The healing work that I have made a point of engaging in over the past two years is paying off. I am carrying less baggage as a result. I am carrying less shame into my interactions. Before I ask others to affirm me, I catch myself. Holding myself to a higher standard than wanting to win anyone’s approval.

I am here to make myself proud.

Over the past two years, I have learned that attaining status isn’t what creates self-respect. That can only come from being able to choose myself, come rain or shine. If I am the person I want to be with after the party or without an invite, I’ve got everything I need to make a meaningful life. I look to the quality of my connections for proof of my growth, my wealth, and my well-being.

i call upon an ancient conversation
of blues in the horizon
sacred arcs that line an engine's shape
with dew, with moving water
to lift us beyond our joys or sorrows
in life, in death
reality, imagination
through the motion that remains, in our bodies
in our thoughts
from grief into mourning, that mourning of the blue
which sits in the distance
i know there rests a book somewhere
of lessons whispered still. pieces of a vessel
re-imagined by a blessed hand
into daughters, into sons
into lovers true. i know you rest
still sweet and brown and salty haired
among another ocean
that slippery place in which we cannot step
until our calling
until we have been made transformed
through you, dear glint of twilight
promise of water and air

If a pandemic cancels the remainder of your spring semester, and your recent ex decides to suspend the rules of your breakup in case “the apocalypse” keeps you apart forever, and you find yourself lying once again in his bed, your faces flushed, the afternoon humming by outside, take your time with leaving. The future will charge onward, but for now you can allow the memory of other lazy days you spent in this bed to envelop you entirely. You would like to believe this feeling transcends whatever comes next. For an hour or two, it does.

I always try, as best as I can, to lay things bare. What does this person really want? What is this person really thinking when they look at someone?...I try to notice tiny things, the way I do when I’m reading or watching something. To focus on the tiny thing and be brutally honest about that tiny thing even if it makes the character sound a little weird or obsessive. There’s a story in this collection called “Pink Bubblegum and Flowers,” and she’s just bored and annoyed and she sees a guy working on the deck and decides, “I want that one,” and obsessing over him is her plan for the day until something else pops up. And that tells you what you need to know about that character.
...I’m just really aware that every person I walk past has a rich and full inner life like I do. That’s why I sit down to write—the love of language and capturing those things and putting characters into wild situations and then trying to wiggle them out.

...no matter what happens, I have to be out there, in the world, in order to make my bus—there are so many hypothetical B38s, right now, that some algorithmic version of me is catching. Could catch. But I have to be there, in the moment, to make it.

I’m not really talking about a bus, although I am talking about a bus. I’m thinking about how often I like to say I’ll love you forever, and I do mean it when I say it. But forever is just a word; what I really mean is I’ll do my best to love you every day, and every day thereafter. And every day I will try.