And She Was

Obiter Dictum: Why I Haven't Been Writing

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:37:58 -0400

Why is such a pesky little word.

Sometimes I do not know why. I know that I must, or I could, or I should, or dare I even say that I know I ought. Yet, rarely, rarely ever do I know why. This makes me free in a lot of ways. I think it means that I trust myself, and since I hate why I can just accept that I have always had a strong sense of self, that I trust myself to know enough to make whatever decision, or action, or etcetera, and I can move on with my life.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I live unexamined for I reflect on decisions all the time. But I hate reflecting on the why. I think about how I felt when, or who was with me, and where I was then in life and where I am now because of it. Why is not a part of my vocabulary. When I read in the local newspaper about a story of a crash that has happened just hours before, I find myself frustrated that there is not a second-by-second diagram of the cars' movement or a root cause analysis waiting for me in the article. The Boston Globe is not in the business of reconstructing car crashes on Route 1 but I am so fundamentally uncomfortable with why that when I am force to think about what may have caused a crash with no answers… words fail.

Me and my relationship to why is particularly unfortunate because I don’t ask myself “why not”. I leave alternatives on the table. I keep my path and my instinctual decisions and my knowns.

Whys move me further away from doing. Whys make me unmotivated.

There’s more to write here, but you’ll never guess, I don’t have the words in me tonight. They flew away… and I don’t know why… and if I have to ask that question… then frankly it’s not for me to know.

Meditation On A Weekday Evening

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 23:01:02 -0400

She had a sadness like an orgasm building in her for weeks.

She had felt her herself come to the brink of losing all control and inhibition at random times: coming back from a coffee break, looking at herself in the mirror before work, looking around on the subway, etc.

For all the almosts, for all the sting in her eyes, she hadn’t cried.

Sadness is the tether, mourning is the medium for expressing interaction attempts and failed intimacy with the whole of humanity.

Until sitting on her couch, at 9pm, the tears came, streaming down uncontrolled. Then they would stop, and the burning in her eyes would start again and with a blink, more tears would appear.

Like an orgasm, the more she thought about what brought them now, what caused their waves and their demand at her subservience to their passions, the more abstract the whole thing became.

She could tell herself, “look at the world, who wouldn’t cry”. But this week wasn’t The Week, it was a just a week. Tears were no more justified now than at any other time. And these tears had demanded, they had persisted, they were a lover that kept going, and going, and going until she found her release.

It was a weak climax. It brought neither catharsis nor relief. They imposed more questions, more exploration, and more obligation onto a poor girl who had enough on her plate for one evening.

After the tears her cheek-skin was taut. Her eyes sharp and tender. Her eyelashes slightly sicky to each other. And she felt worse than before she had cried. Because now the sadness was real, and she had no earthly idea as to the cause.

This Bias, This Commodity, This Currency

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:32:47 -0400

I am a woman.

I have been sold to all my life.
In this amazing time of profound technological advances I too am now able to be sold.
They can sell me without me ever removing my eyes from the screen.
It is incredible how frictionless it is to become commodified. And, in the real magic, somehow we frictionlessly ended up participating in this market. You cannot ignore the social capital gained by following trends. By continuously buying clothes in the right cuts, from the right stores, at the right, often high, prices. The pressure to look a certain way. A way that can only be achieved by specific products, shown to you through a video on a screen by a woman who, in almost all circumstances, is lying to you about how easy her life is, in order for you to buy the product using a link, so she can get pennies from the purchase. Pennies she puts into the piggy bank that allow her to inch closer to achieving the easy and smooth life she pretends she currently has. But she already knows that the second she could achieve the life she pretends to live now, she’ll be expected to live an even more glamorous and luxurious life, and she will be stuck in the cycle of pretending. So she gets under lights that wash out the texture in her face and tells people about a serum that changed her life. We women must keep up. So we buy, so that we retain whatever status rung we’ve only just begun to cling onto. And we buy the next serum. Without ever examining the sway of the motion that compels us to do so. And we buy the next shine. We don’t think about what we have allowed ourselves to be swept up in. And the next smell. And the next health. And the next word and phrase. And the next organ to care about. And the neighborhood to eat in and the neighborhood to live in. And we are washed away into the sea of commodity and they tell us that is is calm waters. I am so far away from the shore that I don’t even know who I would be if I made my way to the sand.

Is that it? Am I afraid of the environment I will find myself in if I pull out of the current? Am I more afraid to look inside myself at what primordial deficiency I feel inside myself can be solved with currency? But I am already in fear and if I feel it already, how could it be any worse to admit out loud that I don’t know who I would be if all the commodity was stripped away from me.

I don’t think I am capable of swimming in this current anymore, but I don’t know if I am strong enough to break out of it and go out on my own. I want to scream “I am my own, I belong to myself and I belong to those I love, I belong to the ideas that move me” but then I would have to lie with myself in the bed that I bought from a global retailer, because it was the easy place to buy from. And stare across the room to my vanity littered with beauty products that I will not use in this lifetime if I do not give a concerted effort to using them up. Beauty products that are so easy to look at, and to move from one location to another without ever asking why.

I perform a material Decartes. If he went through all that he knew about the universe and rejected it unless he could prove it through his own senses, leaving him with the first principle, the Cogito . I will use up all I have, each bit of matter, I will hold each item in my senses, separating items from the emotional and value, and rebuild my own existence knowing that no items from the past exist to me unless I have said they can.

Pre-Raphaelian, Post Modern, It's All Old Class Notes to Me

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:06:31 -0400

All it takes are a couple well executed ideas and beautifully illuminated sunset clouds for hope to spring forth again. I am young, I am elastic, and my ability to skip and hop and play should not be taken for granted. I can’t touch my toes. I used to pride myself on flexibility and yet every morning I tell myself I need to stretch. Often I forget to do much more than reach down to be dismayed by my lack of progress.

I must not give you the wrong impression- the fact that I’m only concerned with my inability to touch my toes should be considered a huge improvement in my personal life and times. It’s a happy time of life. One that I am willing to face, knowing full well all my deficiencies, expecting the best.

As I sit down and write, I am forced to reflect on how slowly this piece comes to my mind– how my typical self-pity was a much more effective writing partner. It is much harder to treat hope seriously. The threat of a “melodrama” classification holds back words or phases that might more accurately describe my state of mind. But I find that only has the effect of when I walked into a gallery labeled “anti-Raphaelites” (their movement, Pre-Raphaelite) whose art was supposed to be a rejection of the overly flowery and unserious art of Raphael, that to me, these anti-paintings looked more like Raphaels than the ones I had seen.

The sublime and the grotesque, the romantic dichotomy of aesthetics, (and you must forgive me that I didn’t pay enough attention in Theatre History: I to find an inverse of the melodrama genre, I don’t mean to lose that thread, I only have so much to give to these pieces) is plainly reflected to me in the average urban life. The quiet mornings in solitude, hearing what limited range of birdsong is offered, tending to the window-side plants. Then leaving the home each commute and finding the singing birds matted feathers, and the cigarette butts, and littered lottery tickets. And for some reason, and I believe it must be the shift out of the summer heat the trash and the sometimes smell and the acidic city life have given me such energy you would think they were a clear blue body of water.

The last the dog days brought some meaningful change of mind. No epiphany, but we’re post-modern here, we know epiphany doesn’t exist in the way we’ve been told it does. Nevertheless I have crossed off the first serious item off my bucket list, I started to long for ways to get out of my house each day, I practiced a flow-esque focus at work. And sometimes I find myself praying for the first time in half a decade.

My Search for El Dorado

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:52:23 -0400

It is getting to be that time of life when all my most inspired thoughts from each morning are showing up as 3 year old think pieces by someone who’s been in the game for longer than I’ve been alive. I cannot find originality in any of my inspiration.

I feel like I should take this as the reassurance I always wanted in middle school: I’m normal. At least real-world normal. People who were normal in middle school are the people I would now classify as “mean girls”. By this admission I’ve proved my first point, in calling it “mean girl” I am not original as everyone is calling girls who fit in with all the right and rewarded aesthetics “mean girls”.

Now, I could take this as an opportunity to explore how these girls with the “right and rewarded aesthetics” are proprietors of a benevolent patriarchal narrative- but I have nothing new to say about it. I would merely be regurgitating talking points from podcasts and substack blogs.

When I say I have nothing original to say, I am not saying it in a “there is nothing new under the sun” or a “the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing” way. My sentiment comes from a deep and purposely-left-unexplored fear that I have lost all of the marvelous and joys of my childhood creativity where I invented governments for toy animals and an entire fantasy life that I explored to fall asleep each night. I think about this in between TV shows and podcasts the way a smoker picks up another cigarette to ponder why her wrinkles are so deep no matter if she follows her skincare routine each night. It is too uncomfortable to exercise my brain in the practice of boredom and contemplation that is required in order to have even the beginning of an original thought.

My antidote is not original, but medicine hardly is. I keep thinking I’m special enough to go into the highly experimental and groundbreaking treatment for my malady. But my case has been seen twelve times today by the doctor already: less screens, more exercise, prioritize reading, and 30 minutes each day channeling artistic energy.

But who has time after work? After meals are made and eaten? After the living room has been vacuumed and the trash taken out? What about the evenings of a deep and inescapable fatigue that renders me motionless on my bed- searching for a video or article or post that will have the Answer.

Then I lie awake at night resenting that I spent my whole life waiting for the Answer to be told to me, instead of trying to figure it out for myself. Asleep, I have dreams of running away from all my life, and the street engulfed in flames behind me, and trolley cars speeding next to me carrying all their passengers away from the same flames that I am trying to out run. I resent that while I keep trying to outrun this dread that I am not the inspired-genius that I could pretend I was at 8 years old, there are some people blissfully unaware or who enjoy the community that common think pieces and style sections bring. I wake up to commute to work with people who I know must have rich inner lives, but when surrounded in a mass of young professional humanity and everyone lives in the same neighborhood, and where’s the same thing to work, and carries the same bag, and gets off at the same subway stop– it makes me think about how many of us are even unnerved by this singularity of behavior.

But I’ll push this off– I have friends to see, and projects around the apartment to finish. I even have a date night tomorrow. Perhaps my life was not made to be original the way I imagine it should. And if I try a little bit harder to meditate on a brief glimpse of an idea I had earlier, you can’t blame a girl for trying, just once more, for Halley’s comet.

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:07:26 -0400

dec. 16th

Boy stands at the platform for Alewife. Girls stands on the opposite side for Ashmont/Braintree.

They stand across four rails and a combined total of 1200 volts of DC energy.

They lock eyes.

They bashfully look for an oncoming train that is minutes away.

They lock eyes.

They smirk.

More bashful glances.

The girl slyly sways, the boy tilts his forehead down to focus his gaze even more.

The on-coming train is announced.

She can she his silhouette even as the train moves between them, he is an optical illusion.

They mouth “I love you” right before the Red Line Number 3 arrives at the station.

She gets on board.

She turns around to look through the window.

He’s already looking at her.

Their heads follow each other as her train leaves. And she will see him again.

And as their trains take them in opposite directions, and he transfers, and she sleeps, and he watches TV on his couch, they will still feel those 1200 combined volts.

Girl Seeking Color Pencils

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 21:15:00 -0400

The very first day I moved to Boston, July 5th if you must know, I told myself I needed a pack of colored pencils.

It’s one of those items that I must’ve always had access to in my life.

My parents have lived in my childhood home for almost 30 years. In those 30 years, items have accumulated, inbred, and then nested in bins in countless pieces of furniture that have storage. The whole of human existence can be found in that house, but you may spend hours looking for it.

Because of the shear volume of items in that house, if I wanted colored pencils growing up I would simply ask myself a few questions: do I want the off-brand colored pencils in the garage cubbies that hold excess school supplies? Do I want to go into the basement and look at the art studio section of the basement where decades old art supplies from my dead grandmother live? As well as a mountain of old craft kits for children. Or I could go into my room where I had bins of school supplies from yearly, semesterly replenishments, and find several nearly intact packs of colored pencils? Or I could go to my sister’s room and go into her bin of school supplies that she has furnished over the years from the previously mentioned sources.

Abundance. But abundance at a price. There were so many options in that home, it became paralyzing. And after I’d opt to bring some more colored pencils in from the stash outside, forgetting that I already had enough pencils under my bed, I’d add them to the collection of things in my room, and suddenly the abundance of items became suffocating. I rarely had a good nights sleep in my childhood room. I was haunted by the amount of stuff in my room, in my house, on the planet, and I couldn’t sleep. One of the worst nights of sleep I ever had was the night that I realized that in all the things of my house, I had lost the password to my Webkinz account. It is important to note that I hadn’t used that account in a over a year when I had that thought, it wasn’t as if something that was actively important to me had been lost. It was the idea that in all that existed, I had forgotten something that I once cared about, and the realization that I would have that feeling more and more often as I grew up. I was 10.

In college, I studied theatre. I had colored pencils as a part of my curriculum. I wasn’t much of an artist, either in visual or theatre arts. And by the end of college I was so depressed that I spent the next year in grad school trying to forget that I had ever not been in grad school. I never wanted colored pencils. I wanted to drink with my friends. And date guys while convincing my best friend he was in love with me. Then after I convinced him, I spent my time connecting with him, connecting with other people, expanding the world that had become so small when I was studying theatre.

With graduation came a job and a new city and the new need to assert my humanity outside of a job. This was a completely foreign feeling to me. I felt like the part in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the monster lives in an abandoned hut in the Swiss alps and watches a family. This one family and the books he finds in the hunt– Paradise Lost, Plutarch, and Goethe– and tries to become a human from that information alone. No matter how many articles on The Cut I looked at, or trendy memoirs of trendy girls I read, or account I followed on Instagram, I felt like the monster being chased out of town with pitchforks.

I spent all my time listening to audiobooks, I started trying to discover my style– mostly through looking at pinterest and you will be shocked to know that it just left me feeling more depressed, and I wanted to start drawing. Drawing was going to be a way for me to somehow unlock my inner desires. Find the truest parts of myself that words cannot describe. But I needed colored pencils and blank un-lined paper. When out after work I would say to myself, “oh I should find some” yet, I never found the agency to actually stop in a store that I knew would have them. I also convinced myself that a CVS I was already in would at least have some Crayolas. They never did.

That’s how I found myself almost 6 months in Boston with no colored pencils, no clear desires, and a blog that no one reads.

I host parties that only invited people show up to. I have two pieces of plastic Tupperware in the fridge with moldy food. There is a chance I throw them out under the justification that I prefer glass containers better. I eat too much one day, eat too little the next citing a “stomach ache”, and eat too much the next. I listen to podcasts that I’m embarrassed I listen to. And I don’t know how to be a human in the city. All I want is to feel like there is a part of me that is known in this city. I want to buy colored pencils at an indie art supply store, while I’m there see a poster for some event, go to said event, become the belle of ball, and become part of some ‘scene’, become infamous, become a hostess where people pretend they’re invited to my parties just to feel like they’re apart of something: we’re all phonies, we’re all lying, we all think our lives are going nowhere, we’re all 6 years away from moving to the suburbs.

Maybe I should just get a prescription for Wellbutrin, read “Bowling Alone”, and slowly fill up my house with things.

What are you supposed to do after work?

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:38:01 -0400

Monday:
-bought my lovely boyfriend the Christmas gift he really wants, but he doesn’t know he wants so it will be a surprise
-made a trip to the grocery store (and got some blue cheese stuffed olives (among other things))
-pre-made some orzo to prevent vegetable broth from going bad
-drank a martini
-ate ricotta and toast
-finished the audiobook of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of Your Dead”
-watched an episode of “Social Studies”
-started an audiobook
-listened to said audiobook as I scrubbed my dutch oven from burnt food from meal prepping
-took a long overdue shower
-tried to get the lint out of my hairbrushes
-read some text on nihilism
-did the dishes
-continued my duolingo streak
-sent an audiomessage to my sister
-texted my loving boyfriend about how he finished Moby Dick and went to his dad’s birthday dinner
-ordered a turtleneck I’ve been wanting since the summer
-washed my face
-dry brushed and lotioned my body
-brushed my teeth
-updated this blog
-planned my next morning
-did tomorrow’s crossword
-told my boyfriend my favorite part of the day
-watched a sitcom to go to bed

The Metaphysics of a 20 Something Year Old in Love

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 21:24:24 -0400

There is the relational and the absolute.

The relational is what makes me cry when I’m five beers, or three cocktails, or three beers-and a shot, or two beers-a cocktail and-a shot deep into a night. It’s the inner voice that tells me you’re going to leave me when you stop being hypnotized by my hips, when my coy games stop intriguing and amusing you, and they become yet another crease in your brow. The relational is all the questions that start in my soul but cannot be translated even though I wish with all my being to ask them of you. It is the secret mysteries of the world that I can never find the words to express but I know must somehow be able to be released from inside of me.

The absolute is when you hold me. It’s your hand in mine on the sidewalk, even though I know you dislike that kind of trivial public affection. It’s silence between us. It’s the shared cup of coffee in the morning. It’s the five feet between us when we are at a bar with our friends and we have been kept in separate conversations all night. It’s reaching for you at 2 am when we are both having a restless night. I feel your movement through space at each infinite number of finite points. It’s how I knew you loved me months before you did.

You well may be the axiom of my life. And I am a weak student, cramming before class discussion, trying to make sense of your dense text.

Manifestations of a Fruitful Geese:

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 20:28:43 -0400

-flock mentality
-good for the gander
-geese of a feather
-gosling takes providence
-geese rehearsing “V” formation
-honking good time
-flock leader

On the Part Just After the Beginning

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 07:56:30 -0400

If I am paralyzed by beginnings, then there is not a word strong enough to describe how I feel about the second step.

The second step indicates the direction, path, continual motion of everything else. Its so easy to correct course after one, two three, four steps…

If I think about it. A mile is a good basis for distance. If I've gotten a mile away from something, I am not too far away, I can walk it, and it's only taken 20 or so minutes out of my day.

There's approximately 2,000 steps in a mile. And if I needed to get back to my life, a mile seems a short ways to walk back. So there are 2,000 decisions and moves and actions that I can take almost no consequence; a mile is an easy distance when you're 23 years old.

This is a labored metaphor I know. But asides from moving from Providence to Boston and my work… I can't think of something in my life that I could maybe say I've made 2,000 conscious decisions about. I create goals for self improvement and I create phases for how to redecorate my apartment, but actions I take in the privacy of my own home feel almost like cheating.

I'm terrified of becoming the completely internal being that defines suburban living, who's involvement in greater life is defined by neighborhood complaints, PTA feuds, and surface level interactions. I lived to go to school for most of my life until this point, and I find myself grasping at ways to define and hone who I am. It is hard to explain the feeling that although you know your life is just beginning, you have no experience with the training wheels you wish you could be taking off right about now. So here I am, riding around the block-- over and over and over again-- each turn a little more confident.

But the question still remains: Where I will go once I shed the extra two wheels?

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 16:14:26 -0400

Frank O’Hara meditating on an emergency in my line of work:

“Yet / I trust the sanity of my vessel; and / if it sinks, it may well be in answer / to the reasoning of the eternal voices,/ the waves which have kept complaining about the service we provide”

-To The Habormaster of Long Wharf

On Beginnings

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:35:14 -0400

I am intimidated by people's belief that other's will care what they have to say. Perhaps it is my cynicism towards my own ability to say anything of importance. Perhaps it is the insecurity of my lack of focus or set perspective on life. How do people begin to make sense of things in a way that can be serialized and then have the confidence to publish it, promote it, and build on it?

In Joan Didion's essay "Last Words" she focuses on a passage in Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms". This intimate examination of less than 150 words, exposed the difference in how I read, versus how a writer reads. Didion reads in a world where the words reveal truth. I read as if the words obscure a truth that exists in the world separate from the author or the book. I read how a playwright wants you to read, as if it is only the first step to see words on a page, for in reality the words live on a stage and are housed not in bindings but in the breath and movement of actors. And maybe that’s how I think I should write, as if the words I write actually belong to me in conversation and not to a one dimensional deposit. However, I don't think I read or write correctly, and there lays the paralysis that prevents me from making anything.

Goethe writes, although I read of it in Kierkegaard, that Hamlet's soul is like an acorn planted in a clay flower pot, and upon sprouting into an oak, shatters it. I've always contended that by asking "to be or not to be" Hamlet is exposing his own logical fallacy as by asking that question he has introduced a third thing into the mix. His asking is the same as roots growing, stretching, pushing up against the pot's resistance. And perhaps my paralysis at creating anything should take a note from this, by asking myself "what should I do", the tension between "to do or not to do" is rendered void. People find the confidence to write and make sense of the world because they have asked questions of it, and they have grown roots. Serialization and repeated creation are just questions bearing the fruit of speculated answers. Right now I feel like a lonely seed dropped in the middle of a field, I hope to figure out what my pot looks like, and if it is even made of clay. I hope that you will join me.

I think I sound sufficiently pretentious with the examples I used in this piece, but in my defense I just finished reading Didion and Kierkegaard. It’s not as if I have these quotations sitting for years in my brain in perfect order. No, they are just sitting on the nightstand waiting to be put on a shelf and forgotten.