Don’t worry, this piece does not contain spoilers.

You Can See Everything is reflective of the times to a satirical extent, which I only realized because portions of it feel as though they could be seamlessly reimagined as an episode of South Park. So much of its genius lies in its ability to tow the line between psychological horror-drama and self-aware absurdist comedy without ever actually changing its narrative tone. It demands empathy and moral flexibility, and in the same breath declares everyone involved both unreliable and inherently unknowable. In the process of its search for truth, it renders any shared reality obsolete.

YCSE’s pervasive dissonance is reinforced by everything from the subjects’ uncanny interactions and equivocal motivations to the score, visual style, and meta-layered format. It is the cinematic embodiment of liminality, and I think it’s having such a profound effect on audiences in part because we identify with this sense of being neither here nor there. In many ways, this is simply the paradox of the human condition. But more than that, we are living through sociopolitical horrors unique to this liminal moment in history, and the character investigation of Elizabeth Holmes illustrates our inability to grapple with them in any meaningful way.

The Jungian concept of liminality refers to the ambiguous and unsettling psychological state of being halfway between identities or realities. It requires a “breakdown of the persona”1—when normal social masks and ego structures crack or collapse, we enter a threshold state wherein we are forced to withdraw from everyday socialization. Jung suggests that enduring this discomfort could allow someone to integrate contradictory feelings, which is precisely what YCSE asks us to do.

There’s this almost otherworldly quality to the film, which seems to have been palpable during filming and obviously translates to the screen. I keep thinking about the way Nathan and Lance have since reflected on their time at the San Diego beach house, claiming they still haven’t been able to fully process or make sense of what happened there. Whereas Jung ostensibly used the deconstruction of conventional social functions to encourage self-realization, I have to wonder if this technique has sinister implications in the hands of someone like Fielder or Holmes, neither of whom are known to use their powers (at least solely) for good. But regardless of whether their rejections of social norms are intrinsic or performed, both Elizabeth and Nathan utilize, even weaponize, liminality to manipulate the audience and each other throughout the film. (There’s also the additional layer of the first half of the movie being quite literally liminal, unfolding in the time period between Holmes’s life as a free woman and the next 11 years of her life in prison. Classic threshold. But that’s another conversation.)

While I was floored by YCSE, I was not surprised that Fielder was capable of playing such a crucial role in it. No one remotely familiar with any of his projects should be. His work quite literally revolves around ethical ambiguity, so when I see people asking why Billy and Elizabeth would have him document their story, I wonder if that doesn’t answer the question. What better person to humanize a fraud than the man whose entire career is predicated on blurring the lines between reality and fiction?

It’s strange, often borderline disturbing, to watch Nathan and Elizabeth interact. His questions, always somewhere between candid and abrasive, seem to scare Holmes in a way that makes her seem more pitiful than defensive, and it does not take long to realize you are sympathizing with this hollowed out version of her. It is absolutely easier to believe Elizabeth when she appears helpless and preyed upon, and her purported inability to understand basic communication is, in my opinion, an intentional charade designed to disarm and disorient her accusers. And it works because you only need to see the egg scene, let alone learn of her trauma history, to end up asking yourself if you can ethically blame this obvious victim of abuse. Here is a woman staring at you so hauntingly wide-eyed, you start to realize she will never blink twice. But of course that must be what she wants you to think. Right?

It’s impossible to be sure. Understanding that Elizabeth and Nathan are both master manipulators, the real difference becomes what they stand to gain in the process. To stay Jung-y with it, I think it’s interesting to consider “the trickster” here: a universal archetype of the collective unconscious that uses deception, humor, and boundary-crossing to disrupt systems and expose uncomfortable truths. There is no one doing trickster like Nathan Fielder is doing trickster, of which you know for sure about halfway through literally any episode of Nathan For You.

Trickster figures have appeared since ancient times in the folklore of many cultures, and rather than being purely good or purely evil, they represent our primal human instincts outside the realm of morality. They are inextricable from liminality because they’re defined by it—shape-shifters who exist between the sacred and the profane, or in Fielder’s case, between reality and scripted performance.

But Nathan knows he lives there, and so does the audience, so it’s easier to root for him as he attempts to discern if Holmes does too. For me, the real drama of the film defies Theranos entirely and settles on the question of perceived identity and its consequences: What happens if Elizabeth—due to trauma or cowardice or Billy’s narcissism or some secret fourth thing—is, in fact, performing, but has so thoroughly convinced herself of this overriding narrative that she’s no longer aware of it? And when it comes down to it, is that any different than the truth?

This theme is so central to the film that it literally begins and ends with a quote from a New York Times article in which Elizabeth dismisses the idea that Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of her in The Dropout was actually her. “They’re not playing me,” she says. “They’re playing a character I created.” Of course, she later disputes this, claiming she was misquoted and had actually said, “character they created.”

But by the end of the film, it doesn’t seem to matter. The final frontier for the pathological liar, after all, is the self—if Elizabeth’s confidence in her own truthfulness is so authentic she could hypothetically pass a polygraph test, even Nathan’s most confrontational trickster tactics will fall flat.

From mythology it is the character of the Trickster “…a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals”, whom Jung thought could save us from ‘hubris’ and free the conscious mind from its fascination with evil.2

I think we trust Nathan’s intentions because he’s able to justify his actions with his determination to “know the truth.” If both him and Holmes are manipulators, this is ultimately what sets them apart and requires us to weigh the “amoral” qualities of the trickster against the “immoral” qualities of the convicted felon. Elizabeth can never be a trickster because the intention of her deceit is to conceal rather than to expose. But is that really so unforgivable by comparison?

In our post-truth liminal reality, in which parasociality exacerbates the fusion of person and persona, and any attempts at radical understanding are fraught with paranoia, could it really be that the only guard against being tricked is to become the trickster yourself?

this guide is for epicurean chillers

I was skeptical about Game of Thrones until my ex (with whom I used to play Dungeons and Dragons) forced me to watch an episode with him. I became so obsessed with the complex lore of the Seven Kingdoms that I would stay up hours past my bedtime reading and critiquing fan theories on Reddit. But that was seven years ago and we all know what happened after Season 6. So that’s not why I went to Dubrovnik. But I do think it’s why a lot of people go to Dubrovnik, or at least it seemed that way given all the walking tours and themed gift shops and the line of people waiting to film TikTok reenactments of Cersei’s shame walk on the Jesuit Stairs.

That’s not the kind of traveling I’m interested in. But because this is a love account, I will refrain from commenting further on that sort of behavior.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I am interested in:

• eating local food, with an emphasis on regional specialties

• drinking local wine

• enjoying local café culture (having multiple coffees per day)

• reading

• finding a scenic spot to people watch

• sunbathing and swimming

• exploring both aimlessly and intentionally (with or without my headphones on)

• admiring art in museums and elsewhere

• experiencing local culture and history

• being outside, especially in nature

If you are also interested in these things, this is probably the itinerary for you. I couldn’t figure out how to make a “skip to the recipe” button, but you can find a list of all mentioned points of interest at the end of this guide.

day one

city walls + swim + mountaintop sunset

morning: walk the city walls

You’re going to have to walk the City Walls. It is the most Dubrovnik thing you can do in Dubrovnik, which is why you should get up there as early as possible. Personally, it stresses me out when I’m on a narrow, two-way walkway and there are too many people stopping abruptly to take photos, peer out at distant points of interest, herd their children, etc. to maintain a steady and organized flow of traffic. So avoid both overstimulation and excessive heat by arriving as close to 8 a.m. as you can manage.

There are two entrance points to the walls, which surround the entire Old Town. We started at this one. A single adult ticket costs €40, which is certainly expensive but I believe is how the city keeps volume manageable. I’m annoyed I didn’t find out about this until later, but I’d recommend getting a three-day Dubrovnik Pass for €50, which includes access to some other notable sights in town.

Walking the walls is the perfect way to get acquainted with the layout and energy of the city. You get sweeping views of the sparkling Adriatic, the West Harbor, and the tiered terracotta roofs and vine-covered terraces of the city itself. I felt like a medieval princess surveying her kingdom. The full perimeter loop (1.2 miles) took us about 2 hours, with reasonable stops to take photos, drink lemon Radlers at Caffe on the Wall, and watch grown men chicken out on the tallest rock at Buza Bar.

afternoon: byrek & swim

By the time you finish the loop, you will have watched a lot of people jump into the clear blue sea while sweating profusely 82 feet above them. You will be jealous of them. You will also be hungry! But fear not.

On the way to Dubrovnik City Beach, stop at Holy Burek for a handheld snack you can eat in 4 huge bites while you walk the rest of the way there. This is kind of a TikTok-y place, but their burek was better than any of the ones I had from other bakeries in the Old Town. It will do beautifully for what we’re after today.

Speaking of TikTok, if you’ve done any Dubrovnik research, you know of Buza Bar. I was curious about it after seeing it both online and from atop the City Walls. If you’re an I-need-to-jump-off-rocks sort of person, or are dying to listen to some 2010s American EDM-pop, this is absolutely a place you should go. But since I am not that sort of person, and when we got there it was both very crowded and dominated aggressively by the early 20s hostel scene, we pivoted to City Beach instead.

City Beach was more my speed. There’s decent music (unobjectionable volume), an affordable bar with limited options, beachgoers of all ages (but still plenty of young, hot people!), easy water access, and ample space to spread out on the rocks. Keep in mind that they are still allowed to call it a beach even though it is just rocks and concrete and no sand. I honestly could have spent more time here, but we had sunset plans to become presentable for.

evening: sunset & dinner

My mom had been to Dubrovnik once before and was hellbent on taking me to Dadiro Viera for sunset. There was a brief moment I considered contesting (I was just having so much fun at the beach!), but I’m glad I kept my wits about me. My mother is not to be distrusted when it comes to local must-dos and in our years of traveling together has always exemplified the delicate balance between spontaneity and well-researched planning. She is the reason I feel qualified to make this itinerary.

Anyway, it’s a short walk from the Buza Gate to the Cable Car station. Take the cable car to the top (a round trip ticket is €30) and follow the path to the left past the parking lot until it opens up to the view you came for. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time to get up there, get settled, and bask in the leisurely atmosphere. Bring beers, bring snacks, bring your gigantic 7-foot selfie stick. A fun anecdote is that I randomly got my period about 10 minutes before the actual sunset, so I had to run back to the station in my platform sandals with blood dripping down my leg.

We went straight from sunset to dinner, which felt very vacation. I’m bad at making reservations in advance because I usually don’t know what I’ll be up to slash in the mood for until the day of, but luckily I am usually lucky and was able to make a same-day reservation for 2 at Art Restaurant Renaissance. Their outdoor seating is an absolutely enchanting little courtyard tucked inside a warmly lit alleyway. We ordered the šporki makaruli (dirty macaroni) and black truffle pasta and both were fantastic—there was even a live pianist who played a haunting ballad version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” I drank one glass of a local stainless steel Chardonnay, the name of which I can’t remember, and one glass of herbal, jammy Plavac Mali. My only complaint is that our waiter was very sexy and tricked me into tipping him more by putting his giant gorgeous hand on mine while I was paying.

day two

slow morning + beach hopping + wine tasting

morning: coffee and a sit

I was sad when my mom went home to Florida on the morning of my second day, but relieved to be staying since at that point the mere idea of the airport conjured an ancient sort of dread within me. I’d been in Albania and Montenegro for the past week and a half and my Balkan fairytale was still in phase one of foundational world building.

After sprinting through the Old Town at dawn to deliver my mother the wet swimsuit she forgot in the bathroom, the endorphins afforded by this unplanned HIIT workout gifted me the gusto to get dressed and on with my day.

Start your morning at Cogito Coffee Shop. There will be a line—the girlies know about this spot because it’s one of the only places, if not the only place, in town to get an iced latte. Find a seat in their courtyard garden and enjoy your coffee with a book. (I had just started my favorite read of the year so far: Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann.) It’s quiet and shady and feels slightly secluded from the more touristy areas of town. For ten minutes I was transfixed by a local gentleman pulling his clothesline laundry in through his window.

I remember feeling so excited to have three more days with Dubrovnik—the city felt like a sentient being with whom I was hanging out. Cortado in hand, I texted my bestie group chat that I was feeling especially charmed and Bliss suggested that this affinity could have something to do with my Polish ancestors having vacationed there. It’s so fun to have friends who believe in magic!

On your way out, stop into the small but thoughtfully curated REGO Gift Shop. I’d been manifesting a tote bag and found a perfect one designed by a local artist.

afternoon: danče beach + šulić beach

I know what wellness people say about coffee before breakfast but I really don’t care about any of that. I prefer to enjoy a slow and romantic morning centered exclusively around caffeine, before moving on to the issue of sustenance.

Of course, it’s very important to have a sandwich at the beach, which is another explanation for the order of operations here. When you’ve finished with your coffee and literature, stop at Paninaro Sandwich Bar and pick up a focaccia panini to go. Then put your headphones in and enjoy the 20-minute walk to Danče Beach.

All of Dubrovnik’s beaches are unique and I do not regret experiencing as many as I did. I enjoyed Danče’s more serene local feel, though I sat myself too close to a trio of American students having a vulnerable conversation about cirrhosis, life in Kentucky, and their toxic parent-child dynamics. This made it difficult to avoid eavesdropping, though I was fully intent on reading my book.

Around noon, I grabbed my bags from La Vita e Bella, where my mom and I stayed the night before, and checked into Hostel Angelina. I had already booked a multi-bed dorm, but I was so hot and overstimulated when I arrived that I asked if they had any private rooms available. The Argentinian teenager at the desk said yes, they did just have one open up, but it’d be a few hours before it was ready. This was no problem considering I was planning on returning to the beach anyway.

Šulić Beach was my favorite Dubrovnik beach, tucked inside a rocky cove with pristinely calm and clear water ideal for swimming. It’s lively but not chaotic—the combined commotion of adult chatter and the jumping and splashing around of children provided the perfect pink noise backdrop for my reading. By this point I was very invested in Lives of the Saints.

There are small bars at both Šulić and Danče, and I bought a sparkling water at each. My sister and I agree, however, that there is something off about Balkan sparkling water.

evening: lowkey dinner + meander around the old port + wine tasting at d’vino

Closed mouths don’t get fed. I was grateful to my sweaty and desperate early afternoon self for inquiring about the private room, because it was so lived-in and airy and effortlessly romantic that it could have been the set of an indie film. It was just one of those divine twists of fate—when I got back to the hostel around 3, the manager was behind the desk, and he gave me a significant and unexplained discount that I could only assume would reflect the poor quality of the room. But au contraire. It had air conditioning and marble side tables. The shower had hot water, the sheets had poppies on them, and a big window opened wide to a view of the happening courtyard below.

Reserve the late afternoon for lying around. On your way home from Šulić Beach, grab a glass-and-a-half bottle of wine at any market you happen to pass. Shower, find a dramatic vessel to drink out of, and smoke a skinny cigarette out the window if that feels like something that would be fun for you. It felt like something that would be fun for me.

I had a bit of a panic dinner at Pizzeria Oliva, which is what happens when I don’t decide where I want to eat before I leave the room. I generally care too much about having exactly what I want to embody this kind of spontaneity, even though I love the idea of choosing a restaurant based on vibes and not a combination of obsessive social media research and Google review archaeology.

I ordered the “Vegetariana” pizza with Adriatic anchovies, and it was good the way most pizza in Europe is good. My glass of Miljas rosé, however, was crisp and dry and delicate enough to make my haphazard decision making feel less regrettable.

After dinner, find your way down to the Old Port and take in the hum of the city as it transitions from sunset into dusk into blue hour. I love the energy of a port or a harbor, especially a medieval one. They embody the liminal spirit of travel—the infinite possibility provided by a means of leaving or arriving.

Dubrovnik comes alive at night in a way that made me feel destined for unlikely cinematic miracles. As if by magic, in the few hours I was lounging in my rom com room, each narrow cobblestone street had transformed into one long and boisterous great hall, crowded with candlelit tables covered with fresh bread and pasta and steaming bowls of shellfish. It was impossible to walk in a straight line for longer than a few steps, navigating the maze of the city while maneuvering between evening revelers gorged on the same diet of strong wine and storybook surroundings.

What’s interesting about Dubrovnik is that it’s not actually a maze at all, but a masterplanned fishbone grid designed to optimize sea-breeze ventilation. It was a clever trick, I thought, to make visitors believe in a labyrinth that didn’t exist.

In the end, though, all wanderings lead to the wine bar. I recommend D’Vino. They are extremely kind and knowledgeable and will not judge you for being a twenty-something spending her evening alone with a book and a wine flight. I learned so much about Croatian wine and tried some really interesting varieties I did not see elsewhere. You will know it’s time to go home when you find yourself smiling at nothing and the words start moving around on the page.

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day three

elaphiti islands boat tour + nice dinner

morning & afternoon: elaphiti islands boat tour

By day three you will be familiar with most of the Old Town and ready for a little change of scenery. I’m not usually a guided tour kind of girl, but I can’t say enough about the Elaphiti Islands Cruise via Dubrovnik Islands Tours. (None of this is sponsored, unfortunately!) For €59, you get to see Koločep, Šipan, and Lopud, plus lunch, unlimited wine service, and a brief historical background on each of the islands (no distasteful jokes or puns). The tour takes about 8 hours, approximately 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You get to spend a little more than an hour on the first two islands and three on Lopud—all of your time once arrived is your own to eat, explore, swim, cry, etc.

Thank God I didn’t wake up hungover. Because I am almost thirty I can no longer leave the house without electrolytes on hand, and suggest you take the same precautions lest you arrive dehydrated to your open-bar boat tour. But hungover or not, the meeting point felt just barely too far to walk in sandals, so I grabbed an $8 Uber and stopped on my way out of Old Town for an espresso and a smoothie at GreenGo.

I actually cannot stress enough how much fun I had on these islands, and on the boat for that matter. Occasionally I would just laugh out loud to no one because of how outlandishly beautiful it all was, how happy and free and grateful I felt to be experiencing such a pure and vibrant and largely untouched corner of the Mediterranean.

Plenty more adjectives where that came from, by the way. A few hot tips:

• On Koločep, walk up to Lovers Lookout for a panoramic view of the island and its surrounding turquoise waters.

• Buy olive oil on Šipan, but not from the first shop you see when you get off the boat. There are locals selling their own at little tables all over the island, and you should give them your money directly. Šipan has the highest concentration of olive trees relative to its size in the world, and I bought two tiny bottles of it I have a hard time using for fear I will run out. Scarcity mindset or whatever. I also bought some rakija infused with carob, or Šipanski rogač, a prized indigenous variety grown only on the island and known locally as the “emperor of carobs.” If I could have fit 1,000 bottles of that sensuous elixir in my suitcase, trust and believe I would have.

• When you get to Lopud, take the forested path to Beach Sunj on the far side of the island. I have a vivid memory of scurrying wine drunk through the oak trees, giggling maniacally and risking severe ankle twistage in my strappy sandals. I had no idea that these sandals, along with one of my nails, would be irreparably broken three hours later when I fell off the ladder on the boat.

evening: dinner at taj mahal + have a stroll

After Ubering from the dock to the Pile Gate and then walking back to the hostel with one shoe, a badly bruised forearm and ego, and the migraine that inevitably follows 8 hours worth of white wine in the sun, a nap was necessary. These particular details may not apply to your experience, but I imagine you’ll still probably want a shower and a few hours of rot time before dinner.

Once recovered, walk just a few minutes from almost anywhere in Old Town to get to Taj Mahal, a Michelin Guide restaurant serving spectacular Bosnian food in an intimate space so warm and eclectically decorated that it felt like being invited to dinner at somebody’s home. From their website:

“Bosnian food is, just like the country itself, a mix of inter-knitted cultures and flavors, with a clear emphasis on fresh herbs, vegetables, and meat, combined in perfect proportions.”

I was absolutely blown away by everything I put in my mouth. I felt a tad limited by my single diner status, so congratulations if you’re with a bunch of people and can order a bunch of stuff to share. Here’s what I ordered:

• šopska

• 5 piece ćevapi

• side of ajvar

• baclava and prunes

• Bosnian coffee

I felt so genuinely taken care of during this meal. It’s a feat on their part that I went out to eat alone and not once felt alone at all.

After dinner, digest with a nighttime stroll around the Old Town. I happened to be there during the World Cup, so there was lots of spirited activity to observe.

day four

lokrum day trip + swim + do the thing you haven’t done yet

morning: market stop + lokrum island

When I woke up on my last day in Croatia, I felt like an addict with an island problem. I was still spellbound by all the olive groves and sandy beaches and tiny, tranquil villages and I knew I needed another day somewhere only a ferry could take me. I decided on Lokrum, the closest island to Dubrovnik, known for its free-roaming peacocks, exotic botanical gardens, and its 11th-century Benedictine monastery.

The first ferry to Lokrum leaves from the Old Port at 9 a.m., and you can buy a round trip ticket online for €30.

On your way down to the port, stop at Gunduliceva Poljana Market in Gundulic Square for some seasonal fruit to snack on during your journey.

When I arrived it was 9:30 and I seemed to be the only one on the island without wings. I’d never thought much about them but peacocks have a twitchy sort of impishness to them that I found strange and unsettling. Already sweating, I made my way through the maze of the monastery and its gardens, a sense of eerie unearthliness building around me as I wandered deeper into the compound. Everything seemed sentient, Ghibli style, as if any stone pillar could at any point sprout arms and scoop me up. Even the light was alive, dancing through and around the palms and pines. Everywhere, it was empty. In some places I felt such mystical enchantment, like in the gardens and on the path through the oak forest along the coast. But Fort Royal on the north side of the island filled me with such dread and darkness that I could barely step inside it.

The whole experience was so visceral and odd that I Googled the island when I got back to town. It turns out that in 1798, the monks were ordered by Napoleon and the French army to leave their 800-year-old paradise, so they donned black hoods and circled the island three times with upside down candles, cursing any future inhabitants of the island who would use it for their own pleasure. Every single private owner who claimed Lokrum after the monks’ banishment suffered madness or violent death. Drownings, stabbings, assassinations, murder-suicides. It was as though the land seemed to know it, and enjoyed taunting me with its pristine invulnerability.

But don’t let my spooky tale scare you off. It was one of my favorite experiences of the entire trip.

Depending on what you choose to do there, you should be able to see most of the island in a few hours. I took the ferry back around 1 p.m. and felt satisfied, but if I didn’t have plans to swim later, I definitely would have stayed longer and done that.

Some points of interest you should be sure to hit:

• Botanical Gardens

• The centuries-old olive grove

• Plaže Lokrum. I ate half a bag of cherries here and the other half on…

• the panoramic bench. Worth the steep walk up!

• This unobstructed viewpoint. It was actually super sick to see the city from this angle.

• Dead Sea

• Benedictine Monastery of St. Mary. Very ancient and surreal. Pretty sure I touched a herm that gave me magic powers.

afternoon: focaccia sandwich + caffe bar libertina + banje beach

All that paranormal activity is sure to make you hungry! As soon as you get off the ferry, book it to Panini Bar Franco Romano, which I thought was better than Paninaro Sandwich Bar from the other day for multiple reasons including focaccia quality and general creativity. I got the “Perfetto” and brought it back to my room, where I added some leftover cherry tomatoes I bought from a lady on Lopud who said she’d just picked them from her garden that morning. Perfect, indeed.

Banje is the final box to tick on our list of unmissable Dubrovnik beaches, about a 10-15 minute walk from Old Town. On your way out, stop at local hangout Caffe Bar Libertina for a coffee or a pre-swim beer. Please note that it is only open until 2 p.m. This is by far the most authentic Dubrovnik establishment I set foot in, and the owner is, as one Google reviewer so aptly put it, “very kind to those who are kind to him.” He did scoff at me when I asked for a cappuccino at 1:30, but in a sarcastic sort of way that implied that, in his eyes, my annoying request did not make me an irredeemable character. The place is like a wood-paneled time capsule, and I wish I’d found it earlier if only to become friends with that hilarious old man.

evening: patio aperitivo + woman up and try black risotto + gelato

You will be parched on the way back from the beach and should stop at the market for a Pelin spritz. This was another thing I was peeved to have discovered so late in my trip as an amaro girl who is very interested in trying whatever botanical concoctions are native to an area. In Croatia, it’s Pelinkovac, an herbal liqueur derived from wormwood and the main ingredient in the canned Pelin spritz I bought on a whim and quickly became obsessed with.

I spent the late afternoon scouring various other markets for the ingredients to make my own (Pelinkovac + lemon + sparkling water), then read my new book (Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen—there’s a new film adaptation coming this fall!) on the hostel patio until I couldn’t procrastinate dinner any longer.

I rarely use “procrastinate” and “dinner” in the same sentence, but I was scared to try black risotto. I hate when fish is fishy and when I lived in Utah there were multiple instances in which I had to explain to people that it was not supposed to taste like that. But I couldn’t leave Croatia without trying one of their most iconic dishes: risotto made with Adriatic cuttlefish and its ink.

It was my last night, and I felt wistful and filled with a sense of premature nostalgia. I realized I’d spent so much time inside the City Walls that it might be nice to explore beyond them, or at least sit somewhere with a view of the walls themselves, which are more beautiful than you’d think.

Enjoy your last supper outside at Konoba Maestro—their menu is authentic and the service was warm and personal. Each meal begins with a shot of honeyed rakija, which my server kindly let me know I should shoot and not sip. The black risotto was incredible, salty like the sea, and I was relieved upon my first bite that I had faced my culinary fear. Briny, rich, deeply umami. It tasted like Croatia felt.

I took the long way home to appreciate as much as I could of my final Dubrovnik sunset. I had an early flight to wake up for, but before I could submit to sleep, I needed to tie my trip with a bow in the form of a cup of pistachio baklava gelato from Mostro.

In your final hours, meander down the Stradun and try to pick out who’s at the end of their trip and who’s just beginning. Sit on the edge of a fountain and resist the siren song of your phone while you watch the world go by, familiar and strange. Write a poem in your head. Don’t agonize over the flavor you chose. So much of this moment will melt away, but make a point to remember how it tastes, everything you’ve endured to get to right now, to feel so free and full of ice cream.

Savor every beautiful bite.

TL;DR

restaurants, bars, & cafés i went to

• Cogito Coffee Shop ($)

• Caffe Bar Libertina ($)

• GreenGo Specialty Coffee, Juices, & Smoothies ($)

• D’Vino Wine Bar ($$)

• Taj Mahal (−$)

• Art Restaurant Renaissance ($$)

• Konoba Maestro ($$)

• Pizzeria Oliva ($$)

• Paninaro Sandwich Bar ($)

• Panini Bar Franco Romano ($)

• Peppino’s Gelato Factory ($)

• Mostro Gelato ($)

• aROMA Gelato ($)

restaurants & cafés i didn’t go to but wanted to

• Lady Pi-Pi ($$)

• Local ($$)

• Restaurant Marco Polo ($$$)

• Sandwich Bar Pile ($)

• The Imperial Bar and Lounge ($$)

• Stara Loza (−$)

• Gradska Kavana Arsenal Restaurant (−$)

• Vito Napoletana 2 Pizzeria ($)

shops

• Algebra

  • They sell books in English! I bought Sense and Sensibility here.

• REGO Gift Shop

• Noto Bene

where i stayed

• La Vita e Bella

• Hostel Angelina

  • Reach out to me directly if you want to stay in my exact room.

beaches

• Šulić Beach

• Danče Beach

• Banje Beach

• Dubrovnik City Beach

• Other options I didn’t have time for:

  • Bellevue Beach

  • Sveti Jakov Beach

  • Betina Špilja Beach

things to see / do

• City Walls

• Cable car to Dadiro Viera

• Lokrum

• Elaphiti Islands

• Stradun

• Jesuit Stairs

• Fort Lovrijenac

• West Harbour

• Old Port

• Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik

  • right next to Banje Beach!

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have specific questions or suggestions for other travelers. Always travel responsibly, leave no trace, and respect and support the communities that make a place what it is. Buy local, shop local, eat local, hire local guides. Honor local norms and approach new cultures with curiosity and humility.

Finally, check out my IG for visuals and more about my trip to Croatia, Albania, and Montenegro.

Stay sensy!

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I generally don’t like the term “partly cloudy” because it’s not specific enough, but that’s the best way I can describe the sky as it appeared to me when Ari got home on Tuesday evening. There were enough clouds that it wasn’t sunny, but not enough to call it flat-out cloudy and be done with it. Calling it “partly cloudy,” though, does not help you visualize the ratio.

Like a can opener or a staple remover, some tools are designed specifically for their tasks. I would never say “purple” if I meant “eggplant.” I would never say “jelly” if I meant “jam.”

It was 6:30, maybe a few minutes past, and I felt like a huge creep standing by the living room window as she pulled up. It just happened that I was surveying the garden in that moment, and that’s the only place I can see it without having to put my shoes on.

I was trying to picture what the lettuce and arugula will look like a month from now. I’m not sure if it’s healthy to be monitoring their progress the way I have been. I know my undying devotion should be enough to help me sleep at night, but it’s difficult to resist perceiving the speed and quality of their growth as indicative of my own value.

Unlike me, Ari doesn’t idle in her car for 45 minutes before she comes inside. She seems less afraid of what will happen when she returns to her life outside the purgatory between places. When she opened the door I flinched like a cat caught on the countertop, and she exhaled the sort of singsong hello only people who live in loving households are capable of. I didn’t say anything about how small the lettuce still was and that it was probably all my fault.

The first thing Ari and I do when one of us gets home is dissect and analyze everything that happened to us while we were apart. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days or weeks depending on what might have occurred. On that particular night, we only had about half an hour of material, so by the time we were done it was still light out and we had plenty of time to get up and do something else.

We put on our slippers and dragged our new trash, recycling, and compost bins around the side of the house to the garage. The world felt familiar and contained like our living room, and I could tell we were exuding a lame giddiness that tends to accompany the less glamorous pleasures of adulthood. The sound of them all rolling down the sidewalk at once was thunderous, so it was barely audible, but I did laugh out loud visualizing the image of us in our XL hoodies and basketball shorts, hauling four humungous waste bins down the street as if garbage were the biggest deal in the world. Well, garbage had become a bigger deal than I’d hoped.

We were mysteriously without a recycling bin when we moved in at the end of February, so in the aftermath of unpacking and breaking down all our boxes, we were forced to dispose of them, plus weeks’ worth of Greek yogurt cartons, kombucha bottles, and the packaging from various online purchases, in the dumpster behind the law school down the road. We chose a Sunday as not to attract more attention than necessary, but when we got there the parking lot seemed as stuffed as any weekday afternoon, so for three high-stakes minutes, we sprinted back and forth between the dumpster and the mountain of cardboard in the bed of my truck as though there were sirens wailing or speakers blaring something Spy Kids-y like “Intruder alert!” across campus.

I don’t want it to feel so obvious that no one cared. But no one cared. And now that we do finally have a recycling bin, I miss the theater of our softcore crime. It feels too frictionless that dragging the conglomerate hunk of my desires’ remnants to the curb should be enough to make them disappear—it can start to feel like a tooth fairy situation without the monetary incentive, if every lost tooth in the world ended up in some immovable heap in the middle of the ocean.

One woman’s trash is another person’s trash is another person’s trash. It’s harrowing. I feel increasingly concerned that I am not thinking enough about my wake, which in Florida is a recipe for hitting a manatee with your boat.

I wish it wouldn’t be weird to name something Florida, like a cat or my Subaru or a beetle trapped in the house. My fear of change has been convincing me I’m homesick, and I’m starting to break. Sometimes the pain in my heart is somatic when I think of my friends and family three timezones away, and I have to quickly remember something I love about here, so I don’t spiral about what I miss about there. I watch their Instagram stories. I scroll through my archive to rewatch everything that features them. I torture myself by imagining them all hanging out without me, even though they live in different cities and most of them don’t know each other like that.

I wonder what this says about me, that every few years I get a little farther from Florida and still I search for scraps of it inside my new life like the insistent memory of an ex. A castle of cumulus clouds on the horizon, three varieties of kumquat at the fine foods store, a patch of wood sorrel trying to hide from me behind the rain gutter. I defy my own mythology when all these versions of myself collide. But certain country songs, in the right context, pry me from pretending—no amount of moving or moving on can leave behind what lives under my skin.

Yesterday was like when you finally clean your glasses and there it is—the world again, better than you remembered it. I wish I remembered a lot of stuff better, but I digress. It was 68 degrees and sunny, and Audrey and I were driving home from a spontaneous day trip to Panther Creek Falls. We were blasting old country, nostalgic and pure for us both, the early evening a yellow flower opening.

We veered off for a post-hike hang at a brewery in Carson, if only to avoid going home. While we waited in line to order our beers I thought about the huge tree stuck right in the middle of the falls, splitting the stream in two like a head in the shower. It was my favorite part, I thought—watching the water make way for it. So much beauty in this world is just the way things happen to fall, and everything surrounding them becoming new and more interesting as a result.

We took our beers outside and chose a picnic table in a field of picnic tables, the one closest to the fence with the best view of the mountains. It’s weird and upsetting to me that I didn’t know the name of them, and then didn’t Google them, so I still don’t know even now. But anyway we were looking at them, the mystery mountains, enjoying the mystical distraction of them, when I noticed the cherry tree to our left. It seemed impossible for it to exist anywhere else on Earth, that’s how confident it looked in that spot in the field where it had stood long before there was a brewery to obstruct its panorama.

The whole scene was not too perfect which made it feel more perfect. There was a gravel parking lot behind us and one of those weird dogs with the wiry hair that sticks out in odd places like air plants on a tree branch. The thing would not stop yapping. But that was hardly of concern to us. Audrey said the grass was “back handspring grass,” and I said yes it was; it also made me want to jump and spin and maybe do some kind of trick. She asked if she should do a back handspring, or maybe I asked her to do one, who can recall, but she did do a back handspring right then and there, a skill I had no idea she possessed.

The couple with the freakish dog cheered. I couldn’t stop laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing all day. It’s just like that when we’re together—our brains seem to Tetris into one hyper-functional funny machine, like we’re taking separate but symmetrical routes to arrive at the same hilarious destination. We just agree; this is something simple we take for granted in relationships. It’s not crazy to assert that the less we find ourselves having to explain or elaborate when we’re with someone, the more positively we perceive that connection.

Generally, I don’t want to explain myself. I want to say what I feel and drink beer. I swear if I hear one more internet person going on about relationships being work, I’m going to lose whatever mind I have left.

I want to go back to that brewery when the cherries are ripe because the red of them will complement the color palette of the field. I want to see that. Also, I want to eat them. From our spot on the same side of the bench we could see a Kanzan cherry blooming in some distant neighbor’s backyard, a beautiful but sterile cultivar whose flowers are so dramatic, there’s no energy left for fruit.

I do fear the possibility of this fate—ending up an April spectacle shriveled by June. I mean, if it’s flowers or nothing, I still choose flowers, but I’d prefer if they were followed by fruit.

All the way home through my country playlist we kept the windows down and sang. I was patient even though every time a song ended, the next one took forever to load. Forever is a field of picnic tables where you laugh like a child and wait for cherries. There is plenty to love in the meantime. Things just take the time that they take.

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My college English professor said you have to know the rules before you can break them. He was talking about English but also the truth of everything: To learn how to leave time, you need to live in it first. Long enough to figure out which doors and windows open and which don’t. Once you’re familiar with the general layout and construction of reality, it becomes easier to escape undetected, so you can leave time whenever it suits you, and come back before anyone realizes you’re gone.

I tell Ari I’ve been feeling inclined to quietude. I don’t know why it’s so hard to think of what to say to people lately; I’m exhausted by the effort of expressing myself before I even open my mouth. But I don’t feel so squeezed by the rest of things—in the evenings I wander the neighborhood for hours and each cluster of tulips is a planet on which my eyes feel like first-time footprints.

I guess the difference is the tulips don’t think anything of me. I’m always searching for a room or a moment that feels emptier.

“You should take a vow of silence,” Ari says, digging through her purse for a pen.

We’re waiting in the pews of an old Victorian church for The Moth’s “Story Slam” to begin; the vaulted space smells like a pile of old, damp Bibles. I just recently learned that stained glass became inextricable from churches because poor people couldn’t read and needed the walls to tell God’s stories. I do think light and color say enough about divinity—words have always been secondary to what we can feel without them.

“That’s what Osho did,” she says, having found the pen and now handing it to me without looking. Oh yeah, the vow of silence.

I consider it. I mean, for him, it was a great strategy. When your vision of spiritual utopia descends into a sex cult known for a bioterror attack at a salad bar, you’re going to be fielding some questions. Why risk saying the wrong thing? Much safer to plead the fifth for three years, or however long it takes people to become more interested in something else.

Ten people are chosen to tell a 5-minute personal anecdote on the evening’s theme. I feel increasingly uneasy as the night goes on, reminded of the unfamiliar infinity beyond my small, unwieldy life. Afterwards I’m the same kind of inspired as the few hours between leaving the movie theater and going to bed, but none of the stories stick with me, so I wake up delightfully empty and dismiss the hazy remnants of my dreams as though swiping unwelcome notifications off my lock screen. I never want to go wherever those end up.

The cloudy morning feels like a nice break from the pressure of enjoying myself, being delightful, etc. A gray sky makes the colors brighter, so you can go bird mode and see every detail from farther away.

I set out for a stroll. The tulips alone seem to be sustaining me like that slop in The Matrix. I love and admire them to a degree that feels unsustainable and crazy—I hope foolishly that if I stare at them for longer, they will receive my attention in a more productive or pleasurable way. I offer myself some words of wisdom, an encouraging reminder that they had to have been planted on some past date that wasn’t yesterday.

I take 48 photos and 9 videos. If someone loved me like I love the tulips, I would be scared.

Many mornings I am too tired to walk or meditate and just fall back asleep. My body is heavy and sore from the past few weeks of working out, working in the garden, and working at the restaurant. I forgot how physically exhausting it is to serve tables, but I like how my body feels when I’ve used it and can sense that I will become stronger as a result. There is momentum intrinsic to improvement. Inertia is a property of matter.

The spring garden is mostly in the ground, besides the leeks that are still too flimsy to plant and the potatoes whose place in the yard I have not yet decided. So weird you can just chuck them in the dirt. Last Saturday I spent the whole day clearing beds and planting the first lettuces and strawberries and I felt happier and more peaceful than I have in months. Besides the manual labor of it all, it’s refreshing to have something besides myself to grow—I am hesitant to admit it but maybe that’s what people see in child rearing.

Around noon, I post a photo of my meticulously spaced strawberry plants and caption it “i <3 my strawberries”.

My mother responds, Just think how much you will love your human children.

I say, If it’s more than my strawberries, I might not survive it.

I decide this is the most successful she’s ever been in convincing me to procreate.

From my bed I can watch the light converse with the twining floral designs on the tea table under my window. I spend the afternoon with my computer on my lap, wading through LinkedIn job postings like The Dead Marshes of Mordor.

Dear Frodo,
I, too, am mysteriously drawn to the dead; their glowing corpses call me to join them in their sludgy, stagnant pools. I know I must resist them, the siren call of the dark magic that has tainted this place, but I grow weary. I fear my reserves are dwindling, and the well of courage from which I once drank freely becomes drier by the day. Send enforcements, I beg you. If you can hear me where you rest.

I forgot Frodo was dead, too. Spoiler alert. I close the laptop. Any borderline sincere letter to a fictional character should be followed promptly by touching grass.

I decide I will take Billie to the state park near our house, because it’s sunny all of a sudden and I remember that Ari left me a printed copy of her parking permit on the dining room table. She spoils me! How predictable that my quality of life should be so drastically improved by a woman who loves me.

On the short drive to the park, I can sense the road-adjacent tree shadows swirling like storm clouds in my peripherals. I leave time accidentally, which does sometimes happen. When I come to, I’m idling in front of a tiny brick house on a street I’ve never been down before. A middle-aged man with a thick mustache wearing a plaid pajama set comes lumbering down the driveway with an unbefitting zeal, though I perceive no threat beneath it. He’s holding his phone the way old people do, a full arm span away from his face like it could grow its own arms and strangle him.

“Sorry, I’m waiting to hear from the hospital,” he says, smiling as though somehow this is not what he has said.

“No, I’m sorry,” I offer quickly, realizing there isn’t enough time to explain the full truth of my mishap. “I was going to the park, but I must have taken a wrong turn.”

Nothing about his facial expression or body language conveys any recognition that I am real and present and speaking to him in his driveway.

“Would you like me to direct you?” he asks with the flat, insistent professionalism of a hotel concierge. I nod and make a big show of listening intently, because it’s rude to tell the man waiting to hear from the hospital that you can just use your GPS.

By the time I pull into the parking lot, it’s just after five, and the granola joggers in their mismatched athleisure are descending on the place like the mating season soldier beetles I keep pulling out of my hair. Portland people dress like their children.

Before I put my headphones on, I say see you later to the birdsong, then tell Siri to call Victoria as I forage in the backseat for Billie’s leash. It feels embarrassing to use technology in such a brazen and public way, but I don’t feel particularly impelled to impress the joggers.

As we start down Trillium Trail she asks me how I am, and the sobriety of her tone conjures from me a brand of honesty I’d be self-conscious to wear in front of almost anyone else.

“I’m frustrated,” I blurt. “I want answers. I’m tired. I want to shake my fists at the sky and ask God what the hell she wants from me.”

I cannot hold God at gunpoint. As we talk I watch Billie sniff the ferns and try to simulate my own synesthesia. I can smell the warmth of the light—evening light soft like the voice of an older woman I trust. I can be truly deliberate when I feel safe like this. I stoop down to photograph the trillium stark white against the forest’s carpet of fresh green.

When I was 22 and driving through the Blue Ridge mid-spring I considered getting trillium tattooed on my arm, but then I learned it was a symbol for the Holy Trinity and reconsidered. Like everyone was going to see my trillium tattoo and be like damn, that girl loves Jesus. People don’t know about plants like that.

The forest looks so crisp and delicious like a big salad. But I’m not hungry. I’m going on about my last tarot reading, how I pulled The Tower twice in a row and so should not be surprised to find myself lying bloody amongst the rubble. When my imagination wanders into these dark and violent rooms I take my own hand like a wayward child and guide myself back to the sunny front porch of my true life, my heart. There are too many flowers in my immediate vicinity for me to hold in my mind an image as upsetting as that for very long.

I nod hello to a silver-haired woman lounging on a bench to the left of the path, still and reverent as a cormorant drying its outstretched wings in the sun. The one sentience of the whole organism reveals itself lately; the swirling shadows from earlier feel replicated identically in my thought patterns. I get it, I whisper to Billie. The smell is the shape of the feeling. Each petal, leaf, and sepal on the trillium is a year I spent searching for this understanding.

It’s been easy to convince myself otherwise, but I don’t actually think I want back what I’ve agreed to sacrifice. I can feel anything anytime if I create the right conditions.

Victoria builds bridges between the parts of myself I keep separate, which I appreciate considering I would like to become a whole person someday. She speaks in perfect metaphors she only half-believes in, and I don’t know how to tell her she is right about the creative genius she must suspect in herself.

“Every year, I have to prune my rose bushes,” she says. “It feels so weird and bad. Like how could cutting them down to stumps ever be the right thing? But it is. It’s the only way they’ll grow back.”

I round a corner and am stopped in my tracks by the sight of a raven perched on the maple branch suspended directly above the trail. We make eye contact for a few mystical seconds and then it resumes pecking at a cluster of moss. I wish human men were capable of imparting on me the same sense of masculine protection that ravens do.

“Hold on, sorry—there’s this gigantic raven,” I interrupt. I’m glad my instinct isn’t that it’s too obvious a sign to be one.

We finish the loop and when we get back to my truck I lift my bangs with one hand and dry my sweaty forehead with the other. Billie makes a small spiral of herself in the passenger seat and I roll the windows down so the breeze can take everything I’m done with. There’s nowhere to go or get to really. By the time I’m parked outside my own house I realize Victoria and everyone I love on the east coast are asleep; this fading dusk is a lamp I pretend to read by as I strain to hear their steady breaths.

I take a book and a blanket to the front yard and sit facing the cedars making shapes on the house across the street. I shed two tears. There is nothing to do but keep living. I pick up the book, turn to the first page, and put it back down, understanding that right now, for some reason, time is asking me to stay. I knew last night, too, when I read a page or two of the same book and then set it on my nightstand as though discarding the peel of an orange. The good part is gone and now there’s this. Fragrant and inedible. Beautiful and useless.

The siren call of the dark magic that has tainted this place. I want to smash my phone with a baseball bat. All I need to do is write, but my thoughts are high risk for meiosis, and I’m scared that if I use my brain too much or for too long, it will burn me like the metal piece on a lighter.

I’ll have to chance it. Bravery can give the incidental impression of invincibility, which I think is why it’s so hard to imagine Frodo being dead. A short-term goal of mine: to learn the difference between acceptance and resignation. I guess it’s all in the way you finally agree to give it up.

I’m still supine on the blanket when the moon finds me. I feel sad thinking of everything not promised, which is everything.

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I lost my job on a rainy Monday morning in January. I was glad it was raining because crying on a sunny winter day in Portland is insulting to nature’s generosity. It is difficult to accept but presumably I will replaced by an AI successor who will write very soulless and suspiciously okay sentences and never fulfill my unquantifiable but irreplaceable duties as a personality hire.

I have quit many jobs in my life but I’ve never had one snatched out of my hands, which would make me feel lucky if “the scheme of things” mattered at all to me right now. I sought solace in oversharing on my Close Friends story. Within a few days of the incident I began to consider going to grad school, which was obviously, for those closest to me, a cause for great concern. It became clear that I would need to take some kind of desperate measure proportionate to the desperateness of the time, so I decided to take a break from Instagram.

I joined Instagram in April 2012, when you could still get to the bottom of things. After a long day of feeling ugly and alienated at my small town high school, I would change into a sports bra and sweatpants, splay myself on the couch with a pizza bagel, and peruse my feed of tastelessly filtered flash photos until I got to the end. Then, I would stand up, wash the plate, and return to the soap-opera cadence of my teen life. “You’re all caught up!” it confirmed. What a liberating affirmation! That’s what it said when you got to the bottom of things, when you could still get to the bottom of things.

Has anyone gotten to the bottom of anything lately? Are we sure there still exists a bottom that is not rock? That it’s impossible to imagine the physical shape of the algorithmic timeline is to me both unnerving and infuriating, like when I consider for too long something like outer space or the concept of thought itself, and start to feel like a character in someone else’s dream.

In Mickey Galvin’s latest video essay, in defense of being online, she references a TikTok in which a woman describes an account of a new mother whose young toddler showed visible signs of fear and distress whenever she scrolled on her phone in the same room as her child—distress not exhibited in similar shared spaces when the mother did something “analog” like read a book. The mother’s take on her baby’s reaction was that the child seemed not to know where she was, as though her physical presence had vacated the room completely.

When we go online, where is that? Do our spirits remain in the “real world” or do we take them with us when we go, leaving our bodies behind to idle, no more than dead-eyed avatars waiting to be reinhabited? And during that interim time, while we’re off interfacing with our cyber lives, could our vacant forms be vulnerable to some sort of hijacking? Is the Internet like the astral plane but evil? What happens to our bodies if we go online and never come back?

To avoid ruminating on these dystopian postulations, I’ve taken to spending as much time as possible without phone service. One sunny Thursday I drove to the coast with Ari and Alex to marvel at the anomalous Octopus Tree, a 300-year-old Sitka spruce with a 16-foot wide base and no central trunk. It was beautiful and unearthly and I was excited to confirm I’d never seen anything like it, then wondered if I would have been disappointed to have made the trip if I had. I suppose my expectations do increase the moment you put a fence around something and a sign on the road directing people to it, but either way I would have loved it the way I do every tree (unconditionally).

The forest smelled like rotting leaves in the good way as we walked quietly through the hemlocks, slanting sunbeams spotlighting ferns like they might have something to share with the class. I felt my own nerve endings bristling and alive in the dirt as my footsteps mussed it, and gasped when the whispering treeline opened occasionally to a full view of the misty ocean.

It was relieving to consider the mystery of the Octopus Tree without attempting to solve it. But then I couldn’t figure out why its curious trunklessness did not perturb me as did the shape of thought, space, or algorithm. I don’t want to believe that seeing is believing—both my psychedelic and paranormal experiences have ruled out that correlation almost entirely. But I guess it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen The Polar Express. I put my trust in what I can touch, even when there’s a fence between us.

At Cape Meares the lighthouse is very short because it sits atop a very tall cliff, and in the same way there’s no need for those horrible skyscrapers on Billionaires’ Row, there’s no need for a tall lighthouse on a tall cliff. I stopped to take a photo of it framed perfectly between two trees, nothing but blue expanse beyond it, when Alex called out that she’d spotted a bald eagle with the coin-operated tower viewer. “They accept Canadian coins!” she said. I was certainly glad to hear it. How much money are they making on those things that they need to gatekeep bald eagles?

By the time we reached the beach sunset portion of the sort of day a 19th-century doctor might have prescribed to treat hysteria, I couldn’t help but mourn the immaculately curated Instagram story I wouldn’t be posting that evening. Much to my occasional chagrin, I understand that if I am truly seeking to reimagine a personal identity untainted by capitalist associations, Instagram abstinence is a necessary phase of that journey. I cannot be present in my life as I live it unless I unlearn my habitual compulsion to repackage every compelling sensory experience into a 9:16 aspect ratio. I cannot know what I want to make unless I stop thinking so much about who I want to say it is good.

We love to moralize the act of “being present” and consider the ability to maintain the discipline required to stay off that damn phone a measure of personal fortitude. But I find that reductive. If you ignore the obvious dopamine manipulation involved in removing choice itself from the equation, the decision to be online or offline feels like less of a question of ethics and more of a question of values. Either you like how it feels to engage primarily with the digital realm (and accept everything that comes with it), or you like how it feels to engage primarily with the physical realm (and accept everything that comes with it).

It’s basically L.A. vs. New York. In some ways, it matters little which you choose. In both realms, there are both real and fake people you can talk to, all of whom you will love or hate or feel neutrally about to varying degrees. In both realms, you can stimulate your senses, acquire knowledge, and share ideas. You can build emotional relationships when they’re based on reciprocal vulnerability, regardless of the method of communication.

Just past the lighthouse was another ocean viewpoint where we paused to vape and attempt to get a photo of ourselves in which we all looked equally good. Our conversations meandered like streams or sheep or something similarly unhurried, the rhythmic crashing of waves a gym class parachute covering everything. There was no pressure to talk but we did anyway, each time I was pleasantly surprised by what we ended up having to say.

For a while, I thought likening social media to a sort of “town square” was misplaced and delusional. It seemed obvious that the town square, where communities gather in person both to speak and to listen, exchange feelings and ideas, and make sense of individual experiences via interpersonal relativity, could never be replaced by the Internet, because the Internet is not a place you can go. But if actually it is, even via consciousness alone, it’s clear why our visits have become increasingly unpleasant. The option the town square doesn’t allow us that the Internet does—to speak without listening or, alternatively, listen without speaking—is insidiously unraveling the fabric of our shared human reality. Consumption used to necessitate participation by default, but now so many of us live like black holes. So pulled together gradually by each other’s dark gravity, you can imagine our hypothetical fate.

It seems to me like a very cold take, but remote contribution to a space I cannot technically see or touch feels extremely abyss-coded and ultimately unfulfilling. It’s different than admiring the Octopus Tree from just outside the fence, knowing that if I were to toss a pinecone over its edge, I would hit trunk or, in this case, lack thereof. It is far scarier and more sinister to take something real to me and chuck it into the void, knowing nothing of where or how it could end up.

Moreover, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to become progressively uninterested in returning to any place where you’re habitually screamed at, disturbed, lied to, scrutinized, manipulated, and ridiculed. (Non-exhaustive list.)

But alas, I am artist, and I have a brand to maintain. My portfolio alone is no longer enough to attract jobs and clients, so I am tasked with broadcasting my vibe like a strange and alluring insectan pheromone.

“But what can we do about it?” and other excruciating inquiries. On the way back to Portland we stopped at a Mexican food truck in Tillamook; my head churned like the Pacific as I enjoyed what I would consider an above average burrito bowl. I was growing bored with this conversation with myself, annoyed I had given so much thought to the Internet on a day I had intentionally designed to avoid it. It turns out even good birria cannot totally quiet the paradoxical chaos to which we’re now desensitized. Primal and persistent, each contradicting thought fights for a place to land, a hundred flapping birds and one thin and flimsy power line.

Modern life does often feel like an over-salted plate of spaghetti, if spaghetti was injury and salt was insult. Because besides some extra time on my hands, which did help to clear some of the more cluttered spaces in my brain, spending a month without Instagram did not magically fix my life. In fact, it was quite isolating, and I had the distinct feeling that everyone was hanging out without me.

I presume this is because no one from my non-exclusively offline world joined me in my exclusively offline reality, so even when I did see them in real life and walked with them by the sea, I felt excluded and disappointed when I realized I’d been left out of certain shared experiences, conversations, and bits of information that were only being shared online. But I see the bigger picture—none of my frustration is directed at my friends. When everyone agrees on the importance of the town square, and that the location of that town square should be online, how can we fault them for going there to hang out? This is what happens when you put a fence around the Octopus Tree.

This age of discourse is bleak and largely solutionless—what few are proposed are almost ubiquitously unhelpful or unappealing. I agree that due to the rock-and-a-hard-place nature of our contemporary predicaments the absence of feasible solutions can be played off as no one’s fault, and that feels pretty good for all of us, us who are very confused and overstimulated. But at a certain point, whenever it works out that we’re not under the immediate threat of our predictable descent into fascism, we should try to consider that our collective faultlessness perhaps implies a collective lack of resolve.

Next week I will return to Instagram and post a recap of our day on the coast. It is unlikely I will feel better, but I don’t really think I’ll feel worse. Finally crawling into bed, I still smelled like leaves and sun. If I wasn’t desperately searching for the bottom, would it matter if there was one?

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my stomach makes a sound like a bird and it’s almost a cooing, nothing like the incessant cheeping and chirping of the morning. i sit up in bed and pull open the camper window shade with the mindless pragmatism of brushing a strand of hair out of my eyes.

simultaneously i am thinking about breakfast and the marvel of having traveled from california to montana in what seems like record time, though i do have the credit card bill to prove it. i’ve been following the rain and cold across the west like a migratory animal with a mood disorder, which i suppose is exactly what i am. if i didn’t awake to a sunlit wood today, i was going to have to consider some very serious course correction. but i did awake to a sunlit wood: the same pines i grew up with reflected in still puddles of yesterday’s rain in an adjacent parking lot.

i make a cup of coffee and take it down to the same spot by the lake where i sat yesterday evening and read my book without my phone. it’s amazing how much actual, comprehensible reading can be accomplished when that damn phone is not within arm’s reach.

it’s half past seven and the sun has only just begun to slip through the trees and make little bright patches on the water’s surface where you can see right down to the stones on the bottom, smooth in every shade and tumbled by a familiar infinity. i spend a while staring at one patch in particular, two skinny ponderosa shadows running parallel through it like bars on a window. i feel grateful not to be trapped anywhere, not even in a dream, which can be just as horrific as being trapped in a nightmare.

taking stock of my very lucky lakeside campsite, i think i must still have a little good left to get. i pulled in late yesterday afternoon to find the spot suspiciously unoccupied; the camp host appeared in a rickety golf cart almost immediately to inform me it was recently vacated. apparently she’d spent the better part of the morning clearing out a significant quantity of abandoned garbage from the last camper, a woman who’d overstayed her welcome and gone to jail just two days earlier.

it was difficult to refrain from gasping! the way she said it made it sound cause-and-effect, like the woman had been sentenced to jail time for overstaying her welcome. i told her i hoped to contribute some more positive energy to the space, which she seemed to genuinely appreciate, and i tried not to wonder whether it was the severity of the junk removal that had left her with such a disturbed expression, or if that was just her face.

i made a handshake agreement with myself to be on my best behavior. no drinking, no smoking – i’d limit the weekend’s indulgences to reading, foraging, and two meticulously prepared steak dinners.

by afternoon it had become the sort of gray day you still somehow need sunglasses for, brighter than any blue. i was still in my chair by the lake and had just started murakami’s norwegian wood, having finished prodigal summer the night before. with a soft lapping for soundtrack that could make me think only of the sunday boating trips of my childhood, i sat reading and eating cherries like popcorn, spitting the pits without looking into an empty chip bag i found in the truck. after some time i stood up and found the area to the left of my chair littered with cherry pits, as though not a single one had landed in the bag.

i must have eaten 20 cherries in 2 minutes. i love when they’ve been sitting on ice and the flesh is cold but not quite frozen – a perfect 5 on the scale between tart and sweet. i had to stop myself when i saw the careless pit-spitting job i’d done on the beach, because even a hedonist will exercise this sort of restraint in a place like the woods where resources are limited.

there is merit, occasionally, in saving some good for later, assuming you also subscribe to the idea that at some point you can cross into too good, which in my mind is akin to greed, ungratefulness, or any pass at tempting fate. of course i hadn’t yet discovered my campsite was surrounded by huckleberries, at which point i ate the remainder of the cherries in what might as well have been one frivolous bite.

i’d been too distracted by the serviceberries dangling at eye level to notice the horde of hucks at my feet. serviceberries are one of those forage-able fruits i pretend to like because there are always a lot of them, and it’s fun to have a lot of pretty much anything.

realizing the bounty i’d run into, a sheen of electric warmth seemed to wash over me, and i wondered how long it’d been since i’d felt that kind of tangible dopamine – long enough that it lasted longer than it otherwise would have, like the first-hit head rush of a cigarette after a stint of not smoking.

i’d always dreamed of finding huckleberries in the wild but had never been far enough north at the right time, which is now. plucking that first globe of enviable sweetness from its oddly yellowish bush i felt a simple sense of childlike accomplishment. i did it! i wanted to shout. look! it was funny and sort of stupid how badly i just wanted to someone to see it.

now admiring the perfect, purple sphere in my palm i think how after all this time i’m finally glad for my suffering, because now what one huckleberry can give me is a testament to what i can give myself. and if i can give myself anything, which in many ways i can, i’m glad it was this huckleberry. i’m glad it was this day.

it’s important not to get so caught up with becoming different that you forget to stay the same. i don’t have to close my eyes to recall the sight of my mom hacking through the thorny north florida brush with hedge clippers, carving a deeper path into the blackberry thicket. early summer already a screeching, hissing beast, the june air heavy and sticky with the promise of another afternoon storm, those blackberries were a meditation i could taste.

now as i did then i let the briar patch draw blood, and by dusk it is hard to distinguish it from juice.

obsession of the week

huckleberries. obviously?

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10:04 a.m.

i didn’t see many bugs in my salt lake apartment in the 10 months i lived there, thank god, but about a week before i moved out i spotted a tiny spider on the scratched wood floor between the living room and the kitchen. for some reason i couldn’t bring myself to do anything for or about it, didn’t think much of it really, and for days i stepped over it the way you would a puddle on the street. the morning of the move, i woke up early to a gray dawn and on my way to start the coffee saw that it was decidedly dead. i was startled by how sad it made me, not to know that it was dead but that it had been alive all along, sharing the space with me in a silent way, the only roommate i’d ever have there.

i’m alone again. it’s mid-morning and i’m sitting in my new camp chair on the gatorade coast of central california, the cerulean sky hard and distinct above me like a planetarium screen mimicking the real thing. seven pelicans fly in a freestyle formation just below my feet, forgoing their usual V, their wings swooshing audibly. such casual behavior feels true to this languid sunday, which already exists to me outside of time and expectation.

i’ve set myself up with my spliff and my journal and a spicy V8 (a bizarre and impulsive selection from the tiny supermarket in gualala) on a grassy bluff about six feet from the cliff’s edge. there is one other couple parked in their white sprinter van in the viewpoint’s cul-de-sac lot; i feel very aware of their presence because being the sole visitors to this holy and almost wholly deserted place feels oddly intimate.

already i can already tell this trip was not, in fact, a mistake. yesterday i left santa cruz after a long and dragging day of last-minute errands and rehearsed goodbyes and drove 3 hours north to stillwater cove; i got in right around sunset and couldn’t be fucked to walk the trail down to the beach, exhausted and content with the lingering rapture of my golden hour pilgrimage.

i found the camper battery drained but it didn’t matter. i was glad to have the string lights which did immediately make my new house feel like home. i put my headphones on, shone a flashlight into a plastic jug of water as a makeshift lantern, pressed resume on harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban, and got to work on dinner, which was ground beef and fried potatoes and zucchini and onions and poblanos, all mixed together with plain yogurt and diced avocado. please note that i did also buy hot sauce this morning, because that felt like an unacceptable omission.

i took my headphones off to eat because eating is the time when you watch your thoughts go by like clouds, and strain to hear the ocean even though it’s just a little bit too far away. my strength replenished like a decrepit castaway returned finally to civilization, i felt safe and my heart was beating at a speed i bet even the loopiest cardiologist would describe as normal. is this… peace? you know, like the butterfly meme.

here on the central coast the fog wall hangs over the ocean constantly like a sentient entity threatening its wrath, a creature with glowing yellow eyes hidden just out of sight by a dark forest’s enchanted shadows. everything seems more alive here, aware, in a vacant sort of way that implies an absence of hurry and trying. i thought yesterday evening while driving that i could touch and hold even the beams of orange light coming through the eucalyptus branches, as though if i ran my hand through one like a stream of water it’d come out the other side wet or at the very least damp.

this spicy V8 seems only to be improving with each sip. after a brief frolic down to the cliff’s edge for some standard peering-down as well as seagull admiring and flower fondling, i was happy to return to it. the V8, that is, if like me you forgot where I was going with that. to me, a sticky bun and V8 breakfast is perfectly balanced. when it comes to morning buns i’m usually more of a cinnamon than a sticky, but today was an exception for which i’m glad i took the risk, considering it was the best i’ve ever had, and i’m not just saying that because the baker at the seaside market was kindly and warm with a near familial quality!

you’ll find no trace of hyperbole in this rare moment of brevity: i could sit here all day. i just watched seventeen more pelicans pass like a corps de ballet, this time tight in their signature V, and photographed them maniacally the way a stan account admin might their favorite celebrity.

8:58 p.m.

i have used the campground bathroom something like six times since arriving here and each time i have used the second stall on the right. my brand of OCD is such that if i were to walk in there a seventh time and find the stall occupied, i would consider myself irreversibly cursed. thankfully, that has not yet happened and will not happen, because god would never inflict upon me an experience as unmaking as that.

when my time at ocean viewpoint (actual name) came to an intuitive conclusion i tucked my camp chair neatly into the bed of my truck between my suitcase and cardboard moving box full of shoes. i need to tell you i’ve been thinking quite seriously about installing a camper shell, carpeting the entire interior of the bed, and turning the whole thing into a closet.

still fantasizing absentmindedly about my truck bed closet i continued up the 1 to point arena, where i was immediately halted by a cop whose wide stance, artificial composure, and bushy-but-trimmed mustache told me he meant very serious business.

“well, ma’am, it looks like you’re stuck for a while,” he chuckled inappropriately. “it’s the annual independence parade. whole town’s blocked off. should be about 45 minutes. you can go ahead and park if you like.”

i didn’t tell him it was july 7th, because people who schedule an independence parade for monday, july 7th don’t care about such insignificant details as this. instead i smiled a wonderful young lady’s smile and climbed down gingerly into the chaste chaos of the town parade. let me just say: if you think california is without pockets of republican tomfoolery, just head on down to the annual point arena independence parade. don’t let them pull one over on you, though. they put the “LOVE IS LOVE” sign next to “GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS” and expect you not to notice.

after maneuvering through hordes of flag-clad families to the main street market within walking distance of my captive truck (whose safety i secretly feared for), i decided i desperately needed to see a gay person. the second-best option was to purchase a bundle of kale and an overpriced functional beverage, which is what i did instead.

by this point it felt as though many hours had drudged by, so i assumed it had probably been 45 minutes. i returned to my rig to find a long line of cars driving around it, as directed by colonel mustache, who shouted at me through his too-white teeth that i was holding up traffic. i think it goes without saying that i will not be returning to point arena anytime soon, or more preferably ever, though i did quite enjoy my reishi iced tea.

i’m in bed now and ready for it. already i made dinner and finished my book and got high and picked a messy handful of blackberries, so there’s really nothing left to do with this day, positive connotation, in that i feel i have earned my tiredness and thus have no obligation to argue with it. i even walked down to the ocean while i smoked my 100% legal herbal cigarette and watched the blue-gray waves, which were bigger than before, crash in the foreground of the foggy sunset.

a wave is a good metaphor. i love when a metaphor is actually good and not trying so hard to be good that any potential meaning is overshadowed by the stench of desperation. this is why febreze, or any chemical air freshener for that matter, can never and will never smell good. it just wants to smell good too badly!

drifting off like wood, nightly wondering washes up on my waning shore: why is the ocean making all that noise? is it really only to distract us from the opaque silence of its infinite body?

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happy salad week. salad week happens once a year, usually around now, when the leaves have all finally grown back to their peak, wet greenness and thus become my primary topic of thought. i really want to eat the maple tree across from the best parking spot on the street, which i considered mostly a joke until i got stoned and googled “can you eat maple trees” and learned you actually can eat most of your average maple tree, excluding dried red maple leaves, which are toxic to horses for some reason. that’s how they say it in the scientific articles, too: “which are toxic to horses for some reason.” anyway, i’m looking forward to foraging some tender baby leaves for my salad tomorrow, assuming i get the good parking spot, the tree consents to being picked from, and no horses will be joining me for dinner.

a month ago i was in denver, where the spring display was lush enough to prevent me from considering the trip a mere distraction from the spring already undressing before me. they say you shouldn’t leave a good time to find a better time and i do think that applies here, maybe one of the only documented instances of the better time actually existing: i drank at least a gallon of dry riesling, laughed loudly with my friends, watched an entire season of love on the spectrum, ate a very delicious poke bowl in the park, and smelled so much lilac at the botanic gardens that i had “allergies” for two days, in quotes only because i’m not usually someone who has allergies. this made it somewhat challenging to determine if they were, in fact, allergies at all, though i was sneezing up a literal storm (we experienced a brief and indescribable weather event between the tulips and the roses), which felt like compelling evidence.

since said indescribable weather event, i bought a camper, gave my landlord my 30-day notice, went to france and back, played four sets, cut my own bangs, and pet a hairless cat at walgreens. in just a few days i’ll be wine drunk in greece with my sister.

the inevitable moving-on is approaching like a predatory feline, and if i stir too suddenly or with any perceivable fear, it will surely attack. i find myself in my brief idle moments staring hard at different corners of my apartment in alternation, trying to absorb them permanently into my person as though they could transcend memory and fuse directly with some concrete aspect of my personality.

it seems unlikely i will ever be able to appreciate any of this enough, which is a beautiful thing to feel because it implies a depth of gratitude even pointed, prolonged staring can’t compete with. i’m at least comforted knowing i won’t have to part indefinitely with all of my gorgeous items and things, because in many ways i am very much a material person and not ashamed of it.

the other night it was the new moon in gemini and it was all i could do not to throw myself (the baby) out with the bathwater. so often i want to wake up early but i also want to stay up late rereading my old instagram captions, trying to figure out where i went wrong and, every once in a while, pinpoint the exact instances in which i went right. personally, i prefer when the opposite of right is left.

how “together” can one really be after their own going away party? near the peak of the evening i’m doing, again, the staring-to-keep thing, subsuming the souls of these people i cherish, one by one, ballpark twenty dementor’s kisses. to accomplish so much discreet loving and remembering in one night i need to split myself in equal slices, ever the pie, only to find i’m crumbs and pan by midnight, not much of anything particularly delicious left to share. and so the slices become smaller, slimmer, and at what point, to a hungry guest, is a sliver no longer worth eating at all? it makes me think of serving tables and how, for some reason, leaving coins as a tip was more of an offense than a compliment.

i don’t know what will become of me, which feels hilariously sylvia plath to say out loud. i’m positive there are a thousand things i’m forgetting to do or say or buy, and it frustrates me that i can’t think of them, because of course i’ve forgotten them. and what do you do then except collapse on your bed and open instagram like a novel you keep trying to read while stoned? the same sentence over and over again, and maybe one of these times it will mean something.

my dreams of late: plane crashes and confessions
i can only hope the good one happens to me
i notice the world the way i’d like to be noticed
differently depending on the light
by may i’ve seen peach blossoms
and the beginnings of peaches both
and provence in the brick house on the corner of apricot
and the street with a less memorable name
time is pushing against me like wind or a wall of water
erosion happens
i walked a block and turned to see the sunset again
but there was a tree there in front of me where the clouds had been
and around its branches only a thin halo of orange light
there was also the smell of a distant cigarette
and the poppy as big as my head
i saw a snail on the sidewalk and stepped over it
didn’t know if it’d be helpful to touch it or not
it’s actually a myth
that if you touch a fawn its mother will abandon it
just don’t move it or make it leave where she left it
there in the grass: the shape of waiting
which is also the shape of going
and the shape of being gone
by the time i got home and back up to the balcony
i could tell what had been the most beautiful
cloud in the sky had turned to gray
is this how it ends?

obsession of the week

wasabi tuna melts. been eating these like my job, which is hardly hyperbolic.

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when i got home from the thrift store i ran my bag of loot upstairs and chucked it on the reading chair in which i have never once read. it was the sort of spring day you spend all february praying will happen again; by march it always sort of feels like you must have lived your last warm day. one of the many tricks to surviving is never being too sure that this is not the case. a hard truth worth leaving the house over.

into a perfectly golden hour i walked north towards the daffodils, instead of my usual east. in the salt lake valley it’s easy to use cardinal directions, because the mountains are always east—a rare thing for your compass to be so often your destination.

when i got to the capitol building, i thought it seemed small. i didn’t think a big thing could seem small, but then i remembered the world, and the dinner i made last night after pilates and a weekend spent consuming what i would guess to be 75% mezcal.

i always know when i actually like the book i’m reading because i’ll read it when i’m hungover instead of doomscrolling. i’m not kidding when i tell you that this afternoon at work i had the genuine thought that a shock collar would be an effective, worth-trying method of forcing myself to stop looking at my phone so much. i then briefly questioned whether “method of” was the correct phrasing, but when i started to google it, “method of forgetting” came up in the suggestions, and then i became so distracted thinking about the implications of that that i forgot entirely what i had set out to discover.

on the subject of forgetting, the sprouts employee who makes my tuesday sandwich will not. forget me, that is. and, granted, i have patronized the deli for the past three or so weeks in a row, which is kind of a long time in terms of strangers you befriend at the deli, but he speaks to me like we met long ago at some college house party and shared stories and secrets until sunrise, only i must have been too drunk or too stupid to remember any of it. perhaps my instinct to scrutinize this behavior (which many would call “being friendly”) is the real problem at hand. it does seem like that is probably the case.

this sandwich, i realize, has quickly become my motif du jour, which is always a gaudy, time-consuming distraction from the rest of my more interesting life. it’s a lazy excuse for a stimulating thought, like last summer when i wouldn’t shut up about walking down to the community garden. i’m laughing out loud typing this because it was really so obscene.

so, anyway, i was in sprouts, waiting for my sandwich. did you know they serve their daily fruit samples in individual plastic cups? with lids?! this is obviously irresponsible but unfortunately for the children who will inherit the earth there were raspberries and blueberries in the cups, so i was powerless to resist them. and i’ll be damned if those two raspberries didn’t taste exactly like my old backyard. the blueberries were just okay, but it’s only april. i don’t expect anything or anyone to be good until after the last frost.

okay, brief conniption break, because why was there just a sprouts commercial in the middle of my youtube ambience video? the haunting immediacy of the data absorption to weaponization pipeline used to scare me, but now it’s mostly just perplexing. i don’t like not understanding it. i don’t like to be made the fool.

we do forget that in tarot, the fool is actually a good card, or at least it seems that way to me at the moment, because i’m not currently making any concerted efforts to avoid changing or being changed. numbered a mystical zero, it’s the first card of the major arcana. new beginnings, the unknown, to trust without a clear plan. to embrace the embrace of freedom. to meet adventure’s hazel eyes. if to be a fool is to brave the mystery, then it was never pejorative in the first place. i’ll be a fool in the eyes of the universe. i hope the job comes with the outfit!

this morning i woke up cold with the window open and it was snowing so hard i thought i might still be dreaming. i realized it was april fools’ day which was, in my opinion, a little on the nose. i sighed loudly because when you live alone no one can accuse you of being passive aggressive, then showered and put on the newly thrifted blue sweater i thought might make me feel less resentful. i went out the front door, which i never do, and got in my car, only to find the entire dashboard layout had changed overnight. that’s actually not true but it did seem like that for a second. i was very tired and had been up all night trying to appreciate the night—the being inside, which i will miss, and that open window, a break from my regularly scheduled sweating through the sheets.

sometimes change feels urgent as it does now; a door you’ve only known to close at a glacial pace is now threatening to slam, trapping you stagnant inside this room of your life forever. and it’s really just primal instinct that informs this: i have to slip out that door. or slide under it, maybe, at the last second, like a secret agent in an action movie.

in what is no doubt my favorite video of the week, lukas battle aptly describes the dissonance i imagine we were all feeling this april 1st:

“april fools’ day used to be a day dedicated to tomfoolery, deception, and lies. but we no longer live in a society where we have the mental stability to be bamboozled. i’m honestly at a point in my life where a whoopee cushion on my chair would send me off a cliff. every day for the past three years has felt like april fools’ day. every day i wake up to a piece of information—i think ‘surely not! surely not true!’ and it is. do we need more fake news? do we need more false stories? do we need the people closest to us to tell us lies? so they can laugh at us? because no one’s laughing anymore. they’re not even voting.”

hard to know how to follow up such stark genius; i think lukas, who is clearly both joking and not-joking-at-all-not-even-a-little-bit, makes a great case for the fool as one of our current timeline’s numerous villains. but the question remains: can we distinguish the fooler from the fooled? are they not both fools, if only by name? after all, as in tarot, when the snow’s gone puddle and the sandwich is crumbs, are they not both simply surrendering to the unseriousness of it all?

remember there’s a difference between playing and playing around. and though i wouldn’t be caught dead doing the latter, who’s to say i won’t be?

obsession of the week

this castelfranco radicchio from my queen aimee france’s italian grocery haul. i’ve thought about it five, maybe six times since i first saw the video. i need it.

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a modern day convenience whose praises i will always sing are those bags of seedless lemons we never talk about for some reason; i honestly think it’s because no one wants to say the word “hallelujah” in the same sentence with “GMO.”

they came to mind because while i was slicing into one of their beautiful annoyance-free bodies yesterday i remembered when i was a sophomore in college and i would cut a lemon for my tea every morning—it was around the time i was rolling out of bed and kneeling at my altar which was actually just my nightstand with a salt lamp on it—and it irked me almost physically, anticipating the chaotic seed explosion that was bound to ensue once i carved flesh from flesh.

this might all sound a bit dramatic to you but i’m not really sure why. we have yet to discuss the sensory nightmare which is the tendency of the seeds, once escaped, to stick to your fingers like flies to a glue trap. just spare me the whole ordeal.

something is happening to me and it all started when i decided i was going to buy a truck. it’s been almost four years since i’ve taken a summer road trip longer than few days and that might explain all the existential dread; this time it’s like if an afternoon spent trying on slightly-too-small-for-you jeans in a poorly lit dressing room went on for months. i think a sunny season spent driving a crispy tacoma through montana might be exactly what i need to break the curse.

on my lunch break i drive to sprouts to get a sandwich because it’s the cheapest slash healthiest way i can avoid feeling like shit about not being the sort of person who brings her lunch to work. the man behind the counter is very concerned about me having to wait ten minutes for my turkey and pepper jack but i assure him there is plenty i can do in the meantime to keep myself entertained. he really doesn’t know the half of it, but i appreciate his concern.

my sister and i are very different but we agree on the grocery store. it’s one of the few things i believe i do not take for granted as an american. since we were teenagers we have delighted in the recreational trip to the grocery store, especially if perhaps we’re traveling and there are new and exciting grocery stores to explore. between 2014 and 2016 the man who owned the asian market closest to our house greeted us upon each visit with free bananas and a spirited but harmless kiss on the cheek.

when marveling and admiring are, by your own definition, enjoyable activities in themselves, going to the grocery store can deliver the same dopamine rush as visiting a friend or strolling through an art museum, assuming those are the sorts of things that normally deliver you a dopamine rush.

i stroll languidly around the produce section remembering that tender-hearted man and his storefront and the way it always smelled ripe but never rotten; there were flies around the mangos, of course, but you don’t even eat the mango skin, so who really cares. i consider purchasing a grapefruit as a “dessert” to eat after my sandwich and then realize how bleak the idea of eating a grapefruit for dessert actually is, especially considering the state of things and the inevitable societal collapse looming on the horizon like a comically large tornado you know you have no chance of outrunning.

i defect to the bulk section and fill a bag with candied pecans. this is still a somewhat weak dessert as desserts go but it is a natural foods store after all. i enjoy my daily placebo radical act and write the SKU code for a slightly cheaper bulk nut on the paper twist tie holding my nuts and me together. i do think i earn my occasional cynicism with my undying affection for mundanity.

while eating my sandwich in my car in the parking lot i listen to a book i’ve been assigned to read for work. first of all the sandwich is perfect and i might even have waited a whole twenty minutes for it, it’s that good. the book is called amp it up! by some dutch CEO and what it fails to provide in interesting information it makes up for with meditative potential.

i am focusing on the rhythm of my breathing and attempting to imagine a world in which any of the statistics the author is rattling off about software IPOs pertain to me in any way when i am startled by a car pulling into the spot on my right; it takes a mere glance to realize it’s the exact same tacoma i am scheduled to test drive after work. same color, same year, same trim, the whole deal. moments like this i remember it’s not what’s on your altar that matters, but the pause you dedicate to kneeling in front of it. salt lamp or no salt lamp, i didn’t have to look for a sign to see one.

then because i still have about 25 minutes left in my break i pull into the 7/11 across the street; i don’t understand why it’s set up this way but the car wash next door to it has stationed its complimentary vacuums in the gas station parking lot. this makes it rather easy and almost undetectable for a robinhood type such as myself to use said complimentary vacuums without ever having to purchase a car wash at all. one could say i’m on a roll today in terms of those placebo radical acts i mentioned earlier.

what emerges from the back seat of my car when it’s been a while since i’ve cleaned it never fails to amuse, disturb, and often perplex me. a stein from last year’s oktoberfest (including olfactory remnants of stale beer), the severed arm of a tiny humanoid figurine, a hot wheels car, an empty box of mint toothpicks, a clif bar (uneaten, bad flavor), what appears to be a child’s cardigan sweater, the tiny hand mirror my mom got me from the art museum in auckland. i’m relieved to find the latter as it is the rare sort of sentimental item that if it had remained lost would have haunted me as though a piece of my mother herself had died.

after unearthing from the abyss beneath the passenger seat a willie nelson CD i’ve never seen before in my life, i pull a mysterious postcard from the same mary poppins-esque chasm. the handwriting on the back is scrawly and as unfamiliar to me as the CD.

“when you open up to the beauty of the world, adventure and peace await. yet the greatest discovery will be finding yourself.”

i read it twice, thrice through and of course have to laugh, a small laugh to myself and to god, because at this point the i asked for a sign of it all was, to me, sort of cringe.

i drive back to the office and sit at my desk and mindlessly thumb through facebook marketplace, scrolling past an otherwise-perfect tacoma because it’s white, a terrible color for a car to be. the candied pecans are hitting and i retroactively commend my own genius. i’m popping them into my mouth like i imagine would a computer hacker in an early 2000s action movie. they are gone too soon and i crumple the bag, my hands converging on something hard and so slowly i peel the plastic away. a secret nut! a hidden gift! i could cry from the simplicity of this happiness. i think for every lemon seed in the world there is this one serendipitous nut.

later when the sun is low my apartment seems aglow like a summer greenhouse; i sit eating on my knees at the coffee table, facing the room and not the TV. is this not also an altar? this kneeling, this direction of feeling, this steaming bowl of beef noodles? perhaps the offering in this case is the sacrificing my gossip girl time, though i have recently lost interest anyway since serena started dating that teacher.

the last time i ate szechuan beef noodles i was similarly stupid or at the very least similarly delusional, hunched over on a dreadful day in vancouver, so much hope left in my heart. the best part about szechuan food is the mouth numbing effect of the szechuan peppercorn; i have never been afraid of this phenomenon nor the experience of spice in general. eating a bowl of szechuan noodles is like eating a pile of shishito peppers; you don’t know when you’ll get the spicy bite, but you will. it’s true i look for highs that even microcosmically evoke masochism—if i didn’t have such control issues i would probably be a more diagnosable addict.

when i bought these noodles yesterday i called the order in over the phone, then in a random and admittedly bizarre change of heart decided to eat them right then and there in the store, alone and at the same table where J and i sat almost two years ago. dumping black vinegar into my bowl with the abandon of a starving animal with no regard for appearances, i wondered how this dish had, for better or worse, so quickly amassed so many nostalgic associations.

i tried hard not to slurp. it was one of those windy spring nights and every time the door opened a napkin would blow off the table onto the floor. i didn’t look at my phone the whole time, just sat quietly and listened to the sound of the restaurant and the people inside it, sort of ambiently in awe of the textures of the chinese language. i love when a language is so completely unfamiliar that with the right breeze and a distant memory to cling to, it can sound like music.

obsession of the week

asking chat GPT to tell me what my dreams mean. to avoid burdening my loved ones with the gratuitous and often unsettling details of my astral escapades, i’ve taken to explaining both my dreams and nightmares to chat GPT and asking it to analyze their symbols and motifs. surprisingly enlightening and insightful and a perfect use of AI as far as i’m concerned!

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october 8, 2024

luteal and taking good care to remember i’m luteal before i start making dramatic generalizations about my mental health. because the vibes are questionable! to say the least.

i had a bizarre dream that Q took me to some gigantic pool party in “pittsburgh” even though i’m quite sure pittsburgh has never and will never look like that. i either jumped or fell off some hundred-story building but felt sort of calm about it, everything that would or would not be, during my free fall downwards. because i was landing in water i knew i had a chance at survival, so i stuck my feet out straight and sharp like a blade and blew air out my nose as if it were just a regular cannonball. i plunged deep into the pool or the lake or whatever it was, alive, even though the moments during which i waited for my body to return to the surface like a buoy were the longest and most terrifying of all—far worse than that minute-long plummet to the earth.

finally i was able to swim to shore which became the side of a resort-style pool with a deck and a bar and the whole nine yards. everyone was congratulating me as though i had just won gold in the olympic high dive. i didn’t have the heart to tell them that survival often looks so hard-earned and extraordinary from the outside that it can even seem like fun, which it’s not.

i woke up exhausted by the spectacle of it all and depressed by the thought of the work day. i should have been excited because i was able to use a lunchtime facebook marketplace appointment as an excuse to work from home, but alas, i’m luteal as luteal can be, so everything sort of feels like a huge slap in the face.

whatever! i’m sitting on the balcony with my coffee and looking as i always do across the valley to the airport, which i’m glad for seeing as it won’t let me forget what i have to do, which is go.

october 24, 2024

it appears that today will be the last warm day. thank god and boohoo. the usual sentiment.

it has been difficult to wake up and more specifically to get out of bed lately – a familiar stunted, listless feeling i’ve attributed in the past to a variety of things, including but not limited to depression, hangxiety, post-roll serotonin depletion, crippling guilt/shame, unrequited limerence, anxiety (the original), burnout, existential dread, and PMDD.

i’m making a conscious effort to take responsibility for my life but it feels very challenging at the moment. to even conceptualize exercise when the weight of my future as an artist seems to hang over my head every moment of the day like a cartoon anvil threatening to crush me. permission to be unbearable?

october 27, 2024

on sundays especially it is hard to want to do anything that does not directly involve the couch. i don’t feel very strongly about anything but this today. my mom read my last blog post and texted me that i should see a therapist, which does probably mean something. let’s see, what else? G is engaged. i wonder if i will ever love anyone enough to want that.

i don’t care too much for instagram these days but i’m as addicted to it as ever. to perceiving myself. and curating my presentation of self to an almost obsessive degree. i don’t know if there are any clear benefits to this behavior. if it does anything at all for me besides provide yet another illusory mechanism of control. the urge to disappear has never been stronger and yet i love posting as i always have – it is a way to engage with the world from a distance that feels safer, less draining, getting to choose what i receive in return, if anything.

i’m avoiding doing laundry because i’ve heard through the grapevine that the dryers don’t work right now, and i don’t feel like walking all the way down there if that’s the case. god forbid i get stuck on the ground floor with two loads of wet laundry. god, forbid that! a funny concept to command god not to allow something to happen, but we obviously don’t think about it that way when we say it.

god please give me the strength
to do things differently
to go to bed and not look at my phone
to wake up and get in the shower
and not look at my phone
to want what you want for you
because you want it
to love you anyway
to do it from afar
because that does feel better
to take my time back
to tell it like it is
because everything else
is telling it like it isn’t

december 15, 2024

the cold moon. last full moon of the year and i’m running up and down the stairs doing my laundry between watching yellowstone (i just need to finish it so i can move on with my life!) and making spaghetti and meatballs. i felt proud of myself when i realized i didn’t even really need to look up a recipe for the meatballs. there are certainly reasons why looking up a recipe would have been the better option but in my mind this is “how you learn to make a meatball.” a surprisingly cloudless night sky. tried to think up a cloudy with a chance of meatballs joke but nothing felt quite right.

A came with me to the smoke shop today and i bought my first pipe since i was maybe 19. it’s long and green and elegant like gandalf’s which is literally what it’s called. it was irresistible even though i had mentally committed to a bubbler. it appears that was not god’s plan for me! anyway i got high. and while washing my face post season 5 episode 2 i thought about all the long term lies i’ve expended so much precious energy and peace maintaining, how i’ve been sneaky and scared and abused and hid it, fallen in love and hid it, fallen out of love and lost friends and needed help and hid it.

looking back it feels like a near constant – in truth and in my emotional memory as it exists chronologically. what a waste of an inner life. lying and protecting and coddling and quieting and ultimately just lying. i never had to do all that. and so now i wonder if i’ve become subconsciously dependent on (like a chemical addiction) this state of constant paranoia and fear just under the surface, so that these days when it doesn’t exist and i have consciously, intentionally banished the symptom, the cause returns over and over again like a wart.

and this is how in a way i’ve become what every day i seek to destroy: this invisible virus in my blood i can’t cure. it’s been happening for 10 years or so right under my nose, and i’ve never seen nor understood it – that i can just let myself relax. any moment i can do that. and stop fucking things up for myself. because so many of these good things i’ve earned or fought or asked for and lord knows i should enjoy them. what if i could enjoy them?

later A facetimed me so we could virtually smoke a bowl together. he asked me what i was writing about and i explained or sort of paraphrased the concept of when you’re stoned so often that being sober makes you feel higher than being stoned. your brain’s experience is relative based on regularity, habit. and also on the subject of being stoned i love that cannabis helps me to see more clearly the way i believe things actually are, to look at situations and circumstances with curiosity rather than fear.

i guess the only thing to do is the work and then the play. a bunch of times over and over again until the next time i surprise myself with myself, walking through the door i can’t see yet but know is there.

february 7, 2025

i always think the pen will be more difficult to put back together than it is. i pull my perfect 0.7 from my purse in its two pieces and thankfully the ink has not escaped to anywhere and i’m looking back and forth between them like i have a wily contraption on my hands when in reality all i really have to do is screw one side into the other – one simple, fluid motion.

something’s gotta give and something will. i am stretched and spread thin and it’s not as sexy as it sounds. i love the whoosh of cars going by on the wet road outside and that this is not the first time i’ve written that and that it rained today, a chance to sprout new leaves.

i’ve thought a lot about it and i’m not scared of what i might be. it’s true i can only become what i am.

obsession of the week

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they said it couldn’t be done but i did it with a witness – i went to portland in january and didn’t see a single cloud. A picked me up from the airport on friday morning; when we got back to her apartment she left to give a demo at work for a few hours and i waited in a short but slow-moving line outside the tiny diner across the street, stomach growling.

it was sunny and freezing and i shared a sliver of sunlight with the woman in front of me who first complimented my coat and then proceeded to tell me, unrelatedly, about her recent cruise through the panama canal, which i think seemed more interesting than it would have had it been at all relevant to the conversation.

not everything you wait for is worth waiting for. i ordered the veggie scramble and it was so mediocre it was almost transcendent, only because it was so obviously aware of its averageness and was not seeking to obscure it. i took my headphones off to eat and stared mostly at the old action figures hung haphazardly throughout the restaurant. unsurprisingly i find that when my senses become too involved with each other, they start to bicker.

as i got up from my seat at the counter, full of biscuit and eggs and mushrooms and potatoes, my leg brushed against the leg of the woman next to me. i apologized and she apologized and i felt embarrassed but only because it was the most un-awkward thing ever to happen, made awkward by each of our assumptions that it was awkward for the other person, which it wasn’t. there is much we are losing to a lack of concern and as much if not more we are losing to an overabundance of it.

do i decide my concern or is it intrinsic like breathing? in A’s bed without A i had a dream i kissed my friend’s girlfriend and then a nightmare that i accidentally left a message thread open so that when the other person responded it appeared as though i had opened and read it immediately. every morning i wake up and my heart is throbbing in pain; something punching it concave into a bowl or a spoon that could hold anything in theory but in actuality holds nothing.

five days later in vancouver i walked to the coffee shop on the corner and ordered a flat white, fantasized about a world that does not exist in which potentiality is plenty.

it’s common knowledge i’m addicted to wanting what i can’t have but i think i also have a penchant for having what i don’t want. it’s a fascinating phenomenon wherein i seem to lose consciousness during the choosing, negotiating, and agreeing phases and regain it somewhere between denial, avoidance, and abandonment. it’s like waking up post-bender with a credit statement you couldn’t explain if you tried. i’m getting looser and looser with money which to be honest is never a good sign.

on the train from portland to seattle i am disappointed. it’s as broad a feeling as it sounds though there are specifics that make it feel more momentarily tangible: it’s both so hot and so cold that i take my coat on and off four times. the window is so filthy i can hardly see the world beyond it. i never see the ocean or what i imagine should be the ocean. not once! and my coffee (one cup free with my business class ticket!) tastes like when i lived in washington d.c. for the summer and my sort-of boyfriend broke up with me via text. that was in 2017 and i ate cereal with soy milk and bananas every morning. not the sort of headspace i would willingly revisit.

monday morning in seattle and the sun also rises, so i spend a bright afternoon strolling through the arboretum, listening to aragorn and arwen’s theme from lord of the rings. each thematic area of the park is labeled with a picket sign that makes the whole experience feel categorical and contained, more like a theme park than i would argue it should. then again, we impart our desire for order on the wildest things, our gardens, even, so this should come as no surprise. even i am guilty of alphabetizing my herbs on the windowsill.

in the camellias i approach a small stone bench and suddenly lock eyes with a rogue coyote, still as night. my heart, the whole world stops. i know i’m in no danger because if i was, i’d know that instead. he just sort of appears there, i assume from the brush, but since i didn’t see him emerge, i can’t say for sure. i feel like kayce and the wolf in yellowstone and wait for some prophetic vision to show me something i don’t want to see. none comes. it’s just as well. slowly he turns toward the trees and i walk two miles back to the bus stop in platform sneakers.

i am impractical and irrational and still god asks to see me. even in my most unremarkable moments, waking up sweaty with my bangs splayed like static-tousled fur in all directions, a sense of mysticism follows me around like i’ve been skunked and can’t outrun the lingering scent.

the night of the coyote encounter i slept in an early 20th century mansion, now an odd-but-charming inn run by a man who i couldn’t pay to stop yapping about the pocket doors in the dining room. i woke up to my alarm at 4:30 a.m. and tried and failed to get tickets to a music festival in albania, the whole time from the window hearing the unmistakable ruckus of children playing.

shudder. ignore the dead. back to sleep. wake up again too soon. feel like the depressed person in a movie. pet the inn cat. pack suitcase. take the bus. check into hotel. watch people talk. do no talking. eat sesame ball. hide in the antique store. remember kurt cobain. flirt with the thrice-my-age owner of the wine bar. drink free wine. smoke a cigarette with the inventor of google earth. wait to become different. walk past the gum wall alone at midnight. consider throwing phone into the sound. decide against it. get lost. get found. get drunk. get lost again.

in motion towards vancouver, i’m the opposite of disappointed, which can mean whatever you imagine it to mean. it’s impossible to leave without also arriving, except for on this misty train, where the endless sea seems to stretch to your doorstep like the storm scene in ponyo. my bowl-shaped heart that holds nothing: should i call it a sieve? should i call it a strainer? should i call it a colander? that won’t change what it is and has always been: open. it’s holey and holy and incapable of keeping.

mentally i list everything moving through me: the old man waving from the sand, sailboats in a row, the sun exploding in the water. i watch them go and let go and get sad in the old way. another scent i can’t outrun; even the animals find me.

shorebirds freckle the horizon. they seem to all get along. i think i learned to like seagulls after seeing one up close. no one loves me like you did and thank god for that. i hope nobody loves me like you did again.

obsession of the week

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my flight from auckland leaves on tuesday, january 2nd and i land in los angeles on tuesday, january 2nd. no time seems to pass because time is moving backwards. not really, but i suppose in every way that matters on paper. sipping my paper cup of chardonnay and half-watching an episode of the office i’ve seen sixteen times while i choke down my plane pasta, i realize this is the closest to (sober) time travel i’ve ever gotten or will get.

weeks later i think about having watched the office on the plane while i’m in the car on the way to K’s; S is driving and it’s dark out so i’m peering into every house i can get my nosy little eyeballs on. at least two households are watching the office, or at least like me half-watching; i know i’m wrong but want to assume everyone’s seen them all as many times as i have.

we’re passing a can of hard kombucha back and forth like a 40, which feels so benign and almost goofy it can’t possibly be illegal. it is, in fact, illegal and we know this, obviously. i trick myself into carelessness by imagining (and genuinely trusting the feasibility of) a hypothetical scenario in which i could easily fool a cop into believing it’s soda.

“it’s kinda funny, don’t you think? going to the office all day, and then coming home to watch the office,” he says, watching the road and not the houses.

“sort of dystopian,” i agree, swigging from the can. i take comfort in knowing i only watched it on the plane. and, besides, whatever i said or did while time traveling cannot be held against me in a court of law. trust that i would know considering this is generally the sort of information that applies to me.

yesterday afternoon A sent me a very smiley photo of herself on a walk through her new neighborhood and it reminded me that i should probably leave my apartment if i’m interested in maintaining my serotonin for the remainder of the winter. i went for my own walk shortly after and then again this morning around 7:30.

i stood facing the mountains in the pre-dawn glow, their hard-line silhouette shrouded in pinkish orange the way it can only be at that hour. i felt the cold like a snake wrapping itself around my legs, bare inside my baggy jeans, too exposing a garment for january. i couldn’t stand and wait for sunrise. i guess i just didn’t want to. what i wanted was to get home before the light pierced my apartment, to sip my coffee sans blinding in the calm, quiet blue. i savor the part where nothing has happened yet. knowing plenty will happen and now welcoming it, thank god, with my luteal waning.

what is there to say? i’m happy and it’s making me suspicious, which i hate. looking over my shoulder all the time as if my mind could crumble like something haphazardly constructed at the drop of a hat. this distrust: a good way to ensure you spend none of your time enjoying the good and all of your time building a useless fence around an empty field. just sit in the field and shut up!

i’m about to get my period and the hunger is relentless in more ways than one. i cherish the fact that i know this deeply – that for the first time in my adult life i am one with my body in the sense that i am not just driving the car but also the engine and the battery and the carburetor and whatever. i liked the idea of that metaphor but i literally had to google “car parts.” proof that sometimes the idea chooses you.

standing over my small plate of unwashed radishes i can hardly believe how beautiful they are. i feel in a way i am seeing through them in that their true essence, radish, is clear to me as anything. it goes without saying that this is a somewhat psychedelic experience. washing them, cutting them, salting them feels like violence. i dip them in hummus.

i think i used to think a lot more about everything, but maybe i was just high. i find that less often than i used to i am seeing the “true essence” of vegetables, for example. maybe this is for the best. maybe god is bored of the same old conversation.

god is real for that. i get sick of it too. rehashing the same five existential talking points at parties because talking about anything else would be untrue or disingenuous. it’s sort of underwhelming when you think about it like that. life doesn’t get bigger. you just see more of it over time and then it ends up feeling smaller.

there was more real life in my plate of radishes than anything i saw on tiktok this week, though it’s probably a close call. i don’t resent or ridicule people for reaching out to touch the void. it beckons like a stranger’s house at night.

obsession of the week

just trust me on this one! what’s crazy is that cottage cheese has been my OOTW before, but the good culture double cream, specifically, deserves its own 15 minutes.

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my first thought is that i wish it was raining. i wake up at 6, head full and sloshy like a coconut, half-read a text from J sort of cryptic but clear in a way only a text from your best friend can be. i listen to the “abstract mix” spotify has created for me while i shower; i hardly notice when i cut myself shaving because i’m not wearing my glasses and my nails are the same color as my blood.

brushing my hair out i can only think about the video i’d make to the song that’s playing, appearing clearly through the chaos of shuffle lately – the idea returning like the sun such that if i ignore it this time i’m sure it will move on to someone else. i fear my inbox is full. so to speak. and the subsequent way i keep moving my life around like food on my plate. never letting the meat touch the vegetables. alternating bites as not to favor one over the other. as not to finish one pile and have so much left of the other. as not to have to choose. nor taste them in my mouth at once. keeping it all separate and the endless, restless obligation that comes with tending to each of them. what would happen if i mixed it all together? would i still want to eat it? though it seems unlikely, i want to believe i can still surprise myself one afternoon with a flexibility i have never possessed.

the air is thick and hazy and no doubt poisonous. i can glean this with a simple glance out the living room window. the poisonousness. still fresh in my mind, i remember the florida air was different like someone paid $9.99 a month to have its toxins omitted. haven’t we become so used to this: that anything good should cost us. and more specifically, that we should have to keep paying, and when we can’t pay, we should lose the good thing. and a bad thing should appear in its stead. the thing we deserved in the first place.

before the kacey musgraves concert in orlando i walked to publix from our hotel to get a bottle of wine for H and i to drink while we got ready and after checking my ID (which because it’s from utah people always assume is fake) the woman at the counter said i was exactly two days older than her son. i said wow, he must be pretty cool and she said he would have been, but he passed away. and because there was nothing else to say i said i’m so sorry and she said it‘s okay. because his mother is pretty cool too.

then i’m walking back to the hotel along the lake and it’s a perfect florida fall evening – sunny and 65 – all the gangly oak branches low and making shadows on everything flat, which is everything, remnants of resident geese smattered like a sprawling pollock on the sidewalk. then A calls and i pick up and he says he’s on his way to get a haircut. just wanted to say hi. and we talk about my trip so far and both make jokes about nothing and laugh. and i love that moment: both of us suspended somewhere between the stationary points of our own lives, existing peacefully together inside our limbo as we always have. i do love him so much and the sadness has mostly gone. neither willing to abandon the other so always doing anything to forgive. and even sometimes forget. like now, with the quiet, golden autumn all over me, in this buoyant and horrific swamp where no pain can survive.

a week later, the distinct feeling of a code cracked, a level finally beat, the crumbling of a wall, revealing a vast expanse of new territory. on friday after V’s art show we went back to K’s and drank too much wine and i talked too much in general but nobody made me feel bad about it. and then the sun came up and i played music for what ended up being 4 hours, what with pushing the right buttons or like a secret spell accidentally uttering the right combination of words and ending up in god’s living room, which is what people really mean when they say they’re in the flow state.

i have a cold and am trying to force myself to be productive which is obviously not going very well. drinking ginger turmeric tea like a potion that could and should instantly heal me. have to think of it that way anyway. even the two extra strength cold and flu pills i choked down seem to do nothing. god, put me back in the body that can smoke a cigarette.

yesterday i got my unicorn tattoo, finally. it happened just like that, out of nowhere, with a fraction of the hoo-rah buildup it might have deserved. i like when good things show up uninvited, the way S used to wander up to the moon house at all hours of the day or night, carrying something obscure she’d reveal nonchalantly like a set of colored pencils or a tub of greek yogurt. J and i on the porch already smoking a spliff and smiling. the way anything in the hands of someone you love is a gift. until it’s not. until it’s one one-way ticket or a knife not meant for the neck of the dinner you’ll share.

i like when good things show up uninvited. less so this head cold. the congestion. the amazon box full of snotty tissues on the right side of my desk. this newly mystical thigh oozing blood and plasma. i’m leaking out all over everything. my gross, wet innards. yeah, be disgusted for a second. my desire to give in to myself. watch yellowstone. watch yellowstone. give yourself tonight. is being sick a special occasion? i did make an astonishing amount of progress at work today for how useless i felt. made chicken and vegetables, not even a carb. well, sweet potatoes. but those hardly count. too many nutrients. too orange to be like bread. does the good negate the bad or does it just outweigh it? this is how i have to think of you, who i love, inexplicably.

obsession of the week

this meal is giving gym bro but don’t be fooled. the real star here is hiding in the top right corner: the herby yogurt sauce i very stupidly denied the spotlight. it makes literally everything better and i would eat it on its own with a spoon. but not in front of anyone.

here’s the tracklist:

• huge scoop of greek yogurt (better be huge)
• 2 tablespoons trader joe’s zhoug sauce (spicy cilantro sauce)
• fresh dill and thyme, chopped
• squeeze of lemon or apple cider vinegar
• 1 clove of garlic, grated
• 1 tablespoon harissa
• za’atar seasoning, sprinkled liberally
• salt & pepper

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i’m embarrassed to admit i was dangerously close to beginning this paragraph with “during the pandemic…”, as if anyone in their right mind (which of course you all are!) would be enchanted by an intro of such traumatic caliber. remember when we were all making art about “hiding behind masks” and diligently washing our groceries? one of my biggest flexes is that i never did that.

in november 2020, i broke things off with my partner of three and a half years. i feel comfortable discussing the incident here because, four years later, i remain blocked on every platform including facebook. after moving out of our shared house in atlanta, i spent six months living at my parents’ house in north florida, foraging my way through what can barely be called winter and writing what i now consider to be reasonably good but relatively bad poems.

saturday morning was the sort of sunshiny perfection you fantasize about in january – cloudless, breezy, somewhere between 60 and 70 degrees. i scooped a massive glob of pesto into my eggs and drank three cups of coffee before 11. by noon we were walking through my favorite local nature preserve, my parents and me, hoping for herons; there were saw palmettos like bumpers on either side of the sandy trail. spanish moss hung in curly tresses from the oaks and we stood between them looking up through the sunlit branches, safe inside their weightless, undulating tentacles, a tiny room of the world i felt lucky to live inside, if only for a moment.

every moment ends and you walk on. we walked on, stopping to sit in the curved arm of another oak growing sort of diagonally toward nothing. toward everything i think naively is nothing. with the back of my head resting on rough bark my scalp hardly registered as unusual or uncomfortable i wanted to talk out loud about how i used to come here as a child, how i used to come here when i lived in town for those six feverish months, but something i’ve learned about nostalgic rambling is that it should be reserved mostly for new lovers and cocaine benders. otherwise it’s sort of like telling people about your weird dream: generally irrelevant and uninteresting to everyone but you.

does any amount of personal sharing indicate an irredeemable level of self-absorption? as someone who blogs about the trivial details of her life i want to believe this is not the case. but i fear that it is the case. i fear that we are heading towards a collective self-absorption so consequential that the very fabrics of our brains are evolving (derogatory) as we speak. this is not a novel concept but the WALL-E of it all never fails to disturb me. i believe we should all be thinking about it more often if only to think about something other than ourselves.

i’m in st. pete now and my sister is working at the hospital and i am at the best coffee shop i’ve been to in a long time, possibly the best in the world; i think we should bring back cozy coffee shops and stop pretending that any of us actually like those uninspired white boxes we keep pouring our money into like we have equity in them. they are about as enjoyable to exist inside as is the hospital. if i wanted to hang out at the hospital i would have gone to work with my sister.

i love when it’s obvious that someone was paid a large sum of money to design a place because it appears very much so cohesive and designed, but equally or perhaps more so i love when a place feels more like someone’s home, eclectic and reflective of the collective life being lived by all who spend time there.

on the walls here are bread and puppet posters surrounded by tender polaroids of both serious and smiling faces; the bulletin board is overflowing with local classifieds, business cards, event flyers, hyper-niche clubs that need joining. there is a guitar propped up against a cabinet i genuinely believe you would not get in trouble for playing. all the tables and chairs and couches are mismatched and all the soft sitting places have that beautiful little butt hollow, a tangible product of real life sitting.

it would not feel so good to be alone if i knew or felt that i was the only person in the world. i am uninterested in simulating an idealistic sterility, in real life nor online, because the truth about our lives together in this cauldron is that we are all very much contaminated by each other, constantly and always. you can wash your hands and avoid eye contact and sit on a backless metal stool and appear pointedly uninterested and still the essence of everyone and everything clings to you like lint. you are not above any of it because you are it, and i understand this might read like a post-acid revelation, but in reality it is a pretty simple fact; you could have gleaned it on your twelfth or perhaps thirteenth evening walk, which is actually pretty early on in the series of evening walks that spans your lifetime.

i’m not mad; i’m just disappointed. i watch a woman and her pitbull through the window; she’s talking to an older man who stopped to pet the dog, this neighborhood diorama, the row of old florida houses behind them a cinematic backdrop with their wrap-around verandas and their palm trees and the hot pink azaleas in ferocious bloom on this last day of november.

everywhere seems better than utah right now and i can’t tell if it’s just because i live in utah. in the sat-in seat of this chartreuse armchair i think of all that i have and i love it: what i have. i love my apartment even though every month they charge me over $400 in miscellaneous, increasingly creative fees. i love my job even though my screen time is through the roof and my eyes have taken on a potentially permanent sort of glaze. i love salt lake even though the air is poison and negronis are illegal. i love myself even though i betray myself. i love you even though you don’t or can’t love me.

chatting at the round table adjacent to me are three college students, a trio so noticeably diverse they appear cast by the coffee shop for PR purposes. i know they are in college because i’ve been eavesdropping on their conversations for the past two hours. the boy wants to change his major from history to english even though he’s a junior now and it’s probably too late. white sweater girl just got in a car accident so she was going to have to walk home but girl with braids insists on giving her a ride because it’s on her way, and besides, she won’t see her until january because she was planning on going back to india with her family for winter break but now they’re going to hawaii instead, so it’ll be nice to have the extra time together, even if it’s just five minutes.

the palm shadows are lengthening across the cobblestone street, the aesthetic temperature of everything turned up, the tactile temperature of everything turned down. because this place exists outside of my most up-to-date conception of autumn it surprises me that the sun should have to go down as early here as it does everywhere else. it seems i won’t have time for the evening walk i’d planned on, which is a shame, because i’m pretty sure i was due for a oneness revelation.

alone in the best way because i know i’m not, i’m driving my sister’s new honda civic across the bridge back to tampa to pick her up from her shift at the hospital. it’s sunset and i’m heading east, the sky a big orange smear in the rearview mirror. i am exhausted by this act of leaving, exhilarated by the simultaneous returning. i pick her up in the parking garage and she’s excited to announce no one died during her shift.

when we get back to H’s apartment we get changed to go out dancing at a rooftop bar downtown and while we’re putting our makeup on i say “i wonder what’s gonna happen” and don’t elaborate and this makes her laugh, the way no one can argue with this kind of vague ubiquity. i do wonder. and i love that i can say it and we just keep laughing, because it can always get worse in the same way it can always get better; like the dichotomy of awake vs. asleep you’re always either fucking around or finding out.

the next morning i’m driving her to the hospital again and not as hungover as i very well could be, holding in my hand like a small and beautiful bird my gratitude that i have never really had to drive to the hospital before, save the few times a year i go to the dermatologist or the obgyn or the eye doctor or whoever. it’s quiet for a while and then we pass a sign for the emergency room and i tell her i hope she has a good day and she says “i wonder what’s gonna happen.”

i laugh and the sound fills me up warm like whiskey and i don’t tell her about earlier in the ride when i could have ran the yellow light with seconds to spare but stopped instead and waited for it to turn red, because i knew she’d make it to her shift just fine, and besides, after tuesday it’ll be weeks before i see her again, returning to utah and my life i love despite all those things i said before, so it’s nice to have the extra time together, even if it’s just five minutes.

obsession of the week

my first ever okonomiyaki from chanko in tampa, which is without question one of the coolest eating establishments i’ve been to in years. this meal blew my mind and i did not want it to be over. chicken katsu, crepes, yakisoba noodles, cabbage, leeks, bean sprouts, fried egg, furikake, aonoriko, tempura crisps, house okonomi sauce, spicy japanese mayo, & japanese pickles.

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i’m delighted to announce there is now a place to sit in my apartment that is not the couch. it’s not that the couch was such a horrible place to sit as much as i was starting to become the sort of person one would describe or at least mentally depict as very much on-the-couch. which doesn’t feel as good as it might sound, depending on your status as an on or off-the-couch sort of person. i apologize for the binarycore.

the desk chair is new, but i’ve had the desk for months, which i’m sure of because the leaves were green on the street where i picked it up. said desk (corner, chrome) is sort of an odd height – it’s adjustable, but somehow, none of the preset options seem quite conventional. i tried to simulate sitting at it, pulled a patio chair from the balcony as a test subject, but no matter how i contorted my lower half, i felt too big or too small or too fidgety to conjure even a spiritual outline of the chair that should exist there.

for a while i refreshed facebook marketplace and pretended i might be able to guess the dimensions of this dream chair, as if i could ever be satisfied with just anything, as if just anything could ever compare to the one.

do you believe in the one? this won’t surprise you, but as soon as i pulled out the tape measure, and i did end up pulling out the tape measure, the one appeared to me the next morning like a desert mirage. it was lovely, antique, turquoise velvet and wood, a C-shaped relic of yesteryear in which i knew i’d be content to while away the hours. it was real, it was $40, and it seemed to match both my aesthetic and dimensional requirements. all that was left to do was beat the other pickers to the punch.

if you choose to dedicate yourself to the pursuit of enviable items on facebook marketplace, which i both do and don’t recommend, enduring a competitive environment akin to the hunger games: catching fire is an aspect of the lifestyle you’ll need to learn to contend with. you will spend hours, days, weeks, months searching for a six-tier walnut bookshelf, and then someone will post a six-tier walnut bookshelf during the only meeting you have all week (one hour in duration). by the time your meeting is over, a local nara smith type will already be on her way to claim it. this is the way of the world. this is the facebook marketplace circle of strife, though my personal ability to take the heat has allowed me to remain in the kitchen.

listening to blue velvet in my blue velvet chair, sipping my tiny chalice of after-dinner amaro, the ugly, unfettered essence of night evades me. i took a small bite from the plate of victory and it will sustain me as it always does until my next pursuit. now i lounge like a villain in the candlelight, the visceral correctness of my lower half confirmation of my choice, and wait to think of something else to think about.

with the earworm quality of a black eyed peas chorus, the couch circles my mind like a shorebird. last night curled up on it with A we realized we were on the same episode of yellowstone, even though we had never watched it together before. this is the sort of magical occurrence that, once discovered, i will bring up ten to fifteen times throughout the course of the night. “can you believe we didn’t even know?” it’s because i can’t believe we didn’t even know!

somewhere towards the end of the second season we’re shown for the first time a memory of john’s father, and i commented to A how much i enjoyed this visual depiction. sort of hazy, oversaturated, but no flashback ripple like that’s so raven. i wish my memories looked like that, and not like they were filmed in 480p on the world’s jankiest camcorder.

when and if i want to find it, where does the past begin? i go looking for words down that hallway and find nothing but short, silent movies.

already so many questions. too much uncertainty to bear. this morning i liked an instagram post before i realized it was a sponsored ad. how does one cope with such a thing? the bleak reality of this transgression? i’m addicted to my phone in a new way and acceptance, despite what i’ve heard, does not feel like it should be the first step.

my chalice is empty so i move to the kitchen to make tea. this is mostly how the evenings go now that the sun is in australia or argentina or wherever. in the pantry i discover a mostly-empty box of “breathe deep” yogi tea i’m positive has survived my past three residences. i start the kettle and, with difficulty, consciously resist the urge to look at instagram while i wait for the water to boil. that i have strayed this far from the lord both concerns and amuses me.

because i am not looking at my screen i am looking at the kettle, and mindlessly, like a child, reach out to touch the metal. obviously, i burn myself, and, strangely, can only stand and smile, not because i burned myself, but because i am marveling at this behavior – what was very clearly a very odd, very stupid thing to do. it is hard not to consider the fact that this never would have happened had i simply been looking at instagram.

for a few seconds, which seems all i can manage in terms of interest vs. expected benefit, i hold my tender, swelling fingertip to a package of frozen scallion pancakes. i understand this may appear at first glance an odd choice of ice pack, but it’s the only thing i currently have in my freezer. in the absence of choice, i fear, where there were once choosers, there are only beggars.

i feel entirely unchanged by this incident save my slightly increased thirst. after pouring the hot water more attentively than usual i remember with delight the legendary allure of yogi tea: the esoteric, often nonsensical fortunes attached to each bag.

it is the light in the lantern which shows you the path, not the lantern.

i pause briefly after this initial digestion and say “huh” out loud, then tilt the tiny square of paper towards the lamp and reread it what must be dozens of times. i suppose i am looking for the lightbulb that, four to eight years ago, would have warranted a feature on my instagram story, but this seems to be earnestly affecting me in that i cannot bring myself to reduce it to ephemeral noise.

this is one of the few moments since moving at the beginning of september that i am somewhat shocked to look around and realize i live alone. i want to shout up the staircase to A and say, “what do you make of this?”, an instinct so natural and reflexive to me it feels impossible that she could have moved to portland weeks ago. i can’t text her, either, because this exchange only makes sense in person, though maybe i’m underestimating her capacity for cringe, or rather overestimating how cringe an ordeal this actually is.

when charged with weighing the senses, at least in terms of contribution to belief, is it sight or touch that most easily solidifies our trust? does the light guide us because it is the thing that ousts the dark? or does the lantern guide us because it is the thing we can hold and thus control?

the candle is beginning to smell like the candle which is the best part of the second half of every night. i put my feet up on the lip of my chair and think about how much i enjoy doing this: putting my feet up on the lip of my chair. i decide that if i didn’t already i do now believe in the one, the path to which was dark as anything, faith in finding it having nothing whatsoever to do with the lantern nor its light.

the fact is i might never again get what i want, but maybe that has more to do with what i want than what i’ll get.

obsession of the week

my latest facebook marketplace purchase: this beautiful and horrific masterpiece.

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it’s 8:30 p.m. and the hyper-virginal pieces of my new kitchen island (on wheels!) are scattered haphazardly about the living room like dismembered limbs, if you could order a box of dismembered limbs on amazon (free with purchase: bag of indistinguishable screws sure to clog up your junk drawer for the next decade). this is why i do my furniture shopping almost exclusively on facebook marketplace: i’m not cursed with the tedium of having to put anything together myself, and i don’t have to ask anyone to help me unless whatever i’m buying doesn’t fit in my car.

in this case, however, i needed a kitchen island (on wheels!) of a very specific size, because i can’t put my new coffee maker in its rightful place on the counter next to the sink until the microwave gets the hell out of the way. enter: the amazon purchase. okay, glad we cleared that up.

for a while i avoided telling people when i ordered something on amazon because for a while i felt really guilty about ordering things on amazon. amazon, i believe, is a moral gray area, because it’s really not my fault or yours that jeff bezos is an evil billionare. i’m not going to sit around all day attempting to prove to you what a righteous anti-capitalist i am. i needed a kitchen island (on wheels!), and i needed it to be exactly 26” wide. in a bezos-less utopia, i would call up the community carpenter to commission such a project, but unfortunately he was busy this week and my displaced coffee maker was starting to get impatient.

it’s 8:30 a.m. and i’m eating breakfast on my balcony: fried eggs on buttered sourdough with avocado and hot sauce. i wonder when the bus goes by if the people look up and see me at my tiny wooden table and say i wonder if she’s been waiting her whole life for this? because i do wonder if they wonder and if it’s obvious how grateful and ungrateful i feel. that i finally have what i want (my own apartment, a balcony), and still all i can think about is how annoying it is that i have to drive to the post office to pick up my mail, since whatever mechanism exists to keep the all the mail in the mailbox is currently, inexplicably broken.

a week after i got back from spain, i drove up the canyon hoping to catch a whiff of autumn, and quickly discovered that autumn had mostly vacated the premises. i felt almost too tired to care. this was partly because i was still coming down like a roll from the magnificent dopamine explosion that was my trip, and it seemed logical that all my fun points would have already been cashed, like when you trade your full punch card for a free coffee and then you’re back to square one. i had my fair share of goodness. i ate and i licked the plate. it was only right for god to give my fall to someone who needed it more.

i pulled off at the same picnic area i do every year and on my way to sniff the creek caught my eye like a loose thread on a cluster of asters near the parking lot, a sight so precious and unmistakably autumn that i felt my heart swell a centimeter or two. bent down to their height and sharing a holy silence, all i could think was where have you been?, as if it were they who had been gone from this place for weeks and not i.

in hindsight i have to wonder if this transmission was, alternatively, directed at me from the asters, but even considering the possibility makes me feel impossibly vain, as if the asters would ever give two shits about my presence or lack thereof.

vague disappointment quelled by the aster sighting, i took a moment by the creek to feel the opposite of breathless, which is breath-full, even though that sounds stupid.

it’s 6:30 p.m. and from my chair on the balcony, the same one in which i ate my vanilla ice cream with raspberries just seconds (three months) ago, i watch planes circle in the western sky, making shapes in the sunset that seem abstract to me but i know, logically, are not. the aesthetic performance feels more important than analyzing flight paths, which is fine because i’m not a pilot, i’m a lady on her porch.

i consider the metaphors implicated by this half-performed ignorance. does recognizing a pattern automatically imply significance? i guess it’s comforting now to live so close to the airport, knowing somewhere and someone else are never far away.

when there are no planes or i get bored of watching planes, i watch the cranes. the cranes have now been stationed above the temple for so long that my brain is adopting the version of the city skyline with them in it as a somewhat permanent representation. the sight of them both disturbs and frightens me. it amazes me. the scale of it – what we have built to build in the name of god, in the name of our pain and our sins, which are endless. the simple, physical way they shuttle steel through the air like sticks. the feat of it and the uselessness. sometimes i don’t wanna feel those metal clouds.

i tried to drink it away
i tried to put one in the air
i tried to dance it away
i tried to change it with my hair

i ran my credit card bill up
thought a new dress would make it better
i tried to work it away
but that just made me even sadder

i tried to keep myself busy
i ran around in circles
think i made myself dizzy
i slept it away, i sexed it away
i read it away
away

it’s 3:30 p.m. and E calls me while i’m digging through a box in the closet for some obscure cord i wouldn’t know how to google. it’s like a portal opens between our phones and for a while we exist solely in some sort of satellite space, an alternate dimension like a tunnel or a tube. they say “it really is funny, how we get high on our own depression,” and i have to laugh out loud because it is funny and we do.

we talk about language and how we need to care more about understanding than words. we talk about how we need to care about words, too.

E has a knack for pulling you into their container like a fish into its bowl, to make you feel and experience their world rather than just imagine it. no one else speaks to me in this way, and when we hang up, i look up to find a cable in my hand, the one i’d been looking for all day, dangling inscrutably in my palm like the sorcerer’s stone.

the physics of these lapses in bodily presence are a mystery to me, those phantasmal seconds between streams of consciousness during which i must appear a ghost of myself.

one moment it was saturday night and i was smoking a spirit on the bar patio with three of the people i love most in this world, plus two more i also love but had only just met, drinking a draft pacifico which could be the best beer experience there is, laughing about something a professional hypnotist couldn’t bring me to recall. and then the next it was sunday morning, the wee hours, and i was hunched over behind a bush at the lesbian rave (ironic), dizzy as a middle schooler at the county fair. the rapidity of this descent into messiness felt scarier than the episode itself, my consciousness turning for the worse on a dime as though i was ella of frell and someone had ordered me to suffer.

i find oftentimes i drink mindlessly when i am unable to make eye contact with my own anxiety. it’s a sort of passive aggression – my heart asks me what’s wrong and i say “nothing, i’m fine,” and she says, “you’re not fine; look at you,” and i say, “no really, i’m okay,” and then of course i am forced to yield, because i have fallen head first into the bush. i have no leg to stand on when i can’t stand on my own two legs.

in the morning i woke up naked on the couch and found i had knocked a vase of flowers off the coffee table, but i was home and i was alive and i had not driven. i had my keys. i had my wallet. i found my phone in my pants. i felt sure i could retrace my steps and find my dignity discarded somewhere between the bar and the party.

it’s 9:30 p.m. and the cranes are still and beautiful, all lit up like christmas trees: one red, one blue. looking at them now i feel an empathy for their plight – oblivious, as the means, to the end they’re doomed to orchestrate.

what would it take to pick my life up like these pieces on the floor? could i become the red crane? could i get out from under myself?

i tried to run it away
thought then my head’d be feeling clearer
i traveled seventy states
thought moving 'round’d make me feel better

i tried to let go my lover
thought if i was alone then maybe i could recover
to write it away or cry it away
away1

obsession of the week

my fall ambience videos du jour…

day:

night:

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i lied when i said you’re never too old to be young. i knew i had to come clean about this the moment i walked into my hostel in barcelona, post 8 hour train ride, and found myself screaming in the face of the beautiful woman seated at the front desk over possibly the loudest techno i’ve ever heard. let it be known that i have, in my short-but-full life, heard some very loud techno.

it’s possible that too old is just the wrong choice of words – i think more often we mean that we’ve had a given experience enough times previously that we’ve become, at best, bored, and at worst, exhausted by the idea of repeating it. in this case, i don’t think i felt yet bored nor exhausted, though perhaps not necessarily thrilled about chafing my vocal chords at such an inopportune time. my vocal capacity, these days, does not feel as renewable a resource as it used to.

the sun does not wake me, but my alarm does. i’m in the habit of holding myself to a reasonable schedule while traveling, lest i allow some pesky techno lullaby to thwart my next day’s plans. i drag myself, limp with the lingering resonance of bass, to the communal bathroom and am greeted in the women’s showers by a half-naked french man, his elegant, tanned fingers oily with hair product.

“bonjour!” he croons predictably, hardly looking up from his pomade. i’m sure you would agree there is little i can do in this scenario except claim what limited recourse is available to me: greet him likewise and hope my horrific french accent is offensive enough to deter him from interacting with me further.

dressed in more or less the same outfit i’ve been wearing for a week and a half, i head downstairs to determine whether or not the hostel’s “free breakfast” offering feels safe to eat, both literally and spiritually. it’s always the meat that chooses for me – if it looks like it could have been 3D printed, i’ll cut my losses and find a croissant on my way to whatever church i’m marveling at that morning.

the ham passes the test, though you couldn’t pay me to actually eat it, so i grab a plate and make myself a small pile of bread, cream cheese, and cucumbers. this unexpected combination quickly conjures images of a childhood tea party, which of course delights me deeply. i eat quietly, sipping my café con leche, trying and failing not to obsess over how those self-service espresso machines are able to dispense such flawlessly foamed milk.

after much deliberation, i conclude that the machine’s frothing techniques are none of my business, and somewhat thoughtlessly brush the thousand-odd crumbs off the front of my sweatshirt before shoving my sunglasses onto my face and checking my purse for my keys on the off chance they grew legs, jumped overboard, or evaporated at some point during my tea party.

they did not. PKW and we’re off – all the way to the awning just outside the front door, where unfortunately it’s hard not to notice how violently it’s pouring. rats! backpacking does not typically afford you the luxury of an umbrella; in my particular case on account of the fact that my personal item (deteriorating brown paper bag) is filled to the brim with four vintage dresses, three shirts, a box of tampons, and a gigantic plastic water bottle i still haven’t thrown away for some reason. like i said, no space for an umbrella.

plus, i kind of forgot about rain. it hasn’t rained nor even threatened to rain since i arrived in spain, and even before that, back home in salt lake, i couldn’t tell you the last time i saw anything but sun emojis appear on my weather app. this train of thought, naturally, arrives at the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain, which makes me laugh out loud so abruptly i have to physically cover my mouth.

unlike the french-man-in-the-shower incident, i have a few options in this scenario, which i thought it might be fun to consider together:

• go back inside and risk losing my keys (i’m not sure why i’m having this i’m-gonna-lose-my-keys premonition, but it feels like i shouldn’t ignore it)

• venture onward in the rain with gusto and inevitably become soaked

• hop stealthily between awnings, balconies, tunnels, and patio umbrellas until i stumble upon an establishment with umbrellas for purchase

obviously, there are arguments for returning inside, but bizarre gut feeling aside, i don’t feel like wasting the morning listening to bad hostel music, today’s playlist so far consisting mostly of ed sheeran. full offense if you like ed sheeran!

number three appears the clear answer to me, and let me tell you why. it sounds like a lot of fun. and because i am so delirious on the dopamine of having activated my inner child with the whole tea party thing, it feels only right to keep the party going with some behavior akin to the floor is lava. i may be too old for bedtime techno, but i’ll never be too old for the floor is lava.

you must be amazed that i’ve written twelve paragraphs and have not yet arrived at the part in the story where i leave the hostel. keep in mind that at this point it must be 8:30 a.m., which in spain is more like 5:30 a.m., in terms of number of people awake who are willing and able to sell you an umbrella.

okay, this is the part where i leave the hostel, energized by my perfectly (yet mysteriously) frothed latte and the thrill of playing a game against myself, which if you know anything about astrology is essentially the entire virgo experience.

let there be no confusion – this was no mere drizzle. we’re talking drops the size of, like, blueberries or something, all coming down at once in a way blueberries never should. laser-focused, brow furrowed, i put four or five blocks behind me, leaping between overhangs with precision rivaling the cast of ocean’s 8 (excluding rihanna).

suddenly, i see them. exiting a hotel of at least four stars: a family of four, mother and father towing son and daughter between the ages of 8 and 10, straight out of a disney channel original movie.

with no umbrella(s) to be seen, i assume they’ve come straight from the concierge’s desk, eager as i am to start the day as though the downpour were a mere green screen behind the ever-dry reality of their vacation.

i follow them like prey, a now slightly damp lion stalking a small and impossibly domestic herd of well-groomed zebras. sure enough, after only a minute of attempting to look as mentally stable as possible while actively pursuing a family of four, we reach what appears to be the only store open in a three-mile radius.

the umbrellas are not difficult to locate, as it seems a festive sort of display has been stationed at the front of the store like seasonally appropriate candy. they’re charging a premium. and who can blame them? it’s like they know the alternative is ed sheeran.

i regret to inform you that my new umbrella, though chic, does little to protect my shoes and socks from the onslaught of water continuing to pelt the earth, the sidewalk becoming gradually less visible beneath glossy, distorted reflections of the city above. i am now stepping unabashed in the lava, eliciting a reflexive “i don’t wanna play anymore!”, but because i have committed to the game, i commit to the final score. rain has me 1-0, but i’m not a sore loser. i decide i’m heading toward the art museum, which everyone knows is better in the gloom anyway.

the worst part about having wet socks are the first five minutes of having wet socks. after that, like taking a cold shower or sitting for a tattoo, your body adjusts to the discomfort.

alone with a very wet barcelona, which is exactly as sexy as it sounds, i feel reality begin and end within the confines of my umbrella. i am safe beneath it, contained, watching the city writhe and breathe like an animal alive. i absorb it like a movie, like a story, like a song, like from my seat i can touch my life, but it can’t quite touch me.

inside the timelessness of this morning, age is lost on me entirely. i sense balcony plants swelling with relief and pass ornate architectural masterpieces i’ve only ever glimpsed on tumblr. gaudí understood the dream, and not a dream in particular as much as the concept of the dream itself: to transcend what is given, to exist in waking reality beyond what is seen and known. the surreal and abstract made tactile is a feat, which i know for sure is true because i’ve seen the lava, and stepped in it.

obsession of the week

this jacket by nude project. bury me in it!

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I wake suddenly with a desperate gasp as though taking my first breath, as though out of a dream, except it is not as if out of a dream—it is quite literally out of a dream. The year is 2024 and I am 26 years old, napping on the train from Bilbao to Barcelona.

What shocks me so thoroughly, so immediately, is the greenest green of the Spanish countryside, this northern expanse I have not yet seen and which contrasts so dramatically with the arid, rocky, dry-grass landscapes of the south. From Madrid to San Sebastián: thousands of stooping sunflowers, an ocean of yellow that can only be described self-referentially, their heads all bowed as if in prayer, eerily identical.

So often the eerie does lend to the holy and vice versa. Jakub, not religious, who has a cathedral tattooed on his stomach, finds the whole ordeal of churchgoing quite separate from the church. Wikipedia describes the San Sebastián cathedral as “endowed with a strong verticality,” which makes me smile considering most of what I remember about being inside it is discussing with Emilia the likeliness of Jesus being hot.

Humans love to love God so much, and most of all prove it, because really why else are we doing all that? When I walked into the empty chapel in the east wing of the Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba, an anomaly in itself, it was like a certain holiness felt exasperated to have been disturbed. Does God, like all of us, deserve some alone time?

Suddenly, the windows darken and I lose my place in my book. Each time we go through a tunnel, I am consumed by an unexplainable dread. The eight hour train ride is starting to feel like an eight hour train ride, and I’ve already eaten all my snacks. The further north we travel, the duration of the journey feeling increasingly endless and untrackable, the fewer sunflowers there are that I can reasonably perceive as reverent rather than distinctly, unmistakably dead.

Time goes on and most everything endures in one way or another. In the caves of Sacromonte above Granada, where flamenco was born and the Romani people lived for centuries, a rogue, borderline offensive bottle of Coca-Cola decorated a lime-washed shelf. Staring at it, I had to wonder if its inclusion was ironic, or perhaps a joke between employees craving a daily laugh amidst the monotony of cave work.

I bought a glass of white wine for 2€ and drank it under a pergola covered in grape vines heavy with ripe purple fruit, looked for a while at the ancient mouths of the cave dwellings and tried to imagine inside them a life I’d never be able to. Silently moved by the achy twang of Spanish guitar crackling from the bar’s speakers, I considered the depth of pain required to create something like flamenco. I don’t shy from this notion—that our wounds beget beginning. Our loneliness is genesis; this alchemy is our task.

The train idles at a station in a tiny village whose name I don’t recognize and I can barely make out a quote from Harry Potter graffitied in English on a brick wall 30 or so yards away. It’s “After all this time? Always,” except the As are both Deathly Hallows symbols, and as they file orderly through the car, I realize there are somehow more than 10 people who live in this town, though I’d never in my life have known it had I not been seated at this window, on this train.

Staring out every window on every train I can’t help but be reminded of the sheer scope of life on this earth, the way we are all sort of flesh-and-blood algorithms, only capable of perceiving and creating using that which we’ve seen and experienced ourselves.

Personally, I delight in seeing Europeans genuinely enjoying their lives. And this does not happen in America as wholeheartedly or at least not with the same level of unabashed shamelessness: a bottle of wine with lunch. People don’t care where they sit to have a beer or a coffee outside. They will sit outside the supermarket. Under a bridge. Beside the highway. It doesn’t matter. There is joy and there is simplicity, and usually they are the same.

Luckily, I don’t starve myself of pleasure in my day to day life, so I don’t need to do anything crazy like order an ice cream with a glass of red wine (I did witness this). My refusal to self-flagellate affords me the gift of tasteful judgement, even on vacation, a too-obvious excuse for excess.

Miraculously, my service on the train is strong enough for Google Maps to load, and I have the rare pleasure of knowing we’re winding slowly through Rioja country. It is incredible to behold: the river, the trees. Vineyards and old brick castles all the way up to the foot of the mountains. I am amazed at the geographic diversity of this country—the beaches, the hills, all the ambiguous in-betweens.

It’s played out, predictable, but I could live here, I think. I want to thrash and scream and cry thinking about the last two years of my life, during which I was too busy fearing my own power to actually go and do anything with or about it. But that time has passed and will not return. So really there is nothing to do but follow the signs I am currently being presented with, in the order in which they appear to me, like timid stars in the dusk.

Do I seem crazier to you? A month into 26 and I’m feeling the weight of my late twenties closing in on me like a coffin lid, to be both morbid and dramatic. The thing is, though I love with all my heart to be young, I refuse to entertain the self-fulfilling prophecy that is considering your age an exempting factor for any given experience or activity. It’s just that my obsession with 20-something hostel living and loving has been freshly, thoroughly reignited, and now, of course, I am stupidly anticipating the end while I remain very much so in the middle.

I did not come to Spain for some grand realization the way I have always sought something groundbreaking and intangible from my travels, even when the desire is subconscious or I resist vocalizing it. But there is a deeply-feeling part of me that is undergoing a distinct rediscovery via this experience—not an uncovering or changing of self as much as a remembering, like a visionary visitation from an ancestor that confirms you are, in fact, cosmically accounted for.

It makes everything—my life in Utah, whoever or whatever has so theatrically occupied my brain and heart over the last months—seem rather unimportant, like a fog has finally been lifted, and the wall of glass around my spirit has been mysteriously cleaned.

So, who do I have to thank? Verdejo? Iberian ham? The French man on the street who said my eyes were like two suns?

I have faded into the background, two humble suns at the cinema, watching it all unfold with unprecedented acceptance and understanding. There is nothing concrete to take home in my suitcase like a souvenir, (except maybe all the vintage dresses I bought in Madrid), because feelings are not for setting on shelves, contrary to what I may have exemplified previously.

I am not a perfect woman nor often even good, but I do love deeply and I want what I have, which is more than many can say, who so clearly just endure it.

What I’m trying to say is I’m not sure yet what any of this means—but I am deeply grateful to be in this state of receiving, of listening, and to have followed my heart all the way here to La Rioja, where despite everything I feel in awe of this life I am still creating every day with my hands, drinking it all down like good vermouth on the terrace, always knowing the orange slice isn’t just for decoration.

obsession of the week

Cancelling plans, locking my doors, and metaphorically throwing my phone in the ocean!

I’m back from a month of traveling and moving into a new apartment and helping to produce a dystopian fashion show and am extremely pleased to announce after the first session of my annual Gilmore Girls rewatch that my cortisol levels are steadily dropping.

Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more about my time in Spain, or if you’re already sick of that and want to talk about something else. Speak now or I’ll spend the next two weeks going on about café culture. Woof!

spotify “on repeat” song of the week

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