Chapter 4

The river was behind her. Mississippi was ahead.

Remedy had been driving less than two hours since leaving Prince, and her body had yet to forget him. There was a pleasant soreness in her thighs, a little ache in her lower back, and a smile that kept sneaking onto her face no matter how many times she told herself to behave. The man had been a good deal of trouble, and she had enjoyed every minute of it.

The road carried her out of the hills and into flatter country, where red clay ditches cut through the green and Spanish moss hung from oak branches. The air grew warm and damp, clinging to her skin through the open window. She had eaten two of the biscuits Prince packed for her and finished his cold coffee.

The radio crackled.

Remedy reached for the dial, expecting another burst of static. Instead, a woman’s voice came through, low and close, as though she were sitting beside her.

“Keep going, baby.”

Her hand froze on the dial. The voice vanished, leaving a silence so complete she could hear the tires rolling over the road. Then three knocks sounded beneath the dashboard.

Remedy took her foot off the accelerator and stared at the radio.

“Lord, I hope you know I am not in the mood for this foolishness.”

The radio popped, and the crickets started back up in the ditch grass like nothing had happened. Remedy waited before putting the car back in gear.

The green pamphlet lay on the seat beside her. She opened it to the page marked Tennessee, where the blue ink had appeared that morning.

She’s waiting there.

“Then I hope she’s got some answers,” Remedy murmured.

The sign appeared a little after noon, nailed crookedly to a wooden post just over the Mississippi line.

LOTTY.

Beneath the name was a black cross.

Remedy turned onto a narrow road winding between the trees. The settlement was smaller than she’d expected. A handful of houses stood among the cypress, some raised on posts and others resting close to the ground. Bottles dangled from branches, and several doorframes were painted a pale, ghostly blue.

Three women stood beneath an oak near a small church. One held a Bible against her chest, another watched the far end of the road, and the third kept looking toward the swamp.

As Remedy passed, the woman with the Bible stepped forward.

“Hi, Remedy, you looking for Lotty?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re standing in it,” the woman said. “This whole settlement’s been Lotty since before I was born. But I expect it’s Miss Lotty herself you want. Then you’d best go straight to her house. Don’t stop at the store, and don’t go down toward the water.”

Before Remedy could ask why, a faint vibration passed through the ground. The women went still. Bottles began rattling at the far end of the settlement, their glass turning in the trees.

There was no wind.

The woman tightened her grip on the Bible. “Go on, child. She’s waiting for you.”

Remedy swallowed her questions. She’d been raised to respect her elders, and she could tell the woman had already said more than she intended.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

At the edge of the settlement, the road narrowed beneath the branches. A dark timber house stood beyond a stand of cypress, its porch lined with bottles and bundles of dried plants. An iron pot sat upside down on either side of the steps.

An older woman stood waiting. She had a deep brown face, a headwrap knotted neatly at the nape of her neck, and a cotton dress that had seen more work than Sunday gatherings. An open Bible rested on a table beside her, weighted with a smooth river stone. In one hand she held a bundle of roots tied with red thread. The bottles above her head rattled, but her eyes never left Remedy.

Remedy parked and approached the porch, smoothing her dress.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. I’m Remedy.”

“I know who you are.”

The woman’s gaze moved to the pendant beneath Remedy’s dress. She studied her face with an expression that was neither surprise nor suspicion, but recognition.

“So,” she said quietly. “Gladys finally let you go.”

Remedy’s jaw tightened at the sound of her grandmother’s name.

“Come up here, child. Mind that first step.”

A thin line of dark powder crossed the porch boards. Remedy lifted her foot over it. Lotty went inside, and Remedy followed. The house was cool and orderly, jars and roots everywhere, nothing out for show. Everything had a purpose.

Lotty closed the door, and the bottles outside fell silent.

“Have you been hearing things on the road?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Anybody calling you by name?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Don’t answer when they do.”

Remedy’s stomach tightened. “You know what’s happening?”

“I know what has been happening here. I don’t yet know what it wants from you.”

Lotty explained that for three nights something had been calling from the water and beneath the house. Last night, it had sounded like Lotty’s own mother standing outside her door.

“I’ve called on my people, and I’ve leaned on this Book,” Lotty said, resting a hand on the Bible. “For a time, that was enough. But whatever is down there has grown stronger.”

Three slow knocks rose through the floor. The pendant warmed against Remedy’s skin.

“Stay behind me, child.”

Something struck the underside of the floor hard enough to rattle the table. A board split, and black water welled through the crack, carrying the rotten smell of the swamp into the house.

A voice rose from beneath them.

“Remedy.”

It was her mother’s voice. Not something that merely sounded like it, but the familiar voice that had once called Remedy in from the yard when the streetlights came on.

Remedy’s lips parted.

“Don’t answer it,” Lotty warned.

The voice came again, softer this time.

“Baby, come here.”

Tears filled Remedy’s eyes before she could stop them. She hadn’t heard her mother speak to her that way since she was a little girl.

“Whatever you hear,” Lotty said, “you remember who raised you.”

Remedy thought of Gladys smoothing her hair, correcting her when she spoke carelessly to an elder, and telling stories that always seemed to stop just before the important part.

Don’t go looking for her. She already knows where you are.

The pendant burned against Remedy’s chest. A pale hand appeared between the floorboards, fingers curling around the wood.

Lotty didn’t reach for the Bible. She threw herself at a different board, one that looked no different from any of the others, and tore it up with her bare hands. Underneath sat a small clay jar, sealed with wax and wrapped round with red thread.

She snapped the wax with her thumb and spoke fast and low as she worked.

“This is Lotty, daughter of Deloris, great-granddaughter of Ann. I call on my ancestors. Lenora. Martha.” She kept calling names, one after another, like she was throwing rocks at a door. The air in the room thickened, and Remedy’s ears popped, like she’d gone underwater and come up too fast.

The fingers in the crack went still. Then, slow and reluctant, they withdrew.The fingers in the crack went still. Then, slow and reluctant, they withdrew.

For one breath, Remedy thought it was over.

Then the house went completely silent.

A woman’s voice rose from beneath the floor, clear as a bell.

“You promised.”

Lotty scrambled back, one hand braced against the overturned table.

“I know what I promised!” she shouted. “And I kept it longer than any of us had a right to.”

The boards burst upward. Black water exploded across the room, overturning the table and throwing Remedy against the wall. Lotty caught her arm, but something seized the older woman’s ankle and dragged her to the floor.

Beneath the water, a pale face appeared. The woman’s mouth was sewn shut with purple thread. Her eyes fixed on Remedy, and she didn’t blink.

Lotty fought to free her ankle. Then she looked at the woman beneath the water.

“You want the truth told? Fine. Let it be told. But you don’t get to drag that child under to make your point.”

The pendant grew so hot that Remedy tore it free of her dress. The chain snapped, and the gold charm began to stain, the black spreading fast enough to watch, swallowing the C whole.

Remedy felt it then, underneath the fear, a pull running straight through the water and the house and the dirt below it, like all three were the same thing wearing different skins. Whatever Lotty and her people had been holding was stretched nearly to breaking. Remedy could feel the gap in it as plainly as she could feel the pendant burning her hand.

She didn’t know how she knew. She only knew something on the other side was trying to get through, and Lotty alone could not keep it shut.

The woman in the water began to laugh. The sound was wet and broken, escaping through stitches that loosened one by one.

Remedy was tired of following signs she couldn’t understand. Whatever lived beneath that house had been calling for her, and she would not let it keep calling as though she belonged to it.

She stepped toward the broken floor.

“Remedy, no!” Lotty cried.

Remedy held the pendant above the black water. “I hear you,” she said.

The woman stopped laughing.

Remedy closed her fingers around the gold charm. The woman’s expression changed. The hunger in her eyes gave way to recognition. She knew that pendant.

“But I ain’t yours.”

The pendant answered her. She didn’t know what she’d done or how she knew to do it, only that something in the room had heard her and moved.

Then a word rose into her mouth, one she had never learned, in a language she didn’t recognize, low and sure, like it had been sitting in the back of her throat her whole life.

The water recoiled. Every bottle on the porch shattered at once, and a sound older than any human scream tore up from beneath the house. The floorboards slammed shut. Water rushed backward through the cracks, dragging the pale woman’s face with it. For one last moment, her eyes stayed fixed on Remedy.

Then she was gone.

The room fell still. The pendant lay cold in Remedy’s hand, its gold surface blackened end to end, the letter C gone under it. Lotty lay beside the overturned table, one hand pressed to her ankle.

Remedy sat with her back against the wall, her hands shaking too hard to be any use to anybody, Lotty included.

After a while, she helped Lotty into a chair.

“Are you hurt?”

“My ankle will mend.”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve…”

“Don’t apologize for what you don’t yet understand,” Lotty said.

She looked toward the broken floor. “I’ve spent years keeping that woman beneath this house. I told myself I was keeping her from getting out. That was true enough. But it wasn’t the whole truth.”

Remedy looked at the blackened pendant. “What did I do?”

“I don’t know what you did, child,” Lotty said. “But I know what you’re carrying. Then you best keep it close. She ain’t the only one who might recognize it.”

There was something in Lotty’s expression Remedy couldn’t quite place. Relief, maybe. Or the look of a woman finally seeing something she’d waited years for.

“All these years,” Lotty murmured. “And you walk in here and do what I couldn’t.”

She glanced toward the floor. “She may have been wronged, but she doesn’t get to decide what happens to you. I made a promise, child. I thought keeping it would protect you. I see now that protecting you and keeping you ignorant weren’t the same thing.”

“Now, I reckon,” Remedy said, looking toward the broken floor, “we start telling the truth.”

Lotty shifted in her chair and winced. Remedy rose to help her, but the older woman waved her off.

“Don’t look at me like that. You’re the one who walked toward it.”

“It was dragging you under.”

“And I appreciate the assistance. I still have a hole in my floor.”

Despite herself, Remedy laughed. It came out shaky, but it was a laugh all the same.

“Don’t think that means you ain’t helping me clean this up,” Lotty added.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lord, Gladys did leave me with a handful.”

Remedy laughed again, then looked down at the pendant. The humor faded, leaving her with the weight of everything she still didn’t know.

“Your grandmother knew this would happen,” Lotty said. “She was afraid of what you might become if you knew too soon.”

Remedy shook her head and laughed, a little wild. “All I wanted was to go to New Orleans.”

Once they were settled, Lotty went to a small cabinet and returned with a tin box wrapped in faded cloth. Inside lay an old photograph, a folded letter, and a small brass key.

In the photograph, three women stood in front of a wooden house. Remedy recognized Gladys at once, younger than she’d ever known her, her face serious beneath a neatly pinned hat. Cora stood beside her, one hand resting against Gladys’s arm. Between them stood a third woman in a plain white dress, wearing a small gold pendant at her throat.

Remedy leaned closer.

Celestine.

Remedy turned the picture over. Three names had been written on the back: Gladys, Cora, Celestine. Beneath them, in a different hand, was a single sentence.

We agreed she would never know.

Remedy read it twice, searching Gladys’s younger face for some hint of the grandmother who had raised her. There was nothing she could recognize.

“I wasn’t there when they made their agreement,” Lotty said, “but I know what it cost them.”

“What agreement?”

“That’s a question for Celestine.”

“She’s in Louisiana?”

Lotty nodded. “She’s been waiting for you longer than I have.”

Remedy reached for the letter. She recognized Cora’s handwriting from the few notes her aunt had left behind, the same rounded letters that had once labeled jars in her mother’s kitchen.

If you are reading this, then Gladys could not keep you away, and I could not get to you first.

Remedy paused. Her aunt had been dead for three years.

She continued.

There are things about your mother that neither Gladys nor I had the courage to tell you. We thought silence would protect you. We were wrong. When you find Celestine, ask her what happened the night you were born. Ask her why the water remembers you.

The letter ended there.

Remedy lowered it slowly. The questions she’d carried since Detroit had multiplied, but for the first time, they had a direction. Louisiana. Celestine. The night she was born.

Lotty watched her fold the letter and return it to the tin.

“Whatever happened in this house today, it wasn’t the end of it,” she said. “Not everything that knows your name has a right to it. Remember that when you’re on the road.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Remedy finished wrapping Lotty’s ankle. She wanted to ask a hundred questions, but the older woman’s tired face stopped her. Whatever had happened beneath that house had taken something out of Lotty, and Remedy wasn’t going to demand answers she wasn’t ready to give.

She said her goodbyes, climbed back into the Ford, and pulled the green pamphlet onto her lap before she turned the key.

Blue ink spread slowly beneath the name Lotty.

LOUISIANA.

Underneath it, another sentence appeared.

Ask Celestine who called you back.

Remedy stared until the ink stopped moving. Then she closed the pamphlet, smiled, turned the radio on, and found Cab Calloway waiting for her on the other end of it.

She pulled back onto the road and kept going.

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

I had the pleasure attending classes at Equilibrium Baltimore, a Black-owned boutique wellness studio offering aerial and traditional yoga, pole fitness, lyra, and self-defense. It’s a welcoming space built for strengthening your body and building real community through movement, so if you’re in Baltimore, add it to your list

Beyond

I’ve been sneaking off to Annapolis and falling for Wild Country Seafood. The owner remembered me after just one visit and treats me so well every time since. The food is yummy and affordable, so go check them out

Chapter 4

Remedy woke up tangled in a quilt she didn’t recognize, the smell of woodsmoke and old cedar hanging heavy in the room. Sunlight was already cutting sharp squares across the floorboards. She sat up too fast, reaching for the dashboard clock that wasn’t there before she remembered where she was. Downstairs, a pan hit a stove and a screen door slapped shut.

By the time she washed her face and came down, her clothes were neat, her shoes were waiting, and Mrs. Vicky had already packed her up. Remedy left Mrs. Vicky’s with a heavy square of brown butcher paper twisted tight around a warm tin plate on the seat beside her. Inside was a split buttermilk biscuit still weeping butter, two thick slabs of cold-fried catfish, and a small crumpled twist of foil holding a handful of fried peach pies that hadn’t quite cooled yet.

“For the road,” Vicky had said, handing it over with a look that didn’t invite argument.

The river road was right where Vicky said it would be, and that was the first thing that bothered her. The road everybody else took ran straight and paved toward town; she could see it cutting across the valley in the distance. But Vicky had warned her: Don’t take the road everybody takes.

So Remedy kept on the narrow, winding gravel track, following the water like it was leading her somewhere specific. She kept the radio off. She kept both hands on the wheel. She checked the rearview every half mile like a woman who had learned something about rearview mirrors. Nothing. Just mist burning off the slow river sheets and a mockingbird that wouldn’t shut up.

“You not finna talk to me today?” she muttered, to Gladys, to the car, to whoever was listening.

Her wristwatch said 9:15. She hadn’t driven ten minutes down the bend before the trees suddenly parted, wide and bright, and there it sat. A little white church with no steeple, just a flat roof and a bell hanging from a wooden frame in the yard, like somebody had decided heaven didn’t need the extra height. Trucks and wagons were parked deep in the grass. Women were carrying heavy pots. Somebody was already laughing. The bell wasn’t ringing, but somebody had propped it wide with a broom handle so the sound of it swinging empty carried anyway, a low tin knock every time the wind caught it.

Remedy parked behind a mule cart and sat a second before getting out. A boy no older than eight ran past her window chasing a hen, lost the hen, and kept running anyway like the running was the point.

“Morning, Remedy. Did the bed treat you right?”

A woman came off the church steps wiping her hands on an apron already gone gray with flour. Remedy’s hands tightened on the steering wheel for a fraction of a second before she let them go. She didn’t ask how the woman knew her name. Down here, asking questions like that felt like trying to dam a river with your bare hands.

She popped the latch and pushed the door open. “Better than I deserved, ma’am.”

The woman’s mouth twitched into a small, knowing smile. “Then you’re in the right yard. Come on, set another plate, we got company from up north!”

Nobody in that yard asked why. Remedy would think about that later, how nobody asked why a woman traveling alone in a car with Michigan plates had turned up on a Saturday morning. They just handed her a rag and put her to work polishing pews that didn’t need it, because idle hands made a woman feel like a guest, and guests weren’t what Saturday was for.

By noon the fish was frying in three different pots and somebody’s grandmother, a woman named Lena, had commandeered Remedy’s hands for snapping beans. Lena didn’t say much. She just hummed low under her breath, something that wasn’t quite a hymn and wasn’t quite not one, and every few minutes she’d glance sideways at Remedy like she was checking a pot that hadn’t boiled yet.

“You got people down this way?” Lena finally asked.

“Not that I know of, ma’am.”

“Mm.” She snapped a bean hard enough to make a point of it. “Girl wearing Cora’s pendant, riding in on a Ford with dust from four states on it, showing up the same week the water’s been talking. You got people down this way.”

Remedy’s hands stilled over the bowl. “You knew Cora?”

“Everybody ’round here that’s old enough knew Cora, or knew somebody Cora fixed.” She smiled, small and private. “Some of us still got the scars from before she fixed ’em.”

Before Remedy could ask more, the church door opened and a man in shirtsleeves stepped out onto the porch, clapping flour dust off his hands. “Y’all hush that talk and come eat before the fish gets cold and I get blamed for it.”

Lena rose slow, joints cracking, and pressed the bowl of beans into Remedy’s arms like a promotion. “Come on, then. Eat first. Talk later.” She paused at the top of the steps, not quite looking back. “And tonight, you come down to the water with the rest of us. Ain’t no sense in you being this close and not going.”

“Going where?”

Lena’s smile widened just enough to show she wasn’t going to make it easy. “You’ll know when you get there, baby. You’ll know.”

By the time Remedy found the river, the whole hollow was already lit. Lanterns hung from a clothesline strung between two sycamores. Somebody had dragged an old piano down the bank and nobody asked how. Under a tin roof held up by hope and four cedar posts, folks were packed shoulder to shoulder, fish frying in a black skillet the size of a wagon wheel, and the air smelled like cornmeal, sweat, and trouble. The good kind.

She stopped at the edge of the light. The river ran slow and dark behind the roof. Vicky’s voice sat in her head. Don’t trust water.

“Then I won’t drink it,” Remedy said to nobody.

A man with a gold tooth and a serving spoon leaned out of the crowd and held a tin cup toward her. “You look thirsty, Detroit.”

“How you know I’m from Detroit?”

“Baby, that Ford been the talk of the hollow since noon.”

She eyed the cup. “That water?”

He laughed so hard he had to set the spoon down. “That’s corn.”

“Then give it here.”

It hit like a slap from somebody who loved her. She was still coughing when a woman in a yellow dress caught her by the wrist. “Don’t stand there looking like the church sent you. Come on.”

The floor was packed dirt and it didn’t matter. The piano came in low and dirty, the trumpet slid in behind it like it had somewhere to be, and a washboard kept time like a heartbeat with a grudge. Remedy meant to dance one song. She danced four. Her scarf ended up on a stranger’s chair, her hair started coming loose, and a man in rolled sleeves and suspenders put his hand at the small of her back like he was asking permission. She said yes with her hips before her mouth could get in the way. Heat came off him. Heat came off everybody. For the first time since Detroit, nobody needed her to explain a damn thing.

The man’s name was Prince. At least that’s what he told her. He wasn’t from the hollow. He’d come down from Knoxville with the trumpet player and had the kind of smile that made Remedy forget, for several minutes at a time, that she was supposed to be afraid of anything. He didn’t ask about the pendant. He didn’t ask about Detroit. He didn’t ask where she was going. He asked if she wanted another drink. She said yes. He asked if she wanted to dance, and she said yes to that too.

Then the piano player looked at the trumpet, the trumpet grinned, and the first notes of “Backwater Blues” rolled out across the dirt. Remedy stopped dead. She knew every word. She’d learned them at her mother’s phonograph, kitchen window cracked. She didn’t mean to sing. It just came, low and sure, her voice slipping underneath the piano until somebody near the back picked up the next line. Then somebody else. Then half the room. The whole thing became less like a song and more like a church that had lost its mind.

Prince watched her from beside the piano. He wasn’t smiling now. He was just watching. When the song ended, the room erupted, and Remedy laughed because she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t laughed like that in months. Maybe years.

Prince leaned close enough that she could smell corn liquor and soap. “You always sing like that?”

“Only when I’m happy.”

His eyes stayed on hers. “Then I hope you stay happy.”

For a moment, she forgot about the river. Forgot about Gladys. Forgot about Cora. Forgot about the blue ink appearing in her pamphlet and clocks that moved backward and women who stood in woods waiting for men to disappear. She was just a woman with her hair coming loose, laughing beside a piano while a handsome man looked at her like he had nowhere else to be.

Then the pendant went warm against her chest. Not hot. Just warm. She looked past Prince toward the river. The water was black glass, and in it a woman stood knee deep, her skirt floating around her. Dancing. One beat behind everybody else.

Remedy’s smile disappeared. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run either. She just stood there at the edge of the lantern light with her heart going hard and slow at the same time, watching a woman keep time to music that had already stopped.

The band had quit. Nobody else seemed to notice the river, or the woman standing knee deep in it, or the fact that the singing had died in everybody’s throat at the exact same second. The whole hollow had gone still, the way it goes still right before a storm decides which way it’s headed.

A woman in a beautiful turquoise dress, honeysuckle in her hair, came up beside her. “You see her too.”

Remedy looked at her. “You see her?”

The woman kept her eyes on the river. “Everybody sees something eventually.”

“Who is she?”

The woman was quiet for a moment. “Depends who you ask.”

“Well, I’m asking you.”

That got the smallest smile. “Then you better be ready for the answer.”

The woman in the river lifted her face, all the way. For one long second, Remedy was looking at her grandmother’s eyes set in a stranger’s face, heavy-lidded and knowing and older than the river itself. Then she smiled. Not a haunting kind of smile. The kind your favorite aunt gives you when you arrive at her house for a weekend stay. She raised one hand out of the water, slow, and pointed. South.

The pendant burned hot against Remedy’s chest, hot enough to make her gasp, and just as fast went cool again, cool as creek water, like it had said what it needed to say. When Remedy looked back at the river, there was nothing there but the dark and the current and her own reflection, alone this time, steady, not a beat behind anything.

The band picked back up like it had never stopped. The gold-tooth man hollered something about the fish getting cold. The woman in the yellow dress squeezed Remedy’s arm and pulled her back toward the fire like nothing in the world had happened, because down here, maybe nothing had. Maybe this was just Saturday.

Share

Remedy looked at Prince. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the river. “You saw her,” she said.

He looked at her then. “Yeah.”

“You know who she is?”

“No.”

It was the first lie she’d heard all night. Remedy smiled. “That’s all right.” She didn’t know why she smiled. Maybe because she was tired of being afraid. Maybe because Prince was still looking at her. Maybe because Detroit was a long way away.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere quieter.”

She looked once more toward the river. The water was dark. Still. Waiting. Then she took his hand, and she didn’t look back.

The porch boards creaked under her shoes. He didn’t rush her to the door. He stood there with his thumb moving slow over her knuckles like he had all night and planned to spend it.

“You can tell me to go home,” he said.

“Which one?”

He laughed, low, and she felt it in her ribs. Weeks of keeping her back to a wall and one eye on the mirror, and here was a man asking permission with his whole body and not one question. His mouth found hers slow. Cedar smoke, corn liquor, soap. Her hands were in his shirt before her good sense could get a word in, and for once her good sense didn’t fight very hard.

He walked her backward through the dark and she let him. The lamp stayed off. A button gave up somewhere, hers or his, and neither one of them stopped to check. His mouth moved down her throat, slow, and the pendant sat warm against her chest, easy and quiet, like somebody had stepped back to give them room.

“Remedy,” he said, like it was a word he’d been saving. She had been Detroit’s problem. Eugene’s mistake. Luvenia’s worry. Tonight she was just a woman with somebody’s hands on her who wasn’t asking her to be anything else.

Later, she would remember pieces of the night and not the order of them. Prince’s laugh. The creak of the porch beneath her shoes. His hand finding hers in the dark. The smell of cedar smoke caught in his shirt. The way he looked at her when she told him she was headed south.

“How far?”

“New Orleans, eventually.”

He smiled. “That’s a long way to go.”

“I know.”

“You planning to stop anywhere?”

Remedy thought about that. Then she looked at him. “Maybe.”

The rest of the night belonged to them.

By morning, Remedy woke beneath a quilt she didn’t recognize. For one confused second, she didn’t know where she was. Sunlight pushed through thin curtains. Somewhere downstairs, a pan hit a stove. A screen door slapped shut.

She turned her head. Prince was asleep on the other side of the bed, one arm thrown across his face. Her clothes were folded neatly on the chair. Her pendant lay against her chest, warm. Remedy stared at the ceiling, and then she smiled.

“Well, damn.”

She dressed quietly. She found her shoes beneath the bed and her stockings hanging over the chair. On the kitchen table downstairs sat a plate with two biscuits, a piece of fried fish wrapped in paper, and a cup of coffee. Next to it was her pamphlet.

Remedy frowned. She hadn’t brought it inside. She picked it up, and the page had opened itself to Tennessee. Under Lotty, the dark blue ink had changed. There were only three words. She’s waiting there.

Remedy stared at them. Behind her, Prince appeared in the doorway, still barefoot, shirt unbuttoned at the throat. “You leaving?”

She turned. “Yeah.”

He nodded like he already knew. “Still headed south?”

“Still headed south.”

He smiled. “Figured.”

Remedy slipped the pamphlet into her bag. At the door, she paused, and Prince looked at her. “You gonna come back?”

She thought about lying. Instead she smiled. “I don’t know.”

Then she walked out into the morning. The river was behind her. Lotty was ahead. And for the first time since Detroit, Remedy had no idea which one she was more afraid of.

Chapter Three

The road didn’t just cross into Tennessee... it sank into it.

The farther Remedy drove, the taller the trees became, narrowing the road until it felt less like something people had built and more like something the mountains had simply allowed. Afternoon light came through the branches in long, dusty streaks, turning everything the color of old copper. The mountains were beautiful in a way that made her suspicious, beautiful usually meant somebody or... something had worked hard to make you forget what happened there, and Detroit had taught her to be wary of anything that looked too peaceful.

She hadn’t eaten much since Kentucky. Half an apple and a biscuit wasn’t hardly enough, but she had been too nervous to stop somewhere she didn’t know, keeping up the self-promise that she’d find a decent place closer to the next town. Her stomach growled loud enough to make her laugh.

“Girl, hush,” she said to the empty car.

Glancing at the dashboard, she saw the clock read 3:17. Then it quickly changed to 3:11... 3:12. Remedy frowned and tapped the glass above the clock. 2:59. She checked her wristwatch: 3:17. She stopped tapping.

“No.”

The radio crackled. Reaching for the knob, the static softened before her fingers could touch it, and a woman’s soft, familiar voice came through:

“Remedy... Baby.”

Remedy swallowed, her hand frozen mid-air. “Grandma?”

The radio went dead, leaving only the hum of the engine and tires rolling over pavement. Then came three knocks. Not on the window, but behind her inside the car. Remedy’s shoulders tightened as three more sounded, closer this time. She remembered what Gladys had told her as a little girl: Never answer a voice calling you from the woods, and if somebody knocks somewhere you cannot see, don’t invite them in. Remedy kept both hands on the wheel and did not turn around.

As the road curved, she noticed the black pick-up truck behind her. She had seen the two men inside several miles back and had tried slowing down to let them pass, but they hadn’t. Now they were close enough for her to see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. Remedy reached down beside her seat, pulled Gladys’s cloth bag into her lap, and opened it to reveal salt, red brick dust, peanuts, and Florida Water. Her fingers closed around the little bottle as she spotted a folded piece of paper underneath everything. She opened it to three words: Don’t let them cross behind you.

Looking in the mirror again, she saw the truck speed up, so she matched their pace. The road curved again, but this time the men pulled around her and parked across the lane to block her path. Remedy slammed on the brakes. For a moment, neither man moved. Then the driver’s door opened and a white man stepped out, followed by his passenger. Remedy locked her doors.

The first man walked up to her window. “Gal?”

She didn’t answer.

He smiled. “You lost?”

“No.”

“You sure is a long ways from home. We saw those Michigan plates.”

Remedy’s hand tightened around the steering wheel. “Yes.”

He glanced toward the other man. “Whatcha doin’ ’round these parts?”

She didn’t answer.

The second man stepped closer, their positions making her think again of Gladys’s note. The first man leaned toward the window. “You got family around here?”

Remedy looked directly at him. “Yes.”

The second man stepped up angrily. “Who told you to look me in my face, girl?”

That was when the woods went quiet. It wasn’t the silence of something harmful—it was the quiet that comes when protection shows up and settles over you like a heavy, warm quilt. Remedy’s heart didn’t spike. Her shoulders dropped as a deep sense of safety took root in her chest.

It didn’t frighten her at all. But it turned the men cold.

The first man leaned toward her window, but his smirk suddenly froze. His eyes shifted from Remedy’s face to something past her shoulder, out the passenger window toward the tree line behind her car.

“What?” he muttered, his voice dropping low.

His friend was staring past the car into the woods, too, his skin turning ash-pale. “Earl... Who are them women?”

Remedy turned her head, looking out her passenger window at nothing but shadow and oak trees. “What women?”

The men stumbled backward, retreating into the middle of the road to put distance between themselves and her car as a soft humming rose from the woods—a woman’s voice, joined by another, and then another. The sound was low and sweet, almost like women singing to themselves while preparing Sunday dinner.

Remedy’s skin prickled. She reached into Gladys’s canvas bag, her fingers going past the basic powders to a small leather pouch tied with red twine. Inside was a heavy mixture of grave dirt taken from the families plot and shredded Solomon’s seal root. She didn’t scatter it light she drew a thick, dark line straight across her driver’s side floorboard.

The first man backed away toward his truck. “There ain’t nobody supposed to be out here.”

His friend didn’t seem to hear him, pointing a shaking finger past Remedy’s car. “Don’t let ’em touch you... They’re right there.”

Remedy looked out her passenger window again, catching sight of a white dress at the edge of the trees. A beautiful, still woman stood there, her dress moving slightly in a breeze Remedy couldn’t feel inside the car. Another woman appeared beside her, then another, until five women stood in white beneath the timber. One wore a scarf tied neatly around her head, another had her hair pinned beneath a top hat, one looked young enough to be someone’s daughter, and another looked old enough to have buried half a family. These women looked peaceful. One smiled..not at Remedy, but at the men standing in the road.

The humming stopped.

The first man turned to run for his truck, lunging for the open driver’s door. His fingers almost brushed the chrome handle before he screamed, falling hard to his knees as blood began soaking through his shirt sleeve despite no visible hands touching him.

“What the hell”

The passenger bolted toward the passenger side, but something yanked him backward off his feet. He landed on his back in the dirt, trying to crawl under the truck’s rear axle before stopping to stare straight upward into the empty air, whispering a small, terrified, “No.”

The humming started up again as the man began crying. Remedy sat frozen behind the wheel; she had seen enough strange things to know this wasn’t meant for her participation, but for her to witness.

The first man pushed himself up from the gravel, staggering toward Remedy’s window with his nose pouring blood onto his shirt. “Help me... Please.”

Behind him, the women stood calm. One lifted her hand, and whatever he saw made his knees buckle right back out from under him. He hit the dirt hard. Then, in an instant, the women disappeared back into the thick timber, dragging both men into the shadows with them.

Remedy waited..ten, twenty, thirty seconds. Nothing.

She stepped out of the car into the quiet mountain air, feeling the cool ground beneath her shoes. Reaching into Gladys’s canvas bag, she pulled out a small cloth bundle bound with cotton string.

Inside were crumbled wild rose petals, dried honeysuckle blossoms, and a piece of hard peppermint candy.

Remedy pinched the sweet flowers and let them drop to the dirt where the men had been taken. She set the piece of red-striped candy gently beside the petals, then reached into her coat pocket, pulled out a shiny Mercury silver dime, and set it right on top.

“Thank you, Ancestors,” Remedy whispered into the dark trees.

She climbed back inside, pulled the door shut, and rolled her window up until only a crack remained.

Share

She looked down at Gladys’s bag; the thick line of grave dirt and Solomon’s seal on the floorboard hadn’t shifted an inch. Shifting into gear, Remedy carefully maneuvered her car around the open driver’s door of the pick-up truck. The truck sat idling on the gravel shoulder, its headlights cutting uselessly through the growing dusk, its engine purring into the empty holler. No blood on the road, no signs of a struggle, just a running truck left behind in the hills.

As she drove away, Remedy looked in her rearview mirror: the driverless truck grew smaller and smaller against the dark wall of trees, and somehow, that silence was worse

By the time she found the boarding house, the sun had begun to drop behind the mountains. A hand-painted sign leaned against the porch: MRS. VICKY’S ROOMS & PRESSING. Remedy knocked, and a Black woman in a housedress opened the door, looking her up and down.

“You hungry?”

Remedy blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Come on in, then.”

That was how Vicky introduced herself, not by asking where Remedy came from or why she was traveling alone, but by feeding her beans, cornbread, greens, and fried fish. Remedy ate like somebody might take the plate away while Vicky watched from across the table.

“You been driving long?”

“Since Detroit.”

Vicky nodded slowly. “That’s a long way to come hungry.”

Remedy smiled. “I’ve had better days.”

Vicky poured her a glass of water. When Remedy looked at it, a sudden wave of nausea made her push it away. Vicky noticed.

“You don’t drink water?”

“I do.”

“Just not that one?”

Vicky smiled, unbothered, as she took the glass back. “Folks get funny when they’re traveling. Don’t worry about it.”

After eating, Remedy set her napkin down, opening her mouth to ask about her next stop. Before she could speak, Vicky leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixing on Remedy.

“You headed towards “Lotty”, ain’t you?”

Remedy went still. Lotty. All this time, reading her grandmother’s notes, she’d assumed Lotty was a woman, a relative, an elder, a contact to seek out. Hearing Vicky say down toward shifted the ground right beneath her feet. It wasn’t a person. It was a place.

Vicky smirked softly, setting her dish towel aside. “These hills talk, child. And folks down in Lotty been waiting on Gladys’s line to come through.”

Remedy swallowed, her pulse quickening. “You knew my grandmother?”

“I knew of her,” Vicky’s voice softened, filled with a quiet reverence. “Women like Gladys don’t disappear just because they pass on. Their roots run too deep. And you got people down in Lotty waiting to meet you.”

Remedy looked down at the cloth bag in her lap. “I don’t have family out here.”

“You sure about that?” Vicky looked at her for a long moment, her gaze heavy and knowing. “Blood ain’t the only thing that makes family out in these hollers. The kind of folks waiting on you... they’re the kind that don’t always leave when they’re gone.”

Remedy thought about Detroit, about the people who called her foolish for leaving or acted like a Black woman traveling alone was something that needed explaining. Maybe that was the problem. Everybody wanted to tell you where you belonged.

Vicky walked to the door and looked out toward the road. “Tomorrow, follow the river road. You’ll come to an old church without a steeple. Don’t take the road everybody takes.”

“Why?”

Vicky smiled. “Because everybody takes it.”

Remedy laughed. “You could’ve explained that one.”

“I just did.”

For the first time all day, Remedy laughed for real. Vicky handed her a small piece of paper with penciled directions. “Lotty is down past the bend. You’ll know you’re close.”

“How?”

“You’ll know.”

Remedy folded the paper and tucked it into Gladys’s bag. When she picked up her pamphlet, she noticed something new: the name Lotty had been written beneath the Louisiana line in fresh, dark ink she hadn’t written herself. She turned the page to find three final words: Don’t trust water.

Remedy stared at it, then closed the pamphlet. Outside, somewhere beyond the house, a woman began humming. Remedy didn’t look toward the sound. She didn’t need to. She already knew the mountains were listening.

Baltimore And Beyond

Baltimore

After a long hiatus, I’ve rekindled my love for Café Los Sueños. In a city where a tiny monopoly controls half the coffee shops, they’re one of the few local spots offering real diversity and character. Plus, the coffee speaks for itself: the Ethiopian pour-over is divine, and their cold brew has that smooth, tea-like finish you can't find anywhere else.

Beyond

I finally had a change to check La Betty - which is a cafe in the morning and wine bar at night, owned by the owners of Baked and Wired. Delicious baked goods and Absolutely phenomenal coffee.

Hi my loves! Here is Chapter 2 of Remedy.If you missed Chapter 1, it’s linked here.I hope you guys are enjoying this little short story. And even if you aren’t… I’m doing it anyway. Why? Because the ancestors told me to, and I get in trouble if I don’t listen! Again, while this is a little different from my normal writing, it still carries the same sentiments and the same love.

Love you!!

Chapter Two

There was a woman who had been dead for forty-two years.

Remedy thought about the woman the whole way out of Ohio. Even after she cried, she couldn’t shake it. Her grandmother’s voice kept coming back to her, the way Gladys always seemed to know exactly when Remedy needed to hear something. Don’t go looking for her. Gladys had been gone eight months now, buried under the big oak behind Mount Olive with her hands folded over a Bible she never once needed, because the woman had carried more scripture in her bones than most preachers carried on their tongues. But dead didn’t mean quiet. Not in this family. Not with this work. Remedy had learned young that the women in her line didn’t stop talking just because they stopped breathing. They just found other ways to be heard, and lately Gladys’s voice had been coming through clearer than it ever had in life, close enough to feel like breath on the back of her neck some nights. She already knows where you are.

Remedy hadn’t understood that warning when Gladys first gave it. She was starting to.

The road into Kentucky came on slowly, the green getting thicker and the hills beginning to rise, and by the time Remedy found the turnoff, the sun had gone low and orange through the trees. The house sat back from the road behind a garden gone wild with things that looked half planted and half invited. There were marigolds around the steps, rosemary tucked close to the kitchen wall, and bottles hanging from the branches of a small dead tree near the fence, green and blue glass catching the last of the afternoon light. The porch ceiling was painted a soft blue-green, the color of shallow water. Remedy noticed that first, though she couldn’t have said why. The house itself was white, a little weathered but well cared for, with two rocking chairs sitting beneath the windows and a screen door that slapped softly against its frame every time the breeze came through. Julia was on the porch before Remedy cut the engine, one hand resting on the railing, watching her pull in like she had been expecting her all afternoon.

“Ms. Remedy from Detroit,” Julia said. Not a question.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Cora told me you might come through.” The name hit Remedy hard. Cora. She had been gone three years now, one of the old aunts nobody talked about above a whisper because of what she used to do for money down on Hastings Street. Remedy remembered her mother calling Cora difficult, her grandmother calling her gifted, and that had always been the difference between the two women. “Said you’d be needing a bed and maybe something else besides.”

“Cora.” Remedy said the name careful, testing its weight. “You knew my aunt Cora.”

“I know a lot of women who don’t walk among the living no more, baby. That’s half my correspondence these days.” Julia’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Come on in before the heat gets in the house behind you.”

Inside, the dish of salt sat by the Bible same as it had before, but tonight there was something new beside it: a small mirror, no bigger than a compact, face-down on the table like it was being punished. Remedy noticed it. Julia noticed her noticing, same as last time, and this time she didn’t wait to be asked.

Share

“That mirror’s been turned down three days,” Julia said, setting out two plates without being asked what Remedy wanted. “Ever since I dreamed a woman standing in water up past her knees, skirt floating around her like something dark opening up. Didn’t like her face. She turned it away from me before I could get a good look, so I turned my mirror away right back. Seemed fair, if you ask me.”

Remedy’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “I had that same dream.”

Julia didn’t look surprised. She looked like she’d been waiting to hear it confirmed.

“Course you did,” she said. “She’s not calling me. She’s calling you. I just caught the whisper, the way you catch somebody else’s radio station if you’re standing close enough to the wire.” She finally sat down across from Remedy, folding her hands the way she had before, but slower this time, more deliberate. “You said you had a name in Louisiana. You didn’t say it out loud, but I’m going to say it, and you tell me if I’m wrong.”

Remedy’s mouth had gone dry.

“Celestine,” Julia said.

The candle on the table, burned nearly to nothing, guttered once, hard, though no window was open and no door had moved.

Neither woman spoke for a long moment.

“My grandmother told me not to go looking for her,” Remedy finally said.

“Your grandmother was a smart woman.” Julia reached over and turned the little mirror face-up, finally, like she’d decided something. In it, for just a second, just a flicker at the edge of the candlelight, Remedy could have sworn she saw two women standing behind her own reflection instead of one. Then it was only her own tired face looking back. “But smart don’t always mean right, and dead don’t always mean done talking. Your grandmother’s been trying to steer you off this road since before you left Detroit. Cora’s the one who pointed you down it. Two women on the other side pulling in opposite directions over you, and here you are in the middle of it, still breathing, still got to decide for yourself.”

“What is she? Celestine.”

“Family,” Julia said simply. “The kind you don’t talk about at Sunday dinner. The kind that gets you where you need to go, but never for free, and never quite the way you asked for it.” She stood, collecting the plates though neither had finished eating. “I got a room for you tonight. But I’ll tell you what I told your aunt Cora: whatever’s waiting on you down there, it’s older than your fear of it. And it’s been waiting a long time.”

Remedy slept badly in the back room, under the cedar-smelling quilt, and this time the dream came clearer. The woman in the water turned, finally, just enough. Not her whole face. Just enough for Remedy to see that her eyes were the same heavy-lidded, knowing eyes Remedy saw in the mirror every morning of her life.

Her grandmother’s eyes.

She woke before dawn, her heart beating hard against her chest, fast and heavy, like a jazz drummer who’d gotten too far ahead of the song. She reached out and found the little mirror from the kitchen sitting on the nightstand, though she hadn’t carried it in there. Face-up. Waiting.Remedy left it right there.

She gathered her things from the back room and carried her bag toward the front door. Julia was standing on the porch, looking out toward the road.

“Hold on, baby.”

Julia reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out a small gold pendant, old and worn smooth. When she placed it in Remedy’s hand, it was warm, and Remedy could feel the faint weight of work in it.. oil, prayer, years of somebody carrying it close.

“Your grandmother left this with me.”

Remedy turned it over. There was a small C scratched into the back.

“Cora?”

Julia smiled. “Just wear it.”

Remedy slipped the chain over her head.

“For protection,” Julia added.

Remedy touched the pendant beneath her dress. She didn’t ask from what.She thanked Julia, climbed into the Ford, and pulled back onto the road.

She drove eight miles before she saw the public telephone box outside a darkened dry-goods shop. She pulled over, dropped her nickel into the slot, and waited for the operator. The wire hummed with static, a dry, crackling sound like dead leaves scraping across pavement. Remedy hated that sound.

“Pop?” she said into the receiver when the line connected.

George’s voice came through thin and warm from all those miles away. “I’m here, baby.”

“I’m through Kentucky,” she said quietly, pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the booth. “Mama okay?”

“She’s fine. Sitting in the parlor sewing.” He paused, his breath heavy on the line. “Your grandmother’s trunk in the spare room... it knocked three times last night, Remedy. Plain as day. Right around midnight.”

Remedy closed her eyes, feeling the thrill of it buzz beneath her skin. “What did you do?”

“Left it alone, like you taught me,” George said softly. He cleared his throat, the sound rustling through the receiver. “She knows you’re gone for good, Remedy. We all do. Your mama’s trying to act like she ain’t worried, but you know your mama.”

Remedy smiled despite herself.

“Go build your life down there, baby. You got a right to have one. Love you.”

“Love you too, Pop.”

She hung up the receiver and stepped back into the cool morning air. For a moment she just stood there beside the telephone box, thinking about the trunk in the spare room and the three knocks that had come from inside it. Then she got back into the Ford and opened her road atlas to the green pamphlet tucked inside.

Beneath Louisiana, where there hadn’t been anything before, a fresh line of dark blue ink had appeared on the soft paper. Remedy stared at it. She couldn’t tell if it was a town, a landmark, or simply a name.

Lotty.

Lotty knew her too, Remedy thought. Lotty knew Celestine.

She put the car in gear and turned her wheels south toward Tennessee.

To be continued.

Thank you for reading, Lovebugs! I still can’t believe I’m writing a short story, but honestly, as a loner with a vivid imagination, maybe it was only a matter of time.

Leave me a comment, and restack this if you’re enjoying it. I’d love to share Remedy with more folks!

Love ya “hear.”

Leave a comment

Hey love bugs.

Ancestors told me to write this one. I don’t fully know why, but here I am, doing what I’m told.

I’ve always loved fiction and sci-fi, especially the kind of storytelling that bends history without breaking it. Lovecraft Country lives in that space for me. So does Their Eyes Were Watching God. Real history, real folklore, and then something strange slips through the door.That’s what I’m playing with here.

This is a short story, told in parts, dropping bi-weekly over the next few weeks. It’s a Black hoodoo story about a woman leaving Detroit in 1934 and heading south. Where she’s going, I’m not telling you yet.

And don’t worry, I’m not abandoning the real-world stuff. Baltimore & Beyond is still here. The travel stories, guides, food, history, genealogy—all of it is still coming. The New Orleans guide is still dropping next week, right on schedule.

This just felt like another way to tell a story.

Some of this is rooted in real history and folklore. Some of it I made up. And some of it... well, my ancestors told me to write it.

So I’m listening.

Let’s see where Remedy ends up.

—Zoe

Chapter One

The car had been running eleven minutes before her mother came out the front door, and the whole time Remedy sat behind the wheel with her hands loose at ten and two. It was already hot enough that morning to make the back of her neck sweat, and she had the windows down even though the air smelled like gasoline and somebody down the block burning trash. The radio was low. Bessie Smith was singing something sad enough to make Remedy turn it down before her mother came outside.

She was gorgeous, though the world wasn’t quite framed to tell her so. Not pretty like the light-bright girls grinning out of the Chicago Defender society pages, and certainly not like the pale, ghost-faced women painted on the covers of the white magazines left behind in her styling shop. Remedy was dark, the rich, warm brown of polished teakwood, skin that drank in the sunlight and held onto the heat. In a time when women had learned early which side of the paper bag the world preferred them on, Remedy carried her color like royalty. She’d grown up looking at pictures of Madam C.J. Walker and hearing the thick, honey-gravel voice of Bessie Smith coming off the phonograph, women who occupied their space fully and never once asked permission for their dark skin. Remedy oiled her skin with sweet almond and clove until it gleamed like silk under the lamplight, unbothered by the quiet whispers of people who thought a woman ought to shrink herself to be soft.

She was built thick through the hip and thigh, heavy in all the ways that made a room feel full the minute she graced it with her presence. Pretty the way a plot of land is pretty, something deep, rooted, and undeniable that you had to stand in front of a while before you understood the full scope of what you were looking at. She’d been told her whole life she had her grandmother’s eyes: heavy-lidded, knowing, the kind of dark eyes that made grown men feel like they were being graded on a test they hadn’t studied for.

Her mother came across the yard fast, still in her slippers, one hand pressed to her chest like she could hold her own heart in by force of will.

“Your daddy ain’t coming out,” Luvenia said, and there was no cruelty in it, just fact laid down plain, the way you’d tell somebody it was fixing to rain.

Remedy nodded slow. She’d known that before her mother said it. She’d felt the shape of her father’s absence from inside the house that morning, the way you feel a tooth that’s about to go bad before it ever aches. What she didn’t say, because it wasn’t hers to say yet, was that George had come to her two nights before, quiet, after Luvenia was asleep, and pressed a roll of bills into her palm folded so tight it looked like nothing. Gas money, he’d called it, but his eyes had said something bigger than gas, something like a man finally admitting out loud, if only to himself, that his child had never once fit the size of the life this city had planned for her.

“You leaving,” Luvenia said, like the words tasted strange even coming out of her own mouth. “Really leaving. And what about Eugene?”

Eugene was standing a little behind her, off to the side of the yard, hat in his hands, the ring he’d never gotten to put on her finger sitting somewhere back in a drawer she’d already made her peace with. He hadn’t said much since he’d walked up. He didn’t need to. His whole body was saying it for him.

“I told Eugene before I told anybody,” Remedy said. “He knows this ain’t about him.”

“I bought a house,” Eugene said, soft, more confused than angry, a man reciting the plans that were supposed to have already worked. “Told my brother we’d be in it by spring.”

“I know you did.” She said it gentle, because there was nothing about Eugene that deserved sharpness. “You didn’t do a single thing wrong. That’s the whole of it. Ain’t nothing wrong with you to fix. This is just me.”

Eugene looked down at his hat. “I thought we was gonna grow old.”

Remedy swallowed. “So did I.”

Luvenia’s hand found the open window and gripped the door frame. “It’s not safe for us down there, Remedy. You know that better than anybody, you the one always reading about it.”

“I know what it costs, Mama. I read the same papers you did.” She looked past her mother’s shoulder toward the house, toward the window where the curtain hadn’t moved. “But I need to experience something else. Something bigger than this. I been sitting in this cold my whole life waiting on something and it ain’t never come, and I got people down there. Not just blood, though I got that too, cousins who stayed when everybody else ran up here chasing factory money. I mean people. Women who do what I do and don’t have to hide it in a kitchen drawer. Music that don’t apologize for being loud. I want to go where the whole of me fits, not just the parts that were useful up here.”

Luvenia didn’t have an answer for that. She just reached through the window and took her daughter’s hand, held it the way you hold something you already know you’re going to lose, memorizing it.

“Write me,” she said.

“I will.”

They both knew what that promise was worth, and they let it stand anyway, because some lies are just love wearing a traveling coat.

Remedy checked the glovebox once more out of habit. The little green pamphlet rested on top of the road atlas, gone soft at its folds. It wasn’t the Green Book. Not yet. This was older than that, made from somebody’s list of places and people passed from hand to hand. Names of boarding houses, restaurants, churches, gas stations, beauty shops. People who would open their doors if you said the right name. Her grandmother had added some of them herself.

There was one address in Indiana that Remedy had circled three times. Another in Kentucky with a woman’s name written beside it. And one in Louisiana that had no address at all. Just a name.

Celestine.

Remedy had asked her grandmother about that one once. Her grandmother had looked at the page for a long time before saying, “Don’t go looking for her.”

“Why?”

“Because she already knows where you are.”

That had been enough to make Remedy close the book.

Now she opened it again.

Celestine.

Still there.

Remedy shut it.

Beside the pamphlet were the papers for the car, a car that had never cost her a single dollar because it hadn’t been bought, it had been owed. A woman two streets over had come to her a year back near out of her mind, marriage falling apart at the seams, husband’s eye wandering somewhere it shouldn’t, and Remedy had fixed what needed fixing in the way her grandmother taught her, quiet work, root work, the kind you don’t discuss over Sunday dinner. The woman hadn’t had the money to pay what that was worth. She’d had a husband with a used-car lot instead.

Nobody in that family ever asked Remedy how she’d earned it. They just handed her the keys. Some debts you just paid and moved on from, grateful you weren’t asked to explain.

Remedy put the car in gear.

In the mirror she watched her mother get small, watched Eugene stand there long after the car had started moving, still holding his hat like a man at a funeral for something he couldn’t name. And she watched the curtain in the front window finally, finally move, just a hair, just enough to prove her father had been standing there the whole time after all, watching his only child drive off toward a life he couldn’t follow her into, but one he’d quietly paid for anyway.

Detroit was still green when she left it. The city hadn’t given her much softness, but it had given her work. It had given her women who sat in her chair every Saturday morning with their stockings rolled down around their ankles and gossip in their mouths. It had given her music coming through open windows and children playing in the street until somebody’s mother yelled their full name. It had given her Eugene. It had given her enough.

Remedy drove south, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the green pamphlet in her lap.

She didn’t know yet that the first thing it would lead her to wasn’t a boarding house. It was a woman who had been dead for forty-two years.

All she knew was that somewhere ahead of her was New Orleans, and somewhere behind her was everything she had decided she could live without.

She didn’t cry until Ohio.

To be continued.

Baltimore & Beyond

Baltimore-ish( Ellicott City)

I’ve been eyeing Luna Cafe for a while, waiting to see when they were finally going to open, and y’all—it’s super cute. The staff is kind, they’re right on Main Street in Ellicott City, and the whole place is just a little cozy.I had the almond cookie and a nitro, and both hit the spot. If you’re in Ellicott City, check them out!

Beyond

It should come as no surprise that I love Yellow. Anything by Chef Michael Rafidi has my attention. I ended up in DC on a weekday this week and decided to go enjoy a falafel pita, and my gawd.If you’ve only experienced Yellow during the busiest times, please, if you can, go in the middle of the day. There was something about sitting there, eating that pita without the rush and the crowd that had me feeling like I had been reincarnated.I swear I left that restaurant a new woman.

Leave a comment

I am not talking about a hip thrust or the 16 miles in your marathon training this week. Not the girls trip, or the solo trip to Morocco……….well, maybe lol. Movement as a privilege. An act of agency. An ancestral act of liberation.

A few days ago, I saw a meme breaking down all the invisible ways time gets wasted when you’re in poverty.Before I had a car, I spent 3 hours every morning just getting my kids to school. Three hours every morning spent navigating the city instead of sleeping, working, resting, or building anything for myself. Just getting from one place to another.

And I still live that shit. If I want a real gym, I’m driving thirty minutes out of my way. If I want decent fresh produce, it’s a thirty-minute walk each way. I have to become Dora the Explorer to find anything decent.

I’ve written about the Black Butterfly here in Baltimore before, so I won’t drag you through the map again. If you’re not familiar, it’s the part of the city where access to things like good schools, grocery stores, reliable transportation, and green space is far more limited than in the neighborhoods outside of it. Strip it down to what it actually means: when your neighborhood makes you travel farther for the things other people can get down the street, you pay for it in time.

The myth of capitalism is that we all have the same 24 hours Beyoncé has. We all know that’s a bald head snagga tooth lie. When a system turns basic necessities into luxury, such as fresh food, a clean gym, getting across town into a geographic chess it’s not an oversight. It steals the one resource you can’t get back. It keeps you spending your hours fighting friction instead of building a life. And a tired body stuck in a loop is easy to exploit. I wholeheartedly believe that’s part of the design: keep people so busy navigating survival that they don’t have the time, energy, or space to ask why survival is this damn hard in the first place. Give me my aluminum hat please….I want it pink with glitter and purple and teal hearts..thank ya.

This is hundreds of years in the making. This country spent decades dismantling public transportation and building highways straight through Black neighborhoods. Then it handed mobility a cover charge: buy a car, pay the insurance, keep it running, or stay where you’re put. Only those with access are given the freedom to move.

Take a look at good ol’ American history and you’ll see it plainly. Those in power have always understood the power of movement and how to manipulate it, pulling the puppet strings to control who gets to go, who gets to stay, and who gets left behind. Forced movement for some, forced containment for others. Indigenous people pushed off their land while slave patrols, pass laws, sundown towns, and redlining kept Black bodies locked in place. The state figured out a long time ago that mobility is power. Our ancestors figured out the same thing from the other side, and used it as a weapon.

Harriet Tubman walking north in the dark wasn’t just an escape. It was a woman mastering geography and physical endurance well enough to steal property the law said she wasn’t allowed to steal: herself, and then go back for more. Decades later, six million of us packed cardboard suitcases and left the South for good in the Great Migration, refusing to sit still in a place that had made containment the whole point. That wasn’t a slow drift north. That was a strike, walked and ridden on train tickets, and it built entire cities and economies out of nothing but the decision to move.

Black family during the Great Migration

That history is still in our bodies right now.

You can watch it play out in real time. Some people walk into a room and take up the whole doorway, reach across your body without a glance, move through an airport or a foreign city like the terrain was built for their comfort. They walk through space like they own it, because everything in their life has told them they do.

Most of us were taught the opposite language. Hyper-awareness. Edit your posture. Measure your stride. Scan the room before you’re even through the door. We were trained to treat space as something we borrow, never something we inherit.

That’s why travel hits different for us. It’s not a vacation high. It’s a system error.

When I’m in Europe, hopping from Barcelona to Madrid round trip for under eighty dollars, less than it costs some people to cross one car-choked American city, the spell breaks completely. You feel it in your chest. The food deserts, the bus line that conveniently dies at the county border, the sheer exhaustion it takes just to stay fed and healthy none of that is nature. Once you see another way of living, it becomes a lot harder to accept all that shit as normal.

High speed trains in Madrid `

And maybe that’s the catch-22…… you need the freedom to move in order to see that the life you’ve been handed isn’t the only life possible, but the people with the least access to movement are the ones most likely to be trapped inside the story that it is.

Because once you move through enough of the world, something else starts to happen. You realize you are not just a person moving through somebody else’s world. You are a person capable of creating your own. You see other ways of organizing cities, neighborhoods, transportation, food, leisure, work, and everyday life, and suddenly the way you were taught to live doesn’t look inevitable anymore.

And as a Black person, there’s something particularly clarifying about that realization. I refuse to believe we would have designed a world where our own neighborhoods were the places with the least access to the things that make life livable. I refuse to believe we would have built a reality that required us to spend half our lives just getting to the things we need.

Moving through the world proves the cage was never load-bearing. It shows you the whole thing was a blueprint somebody else drew up, and you were never required to live inside it.

So to every Black woman moving her body today, lacing up to run miles on pavement that wasn’t built with you in mind, driving past the food desert to get what your body actually needs, booking a ticket across an ocean just because you can, know this…your mobility is not indulgent. Its your ancestral right.

Me living my best black ass life in Madrid

You are not passing through space. You are breaking a loop that was built to hold you. The world is pliable. Space was never something you had to inherit permission for. It was always yours to take.

And movement is how you build a life that actually belongs to you.

Anyway… if this has you thinking you need to get the hell out of here, I still have spots open for The Love Bug Collective in Oaxaca this February. Come with us!

Baltimore and Beyond

Places I'm eating, drinking, exploring and getting into whether they're around the corner or across an ocean.

Baltimore

There are two new coffee shops opened in Baltimore— wooohoo!

From the owners of Off The Roux, Jem’s had its soft opening this week and it is super cutie pie! I’m excited to see what they do with the space.

Hello Trouble also had a sneak peek this weekend, and I’m excited to see what they’re bringing to Hamilton. The restaurant comes from former Maggie’s Farm chef Andrew Weinzirl, so there’s definitely some pedigree behind this one

Beyond

Finally made it over to Ayat’s new Foggy Bottom location! If you’re not familiar, Ayat is a NYC favorite that just opened its first D.C. location, so of course I had to see what the hype was about.The service was amazing, and they give you complimentary pita, olives and za’atar, which I will never complain about. I wasn’t in love with the pizza, though. I’m definitely going back to try something else because there’s enough on the menu that I’m not ready to write Ayat off after one dish.

Leave a comment

The difference now is I’m doing it for me not for the reactions, not for the applause. Do we dare say this Leo is healing?

Now I am not saying in anyway that this is easy. I desperately want to get to a point where I don’t give a fuck, but the truth is … that shit still hurts. If someone would have told me that I would still be impacted by people’s judgment in my 40’s. I wouldn’t believe it. I am wholeheartedly working on trying to just say fuck it and move on. But folks are mean af.

If you’re anything like me afraid to step into this fully.. this article is for you my love…while it maybe hard it is NOT impossible and so fucking worth it.

When you get up, put on the outfit, do the big hair, show the body you’ve worked extremely hard for, you aren’t asking for an audience. You’re maintaining a personal baseline of self-respect. But we live in a culture that has grown so comfortable with social laziness that putting effort into your appearance is immediately misread as a provocation.

I hate my neighborhood. And to be honest, they hate me too. I’m the only single woman on my block. I remember watching films when I was younger that Susan Sarandon energy, in the Witches of Eastwick, you know? The single, sexy woman that all the married women hated. That’s the role I seem to play here. A woman who looks good and minds her business becomes an unregistered hazard. They don’t know what to do with a woman who doesn’t need a partner to justify her presence on the block, so they default to suspicion. I want to tell them please be mad at your husband not me ..they are always flirting with me!

People look at a confident, single woman and they instantly try to categorize her. If you are attractive, unbothered, and living independently, you aren’t allowed to just exist. You become a projection screen for everyone’s insecurity.

Here's what nobody tells you: some folks will see your light and it's gonna scare the fuck out of them. Your energy alone disrupts their whole thing. That’s not a YOU problem. That’s all THEM!

Share

To society at large, a woman who steps into her sensuality and owns her physical presence is immediately slapped with cheap labels: slut, threat, distraction. We see this dynamic play out every single day the cultural obsession with dissecting women like Megan Thee Stallion, with monitoring and judging women who are unapologetic about their bodies and their space.

This isn’t new. We’ve been here before. During slavery, Black women were forced to cover our hair, forced to hide our bodies, yet hypersexualized all at once. We were told our bodies were threats. Even the church participates, preaching that women’s sensuality was inherently sinful. That narrative didn’t die. It evolved. Now it shows up as side-eyes on the block, as unsolicited commentary, as the constant message: shrink yourself to make others comfortable.

Every Sunday morning, I charge my car and walk to the coffee shop to work on things for my business for the week. And I deliberately wear something risky. Leather. Crop tops. Curves on full display. I do it to remind the church folks of the sins there were performing. Judy away Mary, pray for me while you are at church ..THANK YA.

But here’s the thing: Jesus loved the hoes. Mary Magdalene wasn’t ashamed of her sensuality .. shucks she was the one that found Jesus according to y’all bible. She wasn’t erased by it. She was transformed by it. Yet somehow the church twisted that into “women should be modest” and “cover your body so men don’t stumble.” Nah. I’m not here to manage anyone’s discomfort with my presence.

To the woman reading this who’s afraid: Yes, it hurts sometimes. Yes, people will judge. Yes, it’s hard to not care what they think. But your magic is real. Your aura is real. And the people who are intimidated by it? That’s not a reflection of you. That’s a reflection of what they’re afraid they could be.

We’re living in a time when women are being asked to shrink in every direction. Did someone say GLP, diet culture, what the fuck is this obsession with making ourselves smaller. Figuratively, our voices are being silenced in the courts, our rights are being stripped, we’re being told to be quiet, be modest, be less. It’s getting too puritanical out there. We need to shake it up.

Now is not the time to play small. Not with your body. Not with your voice. Not with your ideas. Not with your presence. When you use your voice to stand up for yourself when you take up physical space, when you refuse to shrink your body or your opinions or your ambitions you’re not being selfish. You’re refusing to participate in the system designed to keep us controlled. Because honestly? It's all connected.The policing of our bodies, the silencing of our voices, the theft of our rights it’s all men trying to reclaim the space we’ve been taking back.

So here is the thing love bug..we have to get up ..put on the outfit, wear the makeup if you want.. wear the dress to show off your hips.. all these things are gifts. Speak up when you need to. Take up room. Not for them. For you. For every woman who’s been told to shrink.

The truth is, most of the side-eyes, the judgment, and the unsolicited commentary have very little to do with the woman walking down the street and everything to do with the deep-seated insecurity of the person watching her. My presence isn’t an invitation, an audition, or a threat to anyone else’s existence. It is simply a declaration that I refuse to apologize for taking up the space I’m in.

Remember not to shrink they can CHOKE…

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

I visited one of my old faithfuls yesterday Reversed Thrift. If you haven’t had a chance to visit them for whatever reason and are in the market for some fly affordable thrifted items check them out. If you get a chance to meet and talk to the owners they are simply amazing.

Beyond

I finally had a chance to visit Civic in DC, which is a black owned coffee shop, but to be honest to call it that doesn’t give it justice. They were so kind when I came in - like I know we throw the community word out but you feel It when you come in for sure. Check it out if you are ever in the area.

Leave a comment

I started taking trips on my birthday a few years back. I would always spend my time in my favorite place, New Orleans, then I pushed my birthday trip back to the end of the month to like mourn summer. I would always spend my birthdays alone, on my trips, and then Kasia got old enough to travel with me, she became my travel partner. Now I have my own birthday tradition. I dilly dally in NYC, thrift, eat all my favorite things, drink my favorite coffee, and march it out blast. I’ve started taking inventory on things I’ve accomplished over the year and it has helped immensely. Previously my birthday was a reminder of how much of a loser I was, or at least to me.

Let’s get into the things this year has taught me. I’ve officially submitted my retirement paperwork, and by that I mean my retirement from survival mode. You know how you quite quit a job? Man, my body was doing it before I even realized I was officially burnt out.

For a long time, survival mode was the good bra keeping my big ole breasts in place under my archival thrifted dress. That snaggletooth ho would stutter in my ear… the faster you move the more you can get down, keep pushing even when you are beyond exhausted. But as I step into this next year around the sun, armed with just a tad more wisdom, a lot more life experience, and a deep desire for ease, I’m realizing that the urgency that once protected .. me ..( or atleast I thought) is now just taking things away from me. The only thing my fragile nervous system can rush through these days is my interval speed work.

It hits you in the small, quiet moments. I realized recently how much rushing has cost me, not just in big life goals, but in the micro details of my day.

I’ve spent so much time eating on the go, moving frantically from one task to the next, rushing through basic self-care. I told y’all last week that I am combing out my locs, and how much is coming up for me in that process. One thing that keeps coming up is how much healthier, fuller, and more vibrant my hair could be if I had just slowed down and handled it with patient hands instead of hurried ones. All the moments I didn’t moisturize, wash, or wrap my bonnet like I should have, because I was rushing, or too damn tired at night because I spent the whole day rushing.

Rushing was a byproduct of feeling like I had to do everything at once. As a single mom, oldest daughter, that shit is in my DNA. But say it with me: softness requires slowness. Softness asks you to take your time while you eat, to breathe while you style your hair, to sit in a moment without treating it like a pit stop on the way to somewhere else.

Part of stepping out of survival mode is being brutally honest about what supports your peace. I’ve realized my current environment doesn’t always make it easy to be soft. My job, Baltimore, my block, none of these things support my next stage of life. I know I’ve said this a ton of times, I keep shouting it to the mountaintops hoping the ancestors make it shake for me to get through. Hey y’all, do y’all see me putting in the work to make it happen? Dammit. I am so tired of just living through the motions. Admitting that my current living situation might not align with the soft life I’m building isn’t a failure, it’s clarity.

And with clarity comes the realization that worrying is a thief.

It’s a cliché because it’s true: worry takes away today’s peace without changing tomorrow’s outcome. Looking back over the past years, every single thing I lost sleep over, every scenario that kept me up at night, worked itself out. Every. Single. One. I am a professional “workouter”, and you are 100% stronger than our worries. I know for a fact this is easier said than done, I am in no way saying it’s not, but if I could change anything it would absolutely be all the time I spent wondering “what if this doesn’t work out,” because it legit always does.

I’m learning to walk the fine line between staying disciplined with my goals and refusing to let anxiety drive the bus. I don’t need to worry my way into progress.

I used to think success had to look like explosive numbers, 100,000 followers, a fully turned-over business overnight, massive public milestones.

Now? Success looks like doing what I said I was going to do.

Baby Zoe and my absolute Favorite Auntie Mattisha

Success is not waiting for “tomorrow” to enjoy the your life. It’s honoring the promises I make to myself today, keeping a rhythm even when it’s hard, taking pride in building something piece by piece. You don’t need to reach the final destination to celebrate the fact that you’re actively on the path. The fact that I sit my fat ass down weekly and WRITE a Substack is immense success to me. I always think the only thing between the person you admire and you is that they just did the thing.

Share

I’m also giving myself more grace. I know the reason I’m not where I “think” I should be, or could be, is because I want the thing to look a certain way or be a certain way. And I really know that the people who love and support me most are the folks who undoubtedly know I am a hot honest mess and love me just as I am. I also know that more people who are also a beautiful mess need to see themselves in others, so be your mess and your people will find you.

I'm also learning to trust my intuition over the house music that constantly playing in my head, and to be honest that I'm not completely healed, I've just oscillated. Healing was never a finish line I crossed once and got to walk away from, it's the hair that grows on my chin I have to keep plucking monthly. When a trigger hits, I still feel it, that part hasn't changed. What's changed is knowing how to handle it when it shows up. Hard? Yes. Impossible? Not anymore.

Which is exactly where the gratitude keeps landing this year. As I step into this new year, my gratitude list feels less like polite manners and more like legs in a beautiful pair of platform heels!

For my body’s strength: I forget how strong I am until I just move. To be able to run, to lift, to climb, and to wake up with power in my muscles is a gift I will never take for granted.

For connection and repair: rebuilding a deeper, stronger relationship with my son has been one of the sweetest rewards of slowing down.

For necessary departures and boundaries: I am grateful for the relationships that shifted or ended, because they forced me to look in the mirror, address my own attachment patterns, and build courage around my boundaries.

For steady progress: for every small win in business, every essay written, every step taken out of survival and into peace.

So here’s to another year. Not a year of hustling harder, proving more, or running faster, but a year of standing firm in my strength, honoring my body, protecting my softness, and trusting that everything I need is already unfolding right on time.

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

A few of my lovebugs and I are headed today to Vanessa Vintage Treasures to show her some love. WMAR shared a story this week that she needed some love. If you are able go check out this Black Owned thrift store.

Beyond

I had the most incredible black sesame latte this week in Chantilly, Va at GaJJOK, which is a popup randomly located in Sushi restaurant . I’ve been trying to find a delectable sesame latte since I left Madrid last year and by golly I think I’ve found it

Leave a comment

I wasn’t even sure if I should open with that, but I have to keep it real: last week was a hellish-ass week. But this week’s newsletter is really about slowing the entire fuck down.

Right now, I am in the middle of combing out my locs I’ve had for almost twenty years, but something I’ve been contemplating for years. My ancestors finally whispered, “Baby, it’s time.”

I originally got them when I was in peak survival mode right before I had my son. I needed a style that was easy to manage and would help my hair grow. But the truth is, I had…and maybe still have..so much deep trauma attached to my hair.

Growing up as a kid in the ‘90s, my mother had no idea what to do with my thick-ass hair 4-c hair. To be fair to her, there wasn’t anywhere near the amount of information available back then about natural hair care. We didn’t even know what a 4-c curl pattern was. Everyone was getting relaxers, which completely fried and died my poor hair.

I’ll never forget being mocked so badly as a kid. They used to tease me about having “three scoops” of hair.

Desperate for a solution, my mother gave me a Jheri curl. The way I got picked on for days behind that hairstyle... cue “Let It Soul Glowwwww.”

Eventually, we chopped it off into that classic Halle Berry / Nia Long short cut, and that was fire! But a short cut is high-maintenance. We didn’t always have the money or the resources to keep it up. That’s when a friend of my mother’s, Ms. Pam, told me it was time for me to learn how to braid my own hair. Was I good at it? No. But I got decent, and it was damn sure better than that Jheri curl.

Subscribe now

From there, it was a cycle of keeping braids or a puff. I tried everything, blowouts at the Dominican salons, going to Hair Cuttery for a cut and style (I honestly don’t know what the entire fuck I was thinking).

During the height of the Neo-Soul era, I grew my perm out to see if I could rock a fro like everyone else. Y’all, I had no idea what a braid-out was, and I looked just as much of a mess as you’d expect.

Then, I had my daughter.

I was so busy, broke, and overwhelmed that I couldn’t keep up with my hair. At that time in my life, I was actually homeless, sleeping on my best friend’s couch with a baby.

Whew. Did I just say that out loud? Let’s put a pin in that comment for a second.

Suddenly, I had a baby girl whose hair I had to care for. I did the best I could braids, hair ballies but I was struggling. Years later, around age 25 ish, now with two kids, making a struggle-salary of $11.75 an hour by myself, I just said, “Fuck it, let me get locs.” I loved them for the most part, but the hair trauma was still there. I wanted that effortless, “natural bust-down,” but consistency with hairdressers was non-existent, and money was tight.

I didn’t realize back then how much my own hair trauma was impacting my daughter. As much as I thought I was breaking cycles, I realized I was passing the same hair trauma down to her.

My aunt saw back then that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, and bless her soul, she would pay for my daughter Kasia to get her hair braided. (My aunt is amazing, and I will forever thank her for that.)

Years later, after a heated argument, Kasia told me how she felt about her hair growing up. It broke my heart, but it opened my eyes.

So here I am at 42, combing out my hair.

I’m sitting here dealing with all the trauma, hurt, and grief this hair has been holding onto for decades. I’m literally going to Kasia now asking, “What the fuck is porosity? How do I know if my hair is high or low porosity?!”

As I sit here physically untangling my locs, it is bringing up SO MUCH.

Going back to that pin I put in earlier... I had completely blocked out the fact that I was once homeless, sleeping on a couch with a newborn. I’m realizing how much heartbreak, death of people I loved, but also joy and survival I packed away into these lots.

I used to wonder why it took people so long to comb their locs out. Now I get it. It’s heavy.

I’m sitting here asking myself: Am I going to turn back into that little ‘3-scoops-of-hair’ girl who cried in the bathroom because kids made fun of her?

I decided to comb them out instead of cutting them because let’s be real I am way too vain and not cute enough for a baldie! But more than that, I chose to comb them out because I needed to take my time with myself. I needed to sit with the shit I’ve been holding onto.

Natural hair forces you to slow down. You can’t just slap oil on it and let it go like locs. You have to moisturize, wash, learn, and be patient.

This process is forcing me to be patient. It’s healing my inner child. And honestly? It’s creating a whole new way for me to bond with Kasia as I go through the natural hair learning process she’s been doing for years.

To my kids, Kasia and Z: I am so sorry for not knowing what the fuck I was doing back then. I tried my best. I was operating at 15% of the woman I am today, and I am still growing.

I’m writing this today to tell you: if you are looking to make a massive change in your life, it is terrifying. But maybe... just do it.

It will be okay. You will absolutely be okay. Your inner child will thank you for taking the time to unpack the heavy stuff and slow tf down.

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

My love opened a new gym The Strength Factory in the Whitemarsh Area. It is gorgeous, private clean and most importantly black owned. Check it out!

Beyond

I went to check out Alisha’s thirft in Laurel store finally - a video blew up on Tik Tok letting us know she was closing. The store its self is not closing however she is tranfeing ownership. I purchased- 3 pair of shoes - 3 button ups, phone case, night gown, and perfume for 11 bucks. The sale is over Friday- check it out!

Leave a comment

She told me she felt like she “didn’t hate men enough.” Like her immediate, loud craving to be touched, held, and desired by someone new was some kind of personal weakness. A betrayal of her own independence. Like she had failed some imaginary test of “feminist” strength because her skin’s desire to be explored in a loving manner, after existing for years in an unfulfilling marriage, made her weak somehow.

Before we get to the gristle I want to acknowledge, however you got here matters, and I’m not going to pretend everyone arrives at their relationship with sex and touch the same way. Some of us were shaped by culture. Some of us were shaped by religion. Some of us were shaped by things that were done to us without our consent. Wherever you’re standing, this is for you too. This isn’t about erasing what happened to get you here. It’s about what you get to do next.

If you have ever felt that way, I want you to woosigh right now.

Stop beating yourself up. The world does enough of that, right?

Wanting to be touched, desiring attention, and craving physical closeness does not mean you are weak, and it certainly doesn’t mean you are “bad.” It just means you are human. We have spent our entire lives being told how we should feel about our bodies, how we should share them, and when we should lock them away.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we do this to ourselves. Why we police our own desires so harshly, turning our natural hunger for connection into a crime scene.

We are so deeply conditioned to value ourselves based on whether we are desired or not. And let’s be real, that conditioning starts before we even have the language to name what desire is.

I look back at my own life. I was pursued sexually since I was probably younger than ten years old.

I didn’t even understand what was happening at the time. I didn’t have the context. I just thought that was how you knew someone wanted you, or that it was the only way to feel seen, to feel like you existed in a room.

Think about what that does to a young girl’s brain. Before we even learn who we are, we are taught to look in the mirror of someone else’s gaze to see if we have value. We are trained to view ourselves as objects to be collected, pursued, and consumed.

So when we finally get out of a bad relationship, or when we step away to find ourselves, we think the “strong” thing to do is to shut it all down. We build a steel fortress. We think that to be sovereign, we have to become completely untouchable and pretend we don’t need a damn thing from anyone. We tell ourselves, I am independent now, therefore I must be numb.

But hiding your desires doesn’t make you strong. It just keeps you disconnected from your own skin. You can absolutely recognize how exhausting dating can be, you can be completely done with the nonsense and the low-effort dates, and you can still want to be held. Both of those things can live in the same house. Wanting touch is not a political betrayal; it’s a biological fact.

For the past three years, I have chosen to be celibate.

And let me tell you, it hasn’t been about “waiting” for some perfect person, and it definitely hasn’t been about denying myself. It has been about sovereignty. It’s been about taking back ownership of my own energy.

When you step off the hamster wheel of trying to be chosen, you finally get the quiet space to ask: What actually feels good to me when nobody is watching?

We have to rescue the word “pleasure” from the textbook definitions. Usually, when people talk about women’s pleasure, they jump straight to performance, sex toys, or how to keep a partner happy. They make it about consumption, or worse, a chore. But real pleasure is a full-body, full-life state of being. And as we age, our relationship to it has to shift.

The truth is, some women at this stage of life who are partnered don’t even like their partners anymore. The resentment has piled up higher than my big gusset drawers, and traditional intimacy feels like another chore on a Sunday to-do list. But they keep performing because they’ve been told that’s what they’re supposed to do to keep the peace. I remember my best friend told me her pastor told her that she is not allowed to deny her husband intimacy. I mean, what the entire faaawk!

Let’s create a reality where pleasure begins with just you. Where you take all that energy you’ve been pouring into partners, kids, and jobs, and bottle it up for yourself. The exact thing we are taught we aren’t supposed to do: be selfish.

This is why self-pleasure is so incredibly important. And yes, let’s talk about it. I am speaking about masturbation. I am talking about getting sexy with yourself.

I'm not talking about the Rose or the Magic Wand or the performance of it. I'm talking about the difference between pleasure as a product and pleasure as a practice you own.Masturbation in my opinion one of the best ways to learn your own geography. It’s how you figure out your own rhythm, your own pace, and what actually makes your heart race. When you take the time to explore your own body, you are running your hands over your own skin and saying, “This territory belongs to me. I decide what feels good here. I am the authority.”

And I want to be clear about something: this isn’t only about sex. Pleasure is a multidimensional galaxy just waiting for you to explore. If it takes you a tad bit longer to feel safe exploring your own body, that’s not a failure. You don’t owe anyone, including me, a timeline for reclaiming yourself.

Share Zoe’s Substack

Because getting sexy with yourself doesn’t only happen in a dark ass room late at night. It’s buying the high-quality, soft fabrics that make you feel delicious when you slip them on, just for you, with nobody watching. It’s reclaiming your bedroom as a sanctuary that belongs entirely to you, where you don’t have to perform for a single soul. It’s eating a good meal slowly, tasting every bite instead of inhaling it standing over the sink between tasks. It’s the pleasure of a whole day alone that doesn’t feel lonely, just full. It’s your favorite song loud in the kitchen. It’s the five extra minutes in a hot shower you almost talked yourself out of taking.

None of that requires another person in the room. None of it requires you to be desired by anyone but yourself. This is the part they don’t sell you, because there’s no product at the end of it. It’s just you, deciding you’re worth the good stuff.

It’s about learning to advocate for your own joy when nobody else is in the room. Because if you can’t stand up for your own comfort, your own boundaries, and your own physical pleasure when you’re alone, you will never be able to do it when there’s someone else in the bed.

When you take back ownership of your own body, the way you show up in the world completely shifts.

You stop seeking a green light from the outside. You stop performing. You stop wondering, Do they want me? and start asking, Do I even like them? And if you do choose to share your space with someone down the line, you do it from a place of absolute, unshakable power.

You get the confidence to look at someone and say: “Actually, I don’t want to have sex tonight. I don’t enjoy that.”

Or even better: “Let’s just lie here and read our books next to each other.”

We’ve been sold a lie for so long that simple, quiet closeness isn’t enough, or that intimacy always has to lead to intercourse to be valid. But sometimes, just sitting in the same room, sharing a quiet rhythm, is a million times more intimate and satisfying than anything we’ve been shown on a screen.

I want to tell my lovebug who is enjoying the new love she is experiencing after that crappy ass marriage: enjoy the attention, desire, and exploration that was absent in your marriage. Know now that you are not the same person. Remember, you left that marriage, and that alone is strength beyond measure.

So write yourself a permission slip today. It is okay to want to touch things. It is okay to want to be touched. And if you decide to go find that, or if you decide to cultivate it entirely on your own in your own bedroom, you are not failing. You are not weak.

Go get sexy with yourself. Lock the door, light the candle, put on the sexy lingerie, put on the music, and take your time. But don't stop there. Buy yourself the flowers. Wear the lingerie as a top. Wear the dress you've been saving for a special occasion, on a random Tuesday, for no one but you. Stop waiting for a moment worthy enough to earn your own effort. You are the occasion

Baltimore and Beyond

I’ve been truly enjoying spending my Fridays with Kasia at Richardson Farms, they have a quite delicious 11.99 crab cake that you should try if you haven’t. It’s a horrible picture but trust me!

Beyond

Kasia and I ventured out for our weekend getaway to Lancaster and visited Franchesca’s Pizza in Franklin Street Social. I am a pizza snob and this has to be one of the best slices I’ve had outside of NYC.. they do use dough from NYC perhaps thats why.

Leave a comment

For me, one of those places is Oaxaca.

I went there in January 2024, right after I turned 40, on a perfect midlife trip. It completely uncovered a part of me I didn’t even know existed. It was the first place I recognized I’d been living in a continuous cycle of survival mode. Oaxaca broke my soft life cherry, the one I’ve been curating ever since. It assured me I wasn’t broken or hard to love; I just needed a little nudge to figure out who Zoe really was.

As much as I love Baltimore, I am so much more than the survival it requires of me.

We are taught in the U.S. to look at Mexico, and all the beautiful land after Texas, as if it’s entirely separate from us. As if the people there aren’t our cousins on a farther side of the family tree. But listen, experiencing the culture, any remnants of that lie dissolved as soon as I landed.

I remember spending afternoons at the Instituto de Intercambio Cultural, the library where you go to swap languages with the locals, Spanish for English, just sitting in the rhythm of the city. Because it was election season, the U.S. immigrants there asked me all about the climate back home. By the end of those conversations, they trusted me enough to ask me to carry their provisional ballots back to the States. These were people who had lived there for decades, and they told me, “You will be back. You never visit Oaxaca once”.

And the community? It just happened. One of my friends who runs a business in Baltimore but resides in Oaxaca took me to a weekly gathering hosted by other Black immigrants living in Mexico. I’d seen this kind of thing on YouTube, but actually seeing people who’d been rooted there for years, just living peacefully? It solidified that Baltimore is not your whole story.

Share Zoe’s Substack

Dilly-dallying through the beautiful streets, I’d lock eyes with another Black person who had made their home there, and we would just instantly click. No posturing. We’d end up hanging out for days. There is a deep, unbothered beauty in how the women there take care of each other and themselves. The hair, the culture, the pride—it’s a collective exhale.

This anthropology degree that Sallie Mae is currently requesting her payments for has completely changed how I view the world. It’s about the only good thing that came out of it, otherwise Sally and her Mae can come get this damn piece of paper back. Because of that lens, I can’t go somewhere just to look at it. I need to know what’s underneath. Who built this? Who’s still here? What survived, and what got paved over to make room for a resort? Most importantly who colonized it.

People ask me, why Oaxaca? Why not Cancun? Why not Tulum? Why not the places that show up first when you let the algorithm pick your vacation for you?

I didn’t pick Oaxaca because it was trending. While I was there, I saw the protests. The locals are sick of gentrification, fighting back against skyrocketing costs. I watched those rising prices firsthand while booking this group trip, and I refused to pull a commercial move and contribute to that extraction.

If I’m bringing my lovebugs to this sacred space, our money needs to go exactly where it matters. That’s why I deliberately partnered with Hotel Con Corazón, a boutique hotel that plows its profits right back into local education, and Zapotec Travel by Lily. I can plan a normal, commercialized, soulless trip anywhere. But I want something that will change how you view yourself in the world, your belonging, and how you stand up for yourself.

Subscribe now

Oaxaca has a market culture that runs generations deep. The Tlacolula Sunday market isn’t a tourist attraction dressed up to look authentic; it’s just Sunday. It’s been Sunday there for longer than anyone can trace. You’re standing inside something that was never built for your consumption in the first place. Last week I talked about how sacred Sundays are here ..it’s a theme.

Then there’s Teotitlán del Valle, where weaving isn’t a craft demonstration, it’s inheritance. A pattern gets handed down like a family recipe, except the recipe is dye and wool and story. Some families get to hand down a pattern generation after generation, with no interruption. No forced migration. No records lost. No names changed at a port.

Not everybody gets that kind of unbroken line. I know that firsthand.

My people are from Halifax County, North Carolina, and Stoney Creek, Virginia. Berry Gary on one side, Curley and Tucker on the other. My family still holds land in Stoney Creek. The family still gathers every year for Curley Day out at the cemetery, because keeping that tradition alive is its own act of resistance. But getting to that unbroken line took work…digging through probates of slave owners just to find my ancestors listed as property.

So when I stand in Teotitlán del Valle and watch a weaver explain a pattern passed down for six generations without a single gap, something in my chest recognizes it immediately. We do this too. We just don’t always call it weaving. It’s in the way we cook, the way we dress, the music we pass down without ever writing sheet music. Different thread, same hands. Different language, same story. That’s not tourism. That’s kinship across language and border.

Let’s talk about mezcal. Made the same way it’s been made for centuries at a family-run palenque, slow and deliberate, nothing rushed for a tourist’s convenience. You watch someone roast agave in the ground the way their grandfather did, and you realize slowness itself is a form of resistance. In a world that wants everything scaled, optimized, and monetized by Tuesday, there’s something almost radical about a process that refuses to be hurried.

Slowness. Rootedness. Respect for what came before, that’s the thread running through this whole trip. It’s why I think about Zora Neale Hurston a lot in my work, how she went into communities not to extract a story, but to actually sit with people, eat with them, and learn the rhythm of their days before she wrote a word. We’re not there to collect a highlight reel and leave.

So forget the word. The real thing doesn't need a name, it just needs a space where people get to be.

And can we talk about the food? I’m a notoriously picky eater, and I didn’t think I’d love it. I was exposed to flavors I’d never had in my life, like that rich, deep black mole, and I even mistakenly ate grasshoppers (chapulines), which is a story for another day. But the truth is, I ate good. The fresh, vibrant fruit was unmatched. Some of the best vegetarian meals of my life, incredible baked goods, and hot chocolate made with water, cinnamon, and pure cacao. I enjoyed cups and cups of it, just sitting and watching the city move.

Every plate felt like someone actually wanted you fed and gathered, not just served. It wasn’t fussy or expensive, it was just real, the way food is supposed to be before a corporate price tag gets attached to the word “experience.”

In the United States, we’ve been sold a story that beauty, peace, and joy have to cost a fortune. That rest is a luxury tier, that culture comes with a velvet rope and a markup. Oaxaca showed me that’s a lie. The market, the food, the mezcal, none of that requires money to witness. What you’re paying for with this retreat isn’t peace—it’s never that. It’s the work of building a container where you don’t have to figure any of it out alone.

As we age, it is very important to find..I don’t want to say community, I know I used that earlier but ..everyone’s is pimping that word out ..let’s say your tribe …thats corny too - I am going to find a word for us. More and more women are craving a safe environment. We move through our lives thinking we’re the only ones feeling untethered, unsafe, unseen in the places we’re supposed to call home. For a long time, I felt like I didn’t belong in any of the spaces around me.

So I built one. Not to sell a vacation, but to make sure the women who come with me know they were never actually alone, they just hadn’t found their people yet.

Turns out our dates land right during Carnival. We didn't plan that. We know there are no mistakes though.Here’s what our week looks like:

• Day 1: We open with a welcome dinner. You should never walk into a new place and immediately be handed an itinerary. You should be fed first and given a chance to exhale.

• The Experience: Mornings in the Tlacolula market together, afternoons with weavers in Teotitlán del Valle, evenings on a food tour through Oaxaca’s city streets. And a full day at a family-run palenque watching mezcal made the old way.

• The Ceremony: A traditional Temazcal palenque. After a week of putting your guard down, this is where you let the rest of it go too.

• The Close: A grand finale dinner to sit together, reflect, and let it all settle.

We’re staying at Hotel Con Corazón, surrounded by intentional, warm energy. No corporate resort sterility anywhere in sight.

This retreat isn’t about escaping your life for a week. Cancun does that. Tulum does that. This is about being somewhere that takes ancestry, craft, and slowness seriously enough to protect it, and letting that remind you what’s possible when you take your own life that seriously too. When you start asking what you inherited, what you lost, and what you get to build back on purpose.

We have just 5 spots left, and I cannot wait to share this experience with you!Every room is single occupancy. We're not 22 anymore, splitting a bed and pretending that's fine. We need our own space to actually rest.

• Compact Rooms: $2,450 per person (SOLD OUT)

• Queen Rooms: $2,850 per person

• King Rooms: $2,950 per person

(Payment plans are built in so you don’t have to drop it all at once.) If you’re a subscriber, paid or not, there’s a code in my previous Substack for you. If you don’t see it, just shoot me an email or DM.

Love ya hear.

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

The older I get the more the desire to have everything in walking distance and not having to use my car grows. With that said I am extremely grateful that Sydneys Ice Cream has late night hours until 9, that allows Kasia and I to walk over to grab some ice cream if we want.

Beyond

Finally had a chance to enjoy Lagniappe Bakehouse in New Orleans. My lawd it was divine. If you haven’t had a chance please go check it out next time you are there.

There's a code at the bottom of this one. Ten spots, two weeks. Keep reading…

My mother told me about a TikTok that’s been circulating lately, where people are desperately asking: where is the soul left in this country? Where are the Black-ass parts of America that haven’t been completely whitewashed by gentrification?

I’ve been feeling like a fish out of water lately. Not just in Baltimore, but everywhere I go in this country. I miss the old Harlem, even though I’m not even from there. I miss the old Brooklyn. I miss the texture of a true, unfiltered city accent, the kind that doesn’t get smoothed out for content. And in my own city, there’s only certain pockets left that still feel like something. I have to physically go to Mondawmin just to feel anything sometimes, because it’s like they came in and scraped all the Old Bay and the soul right out of the pavement. Whatever’s left of that soul, it’s not downtown. It’s not in the parts of the city that got the money. It’s in the corners nobody’s trying to develop yet.

I just got back from New Orleans. My evangeline, mi amore, lol.

New Orleans is one of my favorite place in the world, damn near my second home. Now, let’s be real as a regular, I already know you don’t go to Bourbon Street to find the soul of the city. Locals stay far away from that strip. But I also know that Bourbon is where the local musicians, the actual heartbeat of New Orleans make a lot of their coin. It’s where they play for the heavy tourist tips to survive. Bourbon is where you make the money.

But staying downtown this time, I had a moment of panic. Walking through Bourbon just to get over to Frenchman, I noticed only two live Black bands playing the entire stretch. I asked my ex...who is a drummer there, what was going on. He told me straight up: “Zoe, everything is about money now.” Out-of-town owners bought up the clubs. It’s cheaper to hire a single DJ than to pay a six-piece brass band, and the crowds visiting Bourbon now mostly want to hear rock and pop.

I felt a pit in my stomach. It’s one thing for Bourbon to be commercial; it’s another thing for it to price out the very culture it uses as a mascot. Is my New Orleans losing its grit?

Frenchman Street was better, holding onto the actual sound of the city, keeping a flame alive that Bourbon is letting go of. And past both of those strips, if you know where to look, the spirit is still fiercely protected. The Howlin’ Wolf is still holding it down for Rebirth and Hot 8. Chickie Wah Wah in Mid-City is small, dim, and full of locals. The Maple Leaf on Oak Street has been funky for fifty years, the kind of place your mama’s generation danced in first.

So the soul isn’t gone. It just got pushed to where the rent’s cheaper, same as it always does when a city starts pricing its own people out.

Then, on Frenchmen, I saw a man riding down the avenue with a literal smoker hooked to the back of his truck, smoking meat right there in the open air. And I said, now we are cooking.]

Here’s something I’ve noticed about myself. In Baltimore, I can go weeks without finding a single person to just hang with. It’s not for lack of trying. But when I travel, especially to New Orleans, it’s effortless. I meet somebody once and somehow we’re friends for years. Organically, no forcing it, no scheduling anxiety, just two people who clicked and kept clicking every time I come back through. New Orleans has this way of loving on you the second you land, like the whole city decided in advance that you belong there.

And it hit me: the soul of this country isn’t gone. It’s exactly where it’s always been. It’s in the inner cities. It’s in the hood. It’s being kept alive by the people who refuse to be sanitized.

I’m a true fan of the podcast Our Ancestors Were Messy, if you love historical tea, go subscribe immediately. Several episodes dive into how Black people had to integrate post-slavery, and how it trapped us into thinking we had to spend our lives proving our humanity to white people by acting “respectable.

Which is wild, because historically, white supremacy has shown us straight up animalistic behavior. We’re talking about the people who used our skin for leather bags, our hair for chair cushions, and literally pulled teeth out of enslaved people’s mouths to make dentures for George Washington. Look it up, it’s in the Mount Vernon ledger books.

Yet post-emancipation, the “upper class negroes” shunned the field hands and former slaves because they didn’t fit the image of what was acceptable to white society. Look at how Zora Neale Hurston got criticized and ostracized by the Black elite for documenting the way regular Black folks in the South actually talked, dressed, and lived. They were ashamed of the very roots that saved us.

We still do it today. We get money, and the first thing a lot of us do is move out of the hood that raised us. Not everybody, I know some people are out here actually reinvesting, building back into the communities that made them. But the dream, the one most of us were sold, is still get up and get out. We pull our money out of the community that made us and put it back into neighborhoods that never had to fight for a damn thing. We fall for the clean girl aesthetic and the corporate traps, and call it upward mobility. Even back in Zora’s time, the whole idea was “lift as you climb.” But lift who? Everybody, or just the ones the upper class decided were worthy enough to be lifted?

But I haven’t stopped wearing my big pin curls and my bamboo earrings. Not because it’s on trend, but because it’s legit my culture! Who says the girl on the block with the lace peplum pants, the jersey, the finger waves, and the pink grills isn’t brilliant? Who says she isn’t a millionaire?

I’m not saying the Black astronaut riding out on Artemis isn’t Black excellence, because god knows it is. But so is Rae Rae, with the blue Cadillac, riding low, with the Jerri curl, catching the sun at every red light. So are the Obamas. And so is my own grandmother, who worked until she was 65 without ever learning how to read, and still put her children through school. Black excellence was never supposed to be one lane. It’s the astronaut and the girl on the block who’s the best braider in the city and the woman who couldn’t read a word but built a whole future for her kids with her hands. Most global fashion trends come straight from the ghetto anyway, so at some point we have to ask why only one version of us gets called exceptional.

On Sunday, I went to the last second line of the season, hosted by the Uptown Steppers, with Janae by my side. I met her five years ago at Mardi Gras, she was 21, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. I do not take for granted when somebody makes real time for me in their own city. We met up at Chicken and Watermelon first, and the second she told me that’s where we were meeting, I already knew we were about to have a time. She took care of me. Protected me. Passed me everything from oysters layered with crawfish to a daiquiri, even though I don’t drink. The authentic accents, the “babies,” the 12-inch acrylic nails with the intricate art, the bamboo earrings, the fronts, the gold teeth. Gave me LIFE you hear me... I talked to everybody. I met her friends, they treated me like family, it was magnificent.

I got into her friend’s Honda Civic blasting YK and we headed under the bridge. Standing there, watching the cars, the bikes, the spin outs, surrounded by nothing but Black ass joy, I felt something I don’t fully have language for. It didn’t feel like a party I was watching. It felt like the ancestors were dancing right alongside us, like they’d shown up too. I got back to my room that night and cried, for real cried, because my soul had been needing that hug longer than I even realized. I’d felt so disconnected for so long, and New Orleans gave me back something I didn’t know I was missing.

And a thought hit me while I was out there that I haven’t been able to shake since. I know Congo Square is where enslaved people were given their one day off, Sunday, to gather, beat the drums, trade, and pour libations to their ancestors. It’s a different part of the city than where the second line ran, so I’m not saying they’re the same thing. But something about a whole Black crowd taking over the streets on a Sunday, dressed in their absolute best, drums going, brass instruments blazing, folks dancing like nobody’s watching, it felt like the same spirit to me. Like whatever got started in that square never actually stopped, it just kept moving through the city looking for a new place to land. I don’t know if there’s a real historical thread between the two. I just know what my body felt standing there.

For Juneteenth this year, I was too tired to celebrate. But last Sunday, under that bridge, was my Juneteenth. That was the rest and the release the ancestors always meant for us to have. Maybe, just fucking maybe, that was the whole point. To play. To be unsanitized and completely ourselves.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in the South, and I’m convinced Black people need to go there, or go find the hood in whatever city they’re in, every once in a while just to stay grounded. Not to visit it like tourists, but to remember it’s still ours and it’s still holding us up whether we show up for it or not.

I know reinvestment, Black excellence, respectability politics, all of that, those are their own separate conversations. I’ve barely scratched each one here. But I’m going to keep pulling on every one of these threads, because they all deserve more room than a paragraph, and I’m not done with any of them.

I came back from New Orleans full of inspiration, full of ideas, and completely finished with looking down on the spaces that birthed our genius. I need a trip to the ghetto frequently for that soul hug just to keep my spirit alive.

Love, Zoe

P.S. We are headed to Oaxaca for Carnaval...

This trip to New Orleans completely solidified how I want to build spaces for us. When I planned the upcoming Love Bugs Collective Oaxaca Trip (Feb 3–10, 2027), I knew it couldn’t be a sanitized, cookie cutter resort vacation. It had to be rooted in authentic, communal excellence.

We are traveling to Oaxaca during Carnaval season, ahhhhh, a once-a-year ancestral celebration where local villages reject commercial tourist nonsense for raw brass bands, handmade masks, and street rituals. We are staying at an impactful boutique hotel (Hotel con Corazón, which invests 75% of profits into local kids’ education) and partnering with Lily at Zapotec Travel, an indigenous-woman-owned company ensuring our dollars go directly to female artisans and native families.

Because everyone gets their own private, gorgeous room to decompress in, space is strictly limited to just 10 spots. Learn more about the trip here.

FOR My Free SUBSCRIBERS: Like I said it would, it’s here today. Ten spots total, first come first served. Use LOVEBUG for $55 dollars of for the next two weeks.

Read more

However, the around-the-way girl with the door-knocker bamboo earrings in the middle of the ghetto, rocking a fresh, intricate set of acrylic nails, is also whimsy af. People don’t identify her with whimsy because she challenges what is socially acceptable. Like, ghetto can’t possibly be whimsy, right?

The fairy version is soft and friendly and easy to consume. The girl I’m talking about isn’t asking to be consumed at all—she just wants to be respected. Whimsy is the brilliant imagination, the vibrant color, the storytelling, and the absolute art form of styling yourself into existence when the world gives you nothing but gray concrete. It’s the refusal to be plain. Both are needed in a world full of BOTS and Pantone Color of the Year “Cloud Chaser” white. What the entire fuck anyway?

Now, I can be both. One day I may have some fucking sunflowers in my hair; the next, I am going to wear my tits out in my vintage designer dress with my bamboo earrings. And Gawd, I can’t wait to get my all-pink studded fronts….yes, in my big age. Both days, I am dropping F-bombs. It’s called…say it with me ——-character.

My whimsy is loud, heavy-lifting, and deeply rooted in both the ghetto of West Baltimore and the stars. Is whimsy just being a deviant from the norm, from the binary? Being a magical whimsy bitch was a survival tactic for me growing up. A lot of whimsy girls are whimsy because they have gone through some shit, and this is our way of masking. It was a learned tactic from Ms. Frizzle and Sesame Street—they taught me how to check tf out while learning.

Most whimsy Black girls are not what you think they are. Y’all expect us to be nice, kind, and a sort of pushover, but I will cuss you tf out. While we are not allowed to be soft in this world, we are somehow still expected to be a doormat. I refuse both.

People look at an unconventional Black woman and assume every aspect of her life and joy is disorganized. They think because I look at the world through a bedazzled kaleidoscope, I don’t know how to look through a microscope.

But my Virgo Mercury is the actual architect of my magic. She is my grand wizard, fa-la-la bitch! It is the skeleton that allows my whimsy to stand up straight. I feel my absolute best when my high logic meets my deep cosmic curiosity. It’s me organizing my thoughts for my weekly Substack, or mapping out my wardrobe for the next season based entirely on a precise calculation of what I want to feel like.

Thank goodness to the ancestors for her, because she is the backbone of my business. She is the happiest when I am emailing companies and planning our first curated group trip, looking at rates, negotiating prices. I am the happiest when my brain is working hard, learning a new skill, playing in Python to create a website, or analyzing data sets. I love doing deep-dives on things that some people think are absolutely senseless, like the theory of Pangea and how the world was once one single planet that separated over time.

Maybe that’s why I love it. I know what it feels like to be a whole continent watching parts of the world drift away from you.

There is a steep cost to being wired like this inside a system built for factory lines. My day job runs on the same logic as every corporate structure: identical boxes moving at identical speeds. Whimsy does not clock in well. You learn to flatten yourself before the meeting starts. You learn which parts of your brain get to come to work and which parts have to wait in the car.

Every time I pick up my Wellbutrin, I stand there looking at the pharmacy line and realize everyone is on something just to stabilize themselves enough to function in this matrix-ass shit. Is this global? I don’t know. But I know I struggled and fought against it for so long because I was terrified of losing my pizzazz.

When I hold that amber plastic bottle, I feel exactly how I felt when my mother used to put me in the corner and make me write. I know I have to do it, but fuck. I don’t want to be on these drugs.

Yet, there is a paradox here. When I am on my “be cool” pills, I can focus. I get shit done. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to start or sustain my writing, build my LLC, or launch this Substack without them. I can’t help but think: do I actually have a deficit, or do I just need chemical assistance to force a cosmic, free-spirited soul to sit still inside a fucking fuck-shit country?

Share

The medicine makes me sharp enough to build my own empire, but it comes with a lag. I think my medicine makes me delayed. It makes me give people too much grace. When you operate on a higher, more playful frequency, you are already hella delayed when someone is low-key poking fun at you while you’re just being yourself. You’re too busy existing to notice the slick shit. And the world is full of people waiting to slide right into that delay.

Here’s the part I keep circling back to: Are whimsy and being on the spectrum connected, or am I just reaching for a word that sounds prettier than what’s actually happening? I am ultimately attracted to all the shiny shit, and I’ve always wondered what that’s actually about.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells Black girls: When a white girl is hyper-focused, intense, blunt, sensitive to texture and sound, obsessed with patterns, she gets evaluated. She gets a word for it. She gets accommodations, sometimes a diagnosis, and definitely sympathy.

When I do the exact same shit, I get called “extra.” “A lot.” “All over the place.” Quirky if they like me that day, exhausting if they don’t.

Nobody ever asked if the whimsy was actually wiring. They just decided it was personality. Decided it was “just how she is.” Decided it was Black girl flavor instead of asking if it was something that deserved a closer look. So we never got evaluated. We got nicknamed instead. And that’s part of why Black women get diagnosed so late, if we ever get diagnosed at all. We mask too fucking well. We were trained to.

That medication delay I mentioned? That is exactly where I used to lose myself. Somebody would do something slick, something disrespectful dressed up as a joke, and I’d sit there gaslighting myself, asking if I was overreacting instead of trusting what I already knew the second it happened.

I don’t do that anymore. The moment my gut says that was foul, I trust it. I believe my intuition is the ancestors talking, and the more you actually listen to them instead of talking yourself out of it, the clearer that voice gets. So check them today. Don’t give them another chance to disrespect you, because you already know holding shit in doesn’t make you the bigger person—it just makes your body keep score.

I’m not diagnosing myself in a Substack post. I don’t have the letters after my name, and I’m not trying to self-identify my way into a TikTok trend. But I am saying the question deserves to sit in the room. Folks think we are weird af and highly misunderstood, but how much of what gets called “whimsy” in a Black girl is actually just unmasked neurodivergence that nobody bothered to name because they’d already decided what box we go in before we opened our mouths?

Because at the end of the day, being whimsy is deeply spiritual.

It’s not just a personality trait; it’s a cosmic frequency. I honestly believe that people on the spectrum are extremely, uniquely spiritually aligned. We are wired with a direct, open conduit to the unseen, to the ancestors, to the universe itself. Our brains don’t filter out the magic or the patterns the way the matrix expects everyone else to. So when society labels us “weird” or “all over the place,” what they are actually looking at is a human being operating with a completely different spiritual radar.

I don’t have a clean answer. I just know the question changed how I see myself, and it might change how you see yourself, too.

Now, let me say this clearly: If you are whimsical, spiritually aligned, and beautiful, you are a walking target.

Unhealed, unevolved people are desperately attracted to your light, but the moment they realize they can’t control it or cage it, they want to dim it. They just want to suck it up. It makes it incredibly hard to fit into a traditional girl group. I look back at “friends” I’ve had—people who honestly had the personality of an evaporated LaCroix. Just a faint, hollow hint of something, but ultimately flavorless. They latched onto me because they were starving for flavor, but then they’d throw jabs at me for being “too all over the place.”

They make fun of your whimsy, and then they turn around, copy your entire layout, put their own “spin” on it, and look at you like, Let me show you how it’s done.

Bitch, you didn’t have the idea in the first place!

But my saving grace is my velocity. By the time they have plagiarized my last move, my double Leo is already onto the next hairstyle while my Cap rising has teamed up with my Virgo Mercury and mapped out the next three data sets. I’m already onto the next cosmic fixation, leaving them holding yesterday’s blueprint. I am struggling just to be me, and you are up here copying me? Like, find out who YOU are, ho.

For a long time, I ignored my intuition. I noticed the micro-doses of malice, but I gaslit myself. Am I imagining this shit? Am I making this up? I was so scared of losing friends because I was lonely. I tolerated being mismanaged for my whimsy just to have company.

No more. My intuition is an algorithm that doesn’t skip a beat. I know now that I cannot be friends with people who do not like themselves. When you are empty inside, you become an energy vampire, draining my battery to jump-start your own empty tank.

So, here is how I actually protect the light now, because boundaries without discernment is just isolation with better PR. I watch what people copy versus what they actually compliment. Anybody can repost your idea. Watch who shows up for the version of you that isn’t profitable or borrowable yet. I watch who’s there before the algorithm notices me and who showed up after—the timing tells you everything about the motive. And I watch how people respond when I correct course in real time. The energy vampires need you consistent so they can predict you. The real ones can handle you evolving mid-sentence.

This gift comes at a cost, and that cost is a sacred boundaries phase. I am finna sit my ass alone before I am ever mismanaged for my whimsy again.

I don’t need to fit into their girl groups, their corporate molds, or the internet’s neat little aesthetic boxes. If the price of keeping my spark unblinkered is sitting in a room by myself, then line up the empty chairs. My light is far too expensive to be consumed by people who are afraid of the dark.

With love, Zoe

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore(ish)/ DC

I’ve been traveling y’all, and I was extremely exhausted so I rested but managed to bring my azz up to DC for Pride. I finally saw one of my favorite artist Leikeli47 at DC pride. She sung one of my favorite song Money - listening to the video.

She says I got money - sing it, believe it repeat it.. manifest it y’all!

Beyond

I am in one my favorite places, my second home New Orleans, just for a change in scenery…look at this cute azz coffee place Fourth Wall. I am in utter love!

A note: This piece is a love letter to Zora Neale Hurston and her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” She is my bae, my north star, and the entire reason I move the way I move through spaces, through stories, through life. She taught me that Black joy and Black pain ride together and that the observation IS the resistance. Go read her first. Then come back.

You know, over the last few years I stopped calling myself African American. I am Black Blackity Black Black. Jesse Jackson gave us that term back in ‘88. Hmph. Didn’t ask me. This country loves to remind me to go back home to Africa. Like staying here was ever a choice my bloodline made. Like we asked to be brought here. We didn’t pick the boat. And now, ironically, I’m the one trying to leave, on my own terms, by my own choice, in my own time. Funny how that works.

And let me be clear, I don’t claim this country, but watch who you’re talking to when you tell me to go back “home”. Our ancestors built this. The roads, the railroads, the Capitol, the fruits of their labor paid for all of it. So before you say go back to Africa, ask yourself who exactly laid the bricks from where you are yapping your gums on. I am from Baltimore. And I don’t say that like it’s its own country just for effect. Because it is. It’s my Eatonville (iykyk). My nation before the nation

But currently, I am in North Cakalack.

I have crossed lines, chased the highway down into the belly of the map, and now I am somewhere on a North Carolina back road with KentheMan blasting in my Chevy EUV. The trees, the land, shit even the wind is telling me things.

What a blessing it is to be able to move freely. Like, thank you to my ancestors who shed blood and made sacrifices for me to do so. I think about it often, but particularly when I am spending time in the South.

The dilapidated shacks, the crosses, the southern churches, the Amerikkka flags, everything I pass while navigating through these small towns tells a story. There is something so ominous about passing them and crossing the railroad tracks.

As a descendent of magical motherfuckers, I know those tracks carry the medicine of crossroads the ritual significance of leaving all your worries behind and never looking back. I know what crosses over them and what’s meant to stay buried beneath them. Some of what I know, I keep. That’s not for here. But I also know that down here, railroads symbolize something much heavier than just transportation. They dictated who lived on which side, who was allowed to cross they represent a rigid social order. Which side you were born on determined everything that came after: your school, your safety, your destination.

I rode past them with the music up.

I kept thinking whose nostalgia is this landscape built for? Because it’s not mine. The rusted tractors and screened porches on the tourism brochures don’t tell my story. And yet, my people are in this soil. My people are in these roads. Halifax County is not far from here. The Berry Gary line runs through this earth. There is record of Black folks indigenous to this land here before America made it America. Before the flag, before the name, before the lines on a map decided what to call any of us. My people may not have only arrived here. Some of us may have already been here. I am not a tourist. I belong to this land in ways that predate most of what’s built on top of it.

One of my great great aunts from Halifax, NC

The towns down here have temperatures. You feel the climate before you can name the town.

Milltown was a surprise, they were startled to see me, yes, but the surprise said come on in, sit with me. Smithfield was amicable. Breathable. I passed a sign for the NC 4 — four young Black people who fought just for the right to check out a library book in 1957. I drove past it free, music on, going wherever the hell I wanted. Thank you, ancestors.

Then there was Selma.

Selma felt like cooking on an electric stove. You know it’s hard as hell to gauge the right temperature. Like fuck around and find out.

I don’t know how to explain Selma except to say my body explained it for me before my brain could catch up. The stares had a different quality heavy, assessing, territorial. I was followed through a store by eyes that didn’t even bother to blink. I had a coffee at Altas. The staff were warm and wonderful, a brief oasis , but the other patrons looked at me like I was a ghost or a threat, or maybe both.

I went into a vintage shop and got dizzy. Started seeing spirits and shit. The air got thick, and I knew something older than me was trying to get my attention, and it was not the vintage purses and jewelry.

I heard my great-grandma Luci say: Get your Black ass out of here.

Look, I am a whimsy ass Black girl. I usually think I can go into whatever place I want to, mostly because I know I am protected. But in Selma? I just couldn’t shake the feeling that someone might call the Klan to pick my ass up in a pickup truck. So I got up outta there.

I watched Selma shrink in my rearview mirror, the heavy, vibrating tension slowly leaving my shoulders as the highway opened back up.

By the time I pulled into the next town, the air had shifted again. I’ve been wondering what the difference is for white people in the South than up “North.” But the more I travel through this country, and honestly, since the election, it feels like the white folks back up East have gotten so much worse. The more I understand, to the absolute fullest extent, what Malcolm X meant when he said everything south of Canada is the South.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know the white folks in the South have been acting up, too. Nobody is romanticizing the country down here. But speaking strictly from my own experience, the energy in places like NYC, DC, and Baltimore has shifted into something ugly. The people who pretend to be the most progressive, the ones who wrap themselves in liberal ideology, are actually acting worse.

And it’s not because they are fighting for physical space in the city. It’s because they never actually learned how to co-exist. They just come into our neighborhoods, set up shop, and expect the environment to adapt to them.

That’s why there are days I would rather navigate the rural back roads of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or drive through these country Carolina towns than deal with the aggressive, tense friction of the urban East Coast right now. In these spaces, even across different state lines, there is a different cultural baseline. People actually know how to share space.

The white folks down here in rural Carolina have that slow-paced fluency. They say excuse me. They hold doors. They speak first and they look you right in the eye when they mean it.

After years in Baltimore of training myself out of speaking of learning to keep my eyes locked forward, my jaw clenched, and my warmth tightly managed because the city punishes openness. I have had to actively retrain myself on this trip. I’ve had to learn how to say good morning back. To let someone hold a door open for me without immediately looking for a motive.

It is a strange thing to realize that safety and politeness can sit in the same room with a history that wants you dead. But that is the friction of this place. I am not saying the South is safe. I am not saying it is healed or just or resolved. Selma reminded me it is none of those things.

What I am saying is that coexistence is a skill. And some people learned it and some people didn’t.

Baltimore’s white liberals never had to learn that fluency. They moved into Black neighborhoods, gentrified them, put on the Black Lives Matter t-shirt, and called it done. They’re not fluent in humanity. They’re costuming.

They are the exact same people who clutch their bags when I walk by on the street. A Free Palestine pin is not the same as knowing how to share space with another human being on a porch. Do they seriously not know that you can’t “free” Palestine while not giving a damn about your Black neighbor? A Black Lives Matter sign in your Instagram bio is not the same as making physical room on a narrow sidewalk.

Proximity builds what ideology never could. And for all its brutal, bloody history, the South has always had proximity. Uncomfortable, violent, unequal proximity, but proximity nonetheless. They have lived on top of each other, cooked for each other, buried each other. That produces a different kind of knowing. A fluency in the texture of each other’s existence.

I turn off the back roads and pull into the driveway, back to the heavy, quiet reality of why I am down here in the first place. I am here because my best friend is sick. She was diagnosed with stage 3 Esophageal cancer.

While I am driving through history, she is packing up a life she built, forced to move because her body made a radical decision she didn’t get a vote on. I am here to be the muscle. To help her carry things, wrap fragile memories in old newspaper, and decide what gets donated and what goes into the back of the truck.

And in between the heavy lifting, I am driving around these back roads having downloads.

The download is this: I am extraordinarily privileged to move. To just go. To get in a car, turn up the volume, ride past railroad tracks, feel the land, stop for coffee, and keep going. That is not nothing. That is not guaranteed. My ancestors couldn’t do it without a pass or a prayer. My best friend, right now, can’t do it because her body is holding her hostage.

Freedom of movement is not equally distributed. It is not permanent. It is not promised.

Zora wrote that sometimes she has no race she is just herself. The cosmic Zora. I feel that to my core. I am Black and proud and deeply rooted in my people. And I am also still unlearning what I was told Blackness had to look like. Still figuring out where the whimsy Black girl who chases thrift stores and ancient roads and ancestral downloads fits into the picture. Zora figured it out by just being Zora anyway. I’m working on it.

I am not tragically colored either.

I am Black. Joyfully, completely, ancestrally Black. I love being Black the way I love a perfect, rare thrift find; the way I love a city I’ve never been to but instantly recognize; the way I love the exact moment a bassline drops and your whole body says yes.

I am riding free through unfree land. The music is on, the railroad tracks are calling me baby, my people are cheering from the soil, and I am still moving.

That’s the whole thing.

I am moving.

Freedom of movement is not equally distributed. It is not permanent. It is not promised.
Happy Juneteenth, y'all. Use it.

Baltimore and Beyond

Baltimore

I'm most excited about the Pratt Library's Adult Summer Break Program this year. I'm a millennial, I am very much reward-driven, so a summer reading challenge with actual prizes? Say less .. sign up here.

Beyond

I had some phenomenal coffee along this trip .. here is a clip from one of my favorite stops along the way .. Labrar Coffee in downtown Goldsboro.

The DM I get more than any other is some version of this:

And every time I get that message I think…. shucks, I didn’t always know. I had to listen, do some work on myself, and let go of a shit ton of baggage to really get to it. I’m so far from where I want to be, however... I am gracious for where I am. I honestly think people just love that I absolutely do not care and I am going to put that shit on.

For a long time, finding clothes that felt like ME, and not just clothes that fit, was hard as hell. The fashion industry has never made it easy for a woman outside of what society deems an “ideal weight” to feel luxurious, soft, and seen. That hasn’t changed enough. But what HAS changed is me.

Now when I get dressed, it feels like play. Like pure, unadulterated play.

It finally clicked. The Zoe I was as a little girl—staring at Pat Clevland on screen thinking THAT is what a woman looks like….she was always in there. And you know what’s wild? The clothes she dreamed about and saw in films are resting in the vintage racks right now! Thank you to the baddies who donated them and kept them in pristine condition. The liquid satin. The structured knits. The silk blouses. The luxurious furs. The pieces that were made when fashion actually gave a damn about quality, femininity, and drama are sitting in thrift stores right now, waiting for someone with a gentle eye to find them.

Moving Beyond the Weight of Survival

Here is what I know about survival mode, it has its own kind of beauty. When you have nothing, you learn to create everything. You learn to make something out of nothing. Resourcefulness. Creativity. Ingenuity that people with money will never understand. Survival taught me how to thrift. Survival taught me how to see value where others see trash. I would not trade that education for anything.

But survival also has a cost.

When you are genuinely worried about your next meal or your rent or keeping the lights on…and let’s be honest, so much of that worry is by design, it is capitalism working exactly as intended. It is nearly impossible to fully inhabit your own skin. Style requires the luxury of self. And when life has you in a chokehold, that soft luxury feels like the last thing you’re allowed to touch.

I carry a little less survival in me these days, not none, but less. And without that heavy weight pressing down on me, I am finally a little freer.

What I found on the other side of survival changed the way I get dressed, the way I walk into a room, and the way I see my whole soul. However, know even while in survival you are deserving of nice things.

Part 1: Quiet the Chorus

Before you touch a single hanger or open a single app, I need you to sit with a quiet question: When you get dressed in the morning, whose voice is whispering in your ear?

Most of us are not dressing from our own instincts. We are dressing from a chorus of other people’s opinions that have lived in our heads so long we forgot they weren’t ours. It’s the church. It’s your mother. It’s that old job that told you to cover up. It’s the man who made you feel like your body was too much. It’s the world that told you that you were too dark, too big, too loud, too much, and somehow still not enough.

I had a conversation recently that stopped me cold. Someone told me: “I wasn’t sure if any of my thoughts were my own. I didn’t know what was the church, what was the world, and what was actually me.”

That is exactly what fear dressing feels like:

Read more

If you have a basket of ripe, juicy fruit (insert Juicy Fruit by Mtume) sitting on your counter and a jar of sourdough discard staring at you from the fridge, consider this your divine intervention.

Baking with the seasons is pure alchemy. Right now in June, peaches are hitting their absolute peak. Turning from firm fruit into this fragrant, honeyed, dripping nectar that feels like pure summer luxury. And when you marry that deep, sun-ripened sweetness with the bright, sharp tang of a long-fermented sourdough discard? We are going to have some foot rubbing coffee cake on your hands.

(Note: While I am heavy into my fresh summer peach era right now, save this framework. When autumn rolls around, this exact template works beautifully with dead-soft, custardy Hachiya persimmon purée or grated apples. We are flexible here.)

This isn’t your average dry coffee cake. She is dense, incredibly moist, kissed with spice, and piled high with a thick, buttery, brown-sugar coffee cake streusel that shatters when you bite into it. It’s the ultimate baker’s reward and worth every calorie. I mean this could count as pre workout.

Tips from Zoe’s previous errors lol…

Kitchen Scale Manifesto: Lovebug, if you aren’t using a digital kitchen scale yet, please invest in one. It makes all the difference in the world, honestly, just like a good bra. You want accuracy, you want support, and you want everything sitting exactly where it’s supposed to. Grams don’t lie.

The Butter Standard: And please, use unsalted European butter if you can. It has a higher fat content and less water than standard grocery store sticks, which translates to a richer crumb and a streusel that actually shatters instead of turning into sad grease. If we are going to eat butter we might as well eat the best..( if you can).

The Overnight Ferment: If you want an even deeper flavor profile and better digestion, you can long-ferment the base. The night before, mix your flour, melted butter, sugar, and sourdough discard together, cover it, and let it ferment in the fridge overnight. In the morning, bring it to room temp, whisk in your eggs and vanilla, split the batter, and fold your fresh fruit purée into half to create that stunning marble swirl. It takes patience, but trust the process.

Tell me in the comments, Juicy Fruit what seasonal fruit are you tossing into your batch this week? 🖤

It’s the same untouchable frequency as that iconic film clip I keep thinking about, the one where a man in an emerald green velvet coat with a massive chinchilla fur collar walks down a flight of steps. He is fucking Willie Dynamite. He is walking out of a courthouse after beating a case. He knows he just beat the system, he knows he is allowed to be exactly who the hell he wants to be, and by the time he hits the bottom step, everyone knows it too. That is the exact kind of defiance I’m talking about.

And historically, the women who carry that unbothered, room-shifting energy are the ones who occupy space like they own the deed.

Pam Grier walked onto a screen and men forgot their own names. Jackée came on screen swinging her hips and screaming “Marrrrrry!” Eartha Kitt had a small, petite frame, but her presence was massive. Blanche Devereaux walked into every room like the room had been waiting for her. These women command the gravity of the room before they even took a few steps.

That’s the thing I’m talking about. That’s what I’m afraid we’re losing.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: that woman, the one who occupies her space like she owns the deed, she’s getting harder to find. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening right now, in the era of the GLP-1, when half the country is on Ozempic and the other half is talking about it.

I train six days a week. Six. I have run a marathon.( Potentially gearing up for a second) I can lift hundreds of pounds. I have walked up inclines that would make a mountain goat reconsider its life choices. To be honest I can’t believe my old ass is capable of many of the things I do. My body is strong, capable, and thick as hell, and according to the BMI chart hanging in my doctor’s office, I am overweight.

Not “athletic build.” Not “muscle-dense.” Not “functionally extraordinary.”

And in this patriarchal society all that matters is that I am Overweight.

The BMI.. Body Mass Index.. I call it the Bitch Made Index. It was invented in the 1830s by a Belgian mathematician named Adolphe Quetelet. He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t studying health. He was literally just measuring the statistical proportions of the “ideal” European male body for a sociology project. He called it “the average man.” This index was never designed to measure individual health. It was never designed for women. And it was absolutely, categorically not designed for Black women’s bodies, which naturally carry more bone density and muscle mass.

And yet here we are, nearly 200 years later, letting this colonial math decide who is healthy and who needs to shrink.

The system that dismisses my body is also the system that profits from me trying to fix it. That’s capitalism for you!

I’ll be honest with you, because that’s what we do around here. I get anxious before doctor’s appointments. Me. The woman who will deadlift your expectations and put them back down gently. My stomach tightens while I am waiting to be seen which causes my blood pressure to rise.Then I have to hear their mouth about that. All because I know the scale is coming, and I know what the number is going to mean to someone who hasn’t asked me a single question about my life.

However, thank fucking goodness, I found a doctor who looks at me and says: “You don’t have to get on the scale today if you don’t want to.” That sentence alone almost made me cry. Because nobody had ever said it before. Hell, I didn’t even know that was an option!

Growing up as a millennial, I watched the acceptable body change shape every few years like a trend cycle that we were all just supposed to keep up with. The heroin-chic nineties. The low-rise, hip-bone era of the early 2000s. The “slim thick” moment that said you could have a body, but only in the right places. Each era handed us a new mold and a new way to feel like we didn’t fit.

And now there's a shot being marketed to us with an urgency that feels terrifying and deeply triggering.

You literally cannot escape it. I cannot open Instagram or scroll through TikTok without being bombarded by targeted ads for GLP-1s, smoothly marketed as “healthcare” wrapped in aesthetically pleasing pastel fonts. And it’s not just algorithmic BS, it’s invading our real-world safe spaces. I have received numerous texts from my closest friends, and my DMs are filled with messages from my love bugs, all echoing the exact same sentiment: “I feel like I’m losing my mind. They are all on that shit. Everyone so skinny. This is so triggering. Is everyone doing this now? Am I crazy for staying like this?”

It feels like a mandate because the powers that be have enlisted our icons to deliver the message.

Look at Serena Williams. For two decades, Serena was the blueprint. She was the living, breathing rebuttal to the white, delicate, unthreatening aesthetic of modern sports. She was thick, powerful, muscular, and dominant. The world scrutinized her body ruthlessly when she was at her peak. Called her too muscular, too powerful, too much. And she stood tall through all of it. Or at least we thought she did. Because now she's starring in multi-million dollar commercials for a telehealth company, pushing GLP-1 pills and shots.

When one of the most disciplined, dominant athletes on the planet looks into a camera and tells you that her historic body oddly wasn’t enough, that she had to shrink to finally feel “healthy”, something in the culture breaks. It sends a chilling cue to the rest of us: “If Serena couldn’t just exist in her power, what chance do you have?”

But then, you see a moment of pure, unadulterated rebellion. You see Megan Thee MFking Stallion walking the runway at Miami Swim Week in a swimsuit, showcasing all her glorious, powerful, athletic bawdy. While the rest of the industry is shrinking, retreating, and quietly pulling back on inclusive sizing, she is out there launching a line that goes all the way up to 5X.

This moment matters…like let’s shake some shit up! It feels like a rupture in all this made up bs. It is a loud, proud cue telling the rest of us: “Do not let them make you disappear. Look at what is possible when we refuse to compromise.”

This pressure to dissolve ourselves is a crisis affecting women of every background, every race, and every size. The exhaustion of constantly fighting the urge to disappear is universal.

But as a Black woman, I have to acknowledge the specific, insidious weight this carries for us. Because when the system tells Black women to shrink, it isn’t just dealing in modern vanity. It is pulling from a very old, very dangerous playbook.

There’s a book called Fearing the Black Body by Dr. Sabrina Strings that completely blew my mind because she proves that fatphobia wasn’t invented by modern medicine. It was actually constructed by white colonists and theologians centuries ago to visually separate white, Anglo-Saxon women from Black, enslaved women. Thinness was branded as a mark of white “purity” and civilization, while carrying weight, muscle, and mass was demonized as “uncontrolled” and savage.

When the system tells Black and brown women to shrink today, it is using the exact same colonial math it used in the 1830s to strip us of our inherent physical power.

And the patriarchy happily keeps the wheel turning. There’s a classic concept from Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth that explains whenever women make major political and economic strides, the cultural backlash demands that they focus all their currency on physical aesthetics and dietary restriction. A distracted, hungry, exhausted woman hyper-focused on melting her face and her muscle density into a corporate-approved silhouette is a woman too tired to completely tear down the institutions holding her back.

This is exactly why we are seeing a massive shift in body standards alongside the rise of Trump-era conservatism.

Political conservatism thrives on a return to rigid binaries and absolute control. Under this framework, the body becomes the ultimate canvas for social discipline. The progressive cultural era that allowed us to celebrate body neutrality and distinct shapes. The era that allowed thick, powerful women to dominate the mainstream, is being aggressively dismantled.

The political right has always romanticized an idealized, compliant style of femininity, think pageant glamour, hyper-delicate features, and non-threatening frames. Thinness is marketed as “moral discipline,” and in the era of a drug that costs thousands of dollars out of pocket, it has become the ultimate high-status luxury item. Conversely, refusing to shrink, carrying power, or embracing a thick body is coded as sloppy or “woke” non-compliance.

I feel that pressure in my body every single time I walk into a room and someone’s eyes do the calculation.

And if we are going to be completely honest about what this aesthetic is actually romanticizing, we have to say the quiet part loud.

What are they actually saying when they demand that grown-ass, adult women dissolve their curves, melt away their muscle mass, and shrink down into frames that look fragile? It is romanticizing a prepubescent body. It is branding the silhouette of a child as the ultimate standard of female beauty. The system wants women looking undeveloped, fragile, and utterly powerless.

They would love to transport us back into a 1950s layout: small, quiet, and visually unthreatening.

I understand why women say yes to it. I do. When the world has spent your entire life telling you that your body is the problem, eventually someone is going to hand you what looks like a solution and you’re going to take it. That’s not weakness. That’s survival.

And I’ll be completely honest with you, because there is no room for hypocrisy here. I have stood at that exact crossroad. Years ago, the pressure felt so suffocating that I actually started the process of getting weight-loss surgery. I went to the consultation. And the doctor told me I had to lose weight first just to qualify. I sat there and thought…wait. If I can lose the weight to get the surgery.I might as well lose this shit the natural way. And that moment cracked something open in me. Because I realized a surgeon wasn’t going to look at my traumas, my stressors, the habits running my life in the background. I had to do that work myself. And part of that process actually required seeing a therapist. Who very lovingly….let’s say lovingly helped me look at why I was eating the entire bag of chips after the half dozen Oreos. It wasn’t about the chips. It was never about the chips.

And I did the work. I am standing at a solid, athletic, dense 195 pounds. I have lost an entire human being’s worth of weight. I built this body through stubborn consistency, falling in love with lifting, and feeding my ADHD by trying everything fitness-related. Accompanied by plenty of tears and boob sweat.

But let’s look past the physical toll, because what the system is asking us to sacrifice emotionally is even higher. When you chemically quiet your body’s relationship with food, you aren’t just turning off an appetite. You are turning off a cultural lifeline.

Food is not just input and output. It is a deeply rooted cultural experience. For so many of us, the dishes we love are inherently connected to exactly who we are. Food is history passed down through generations. It’s the seasoning your grandmother taught you to measure by spirit, it’s the rhythm of Sunday dinners, the joy of travel, and the way our communities gather to celebrate survival and love

When the status quo convinces us that food is just a dangerous addiction to be managed by a pharmaceutical subscription, we lose our ability to participate in our own heritage. We trade the warmth of communal joy for a sterile, isolated standard of thinness.

Share

And the medical reality is clear: for most people, the moment you stop taking the shot, the weight comes right back. Are we really supposed to buy a subscription to a pharmaceutical company for the rest of our lives just to maintain a silhouette society deems acceptable?

We have to stop treating “fat” like it’s a dirty word or a moral failure. Fat is not a bad thing. It is a biological tissue that keeps us alive. But society has weaponized it, turned it into a symbol of laziness or shame, and forced us to deal with all this collective bullshit just to exist.

Choosing not to be on a GLP-1 right now? Choosing to stand firmly on a strong back and thick thighs that carry the bone density of ancestors who survived the unimaginable?

That is a radical act of rebellion. Don’t we love a rebellious baddie!

It is a middle finger to every magazine cover, every doctor’s chart, every algorithm serving you ads for things you never asked to want, and every political wave trying to discipline you into compliance.

They want us small. They want us to disappear. But some of us already know what Willie Dynamite knew walking down those courthouse steps. The room doesn’t decide what you’re worth. You walk in already knowing. Heavy, loud, and taking up every single inch of the space you own.

Baltimore and Beyond

Kasia and I ventured to the Italian Festival to enjoy all the carbs, specifically the holy trinity of fried dough….zero regrets.

Beyond

We ventured back to Columbia, PA and scored some amazing records for .50cent a piece.

Thanks for reading love bugs! Sending all the fluffy, soft but muscular hugs!

The Method

1 Mix the Dough

5 min

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and salt. Pour in your warm water, starter, and melted fat. Mix with your hands until a shaggy dough forms, then knead it right in the bowl for about 2 minutes until it smooths out and forms a cohesive dough.

2 Divide & Shape

5 min

Divide the dough into 6 equal pieces (roughly 35–40g each if you’re using a scale) and roll each piece into a tight, smooth little ball.

3 The 20-Minute Rest

20 min (Crucial)

Cover your dough balls with a damp towel or an inverted bowl so they don’t dry out, and let them rest on the counter for 20 minutes. Do not skip this! Shaping the balls tightens up the gluten; this rest relaxes it completely so the dough doesn’t snap back when you try to roll it out.

4 Roll Them Thin

5 min

On a lightly floured surface, use a rolling pin to flatten each rested dough ball. Roll them out as thin as a dime (or your ex’s hairline). They should stretch easily now without fighting you!

5 Blister on the Skillet

30–45 seconds per side

Heat a cast-iron skillet or heavy pan over medium-high heat until it’s nice and hot (no oil needed). Lay a tortilla down. Within 15 seconds, you should see beautiful bubbles puffing up. Flip and cook for another 20–30 seconds.

6 Keep Them Soft

The Steam Trick

As they come off the heat, immediately stack them inside a clean, folded kitchen towel. The residual steam keeps them incredibly soft and pliable instead of turning into crispy crackers!

If you make these, please let me know how they turned out!

All the Love,

Zoe

I woke up this morning thinking about sexuality. Specifically, how we define it versus how we were taught to perform it.

Don’t get me wrong, I know sex can be an incredibly powerful tool when it’s used correctly. Some of us very much enjoy sex magic. IYKYK. It should be this potent, cosmic, beautiful thing. I wish it wouldn’t have taken until my big age to really understand the immense power I held as a woman. Instead, for most of my life, I experienced sex as something men do to you, not with you. It often felt like an act of procreation or an exertion of power, rather than mutual connection. There were so many times… way too many times where my boundaries weren’t just crossed. They were completely disrespected.

As a two-time rape victim, I understand the truly heavy, fucked-up reality that almost every single one of us knows someone who has survived sexual abuse. The statistics show that nearly 1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape in their lifetime. If you are reading this right now and carrying that weight, please know I see you. I am sending the biggest, warmest, softest big boob hugs your way.

For years I carried my own history, trying to navigate intimate spaces while holding onto that trauma. And the most painful part of patriarchal power dynamics is how they sneak into the spaces where you think you are finally safe. I shared the details of one of my assaults with my last lover. I trusted him. I thought he was a safe space. The last time we were intimate, he mimicked exactly what I told him my attacker did and told me he was “teaching me a lesson.”

When someone uses a story you shared with them as a weapon against you, it doesn’t break you. It wakes you the fuck up. That was my breaking point. I realized I had been auditioning for a role in a Tubi film I never asked to star in. So I shut the janky ass production down.

Which brings me to where I am today: navigating perimenopause and three years into intentional celibacy. Honestly? I think I officially retired my vagina from the dating market. I gave her my dream vintage Schiaparelli heels, threw her a little pension party, and said, “Thank you for your service. You are officially off the clock.”

But please don’t mistake my celibacy for a lack of sensuality.

During this break, I had a massive epiphany. I used to think that it was the men who were making the sex great. How foolish of me. I realized it was actually just me. I was the one bringing the magic. And you want to know how I know? Listen, sexy time on my own terms has been an absolute blast. My vibrators are always there for me, completely reliable… as long as I remember to charge the damn things.

And the aftercare after my climax(es)! There is something so incredibly sacred about giving yourself what you used to pour into someone else. Taking all that love, attention, and tenderness and pouring it right back into you! I have been channeling that raw, potent, orgasmic energy directly into my business, my creativity, and my lifestyle brand. When you stop giving away your life force to people who don’t deserve it, you suddenly have a surplus of magic to build your own empire.

Giving up traditional dating wasn’t a sentence. It was a sanctuary. I needed a break to figure out who I am when I’m not performing, transforming, or trying to be picked like a draft choice in the NFL. Because being chosen was the whole goal for as long as I can remember. And I had to ask myself: who taught me that?

Disney told us the prince was coming to save us, though Sleeping Beauty was literally unconscious and Cinderella’s whole fate rested on a glass slipper, so the bar was in HELL. And don't even get me started on Princess Fiona over at DreamWorks. She literally wasted her entire youth locked in a burning volcano, suppressing her appetite and her power, all to fit the "perfect princess" script. And for what? The man who finally showed up didn't even like her! He was just doing a transactional job to get some property back. She had to give up the whole castle fantasy and embrace her inner ogre just to actually be free. Yet, we were conditioned to think being picked was the ultimate goal, the prize. We had to be acceptable to the male gaze just to feel like we had worth. Now? I love living for the male glare.

And our value systems were rigged from the very beginning. Society obsesses over “virginity” like it’s sacred, but historically it was straight-up property law. A woman’s virginity belonged to her father and was sold to her husband to guarantee paternity and the transfer of wealth. We’ve been conditioned for centuries to treat our bodies like commodities. Which is wild, because men treat their own bodies like a public park and expect us to stay gated.

Growing up in a Christian environment, that ancient property law was just repackaged as holy doctrine. I was taught to feel like something was fundamentally wrong with me for enjoying sex, or for even having a desire. Suppress your fire. Lock it down. Treat your body like a fragile secret. But then you step outside the church doors and secular culture tells you the exact opposite: be the biggest, baddest freak on the planet, but only behind closed doors, completely curated for a man’s satisfaction. The church says you’re a sinner for wanting it. The world says you’re a failure if you don’t perform it perfectly. That’s the loop we were handed and almost nobody talked about it.

As a Black woman, there’s another layer nobody talks about either: the ride-or-die myth. We are taught that suffering proves love, that loyalty means endurance. And the world at large takes note of what is permitted within our own communities. When we are not protected and valued at home, society follows suit. I spent too many years believing that. I don’t anymore.

Faced with all that noise. All that societal B.S. packaged up in a neat little bow, I just played the part. For decades, the way I expressed my sexuality was a curated dance so a man would think, oh yeah, she’s the one. I grew up on Lil’ Kim. I watched Sex and the City and resonated with Samantha most, but still thought I was supposed to chase like Carrie or suffer quietly like Charlotte. And Miranda, we were supposed to believe she should be grateful for Steve? The man started out as a literal hobosexual with good pipe. He was a broke bartender living in a tragic apartment, and she was a corporate lawyer buying him suits. I cannot.

Looking back, I realize there were examples of autonomous women everywhere; we were just conditioned to think they were the villains. Let’s go back to Disney for a second, because honestly, I align with almost every villain now. Ursula knew Ariel was being foolish trading her voice and her entire identity for a man she couldn’t even talk to. And Cruella de Vil dropped a whole truth bomb:

The only women with real wit, ambition, and an unbothered attitude were packaged as the bad guys. We were taught to fear the very traits that would have actually saved us.

And it wasn’t just romantic partners. So many male “friendships” were just men playing a long game, waiting. They weren’t helping you move your couch out of kindness. They wanted a reward. And the wild thing is, the second you step into your power and stop performing, they actually respect you more. Like they’re relieved you finally see it. It was never about you not being enough. It was about you not knowing the power you held.

There was a woman named Miss Eva in my life. She has since transitioned and I think about her often. She wasn’t what society would consider conventionally beautiful, however, I thought she was gorgeous. She was dark-skinned, her style was impeccable, and she had this amazing raspy voice. I swear she would float in her heels. Her energy was undeniable. She was magnetic. Men fell at her feet. The women I worked with watched and just said, “I don’t get it.”

Miss Eva would look at me and say: “Baby, I’m the prize.”

I genuinely don’t know why it took me until my 40s to let that land. But here I am.

About ten years ago, I went to see the comedian Luenell, and she said something that has stayed with me ever since: “Y’all, I’m tired of having sex. If I never have sex again, it would be too soon.” I thought she just meant she was over the physical interaction. But sitting here now, three years into my own celibacy, I completely get it. She wasn’t tired of sex. She was tired of the drain. She was tired of handing over her energy, her softness, her time, and her peace.

This is also why we need a real overhaul of how we teach young people about sex. Can we please ditch the fear-based abstinence theory? Let’s have actual conversations about bodily autonomy, real consent, and the difference between performing desire and actually feeling it. We are leaving young girls to figure out their safety through trial, error, and trauma.

Look, I know this is unfiltered. Some of you will think I was foolish. That’s okay. This is just me being honest. (And hi Mom! I’m sorry. Society didn’t leave room for this conversation. But here we are.)

I’m not saying never again. My retirement might just be a very long sabbatical. But the requirements for re-entry are completely different now. The version of me who abandoned herself to keep a man comfortable? She’s gone.

Who would’ve thought the break I was taking would bring all this clarity? This joy. I am genuinely enjoying getting to know me. The forty-something, perimenopausal gal with the Schiaparelli heels and the fully charged vibrator.

I am grateful for the Miss Evas of the world who planted the seed early. It took me forever to grow it. But some lessons you just can’t rush; you can only live your way to them.

Baltimore and Beyond!

Baltimore

I finally checked out Carpet Cafe by Good Neighbor.

It’s super cute inside, it super cute for Baltimore. I enjoyed a Wight Tea sparkling Americano and a cookie by Amanda with Crust by Mac.

Beyond

Kasia and ventured up to York, Pa to do some thrifting. We scored some amazing finds at great prices! I will be posting that video soon!

Let me save us both some time: I did not go to Machu Picchu. If that’s a dealbreaker, no hard feelings, close this tab and go find your guide. But if you want to know what one week in Lima actually looks and feels like, pull up a chair. I’ve saved all the places I visited saved here.

I took my daughter Kasia for her birthday. No psychedelics either. Did y’all know possession is technically decriminalized there and you can pick up a couple grams for under two dollars? I looked that information dead in the face and kept walking. I did not survive the 90s to fold in Lima for a two-dollar high.

But here’s the thing. Even without any of that, something rewired. My aunt saw me when I got back and said “Niece, how does it look like you aged 10 years backwards?”

I left something there. I’m still figuring out what.

Getting There

I flew Copa Airlines for the first time and will absolutely fly them again. They hub through Panama City, and here’s what nobody puts in the blog posts: Copa has an official Stopover program that lets you stay in Panama for up to 7 days without adding a single cent to your airfare. Two countries, one flight. I filed that away for next time.

We flew overnight from BWI and landed in Lima around noon with the whole first day ahead of us. Round trip: $328.Yes, really.

The airport part nobody tells you: After baggage claim, everything, including your personal bag, goes through one more X-ray. When those doors open into arrivals, you will be swarmed. Say a firm “No, gracias” and keep moving. Exit near Door 3, cross the walkway to Parking Lot E2. That’s the Uber Zone. Ride to Barranco ran about $18.

Download Uber and DiDi before you land. Average rides around the city were under $5. Do not hail street taxis. Lock the price before you move, and wear your seatbelt Lima traffic is completely insane. This not a suggestion situation.

What to Expect From the Weather

You are going to pack for tropical heat and Lima is going to laugh at you. Lima sits near the Humboldt Current, creating garúa, a heavy coastal fog that turns skies flat gray and makes a humid 65°F day feel genuinely chilly.

• Summer (Dec–Mar): Warm, clear, sunny, the postcard version.

• Shoulder (Apr–May): Transition months, still mild, a mix of sun and cloud, less crowded, and honestly a sweet spot. We went in April and loved it.

• Winter (Jun–Sep): Gray and humid. The clouds usually break by afternoon.

• Packing: Light layers (essential for evening ocean mist), comfortable walking shoes, sunscreen, and a refillable water bottle (never drink the tap water).

Also: Peruvians dress well. This is not a flip-flops situation. Match the city’s energy.

Where to Stay: Barranco (With a caveat later)

Barranco is the arts and bohemian district, colorful, walkable, full of independent coffee shops, street food, local shopping, and a neighborhood pulse that feels genuinely alive. We stayed in a gorgeous apartment hosted by Carolina for $382 for the full week. Rooftop pool. Morning coffee before the city woke up. That part alone was worth the flight. The listing is here.

Light sleeper note: our place was on a noisy street. It was lively from 7 AM to 11 PM. Choose a quieter side street if you need silence to function.

The Week

The Daily Blueprint

Day 1 — Land, Groceries & Low-Key Pizza Shake off the travel. Check in, then head to Metro Barranco or Flora & Fauna Healthy Market to stock up, grab fresh lucuma, cherimoya and water for the fridge. Take a slow introductory walk, stop for a specialty coffee at Flora Caffè or Ciclos Café, and end the night at Vecinos for incredible low-key local pizza.

Day 2 — Miraflores, Cats & The Thrift Hunt Grab a Pan con Chicharrón, crispy pork belly, sweet potato, pickled onions, at La Lucha Sanguchería right by the park, and wash it down with a deep-red Chicha Morada. Start at Parque Kennedy to pet the hundreds of community cats. If they are open grab some Picarones from Picarones Mary. Spend the afternoon hitting Miraflores thrift spots like Amado, Second Chance Ani and Get Me Thrift ( my fave) for quality vintage. For lunch, slide to Al Toke Pérez for that famous $6 street-style seafood fried rice and or ceviche. Wind down with a stroll through the Santa Cruz corridor’s design boutiques and finish at Olivia y Coque for the legendary 75% Amazonian cacao chocolate cake. This pocket of the city felt exceptionally safe and welcoming. I would definitely consider staying here next visit.

Day 3 — Ancient Pyramids & Dinner with a View Explore Huaca Pucllana, the pre-Inca clay pyramid sitting in the middle of modern Miraflores ($4). Don’t bother changing, dust off your shoes and walk straight into Huaca Pucllana Restaurant on-site. Eating traditional food with a direct view of a 1,500-year-old pyramid is a so freaking cool. Head back to Barranco for a low-key evening on the artsy streets.

Day 4 — Coast & Desert Day Trip Book a full-day guided tour through GetYourGuide. Speedboat to the Ballestas Islands to see sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and marine birds on dramatic rock formations. Then on to Huacachina Oasis, a natural lagoon ringed by towering desert dunes. Dune buggies. Sandboarding. The scale of the desert will make you feel appropriately small.

Day 5 — The Coastal Walk, La Mar & A Cliffside Sunset Grab breakfast from Cafe Ancestral, if the fog has lifted, you will have a gorgeous view of the water. Walk the historic Bajada de los Baños stone path down to the Pacific. On the way back up, stop at Demo for their Hibiscus Cold Brew, floral, sharp, and perfect after a coastal walk. Then head to La Mar Cevichería for lunch, an absolute Lima institution. Order the classic ceviche and knife-sharp tiraditos. Lunch-only, no reservations, so arrive hungry and ready to wait a little. Worth every minute. There is an amazing coffee spot right next to it Coffee time. Afterward, follow the cliffs to Parque del Amor for mosaic walls and sweeping ocean views, then walk into Larcomar to shop to watch the sun go down over the water from a cliffside cafe. Then back to your rooftop pool.

Day 6 — Souvenirs, Chinatown Lunch & The Creole Feast Spend the morning hunting textiles, alpaca scarves, and silver at Barranco’s artisan markets. If you spot street vendors grilling anticuchos (beef hearts) over open coals, stop immediately, I hear that smoky sidewalk flavor is unmatched. Then Uber to El Barrio Chino to shop and enjoy a fusion lunch at Chifa Unión, where Cantonese wok technique met native Peruvian ingredients and birthed Lomo Saltado. Freshen up, catch golden hour on the Bridge of Sighs, and end the night with a full Creole feast at Panchita, Aji de Gallina, slow-cooked adobo, all of it. You didn’t come this far to be timid.

Day 7 — Pre-Columbian Art, A Local Send-Off & Departure Morning at The Larco Museum: 5,000 years of pre-Columbian art inside an 18th-century mansion built over a 7th-century pyramid ($13). Head back to Barranco for a slow, unhurried lunch at Canta Rana, a neighborhood institution, cash only, no-frills, and ceviche that hits exactly right. No famous-spot energy, no wait game, just good food in the neighborhood that loved on you all week. Pack easy, head to the airport full and unbothered.

The Ones That Got Away: Add the Basílica and Convent of San Francisco for its famous catacombs if you have extra time. Kasia and I skipped it, the ancestors said absolutely not, but it looks insanely cool.

Eat This

Budget $250/person for the week and you will never look at a price tag. That number sounds impossible until you’re sitting in front of a $6 plate that makes you want to cry a little.

• Al Toke Perez — Japanese-Peruvian fusion. The seafood fried rice. Get it.

• Panchita — Gastón Acurio’s love letter to Peruvian street food. Best anticuchos de corazón (flame-grilled beef heart) in the city. Do not let “beef heart” scare you. You didn’t come this far to be timid.

• La Mar Cevichería — The seafood institution. Lunch only. No reservations. Show up early or show up waiting.

• Demo (Barranco) — Elite daily bakery from the Mérito team. Pour-over coffee, guayaba and goat cheese pastry. Take your time here.

• Vecino - A small neighborhood pizza spot, this was the first place we visited so damn good!

• Oliva y Coque — The cacao cake. Already told you.

Skip Flama Pizza. Globally top-rated. I was not impressed. Some hills I will die on.

Know Where You’re Standing

Before you just walk through Barranco, know what you’re walking through.

This neighborhood has been a center of Afro-Peruvian music and culture for generations. The cajón percussion you’ll hear after dark, the festejo and landó rhythms, all of it traces directly back to African descendants who survived slavery on this coast. The peñas, traditional venues that are part concert hall, part dinner theater, part dance club, were born here. Peña del Carajo and De Rompe y Raja are two of the best still carrying that tradition forward. Go.

A note for my Black women travelers specifically, because I looked for this section before I went and it didn’t exist:

In Lima, Kasia and I found that people largely assumed we were Peruvian. Not tourists. Just part of the fabric of the city. That was quietly, unexpectedly profound. Lima has seen Black people for centuries, because it has had Black people for centuries. We got some stares (that’s just part of traveling while Black) but nothing aggressive, nothing threatening. Mostly warmth. Genuine warmth. Show up willing to try in Spanish and the city will meet you more than halfway.

The Whole Week, What It Cost

Round-trip flight (Copa from BWI) $328,Apartment in Barranco (split)$19, Food (eating like actual royalty)$250, Ubers & transport $50, Activities, tours, entry fees$100 Total~$919

Final Thoughts

On the flight home, Kasia got quiet for a while and then said:

I knew exactly what she meant.

You don’t need the ayahuasca. You don’t need Machu Picchu on the first trip. You just need to show up, stay curious, tip generously, and let Peru do what Peru does.

It will handle the rest. 🤎