They say that what you love is your fate.

That no matter how you feel about it, or how much you try to circumvent it, there is something in this world to which your heart is just inextricably bound. Whether you accept it or not, run towards it or from it, you belong to that thing.

You could say that this was the year of me learning how to belong to mine.

LOOKING BACK

At the beginning of 2023, I sat at a candle-lit table with family and friends and ate black-eyed peas for good luck while saying how strange it was, how absolutely insane it was, the events that I knew the year would contain. It felt immense, unfathomable. Barely recognizable. That was yesterday, only one single moment ago. Yet here we are, on the last day of another year gone by.

I had this idea to share my favorite moments of the year, but by default of blogging the whole thing, realized I have already spit them out all over this space. Swim through the archives and drown in the inescapable chaos and confusion and joy that this year has been. It’s all there.

So instead, after stumbling upon it through a late-night camera roll scroll, I will share just one. The one that in many ways, catalyzed all the rest.

DESERT REVELATIONS

Joshua tree. Where it all began.

Deserts have long been symbols of transformation, enlightenment, and divine revelation. They are terrains completely severed from the world we know, the world that knows us. All of that strangeness feels, in a word, extraterrestrial. They say you leave as a different person. I never knew if that was true.

Yet today, I can honestly tell you that if it weren’t for one particular morning in that desert, I would not be here writing this to you.

I can still feel the way that the cold, February ground felt under my feet. I can still feel the rawness of my hands from the rock my climber boyfriend convinced me was a brilliant idea to scale and how we swore we could see the earth curve from the very top of it. The land looked prehistoric. It held no trace of me and I loved it for that.

I can still hear the record we played and remember the clarity that the frigid morning sunrises gave me. The sun would crawl over the mountain and shoot liquid gold over everything in sight. It felt like being born, standing with your ankles in those pools of honey.

He snapped the photo above of me watching that light and it remains one of my most underrated favorites. It’s me, at 20, ignoring my well-meaning boyfriend for the sake of the sun. It’s me, looking so small, so anonymous, against a world that I remember it felt as if I were seeing for the very first time.

I loved it then because it was an intimate moment with the earth that he managed to preserve for me from eyes that were not my own. I love it now because that sunrise conveys the feeling that I have arrived at, almost a year later, of watching something new be born all over again. There is so much ambiguity to the shot. It’s enshrouded by shadows, by black silhouettes of things just beginning to take form, existing as a microcosm of what the world feels like to me these days.

I am sitting in some corner of it, staring out at this blinding light and not minding if I can’t see anything but it.

I can barely see anything but it.

CHASING SUNLIGHT

It’s neither the clearest nor the most perfect image. It’s enshrouded by blind faith in the things I cannot see, guided by the fractured light of what I can, just like this year. The year that art and writing went from indulgent hobbies to religious practices. Maybe I love the image because it provides a visual for the ever-tightening grip that my dreams have on me. They are the sun. They are pulling me out of bed, away from endearing lovers and warm covers, to the brittle window to watch.

To feel.

To exist in the same space as.

There was just something in that light, something in that air, that you are going to have to believe me when I tell you shifted something deep inside of me.

I broke up with that boyfriend and started this blog one week later. It’s because of that decision that I got an editorial internship. It’s because of the internship that I am racing off to New York City as fast as I can in an endeavor that feels akin to chasing sunlight. And it all, I am only just seeing now, started in the desert on that cold morning, when I knew almost nothing and everything all at once.

If what you love if your fate, I was just beginning to grasp at the hand of mine.

TO 2023

I try to tell my family why I am working so much, why I willingly work on holidays and stay up to all hours of the night, clacking on a keyboard, forgetting to eat or sleep. My mother lovingly told me that she thinks I am crazy, that writing and editing a million things all of the time sound like hell.

I told her that hell is not doing it. Hell is doing anything else.

This year, if anything, has taught me that. For at that candle-lit table way back in January, the things that I wanted still just felt like oversized clothes hanging in a kid’s closet, waiting to be grown into.

I think I have grown into them now. For when I pause, when everything gets quiet for just one moment, I look down at my hands and see that they are not quite the same hands that rested on that table in January. Back then, I used them for gesticulation. I want to do this and I want to do that. They danced in the air, holding nothing but dreams. Fluid abstractions.

When I look at them now, I see that they are holding real things, concrete things. Things that you will never get me to let go of. This blog, my degree, a dream internship. And soon enough, the keys to my first New York City apartment. Slowly, it is happening before my eyes.

There are tendrils of fire burning my fingertips as I reach for what I want and noxious fumes that make me so dizzy I can barely stand up straight. And thank god. Thank god I can barely stand up straight because the world has never looked as interesting as it does from this angle. For even still, even a bit burned and intoxicated, I am more in awe of life itself than I ever have been.

That has been a very cool process to actively document and share with all of you for the past year.

I hope you are well and happy New Year’s Eve.

Cheers, m.

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