I start by pouring oat milk into black coffee.

I peel the rind off an orange and follow the juice with my tongue as it rolls down my wrist. I take my socks off and step into the warm morning light.

Sundays are for Nina Simone and lemon cake. Blueberry scones. Really good books and going barefoot. I’m sitting in the sunlight, drinking coffee, and eating oranges. Warm rays of honey are oozing over the yard like they have no business doing in the middle of February and I am eternally grateful. In Southern California, spring is already latent in the air.

BOOK REVIEW

I recently read Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, and am, as always, thinking about innocence and how silently it leaves the bodies of girls long before they know it has gone.

About how painful and beautiful and heartbreaking it is to grow up a girl and how those early years of awakening to the world become frozen in time. We look back upon them for the rest of our lives as a collection of secrets that we were too afraid to tell even ourselves for a long time.

Girlhood is a labyrinth of loss and love and something indescribable that permeates the pages of Woodson’s novel in such poetic eloquence that I could barely breathe as I read it. For I carry the trauma of girlhood with me like an extension of my own body. It lives inside of me. I can feel its sharp pulse.

In those early days, the world is a battlefield. And no matter how much your mother may try to protect you, she will never be able to shield you from the minefield that is adolescence. You will get your heart torn out of your own body, you will watch the blood trickle down your own wrists. You will learn things, internalize things that no one can shield you from. It is an experience of infinity in that way. And it is often one that you don’t feel the full force of until you are twenty-something and wondering why you cannot trust anyone anymore.

I remember so many things from those years that they have become a part of me.

I know my childhood home phone number by heart. I know the street I grew up on and the birthdays of everyone I have ever loved. People I did not love too. I know the route to my high school and to all of the houses of the people I knew and drank sketchy alcohol with. I could drive through that world with my eyes closed. My body remembers every turn. I know kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. I know seven times eight equals fifty-six. I know every word that has ever broken my heart. I know the rhythm that the ocean swayed to that summer that I could barely speak. I know which month. Which year. I know the face of the teacher who saved me and each book that he used to do it. I know the melody of Bon Iver’s “Holocene”, could recognize it anywhere. I know the pink sidewalks that I learned how to walk on; the pink sidewalks I danced on, sang on, skinned my bare knees on. The ones I walked all over barefoot and broken-hearted. I know each one of those days by heart. And all of the ones that came before them.

The one’s where I was just a child, looking up at a sky that I thought went on forever.

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