Howdy.

I know, I know—long time no chat.

But I come with news. I’ve recently acquired three scintillating, dream-esque jobs that allow me to work from home as an editor and copywriter. I use this as my sole excuse for bringing you a quote about January at the end of February.

JANUARY WAS MOMENTS

I stumbled across this while shamelessly scrolling through Pinterest poems a few weeks ago and immediately stuck it here, into a draft, where most things live for a long while these days.

But anyway—Patricia Highsmith!

“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: […]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”

I came across this quote from Highsmith’s novel, The Price of Salt, and felt compelled to share.

Mysteriously familiar, yet unknown. Like a word one can almost, but not quite define.

I can’t think of a better way to describe how life has felt lately.

Like a magician pulling a scarf out of a hat, I am watching life continuously unfold before my eyes. I cannot believe the things that can happen when you make very bold and possibly, highly debatably, irresponsible decisions, like moving across the country without a job. I think, despite all the chaos and stress and turmoil that mine has undoubtedly brought upon me at various stints, that those big moves you make in life are actually the most responsible.

You’re actively taking responsibility for your own life. You’re saying, I’m going to do this. This is what I want to do with the time I have here, and I accept whatever it may bring.

Looking back on this past year, I am in a constant state of awe over what it can bring.

Take January, for example.

RECOLLECTING

In reflecting on my own start to 2025, I am realizing that I coming back home to myself after a while away. I got laid off just before the holidays and I am realizing now that I think it sent me away from myself. Unemployed is a very difficult thing to be in New York City come the end of the year, but it wasn’t just about the lack of a paycheck. It cut me deeper than that. It seeped into my bloodstream and swam through my veins like ice water, day in and day out. And they were long days. Like, walk seven miles around NYC kind of days.

People will try to tell you how to feel in such circumstances.

They will tell you two things mainly. One, that you have nothing to be ashamed of. And two, that you need not stress, that things will work out. But I can tell you frankly that I felt nothing if not an unrelenting deluge of shame and stress washing over me over the course of those months. I must have turned somewhat inward. There were things about what I experiencing that felt utterly incommunicable to anyone in my life. I felt very alone and very ashamed, as if I were the only one in the world to have ever been unemployed.

I felt far from myself.

The entire world was saturated with a malaise of something I couldn’t articulate. Amid the beautiful people and things in my life, I don’t think I fully realized how corrosive that malaise was to my spirit.

Yet, November and December turned into January, and January turned into a job far better than my last. Writing and editing opportunities presented themselves and I sat in the middle of a tornado of good news for the first time in months.

I went for a long walk during one of the evenings proceeding this news and bought a few new books from a local bookstore. I was standing there, arms full of paperbacks that my apartment was telepathically begging me not to bring home, when I noticed it. The weight had lifted. The whole world felt lighter, softer, and kinder.

I came home to myself after a very long while away.

So yes. January has been grim as an old man, yet pure as any beginning. It has been one thing and all things. It has been moments, and it has been a year. It has all been a word that one can almost, nearly, but not quite ever come to define.

THE PRICE OF LOOKING BACK

As for February?

I find myself smacked by waves of nostalgia and gratitude all the time these days. Maybe it’s winter, or maybe my frontal lobe is developing, but I feel different. I have been in New York for over one full year now and it has been nothing if not the most ineffable experience of my life. Some things, like Highsmith’s January, just can’t be defined.

Lame talk from a writer, I know.

In a roundabout, string of consciousness way, one in which I will make sound very official by saying that I am emulating Patti Smith’s uninhibited, flow-chart prose, I see a connection within the letters of Highsmith’s words. I am drawn to the title, specifically. The Price of Salt. It makes me think of Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse and that stupidly brilliant quote I can’t ever stop pasting into the margins of my life.

“But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”

And what is her idea of January about if not looking back and feeling so incredibly dumbfounded by the things we can no longer grasp? The things we can only ever fathom in the mere recesses of our own diluted, demented memories as we glance at the ground treading beneath our feet?

Now, I’ve been told, Highsmith’s novel actually concerns the labyrinthian romance between two impassioned women and might have very little to do at all with Vonnegut’s ideas.

But the salt.

The price of looking back. The price of life.

You change your whole world, and then you remember the other. You remember the place that incubated so much of the existence you currently embody, and it pulls at something in you that nostalgia is really too weak of a word to fully encapsulate.

I don’t miss that world, but I do remember it. I don’t miss who I was, but I do remember her. She was not sipping espresso martinis on the Lower East Side with the love of her life, and she was not walking through a snowstorm to the subway. She wasn’t getting paid to write or running under the Manhattan Bridge or walking through the golden light of Brooklyn with a bag full of books.

She was stretched out under the sun, dreaming. When I look back, it is only to say thanks. Thanks for being the reckless freak who went after all that.

But anyway.

Enjoy some blurry, dare I even say spinning, visions of my life as of late.