on changing shape, on bloom.
poking my head out from the soil, wondering what it might look like to come into bloom.
It was almost two years ago that I wrote my last public letter, just as I was in the midst of going through a major purge. So much of the life I had been living until that point shed in the months that followed—I left the three jobs I’d pieced together to support myself when I first moved to NYC, said goodbye to the students I’d mentored for years, packed up the apartment I’d lived in for half a decade, and moved to a new home. Friendships faded, I went deeper into the ones that remained. Three new babies entered my life months apart, the small faces of strangers surprising me with their babbles and first attempts at making fists. I set boundaries that hurt my heart, and slowly filled the space the grief cleared with new possibilities, new questions, ones whose answers arrive in glimpses. I don’t force an answer. I played basketball, I swam, I rode bikes around the city. I traveled the bit I could, had a few flings, went broke, saw Bartees Strange and Mk.gee and Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez play their new albums. I spent time in archives, including my own. I got nine stitches in my right knee, went to housing court, the beach, protests. I made sets of dinner plates and bowls and tarot cards out of clay. I lifted weights. I ran over the Williamsburg bridge. I hosted my first Christmas, wrapping my guitar in green tissue paper because I hadn’t saved enough for a proper tree. Mostly, I embraced my solitude, spending many hours in the bath, and in the final weeks of the year I gave my first reading in over a year.
The New Year began with a new short story of mine coming out in BOMB, edited by Raluca Albu and featured the wild, surreal artwork of beloved Emma Caster-Dudzick.
A few months later, I taught a creative writing workshop for UNC - Wilmington and celebrated the Lunar New Year in Chinatown.
The next month, I read again in the East Village from an essay I had come out with Sunday Salon on how difficult it’s been for me to learn to receive, though sometimes the answer seems to be as clear as what one of my dearest friends tells me on the regular: “you deserve it all,” “just be in the womb.”
Okay.
I try. I begin to step back into the light. I let it feel good, and when it doesn’t I stay and ask myself why. I realize there are old forms I can no longer hold, old ways I can no longer be.
A colleague-turned-friend was in town at the start of April. I did many of the touristy things I often forget about the longer I live in NYC, reminding me of the magic I live within and often close my eyes to. How they traveled across continents and oceans just to be here for a few days. Both single, we talked about how the longer life goes on, the harder it can be to let someone in. How, like a subway car, there are less and less seats available as the train moves forward.
“Someone can still get on,” they said, laughing. “You just got to squish.”
As we say goodbye, they leave me with flowers, an early birthday present. “I hope you will let yourself open,” they say. I watch for days as the tulips remind me how.
A few days later, I turn 34 and go to a nu disco party with friends, one of whom gives me a bracelet with a simple suggestion: bloom.
If I can’t show up in the way I want to, I tend to not show up at all, which I think means what I need now is a looser form, one that can hold me as I feel into my new shape, a form that leaves room for irregular petals and leaves. I want to let whatever wants to come forward, what is ready to bloom, to do so. I want to get out of my own way.
So, for now, what I’ve done is unlock the archive here (no more paywalls!) and stripped away the Conversations With Animals-as-podcast framing. It feels like that was the project that landed me in this space after a fateful meeting with the extremely kind and patient Austin Tedesco who encouraged me to bring Conversations With Animals over to the platform and generously helped me get everything up and running, but as I look forward into all the other projects I want to share with the world, I think it’s time to reimagine what this space could be. I think it’s time to reimagine what I could be, don’t you?
