All we ever really have are matches in the dark. Moments. A look in your partner’s eye that you catch over lunch. The smell of street tacos. Hearing your friends’ baby laugh. Reading a really good passage and having it stick for seven years. Here’s to your illuminations, and to mine.

If we’re at a party or we’re at a potluck or we’re at a reading and I mention Fortnite to you, know I’m just wanting that same release for you, know that I’m advocating for play. Sometimes a narrative is overrated; sometimes dancing in a virtual world in an Ariana Grande outfit is what we need.

—Gamer Girl

But trying to reflect on the moment as it was happening, trying to write about how special Amsterdam felt to my union as I sat next to the city’s canals sipping an Americano and listening to ducks quack, it felt impossible. The joys were so evident and immediate—there, in the shade of a specific red lipstick or here, in the movement of a smoke cloud from someone’s lit cigarette— that I felt no real desire to document.

— But Wait, I Want to Feel This a Little Longer

I can feel You anyway. The You of this path I’ve come from; the one my grandmother’s feet knew, and I have her feet, too, I memorized the shape of her big toe before she died; the same path of my mother, that path she ran to get to me. One day You will walk to this path and I will meet you. I will want you, and want you, and want you. make all the difference.

— Motherhood is Daughterhood is Childhood

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What would happen to us? I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t have an answer. But every day I give those three words to Hans and he gives them to me. Validation as antidote against the unknown.

The Magic of Validation

The constant conundrum of being human is that life is both pretty boring and infinitely fragile, both insanely superficial and hopeless AND mystifying in its beauty, its metaphors. I choose to take the metaphors where I can get them. To wish on satellites if there are no stars shooting across the sky.

Feeling Everything and Feeling Nothing: Roadtrip Chronicles

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I thought a lot about the concept of warmth- how lovely the heat of a fire I created felt, how tremendously comforting it felt to nurture flames into a continued burning.

Warmth