There is this kid part of me that still gets giddy looking out at this city.

I stare out the window of a cab and see a guy stumbling out of his apartment and onto the sidewalk with a skip in his step.

And I think—that. That is what I love.

You get to stumble into the world here. You step outside, and you are, for better or for worse, smack dab in the very thick of it. There is no separation. No barrier. No way to keep yourself from living your own life. From witnessing others do the same. It’s a city of silent intimacy. We are so close to one another. So intertwined. Life reaches in through the windows and pulls at you. It whispers sweet nothings into your ear.

Come and see what you will find.

I can hear you breathing, but I don’t know your name. I can hear your whole phone conversation, your whole life, but I’ll never see the end of it. Every person on this train, this street, this block, is a story I will never know the end of.

I reach for his hand as he reaches for mine, and all of a sudden, I understand the meaning of having someone whose stories you do get to know all of. Someone who knows all of yours.

I wanted independence the second I could have it. I turned eighteen during the pandemic, and that only made me want it more. I dreamed of living alone, traveling alone, being alone. I think this is instinctual, a natural drive to leave your parents and start your own life. You think your entire selfhood hinges on it. Maybe it does.

And then you wake up.

You pour the water over the coffee grounds and check your email, and you realize that you are a whole adult with a whole life. You don’t have to prove your seriousness to anyone anymore. You don’t even have to be serious. No one is watching.

And if you’re very lucky, if you are in the exact right place at the exact right time, you may even find that you don’t have to be alone anymore either. Your side will ache from all the laughter. You will make dinner for two, waiting for him to walk through that door at the end of the day and tell you everything. You want to hear everything. You want a life bigger and louder than the one you were content with just a moment ago.

My heels click against 42nd St.

We’re walking home from a dinner party in SoHo. Some huge loft with exposed brick and champagne and little appetizers that look more like abstract art than something you should be allowed to eat. It was pinched out of a dream I had on one of those lazy afternoons in California, floating in a pool in the middle of November, imagining another life. This life. Someone took a photo of us, smiling ear to ear, and all I could think when I looked at it was, when did I become her?

My heels click. The sound of my own adulthood grows louder and louder with each step. Click, click, click. When did the abrasive rattle of my skateboard’s wheels give in to this? I almost see her for a moment.

Two years ago, I wrote an end-of-year post reflecting on the idea that “what you love is your fate.”

It is that post and that year that I return to, because what I wrote then is stained with an eerily accurate premonition of what was to come. I was on a mission, guided by blind hope and unwavering faith.

In that post, I wrote:

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.

— This Was 2023, Spinning Visions

You were going to New York no matter what. There would never have been any stopping you.

My mother told me this last week while home in California for Christmas. I had blinders on back then, busy in the thick of trying to get here. But I can see now how crazed I must have looked. I knew and I knew and I knew that something was here. Something.

I loved New York and so it became my fate. I knew it while standing in a desert with a boyfriend I would break up with in a city I would leave that I was fated to whatever New York held for me. There would never be another option, another road, another life to wonder about the unmet details of. My fate was decided. I belonged to it entirely.

I didn’t know that two years from hitting publish on that post, I would be drinking coffee and eating orange slices in my childhood backyard with the love of my life, the one I would meet just months after moving to New York.

I didn’t know that I would ache with a split love for two places, each intoxicating and alluring in its own right, with a fervency that would drive me mad. I didn’t know that I would be so old, so happy, or so set on new dreams that only this city could have granted me access to.

I didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that joy could be so abundant.

There was no way of feeling the cold wind of Fifth Avenue blow through my hair after a solo night at the MoMA or smelling the hot rain of the summer I would meet him on that sizzling corner in Brooklyn. I did not know these things.

But I also did.

I knew just the slightest hint of them. Each one was fated the first time I ever stood alone in Brooklyn on that hot, humid trip in June, watching the London Plane trees drip with thick, syrupy summer rain.

Whether I accepted it or not, the concept of home split into two that day, like a cell. Sweat pooled in my Doc Martens and on the nape of my neck, and I let it. Life would never be the same. After all those years spent belonging to just one place, I would now belong to two. It would never again not be this way.

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.

— This Was 2023, Spinning Visions

What you love is your fate. If I were to make a resolution, it would be to keep trusting that love.

Somewhere within it, come the end of 2025, I finished a memoir. (Stay tuned.)

Happy New Year.