coming out

April 8, 2021April 8, 2021

Bloom

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anaïs Nin

She comes to the window from a dream, pale and beaded with the night’s sweat like dew upon her brow. Here everything is still for a moment, the pale morning, the sun not yet peeking over the hills outside, the hum of the air and the business of moving about all pause for a breath, a heartbeat. Any small event will do, because in this moment, she took her first breath, and looked out to her first morning and everything familiar became new. Fear and excitement rose as she savored it all, the still, the muted gold of the hills, a new home perhaps, the pale morning, the dewy sweat of night’s fevered dream.

She had come at last.

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

Years In and Out

While the temptation is strong to ruminate on the strange effect of time and our divisions thereof, considering how we’ve treated 2020, it’s not the individual year that I’ve wanted to write about here. I know, it’s likely a joke now – I write “Let’s go” or “Let’s begin” and then some measured amount of time passes before I write again – but this entry has been hard to put words to not due to the subject matter but rather due to the nature of our divisions of time and how we relate to them. I don’t need to wax on for how horrible 2020 was, many others have, and that’s not what this is about. This is about years, plural, an unending stretch of time, not divided in packages of days or minutes or moments, but rather long stretches for which the only measure that can be applied is ‘years’.

December 6, 2020December 13, 2020

Points South

Well, it’s not as far south as New Zealand. But something that I got to do during this pandemic was visit the city of my alma mater, San Luis Obispo. I wanted to write about this sooner — this trip happened in mid-October — but this pandemic, lemme tell you, friend, it has done a number on my writing. It’s been hard to sit at the trusty ol’ laptop and bang these out. It’s not like in Singapore where I had my Monday morning ritual. Walk the dog, chat with the helpers walking my neighbors’ dogs, shower up only to start sweating the second I walk out the door, hike down to Baker & Cook, order my eggs benedict or tartine and then wax travellouge at you all.

Yeah, it’s not like that now, is it?