I wondered how the animals experienced this place full of human bone and rotted away flesh in boxes—if it disrupted their experience at all, if they took it for granted, if they thought we were strange for burying each other all next to each other, or if they were only capable of acceptance. I listened for all of this, hoping to catch even a glimmer of insight. No luck but that’s ok.

Sometime this winter I’d realized that when people spoke, I took their words and the way they said them, and tried to analyze and assess what this meant about them, what this revealed about human nature and the way we navigate the modern world. I heard the words but the currents of bias, the suggestions of conflict between natural desire and societal obligation, were where I paid my attention. This helped me build an Understanding, without which I would be armorless: I had an idea of how things went and I felt pretty good about it. The night of this realization I was enjoying a feeling of safety in the uncertainty, I was feeling warm curiosity about what out there I didn’t know. Sitting in my big green chair by the window, I was basking in faith, and so when I saw that this analytic assessment was my habit, I couldn’t help but think: what a weird, calculative way to regard other people.

We are human beings: we catch life through the senses and then filter them through consciousness. We hear see smell taste touch something and we file it away into our understanding of things, and then we can sit back, believing that we know. But how much of the sense-making becomes distortion, changing how you see and what you focus on? At what point do we close ourselves off to surprised and begin to just scan for what we know? Didn’t leave much room for just being, for living my life through my senses. For seeing what came out of that mode of existence, the sensual one, the animal. This seemed backwards, like why have senses if I wasn’t going to enjoy them, if I wasn’t going to let them connect me to the world in real time? Maybe senses are the god-given form of entertainment, so what am I doing disrespecting them and myself and the world by only using them to extract material for my theories? They give us pleasure and pain, and then everything in between. Listening to rather than listening for put me in the moment. Handing over my attention to my ears crowded out the noise of the thinking mind. If I was going to exploit my sensual intelligence so that I could favor my thinking mind I risked becoming a shell, propelled forward and animated by my brain’s calculations of how I should act and what I should do. I leaned further toward robot than animal.

The antidote to this weird habit of analysis, I thought, was strengthening my listening. It wasn’t hard, there in the graveyard. The stillness made paying attention seem like the obvious thing to do. It only got weird when someone would stroll past me and suddenly I was self-conscious about standing still in the middle of the cemetery with my arms at my sides, hands totally unbusy, chin up, intently doing something but how could they know that what I was doing was just enjoying my animal existence.

Anyway, I took lovely photos. The light was perfect. The sky gorgeous. Airplanes flew overhead, in a route I know well. In a route I used to observe from the roof of my old apartment building, in a route I have flown. I walked and walked, and the sun began to dip, and officially I confronted the fact that I was totally underdressed. It had been 29 degrees when I left the house and after all those days of 17 degree weather I had gotten cocky. My hand warmers died, no hat, no gloves, one pair of pants. I ended up on the opposite end of the graveyard, no exit in sight. The sky had gone golden peach, long streaks of horizontal clouds catching and holding the final bits of sunlight but I was too cold to care. I turned around at the northeast corner, determined not to use my phone for directions. A man drove up in a Subaru and looked at me. Through the window I could tell he wanted to say something to me, so I waited as he let the engine pull the car at my speed. He rolled down the window and said, are you going to spend the night here? He spoke with a thick old New York accent and I allowed myself an internal giggle. I wasn’t planning on it, I called out, Where’s the nearest entrance? He pointed through the windshield past the steering wheel, Up here, he said, I’ll let you out, and he drove on towards the structure beyond the cluster of graves to my right.

I followed him towards the locked gate and waited as he parked the car and walked towards me, sorting through a mass of keys on a big ring. Thank you, I said. Of course, he said back, still looking through his keys. Are you a groundskeeper? I asked him. He chuckled and looked up at me. I realized with a bit of a jolt that the whites of both eyes were completely blocked out in bright red. I’m security, I’m here overnight. I nodded as he went about unlocking the gate. You sure you don’t want to stay a while? We could have a meal, a cup of coffee. I looked down into his red eyes. He was smaller than me, a decade or so past middle age. I appreciated this blood-eyed cemetery creature’s forwardness. I smiled. Maybe another time, I said and stepped out onto the city sidewalk, you have a good shift.

The idea of going home felt sad and lonely and dark so I teetered around on my numb feet, moving through the residential neighborhood outside the cemetery’s gates. The street was full of families getting home. I passed a father and a young girl who was pitching a fit over her tricycle. Her father picked it up and started walking on and she was left to follow him, her head thrown back, her crying directed now at the sky. People looked me in the face when I passed them, and we nodded acknowledgement of each other. Dogs walked on leashes slightly ahead their owners, kids wore their backpacks and little beanies and gloves, walking behind or ahead of their parents, talking to themselves, getting lost in the experience of the commute back home. I liked well enough what I saw, but true pleasure was inaccessible for me; I was too cold, and so there was nothing to do but turn left on 5th ave and walk back to my apartment.

This is what has come of my listening practice, today, after a season of it: people do know themselves, but they don’t always like what they know, so they get loud in hopes of drowning out the high pitched frequency of truth—they do this with their mouths when they’re talking to you, and they do this in their lives with their vices and their own narratives and theories of the world. Me too: I have shushed desires that make me uncomfortable in effort to stay on track, whatever the fuck that means, and I have frequently fallen back on weed wine and rewatching substance-less movies at night, the good ol’ numb and collapse, because I’m afraid of what will come out of the silence, which means I am afraid of myself. But when I started listening, that included listening to my feelings and my body and acting on what they told me I wanted: I left the function when I was tired of talking, I said what came to mind when it came to mind rather than holding onto it or awkwardly polishing it up, I changed the subject when I was maxed out on the old one, I gave invitations to people I was interested in, I made an effort to build habits around incorporating my desires, I let myself realize that getting high actually didn’t feel that good, and that sometimes alcohol felt like poison without the fun and that the movies were boring. And then the silence became easier to bear.

Here’s what else has come from listening: the mistrust of others has dissipated, I don’t care so passionately about our blindnesses anymore. This is the state of the world. I am angry with the people who squander their power erecting barriers between people and their intuitions, and I’m sad that so many people suffer the pain of severance from self. But people are what they are as they stand before you, incomplete but as complete as they’re going to be. There is hope in me that they will wake up a little and a little more to themselves, I believe that people are capable of expansion, but they very well may keep on putting themselves down for a nap when the truth rears its head. This is the state of the world. Everyone is incomplete, everyone at least a little blind and deaf, and I’m no exception.

On 5th ave people are doing their evening commutes home and their walks for exercise. A short, curvaceous woman is dressed in multicolored swirly-patterned leggings and a Kermit the Frog green cropped and belted insulated jacket with a fur-lined hood. Her hair is in a perfect half-up half-down style, lots of hairspray, fuzzy ear muffs. When we got close enough, she gives me a cordial look of acknowledgement and then suddenly I am floating in a cloud of vanilla bean cocoa body spray. Wonderful. Immediately after the lady there’s a large man walking slowly in the same direction I am and on the left side of the sidewalk. He’s in a navy blue security guard uniform, looking down at the ground shuffling along headed south. I get ready to pass him, and when I do, instead of looking at the ground or straight ahead like I normally would, I turn my head slightly in his direction, a dumb smile on my face, and he looks up at me and our eyes meet and he gives a very sweet little chuckle of surprise. “Hi,” he says, “Hi,” I say. And that was that, nothing more. A half mile up, five geese fly in their shape from the street over the gates of the cemetery and underneath them a little boy of eight or so is crying loudly to his mother: “And we’re not even clOSE! And we still have to get on the tRAIN?!?” At first I am embarrassed at his display, label him a brat, and then I remember that my big adult body is colder than it’s been all winter, and the sun has finally set, and that little boy has probably been awake since the sun rose, and was promptly jammed into a classroom under fluorescent lighting for about five hours too long. An extraordinarily gorgeous man, about my age, has his headphones on his head and is looking around the street, and I’m talking into the voice memo app, my achingly cold hand just focused on not dropping my phone, and as we pass each other we hold eye contact, I see a small, sweet smile in his eyes and it doesn’t travel to his mouth and this makes me shy and embarrassed but I smile back into his eyes and let it momentarily reach the corners of my mouth because I will witness him, I will witness us, this is what being alive is for. A few moments later there’s a couple, the woman walking about a foot ahead the man and to his right, looking angrily at the ground, and the man behind her, a face emptied of energy and hope, looking straight ahead and not at all into the eyes of the people he passes.

I stretch out across my mat on the floor, my bedroom lights orange, music in my ears. I am alone, alone, alone and it feels like infinity.

My large and hungry brother crunches down on chips and I’m sitting on the counter talking and he looks up at me, clear and deep blue eyes, heavily lashed, open wide asking what? He didn’t hear me over his chomping.

A crazy man sends me $2,000 three days before I move house, an answer to my problems, but I decline. That money is not just money.

My sister is getting a tattoo from my uncle and he spreads his needle across her inner arm. I lean in and ask her something stupid and irrelevant. Don’t fucking ask me questions, she spits over her shoulder. Obviously, what was I thinking.

Early March the air gets warm for two days. I wear a t-shirt, my pale greenish arms open to the breeze. I sit by the water next to someone new. Sometimes we are talking and sometimes we are silent.

During a visit to Sacramento the dog develops a pink cyst on his front paw. He licks and licks and licks and it gets bigger and pinker and it reeks. We wrap up his little paw, and he gets depressed about it but after a few days it goes away.

It’s late at night, summer, and I’m strolling through the Village. A pack of young men bounce down the street, taking their time, and suddenly one of them erupts into a back flip. I pass by them without complimenting the backflipper and feel regret for the next few blocks.

I cry to my mom many times. She looks at me with her gentle eyes. I feel that strong, steady love, I melt into her perfect mother’s body.

We three sit in a cafe, having an afternoon coffee. Our friend looks at us across the table, hands us a letter she wrote for a person who did her wrong. She cries as she watches us, at the fact that this is happening, and we cry as we read, struck by a sort of inexplicable power coming from the words on the page. Afterwards we invite her to sit between us, our sweet, old friend, and we flip through the photos of our shared past, laughing, feeling awe at the way time goes.

I bust my ass at work, sweating profusely, feeling the satisfaction of grind, grind grind, exert, exert, exert. Pick up, put down, uncork and pour, still, sparkling, tap? How’s everything? People keep forgetting their leftovers and it’s my fault, I didn’t give it to them. The pizza chef yells service, downstairs they slap the bell again again again. A woman says to me, it’s so strange, you have the same voice as my sister-in-law. That must be so weird for you, I tell her, a familiar voice coming out of a stranger’s face. At the end of the night I sit down and do the money math, put on my coat, go home.

I play a memory all this year: my friend calls me out for holding my tongue when I really shouldn’t. “Be a doer, Lily,” she’s said. I’d been so annoyed at her. And she’d been right.

Walking down the street one night, my eyes are fixed on the sidewalk. I’m thinking, lost in my head, probably frowning. Out of the night emerges a wonderfully gentle thick voice, “You enjoy your evening, alright?” My eyes leap up to his friendly dark face, mustached, doughy, hooded, heading home from work. I grin hard and thank him. I will enjoy my evening.

I free bleed during service on Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day to me.

One Friday night I walk up and dear old Carlos is drunk as skunk in front of our apartment building. There is blue and gold confetti littering the sidewalk. Que pasa? I say to him. It was a baby shower, he tells me, and it’s going to be a boy. The woman I pay rent to is four months pregnant and I had no idea. The next night I run into her husband in the kitchen and congratulate him. You didn’t hear her throwing up all the time? I didn’t! I really didn’t. I’m sorry and will you want me to move out?

A woman in a cafe holds a new teeny tiny baby in her arms. It’s beginning to snow outside. She looks down into the bundle, just looking, utter serenity set bone deep across her face.

I walk onto the train one rainy morning and there’s a person sleeping in an upright position, his big soft belly out in the open air, his two hands lodged cozily beneath.

My friend stands opposite me on the sidewalk after I’ve just told him the truth, sort of embarrassing. His eyes are level with mine, such a good and steady beautiful gaze, I’m looking, he’s looking, and in such an interesting way this kind of feels like home.

I get news that a good man, family but not blood, has been put on hospice. I finish my weekend of work and book a flight to Sac. In the morning I go to the airport for a ten o’clock flight. I take the N over the Manhattan Bridge, looking at the morning sky, thinking how long it has been since I’d seen that specific morning glare. Classical music plays in my headphones and at Union Square a mother and daughter get on. The woman does her little girl’s hair, comb, brush, gel, an elaborate pigtail braid style, and then gets to work on her own. At LaGuardia I pay five dollars for gross drip coffee. I board, only middle seats left, and so I gesture to an older white woman in the aisle seat that I am going to sit next to her. She is not a jolly woman but she gathers herself and stands for me. I sit between her and a polite, gentle-seeming black woman. The plane takes off, and I am content just to think, but sometimes I look over and see what the ladies are doing on their phones. The white woman browses headlines tailored for conservative eyes, a lot of them for Charlie Kirk, a few scorning Jimmy Kimmel. The black woman drafts a professional, clear-voiced text about her plans upon arrival. When the stewardess comes by both women order orange juices. Both have vouchers for an alcoholic beverage but only the white woman uses hers. She brings out her laptop and starts punching numbers into a spreadsheet. The black woman listens to music in her headphones and closes her eyes. I take out my book to read. When the seatbelt light turns off I tell the white woman I am sorry to disturb her but I need the bathroom. She says nothing in response but just then the stewardess starts walking with the tray and the woman points this out to me. “I can hold it,” I tell her and go back to reading. The ladies get their orange juices and the white woman drinks hers down with somewhat surprising speed. Then I see she is working on getting up for me. She passes me her small bottle of sparkling wine and says, “Can you ask them to hold them for me?” I blink just a moment, slightly taken aback by the unnatural way that the pronoun came out of her mouth but relay the message to the black woman who says yes of course and the white woman struggles out of her seat and I rise and pass her. It seems to me that the white woman saw that the black woman was black and that I was young and perhaps also that I was dressed in men’s clothes and chose not to use a binary pronoun because she feared that we would be reactionary. After the bathroom I start to have some ideas to write on and I pull out my laptop and log in to wifi and open up my working document. My computer catches up and the messages start rolling in and I see that there is a text from the good man’s wife: “Lily, I’m so sorry but Nick passed away early this morning. I thought we had more time.” I’m suddenly overheating. I cry and cry and cry, my nose running like a faucet, and I have no tissue and no napkin, I just keep using my sleeve and hands and wrists, and I can’t stop my sloppy sniffling, my whole face soaking wet, but no one around me moves a muscle and eventually the tears slow and I write back: “Sue, I’m so sorry.”

A man out by the water hacks a loogie and my eyes without my consent dart to his mouth and I see the slimy goo take such a long time to slip out from between his lips.

It’s twilight and the city goes blue. All of us keep walking driving biking sitting standing and here we are, all of us, being here while the city goes blue.

A middle aged Latina hacks a loogie into the gutter with hard beauty and skill. Way better, that one.

On Tuesday evening someone’s baking and for just a moment the smell of exhaust and tar gets crowded out and the air under the BQE smells like warm melty chocolate.

The intersection is full of prolonged honking. A man in one of the cars sticks his head out the window and crooks it to look at the honking car behind him and shouts, “Yo! Where the fuck you want me to go?”

I fly back into the city, it’s ten at night. All of a sudden I look out the window and we are passing my neighborhood. I find my block, find my building. Toy city.

I share an incredible meal and a bottle of wine with a friend at a restaurant in Manhattan. I drop her off at her train and cross the street to head towards mine, lighting up a roach from my purse and putting in my airpods. It feels good, the air is cold but not frigid, I’m going home to my quiet and still bedroom. On the train, I sit down at a window seat so that I can look out at the city and the river as we travel across the bridge. We take off, and for the first time ever I notice the way that my body feels in motion. The awareness is completely new and soon I fill up with absolute glee, as if I’m on a roller coaster. We slow into the next stop, and when we pick up again out the station I want to squeal and kick my feet. But the train doesn’t go over the bridge, it goes local, and after two or three stops my airpods die and I begin to tremble and sweat and feel positively overcome by nausea, and all I can do is commit myself to a new mantra: I will not throw up, I will not throw up, I will not. I repeat until the train rolls into my stop and I walk off and ascend stairs and stairs and stairs until I’m in the apartment opening the window for air, and I go wash my face and brush my teeth, taking big deep breaths, and I climb into bed and sleep crowds everything else out.

My older cousin gets married. We’re all together again, laughing a lot and feeling the love, but it isn’t like old times because one of us is gone and so much else has changed.

At a Denver Broncos game I’m drunk and they’re doing a stand up to cancer thing and someone over the microphone asks the people in the crowd to please stand if they have ever fought or are still fighting cancer. I look over and see my auntie and my grandpa rise. Tears flood my eyes. Later on they do the military flyover and the stadium lets out a cheer and all of a sudden I’m crying again?

A man with extremely long handled tongs retrieves cans from the platform trash can for resell.

I dream I’m pregnant, again and again. Sometimes the baby somersaults and I feel it pushing up against my skin, nudging my internal organs. Sometimes labor is beginning and I have to bear down and let the contractions move through me. Sometimes my friend is there, sometimes my cousin, sometimes a husband is on his way and sometimes I’m alone.

My auntie looks at my face over FaceTime and says, “Come on, now, it’s time to change your number.” The crazy man can’t and won’t stop *67ing me. And so on Monday morning I do it.

An Orthodox Jew standing on the train opposite me bows his legs to scratch his balls.

I’ve just arrived at the apartment of someone I’m casually seeing. I see something a little too eager in his face and realize: shit, his impending heartbreak is a boner killer.

A man in a baseball cap with a big round belly and a satchel walks onto the train licking a vanilla soft serve cone, not a care in the world.

My dad and I notice the sky at the exact same time: “Oh my god look at that—” “—look at that sky,” we say at each other and I smile and he exhales a short little laugh, his lovely gapped teeth in that familiar crooked half-grin.

I’m sitting by the bay at sunset when two teens walk by. One says to the other, “Dude. Dude. When I look at the water it looks like AI water.” I lean back on the bench, stupefied.

In Sacramento my sister and cousin and their friends sit in a circle out back on the flagstone patio. I walk out to tell her I’m leaving. “You going to pilates, queen?” she calls out. Yes I am, I’ll be back in an hour and a half. I lean down and kiss her perfect young cheek.

The sky over the cemetery goes pink on humid overcast nights. What is going on.

On the night of the big snowstorm, we close the restaurant early and tuck into the biggest booth, playing a game and drinking company wine. The travel ban commences, and we, far from our neighborhoods, head out towards the area’s only open bar, packing perfect snowballs and chucking them at each other. One of us throws one at a passerby. This pisses him off and he shouts out insults our way. All the dudes in our group yell back profanities, sticking together. I get nervous that a fight is brewing so I push my coworker in the direction of the bar but he calls out, “It’s a snowball, ya fuckin’ loser! Lighten up!” And I realize that he’s right, he’s totally right. Later on we run into a pack of upper middle class teens and pelt them with snowballs. “Go home, bro!” they shout at the first ball. They don’t get it at first, think we’re a bunch of drunks misbehaving. But we don’t stop, and soon they start packing perfect snowballs and chucking them our way and we’re in the middle of a snowball fight. We tucker ourselves out and end it, walking away, calling out to the teens to be safe and to have a good night. When I wake up in the morning to the snow-covered city I’ve tweaked something in my shoulder but who cares I’m buzzing with little kid glee.

By early March the rats are back, the birds seem more playful, I see a bee.

Today, first day of spring, I walk by the water wearing just a hoodie and a vest. The sun is warm, the wind cold but bearable. I feel my smile ready the whole time. Out on the pier I do my listening exercise. Boat motors trip across the water and fill up the atmosphere. Same with helicopters. Same with airplanes. Further north a bit there is construction-grade grinding. I hear the wind across my ears. Seagulls squawk. A scrawny man with a scarf around his head is pretending two sticks are swords; he sheaths and unsheaths, then scrapes the wooden blades against each other, standing at the ready. The water laps against the rocks. I continue on with my walk, recruiting my other senses. A man dressed in head to toe orange jogs by on extremely knobby knees. A little dog picks up and starts running after him and its owner calls out, “Oso! Oso! Oso!” Adolescent boys play soccer shirtless, their skinny bodies gliding across their little scrimmage pitch. A miniature toddler in all pink waddles and topples over in slow motion. An old pit bull collapses on it’s back and wiggles around, rubbing itself against the grass, pink tongue flopping out the side of its mouth. I take pictures of all the neglected carts I see on my walk and here they are:

Bet you money I missed some too.

I get home from my walk and a bundle of calla lilies are waiting for me in the kitchen.

My train slides in. It’s jammed full of people returning home but I wiggle myself into the seat by the window, hoping that this train decides to turn express and carry us up over the bridge. I want to see the city tonight and think about all the people stacked on top of each other, partying or sleeping or sitting or whatever. I want them to be happy, and if they can’t be happy I want them safe for now, available for happiness in the future. I want them as peaceful as possible. But we go local, under the East River, so instead I look around the train, trying not to creep anyone out, wishing us all the best. We roll into a stop a few from mine, and a man stands and faces the doors, getting ready to exit. A sentiment seems to occur to him, though, and he turns around to say, Hey! Have a good life everybody, Happy New Year! One voice calls out and many sing back. We say, Happy New Year! He shrugs his shoulders and turns back towards the door. Hey, that’s all, everybody, that’s it, I love you. A woman calls back in a thick Spanish accent, I love you too. I watch him step off, watch him walk past my window, watch him bounce with jolly swagger.

The next day I get up for work with a clear mind. It’s freezing and everything is dusted in white. I’m totally bundled, headphones on. Halfway to the restaurant I hear shouting behind me. It’s: yo! Yo! And a hand taps my shoulder. I’d dropped my camera and a stylish gentleman had run three blocks to get it back to me. I tell him he’s my hero. Outside the subway two old men, one leaning over a cane, the other over a walker, dab each other up.

As I work the weekend, my window of clarity closes and everything about the way I am changes. I like my job—I like taking care of people, I like moving quickly out of necessity, staying on top of the expanding queue of tasks, organizing operations in order of importance, I like learning about wine and food and trying to gracefully describe them. I like carrying out a conversation with my coworkers over the course of a half hour, maybe even an entire shift, chipping away in short, 30-second bursts. I like handing a coworker what they need, I like collaborating wordlessly on a table reset, I like maneuvering around a tight space in close vicinity. I appreciate the grace of the dance, I strive to polish my grace as I dance.

This time around though, the premenstrual descends with a totality, and the only thing to do is implode and try not to get any anywhere. At these moments I do not give a shit about beauty, period. My pants are too tight, my hair is giving me a headache, something’s wrong with either my shoes or my feet, I’ve almost completely forgotten how to smile, there are four bodies in the exact location I need to urgently complete a task, my bra is too tight and yet every step I take wreaks havoc on my tits, I feel like instead of regular makeup I’m wearing clown makeup, a coworker needs to go somewhere and so do I and we must swap positions and I guess wrong their movement every time. My thighs are heavy and sweaty, my thirsty mouth tastes disgusting, I’m hungry and bloated at the same time. Every interaction is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole because I’ve lost my charm. Patience, gone. Interest, gone. I don’t care. I’m inching closer to feral, cast against, contained within, a representative of this civil establishment. I’d be more comfortable if I could get naked, dip back on my haunches and growl, yip and roar like the ogred wretch I am becoming.

But when you’re on the clock, you push and that’s the rule. When I wake up late on Monday, the weekend of work over, the restaurant closed, I’m hollowed out and collapsed. I get out of bed to make coffee and then get right back into bed to watch Mad Men until hours later I notice that the sky is darkening, and suddenly, I have an oppressive hankering for salt and vinegar chips. I walk to Costco, and they don’t have salt and vinegar chips, only nacho cheese Doritos, which I pick up with a nasty scowl and toss in the bag. I crave something sweet, too, like cookies, but the cookie aisle is backed up with all three generations of a family and so I turn onto the nut aisle instead and grab the 3 LB bag of milk chocolate-covered almonds.

I have waned into my gremlin phrase. In a way it’s a homecoming: I am returning to the beast in me, the lady has been crowded out. This can be a totally delicious experience. I like the opportunity to pull the money out of my pockets and fling it across any nearby surface. I like that last night as soon as I got home I ripped my jacket and pants off and both still lay in a heap by the door. I don’t want anyone to look at me. I want to stay in my dark cave and eat pizza and cold chicken wings all day long. I do not care about fruit or vegetables. I only care about my bed and never taking a shower. I like the flattened, saggy bun at the side of my head. I take pleasure in blanketing my furniture in dirty dishes and discarded clothes, I like ejecting my trash on the ground. I take pleasure in pointedly not engaging in anything smart, scrolling past video essays by internet thinkers and going straight to the rich girl vlogging her week in NYC. I hate her but she’s fab, that’s undeniable. I feel no shame when I download Instagram and scroll through reels. I belch and fart with abandon, and if someone in the building hears me yes here I am, an animal in her lair. I’m intoxicated by my own filth. My mantra is, and I say this to myself with glee: I’m a disgusting little gremlin, I’m a disgusting little gremlin, I’m a disgusting little gremlin.

The next day I am still a disgusting little gremlin. My stomach is on fire. At 3 AM I awoke in heartburn hell just to lay there and moan. In the morning I am NOT in the mood. I follow the regimen of the previous day: alternating between TV and looking at the internet. At 5pm I hop up and do a workout in my white and brown plaid pajama set, which rather than challenge or realign me just makes me clammier. I replenish with Doritos and chocolate covered-almonds. I’d made plans to go into the city today, I need a 2026 calendar, I need film developed, I want to pick up a gift for my friend, I need some more concealer, I booked a movie. Instead I cancel on myself and there’s luxurious gluttony to this. I’m gorging on the ecstasy of regression, of denying rules and plans their power. Nothing can touch me. I get to choose, and I choose the path of least resistance—the path of not even a single drop of resistance.

So I eat the Doritos until my mouth feels like an arid MSG wasteland, the almonds until they taste like chocolate infused Saran wrap, and my torso is full of sharp pains. Why does it feel, in my heart, like I signed a contract to finish this bag? I realize that this is how I see the the bag of chips: it is my ball and chain. I bought them, and now I must finish them as quickly as possible, otherwise, every second they sit on the shelf unenjoyed, they represent a missed opportunity.

Eventually, Mad Men isn’t enough: I need another screen. I give it to myself. Soon I’ve purchased $190 worth of vintage denim to add to my existing tower of denim.

At a certain point, I need quieter pleasure—Mad Men is too in my face. So I read the PDF version of a completely plot driven, poorly written book where the monsters go to war in an imaginary world. The prose is annoying, I hate the way the characters relate to each other, but I read it because there is magic, vengeance, and sex and it doesn’t require any critical thinking or application of attention whatsoever. I like that, in this world, anything could happen and for a while it seems like anything might, but in the end, heres’s just another piece of media that follows an algorithm. The paperback that sits on the arm of my chair, written by a psychoanalyst who studies the nature of the subconscious and uses that theory to think about the state and status of humankind—will remain untouched tonight. The PDF, tiresome to begin with, tiresome at the core of it’s very existence isn’t doing the trick anymore—nothing is. I feel like a hemorrhoid. The joyous release of the gremlin phase is over and reluctantly I face the facts: dopamine has usurped the throne, and the gremlin only cares to keep filling the void.

The next day I force myself to throw the chips in the outside trash. That morning I’d made the decision to exit my cave and rewatch Hamnet while it’s still in theaters (spoilers ahead). I think, it will be nice to return to the dream. I want to cry, to be cleansed of my crust. Maybe it will feed my gremlin with some gentleness and hope, and tomorrow I’ll wake up in peace. But it’s the funniest thing. Sitting in the theater a week after the first watch, nothing makes me cry, except to see that precious little boy with tears welled up in his sweet and shining eyes as the family lays the hawk to rest—but even then my tear ducts only tingle awake. I can see moments of strain in dialogue and acting that last week I dismissed as insignificant blips because I was choking on tears. This is, I believe, when the emotionality is unsustainable—it can no longer convincingly pass through the vessels. The children do an excellent job, their drama lovely and believable. But there are moments when Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal seem to clutch at their skills so that they can do what the script requires of them. These moments, on a second watch, do disrupt the dream of the movie. The strain is proof that this world isn’t ours.

More proof: there isn’t lasting ugliness to the movie, not really. I’m thinking about: Will’s cruel father, Will’s mother refusing to let Agnes go to the forest to labor, the moment it seems the second twin is stillborn, when the boy is dying and Agnes can’t put aside her will and ease the boy into a more peaceful death, Agnes rejecting Will’s attempts at connection, when Agnes watches the live performance of Hamlet and cannot chill out and let it be. But after these moments of discomfort, the watcher is rewarded a huge release: Will finally stands up to his father, the baby awakes in her mothers’ arms, Max Richter’s melancholy banger plays in full at the end (which everyone is pointing out is overused, another faux pas of excess; although the song is totally lovely and every time I hear it, it opens me right up) as Will and Agnes reconcile and the little boy’s spirit moves on from this realm to the next. The film examines a terrible ugliness, and then lets time and emotion wash it away. This is not always how real life (as we know it) is. But, out of this pattern emerges a question: what if it could be? Hamnet takes you on a little ride, curated to include resolution, and if you suspend your judgement there will be release. I thank the film for that. I have magnificent envy for those who are quick to cry; I’m a little stopped up. My tears are not everyday, even though there is sadness in the everyday—there is sadness every single day. Crying just takes the edge off.

The movie put me in a state of awe and wonder, and afterwards, I stayed open. My last blog post was embarrassingly raw writing catalyzed by the effect that Hamnet had on me. Other reviews declared it to be a bad movie, with distain for the shameless unrestraint of Zhao’s project. When I first read criticism that Hamnet is over-indulgent and manipulative, undeserving of your tears, a ploy to get the Oscar, I was ashamed of my initial take—while I had been falling for it, others had been calmly, cooly, collectedly critiquing it. Maybe they had cried, but overall they hadn’t been impressed and ultimately felt tricked. Meanwhile, I’d needed a whole night and a morning to recover, and then I’d thought about it for a month. It had changed me. A bit. Okay?! It had. Sometimes you don’t realize how desperate you are for a dream until you witness it. I had let the Hamnet dream in and my dream out to meet it and the dreams had embraced and then the whole thing just sat, exposed, for the duration of the film. It was a flush of hope and release, and I was affected, and then I got to ask myself: what the fuck just happened?

Hamnet paints a picture of a life where intuition and nature have room to animate and guide you. Agnes is who I wish I could be: open to the spirit of nature, respectful to it and understanding of it, a carrier through which the universe’s intelligence has a chance to operate. It’s easy to imagine, right now, living how I do, that in the late 1500s life might have felt simpler because there was less environmental and noise pollution. Perhaps there really was a woman like Agnes, trusted and held in regard by her brother and husband, with the freedom and ability to listen to the whispers of the unknown that exists beyond her. I imagine myself in that position, standing at the majestic foot of my local and familiar forest, listening to what emerges from the depths of my own consciousness, being shown over and over again that my consciousness does not begin and end with me.

I don’t know Zhao, I don’t know if she is a person of pure and singular intention. Maybe she wanted the Oscar and a part of her was willing to do anything to get it. Maybe she saw this thing in her mind’s eye, and it tugged at her heart in a true way, and then also her intellect said: yes, this will be liked by the masses. This will get a rise. This will take up space in people’s lives. This will change moods, and that says something about me because I am the one who created it. Maybe she did feel power (the kind we think is bad) at creating something that affected people. But judging her for that would be lame. As if we haven’t all had thoughts like that. The point of this movie is about vision. What if we didn’t rely largely on intellect to see the world? What if we got back in touch with our intuition and let that guide us out of all these fucking messes? What if we worked to make the conditions of our life more conducive to release? I feel like it was litmus test: who dreams and who denies themselves the dream. Why are you so mad Zhao made you cry? Just wondering, whatever the answer is will be interesting. After the crying, you can see why you cried so much, you can see how you feel. Tired? More free? Did it tug at your edges, prompting you to expand a little?

I want someone to have told me when I was a little girl, like how Agnes’ mother told her, “You must pay attention to your dreams. They will guide you.” I yearn for guidance, something steady and strong to follow, something to show me how to carry both the pain of living and the driving force of hope. I want the keep your heart answer to be the solution. Ideally, it is. This is, sensibly, the Naturalist answer, and when I look on the Hamnet world, I see largely a Naturalist one. But when I tell myself this now, in moments of despair or distress, I am telling myself to keep my heart open to this world: microplastics fucking everywhere, Donald Trump, ICE, GLP-1s, Instagram algorithms, Netflix, the homeless shelter doesn’t allow your dog, MSG, oil spills, fossil fuel. And there is nothing simple about that.

Last time I wrote that when I started home after Hamnet, I was distraught over the current reality of no one looking at each other. I was distraught over our utter lack of oneness. At some point while writing this post, I realized that I hadn’t said something quite right. On the train ride home from the movie, I was seated nearby four men and one woman. Two of the men slept, heads back, arms crossed. One man and the woman stooped over their cell phones, scrolling. The fifth person was a man doing neither: he just sat, no music, no scrolling, just there, like me. He was seemingly present, and maybe he was open for connection. But I could not look at him, even in the moments I thought that he might be looking at me. I was stretched thin, pulled in one direction by desire and in another by fear. I want desperately for someone to look at me, to be afforded the opportunity to relax under their gaze, but I am afraid that if I open my door to them, they will walk right in and steal. And so I avoided him and stayed sunk. I stayed depressed and hopeless. What I was so worked up over, truly, was that we don’t trust each other, even though we miss each other. About three stops away from mine, the man went into his black plastic bag and pulled out empanadas. He sat there, eating empanada after empanada, and he was still eating empanadas when I got off.

I cling to the notion of god because one time when I was 21, and I hattttteeeed myself, hated my life and felt just terrified of the future, felt like any monster of the world could jump out and deliver a venomous bite at any moment, I sat on my couch in silent desperation and tried to feel if there was something outside of me. I listened, not to my thoughts but all the things I could hear that weren’t my thoughts. And what I felt was: how positively minuscule I am. I’m so small, the universe is inconceivably massive, and there is so much I will never know. The discrepancy between amount of things I know and the amount of things I couldn’t even begin to percieve is comical. It was like god slapped some sense into me. My skinny, undernourished body breaked out a sigh of relief. How could the world be so big and also all about me? Not possible. I also felt this: there is enormous potential for the unimaginable. And that gave me hope. So it seemed the lesson, the answer, was: just keep expanding into the enormity, the best you can. That’s my guidance; sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly, sometimes unfathomable, but sometimes totally within reach.

There’s another story from my last post that I need to retell in better detail. I wrote that I was nearly manic over the discovery that the beauty of being alive is witnessing life. But this was not the resolution—there was no true resolution that day. That morning I’d sat pitifully in my chair inside, sad, fretting over us. And the geese had honked and flown across my window, calling my attention outside of myself—and I had been, to my surprise, inspired by a little bit of awe. I had been reminded that I am small and the world is huge, and in it is more than I will ever be able to comprehend, and pouting in my chair wasn’t going to do jack shit. There was rapture and relief. Exhilaration over the vastness of possibility swept through me and I was gassed up over life again.

Today, I nibble on nature and on silence, that’s all I get: little bites, barely a a mouthful. I walk by the water, the shore of the bay littered with plastic milk cartons, tossed away toys, used condoms, a Costco cart on its side. A wooded area where it seems someone is always having sex or shooting up, alternating between total absorption in the task at hand and paranoia at the presence of others. An abandoned stretch of railroad tracks where geese and stray cats coexist, peacefully, it seems—once I saw two headless chickens after thanksgiving strewn between the tracks, a kitty trotting between them. When it’s just me looking at these things, looking at the state of a corner of our world, seeing the way it keeps on going underneath the garbage, I remain aware of the infinity. I can be stunned by it’s persistence. I can get lost in, remain open to the consciousness that I am at the whim of. Dreaming about the kind of infinity Agnes is in relationship to both provides me with a moment of relief from the limitations of the modern world and requires that I mourn the loss of what could have been if not for the force of our forefathers’ will. I will never know a world where Planet Earth’s nature is abundant and pure. If, one day, I gather enough money to buy a house on a piece of land, I will know that outside my property is a heap of concrete and metal, swarming with pollutants. If I forget about the concrete and metal and let myself be consumed by the appearance of abundance, that will be denial.

You have to know suffering to know joy—thats what they say. OK, I will take extreme pleasure in the square of dirt that grows a tree on the bustling avenue. I will take pleasure in the way all those pigeons AKA sky rats AKA flying ashtrays swoop in perfect togetherness. I’ll bend down and let the little chihuahua in a puffy vest give my hand a single sniff before losing interest and hobbling away. I will look into the eyes of the gruff shop owner for as long as he looks into mine, and when he’s tapped out I will admire his magnificent wiry eyebrows and the little moles all over his temples. I will keep my eyes open and search for moments on the street to cherish I fucking will. I will look and I won’t look away.

On the train I work myself up into a tizzy because nobody looks at me. Nobody looks at each other, I huff and fume to myself. Nobody wants to look at me. We are all so dumbed, so far away from ourselves from each other from nature from god, split into millions of pieces, and we suffer from for this. The split is the source of our suffering. God, how will we ever get back. I frown so strongly a migraine starts to nag.

These days, I have a lot of dreams. One of them is for freedom of whole body habitation. Animal like but specifically human like. It’s: powerful sensual bizarre huffing and puffing getting incredibly, astoundingly weird in a space where other people are doing the same thing so embarrassment isn’t really on the table. I want to move my body in a way that makes me now, sitting in the chair in my room, uncomfortable and excited. In my mind its candlelit and everyone is naked and nobody is remembering about society. It’s all just the here and now and the huffing and puffing and god is flowing to and fro, god is being everywhere and everyone is very aware of god inside and outside and nobody is trying to make sense of it. I want to be seen as if society and civilization don’t matter, so yeah probably I’ll need to be naked or like, draped in cloth. In this dream the whole point of the gathering is being as you are just then, just only as you are, in body but also spirit, and having your own experience which is intertwined and inextricable from the other people’s. Nobody’s ego is in the driver’s seat, everyone’s ego is shushed so that the other parts can get some air, get some life. The dream is that the inside be allowed to come forth and be a part of it all. And to be witnessed like that, no rules, just strange absurd gorgeous and terrible human beings with spirits that are here on earth but also Elsewhere, and where is that? There is no urgency to answer, the open curiosity is enough. Maybe you’re thinking orgy. And maybe it is and maybe its not, I honestly don’t know.

Another dream of mine is to be surrounded by nature and trees, it’s warm and I’m barefoot. This is also so that the inside can come outside and be acceptable. Many of my dreams are about this.

At a certain point, though, dreaming begins to give me some grief. Well, an amendment: it isn’t the dreams that create problems. They rise up and surge forth, with power and clarity, resounding along my spine or whatever scaffolding it is that holds me up. This experience settles a moment and the thing thats alive inside me expands just a little. My mind wanders then—to what kind of thing I’m not totally sure—but it’s separate from the dream, it’s something that the dream has not softened. And then the dream, along with the clarity that followed, is attacked by another force in my head. And I cannot judge which one is right, the dream or the force, in this here world, in this city in this country, at this time, at this age. My inner landscape becomes saturated in fear, and I see that everything could hurt me. Wound me or kill me. Reject me, despise me, resent me. Then there is the urging, egging-on sentence: keep your heart open, keep your heart open, keep your heart open—which doesn’t come as a strong feeling easily recognizable as intuition or god, just a voice in my head with very little emotion or strength, coming from another region of my consciousness. There is evidence that this is the right thing: its a message I see often, literally, (in Hamnet for example) or when I do have my heart open and am rewarded with the purity of feeling that is strong love, gleeful, giddy joy and togetherness, or honest and pure crashing down sorrow.

The next morning, Christmas Eve, spirit dampened, drinking coffee in my big green chair I look out the window and see geese fly over. I hear them before I see them, and then there they are spread in their echelon across both of my windows, and interestingly a surge of hope flies through my chest. That’s the kind of thing that helps me believe there’s a god. I don’t have much affection for geese, really, I find them to be a nagging and arrogant bird, but my eyes track them, my ears hear their hoarse honking and my gritty, crusted over fear went slack long enough to give way to something more productive.

When I was in Sacramento, two of my loved ones told me about two separate things in my life: “there is no fixing this.” Do you know what I mean, they asked. To one of them, we were talking about the imbalanced and slightly injured body, I said, I don’t like that. To the other, we were talking about family dynamics, I said, god, okay.

On the walk to the restaurant, after the geese, I work myself into the opposite kind of frenzy as the night before. It’s the near manic energy of discovery. I think about myself sitting on the train, in utter distress over these strangers not being willing to look into my soul on a Tuesday evening. In the theater, looking at Agnes Shakespeare, seeing her being trusted by Paul Mescal my dream man, seeing this be foundational in their relationship, letting the life of this character make contact with my dream—it was nearly too much. That hope is so magnificently meaningful to me, it drives so much of my energy onwards and outwards, that seeing it on the screen on an empty stomach made me drunk, and then when it was done I was hungover. Coming back to reality, being surrounded by concrete and plastic and seeing no one see each other, looking at and listening to, thinking about the true state of the world hurt SO GODDAMNED BAD. The discovery I make as I walk this ugly avenue is this: there is still beauty even if it isn’t dirt and trees and plant medicine and clean water. There’s still beauty even though we’re all afraid of transgressing societal rigidities to be seen as we are. The state of modern survival is perhaps not simple beauty, but it’s happening, and maybe the beauty is that I am witnessing it.

That night after service, I sit at the bar with two of my coworkers: big men in their forties. One of them has brought nice, expensive bourbon from home. We three don’t have people to go home to, to share the holiday with, and so we share it together, and isn’t that nice. At the end of the night though, I am absolutely motherfucking sloshed. We finish the bottle, and then the open wine is pulled from the lowboy and we finished two if not three of those. I take the train home with one of them and he asks me what I will be doing tomorrow, for Christmas. I’m going to see the Timothee Chalomet movie, whateveritscalled. I should be shot for the way I slur Timothee’s name in this public place to this person who is a professional acquaintance. The train slows, then stops, and I slink off to make my transfer, giving it everything I’ve got not to appear totally skunked as I board the next train, ride it and exit it, climb the stairs from the platform, pass through the turnstile, up the stairs from the station and down the street to my apartment. You are prey you are prey you are prey, I tell myself, trying to look alive.

Christmas Day is all about puking and moaning. When I finally bathe, after the sun has gone down, I see the moon’s sliver through the shower window. I mourn the loss of the day. It’s gone, and I’ll never have it back.

The next afternoon I’m back at work, and when people ask how my Christmas was, I am forced to own my shame. Everyone else, it seems, had a lovely day of rest, watching movies and walking around. The coworker I slurred before comes in, tells me I worried him. I do not blame you, I say. Embarrassment doesn’t at all wane, but I must admit I am gifted an opportunity to confront reality: he has seen me for who I, in part, am: a young person who does not always make the zipped up, reasonable, healthy choice. It’s quite slow and I’m cut early, just as it is beginning to snow. At home I eat a bowl of rice and the snow picks up until it’s covering everything in a fine layer. A family exits the apartment across the street and builds a pile of snowman. They dress it in a pink scarf, hat and mittens. The dad shovels all the surrounding snow up and into the pile, then has to walk a few steps to get more snow from further down the sidewalk. The kid, totally bundled, basically just an animated jacket, follows their dad back and forth, doing nothing but that. The mom shapes the pile into a figure, gives it arms and a neck, rounds its head. In the end, they take a selfie, the parents squatting and the kid standing next to the pile, jacket arms sticking out at a 45 degree angle.

My radiator crackles and bangs. My cousin calls me and we talk for two and a half hours. I tell her about the family across the street. I picture her sitting in her apartment across the country, eating takeout in her kitchen, me on speaker phone. We tell each other secrets, we swap advice (how nice it is to be held in friendship!), we talk about how everybody is having babies goddamn, about the unhinged men we once made excuses for but no more!, we discuss our middle school teacher who has recently been named pedophile. She drives to her friend’s house and we hang up. I walk to the bathroom and wash the day off me. I grill some toast and sit in my chair, watching the snow fall though the branches of the tree outside my window. It comes down fast, my gaze becomes fixed on a point in the distance. My eyes zone out, it makes me dizzy. My manager emails me and my coworker asking if one of us wants to come in later tomorrow. We decide to flip a coin. Heads, she goes in at 1 PM, tails, I do. It lands heads, I’ll get the 5 PM. Good, I want to watch the snow fall. A trio of Latinos pause a moment underneath my window, playing music loud on a speaker and laughing with each other. The snowplow drives by. Busses come and go, their roofs layered white. Cars speed on the expressway and I pretend they’re waves crashing and am soothed. I do not want to go to sleep, do not want the silent solitude of the night to pass and for me to miss it. At 2 AM, I reluctantly walk to the bathroom to brush my teeth, walk back and climb into bed. I read somebody’s Substack diaries on my phone until it’s nearly 3, then I turn off the light and lie there, awake, for a while. I can hear the snow against my window. Sleep gets me, finally, of course. I dream that a brick red tick lowers itself into my right areola and all I feel able to do is scream for my mother.

My most useful thought of the week, maybe the year, is: forgive yourself. God’s already done it, but god never needed to; there wasn’t blame or disgrace ever where god’s concerned. Just cause, which may not be warranted but nonetheless can be understood, and responsibility, which you must take if you want to be free. If you say god is not for you, then think about effectiveness. Shame dumbs you, blinds you, makes you unable to see anything in it’s true light, because it has cast reality in shadow. Shame incentivizes you to alter the story, when you tell it to yourself or to others. The reality is: we do what we can with what we have. We do what we do, what we were always going to do, what we are capable of doing. The story won’t change until you become conscious of more of it, til you plant your feet, stack shoulders over hips and muster the courage to look it in the face. Looking away will haunt you because you fucking saw it, motherfucker. Don’t be a coward, don’t do us all dirty like that. What if you are more courageous than you fear aren’t, don’t cringe at that. What if you can’t even fathom what you’re capable of? You don’t know. If you want the sweet mother’s hand of love on your heart, give it to yourself. Imagine it, prefer it, lay it down before your brain thinks you’re worthy, thats fine. Not waiting for other people to do it for you is better, more reality-based, less helpless. Besides, nobody was ever gonna be able to do it as well as you can. It is most efficient. Sometimes someone is mad at you for a reason. That’s their business. Are you mad at you? That’s your business. If you want us to move on, this is where it starts, inside of your own body.

I love you

On Friday I prepare for my trip home for Sacramento which is happening on Monday.

I work the weekend, same old same old. Friday is fun, I’m overflowing with energy to the point where I tell myself to chill out or I’m gonna start freaking people out. My coworkers and I decide we’re gonna start the Artist’s Way Jan 1. Everyone around me is ready to start getting serious about their lives. Saturday a bird shat on me on the walk to work and I just walked the rest of the way because none of the shops were open. And as I walked, I grew accustomed to the shit on my head, and that was also on my hand because I reached up to see what had just plopped on my clean bouncy hair. Sunday I wake up and call my grandpa, and we talk about the family and I tell him about my creative practice and he tells me about Thanksgiving and work. We don’t talk about radiology.

That night I’d had a dream that Jia Tolentino left my birth (I was at the hospital in labor) because she was having trouble with Mark Ruffalo her on again off again boyfriend. I felt betrayed that she had left my birth for something so spineless and trivial as her man calls with a desire or request on a whim. This was, it seemed, a pattern of theirs. Next I heard, I was telling a friend over lunch at the Central Park Boathouse (never been, only seen on Sex and the City and others) & (guess I had successfully had the baby), Jia had settled down in a thruple with Mark and Gwenyth Paltrow and they were living happily in a small cabin in the woods.

On Monday I had a dream that I’d shaved off all my hair and every time I came to in the middle of a scene of my everyday—at the bar pass at work, at a friends’ hot pot night in their apartment at a get together—I was overcome with regret and embarrassment which was made worse by no one acknowledging that I had gotten rid of all my hair and was now, at the beginning of winter, living with a bald head. They’d just look at me and then the look in their eyes would change so that they were now looking through me, and I’d just shrivel into a raisin. I think that one was my subconscious knocking on my door to tell me that my hair has become a little too important to me.

On Tuesday morning my sister and I take the dog out and our time together makes me feel giddy. In the night my brother and I go get a Christmas tree and our time together makes me feel like a big sister. I end the day full of love.

My mom’s job is having a daycare in the house. At nap time, everyone goes either into my parents’ room or into the room where I sleep when I’m here that we call the den. She has three travel cribs that all go up and then the leftover children sleep on top of my parents’ bed. Everyday when my sister wakes up she dies over their cuteness and when I worry about her sometimes I think well, at least she has that.

When I go walking alone in Sacramento I find I become completely swallowed up by my own thoughts and suddenly I’ll be on the next block over and I didn’t look at anything I was surrounded by. So I’ll decide that I’m going to start paying attention now, and before I know it I’m again not looking at or listening to anything, just hunched over, eyes on the sidewalk, muttering to myself. About what? Not really anything that interesting.

On Wednesday I go have dinner at the Bear. My dad and sister are both working. My dad makes me a hot drink with persimmon syrup and I order a sandwich and the sourkraut and sausage soup. Before I get the sandwich my dad asks me to do a few loads of glasses and so I station myself behind the bar and do the loads. I’m surprised the way that my body remembers the precision of the unracking and reracking movements. I could speed through, but I don’t truly need to, so I take my time checking out this corner I knew ten years ago. Someone asks me if we have cucumbers and I say, you know I’m not sure I’m just helping out hold on, and I make two strides over to ask my dad and he says no, no cucumbers.

On Thursday we go for barbecue at the place my brother works. There are about ten people and a dog my dad knows there. I know some of them and actually I know the dog too.

On Friday I’m crying in the car with my mom and she is looking at me, seatbelt off, hands in lap, her torso rotated. I let myself be seen by her crinkly hazel eyes and I say what comes to mind. The car is parked outside my auntie’s house who a month ago got a new knee and she walks out with her cane, listening to Amy Pohler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus on her iPhone speaker. I say, sorry we kept you waiting I was crying to my mom and she says, awww and we have a long hug. Three hours later I get my period and come out of the bathroom to tell them, this is the second cycle that has ended after a cry and they say, ohhhh.

On Saturday the baby of the family turns eighteen.

On Sunday I realize that I associate New York with my creative state of mind. Maybe that means it’s my muse? Which would be codependent of me. Everything I write when I’m in Sacramento feels wrong. Is it because I haven’t paid attention to the moment enough? Maybe, likely.

I sit at the kitchen table. The Christmas tree blinks five of it’s sixteen or so red lights. The heater turns on and the vent above the fridge rattles. Out back is a multitude of green. Just like how I am nearly always inclined to do when there is quiet and I am facing the quietness, I type in YouTube to see if there’s something that I just have to click on. I scroll, and there’s nothing, but I see a three hour video called “Just Thinking…Retro Jazz” by a profile called Pause,maybe?. It’s slow and melancholy and it makes the moment and therefore the page a place I don’t mind being. When I finish writing a sentence and don’t have another I go to the video’s comments and read. Listeners share their current life’s troubles and other people comment, just being nice and gentle with each other. Some write something dramatically poetic, some share their age and where they sit as they listen. Lots of students, lots of middle aged, lots of 20 somethings. Then, abruptly, commercials: AG1, Chase bank, the Kardashians. I keep scrolling and someone writes that they hate to break it to everyone but they’re pretty sure the music is AI generated. The spell for me is immediately broken. I poke around the profile and find tens of hours long videos up, posted since the page was created in June. The name probably should have tipped me off but I’m like a preteen who is just recently free enough to discover the internet’s offerings for the first time.

Later that day when I’m walking the dog I realize what it is. In New York, there is anonymity in the numbers. It becomes clear to everyone who lives there that the human capacity to care about people is finite. You can care about everyone vaguely or you can care about a tribe deeply. Go ahead, fight me on this. When I first moved here, this anonymity thing helped me big time. You could be in a bad mood and show it on your face and people didn’t care. You could be witnessed tripping on the sidewalk but the moment would soon be collectively swept into the past. So much happens all day long that few things stand out in anybody’s mind as eventful. As long as you keep walking you are nothing to anybody but momentary sensory information. People cry in public, or they brush their teeth on the train, they pray in the street. The New York reaction to this is: I dunno—people are people. It’s a shrug. On the street in California the people are scanning you and if you’re not being regular they have an opinion. It helps them know that they are better than you. Or, I don’t know, maybe just that they know where to file you. I developed a persona and would not be seen without her as my mask. She performed what rewarded her praise and approval. As I grew up she grew tiresome, and it became clearer and clearer that she got in the way of my satisfaction.

Sitting at the table I plan to later go sit in the garden my parents got married in and let my underneath self seep out so that it can learn that it’s safe in Sacramento. Instead, I go on a second walk in the dark with my dad. On Saturday, the dog had eaten a pile of human shit out in the park. Tonight he’s sick from it and shits himself bloody. My dad washes the dog’s asshole before we sit down to dinner.

I’m mentally decluttering as I near the end of my twenty-seventh year. I find that a lot of the clutter is made up of things unsaid. The mind’s wandering path is uncontrollable, and the clutter darts in front of my ding dang eyes and obscures my view of What Is Happening. You know? Surely you do.

Yesterday I wanted to write about the places where my body collapses. Hips and lower abdomen, ankles, shoulders. Many of the joints that stabilize. Sometimes, when I’ve been quiet enough and centered enough, things become clear about where they come from and what this symbolizes. A few years ago my friend and I went to see Claudia Rankine read from a not-yet published book. She said two things that have changed the trajectory of my life. One was that right now we are experiencing a collapse of humanity in the self. The second thing was that the conditions of our reality are sinking the body’s desire to rise up. More on this later. Much more.

On Monday my mom gets a robotic hysterectomy and gets to keep her ovaries.

On Wednesday I decide to change the frequency of my vibrations, which have been very low, by posting Instagram. To me, that this is crazy thinking doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s not something I think too long about which means that the ego cannot interfere and curate it. I just post nineteen photos that sit in my camera roll that I like and add one that I took a moment ago: of me and the dog and I’m petting him. There you go people, there you go, universe. I’m doing the same thing with this Substack post. Here you go people, here you go universe. This isn’t ready, but does that really matter? It’s messy in my brain and in my life but we assess and assess with no action. That’s another thing Claudia Rankine said.

I’d walked to work earlier that day, heating up under my layers and shedding them as I went: first fingerless gloves, then scarf, then jacket. On the way somebody had plastered their mosaic to a lamppost: “Love is easy but I’m busy.” A dog in sunglasses smokes a cigarette. You can pack a lot of meaning into six words.

I’m cut early, too early, but it’s fine because I made rent and some this weekend. Tonight though, I’ve too much energy buzzing around in my body and I’m not drinking right now so there’s nothing to sedate it. I think once about walking home but decide the second half won’t be fun, too hungry. Instead I walk part and take the train the rest of the way, eating alone in my big green chair and reading on my computer until three in the morning.

On Sunday I wake up late and don’t have any milk. On the way to the deli grocer it drizzles and I am walking behind two men speaking Bengali to each other. One wears pajama pants and smokes a cigarette and the other wears an outfit like a golfing dad. At the intersection I pass them, crossing the bike lane and waiting as the traffic light goes from yellow to red. There’s a shop on the corner and I walk right in but no milk. When I walk out and turn right I see the pair outside my plan B shop. The smoking one waits outside and I follow the golfing one in. He’s at the milk fridge door. I wait as he pulls out milk, then I do it and follow him to the cash register, wait as he buys milk and walks outside, then I buy milk and walk outside. He and his friend talk a second before heading north and I go south, dangling my jug by its handle.

There’s not a whole lot going on in my days these days. I spend the time inside, in sweatpants, with my hood up. Reading and jotting notes, sometimes taking photos, working out on my yoga mat, watching BBC’s Pride and Prejudice or YouTube videos about upper and lower consciousness, looking out the window. I do a lot of thinking. I do a lot of stripping away. I put on Mariah Carey. I am, right now, waiting, being, not going to get. This is not as sexy as going to get, but when I think about what it might require to go and get, I can see that it would be only a world of discomfort and pain. And the pain would be that of my lower case self, or my personality, or my image; it would be the pain of a certain plain of my existence. A certain false plain of my selfhood, not be a deep soul pain, which is the cleansing kind that changes you. It would be shallow but endless pain, it would be the product of ego being forceful.

Later that night I go walking in the crisp November air. As I near the Gowanus Bay the air turns chillier, making its way into the open space of my pant leg. It’s fine it’s totally fine. I turn onto 2nd Ave, and suddenly realize that it’s creepy

over here at night. Undoubtedly it’s surveilled (construction is underway on bayside projects, Industry City is right there,) but this place would make a for an excellent backdrop to a kidnapping or body dumping scene. But I’d set out to explore where 2nd Avenue ended, it’s been a question for a while now, and I’ve almost answered that question—I can see where it doesn’t go on. I come across a security booth, its windows one-way mirrors and realize with a bit of a start that I’m at MDC Brooklyn, where both female and male prisoners of any and all clearances are held. Luigi’s in there. Diddy’s in there. Fetty Wap’s in there. It’s where Epstein died. I get the heebiejeebies—I bet I could imagine up any obscene depths of despair scenario and have faith that this place has seen it. I think about how each person in there has a soul. I think about how some of them probably don’t even belong in there. I think that only a select few could possibly be capable of recovering their wholeness in a place like that, in a system like this. But…and…well, what do I know about Justice? Only a question. All I know is how to keep my side of the street clean, see what’s true, and do my best to reflect that truth. The night is eerily quiet on this corner, and I look up trying to peer into the weird, narrow windows. No one’s out, but under a vent near a garage door are two tall, unbothered mountains of canned beans. I walk on, feeling tendrils of creepy crawly evil reach out and touch me all over my body and they don’t recede until I’ve put the BQE between us.

In the morning (er, 1pm) I brush my hair put on my wool socks, my brother’s fucked up old jeans, a t-shirt and a wool sweater and a vest under a jacket and sunglasses and SPF to go see if last night’s beans are still there. They are and actually there are two new mountains of beans. That’s four towers of jumbo-sized canned beans of many kind: pinto, kidney, black, garbanzo. One case is called “Mixed Bean.” I go get a bagel and eat it at my desk, listening to someone on Youtube talk about our collective attention span and how it’s been dwindling for almost a century now, and what we can do about it if we so choose. Of course I want to do something about it, but also I am a creature of split desires. I’m starting to wonder if thats an age thing or a just a human condition thing.

I talk to everyone in my family that day and by 10 PM I have the kind of migraine that needs your eyes to be closed.

On Tuesday the beans remain. On Wednesday two of the towers of beans remain. On Thursday I go out at 10 PM, needing a walk, and it’s so fucking cold and windy that I become delirious, croaking and squealing when a gust of wind slows my charging body, giggling at the shock of difficulty. When I reach the MDC I become paranoid, the trash tossed around the sidewalk fakes me out and I labor to crook my neck in my layers so I can watch my back. I round the corner and see: one tower of bean remains.

I’m washing the dishes when I remember, and it comes crashing down on me: you are what you eat. You consume the world with your senses and what you sense changes you. Everything that touches you changes you. I am my Instagram and Youtube algorithms, phone calls with my parents and siblings and grandpas and aunties, The Strokes, Valerie June, Sigur Ros, Spotify’s Top 50, Martha Wainwright. I’m the easy plot page turners I read, the nonfiction I read, the emails I read, I’m restaurant work. My eyes eat the view of the street outside the window, I momentarily chew on the sight and idea of a passerby and then they pass and goodbye to you, my fellow human. My ears eat the loud, melodic laugh of the woman I pay rent to and I metabolize and it swells joy in my own chest. My nose eats the wafts of sewage in the air underneath the Smith-9th St stop and I crinkle and stop breathing. I am silence, I’m tempting the void (Patti Smith), I am the indulgent memory of pleasure or pain. I’m three Costco eggs, peanut butter, Weleda skin food. I’m undercooked pork sausage and the idiocy (my own) that helped me prepare it, I’m McFlurries, I’m deli coffee, complete salad kits, I’m family meal glizzies with ketchup and mayonnaise. I’m the origin of each ingredient, the thought and the labor, the emissions and other waste, the macro and micro plastics, the cruelty and nutrients. I’m the sky above the Greenwood Heights Cemetery and the plane route that flies over it, I’m the experience of an AMC movie theater, the real one not the Nicole Kidman one. I am the cringe I feel when I watch her in that sparkly pinstripe suit. I’m pilates and bedroom workouts, I’m gulped down and choked on water, I’m the photos my cameras capture: digital, film, iPhone. I’m my coworkers when they’re stressing, when they’re laughing, when they’re poking fun. I’m alcohol when I drink and sobriety when I don’t. I’m the family dog’s wagging tail and open face, barefoot sneakers, questions about how things work and what I want. I am the opening up to the answers god gives me. I’m all the things it took for me to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I’m the man on the corner, I am the decision to give him the two dollars in my jeans and I am the resignation not to. I chew on the choice to skip my volunteer shift, I swallow, I digest, that’s me. I am brain telling feet to cross the street at night when there’s a threat or inconvenience up ahead. I am the thirst of my houseplants. I am the airplane that flies to and fro Sacramento. I eat beeswax candles, I eat Amazon who ships them to me for the exchange of my subscription and purchase. I eat the cold air in my bedroom, I am the sore throat that sucks it in all night. I eat tarot cards, I eat Queen of Cups three times in a row, twice upright, once reversed. I carry this message inside my body into the night and I chase it with every moment that touches me afterwards. I eat ignorance, necessary ignorance and ignorance by neglect. I eat hope, I eat rage, other people’s and my own, I’m the tenderness of a father brushing the hair from his son’s forehead, I’m the brutality of a swollen calf covered in bark-like skin, weeping pus from unhealing wounds. I’m the bad mood someone else is in when they walk past me with a scowl, I’m the hungry, predatory eyes of the fucked up man on the other end of the late night train, I’m the fear that motivates extreme alertness. I’m litter. I’m oil spots in the canal. I’m hands holding each other. I’m sigh after sigh of exhaustion. I’m broken, I’m fixed, I’m partial, I’m whole. I eat your origin story, it is my own origin story.

There’s an empty chair at the table in the corner of the room where two walls of windows meet. I can see the street and the sky perfectly. I watch cars, people, birds. I see the trees, full and green, rioting in the wind. Two men run independently from each other, one to exercise, one to hurry. A plane overhead. A jet beyond it. A couple minutes later, another plane, traveling the same route as the the one before it. Outside the library a woman sits at the ledge at the base of the building and yells into her phone. I don’t hear much but: “No friends! No friends! No amigas. Only nine to five.” She hangs up the phone and calls someone else. “What happened!” She’s shouting when she says this, I hear her loud and clear. Then she’s saying the same thing to this person about the no friends, I told you, no amigas. She’s amused, and maybe I’m wrong but I sense in her an air of superiority. Like she’s got it figured out, and these phone people are lagging. She says through the phone, “I’ve got to go, I’m going. I’m hanging up, bye.” And she stands up and walks across the street.

A split flock of pigeons swoop into the intersection and join together to travel, heading south a moment and then flipping a U-ey and heading back north. A man with a walker, a man with a satchel. Two men meet and clasp their rights hands together, say a few words, continue walking in opposite directions. A man on a motorcycle, a man on a scooter. A woman with a mass of hair walking by with slouchy posture. A woman with hoop earrings and a bedazzled baseball cap waiting with her cart for the pedestrian green. Twin pigeons sitting next to each other on the telephone wire, tail feathers flapping to stay on their perch—they’re going through the same thing up there. My friend texts to offer me a free ticket to the Alex G concert tonight, so I search the opener on Spotify and listen. The man sitting across from me at the table twirls his finger at his notebooks and phone, whispers, “I’m going to the bathroom. Can you—” I whisper back, “I’ll watch.” The man at the other end of the table keeps his phone on the table, on vibrate, and it keeps buzzing. We all look at him when it goes off, but he doesn’t change anything.

A young couple tries to cross the street once on a pedestrian red but a car is coming in hot. The two retreat, and when the car whizzes by they move forward again. Again, a car flies by and again, they retreat. The man across the table from me comes back from the bathroom and gives me a compliment on my eyes. He says, I was surprised by them, I had to tell you, I couldn’t focus on my work, but now that I said something I can focus. Earlier I saw him looking out the window, reflective-like, thoughtful-like. I think in his books are prayers, and I am curious about which god he’s feeling for, but I won’t risk the question, not today. I thank him, we are whispering. He says okay, and gestures that he’s going back to his work and I can go back to mine. I say okay and put my headphones back over my ears.

Our interaction felt natural, honest, and I’m warmed. But then I try to get back to the intersection, back to feeling my sovereignty, and there is static interrupting my state of quiet calm. I feel my attention pulled, the unanswered question being: is he looking at me. Is he creeping on me. Does he want from me. But here we go, a challenge. I am being challenged to continue being here, being me, in close proximity to a person who has noticed that I’m beautiful and said something. That’s all this person did. I steal a glance at him, confronting his existence, willing myself to see him as he is: a man, a person. He goes on writing, chin propped in an open palm.

A fire engine with it’s sirens on, heading north. That’s somebody’s emergency, an integral sound of this city. A man in an electric blue polo walks south with a limp, just as a man crosses the avenue towards my corner, also with a limp. Two men straddling the same moped look how anyone on a moped looks: relaxed, understated, hella cool. An old ass dog, I’m talking 15+, trudges round the corner, leashed to a man in a plaid flannel hoodie. They are each other: heavy, enflamed, getting on. The man who complimented my eyes asks me to watch his things again, so normal-like, person to person, there is no prey no predator in this question, and I answer yes, I will be here. It occurs to me that the spell of my fear is broken just as the heavy dog and heavy man pass by again, heading back to where they came from. The man my tablemate returns with a book about Zen Buddhism.

I pause the music in my headphones and turn my head toward the window. Here I am, alone, I am alone at the mouth of my void. The sun shines brightly from every which way and my mind is quiet except to enjoy the going ons of the street outside. All around me is a certain type of cosmic silence. Out of the void comes gentle questions and observations, spilling forth like wavelets in the ocean, receding back into my void, all in their own time. I see people out the window and I am able to like them all. Some wear crazy things, a sweatshirt with a denim print, a Jesus t-shirt that says “I’ll be back,” but mostly people just wear practical clothes in solid colors. This is a practical neighborhood. Most people here have regular, sort of lumpy bodies. Most people carry things. A young man chomping Takis looks in the face like a cook I used to work with, a beautiful kid. I watch pigeons and their shadows fly against the building across the street. I look up and notice that the building is abandoned— the screens are torn and every few window is boarded up. A green plant grows from an upper floor window sill and two pigeons stand side by side at the mouth of an open one on the forth floor. Down on the street I watch an old man’s mouth as he sucks on a cigarette, watch as the smoke jets on out, and I feel a little envious—I wish that did it for me. A piece of plastic tumbles in the wind. A dozen house sparrows synchronize flight from the base of a small tree to the shelter of it’s branches. A medium sized tree out front of the bank across the avenue is mostly green, the deep luscious green of life, peppered with the orange gold leaves of change.

Before I leave the library the man asks for my instagram. He thinks we could be friends, he’d like to be friends. First he asks for my phone number, and I shake my head, maybe we’ll see each other again here, I say. He says okay, and I can tell I’ve made him nervous. I ask if he comes here often and he says yes, to research. He’s from South Africa, he looks to see what his cousins back home are up to on Facebook, he’s worked in restaurants to make money and he studied dance and acting at the Alvin Ailey School. He tries not to be on social media, and I say same here, so addictive, but we both admit that even still we spend too much time on YouTube. I listen until I’ve reached a limit and then I start to pack up. I say goodbye, happy to have made his acquaintance, knowing when I login in to Instagram I will either accept or ignore his follow request.

The sun beats down exquisitely on my back as I walk home. I’m wearing a black knit sweater with holes big enough to feel the crisp air and hot sun alternating pressure on my skin. We all get closer and closer to 2026, and my youth is coming to an end. I’m happy about this. It’s happening, my mind is full of new thoughts always and my eyes just keep seeing and my heart grows stronger and I’m good.

On the train the next morning we cross the Manhattan bridge. I look to the sky; in the north it’s nectarine orange, projecting pink against the shiny midtown buildings. In the south its pink like cotton candy. I turn my body to face the world and pin my suitcase with my knee to the door.

There’s a man on the best seat in the house, the two seater at the very end of the car. I stand to his left, in front of the doors, and look down on the left side of his body. To his right sits his reflection in the metal wall of the train car. He’s old as dirt, goddamn, and he reads something in Arabic. When we’re three stops from Broadway-Lafayette, he puts the book in his backpack and takes out a weathered paper envelope full of money. He organizes, counts, looks up to scan his surroundings. I watch his reflection, watch the people around him. No one looks at him. He stows the money in his jeans and labors to pull the backpack at his feet up to his lap, turning it 180 degrees so that it’s bottom faces the ceiling. He raises the bag up and over his head, pausing a moment as it catches on the bill of his baseball cap. This is the maneuver of an independent man with limited mobility. He pushes his arms through the straps while it rests on his head, and then lets the whole things slide down his back and settle into place.

The old man gathers two mismatching canes in wrinkly hands. Before we even start to brake into the station his rises on wobbly legs. I move out of the way and he uses the subway pole to pull himself round toward the door. He tells me thank you, and I nod, looking into his eyes. He’s small and stooped and like this I’m taller than him. We wait like that, him facing the doors, me facing into the car. I look around; listening to Alex G. The train slows and he looks at me. I take my headphones off my ear. “Have a good day,” he tells me in a Brooklyn accent. Warmth spreads inside me and all around and I smile. “You too,” I say. His face is wrinkled and covered in small dark brown freckles.

The doors close and I take the old man’s seat. A construction worker sits next to me and starts sleeping. We don’t touch anywhere but I can feel the warmth of his leg through my jeans.

On the LaGuardia shuttle I smell people’s morning mouth. I smell the smog from the street and someone’s onion-y body odor. My stomach feels horrible—I crammed a smoothie into it at 6:15 in the morning. The morning sun is glorious, though, no question about that. I let it into my eyes, let it warm up my face. Everyone jiggles on the bus at the same time, the same way. It’s just hilarious, our bodies bumping and swaying, all of us so serious, so soft and fleshy, all on our way to work, to travel out of the city, full faith that soon we’ll get there.

I walk to Red Hook on Sunday. Last night I got home from work at two, read til four, and something about that did not feel right. When I woke up I didn’t quite dread the day, but the feeling of resistance to reality hovered. It’s because I am too obsessed with myself, my thoughts are too loud, they think themselves too important. On the floor I sit to meditate, which is the right choice but I’m out of practice and it barely makes a dent. I travel along third avenue, ugly, bright, hot, loud, tucked beneath the freeway. There might not even be any trees there, I don’t know. Just be, just be, just be just be just be, I tell myself, Just look, just hear, just feel. On 25th or so there is a place to get live chickens. Hanging over the door is a banner that says “BUY 10 CHICKENS GET 2 FOR FREE.” I see this is funny, I know it’s funny, but it doesn’t stir up or make waves in the pool of universe inside me. I bike ride home from Red Hook, a plant jiggling around in the basket. The air feels good and the people are out. The sky is blue. At home my room is a mess and soon I’ll need to clean it. Laundry. Sweep and swiffer. Dust. I need to shop. My fridge only has beef jerky, beer, coffee, apple cider vinegar. In my mind it’s a mountain. I’d rather, I don’t know. Sleep, eat peanut butter and dates, watch people walk under my window, attempt a fascia release with a rolled up towel on the ground. Smoke some weed, go see a movie.

Somethings going on. It’s still my plan to write, I still want to even, but I’m becoming different. Stranger. Things as I know them make less and less sense. I have questions, I want answers. And until then, being around other people is somewhat strenuous. And all you people who read my writings are my friends and family. You’ve known me for a longtime, maybe even forever. And I don’t want to surprise or offend or disappoint you. But I have to get over that because in my heart of hearts I’m okay doing all that. We can negotiate a new relationship with or without words if I become unrecognizable and that makes you feel something. You can be honest with me, I want to make that promise. Maybe I’ll even out when I’m older but right now I want to go after the truth, if I can. The truth is not my personality, I think. I think the truth is that I don’t have a personality. So when I keep trying with my personality I just stretch my awareness away from itself. I sever. I’m barely my senses at that point, I’m more like an empty shell.

I think about god every day. God is something that lives in my mind, not in the other parts of me. God has made contact with the other parts, has imprinted upon those other parts, but every time it’s been brief. And I don’t know how to carry god through me, only in me, in my mind. If you know more about this than me you know where to find me.

My new rule is help old people with their carts on the stairs. A wrinkly small Asian woman descends the stairs behind her cart step by step as I ascend them. It’s raining. I say, “do you want help?” She says, “yes, yes.” I try to pick the cart up out of her hands and she swats me. I have to look up into her face so see why. She holds up her fingers at me. “Two people, two people.” “Oh,” I say. I grip the bottom, she grips the handle. We go. At the bottom she pats me and I tell her to take care. I’m not smiling, I don’t know, the smile just doesn’t come, even though I love her. I really do love her.

My ex-boyfriend calls me at least once a day via *67. Next up I’ll have to change the number I’ve had since middle school. And what a pain in the ass that will be.

Two weeks ago he *67’s me and leaves a voicemail telling me he took all his pills. I send a text to his sister and she doesn’t respond. Fifteen minutes pass and I send another text saying please just let me know you saw this otherwise I’m calling 911. Ten minutes later I call her and she answers. “Lily I don’t understand why you’re still engaging with him.” Never mind that he’s shown up to my building more than once, never mind that somedays he calls me nonstop all day long. One day in May he called me 95 times. She says she saw the texts I exchanged with him last week when the calls had started up again (after a beautiful forty-five day respite). She tells me he’s not a toy or a project. She indirectly suggests I stop posting to Substack. He’s reading my moods.

He calls me from the hospital, leaves a voicemail letting me know that he overdosed but is doing okay. The next day he calls and says that he started believing in god again and can finally let me go and that it feels really good. He laugh sobs when he says “really,” same as he always does. I block the hospital.

Over the weekend my friends and I host a field day at the park. At field day I felt most myself when doing the pacer test. Afterwards I said to everybody, “That was not fun. Nobody had fun doing that.” I shut down inside and kept moving. It took me back to playing soccer. I’m light on my feet the whole day, but I cannot pay attention to anyone the way I want to, there is so much happening, and I get nervous I’m missing the point of it all. Pacer test exertion is familiar and safe. Silence thoughts and push.

I bike to see a bedroom in a ground level apartment. In ten days I move out of my apartment and I’ve barely got a lead. It’s hot, but I wear a hand-me-down linen dress and my sweat gets blown right off my body. The roads on this route are shit. I cross Vanderbilt on Dean and a firefighter waves his hand for us to stop while his buddy backs the truck into the station. He just stands there in the bike lane between us and the truck, facing us but craning his neck to watch the engine. I wish he’d look at us, why not, a hoard of people perched on bikes, planting a foot and watching him and his people do something they need to.

At night I walk to Lowe’s to get boxes because it’s time to get goin’! The young girl woman behind the register doesn’t see me for about fifteen seconds because she’s on TikTok. After I pay I stand by the exit and she rings my friend up for fourteen boxes when she meant four. After we’ve paid we stand for the next ten minutes helping her wrap the boxes together with a little handle for carrying. Her register’s light is still on. People line up to check out. The handles she makes us are unusable. The girl woman is probably brand spanking new to work. That’s what I hope anyway.

We set the tape down while stringing up all our boxes and leave it there, and I walk back to get it. My flip-flops tear at the flesh on my foot but it’s a gorgeous night. On the way back my lover meets me on the street with a hug and kiss. At home I make dinner and he listens to my friends and I talk about Sacramento.

On Wednesday I walk to the thrift store to see if they have any work shirts. I successfully find one ugly shirt.

I put on the work shirt and look in the mirror. It would look better with red lipstick but that is doing way too much. One taste of wine, one long pull of water and the look goes sloppy. An effective server can only be so fabulous, it’s an unfortunate reality. There’s nothing I can do about the shirt. If I were my nana I’d pop the collar.

Render, my Instagram algorithm says. What does that mean! Melt everything down until you can see the matrix for what it is. I know about the matrix! What am I supposed to do about it!

At night I sit in my room in my orange light with my boxes. There is no room on the floor to stretch. I will live with my boxes for the next nine days. Everything will always change, nothing will ever be the same. Thank god I’m okay with that. I move stuff around and make room to stretch my legs out. I sit tall and something in my neck under my collarbone lets go as if dislodged. Its tight and stinging but also lumpy, like when you’re holding back tears. It feels like panic. I pick my my water bottle and drink. Is that the only way I know how to heal myself? Yes, it is.

I’m really comfortable, even though I don’t know where I’ll live next week. At night, the cooks lay out the pizza that didn’t sell. I have money for food but I could take that if I didn’t. My family is alive and so are my friends. All the kids I know will eat as much as they want today, tomorrow, the next day. The street is always loud but not from bombs, ever. All over Instagram are photos of dead children. At least the ones dead aren’t suffering anymore but the ones alive suffer extra for their loss. There’s brief solace for us, over here, and then it’s gone again. We have to acknowledge our blessings and to let them fuel us. If I’m scrolling past videos of people in Gaza to get to easier content that means its time to put the technology away and face the present moment. That’s where my restoration lives.

A storm is rolling in as I dip dates in peanut butter. So much better with peanut butter than almond, what have I been doing. I look outside and the clouds are brooding dark blue. I walk up to the roof. They are moving south to north. Southeast of me, over Little Haiti, I estimate, the clouds are pinked, standing tall and warrior-like against a pale blue sky. The wind whips strands of hair loose from my bun, and they tuck into the corners of my wet and blinking eyes. Trash whirls from the street in upward spirals, a hundred pieces of plastic, paper, and leaves. It’s never ever still up here but this today is chaos.

This really excites me and I listen and watch. The train rolls through. I hear the wind rounding street corners, blowing through intersections. Lightening. Then thunder. Children in an apartment are thrilled and free to scream. The temperature shifts down and water starts to fall. My gray camisole is peppered with rain drops. I look down and a dead and dried out green bug rolls across the rooftop. I entertain the thought: this storm is for me. It’s food for me.

On Saturday I get up five hours after falling asleep to bike to another apartment deep in Crown Heights. The broker Jorge is 30 minutes late, and I ask him what his company expects of us and he explains to me what a security deposit is. Yeah, I’ve heard of that before mister. He tells me that I’d have to pay a $50 matchmaker fee and that totally turns me off even though it’s a nice space and pretty cheap. He’s timid, seems to be roleplaying a smooth talking sales person, anxious about having been so late, is probably younger than me. I’m so over management companies that I’m being cold and hard. I exit the building, walk down the street and feel guilty.

Last week I yearned for unity and this week I want destruction. I want to be alone. Like I don’t want to look at another person for an entire month. I like ripping up my room. I want to rip up my whole life. I don’t want to smile or be smiled at. I like pushing myself from sitting to standing and going before I’m ready. Nothing seems simple, it all looks so hard and rough. I thrash around for the simplicity that I know is there—but can’t for the life of me find it. Alone in my apartment I look for what I have control over. Not much, but I can surrender. Okay, I’ll surrender. I’ll be in a bad mood when a bad mood comes for me. I inhale and let the exhale fall out of me. Then I’ll open up my ears and hear sounds: my friend’s AC unit, a siren, a screech, someone on the street revs their engine. Those sounds don’t tantalize but whatever: they’re happening. Surrender is what my energy transforms to. My body feels sticky with dried sweat. It’s going to stay like that. I do not want to go to work. Doesn’t matter, I’m going. I push surrender out from my skin. It overtakes me a moment. I’m coping. Coping isn’t sexy but that doesn’t matter either.

My colleague’s six year old daughter walked up to the back step of the Airbnb, where my boyfriend and I sat in the warm August air. She led the conversation, no shoes and a wetsuit pushed down to her waist. We were thrilled to sit back and watch her animate and compress, animate and compress and to be soundboards for her experiences. She was talking about Important Stuff. About surfing and her friends. About the fairy garden in her special corner and the special seeds she was storing there. About her mom and her dad, how they farted. Her sister’s farts. Her own. The conversation dwindled and she went to check on her special seeds. She needed to make sure to get them to the fairies. We waited on the steps for her, looking at each other with idiotic grins and dumb, droopy eyes.

She came running round the corner holding a tiny woven basket.

“They’re all gone!” She cried out to her audience. Her eyes stayed fixed on the little basket and she hung her head. “They’re all gone.” She was sad, disappointed the seeds weren’t where she thought they would be, but she was also performing sad—for us and for herself. She was practicing what devastation looked like. Seeing what it felt like to be witnessed in that state, seeing what might come next. We looked on, tickled and adoring. The moment passed and she recovered with extreme quickness. It was romantic and interesting to be taken by loss but life was too good—the day was gorgeous, the backyard full of possibility. We melted down, the gummies way too strong.

I sat looking on a day’s long train ride to Montreal. It was interesting how thoughts emerged with nothing to do but watch the world outside the window. Upstate New York was absolutely lush. I gorged on the sight of the Hudson. I gorged on the wetlands, on the hills, on the spaced out properties of single family houses near Albany. Unknowingly, I’d sat on the side opposite Lake Champlain. The reflection of the sky shimmered across the lake’s surface and I squinted my eyes for the details, hoping god heard my pleas for a gaggle of sweet little birds swooping around to eat some bugs. Everyone in my view across the aisle hovered their neck over their phone and wagged their thumb across the screen.

In Montreal I find my way from the Amtrak to the subway. The people on the street don’t seem to have a problem staring. I wonder if I’m wearing too much color. On the metro, I look around at the nice passengers sitting and waiting until their stop and wonder what, besides all my bags, betrays me as a tourist. A woman sits next to me and her hip spills into my seat. Its a gorgeous large hip. I push appreciation through mine and hope she feels it.

My friend meets me at the metro and rolls my suitcase to her place. She has a studio apartment with a washer and a dryer. She tells me we’ll do a load tonight. We walk to the canal nearby and talk about what is going on. Our lives are so different since last year when we both lived in the same city. God, everything changes. We can’t stop interrupting our own stories to tell each other another thing.

The next day I take the metro to meet my other friends. It’s strange to be on a subway that’s not New York’s. Montreal’s is so clean I’d eat food off the floor. No one lays down. No one plays music. No one asks for money or food. My mind doesn’t wander and I don’t feel lulled.

I think about how people are mostly special when you know them for a long time. Otherwise they’re just people—annoying, mysterious, posers, stylish, sexy maybe, unfortunate, just people in their clothes with their faces and hair, inspiring jealousy or superiority or nothing at all. Hypothetically, if you’re in the right mood, they’re lovely. In reality they disappoint. But when you know them they are yours. You see them grow up. They make you laugh often because you know where the thought is emerging from. Sad because you know their past, hopeful because you know what they’re capable of. They might disappoint you but people can recover from that. There’s virtue in loving people who are difficult to love.

At a park in the middle of the day my friends and I gather round our farmer’s market purchases. Strawberries, raspberries, cherries. We pass around a tomato, sprinkling it with salt we borrowed from a bread shop. We wish aloud for wine. We look around and compare the squirrels to the ones we know. I lay down and look up and we all get quiet. My mind starts to wander. There are duckings in the pond at the bottom of the hill and they tug at my heartstrings. I want my own baby. I want to speed up and begin my family. I want unity and interdependence. I don’t just want I yearn.

A week later I’m at my parents’ house. My brother, sister and I pass each other in the hallway. My mom greets me with a hug and a kiss in the morning. The dog is always wagging his tail when someone walks in from the other room. On Friday afternoon my sister drives to The Golden Bear for her shift. She’s a dishwasher. My brother’s there, finished with his barback shift. He opens the back door for us and we walk in and see the head chef who’s lost a lot of weight. We catch up lightly, barely, but it’s just nice to see his face. My dad walks past us and tells my sister she looks like a lesbian. She agrees. In the front my dad’s getting through a little push. He hands me a glass of watermelon Red Bull vodka slushy. It’s good. He shakes up a cocktail for a customer and suggests we go for drink across the street. I call my mother and she’s there in ten. Meanwhile my brother and I sit at the bar and watch Betty Boop on the TV. My dad’s replacement pours us some water. My little sister walks out and grabs the bus bin, takes it into the kitchen. When she brings it back out she walks up behind me and drinks my water. The bartender breaks balls over her work ethic and she snaps back but retreats to the dish pit. When my mom walks in the four of us walk out. It’s 102 degrees out. We sit at the corner of the bar and my dad and brother order 40’s. I order a margarita. My mom orders a pint of the pilsner on tap. We laugh, we gripe, sometimes conversation fades and we’re quiet. My dad orders chicharrones. When we’re done he walks back into The Bear. The refrigerator’s broken and he didn’t do the drawer. My mom gets in her car and I hop on the back of my little brother’s motorcycle. He told me to wear his boots for the ride and I did. I only brought flip flops and running shoes to California.

The next day I do the same stair workout I did when I was in high school with my soccer player lungs and legs and my iPod. On the way back I look one way and start crossing the avenue, look the other and finish crossing it, running so slow four months ago I’d have been embarrassed.

I like being happy. I like being gentle. I like being sensitive about other people’s feelings. I like letting myself feel my own when they come, no matter what kind. I like doing what is best for me. I like kissing people on the cheek. I like kissing people on the mouth. I like holding hands. I like being quiet. I like not knowing. I like trying to find out. I like giving over to mystery and abstraction. I like eating simple foods. I like thinking about the past. I like dreaming about the future. I like the relief that is surrendering to the only real moment: now. I like seeing how I’m going to fare. I like recognizing that other people are in charge of their own lives, like how I’m in charge of mine. I like thinking about my mom. I like sleeping with my leg pressed against somebody else’s. I like asking for help and getting it. I like thinking about other people’s lives. I like being twenty-seven. I like that I’m never going to be younger only older. I like being mad at people who deserve it, then finding out how I can let it go. I like believing that there is value in everything. I like figuring out what the value is. I like investigating my inner world. I like when other people tell me about theirs. I like when people talk about what embarrasses them. I like when they talk about what’s scary. I like when they talk about what they love. I like telling people no when I mean it. I like thinking before I talk. I like seeing that people are what they are. I like checking myself. I like stretching my hips and stomach. I like cracking my sternum, toes, fingers, neck, ankles, back. I like a hand on the back of my neck. I like casual commands. I like working with other people. I like working by myself. I like when someone is brushing my hair. I like nonverbal communication. I like jokes that are only a word or two. I like sweating. I like other people’s loud laughs. I like dancing, when I’m doing it or other people are. I like surprise. I like children. I like believing in god. I like knowing that I’m going to die. I like believing that there’s something after this. I like crying. I like when other people cry. I like when someone disagrees with me. I like being awake when everyone else is asleep. I like having my period. I like when my period stops. I like when everything works out. I like when dogs look up at their owners. I like when people look at each other.

I’m so relentless about the profound. Goddamn, I do not stop. I’ll chill out now, I swear. Sorry everybody.

Then I sit in my desk and wonder what is interesting enough to talk about. I bop around on Substack, seeing what is out there. I try not to compare my work to what I see but after a while that gets hard. Ever since I quit my job I just barely understand time. It’s just memories of feeling and the thoughts that come afterward, separated into categories like: hot or cold, days with allergies or without, days with gastrointestinal pain or little to none, strings of thought born from reading, days I ate chicken or just tofu, days I liked what I wore or didn’t, moments coming to after getting lost in my head, moments basking in the sun, moments engaged in my work or feeling exasperation over non-engagement, money, nights with the boy or alone, nights with friends or alone. I don’t brush my teeth til like two in the afternoon, my last meal doesn’t happen til everyones asleep.

On Tuesday I did no reading or writing instead I went to the beach with my lover. Something I like about him is that he gives me lots of affection, all the time everywhere we go. We wade out together but he drags ass; he grew up swimming in warm water and me the opposite. When we’re waist high I practice remembering his seven names. He supervises and corrects me when I mix them up then tells me to go do my thing. I kick out til I don’t have to look at anyone anymore. Two NYC ferries pass each other and a cormorant flaps its wings almost desperately in the water between the ferries and I. Calm happens down on me. I realize that the discontent I’ve been feeling all day is stagnancy—I haven’t been contributing to anything but myself. It isn’t peace I feel but something opens up: how on earth can I be free? How can I be free? How can I set myself free?

I walk back to our bedsheet in the sand and avoid the eyes of the beach men. I have three minds about my body: that it’s oddly shaped and everyone knows it, that it’s just about the hottest thing you ever did see, and that it’s just a body, nothing more or less, reacting to its environment and carrying my soul through a lifetime. Either way I know the beach men like tits and ass and after my quiet time I don’t want to see it.

The next day I walk to my friend’s apartment and we sit at the table to create some art next to each other. She starts a zine and I do some editing. Before we sat at the table we’d sat at the couch and talked about sexuality. She’d cried a little and I loved her for it. It’s so difficult how many times a woman has sex when really she’d prefer not to, and that even if it isn’t violent, it makes the fiery wisps of lucid hungry being scatter and tuck away into hibernation, sorry that they surfaced at all. It’s self-betrayal but you don’t know what else to do. Who knows who you’ll find yourself to be if you make the scene you’re afraid of making? I hope womankind ages out of this question. I hope my daughter’s sexuality grows up alongside her.

When I leave her I bike to another apartment, where two of my old coworkers are already spending time with each other. I hear my friend’s lovely laugh through the door and when I sit down she pours me a premade margarita out of a glass bottle. The margarita is surprisingly delicious and I try not to think about how the 20 plus grams of sugar are invading my FODMAP. The other one is a singer and gives us two performances before the night’s over. The songs are from my adolescence and when I see her belt out goosebumps spread over my legs. We talk about the future, we talk about charter schools, we talk about men. These women are smart. I leave at two in the morning and bike home in the cool air.

I sleep til noon and watch Love Island, many episodes, on the couch alone in my apartment. It’s hard to believe I am doing this. I heat up some chicken wings in the oven. I’m so hungry today I think about breaking my FODMAP. Watching Love Island makes it so that nothing is as fun but soon Love Island isn’t fun either. I get restless on a cellular level. I should go on a walk, that much is clear. I reluctantly climb the stairs to the roof.

On the roof the birds are going crazy. It’s so nice to see them ducking and diving and weaving amongst each other. I think, birds’ playful flight is one of the best things about summer, I have been waiting for this. I read Vivian Gornick on her mother. I am in awe at how she balances the abstract with the tangible. I love that she doesn’t tell every detail of the story. She withholds because she can and it’s actually better that way. My god, what a beautiful lesson.

The wind up there is cold and the sky overhead is gray, nearly textureless. My feet are just in flip-flops and they get cold so I walk downstairs. I sit on the couch and watch the episode of Call Her Daddy with Rob of Love Island. I wish I could meet him, is the truth. I imagine us hanging out and think about how I’d probably have to explain my splotchy face and not being able to order basically anything to eat or drink, it might be the Celiac, waiting for the doctor to let me know. In my mind I’d go through all my opinions: body hot, body weird, body just a body, with lovely lady lumps and also dermatitis.

I wonder what it would be like to be in nature everyday. Probably better.

The day after I’ve been thinking about Rob, the roof doesn’t bring the usual calm. I don’t care what the people on the street are doing. It’s because I’m finding the state of things dismaying; it’s hard to access hope. In the intersection, there’s a man and woman walking, their baby strapped to the man’s chest. The baby is small, its head invisible to me, it’s minuscule legs knocking ever so lightly against the man’s side with each of his strides. On a different day I would enjoy this but today I look on with indifference.

I think to myself, there is nothing to do so its time to surrender to the moment. Usually this sound logic assuages irrational discomfort and I can do the surrendering and carry on from there. Today I can’t get any peace and dread sits heavy over me and touches everything I see. I remind myself of me when I was twenty.

Looking at or thinking about my cell phone kills me. Same with reading. Instead I go on a long walk as the sun is getting ready to set. A mile in I’m still tired of myself, of my brain. As I walk, I think, okay, I’m just gonna be until the lamppost, no thinking, just senses, just eyes ears breath muscles and bones. It doesn’t work, instead I just feel my sweaty thighs chaffing and let the bleak thoughts back in. Then I think, maybe it’s time I move back to Sacramento. Rather than scrounge to find some wretched small room in Woodhaven or East New York, far from good transport, far from friends, maybe I get rid of everything and go live with my family, sleep under the same roof as my siblings and the dog again. Look everyday at the tree I climbed as a child. Talk to my mom everyday, help her with the daycare kids, feel her arm around my waist more. Ask my sister for a ride, bring her coffee at school, go into her closet and take her clothes, run alongside my dad’s bike. See my brother’s smile. I imagine people thinking me lazy and spoiled but fuck you it’s not that!

By mile two I’ve gotten rid of the thinking. I run into a friend and her girlfriend, walking the dog, and I tell them about my feelings. They say some things and I see some of their feelings. Some time after we leave each other, I stop at a water fountain and there drinking is an old classmate I had sex with, a very young man. Classic shitting where eating situation. It was awkward at first, then it got less awkward, and I feel some peace and satisfaction. I walk on toward home, feeling the air, hearing the birds, being next to the people.

I think, it is my job to meet myself where I am. Its my job to learn about the world.

For a while after I quit my job I took to sleeping past noon. The roof, if the weather was good, was the first thing I’d do. I’d found a folding chair leaning against someone’s gate on 11th street and I kept it up there, leaning against the stair tower. The roof was refreshingly airy above the noise of the street. The sky would be clear blue, and the roof always silver, always blinding.

I’d sit in my chair and let the sun hammer into my skin. Its warmth after bleak winter was dynamite—the pleasure of it absorbed all my faculties. I only thawed. I only sighed into the warmth. I only surrendered to the godly heat. My eyes stayed closed but the brightness dinged off the metallic paint and up into my face and from above the sun beat across my brow. I was completely surrounded—all consumed—by light and heat. I wasn’t attentive to much else but the overwhelming pleasure of warmth; if a thought appeared across my consciousness, I let it, and then it went and I let it. It was total catharsis—like being completely alone in nature, or blissing out in a hot bath, or crying after a months long dry spell.

So roof time was god time, and god time was extremely helpful. Downstairs, I’d sit at my desk and fret. Not having a job was brand new to me. I’d been a working student for the past 7 years and I come from two fiercely hardworking parents. They were proud to always be in motion, and I inherited pride of my working class origin. But, I had time now, and money in the bank, and out of the freedom emerged doubt around the fixed identity of hard worker. Existing in my apartment, requirement-free, I’d spin my wheels, getting all worked up over the weight of my position in society and on the planet. What should I do, why aren’t ideas flowing out of me, why do I only want to watch Game of Thrones, why not go on long walks around the city, why must I sleep eleven hours each night, how can I get myself the six pack I’ve been wanting, am I a bad sister and daughter, am I a bad friend, why don’t I have more to say to people at parties, what am I doing wrong to deserve all these stomachaches, how can I become a successful and mildly famous writer, when will I discover what I want, how can I reach my full potential and when will my personality become entirely developed. Up on the roof the sun made all that shit small potatoes and I could be free. Life was complex but it was also simple. Everything was going to be just fine.

This was May, and the bumblebees had been working. For some reason they spent a lot of time buzzing around my roof, coming and going, staying and traveling around in circles, attracted perhaps to the shimmery silver paint or the open space, same as me. From afar, I flung some appreciation their way. Such good little boys! Such gorgeous little workers! But if they buzzed close to my chair, my muscles froze and panic leapt up my throat. The bees would fly away but my ecstasy had dampened. It was a total contradiction. It was the open space and the superb satisfaction of the warmth that let me see how both felt powerful but only one felt right.

In first grade I made friends with the troubled kid, Derrick. His hair was the lightest shade of blonde, and he modeled his style after his older brother who wore a lot of black and listened to Green Day. One time Derrick came over to my house and brought his brother’s favorite record. We listened to it in my CD player sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce on the floor. We made fun of my little brother’s bottom bunk and crawled up to my top bunk. I told him a secret that I would never tell anyone else: at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pick my nose and wipe what I pulled out on the wall space tucked behind the guard rail. I thought telling him this would impress him and it did. I wanted him to think that we were of the same kind. Halfway through the school year, I needed new shoes and chose a pair I thought he’d respect. My feet grew quickly that year but I kept on wearing them and now my pinkie toes will look like cashews for the rest of my life.

At recess, Derrick and I would go out to the field and catch bees in plastic water bottles. No one would do this with us. They were too scared or thought we were too cruel. I don’t know how it was allowed—we’d bring them back to class and keep them in our desks until the next recess, when we’d try to add more bees to our bottles. We got stung all the time. After school, we’d move the bottles into our backpacks and take them home and they’d die.

But bees are such beautiful little contributors. Such honorable, dutiful little lads! Thoroughly relentless laborers! For us, a bee sting is a momentary setback—it hurts and then for a few days it itches. One sensation followed by another. For bees, stinging is their final act, which they only do if they’re threatened by your giant body and what it could do to their species. They warn: if you don’t respect me perhaps you’ll fear me. Fear got stuck in my kid body when I was feigning ruthlessness, being cruel to an animal in order to be close to an emotionally turbulent seven year old boy.

Basking, a grown woman now and committed to letting go useless fears, I tried to relax my body when it heard the buzzing. I found this initially too difficult. My mind would command and my body could not comply. The bee would fly away and in my imagination it did so because it sensed my fear and figured I might cause a problem. Then for a while I’d just hear the birds chirping in the trees flanking 11th street and the cars on 4th avenue. Sometimes someone would shout out, in anger or humor or simple communication. A horn would honk and another would respond, and then another and another, all trying to out do each other. The R train would run through and shake the building up a bit. A dog would bark.

The bee kept coming back and it did fly nearer and nearer. Each time, fear would leap up, and I’d try to melt it away. We made a little bit of progress, and I thanked god for the opportunity. But I could never totally chill out; concern always vibrated throughout my body and the bee always flew away.

By the first week of June the bees officially do not come anymore. This feels like all the lessons in my life. A contradiction between a desire and a learned emotional response reveals itself to me and a thought occurs: maybe if I knead out the knots of resistance, I will get closer and closer to the truth. I feel pure elation when I’m letting myself be playful, but I worry what others will think of me if I’m not being cool, clever, and composed. I feel authentically connected to myself when I’m not straining to say something relevant, when I’m being quiet if that’s my mood, but then I’m unable to charm. Writing comes slowly, and a lot of it happens away from the desk, but then I cannot be the madly productive genius of my dreams.

I revisit the contradiction all day long, holding it in my mind, fingering it’s edges, turning it round and round, noticing my body’s reaction to the thought, exploring the movement and momentum of the reaction. I talk about it to my friends, I write about it in my journal, I imagine scenarios which enable me to successfully free myself from the shackles of the contradiction. I resolve to go out into the world and practice changing my behavior and allowing that to change my experience. Why would I use my energy resisting what is out of my control when there is so much unnecessary resistance living inside my own psyche and body?

And while I’m mulling things over, while I’m filing the bee and my silly, outdated fear of it into my world view, it goes from May to June, and then its too hot for the bees to hangout on the roof anymore, and I cannot practice changing my approach. The bees are replaced with flies, which cause in me a reaction of disgust, a reaction I take no issue with.

Maybe my fear has been resolved, by way of my attention to it and my willingness to change, and there just hasn’t been any clear (to me) resolution. No nice little bow tying up that gift. Maybe all I can do is wait until the next time a bumble bee buzzes in my direction to chip away at my fear. Maybe I have to wait til next spring to experience a bee up close and no fear poisoning my perception of it.

Instead I stay out there, no cigarette, no real reason to be there except for I am sitting by myself at my desk in a silent room with a head full of wonder, and outside the world stirs, and so when I emerge from the window, there is no pressure, the world is my oyster, and I feel free to just playfully lop the gentle sentiments of my mind to passersby, and the wind, and the cars. Rats dash away from trash piles, a dog barks, teenagers whoop further down the avenue, and I hover from my own, secret world.

This morning I went to Queens to babysit. My friend had gotten a callback for the part of Nick in a version of Great Gatsby meant to go on in South Korea, and he and his wife needed to film the audition together. When he tells me this I do the math: South Korea is not North Korea. The morning is not actually morning, more like early afternoon, and the air is still. I am comfortable in my sneakers and my bomber. My friend opens the door, baby on hip, dressed for the part, wearing a tie with glowing little foxes in a dark green forest. It looks expensive. His face is cheery and tired, and he’s not wearing his glasses. I take note how dark the skin under his eyes is. He hands me the baby who does not protest at all.

I walk the baby to the park, carrying him strapped to my torso, feeling assuredly aligned with god the whole way there. I have to protect the baby, and so I wait for the pedestrian green at each corner, and when my shoelace comes untied I do not just leave it like that. People look at me and I know they think I’m his mom—same white skin, same light brown hair. We sit on the bench in a park sharing a fence with a school, and I take him out of the carrier and watch him watch the kids running, playing, squealing. Sometimes his brow flutters. I kiss him on his fat cheek, and then remember with a pang his mom telling me that they try not to do this. It’s a post Covid world. His dad and I work in a restaurant together, an undeniably a dirty place and we live in New York City, a disgusting place, and so I’m sure they are just trying to protect him from germs. I am ashamed to say I find it too hard to respect their plan.

When he gets restless in my lap we walk over to the kiddie swings and I put him in. The seat is too big for him and he can’t hold himself erect at all, all he can do is lean forward, arms thrown over the top of the swing, tipping the whole thing forward, so that the front two chains are taut and the back two are looser and I wish I had another baby to throw in the back, because then things would be even. A few times I push him too hard and his little torso tips to the back of the seat and on the way forward he topples over and hits his mouth on the swing’s edge. When this happens I kind of startle, an instinct, but he doesn’t cry about this. We go back and forth and because of his forward lean he can really only look at the woodchips and my sneakers. He seems underwhelmed until I kneel in front of him and smile into his tiny face. Then he kicks his legs and opens his mouth wide into a smile or, when he is so moved, sticks his tongue out between his eight half-teeth.

After I get the text that they have finished filming, I stall a moment more, looking into the baby’s eyes, letting him see me, enjoying a moment of unselfconscious togetherness. I continue to gaze when he finds something else to look at. He is a beautiful reminder to me: there is more than enough just here. I’m reluctant to go back to the grownups but I chuck him in the carrier. Back at the basement apartment his mother is cooking lunch for all of us. I haven’t eaten anything yet—my belly rumbled into the baby’s back the whole walk home. We sit on the ground and play for a moment as his dad edits the self-tape and his mom pulls the foldable table from the corner and gathers chairs.

When we sit down my friend says grace and I enjoy this in earnest. Among other things, he tells god that he prays for me over my day, which I take to mean that he acknowledges his good feelings about my existence before god, and then in union with god wishes the best for me. I’m touched. We chew, my friend asks about my family, I give as honest a surface level answer as I can muster. I strain to make an appropriate contribution to the non-silence. I am, as I begin my twenty-seventh year, deliberately and diligently disengaging from the over-encumbrance of social conditioning so that my real self might breathe. The night before I’d been out, having beers with my coworkers, decompressing after a long shift. I’d gotten home late, and then been up unnecessarily early, wide awake, head exploding with thoughts, and now, sitting at the table, I cannot grasp my social self when I reach for her. My friend’s wife eats very slowly. I ask questions, sometimes hard to come up with, but then become interested in their answers—about the baby’s first birthday, about some light family history, about their plans for after their lease is up—and so the time passes.

It takes an hour to get back to Brooklyn. I enjoy the gentle rocking of the train, interrupted every so often by a lurch that destabilizes everyone. I like watching everyone jerk and sway in symphony. I like how my music sounds, until it starts feeling like too much noise, but then I just take off my headphones and hear my surroundings. I like listening to the train vibrating on the tracks, to people’s voices in conversation with each other, to the woman with a child strapped to her back offering us chicle and chocolate. I’m happy here. Sometimes, in moments of oversimplifying, I think that I am better when I am tired: then my fears are tired too.

By the time the train rolls into my station I’m hungry again—at lunch I ate too modestly, not wanting my friend’s wife to think I was a glutton. It’s cold now; the wind has picked up and it will start raining soon. I scurry down the street and up to my apartment.

For the rest of the day I am tired as a dog. I get caught up on White Lotus, shake my head when I’ve finished the episode: that show feels bad to watch. I inhale a big breath, letting the air cut through the feeling and move away from my laptop to the couch. I eat three chocolate peanut butter cups and a whole bag of beef jerky, sitting on the couch, watching rainwater splash the living room screen. My eyes work fine, capturing the scene in front of me with clarity but my ears are full of the white noise of the apartment and my body feels sunkenly heavy. This all keeps me here. A thought flickers across my consciousness but nothing reaches out and pins it down, and it flutters away. More thoughts flicker, intermittently, but I stay in the room on the couch in my body. The jerky tastes good. When the bag is empty I get up to throw it away and grab my laptop on the way back. I watch The Florida Project, laying down with my headphones on, computer on my reproductive organs, and I fall asleep listening to the kids in the movie babble and screech.

When I wake up I shut the laptop on the movie and walk to my bed. It’s six o’clock and I still have the house to myself. I open up Instagram. I see a carousel post that confuses me: a person writes that casual sex diminishes a woman’s divine feminine power because she is outsourcing love and pleasure from a man who proves, by not committing himself to her, that he’s not able to fully appreciate her. This, the post says, tells the universe that she is not ready to meet the one who will be hers forever. She will not meet the man of her dreams while she is offering up parts of herself to people unworthy.

I put my phone down and worry about this. I am having casual sex, although truthfully, to me, it does not feel casual; it feels like something I am spending time and energy on, however irregular. The things that happen in my life always end up as thoughts in my head. I wonder after everything. The men in my orbit have become interesting to me, and I want to practice getting to know them, not taking them on as my project, just getting to know them, and I want to touch them and for them to touch me. I pursue a better relationship to sex; I started dating again so that I could work on the power that men had over me—I wanted to still feel like myself all the time, even when a man was looking at me, or complimenting me, or touching me. I wanted to work on my own power, and the codependency that I had conflated with love. So what—because I’m doing this I am telling the universe that I am not sufficiently self-possessed and therefore will not meet the man of my dreams? It seemed counter-intuitive to avoid men and sex, especially when I craved men and when I craved sex. I could glimpse the truth of this person’s statement. However interested I was in divinity, I was not having the sex of a divine union. But also, what about letting myself want what I wanted and trusting that I would deal properly when easy times shifted to not easy?

The questions run rampant, plowing through the soft dreaminess that carried me through the first half of the day. Then I start thinking about all the microplastic in me. What’s going to kill me, I wonder, and how much is the microplastic to blame for the suffering I endure now? My thumb flips up and down my screen and I just keep on being worried about the divine femininity thing. What about divine femininity? Am I tainting the wholeness of my soul with my carnal desires, for satisfying them with people who are not as conscious as me? Yeah I’ve caught a whiff of divine femininity, I know deeply that I’m a woman, and I feel my worth as a woman. But is my soul a woman? And what the fuck is up with this belief that the woman is so precious, so giving, that she must protect herself against those who will not properly worship her? I don’t need the men who come into my bed, the men of now, to worship me. The man of my dreams will have moments of total enamor and overwhelming appreciation for who I am and what I feel like, but he will not toss me up on a fortress-pedestal—the moment will pass and he will get back to living beside me. That will be love. I’m pretty sure—

—But I can’t be certain. I pick up the phone again and tempt the algorithm to give me animal videos. Some of the videos make me laugh. I do this for an hour and a half. When guilt knocks at my door, all nervous over the blatant disrespect of my one precious life, I put my phone down and finish The Florida Project.

I watch it soundlessly and eat three plums. I think about how hot Florida looks, but how you barely care about that when you’re a kid playing with your friends. I wonder about the kinds of relationships sex workers have to their own bodies, if they can assuage the pain their bodies must at least occasionally endure, I wonder about how much caretaking is involved, how much the pleasure of performance is involved. I think about how it makes sense for the single mother of a child who doesn’t go to school to put the kid in the bath while she entertains a client. How if a person lives, intentionally or not, outside of societal norms, they have to end up forming social bonds that also don’t conform to societal norms. If they don’t there are consequences. But then again, there are consequences to everything.

The credits roll and then I’m filled with that late night quietness. It’s everywhere around me and it seeps inside. The movie made me hopeful, in awe of the art other people carry in them. The street is quiet, and the city beyond my street is quiet too. The tatters of plastic caught in the trees growing in the avenue’s meridian whip in the nighttime air. I hear them. I hear the underground train rattle through the station. I hear a bus let go it’s breaks and roll back into motion. A person walks south, another walks north and they pass each other. Someone in the building across the street turns of their light.

My lips get dry as I write and the only thing I have on my desk is lipstick, a “rose taupe” named “Pony” so I put that on. It’s really not my best color, a bit too dusty—it was an impulse buy. I think about what I look like, sitting here alone in my chair, in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, lipstick painted across my mouth. My hair is gathered in an orange scrunchie, I wear the white spaghetti strap I’ve had since middle school, grey sweatpants cutoffs that used to be my sister’s rolled twice at the waist. Hanging off my feet are the old suede slides I call my house shoes. I enjoy another moment free from rigidity of self. It doesn’t matter what I look like, I just am. It’s not long until I’m staring out the window again, dreaming, letting the night air push up against my skin. I look at the alarm clock on my desk and its one o’clock in the morning. My lids feel heavy and my eyes lose their focus. I save my work, back it up, and close my computer. I blow out the candle, close the window, take off the cutoffs. My bed is lit orange by my salt lamp and I relish in the way the sheets feel on my legs. Sleep is coming fast for me and it’s all mine.

I’m not ready to meet the man of my dreams. I want to be alone a little longer.