It rained in the desert on New Year’s Day. We were in Arizona — we were still in Arizona. I stole a few minutes in the gentle light that morning, every morning, because even when clouds are forecast in Phoenix the sun eventually breaks through. I’d tip my face up toward the grey sky and wait. Is it here yet?

On the way west two weeks before, we stopped in Las Cruces for a few hours. The yellow grass was dry and the night air smelled like sweet tea. But when it rained in the desert on New Year’s Day, it smelled like sparks. It smelled like what lies beneath the world we built. It smelled like an idea yearning to be born.

In the daylight hours of New Year’s Eve, I holed up at a bar to write. A sporty elder millennial was already seated nearby, watching the game on a huge flat screen, alone. Even with his back to me I could see his ginger hair getting redder under his dusty baseball cap, beard darkening with drops of domestic beer in the aging afternoon.

A tiny dog sat cheerfully by the man’s feet, watching the servers pass with big, curious eyes and slumping on the legs of his bar stool between plays. Oliver. He was quiet and well-behaved, and before long he ended up in his human’s lap, a ball of eager white fluff cuddled into a caricature of American masculinity. The man scratched Oliver’s butt absent-mindedly, eyes still glued to the screen. They both looked pleased. It seemed a very sweet way to spend the last day of the year.

Later that evening, a couple parked next to me at the bar. They seemed very in love, relaxed, easy in each other’s company. Every time the bartender approached, they turned down a drink for themselves but ordered one for the other. No, no, not for me. No, I’m good. Just for her. One for him. She stepped away to take a phone call from her sister, he had a full glass ready when she came back. He took a few trips to the restroom, she always had a bottle waiting. I think sometimes they did a lap just to get the blood flowing. They spent two hours having just one more.

I’ve seen more of the United States in three years of Christmas cross-country road trips than I have in my entire life. But three humans and two large dogs packed into one truck for ten days is an adventure before we even pull out of the driveway. Plus, I am an irritatingly organized person. I like when everything is in its place. I am learning that’s not possible when you’re not alone. But you’re not alone.

On a trip like this, we stretch our legs and crack our backs at gas stations. We force ourselves into nonsensically shaped hotel gyms in the hours we spend not sleeping or eating or driving. In the back of the truck, I spread out into the available space between a suitcase or a backpack or a dopp kit or a bag of road snacks, a few stacks of largely untouched reading material and a loose hairbrush or two. Every year the trip challenges me to accept a little more mess into my heart.

I still make order where I can. I construct a backseat pillow from a jenga tower of go-bags and silly souvenirs. Neon green alien goodies from the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. A lifetime supply of nuts bagged at Pistachioland in Alamogordo, home of the world’s largest pistachio and also a winery. A bag of beef tallow candles from a small town shop decorated with a handmade Thin Blue Line sign by the front door, a Ranchers for Trump flag on the back wall, and a rack of Charlie Kirk T-shirts available in red, white, and blue.

Are we there yet?

In Oklahoma City, we went back for more Laotian. In all the times we’ve been to Ma Der Lao, we’ve never ordered anything. I don’t think we’ve even looked at a menu. We put ourselves in the hands of those more knowledgeable and buckle up for the ride. We’ve never had a bad bite and it’s one of the meals we talk about about most between trips.

This year, we wrapped up our meal with a few Wet-Naps and a list of beloved eateries handwritten by our server, a born-and-bred OKC local. On the way out of town, we stopped at the family-run roadside Pakistani restaurant he recommended. When I asked our server what we absolutely had to have, he looked me right in the eyes and with a smile that appeared genuine, offered, Butter chicken?

I asked him what he was having for lunch. We ate that.

I don’t know what it was called and I’ll never be able to order it again. It’s a morsel lost to that moment in memory, conjured only as a gentle warming in the center of the tongue. He looked bashful when he brought it out, like he was worried we might not like it. He was thrilled when we did. It was made with peppers his family imported from his hometown. How could we not?

In Tulsa, we ate better New American food sitting at the bar at the last spot open late on a weeknight than anything happening in the morass of new New York City bistros, all identical in practically every way.

In Amarillo, we went out of our way to stop at The Big Texan Steak Ranch Cabins, Wagons & RV Park, home of the “free” 72-oz steak. Finish every last bite of the behemoth slab of meat, plus a shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, roll, and butter in 60 minutes without standing up from the table or puking, or pay for the pleasure. It’s a pre-paid challenge experience, which they refund if you succeed. The house is betting against you and they’re not shy about it. Only 12% win. We’ve only seen a few people try. There is also a shooting gallery on the property, an ice cream and homemade fudge stand, and, of course, a gift shop.

In Tucson, I disappeared into Antigone Books for a spell. I thought of someone I dated fifteen years ago, of how different the desert looked through her questioning eyes. I remembered driving from the airport to her family’s home, stunned at the cartoon of blue sky spread out in front of us. At the flat expanse abutting mountains that could not possibly have been carved by accident. What is this place? I’d never seen a world like it before. She took me to Antigone back then. I thought of how long I’ve loved books, of how long people who love me have been taking me to bookstores.

In Phoenix, I dipped a toe into the heated pool, and then a whole foot, and then two, afraid that the further in I went the more quickly I might discover that the warmth was only relative. I got out a lot so the illusion didn’t have time to fade. I laid down a yellow-and-white striped towel on the concrete pool deck and inched along the edge, dangling my legs in the water, chasing an impatient patch of sun. Now and then, for just a moment, the temperature of the warm pool fell into perfect equilibrium with the frizzling winter air, caressing my calves until it felt like I was floating. Until it felt like there was no water at all.

We stayed in Arizona long enough that the world started moving in slow motion. Or was I the one slowing down? I had successfully unplugged myself from the pace of New York, from the relentless pressure to hurry up everywhere always, don’t fall behind, it’s always too late, there’s never enough time. By the end of the trip, I wanted to see my family, to sleep in my own bed, to drink tap water. But I didn’t want to rush again.

We were running out of time in the west, so we made hay. We spent a day wandering a mostly neglected living history museum that I found charming because I didn’t grow up there, and meaningful because people I love did. They knew it better, brother and sister. They saw all the ways it wasn’t what it used to be. Aside from the impossible mutation that memory makes of everything, it seems it really wasn’t. You can never go home.

With nothing to compare it to, I found it easy to move on from the disappointment of the living history museum’s deadness. I saw the shadows of two childhoods worth of tenderness and adventure rolling around the green valley, hills thriving and alive after a rare wet winter in the desert. Baby embarrassments. Toddler trouble. The right post-rain dirt made into mudcakes, priceless joys poking up through cracks in the ground.

In an unofficial arts district, we stumbled in and out of galleries and workshops with their doors flung open and plenty of wine to share. While museum two-stepping toward an impressively realistic oil painting of some kind of spaniel, I eavesdropped on an artist whispering that rent is too damn high. After turning the hand crank on a historic printing press, T. found himself in possession of the owner’s favorite monkey-themed anti-Trump poster, ink barely dry.

Between the studio buildings, I stopped to visit with a mural. The paint was weathered, capturing the neighborhood’s longevity even as new construction lurked around every corner, sweating in tarp-wrapped stacks of steel beams and sheets of glass.

I see street artists I love getting up in big cities all over the world, but one thing I noticed about Arizona is that there’s art everywhere by no one I’ve ever seen before. Unsanctioned art depicting faces well-baked by the sun, cracked in all the right places, smiling from more than their mouths. Block-long trails of saguaros and cardons and all the cacti whose names I will never learn. Graffiti of a bright purple muscle car, its body streaked with flames, sinking slowly into the memory of water, a wide desert sunset fading in the rearview mirror.

I remember being able to pop into a cafe or a restaurant. Or, later in the day, drop by a bar. You could just walk right up and find a spot. You could bring a few friends along, having just decided on the venue while stumbling past the entrance on your way to somewhere else. Hey, wait. This looks fun.

You didn’t have to book at midnight 30 days in advance when a handful of reservations were released to the public like golden Wonka tickets and snatched up before the app even had time to load on your phone.

We didn’t used to have apps. Or phones. But you know that already. You were there.

I don’t think it used to be this way, but I worry I am misremembering. Maybe this was always happening but I wasn’t so close to the scene. Was I too young to notice? Was I sheltered by my parents and their cool life and the total lack of practical stress in mine? Was I just in a different neighborhood?

I don’t think it’s any one of those things, or even all of them. It feels like something else. Information moved more slowly, and in that sense, it really is about the phones. It’s about what Foursquare and Yelp did to the internet and what the internet did to the world.

I feel only slightly embarrassed that I’m on a tirade about the internet murdering culture, which is certainly one of the least original ideas flooding a million Substacks right now. That it is in this case combined with lamentation of the death of the modern restaurant makes it, I admit, a little bit worse. Here we are.

My point is that the intel used to come directly from the mouth of another human being. You had to actually talk to people to get the recommendation, and when you got there, you actually had to talk to people. Trying that great new place didn’t require timing your visit in the impossibly small gap between the latest viral TikTok video and another Best Of The City list.

Plus, the city’s best was different.

I always considered New York home, but to me it felt like a terrible place to be a young person figuring out my life. I was glad to leave when I did. It took the pressure off. I didn’t feel the call to return until 2021, more than a decade later. Coming back to New York when it was actively where I wanted to be was magical. She let me in. We courted and flirted and fell in love with each other all over again.

It was the pandemic; in so many ways, the city was struggling. Part of what inspired my return was the mass exodus. Transplants who had only moved to New York to extract her resources fled to their second and third homes, fled to the beach and the country, to smaller cities that offered them less measurable value but more room to grow their net worth without needing to consider or contribute to the local community.

It was the way they piled their fonts of wealth into the shadowy recesses of their well-appointed caves and hired dragons to curl atop their hoards, just in case, while they went out on the town to see and be seen. To be photographed.

There, like here, they filed into the restaurants and the cafes and the bars that look the way they’re supposed to look and serve what they’re supposed to serve. Where we all dress how we’re supposed to dress and talk how we’re supposed to talk. Where communication is limited to what you can do for me and what I can get from you.

They purse their lips to indicate displeasure. I have tried to blame them for refusing to remove their designer bags from the last open bar stool, but I know it’s much more likely that they are simply unaware. It just does not occur to them that if they scooted over four inches a whole new party could sidle up to the bar. Who are you? I don’t know you. They seek out familiarity, not intrigue.

Now, they come back to New York to prove that they can. They move to Brooklyn and ignore their neighbors. Or they go to Los Angeles, which is better for them if you ask me. Sorry, Los Angeles.

Excuse me, they say with irritation, not with warmth. Excuse me, you’re in my content.

There’s family in town visiting. Let’s take them out. Not here, because it will be a zoo and we’ll never get a table on a Friday. Not there, because there isn’t a person in the room over the age of 25 after 7pm and that whole crowd doesn’t like to share.

Maybe feeling good is in us, not in the room where we do it, but maybe the room has a lot to do with it too.

Just moving through the city, I regularly pass long lines of people waiting on the sidewalk to get into some hotspot or another. It’s a new restaurant, it’s a sample sale. It’s a celebrity sighting. They’ve been camped out for hours. If I’m feeling clever, for everyone’s safety, I cross to the other side of the street. But more often, I blow right by, unwilling to change course on principle.

I shake my head and make big face, which is not nice and also does not effectively communicate the indignation I feel. When I bark a big excuse me, it is with irritation, not with warmth. If they read anything in my elbows out it’s that the crazy lady rides again. There she goes, muttering to herself. I imagine becoming line lore.

I’m mad at them for taking up the entire sidewalk. I’m mad at their total lack of proprioception or care. I’m mad at them for jamming their fingers in their ears.

Hello, this is a city.

Also, it doesn’t make any sense. This place isn’t even any good, it’s just popular. It looks how it’s supposed to look, which is to say, like everywhere else. They serve The Menu, and neither those who dine here nor those who work here can pronounce anything on it. The lighting is dim and the playlist cycles through only the “underground” hits that everyone already knows.

You can’t eat the vibe.

Why are they doing this to themselves? Why are we doing this to ourselves? I’m not really asking. The truth is that most of the time there is no compassion or curiosity in it for me. If I sound judgmental it is because I am judging.

Also, I am sad.

For the visiting family’s sake, for someone’s birthday, I line up at the neighborhood hot spot a full hour before it opens. I do this willingly. It is a weekday morning, but I know that won’t matter. When I arrive, the line is already wrapping around the corner of the block many buildings away from the restaurant entrance.

I’m mad at them for traipsing downtown in their jelly ballet flats. I’m mad at them for claiming someone else’s stoop as their selfie spot. I’m mad at them for sprawling out on the steps even after they’re finished with their photo shoot, lounging, completely disinterested in the world they have occupied.

I watch the people who actually live here, mostly old Chinese grannies, come and go from their front door. They wait stoically while these transplants on morning dates deign to lean one shoulder half an inch to the left instead of actually moving their bodies out of the way of the human beings and their carts and their families. Instead of helping.

Eventually, the restaurant opens and the line moves forward. When it’s my turn to pass the building that has been so thoroughly blocked, I stop at the near edge of the stoop instead of parking myself in front of the steps. The mom behind me has been doing laps with her baby in her arms for the past 30 minutes; I imagine she is exhausted and frustrated and ready to eat. She is also now angling to make sure I clock her mean mugging me.

She wants me to move. That’s what one does, in a queue: make progress. She is annoyed. She turns to her husband to complain. They are Brazilian. They think I won’t understand the things they say about this idiot girl holding up the line.

So I, in response, hold up the line longer than I need to. I’m only one person; I could easily fit in the space on the far side of the stoop closer to the restaurant. But I don’t. I wait, and for as long as I wait the stoop remains clear. A few grannies come and go from the apartment building. Their path is unencumbered, there is no one in their way, I imagine for the first time in weeks. I feel good about this.

Brazilian Mom dances around me in a performance of exasperation that could be narrated by David Attenborough. Watch the mother threaten the stranger without direct confrontation. The ritual dance of displeasure is a wonder to behold. These are no longer creatures of community, these modern animals. They have forgotten.

While holding the line, I make sure that I am looking up. I stare straight at the growing gap ahead of me, so that the grumbling crowd behind me might realize that I am not distracted or unaware, I am making a choice. I want them to know this is intentional. I glance over my shoulder a couple of times in an attempt to catch a few eyes. I manage to stop myself from raising an eyebrow and nodding toward the stoop space before us. Hey, look. Check this out.

I wonder if anyone will understand.

They do not. When there’s room for about five people on the restaurant side of the stoop, I finally cross the Rubicon. The Brazilians stay glued to me, and everyone behind them stays glued to them. There are six barely legal creators posing perfectly on the steps by the time I turn around to see what happened. The Brazilians are whining about what took me so long.

For lack of another viable emotional option, I begin to giggle. I am barely keeping it together as I approach the hostess’ podium. I know her from the neighborhood. She tucks my party of five snugly at the bottom of the list. I leave. I wait. The family arrives. Happy birthday. Balloons. Hugs. Smiles all around. Eggs, bacon, hairs of the dog. A candle in a stack of pancakes. They enjoy the brunch. The brunch is good. I wonder if it’s good enough.

Why is it like this? Is the line the problem? I am not convinced. The restaurants are not the problem, I don’t think. Maybe they are. Did it used to be like this? The line. Was winter always this warm? Was summer always this hot? OK, it was hot. Was it always this humid? Am I too different or is the world?

When the weekend nightlife crowds descend with such ferocity that entire neighborhoods go off-limits, I start to think this is a broken place. I cling to the hope that some of them might also long for what I long for. Don’t you miss what this city was? Before you, before me. Don’t you ever wonder what we could be?

I don’t have the guts to ask.

After ruminating for a while, I call my mom. Clearly I am comparing this moment to my childhood and we all know memory is not reliable. Right? Surely it’s me. I must be romanticizing the New York of the past, like everyone who has ever lived here or loved this town or seen a movie about it. Do I remember any of this, really? Do you?

But my mom agrees it didn’t used to be like this. She talks about how New York felt when she got here, how it felt to her, and I wonder how much truth is hidden in the folds of her personal history. She talks about the ‘70s, like everyone who has ever lived here or loved this town or seen a movie about it. It got better after that, she says.

Somehow, reflecting on what the West Village girls have wreaked leads me down memory lane. I am slathering myself in sunscreen while waiting on the sidewalk for the school bus to summer camp. I am wearing my mandatory blue and white tie-dye t-shirt and I believe the counselors are really my friends.

Was it hot that summer, hot like it is now? Was winter always this warm?

During the pandemic, reading fell away from me. I had a hard time following the words — I’d read the same sentence over and over again trying to put it in my brain. I tried to go slowly, taking one sentence at a time, but I’d inevitably find myself halfway down the page or three pages in before realizing I had no idea what was going on. Who are we talking about? Where are we?

I wasn’t retaining anything. I flipped back a few pages and started the chapter again. And again. The effort was consuming. If I’d been on a subway I would have missed my stop.

But I wasn’t on the subway. I wasn’t in New York. I was in an unsafe home in an unsafe world, everyone was sick and everything was death. For those locked down months, we all got a lot of practice enacting the self-harm of Keep Calm and Carry On. We scrounged for a sense of normalcy, our beacon, our north star, no matter the cost. If only it were normal maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.

When it became evident that normal wasn’t possible, we learned how to make it look normal. The world was burning but we went back to work. We sought comfort. Look how normal we all are. On the one hand, what else was there to do? On the other hand, what the actual fuck?

Masks? What masks? Oh, this old thing? I hardly even notice anymore. No, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’m used to it. Aren’t you?

A few months ago I read a book for the first time in a long time. I mean I really read it. I was inside the story, engrossed in the world. I knew the characters, not just by tracking what was happening to them but by living with them. We were connected. I understood them and I loved them. I disappeared into the book for a few weeks. I’d go to the river to read one page at a time, not because it was a struggle but because I didn’t want it to end.

I’m not sure whether my total immersion was a testament to her writing or some measure of my healing. Probably a bit of both, maybe one as an invitation to the other. Certainly it was a reminder that I was finally starting to live in my body again. Actually experiencing my own life. Remembering.

When you’re dissociating all the time, it’s nearly impossible to lay down new information. Even if you’re not in crisis at any given moment, your brain is never quite sure whether or how to calm down. Your inflamed amygdala slicks the detour from neutral — if you’re ever really there — to fight or flight or freeze or fawn, while your hippocampus shrinks away from all of its logical responsibilities. It can look like you’re participating in your life, to others and to yourself, even as everything you do and say disappears from the record in your mind.

Memory formation? Forget it.

The first time I ever realized I was dissociating, I finished a sentence and had no idea what I had just said. I knew I was engaged in conversation, that is to say some humanoid shape was standing in front of me and speaking in my general direction, and I was, ostensibly, responding to it. But while I had the vague recollection of having just opened my own mouth and emitted some series of sounds, I could recall neither the words nor the intended message. I couldn’t even put my finger on the topic of the conversation.

Terror. That moment of realization is like achieving hyper-awareness while suspended in a sensory deprivation tank in a black hole in an alternate universe. I am suddenly aware that I am by virtue of the total confusion of what I am. Am I a real girl?

I’ve devoted a lot of the last three years to that question. I am a person. A real person. A whole person. I am not my brain, I am not my mind, I am not my body.

A long time ago, I used to be able to recite the exact quote that one minor character said on page 67 in a book I’d read years before. I was a sponge. What I consumed, I integrated. The book became a part of me and I could call upon it not because I had memorized it but because I had worked with it. I was in living relationship with my own experience. We were in conversation.

I was young and unwell and I learned to love my brain. It was a muscle I could exercise as much as it was a character with whom I could communicate. It was not me but it was part of me.

Now when I dissociate, a quality of mourning arises immediately alongside the fear. I can’t remember anything, and it terrifies me. I can’t remember anything, but I used to remember everything. The story evaporates as soon as I close the book. I will remember that I enjoyed it, or that I didn’t, but my ability to tell you why will fade. I know I saw that movie a few months ago, but don’t ask me to tell you what it was about.

I started writing everything down so I wouldn’t forget.

One of the hardest parts is that I can’t always tell that it’s happening until later. I remember feeling deeply immersed in a novel while I was baking by the pool over the summer. I was sure, while I was reading it, that I was really reading again. I’m laying down memory here, look at me. I know what’s happening. I’m in my body. I am here. I am real.

Now, months later, all that confidence falls apart. I remember holding the book in my hands. I can see the bright green cover in my mind. I remember the gentle snap between my fingers as chunks of pages broke away from the spine, glue melted in the desert heat. I can smell the chlorine and the sunscreen caked into my swimsuit. I can feel the burn of the hot metal chaise on my skin every time I readjust and I can hear the wind whipping the striped yellow and white pool towel behind my head.

But the novel’s plot points? I’m not so sure. What the hell was that green book about?

Often, I am not my body. For example, I am not my body when it is doing something well. When I threw the head kick in muay thai last week, I watched my partner’s eyes go wide. We were doing head kick drills — it wasn’t a surprise attack, it was an assignment. My body was executing what had been asked of it.

I came to understand that my partner’s big reaction was her realizing in real time that one could kick the head at all. She was new, she hadn’t trained like this before. I heard some chatter from the bench, T. saying: When she doesn’t kick me in the head when we spar, it’s because she’s nice, not because she can’t.

When they talk about what my body does, my instinct is to hear it not as recognition of my achievement but as commentary on an anatomical anomaly. I don’t believe it, but I also don’t fight it. I lean into it, even. Yeah, my legs are just longer than the rest of me. I shrug. Look how disproportionate I am. I reinforce the idea that my body is doing things, not me. I act like I had nothing to do with it. Which is not true.

I go to the gym and I do what I am told not because I am the teacher’s pet but because it’s the best way I’ve ever found to learn a martial art. The instructor says to kick the head, I kick the head. So when my partner is surprised, I have to reorganize myself around her communication that this is an odd thing to do. I was just doing the drill. The instructor said to do it, so I did it.

In the case of these head kicks in particular, I already know that I can reach. I have a general sense of what my body can do in the disciplines I have been training for so long. But even when an instructor asks me to do something my body has never done before, I still try. I don’t stop to consider whether or not it’s possible. I put my elbow where he says to put my elbow. I turn my foot the way she says to turn my foot.

I can’t always do what I’m being asked to do, but I go for it anyway. Sometimes I make it, sometimes I eat shit. But in those moments, I am not my body. It is not even my body, really. For a few hours every evening in that sweaty shoebox with a few uneven mats, a permanent coating of dust, and no shower, I am in this body. It’s pure embodiment, which is a kind of freedom. If that’s not enough reason to shut up and do what you’re told in the gym, I don’t know what is.

I know what that first book was about, the one I really read down by the river. It’s in there somewhere, I can feel it, and to resist accepting the effects of dissociation as a permanent state, I force myself to think. It was about play. It was about creative relationships, about the practice of making as a unit of more than one. It was about the grey space between life and art. It was about how we need each other, and how we hurt each other worst when we love each other most.

As a form of exercise, I force my brain to remember the main characters’ names. The first is easy — Sadie Green — he yells her name all the time in the book. The second is tricky — I remember his first name — Sam — but not his last, because he uses a pseudonym, which I also cannot remember. I can smell that there’s a mnemonic I can use to get there, a breadcrumb trail I’ve left for myself, if only I can remember what it was… oh yes, the name of the wise old general in the one book I’ve read most. A name I won’t forget. Smart, I tell myself. Good breadcrumbs. I pull the thread from Mazer Rackham to Sam Masur.

I can’t find the third name. I read this book in the summer, it shouldn’t be this hard. Does it start with an M? I can remember specific scenes in his story in great detail, I swear I can, I am only not detailing them here in case you read the book (which you should). I remember the title of the chapter that explores the world of the book from this third character’s perspective. But his name. What is his name?

I catch myself typing the title of the book into the search bar, I stop myself just before my pinky can reach the return key. No, I can do this. I can remember. It’s exercise. Come on, brain. Keep trying. It really sounds like this, how I talk to myself about it. There’s some coaxing. There’s some encouragement. There’s patience, gentleness, because how could there be anything else? My sweet, damaged machine. Please come back to me. Please.

I resolve not to look up the third name. I won’t even pull the book off the shelf when I get home. Is it one syllable or two? M… I will remember. Walking helps, sometimes. I’ll walk this afternoon, I’ll walk tonight. I’ll walk until I remember.

I am my body when I’ve gained weight. I am my body when it’s bloated, when it’s bleeding, when it’s in pain. When it is hunched in shame. I am my body when I don’t like how a piece of clothing looks hanging on my bones or cutting into my flesh. When I cannot figure out how to dress my body because I am not sure who or what I am or what she would wear, my body is me. While my body is never my achievement, it is reliably my failure.

Clearly this is a broken paradigm. I am not in my body, on a regular basis. I am not my body, except for when it’s in trouble. J. tells me that you can’t heal what happened over years in a span of weeks or months — he reminds from time to time because I forget. So I work to settle into however long it may take for my brain to turn on again, for my Self to come home to this body, to rest if not inside this mortal shape then at the very least somewhere closer to this plane.

It’s become hard to write now, because I crave the riddle of the third character. A two-syllable M-name? No, definitely one syllable. When I was young and unwell, and I realize now, likely also dissociated, puzzles were the only thing that tethered me to what had come to feel like normal functioning. If I was doing a puzzle, I could think. Einstein’s puzzle, crossword puzzles, early internet puzzles, flash games that required lateral thinking, which by directly opposing logical thinking, turned me on.

I didn’t always have the computer programs or the hacking skills to play the games the way they were designed, but I was not deterred. No Photoshop? No problem. To solve that clue, I printed out the intricate patterns I needed to layer together and I traced each one, one at a time, onto transparent plastic sheet protectors, which I then stacked to reveal the hidden message. I was resourceful and I was motivated, which was particularly shocking considering at the time I sometimes couldn’t lift a fork to my mouth to feed myself. M…

Now when I am lost, I still play puzzles. When I cannot find the light. It’s good medicine for me. Puzzles don’t exactly get me back into my body but they do engage my brain, and there is hope that I might be able to follow the breadcrumbs from thinking to feeling to really being here again.

I’ve been back in New York for a few years now, so I sometimes miss my stop on the subway because I’m busy reading. Really reading. Sometimes I get on a train going the wrong way because I’ve got just one more chapter and I forget to look up because I am so high on the experience of actually processing information. Retention is a different question.

I don’t want to stop because the book is good. I don’t want to stop because once I finish it, I will have to reckon with whether or not I remember it.

Marx.

Certain corners of my historic neighborhood are populated by pretty fashion people wearing the right trends in the right ways. What they lack in originality they make up for in aesthetic capital. It’s 95° outside and so humid we might as well be swimming, but they keep their jackets on and their sleeves buttoned around their wrists. Their shoes are cool, their bags are cool, their sunglasses are cool. They have the right haircuts. There is a formula.

They fawn over each other when they meet, spraying air kisses into the aether like a caricature of the cultural class. Their voices pitch up a few octaves when they greet each other, feigned excitement and genuine interest blending into an indistinguishable squeal. A smokescreen obscuring what is felt. There is no art here.

There is the one guy whose greasy center part mirrors the straight-line placket of his short-sleeved, cable-knit polo sweater, always buttoned up to the neck. Always wearing tall white socks. Usually seen in thick acetate-framed sunglasses, a single silver bracelet on his little wrist. He yells into his phone and plays the other voice on speaker, never quite touching the glass of the screen to his skin. He sips an iced latte from a plastic cup and always has his pinky up.

There is one woman who is either 38 or 17, it’s hard to tell. She is the kind of thin I assume to be intentional, and her shoulders hunch forward, hiding her heart, due perhaps to skeletal atrophy or crippling insecurity. She is the embodiment of Y2K, which is a nostalgia-driven fashion trend for some and for others, a high school nightmare. Maybe it is insecurity drawing her posture down after all; when I used to wear those clothes I mostly hated myself too.

I have successfully cracked the veneers of a handful of these pretty people who live in the neighborhood. We smile and nod, a gentle salute, when we run into each other at the lopsided sidewalk tables of this corner café, an all-day affair clearly modeling itself after Spanish establishments but unable to screen its clientele for either bullshit or for joy. We trade book recommendations once in a while but I don’t know their names. It’s a certain kind of intimacy.

They rest happily in the shade, these formulaic folks so aptly doing exactly what is expected of us all. They play their parts, if not with elegance then with obedience. I, on the other hand, am splayed out like a pig.

As soon as spring breaks and summer settles, I develop a compulsion to roast myself. With a mind of their own, my bones drag me out of winter and into the light. Picture an emaciated zombie creature, a little less than human, army crawling across a frozen tundra toward the promise of a break in cloud cover, dragging herself elbow over elbow into the full force of the sun, into a concentrated tunnel of light beaming down to earth from the heavens, promising to recharge her dying cells.

I don’t like winter very much.

So I’m sprawled out in the sun wearing as few clothes as I can get away with. It’s not a fit, it’s the bare minimum of public decency. I get here early because I know exactly which tables the sun will hit first as it soars above the crumbling roof of the 230-year-old church across the street. As the light shifts, I drag my folding chair out into the street to lap up every last ray. I chase that patch of sun until I am in the way.

To be clear, it is hot even in the shade. I am not in the shade. I am sweating the kind of sweat that doesn’t just stay on the skin but rolls down the body, that pools in the creases of the elbows and behind the knees consistently enough to drip steadily onto the ground. I usually leave before a visible puddle accumulates.

It’s not cute. I do not care. I am compelled. I must roast.

When the morning rush dies down, the barista comes outside to roll out the awnings. The fashion people can’t have their makeup melting, but I pout when he covers me in shade. I will get more done now, I can see my screen without squinting and I’m not distracted by constantly wiping the sweat out of my eyes. But my light!

Last month I spent a few weeks baking my body in the Las Vegas sun, which might as well be a different star. No pool of sweat appears in air that dry, try as the glands might. An hour somehow feels like a year and also like no time at all. I sat on that roof until I was dizzy, day after day. I mostly avoided my standard sunburn. I tried to drink enough water, as much as such an amount is possible in the high desert in August. I was on a mission, spinning myself around the rotisserie of my poolside lounger, exposing every inch of my body to the oven of Las Vegas.

When I returned home to the city, the compulsion was gone. I still sit in the sun when it’s out, sometimes, but I am no longer driven by insatiable obsession, like I might be torn apart if I can see the light but not feel it on my face. Maybe my body was seeking out the nourishment it lacked, an intelligent machine in search of fuel.

Perhaps that compulsion to drown my naked self in sunlight until it hurts is a desperate cry for absorbable nutrients. Maybe the winter zombie metaphor wasn’t that far off. Are my cells rejuvenated, my organs reenergized? Has my skin soaked in enough sky juice?

Now summer is waning again. It’s not quite fall but the chill threatens, especially in the early mornings when I’m out here before the crowds, hunting the sidewalk café table that I know will be the first to see the light. With each passing day the sun crests onto this spot a little later in the morning, and as its angle changes it tangles in the trees around the church before it can break free. It will come. For now, I surprise myself by sitting in the shade.

I sat on a Wanderthief for two months because I didn’t think it was good enough. I revisited it during my writing sessions; I played the song, I read it through. I changed a word or two, I let it sit for a few more days. But it was finished, mostly, long before I let it live.

The word that drives my panic about this specific type of writing is “sophomoric”: overconfident and immature. If the act of publishing betrays the belief that a thing has value, surely it is possible that I will find out later, when I least expect it, when it’s too late, that it, in fact, had none. Sophomoric. Even if the writing isn’t immature, the overconfidence of publishing it surely is. What if I’m wrong? What if it’s wrong? Am I doing it right?

I was convinced that over-incubated piece was sub-par even after I published it. I know better than to assess the absolute value of writing like an act of creation is a math equation with an answer, but I was out of the habit. I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like. I’ve been thinking about writing a lot. I’ve been thinking about how I haven’t been writing even more than that. So I forgot, briefly, that I needed only to assess this thing against its own potential — is it completely what it wants to be? — and then I needed to move on.

Of course, I got more responses about the thing I was sure was shit than anything else I’ve written here this year. Within hours of hitting “publish,” people were writing to say they were moved by the work. A. said she needed it. Q. said it was the best I’d done; she sent me passages as she read and re-read. I had believed in it only enough to push the button, and no more than that. It’s part of the practice, I told myself, to have a few duds. But look what happened. What is value anyway? What is good? What the fuck is art?

There are a million reasons to stop writing. A few years ago, I stopped writing because I was sick of my own voice. I couldn’t trust it so I hated to hear it; as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get at the truth. Even when some honest idea slipped out, I wouldn’t listen to it. Then instead of opening my own ears, I raged that no one else was listening.

I stopped writing because I hated what I had to say. I stopped writing because I didn’t want anybody else to hear it.

At a bar in Brooklyn last summer, I made small talk with a woman in her 20s who had not yet decided whether she wanted to be my friend, my lover, or my replacement. Until she decided what it was she wanted from me, she definitely wanted to talk about how we were alike. She was a writer too, she said, but she hadn’t been writing much lately.

She didn’t know we had that second part in common most of all. So I gave her the only piece of advice I give myself: Babe, you’ve got one job.

I once told my writer friend C. that the only thing is to write. Everything else is a distraction. We were talking about systems, routines. I’d been looking to grease the wheels of the machine, thinking I might get myself writing again if I could remove some of the friction that irritates the hours between my brain and the page and the world. He had his frictions too.

All of that is nice. But it isn’t writing. I love my pen, but if I wear it instead of writing with it, it’s just a piece of jewelry. The systems and the routines mean nothing unless I write. The kind of writing I want to do also requires me to live the hell out of my life, to take big swings not knowing where they’ll lead and to drown myself in other people’s art. But even the living isn’t writing.

C. sends me memes sometimes, hustle culture stuff teasing my black-and-white approach to this very colorful thing we love to do. I get it, there’s a lot of overlap between a soulless #JustDoIt and my song called Just Write. One is a commercial transaction imploring us to sacrifice our own humanity to churn out more shit, no matter what, no matter how it feels, no matter the cost. The other, I hope, is an anchor. Solid. Reliable. Emotionless. Buried deep.

A writer is someone who writes. That’s it. It’s the best gem I’ve got. When I offered it to that not-writing “writer” woman, I felt a little guilty. It’s hard enough to hear when I’m cracking the whip on myself. To receive that indictment from the object of your libido while you’re flirting at the local dive bar? Yikes.

Knowing I’d said one honest thing was a salve for my mild guilt. Maybe she didn’t really want to talk about writing, maybe she didn’t really want to write. I’m glad I proceeded like she did.

I’ve stopped writing because I was worried about who was reading me. I’ve stopped writing because I was worried no one was reading me. I’ve stopped writing because there were some people on the list I didn’t trust, then I stopped trusting most people.

It never lasts, the stopping. Something always gets me going again, even if evidence of those triumphant returns never makes it out of the desk drawer. Sometimes it’s a surge of defiance that gets me back to writing. But I can’t sustain defiance. And writing for revenge is almost always ugly.

It’s better when I mush around in the having stopped. If I slow down and do nothing for a while, get bored, get lost, some long-forgotten half-full pot in the back of my brain begins to simmer from the ambient heat of creativity unspent, collecting, gathering mass, vibrating against the walls of my self, waiting to be used, wanting to be used, desperate.

Another part of the formula for return is self-flagellation, but the truth is that pain rises unbidden. I really do believe that a writer is a person who writes. Not writing feels bad. Easy.

People get weird when they find out I’m a writer. Sometimes they start using big words that they don’t understand in a misguided attempt to impress. Sometimes they ask me if I’ll write their memoir for them. They ask me what my days are like, how I do it, and I have to decide on the spot whether or not to confess that my “writing process” consists mainly of binge eating and deep cleaning the apartment.

If they find out I’m a writer while we’re texting, they’re prone to becoming hyper-aware of their own grammar. Suddenly every message in the thread is edited. Asterisks abound. They blame autocorrect. It all starts to feel like a test.

I find this particularly amusing because every writer I know is absolutely unhinged in informal communications. The rules go out the window. We play. How is? Where go? What be? We text run-on sentences with lots of all-caps exclamations to make clear what’s really IMPORTANT and make sure the emphasis we feel in our fucking uncontrollable little baby hearts makes it through both screens and into your eyeballs where it can burrow its way into your brain, an earwig, a worm, screaming the whole way at the top volume of its tiny body, REMEMBER ME.

We curse a lot.

Lots of women my age have been telling me lately that they always wanted to be writers. Still could be, I say. It’s not always appropriate, considering the topic of writing comes up during the job chat and we all ask what we do for work so soon after meeting, but I want to grab their hands in mine and look into their eyes the way that, apparently, I’ve been told, freaks people out. I want to brush their hair from their foreheads and tuck it behind their ears, where I will press my lips up close to that soft flesh and whisper the best advice I have ever known: There is only one requirement.

When I was a teenager, someone told me I was knitting wrong, someone who by all accounts should have been encouraging. I wonder if she felt I was encroaching on her turf as the family’s last remaining needle worker. It makes a crooked sense. She told me I was knitting wrong but didn’t show me how to do it right. I still wonder how intentional that was.

20 years later, I stumbled into an otter-themed craft shop in a tiny New Mexico town. The proprietress set me to browsing while she helped a few artists put the finishing touches on a hand-sewn puppet — land of enchantment indeed. I picked out some yarn, a recycled off-white slub that promised to knit up weird, uneven, unpredictable.

When the otter lady reemerged, I blurted out that I was pretty sure I’d been knitting wrong all my life. I didn’t share much about the backstory. I told her I remembered it was something about twisting stitches. The string in the wrong place, the needle in the wrong place, my finger in the wrong place, I’m in the wrong place. I’m doing it wrong.

The proprietress was angry on my behalf; it wasn’t the first time she’d received a discouraged crafter. She asked me to knit a few rows. She watched me do it, she checked the work. “No,” she said. “You knit right.” We picked apart the twisted stitches on one side, and she showed me how I was untwisting them on the way back. Her point was that I knitted in my own way, just like everyone who has ever knitted, and it’s knitting for god’s sake, who cares if you do it right or wrong or naked on a Tuesday?

We caked the yarn together under the skylit workroom at the back of the craft shop. I showed her the pattern I had picked out: a simple necktie. The document opened with a short essay about the creator’s life as a midwestern mom and how she’d designed this tie for her son’s wedding. I knit the swatch, we measured and adjusted. Otter Lady checked that I knew all the stitches and techniques the pattern called for. She gave me a hug, spun me around three times clockwise, blew some fairy dust at the back of my neck and sent me on my way.

I’d successfully completed countless projects in all the years I’d spent knitting “wrong,” so I’m not sure why I allowed the lie to burrow so deep into me. Because I was a teenager when she said it? Because she was someone with authority in this department? Someone who was supposed to love me because we were kin? Someone who never seemed to have much affection for me to begin with?

It seems silly now, in my mid-30s, tangled on the couch every night beneath a blanket of half-finished sweaters and scarves and tiny garments for other people’s babies. Knitting is enchanting. It is mathematically complex, it is otherworldly. It is a self-referential web of thread hooked in on itself, no one loop alive without its neighbors. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a spell.

After I met my otter-loving Knitting Fairy, I drove back east from New Mexico and winter turned to spring and more and more of me came up for air. When I started the project, I’d spent a few days just on the tiny triangle tip, knitting and unknitting and knitting again until it laid flat and looked right. The rest of the tie is basically a rectangle, so I found my groove quickly. I stayed up late knitting without paying much attention because it felt good in my fingers.

I realized too late that I’d passed the midpoint of the pattern. Halfway in, I was supposed to decrease to form the skinnier backside of the tie, the part that hides when looped around the neck. I’d been so enamored by my rows and rows of bumps and holes and loops in a tight little line, I’d entirely forgotten about the pattern. I was knitting again. Look at me, knitting right.

Of course I snapped out of that newfound confidence as soon I realized I’d knit beyond the pattern’s instructions. A portal straight back to wrong. I’d have to undo a good eight inches of work to get back to where Midwestern Mom wanted me to be. I let the project sit untouched for a few days while I overthought what to do next.

Backtrack and try to follow the instructions? Go off piste and make my own thing? Cross my fingers that it would still be something wearable, interesting, pleasing to hold and behold, instead of the fun-house-mirror joke that so often results from my self-directed DIY crafting?

Is it wasted? Is it wrong? Is it too late? Am I doing it right?

It’s easy to see these doubts as overkill when applied to an entirely voluntary craft project, but “doing it right” has driven a lot of my life. Seeing the pattern of mind play out at my literal fingertips — over nothing — gave me some clarity. So instead of choosing to knit forward or backward, I ended up at something more like fuck it.

I decided to make the thing I want to make, because I was enjoying the making of it, even if what it becomes is not what it was supposed to be. Even if it’s not what I thought I was making when I started. Even if it’s not following the rules, or doing what was asked of me, or doing what I asked of myself. I don’t even care about the tie in the end. I just want to knit this silly little slub until I’m done doing that.

It’s summer, eight months since New Mexico, and I’m still working on the mutant project. I’m not at all sure if or how I’ll ever finish it. The tie is now threatening to stretch into infinity because I haven’t yet found the courage to tackle an ending for which I have no pattern. I don’t know how to invent an inverted triangle tip. I don’t know the spell. I’m not doing it right. Same old song.

So I keep knitting the rectangle. It’s only 18 stitches wide on tiny double pointed needles, so knitting two rows takes less than a minute. I’m doing a seed stitch, which means knitting the purls and purling the knits. For reference, beginners are typically taught to knit the knits and purl the purls. It’s a good way to keep things straight, but it’s just a method of learning, not the absolute truth. At the same time, graduating to more complicated stitch patterns means, in a sense, doing it wrong.

At the start of the original pattern, Midwestern Mom’s instructions say to place a stitch marker on the “right” side of the tie—that’s what the front is called in knitting. My Knitting Fairy sent me home with a few removable stitch markers she made on the spot, twisting onto the wire a few delicate beads and charms she had selected for me. She did what felt right. It was second nature to her. She didn’t even look down at the project while she did it.

I clipped one of her stitch markers onto the tie a few hundred rows ago, like the pattern told me to. I’m not even sure it’s where it’s supposed to be. But seeing it dangling there reminds of my Knitting Fairy’s benediction. Make things. Figure it out. It will be your own. Keep going. Row after row. The wrong side, and then the right.

It is The Spring Time: Easter, Passover, full moon in Libra. It’s 34 degrees that feel like 21 when I wake up early to write. It’s raining, dreary, dark. I have had enough.

I went to Sheep Meadow with the rest of New York a couple of weeks ago when it was 70 degrees and sunny on a random god-sent Saturday. Coming up over the hill, the scene in the park felt like what I imagine of horror movies. The heavy metal blood soak in The Substance (which I did see). Bodies, bodies, bodies, each one of them threatening. A tableau of humanity, a polaroid of hell. We dropped our gingham blanket close to the exit and I angled myself to face the outer edge of the enclosure, turning my back on the writhing carpet of flesh.

And the sound of it. The low, angry frequency, an anxiety pill, of hundreds of thousands of people wailing their pent-up desperation to be outside, to feel the sunshine, to feel something. Even before the temperature dropped 26 degrees in the span of an hour, every menacing gale blew through the horde like a wave riding fans’ arms around a sports stadium. The dull drone, hanging low over our heads, took direction. I could hear it coming. I’d turn to see what was rushing toward me from behind.

We were the hedgehogs that promised six more weeks of winter.

I bought a membership to an arts organization last year. I was inspired by their long list of way-out-there plays and performances. I wanted to support, and I wanted the ticket discount. Last week, they announced their first show of 2025. I bought two tickets while complaining loudly to my companion that they hadn’t scheduled more theatrical programming this year. That was the whole reason I’d joined! What a disappointment.

He reminded me that this year has only been three months.

Actually he said “it’s only been…” and while he paused to calculate, I chimed in with “half a year.” How hopeful, how wrong. It’s been a quarter. It’s been three months and it already feels like a whole year has passed. It’s not still cold, it’s cold again. It’s next winter already. That’s how long it’s been.

Even for the least delicate people I know, this year has been a lot. People who I expect to find it sort of lame when we talk about how hard it is to exist right now, under this regime, are just as exhausted by the low drone of destruction that is now our daily drumbeat. It feels inescapable. It feels permanent.

I know people who are finally joining the protests. I know people who have banned themselves from reading the news. The ostriches plunking their heads in and out of the sand hour by hour. None of us feel like it is helping.

I find the romantic ideal of springtime appealing. I do. A postcard of bright, sunny skies presiding over neat fields of tulips, blooms finally pushing out of their tight bulb bodies and up through the hardened dirt. All of the bunnies and the eggs. The feasts celebrating bounty, plenty, enough. Cute layers worn for fashion instead of warmth, sweaters draped over our shoulders. A sidewalk cafe table, dragged to the curb where we can watch the sun linger longer between the buildings each day before giving way to the dark.

But it hurts to push your skull up against the frozen earth that buries you. Every year I forget the pain of breaking through until I suddenly realize I’ve had this headache for weeks. Spring cleaning sounds nice, but emerging from the chrysalis that has protected it for so long is a struggle for the butterfly. It is a battle. A rumble. The snake sheds naturally but the shed is stressful. And eggs are expensive.

This is my song, now. I have abandoned the dream of romance and embraced the violence of spring.

So when people ask how I am enjoying the beauty of this season, I cock my head. The small talk is innocent, but I have forgotten my lines. “Joy,” you ask? What’s that? En-joy-ing. It sounds familiar, a distant echo, the name of a sense memory. Where do I find it? Will I know it when I see it?

I used to be delighted by writing. I relished the opportunity to turn a throwaway moment into a glorious reminder that existing might actually be worth it. There was the kid tromping his toy T-rex through the wreckage of croissant flakes scattered across a cafe table in a Sydney suburb. The time a sparrow landed on my head in the middle of the Mercat Vell, perched in perfect stillness for just a moment, then clawed at my skull to take off again into the summer sky. The mugs on the shelf.

Some of you have been with me long enough to remember.

I used to joke about the joy I took in scrawling pages and pages about the surface of the old wooden bar that held up the pub where I snuck in before I should have. It’s out of business now. The bartender used his belt to hang himself in the woods in New Jersey. I spent many hours over many summers writing by hand about that one stone jetty that juts out farthest into the sea. The one out by the buoys where the kids play. You know the one. At least that’s still there.

But I don’t know what to write anymore. I haven’t been writing, and the less I write, the more I crave the ride of it. The high of an idea, the frustration of its expression, toiling over a single word for many hours before deciding it’s not done because it’s perfect, it’s done because it’s done. It’s a certain kind of quitting, really. All for a payoff so fleeting it can be hard to remember it’s waiting when you’re in it. That one moment, that one exhale. And then it’s gone.

There used to be sparks everywhere and I wrote about them all. Now there are sparks everywhere and none of them is good enough. I am constantly assessing, evaluating, weighing. And say what? I think. They don’t see it. No one cares.

The truth is I haven’t been seeing or caring very much lately myself.

The other day I caught myself enjoying the moment and I promptly wept. I was sitting at my desk with my eyes closed, feeling the daylight fighting its way through the dirty window to reach my face. I could see sheets of ice slicking up the alley outside, but I had a space heater blowing directly on my toes. I took a sip of espresso and lowered the ancient, fading floral demitasse back onto its saucer. I leaned back and listened to the album of my teenage grief and felt good and thought of how this has been happening every day, multiple times a day, and I have built a life that doesn’t even allow me to notice. I wept for the moments I’ve been missing. I wept for the machine I made.

Everything is content now. Everything, and therefore nothing. I’ve been working my way through my patron saints of writing as I seek to reemerge. Annie, Anne, Joan, Nora. But “everything is copy” is distinct from everything is content. Encouraging people to use everything they see and do to feed their art is very different from suggesting that everything they see and do is art.

The concept of content has contaminated experience.

In the mornings, I slice an onion into thin half moons and sauté them in room temperature butter. I toss them in the pan every now and then, lifting the whole thing up by the handle and flipping a few times to keep the sizzle from becoming a burn. Sometimes there’s garlic. Herbs. Spinach. There are always eggs, added after turning the heat down as low as it goes. The scramble is slow, soft, wet. I watch the curds take shape shyly, I inhale the aroma filling my tiny kitchen. I keep the overhead fan switched off so I can breathe it all in.

But as soon as there’s nothing left to do, when all that remains is to look and smell and wait, divining the perfect timing to take this mound of True Love from perfectly underdone in the pan to expertly cooked in the plate, the question of content creeps in.

Could I write about this?

In an instant, it’s all over. Suddenly, it’s just breakfast. Not only is the bubble of sensation burst, but so are the chances that I might write anything about it. Write what, anyway? No one cares about my fucking eggs. No one cares that I unwrapped a thin, flat wedge of Montgomery’s Cheddar a few weeks ago and when that barnyard cloud of hay and manure and frost wafted into my nose I stood there in the kitchen, perched perfectly still, thinking I might melt.

Who was there to tell? Come! Smell this! Look! Taste! Put your nose in it. Get close. Closer. Take it in. Can’t you see? Can’t you feel what I feel?

I am sitting on the gate around the Gandhi statue, all 13 degrees of the early morning air feel like fewer, and the pigeons care neither that it is cold nor that I am there. One pigeon spots a piece of bagel a few feet from me and when he turns toward it, the rest of the flock follows. They fly together, neatly parting to pass on either side of my skull, only barely registering what amounts to a mere obstacle on their flight path between the tree branch and breakfast.

Only two or three pigeons can get at the inch and a half of bagel at a time, but the 30 or so surrounding them don’t seem to realize that. I wonder if they even know why they’re there, huddling toward a general idea of center, pushing in toward each other, beaking their way forward, flapping and flocking and hoping for a turn at whatever’s in the middle. Trusting that there’s something there.

Another pigeon notices some other point of interest and leads the flock skyward. I can’t see what the score is this time, but they mostly leave together. A single pigeon stays on the ground with the bagel, pushing it across the sidewalk, pecking as much as it can out of the center.

In a tent down at the far end of the farmer’s market, a woman yelled at me. I was standing back to back with another shopper, each of us bent over the low tables before us and lost in our own worlds, taking our time combing through the meager winter Wednesday haul, looking for a nugget of something that might warm us from the inside.

To my right, this woman finished paying and I felt her coming toward me. I turned to make room, navigating around the shopper at my back, moving through shared space deliberately. But I wasn’t moving fast enough for her. She yelled “excuse me” about six times, right in my ear, breathing down my neck, she was so close to me. She didn’t take a break. She barely breathed. Her bearing down on me made it harder for me to get out of her way, not easier.

I wish I had turned around right where I stood and looked her in the eye. “Hello, I am a person.” I don’t believe she would have met my gaze. I don’t believe she would have engaged. But I wish I had tried. Instead, she got closer and louder and I got smaller and ducked to get out of range. As she passed I muttered something about how she was an asshole. I whispered something about how I had been moving, actually, shifting around other people in space to get out of her way for everyone’s sake. But she didn’t hear me. And I didn’t say anything about being human.

Usually on the subway at a certain hour, there is at the very least some low level chatter. Often there’s a whole lot more than that. But my subway home from the market that day was entirely, eerily silent. No one said a word, no one made a sound. There was no singular loud voice ringing out for me to hunt down in the crowd and glare at, because there was no voice at all. No commuter playing TikTok videos on full volume without headphones. No coatless man repacking his garbage bag inside a shopping cart inside another shopping cart preaching about bestiality and murder and how we’re all just sheep, can’t we see.

In the perfect quiet, I watched a woman offer her seat to someone who had been standing. I’m not sure why she stood up. They both looked young and healthy and full of energy. They didn’t know each other. She wasn’t getting off at the next stop. I stood next to this suddenly upright woman, alternately reading a sentence of my book at a time and attempting to decipher the silent social exchange I had just witnessed. I stole glances at their faces. Honestly, they both looked confused. What just happened here?

We rode in silence, the three of us and everyone else. Subways are loud machines. They’re musical, if you’re in the mood. But for many stops, no one said a word and the subway sounds seemed to fade a little more at each passing station. Just before I got off the train, the woman who had offered her seat spoke. She wasn’t on a call, I clocked her phone screen when she checked it reflexively to cover for what she let slip. I don’t think she meant to make a sound at all; it seemed like she startled herself when she did. Who said that?

Maybe the thought was too much for her body to contain. Maybe she’d thought it too many times in too few days. Maybe it just needed to come out.

“I was too vulnerable.”

There used to be a statue of Medusa in this park. I used to visit with her, ask her for advice. Her body and face were made conventionally beautiful, highlighting the innocence of her flesh to feed the fear of her affect. There was a reflecting pool too. Sour green algae crept in from the edges of the stone hole, inching toward the cigarette butts and fallen leaves that floated on the pool’s surface. The maze of courts and jails and municipal buildings whipped up the winds that carried debris in every direction.

I remember being aware of the pool, but it never drew me in. I was busy with the Gorgon.

Everywhere I go I’m in somebody’s content. Reading on the fire escape of my Chinatown apartment, crying in Columbus Circle, watching the East River rise and fall from a decrepit bench hidden behind the fence around a never-ending construction project. Auto-shutter, long arms, selfie sticks.

While crossing the Brooklyn Bridge last month, I emerged from the tourist horde to stumble immediately upon some guy filming a dance routine for TikTok. It’s a bridge. There’s nowhere to go. I’m in his video now.

I’m in the background of that couple’s golden hour selfie under the FDR, which is still painted a cheerful lilac that I find both perplexing and incongruous with this part of town. I’m in the background of that guy’s running commentary at the one-time screening of an independent kung fu documentary. In a movie theater. Seriously.

The Medusa statue is gone now. The pool is dry. The park is locked. I walk around to try the far entrance and find an all-black pigeon perched on the chains that hold the gates closed. Out of one eye, without turning his head, he watches me watching him. He’s waiting. I’m waiting. What are we waiting for?

I give up.

As I turn to leave, I trip over a thick rope of media cables and electrical cords snaking their away around the park’s perimeter. A row of police cars and prison transport buses face off against a whole block’s worth of cable news vans. Neat letters laid out in neon tape stake each TV station’s territory on the hot pavement. The metal gates enclosing the media pen bear the marks of both the NYPD and an equipment rental company. Everything is for sale.

It’s my fault for walking this way.

Just a few blocks over, there is another park with a lot more green and no gates to keep out the public. The tulips are overbloomed. The daffodils gray. A loaded swing set groans in the shaded playground. A long line for the public restroom spills out of the park and onto the sidewalk.

I try to take a picture of the droopy flowers but I can’t get around the people. There’s always someone in frame, someone who didn’t ask to be photographed, someone just existing in the world. I want to cut them out of my picture because I want to be cut out of theirs. While I’ve been trying so hard to remember we are each the hero of our own story, I forgot that we are also someone else’s supporting cast. It’s hard to avoid.

I leave the parks behind and turn onto my winding no-car street. I realize I am being followed by another surge of cables and wires, guided along their path by zip ties and electrical tape and heavy duty pedestrian cord protectors. I stomp on one or two, only sort of looking for their owners. It’s not the news machine this time, it’s a movie crew. The neighborhood is scenic, sure. Historic, even. I get it.

Equipment carts crowd the sidewalk in front of my door, wrapped in transparent plastic in case of rain. Every lamppost in sight is plastered with arrows pointing from set to lunch and back again. Around the corner, a fleet of ear-pieced assistants man their trucks and trailers, bored and tired but soon to be paid. They’re pacing. They’re yawning. They’re chain smoking. I crawl upstairs to my apartment and draw down the shades. I do what I can to block out their big hungry camera lens but it’s pointed at my window, waiting to turn me to stone.

Getting through other seasons is not challenging for me. I stop to smell the literal roses growing wild out of a plot of dirt in the Brooklyn sidewalk as the spring air spreads my face into a smile. I shove my nose deep into a bloom that has no scent but its petals brush velvet against my cheeks. The light is long and there is not a lot to rush for. There is time.

The summer days make us mostly nude and the nights take us outside and into each other’s arms. What’s not to love? So it’s a little sweaty. So it smells. That’s alright with me. In the crispness of fall we linger outdoors and ignore as long as we can the nipping of the air. We’re trained all our lives to love the turning of the leaves and the tilling of the gourds. Pumpkin costume. Pumpkin patch. Pumpkin spice.

The sun is in the sky and even when it’s not, you only have to wear, at most, one pair of pants.

Then there’s winter. Dusk is already looming when I open my eyes each morning. Getting through feels all but impossible. Everything is slow. Progress is begrudging. Do I have to go to school today?

I look for proverbial roses and find a dollar-ninety-nine chocolate frosted with sprinkles from Dunkin’ Donuts, even though I never go to Dunkin’ Donuts, I don’t even like donuts very much, donuts are almost always disappointing. But it’s dark before 5 o’clock and my fingers will freeze between the top of the subway stairs and my front door and this pastry seems like the only thing that might turn the lights on in my brain.

I clutch the crumpled wax paper in my fist. I chew the donut.

They always smell better than they taste. That’s what it is.

I look around before stuffing in the last donut quarter. I haven’t even chewed and swallowed the rest yet. I don’t stop and savor it. I don’t dissect the artificial flavors crumbing the roof of my mouth or patiently wait for the sticky sugar glue — “glaze” — to dissolve on my tongue.

How to get through winter? Choke down a chocolate frosted in the cold.

When I started writing this, the winter solstice was 20 days away and the season already represented an existential threat. The symbolism meant something to me but the promise of daylight meant more.

How to get through winter? Remember that the day isn’t over when the sun goes down.

Then it was coming on Christmas and I got so distracted counting the rambutan skins scattered across the platform at a Chinatown subway station that I missed my train. I made a playlist of holiday tunes that don’t suck and that little victory over all the same old goddamned carols helped. Jazzy songs about bad gifts (socks) and bad jokes (capitalism). Getting out of town helped.

Then it was January, which is, it turns out, not the time for new beginnings. February in New York has always vexed me but this year the misery came early. I didn’t realize how long it had been until I overheard an old man chatting up a family of tourists drowning in luggage at the West 4th Street station: “You came at the right time, we didn’t see the sun for seven straight days last week.”

Oh, that’s right. We didn’t. No wonder. They shouldn’t have given us a new season of The Great British Bake Off at Christmas, they should have saved it for February when New Yorkers need a reason to go on. This concept of the two-week winter break and subsequent return to absolute normalcy is deceitful. Cruel. Back to work? Please.

Next year, I’ll treat The Holidays as the start of the celebration, not the event itself. I’ll consider Christmas the opening ceremony to my Great Indulgence-Hibernation. All the blankets, lots of naps, sleeping in, sex. A glass of something before bed, a shot of something in a cup of hot tea. In morning coffee! A big bowl of popcorn. Cozy pajamas and furry slippers and many, many layers. Champagne. Creamy soups and warming stews, braised meats and long roasted root vegetables, the sunchokes that survived in frozen ground.

I will do more, not less, I will just resolve to do it all inside. Stir the spirit by soothing the machine. It can end at Mardi Gras. I went to New Orleans for a couple of weeks and now I’m obsessed with the idea of Lent and where it came from. I didn’t give anything up this year, not officially, I’m a little behind schedule because I was busy laboring under the imbecilic impression that January 1st was the right time to introduce a period of austerity. Now I’m catching up on all those inside indulgences. I’m fattening myself up.

We spent a lot of time in New Orleans tracing and debating how exactly the Catholic Church came to usurp primordial ritual. Maybe next spring I’ll design a personal 40-day sacrifice to weep for Tammuz, god of fertility, and honor Osiris, lord of the underworld and judge of the dead. Until then, surely the cycle of life and death will continue with complete disinterest in my abstinence or lack thereof. All roads lead to Babylon and 20 days remain until the spring.

Every few years I read a book about love. It pretends to be a book about war, but I know better. It’s a kids’ book, really, which makes all the null gravity space battles and preparations for an alien invasion peanut butter around the medicine: how do we love each other? How do we love our most brutal, monstrous selves?

The closer we get, the harder it is to love well. The closer we get, the more our humanity bubbles up between us and then there we are, a mess of body parts entangled in the passionate embrace we learned to perform when we were promised the power of together, until a distant hissing warns that in the background, behind the scenes, we’re boiling over.

There in the boil is our pain. Scry into the writhing surface and you will see the face of every remembered rejection, insult, misunderstanding, disappointment. What floats to the top are all the ways we have learned to protect ourselves from precisely the connection we crave. Because we tried that, once. Because last time didn’t go very well. Because what we offered another was not returned. Because what was offered to us we could not accept.

A few years ago I found living in New York incredibly difficult. Everywhere I went all I could see was how we were doing it wrong. A million tiny neglects. Rejected on-ramps to an oh-so-close utopia. We stand up for each other on the subway, don’t we? We hold open doors. We give directions and we look around to see who needs what. We rummage in our pockets to see what we might have to share. Don’t we?

Back then I read the Metropolitan Diary every weekend to remind myself that there was still magic here, or at least that there were still humans here who wanted some. The stories made it easier to get through the day because they offered hope that by the end of it we might find a way to connect. Eye contact and a smirk shared with someone who saw what I saw. Stopping someone from getting on a subway headed in the wrong direction.

But I didn’t see anyone looking around. I didn’t see anyone helping. It made me angry, how cold and isolated we all were. Time it right and the bowels of the city are the perfect place to witness just how much we don’t respect each other’s space. How we don’t help each other. How under the guise of self protection, all we do is self isolate.

A few weeks ago I caught myself cursing under my breath at the latest gaggle of girls that was pissing me off without really doing anything wrong. In that moment, I became acutely aware that this was a me problem. There was everything that hurt, boiling over: Don’t you know? I wanted to scream. Don’t you feel what I feel? Aren’t you baffled by living?

They were covered in glitter from head to high-heeled toe and tottering arm in arm to a Halloween party. They were on a subway headed in the wrong direction and I hoped that was the worst problem they would face that night. I thought about how their glitter was armor too, how their Barbie and Clueless and fairy costumes inured them to the world or perhaps inured the world to them.

I am in my 34th year and only now beginning to grasp that just because other people aren’t feeling everything out loud all the time doesn’t mean they’re not feeling anything. I’ve spent many years fantasizing about being one of those Chill People — unperturbed. Able to replicate the outfit of the week, arm in arm with a squad of other Chill People, passing as whatever it means to be normal right now, smiling and laughing easily in every environment as if entirely unaffected by the everyday indignities of existence.

Who will those girls be when they wake up in the morning wigless and bare-faced? What will worry them when they are themselves again?

Now I am beginning to understand that maybe Chill People aren’t doing it less, maybe they’re just not doing it on the outside all the time. I confess this is not the first time I have realized something incredibly obvious incredibly late. (You should have seen when I discovered anti-chafe cream; many of our problems are solvable, friends, and we can often only find the answers if we think to look for them.) Sometimes we need to hear the message over and over and over again until we are the right person arriving in the right moment to really receive it.

I understand also that as long as I am angry with my glitter girls, I am not helping. I’m not looking around to see who needs what or rummaging in my pockets to see if I have it. The machine of my own mind believes it is protecting me from rejection, from judgment, from disappointment, from pain. But self-protection is a detour away from the on-ramp to heaven. Self-protection forces isolation because it is obsessed with its own object — there is no room for anyone else’s humanity when I am desperate to distract you from seeing the truth of my brutal, monstrous self.

I batten down the hatches so nothing can get in and as a result, nothing can get out. So I force myself to relax the muscles in my face instead of rolling my eyes in their general direction and I look for ways to love them under my breath instead of insulting them. I lean against the door at the short end of the subway car devouring books about space because sci-fi doesn’t teach us anything about alienness, it teaches us about humanity. How do I forgive myself enough to allow both my own humanity and yours? How do we love each other? How do we love ourselves?

My skin knows the season is turning before the weather changes its mind. It starts to feel like I have scales, and if I could only scrape them off then I might discover what creature I am become beneath all this. When I put my fingertips to my wrist or my ear or my thigh, I experience the sensation that either what is touching or what is being touched might not belong to me. I’m not entirely sure and I also don’t really care to work it out — can I tap out of this particular pattern of existence instead? Can I take off my meat suit for a minute?

I confide in my friends about what hurts so we can do a little bit of it together. Sometimes our pain is acute and the causes are clear, sometimes many acute pains pile up like a multi-car freeway collision, sometimes the everyday of humaning is just too much to bear. Too many moving parts, too much to feel, too much to hold, manage, care for, too hard to do it well. When I returned to high school from a period of being largely unable to function, Ms. Knox was teaching The Great Gatsby. “If it is too beautiful to be borne,” she whispered, “just read the SparkNotes.”

Although I think it is often a legitimate option, there is unfortunately a lot about life I cannot persuade myself to TL;DR. I have to go deeply or not go at all. I want so much, by which I mean both that there is much that I desire and also that I desire it vigorously. But in the same way that love is not enough, neither is wanting. I am learning to distinguish between desiring the thing and being prepared to receive it, because no amount of ambition can till dead dirt into healthy soil.

Is this a thing I want? Or is it a thing I am ready for?

I am not addicted to cigarettes but I am addicted to the pursuit of perfection. I am addicted not to the thing itself but to the striving — to aspiring to a state of being I know very well I will never achieve — which is to say, perhaps, that I am addicted to failure. No amount of internal work or personal growth or self-help or self-care can supplant that addiction to chasing an impossible ideal, and after every fleeting fallow period during which I successfully enact quitting by convincing myself that I am enough, I am as likely as ever to return immediately to the self-flagellation of never really allowing it to be true.

And I am impatient. I am both the sushi chef and the tuna belly. I carve and am carved, I am descaler and scale. I would like very much to rest, but the idea of taking a break just makes coming back to face it all more frightening than it was to begin with. So I do not unzip my skin, for now, and the creature percolates.

Since both the air and the date have declared summer dismissed I pull the sweaters and scarves out of the box in the back of the closet. I yank my long sleeves down over my forearms while I type to hide this baffling human container from my view. Maybe I can exist in this meat suit a little longer if I stop obsessing over it, and maybe I can stop obsessing over it if I’m not looking at it all day long.

Maybe if I can stop myself from popping off each new scale as it appears, if I can resist picking at the scab it leaves behind, maybe then I will be able to allow this feeling to be what it is.

In the meantime I try to direct my energy toward something else, anything else, not as a distraction from what hurts but as a tactic for abiding it. I am an animal beset by feeling, oversaturated and overwhelmed, but I have been down this road enough to know that the only way out is through. Can I slow down enough to hold it? Can I speed up enough to balance it? Am I brave enough to sit in it? Are you?

I used to write. I wrote freely and without concern, because there was no one I was worried might come after me for what I had to say. As I remember it, the writing was actively concerned with truth and the truths in question were largely innocuous. I observed the world and I observed myself and I dreamed up ways I might spend life witnessing the glory of humanity. The writing was easy. I wasn’t worried then about anyone coming for me and he hadn’t come for me yet.

I wasn’t worried then about anyone more individuated, anyway, than the faceless, nameless horde of males that manage to achieve critical mass even without any official affiliation. That whistle at me when I leave the gym and hang their bodies out of moving garbage trucks to gawk and shout at me to use my fucking brain because I’m not sure if they’re going left or right when we pass on the sidewalk and I linger a little too long trying to share space well.

Their threats are not new. Maybe they bother me more now than they used to.

I don’t know if the adult male on a child’s bicycle was trying to cop a feel when he went for the phone in my hand or if he was just an unskilled thief. While he pedaled away, after I realized all the yelling was neither helping me nor hurting him, I caught myself giving him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he missed, I thought. Maybe it was an accident. I reflexively acquitted this total stranger of culpability for no reason other than who I, the recipient of the violation, was socialized to be in the world. I extend myself no such courtesy. I do not excuse myself. Our socialization does not include that kindness.

On the day he tries to swipe my phone, it’s raining. Cataclysmic storms have rolled down to the city from the north, where the horses won’t run on the wet grass and not every creature was made to race on rocks. I buy myself a bright blue and yellow ice cream cone and decide not to mind that the topping will be raindrops. I carry it cold and low in my belly, typing into my phone with my thumbs, turning down another empty street. I am alone before his attempt; after, I am alone and I am holding on imperceptibly tighter.

The rain moves my cursor each time it splashes onto the screen so that I start one sentence down here and finish it way up there. I tried to leave things out of order for you, for a laugh, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I have to clean up, put things where they belong, make something of the mess. I can’t help myself. It’s true that the words don’t make as much sense when they’re not in order but it’s really about control. Making order is my compulsion; I need it to be right.

You can’t tell because this paragraph appears immediately after the last, but it’s now been many days since I started this thing. Many of those days saw rain. I am still writing. I am back in the city where Wanderthief was born, cauterizing a decade-long cycle. I am still concerned with truth and metabolizing fear. Things are different now, but a few people still call me Wanderthief. A few people know who I am, and they’re still here. Maybe I am too. Still here. Still in there, somewhere.