Moroccan woman with a warm smile and sweet eyes hiding behind big glasses. There are so many accents in the room.

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Sometimes, I wish I was the kind of writer who went to a small liberal arts college with a distinctive creative writing track, and had an advisor who taught me about “craft.” A place with seasons, somewhere in a nondescript North—I would need a winter coat and a good pair of boots and there, I would be the kind of girl who always wears a braid. And the braid would be thick but also loose, perfectly frame my face, and be enough to single me out across the quad—also, in part, because the student body is so tiny. Everyone knows each other, but it’s not stifling like high school. No, in college, a small community like that is exclusive—elite. But the school isn’t pretentious. It has the upper echelon glow that makes people respect you, because they believe if they had only worked a little harder in high school, cared a little more about their Geometry grade or about finding strong leadership experiences, they could have ended up at a good school like yours, too. So they respect you because they know it’s a matter of hard work. And this makes you feel a small, contained, rush of pride because you know they know you are capable of hard work, and, no matter what they believe they could have or might have done, what they actually did was shop for prom dresses in the back row of Biology all year long and end up at a large state school with a mediocre football team and an above average acceptance rate.

Somewhere like Bates. Why not Maine? I could have lived in Maine.

That kind of writer is intimately familiar with Anne Carson and has, over the years, developed a strong sense for the strange core of her work. Unlike the kind of writer I am, whose only claim to the new Nobel laureate is through Autobiography of Red, which was assigned to me my senior year of high school. I remember suffering through the novel in verse—thinking it was weird, thinking I wanted nothing to do with it, nor with the teacher who’d assigned it. That teacher—who obviously had it right all along—stood at the front of our six person honors English class (a Syracuse University writing course available to high schoolers for college credit, which appealed to very few members of my graduating senior class) and taught us about panopticons and semantics and signifiers, broke down the meanings of things until what remained was a nothing world built on nothing and which stands for nothing. Quite the revelation.

Four years later, a professor at my large state school with the mediocre football team—a beautiful, electrifying genius—taught us the exact same lesson. Essentially, nothing is real. Make your own meaning, or don’t. It doesn’t matter! All the students were captivated. So when my high school teacher assigned Anne Carson, I should’ve gripped that book like it was the Holy goddamn Bible. Because it could’ve been mine. Then I could’ve gone on to be the writer I picture. I probably skimmed through the book and missed its essence, because I didn’t yet care about the essence of things. (But of course, if an opportunity arises to flaunt this sort of intellectual capital, I will talk about Geryon’s journey with the affection of that Northern writer I missed out on being: I don’t care that you majored in Classics at Tufts, I read Carson in high school.)

The kind of writer I want to be knows how to answer the question, who are your influences? That writer’s mind doesn’t go blank and say something—while respectable and absolutely true—as mind-numbingly obvious as James Baldwin. They’d probably say something more feminist and cool like Clarice Lispector. Even her name is cool. And then, like the kind of writer I am, all I’d be able to think is how badly I wish I was influenced by Clarice Lispector. I’d have to go to the bookstore and buy something of hers because I haven’t even read her work, and that just makes me a fraud, and probably not much of a feminist, either.

And this writer I imagine one day being is so opinionated. An entire web of beliefs guides their life and writing, which means, sensibly, they actually know how they feel about the things happening outside themselves.

But the kind of writer I am is someone who feels an overwhelming urge to stop writing as soon as they get into a groove. To stop and pick up the phone. To stop and look up at the ceiling. It’s hard and it’s hurting my head and I want things to be easy again. There are times when I’m the kind of writer I want to be—the serious kind who writes with a fury—and nothing can tear me from my work. Mostly, it feels good, but it can hurt, too, because I can’t stop, not even if I wanted to, not even if everything is horrible and I never want to look at what I’ve written again.

Or how about not knowing if I want to write a book? How about that? I don’t know if I want anyone to read what I write, ever. But that’s not true, because here I am. I like to see what I can do to people. Because I know how this stuff can work. How the right stringing together of words can haunt and change you. So I become the kind of writer who does sit down to write an entire, rambling draft—fifteen hundred words in thirty minutes—only to look at it as if it is nothing. As if I have created nothing. What the hell is that! Here it all is, all seven thousand characters. You call this nothing? It is most definitely something. Why is it, that in order for work to be seen and given credit to, to exist at all, it has to be perfect? The rotten weird tangles in the middle are your darlings. Tend to them.

What’s so wrong with the writer you are? The East Coast is cold and stiff and no one has heard of those small liberal arts colleges. I’m sorry I’ve never read Kafka. And I hated Paradise Lost—my professor was a Zionist who was incapable of preventing himself from talking about Israel and Palestine. Every class, he’d ramble on. We’re there to talk about Milton but somehow we’re talking about Hamas and he’s shaking his head and I’m closing my eyes. He tells us he attended a talk on Palestine last night to hear from the other side but he had to leave halfway through. He just couldn’t stand it. At the end of the semester, I write a scathing review in the teacher evaluations. Boy, did that feel good, my small rise. I just couldn’t stand it.

Instead of taking a respectable seat at a nice clean desk to do my work like a respectable writer, I lie in bed and imagine getting up in the next minute or two. I can never get comfortable on the couch, so I try every possible position. I don’t write seriously in longhand and I am not offline. Some days, I don’t even leave the apartment. I wake up and roll my eyes in the mirror while I brush my teeth and think about what flavor of yogurt I’ll have for breakfast. Some days, it’s riveting what I come up with. But dammit, I’m a writer! Wipe that shock off your face!

Unfortunately, around four in the morning is also when the first call to prayer echoes through the city of Rabat.

When the alarm went off at seven so my boyfriend could begin his morning routine and head off to school for the day, I got up with him, ready to have the laziest day I’d had in weeks. I parked myself on the couch and binged the entire season of Alix Earle’s new reality show until there was a knock at the door. Still in my pajamas, I answered it to receive an older Moroccan man with a small mouth and several protruding crooked teeth. He had an official looking piece of paper, all in Arabic, which he handed to me.

It became clear very quickly that the man at my door did not speak French, and I knew better than to try in English. The words he did manage to string together fought bravely against a thick Arabic accent. The paper he handed me had my boyfriend’s name written at the top in the only lettering I could recognize.

We flung broken sentences at the other and watched the words fall sadly to the floor beneath us, although I managed to piece together that a package had been delivered somewhere—presumably the wrong somewhere—and I needed to go pick it up. The man gestured wildly to aid my comprehension, until he began repeating the word viens over and over again (meaning, come), and pointing toward the elevator at the end of the hall. I held up my index finger to say one moment, please, and closed myself inside the apartment. Should I follow this strange man to… I’m not even sure where?

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Coming home to a small town is like opening a time capsule and arriving upon a place untouched by the time you’ve spent away. Even the people—childhood friends of years and years—have an essential sameness that allows you to believe, briefly, no one has changed at all. At least, not really. Not like you have. Stories circle around the long ago place we all inhabited together. It feels good.

Four of us go to Maud’s Tavern to drink beer and watch the train spit out commuters the Thursday before I leave. This is our parents’ bar. The inside is swathed in billiard table green, and has the distinct feel of a woodland cabin in a horror movie, where a young, sweet couple looking for a romantic weekend getaway go to get murdered. We don’t acknowledge the subtle step we’ve taken toward getting older by becoming people who drink at Maud’s. Two boys we knew in high school are among the group walking up the hill from the train station, and they come by to say hello. They are the same as they were then, except, not really, anymore. We split the check and talk about our lives now—the jobs we do or do not have and the plans we’re making. It is no fun. When the conversation inevitably returns to the time before, we each light up and immediately prepare a memory, a contribution that will earn us scores of laughter and encourage more welcome feelings of reminiscence.

We leave Maud’s and head to Uncle Lefty’s, a bar across from the town’s VFW plaza where jazz musicians sometimes play the saxophone, and protests are held for peace in Palestine. Various paraphernalia from our high school adorns the bar walls. The school mascot, a yellow jacket, is for sale on t-shirts displayed behind the counter; varsity letters and banners color the dimly-lit space green and yellow. We haven’t worn those colors in years, but we remember when we did. We fill a high top table by the bay window and drink to it—to the time when we did.

The night is getting darker when one of the boys tells a story about the woods. The weekly bonfires held in the clearing behind the elementary school, where seniors mixed jungle juice and freshmen gathered wood, were a huge part of our adolescence. According to legend, “Padj” earned its name from the initials of the four boys who began the tradition in the Hillside Woods decades ago. We donned costumes to celebrate Homecoming and Halloween at Padj. Each senior class christened the first day of school with a party up the trodden path, signing everyone’s matching white shirts in Sharpie, showing up collectively late and hungover to morning classes, smelling distinctly of smoke. Nine months later, the seniors are sent off with a “Padjuation” the night they walk across the stage to receive their diplomas.

The night of our Padjuation, we stayed out until the sun rose. My friend lives across from a corner deli on the way out of town—and at six in the morning, the deli received a bread delivery. On the way past the shop, the other boy he was with snatched the bread off the stoop and ran home drunk and laughing, unaware there was a large wad of cash—some form of payment—in the bag as well, which sent the deli workers into a rightful frenzy. Eventually, the bread and the money were miraculously returned to the stoop. We drink to his good graces.

The bar is closing, but we won’t leave. The bartender flashes us dirty looks until we take the hint and settle up. We roam the quiet, empty streets and buy more drinks at the bodega. The proprietor was a big part of our adolescence, too. He used to sell us beer, every once in a while, if you were nice and caught him in a good mood. He would laugh loudly at the quality of our fake IDs before handing it back, but the laugh was how you knew you had him. Other times, he’d remind us he knew exactly how old we were because he’d watched us grow up, coming into his store to buy a buttered roll and an iced tea after school. It’s getting late, but there is so much more to talk about, like when we’ll all be moving to the city, and junior year.

The ones with work in the morning finally call the night. Our friend asks his mom for a ride home—she used to bring freshly baked chocolate chip cookies into the garage in her backyard that we appropriated in high school, interrupt a game of beer pong or a joint out the window. One time, she drove us to the train station ahead of a Manhattan night out, looked back at us—the two girls in tight skirts and tall boots in her backseat—and in her sweet New Zealand accent said, “don’t let strange men touch your bodies!” We’re all thrilled to see her, and chat warmly as she drops each of us off at our houses around town.

Mine is quiet when I arrive except for the low hum of the TV in the living room, where Mom fell asleep on the couch. I wake her up and we patter up the stairs together, the wood floors spin a little and I laugh at my image in the mirror: I’m drunk like I’m sixteen, instead of twenty-two, with a plane to catch in the morning.

Along the sand, there are clusters of surf schools with wide open doors and sandy floors, their façades all lined up in a row. Shirtless, all-male instructors sit outside their respective shops, mingling with each other and the passersby. Arabic is flung about across the way. Everyone is tanned and dripping.

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It wasn’t until I read Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals that I felt like I could understand poetry, or that poetry could ever understand me. I had that very rare experience of not only total understanding, but feeling like she was speaking directly to me. Her poems were accessible yet incredibly layered, the precision a product of her amazing writing process, which involved printing out pages of work and cutting out individual phrases, even words, to then lay everything out on the floor. A visual artist. She rearranged her words again and again, until it made sense to her in the way it needed to.

At her reading, she played an upbeat walk-up song as she took to the podium, and then devastated the room. A small and striking woman, she was shorter than I had expected, with wide, large eyes as black as her hair that invited you inside and then asked you to stay. Her sleeveless olive top contrasted beautifully with the paleness of her skin and revealed swirling, American-style tattoos that seemed too big for her body.

Despite her quiet strength, it was clear she carried a profound, perhaps dark, sadness. She later shared, with the smaller group who stayed behind for Q&A, that her mother was battling an aggressive cancer, and her long-term partner had very recently ended their relationship. It wasn’t a cloud that hung above her in the room—more like a shadow, clinging to her spine, peering over her shoulder to see what Mag had made of it all. She looked out at her audience as she read, searching for someone willing to hold her daunting gaze. I thought she was remarkable.

I didn’t say what I really wanted to when I asked for her signature, which was something—anything—to relay how she’d affected me. I just smiled and stuck out the title page. It was borrowed, my copy of her book, but I didn’t care, and wouldn’t be returning it.

Since first coming to writing as a child, I’ve traveled through various styles of prose—fantastical worlds of enchanted forests and auto-fiction about young women writers in New York City—before arriving upon my own. With creative nonfiction, I own the power to pluck any experience out from obscurity and anoint it with meaning. It’s a joyful, transformative practice that has only ever nurtured my empathy and attention. Poetry was always a beautiful thing of mystery that I never entertained long enough to take in. Recognizing the medium through Mag, after years of reluctant, adjacent study prompted an immediate opening of the poetry floodgates. I discovered the New York School and picked up a pocket edition of Lunch Poems. Fernando Pessoa and Richard Siken were next among the conquered. The following summer, I flew across the Atlantic to Lisbon, Portugal to participate in my first ever writer’s workshop—named for Pessoa’s seminal work, The Book of Disquiet. Surprisingly, I was there to study poetry.

I spent two weeks working under acclaimed American poet Chet’la Sebree and bowing before the other participants, people of all ages and backgrounds who had traveled from around the world to be there. A heatwave burned through the Portuguese capital, and each day, as I rose with the sinister tune in my head of “I’m no poet,” the ancient cobblestone blistered beneath my feet.

But I was, sitting between Henry and Susan. Across the room from Ari, who wrote about lands and wars and the Animalia of northern Michigan. I was when I asked Eric about the right way to read a poem, and he laughed, said, there is no right way.

Coming to poetry has been a catalyst for discovery in my prose. Adhering to a strict structure, oddly enough, has the ability to set me free. The form demands meaning in every line; I must come forth brutally and accept the sharp edge of precision. Mag indirectly taught me how to take the guardrails off, for there is room to play in the gutters of things.

The medium that once felt intimidating is now just fun. Poetry is inherently experimental. It can reveal what my prose can’t yet access and urge me to say what I mean. I use it to learn exactly what that is.

What do you owe the first person who ever spoke to you? The truth about how they touched you. I’d tell Mag I write poems now. Even when it feels like there is no right way. I am a scrap of paper on the floor, I would say to her. Please, move me.

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sometimes people write poems
about fire that are really
about love making

and sometimes people get
sunburned while swimming
because they think
they should’ve felt the heat

as a kid I liked to press
my hand against sheets
of paper and trace my fingers
to draw little stars

it’s true that I call you
an old flame even though
I still reach
across the dark

at night when you turned on
my street I could see
the lit trail
of your cigarette sparks

you would say let’s just see
where things lead
then my body would
become a satellite or stream

the way the sun beams
off the face of the moon
as they rotate apart

one time I curved
my hands together in arcs
and you held up your fist saying no
this is the heart

– Mag Gabbert, “Constellation”

The teacher, an elegant French woman with grey hair and a tight smile, asks me where I’m from, motioning for me to join her and the other woman, who introduces herself as Clémentine, on the line of red tape.

“I’m American,” I say in French, “but I’m learning to speak.” They nod approvingly. We take first position.

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I’m an East Coast baby, and proud of it. I spent the first thirteen years of my life in Northern Virginia until moving to New York in 2017. The move was difficult, and the teary eyed goodbyes to my childhood friends were filled with a promise of reuniting one day in college, in the faraway land of California, where everything was sun-kissed, girls rode by in cool hats on skateboards, and families never moved away.

California consumed me. Images of swaying palm trees and the smell of ocean I believed was aways drifting in from somewhere nearby was intoxicating. The pennants of its famous universities beckoned from behind tacks in my advisors office as I demanded to know what it would take to get there.

San Diego State University was the first of seven colleges to accept me. I screamed out in joy running through my house when they offered me a merit scholarship. The first time I stepped foot in the great golden state was to tour the school as an accepted student. Tucked snuggly inland in La Mesa, campus is a mere twenty minute drive away from gorgeous, world-famous neighborhoods La Jolla and Pacific Beach.

It was everything I had ever dreamed of and more. I moved across the country in late August, eager to start my new life.

Dorm buildings had private pools in luxuriously landscaped courtyards where city food trucks sold meals each weekday evening. Mine had a view of the canyon and a rooftop where student vendors set up booths selling thrifted clothing. The school’s D1 athletics program funded a state of the art gym with free group classes: heated yoga, pilates sculpt, and kickboxing were some among the many options. We went to the beach in the evenings after class for sunset swims. In late September, it was bliss to be in that water—waves reflected the deep pink of the sky as the sun dipped into the ocean. And the academics were strong—faculty members were esteemed and engaging; courses were both challenging and compelling.

As time progressed, I learned there were, generally-speaking, two sides to California. Those who loved the state for its glamour and access: impossibly beautiful people who partied hard, ran adjacent to celebrities, and strived to reach the top of an ever-expanding social hierarchy. And there were those who loved it for its access to nature and good living: impossibly beautiful people (everyone really is in California) who took their vans on coastal camping trips, got very serious about hiking, and were always barefoot, exposing years-old silver toe rings. I met people who embodied both the Californias I observed, people who fell squarely in the middle, those belonging to one group who clearly envied parts of the other, and people defined by something else altogether (like the silversmith I met in a girl’s surf group who dropped out a few months later and moved to Indonesia). But mostly, I met those belonging to the former group, but who dabbled occasionally in the latter’s activities.

My time in California was one of abundance so commonplace that its excess became difficult to see. Classmates were budding influencers receiving PR packages to the on-campus UPS store. My freshman year neighbors were instagram models attending David Dobrik’s birthday party in the Hollywood Hills over the weekend, while mutuals zipped off to Las Vegas for fraternity formals and bottle service. Greek life was an expensive microcosm of the university ecosystem that instantly dictated social value. Most people went to Cabo for spring break, and Coachella (Weekend One) each April. Recreational drug use was rampant in these circles. For the privileged—a large portion of the student body—school was impossible to separate from an all-inclusive resort vacation, and this feeling persisted for the entirety of our four matriculated years.

There were seven of us girls living in the cute yellow house on the edge of East Falls View Drive, a short walk to campus with a backyard fire pit, a hot pink bench press, and a large swimming pool. We’d been friends since the early days of college, meeting at seventeen and eighteen in dorm rooms and outside sorority houses, banding together for the rest of the ride. We spent our days lounging, mostly. At the pool, at the beach, on the couch in front of the TV. Sometimes we hiked along the coastal trails in Torrey Pines, sprinting into the ocean at the end for relief from the year-round sun. But mostly, we shopped, we drank, and we reveled in our perfect lives.

School was secondary to boys, to wondering what the neighbors over the fence thought of us, to birthdays (long live the grudges we held against those who didn’t wish us happy ones), and to securing enviable weekend plans. We curated perfect outfits from each other’s ever-expanding closets to walk the twenty minutes to class four times a week, which usually ended around noon each day. Nobody had a job during the school year until we were seniors. Our parents helped us—in varying degrees—by paying tuition, sending money for groceries and gas, food delivery if we were sick (or lazy), and anything else we might need. We acted strangely in light of this, never quick to share, charging for common goods like butter and pepper. I once earnestly received a Venmo request for a single dollar.

The only friction in our life together was occasional fighting, which usually broke out in the aftermath of overindulgence—I’m sure you can imagine. Otherwise, our dynamic was simple, at-times, predictable, and easy to slip inside of.

To the extent that California gave me a dream life by the sea and new friends from around the country, my teenage vision came true. But there was also something deeply revealing and potentially ugly about this world. A subculture festers in the bubble around College Area, offering an unflinching look at young, wealthy, white America.

It was the best and the worst way to be twenty. I lived inside a world that could be as generous as it was superficial; as warm as it was thoughtless. I absorbed both. Still, there is much to be said for learning what is right for you through what isn’t. I had spent years believing California would be the key to my happiness. As long as I can get to the ocean, I used to think, that’s where my life will start. I was devastated when the spell broke and I realized that I didn’t always like the person I was there—and, beneath all the beauty and ease, I was actually often deeply, spiritually unhappy.

My life started when I learned how to take action—taking back the attention, ambition, and perspective I’d lost while complicit in the making of a life that asked so little of me. I graduated with incredible memories, lasting friendships, and a profound love for the beautiful city that taught me so much. The ending was sad and difficult, as endings often are. Leaving our empty house behind ripped something raw and desperate from me. But it was also freeing. I put too much pressure on the damn place.

My navigation told me I would arrive after the next right turn. I walked with the kind of certainty in my step that allowed me to brush past onlookers, acting as if I was so set on my destination, nothing—not even a penetrating stare—could put me off my path. So, when I reached the end of the block and there was nothing but an Italian restaurant called Lil Mamma that looked like it had nothing to do with Italy, and the terrace of a café where an older man in a faded red shirt sat smoking, unabashedly watching me, I braced myself for a walk of shame back the way I came.

As I went up the street, slower this time to scan the store fronts, the man in the red asked if I needed help. I was naturally wary of the stranger addressing me in a foreign language (everyone in Morocco assumes I’m French), but I was lost. I explained what I was looking for, asked him where I could buy deux stylos noir, and after a few minutes clarifying whether I was looking for a library or a bookstore, he pointed past Lil Mamma, motioning for me to follow. I relented, noting that the street he pointed out was busy with passing people.

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Around the ladder at the base of the structure, I used to get splinters from running my small hands along the wood. Splinters were such a common childhood ordeal—Mom fetching her sharp tweezers from the medicine cabinet while I cried in anticipatory pain—that I was certain it would be one of life’s persistent burdens.

The neighborhood kids and I spent our younger years walking the storm drain through the woods behind our houses. I remember the opening in the branches where my backyard met the drain; how it felt to sprint through it as cotton caught on brambles, and the shock of concrete as my feet dropped into the canal. From there I’d race up Bailey’s hill (she was a beautiful black Cocker Spaniel who could often be found patrolling the property across from mine), and come out to my neighbors’ front door. They were the Golden family, and they lived on Golden Street. Everything always fell serendipitously into place like this.

In my memory, my childhood is awash in a vibrant, vivid green: the color of my sister’s room (she’s in there, talking loudly on the landline), the pigment of the grass in our yard (it’s impossible to get dad’s attention over the roar of the lawn mower). It is always the most spectacular day.

Lucy had the best playhouse in all the neighborhood. Hers was double the size of mine with a slide and climbing rope, shrouded under cover of the Northern Virginian deciduous trees. I’d see her playing on it with her two siblings from my kitchen window, call out to her from the deck, then cross over through the wood chips to join them.

Lucy and I became friends in May. We’d yell back and forth from our respective backyards hoping the other was within earshot. My name would come echoing all around the woods, travel in through an open window, and beckon me outside.

By the end of that humid summer, everyone knew my family was moving to New York. Dad’s side lived spread about the same suburban county (my parents fell in love in the halls of the high school I would eventually graduate from), and we’d been driving up there, for holidays and major events, many times a year for as long as I could remember. But the road from Virginia to New York raised me on the promise that there would always be a road back—and my Virginia was a lovely thing to return to.

The knowledge of this imminent loss brought forth new emotions that threatened to sharpen into an aching adolescence. My parents hosted open houses in secret, but I’d find evidence of our leaving when I returned home to the frames once mounted upon our walls missing. Photos of me as a child in the ballet tutus I adored—the winter recital where I kept my arms raised, poised above my head, long after the choreography called for it, while the other children had already lowered theirs—gone. I didn’t dare ask where to. Family portraits and moments between my sister and me at Christmas, on the beach—pictured in every ordinary intimacy—came down one by one. Eventually, everything went the way of the playhouse out back.

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In the days before the movers arrived to pack the rest of our belongings away, I discovered I could access the flat part of the roof from my window. Immediately, I mourned the time I hadn’t spent there, imagining the many melancholic hours I could have passed gazing at the low-hanging stars over the cul-de-sac. Mom found me there on occasion, alarmed at my sudden affinity for the uncomfortable asphalt shingles. I was thirteen, learning how to go through a hard thing. A little drama was helpful.

Instead, I carved my initials, along with those of my closest friends at the time, into the teal walls of my bedroom. The print was jagged and shallow—a pushpin is a sorry match for drywall—but it was easily visible, and I was satisfied. I wanted to make sure I’d be remembered by the house. Plus, I harbored a secret hope that the etching would also somehow derail the sale, against my better judgment that, of course, it would not. The new owners simply painted over everything.

In August, we settled into our new house atop the Mount Hope hill (the name that also graced the large cemetary across town, a detail I found particularly loathsome) a few weeks before I was due to enter the eighth grade. It was impossible to deny the beauty of our cliffside property with its striking views of the Palisades and Hudson River, but I still tried. New York was different, and despite our proximity to the Big Apple, smaller. It took me a long time to get used to the change. I had new neighbors now, and we were too old to play in the woods.

So I tried my hand at adult-sized things, like drinking alcohol and smoking weed. On Friday afternoon after the final bell, we walked behind the elementary school playground toward Sugar Pond. My friends told stories of the water freezing completely over during older, colder, New York winters, of the families who came out in droves to skate on its surface as the joint was produced, lit, then passed eagerly around. I imagined the ice cracking; smoke singed the roof of my mouth and excitement gave way to dread that could be abated only by sobriety’s sluggish return. I kept smoking anyway—people said it got better—and the more I partook, the more skilled I became at swallowing the paranoia and biting my tongue.

I watched with indifference and morbid amusement as I transformed from a curious, straight-A student who read books and wrote stories for fun, to a banality of teenage rebellion: held back after school to save a plunging English grade, and asking the boys held back with me to try their Mango Juul to pass the time. The mediums that had long been pillars of my identity—writing, reading, playing instruments or making art—fell away with a quiet, almost imperceptible, detachment. It was a boring cliché.

The first few years passed by in a state of steady agitation, resisting some parts of New York while embracing others. I went from telling people I lived about thirty minutes outside Washington D.C., to thirty minutes outside Manhattan. The latter felt cooler; I deemed New York City a more interesting place to be in proximity to. I thought briefly about the city for college, before setting my sights on California and the West. The distant goal helped reorganize and reaffirm my priorities. Slowly but surely, New York started feeling more like home, and I, more like myself.

The move ultimately fed into a growing desire to see more of the world. It is the source of a deep belief in my ability to start over in unfamiliar places and survive. I can bend gently into change and more easily recognize its capacity to shape me. In the nine years since, I’ve moved across the country at eighteen, to Europe at twenty-one, then to Africa at twenty-two. I’m not sure what leaps, if any, I would have taken had I not been forced to jump that first time.

The world is full of open roads; the farther I follow them, the more often I come across the places that have, at one time or another, housed me. I’ve returned to myself in many little ways along the path, a tiny homecoming at every bend.

Together, my boyfriend and I brought three large suitcases, one small one, an oversized duffle bag, and two backpacks. Not only are the suitcases enormous, they’re heavy and stubborn, which made the short walk to our building’s entrance a spectacle. When we came upon one of the two lobby elevators, we were a sweaty, disgruntled mess. Of course, only after lugging each item into the tiny lift on the right did we notice that the buttons didn’t go any higher than the fifth floor. So out everything came again. On the left-side elevator, I rode up with a man whom I’m positive I hit in the face with my backpack. My apology struck up a conversation in French, one of Morocco’s two predominant languages, alongside Arabic. Although my French has been steadily improving for the last year, in this moment, after all the travel, I could barely have gotten a word out in English.

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September feels funny this time around. Its always been a month marked by the continuation of some of my favorite things, like still getting to acceptably wear flip flops in New York, the wedding anniversaries of both my parents and sister (39 and 3 years, respectively), the lingering kiss of sunned-skin, lighter under-eye circles, and flimsy, stylish cardigans.

But this time, everything’s different. I’m four months out from a conferred English degree, a cross-country move, and the start of my first year off from traditional schooling in seventeen. I’m itching for structure, a routine, some semblance of purpose–of drive. I feel lazy, unmotivated, and, worst of all: indifferent.

Still, I’m lucky to have a gap year. I’m grateful to be able to devote myself to graduate school applications, to no longer be balancing six classes with 3:30am wake up calls for a job in fitness that didn’t pay enough. This is what I tell myself as I stare at the blank page, or as I scroll through TikTok videos about side hustles, feeling like hustle is the very thing I need to figure out for myself. Don’t you know how much potential you have? Here I am, trying to find it.

“I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, I want to tell you this story without having to be in it.” – Richard Siken, from The Torn-up Road

I spent two weeks at a writer’s retreat in Portugal in the early days of summer, when the whole season felt similarly ripe with possibility. I could not believe I was allowed to be there. I met a retiree from San Francisco who wrote poems about her mother, shared a room with a Brazilian prodigy who laughed each night on the phone with her mother, and realized, probably, everything is just about mothers. So I thought and wrote some about mine.

Then I met a New York City native with the kind of easy skill that makes you hurt all over. We sat at the park in the heat of July with open notebooks and ice-cold cider. I imagined she was the devoted, serious kind of writer despite knowing nothing of her habits. She offered to read my work and I scrambled to explain it was an early draft and probably bad while I secretly hoped she would slam my computer shut and tell me it was the best damn two paragraphs she’d ever read in her life. Instead, she told me what her favorite sentence was, which was somehow better, and went back to her notebook, where she had been jotting down the date.

“Rabbit, rabbit,” she said to me. “It’s the first of the month.”