I am sitting on the back patio of a local coffeeshop, watching ivy reach it’s delicate tendrils across the brick.

My parents have returned to California and I am alone with books and city streets again. Open journals and ink-stained hands. Aimless meandering. Nothing has ever felt so medicinal.

Here are some various, generally unrelated, chaotic scraps of what has been on my mind.

THE END OF MAY

I am thinking of the day that I got here.

Of stepping out of the airport and into the February air. Of getting into the cab. Of how beautifully skeletal the trees were as they blurred by. I remember the sunlight. Golden and spilling onto everything, it was directly in my line of sight. It poked me in the eye every time I tried to look ahead. The driver was trying to make small talk but I cannot honestly recall a thing that he said. I was watching the world instead, staring at the old buildings and seeing the inky words of untold stories dripping off the fire escapes, letters falling like rain and my hands wanting to reach out and catch them all. Wanting to close them up in my journal for safekeeping, forever. I remember getting dropped off in front of my apartment, the one I had never even been inside of. I remember standing there on that frozen sidewalk, suitcase in hand, meeting everything.

That was about four months ago, which, seems like a shockingly short amount of time. I feel years away from that day. The seasons have fully changed. My neighbors are all placing flower pots on their Brownstone stoops and windowsills. Little kids run around with ice cream cones and their mother’s wear brightly colored tops as they sit on each other’s stoops. Street markets are opening up, fruit stands overflowing with fresh oranges and berries and raw, wild honey. Concerts are playing in the park. Ice cream trucks roam every evening. The trees are growing closer and closer together, their leafy limbs rain-bowing the street as they reach out for one another, branches interlocking like fingers. Traces of sunlight linger in the sky until 9pm and greet you eagerly at 5am.

You start to feel very young.

The world takes on a playground-esque appeal. Everything is suddenly so alive and waiting for you.

TUSCAN SUN

Something about that warm, inviting air is reminding me of Italy.

Of being sixteen and barefoot in Tuscany that one summer, drinking red wine under more stars than I had ever seen. I had never been to Europe before and didn’t fully believe it would be like the movies. But then it was. It was train stations and candlelit dinners and teenagers smoking cigarettes with their espresso in the courtyard. It was stunning architecture and mouthwatering food and direct eye contact. Pasta and on-the-house shots of limoncello. Cheeky waiters showing you how to carve a fish. It was late nights and early mornings and feeling like you were inside of a world that was somehow so cleanly severed from any reality that you had ever known.

GETTING PERSPECTIVE

I think I was too young to fully take it in, too adolescent for my perception to not be somewhat eclipsed, but it was still so much. It was like a place you didn’t think could be real with it’s sprawling fields of sunflowers and casual displays of ancient history that would give anyone chills.

I remember thinking that it was a place for storytellers, a place where one could feel their linkage to a long line of lives. You felt infinitesimal. I think we’re maybe always in some kind of a pursuit of that feeling. Why else do we stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon or stare up at the Milky Way or climb mountains or fall in love with crumbling brick. As children, we feel so small and so unimportant in the face of the world and that grants us a kind of freedom that we lose hold of as we come of age. We grow into the world and delude ourselves into thinking that many things are more important, more immense, than they really are. We have to stand on the edge of a canyon or look up at the Colosseum just to get perspective, just to feel small again.

You realize that you are more than what has happened to you, more than what you did today, and more than what you will do tomorrow. You’re caught like a fly in the spiderweb of humanity, inextricably wound up within a narrative that transcends your own. You’re part of this sprawling story, this dynamic, living, breathing work of art that is the history of us.

We are so consumed by productivity and money and success. So driven to hammer a nail of worth into our lives that we forget that they are already priceless. You wake up and you butter your toast and you drink your coffee and you do something that makes you feel closer to that pricelessness of life. Maybe that means work and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just means sitting on the earth for a while. Baking fresh muffins or cooking a new recipe. Getting paint on your hands. Saying, I love you. Hearing it back. Walking in the evening light.

That’s how to be happy, I think.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)