little miracles

the sun setting closer to midnight each (still fleeting) day

the red stains of summer fruit on our lips and chins

how memories rise and fade like the blue of the tide

words like lanterns, lighting the way (after Dickinson, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself“)

gratitude for wounds that steadfastly wake us up, day after day

looking up to see that the roses, too, still find a way to bloom every june

the willingness to move forward without knowing where we should begin

no feeling is final,” again and again

questions that remain more interesting as questions

and endings that are not really the end

that every time you think you have lost yourself, further up the mountaintop you’ll find her again

and how i’d want you to see the view from here, with me. i’d hold out my hand.

should we have stayed home?

How did we get here again?

In the days trailing Christmas, Lisbon steadfastly follows all the rules. I’m at once grateful and desolate about the relative safety I’m indulging in, of a country whose people were so devastated early on that they are now strict in attempts to ward off the inevitable. Is that what it takes? The consequences of a past so deep that we can’t ignore the future? It hasn’t seemed to work yet, I think grimly about home, about love, about bids for forgiveness. At least they are trying, I accept, as I walk twenty thousand steps per day to reward myself with pastéis de nata. On one of my sojourns I wander into a bookstore across from a museum, tucked away in a northern suburb where tourists are less likely to go. The newest issue of Granta lures me from its perch. Should we have stayed home? issue 157 inquires, alluding to the familar lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem. I am reverent, called-out, shameful over my first vacation in a long time.

Two years ago we wrote about this, earnestly thinking that after 2 weeks we’d have finished the canned beans we stocked up on. Two months ago we wrote about this, thinking we’d fold our cloth masks and put them away for the future. I saw some people string up cloth masks above their rooftops in triumph at believing they wouldn’t need them anymore; I saw others burn theirs. It’s different the second time around and even moreso the third, they’ll tell you about lockdown, and sex, and falling in love. That’s diminishing it, I know, but we’re all doing our best (we claim).

B sends me TikToks that I don’t watch until I do: bingeing his torrential messages in secret while attempting to sleep, but in public declaring that I’m “too old” to be a millennial and that I don’t watch TikToks. I kid myself when wondering why I suffer from insomnia, but at this point I gladly accept the burden of sleeplessness over other looming ailments. I rewatch The Walking Dead a third time, and this time it seems so close to the truth that I have to turn away to things like Sandra Bullock romantic comedies.

I return home again (what is home?), and I can still taste the cinnamon on my tongue. On every street corner, discarded fir and pine trees tumble into one another next to the metal bins. In the rare event that it’s not raining, Vondelpark is packed; gloved hands full of glühwein and dogs’ leashes. A surge of pessimistic foresight led me to purchase dumbbells at a suburban Target before I moved, and I use them every day. My friends invite themselves over to my place for dinner; they feel trapped, they feel alone. I make food for them on weekends. We sing songs from Moulin Rouge to pass the time. My neighbors across the street decidedly close their drapes to avoid watching me throw solo dance parties to Enrique Iglesias music videos from the 90s. But really I want someone to invite me on a roadtrip in their converted van, so that we can hide from the Greek alphabet and cook dinners over butane stoves in national parks while watching the stars. That’s a privileged-ass thing to be able to want, just like craving B’s curated TikToks under the safety of my Marimekko bedspread to the sound of the Dutch rain. On my daily walks I listen to podcast stories about death and collective grief. I think about my personal grief every day, but don’t write about it.

On cold nights I bike past the Amstel, noting the yellow holiday lights strung on tree branches blinking silently on the river and echoing our hope. Past due, left on for a little too long, yet still glowing like embers next to the bobbing moonlight.

every day a new sky

A year ago, I traded the narrow grey skies of New York City for the blooming vastness of my hometown’s sunsets. Then I found myself bobbing and weaving through the Dutch canals reflecting sea-like rainclouds on my cruiser bicycle with the blue basket tied to the front. I didn’t set out to seek new and different spaces to occupy, but life’s little ship granted me temperate weather from the bursting spring of the New Jersey suburbs to the apple cider season of upstate New York to the strangely warm winter of Texas to the budding summer of Amsterdam.

Starting with my time in New Jersey at the very beginning of lockdowns, I went for walks every day. On those walks, I thought about how lucky I was to be able to take walks. On days when it seemed that absolutely nothing was happening in our immediate surroundings within the walls of our homes but also everything was collapsing outside, I would wake up knowing that I would walk, and then I would go to sleep knowing that I had walked. For some reason, this tiny purpose made me feel a sense of direction during a decidedly directionless, uncertain time. Then when I returned to Texas, I decided to start photographing the sky. Every day, for one year, I took a photo of the sky; sometimes it was while running, sometimes it was clumsily with one hand on my bicycle handlebar and one hand aiming at the sun. Sometimes I forgot to post, but it gave me a reason to look upwards every single day. It prompted gratitude, sometimes awe. Even when it was raining, even the day it snowed in Houston, even when the power went out. Even while devastated by the country’s and world’s politics, disasters, and climate change- what better reminder of the need to stay engaged, to fight for change, than our determined and steadfast sky? Today is the one year anniversary of the project. I hope the photos provide you a bit of peace to browse through, and a reminder to look up.

We have been treading water, starving for togetherness while also forgetting how to be in the company of others. I remember thinking often: I don’t feel lonely, is this a privilege or a curse?

What did we allow in, when none of us should have been allowed out? I recorded my dreams in a notebook next to my bed, and some moments when nostalgia knocked at the door I let its muscular hope overtake me, quietly and then loudly and all at once.

Here, across the ocean, we comfort each other with little remnants of home; but what is home? Of course just like those who keep running from something or towards another, I want to say (and believe): different geographies cure us. But no, time runs just as quickly here and days pass just as slow. Moving doesn’t cure loneliness, it just gives it a different color, it gives it a different sky.