July 2022

It’s Friday evening and I’m on a flight to Philadelphia to visit my brother. Cheap Spirit flight for a weekend trip. Window seat and the sun is setting and the sky is so ethereally gorgeous I have to take a picture. Last night you texted me: don’t forget the good stuff if you ever write about me. And now that wifi and cell service are obsolete — well why not.

I called you “day-nuh” and you told me it was pronounced like “Donna”. Might be an Israeli thing. I don’t know. Anyways, it was a Friday night like two months ago. We got cocktails at the Speakeasy lounge I bring all my dates to. To enter you have to punch in a code at a back door of another bar. This gives me like 0.0001 cool points. It’s a charming place with good lighting. Overpriced drinks but what can you do. The lighting though – if someone doesn’t find you attractive in that lighting and setting, they never will.

Sure you were attractive in that lighting but you were also attractive at sunset on the beach, at the pho spot, in the morning, everywhere. You were kind and you made me laugh. Transparent and introspective. It never seemed like an act. You were hot but didn’t have the whole hot girl facade personality. You spoke with this sort of off-kilter cadence and you had these vocal inflections that I thought were so impossibly cute. You asked me questions and genuinely wanted to hear what I had to say. And I wanted to hear what you had to say. On most dates girls give me monologues, trying to be impressive or cool. I have to pinch myself to keep my attention. Not you though.

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September 2021

There’s a quote from 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, that says “respond to every call that excites your spirit”.

Once I was 18 years old. And I was with my friends on a beach off the Gulf of Mexico. The water was calm so we decided to swim out to sand bar a few hundred feet out. Seemed like a fun thing to do and we were able-bodied, athletic kids. We waded through the waves until we could no longer touch the ocean floor then we picked up our feet and started swimming. We swam and we swam. The shore grew further and further. I started to tire. We surmised that we must be close, we just had to swim a little further. I was exhausted. I was struggling. But we were so close. Once we reached that sand bar we could stop treading water and sink our feet into the sand below and stand and have fun and laugh until we were reenergized enough to swim back. But there came a point when we realized we’d gone too far. It was high tide. There was no sandbar. We were so deep into the ocean that the people laying on towels and sitting on beach chairs looked so small. You couldn’t hear them speak or yell or hear their music. I was gasping for air, panting, treading water. There was no moment of rest. All I felt was electric fear. You have to push and swim all the way back. You don’t have a choice. So I stopped thinking about how out of breath I was. About how exhausted I was. Rhythmically with each arm I tore into the water kicking my legs with as much force as they could generate. I saw the shore and kept rowing my arms until it got closer.

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November 2021

You need to budget better. Stop eating out. You need to cook for yourself more. Have you ever tried meal prepping.

Listen, I’m a fantastic cook. And I’m not talking your run-of-mill ‘dude who knows how to cook chicken and rice and boil noodles’. I can cook. This winter on separate occasions I made a seafood and chorizo paella (absolutely splurged on the saffron) and I also cooked a batch of my Italian grandmother’s sauce from scratch. Took me an entire Sunday. I was really proud of that. And I deserved to be — they were damn good. They were both fantastic. I can cook.

And I love cooking. But. Try waking up in complete darkness and being the first car to leave the apartment parking garage in the morning. Getting home from the hospital anywhere between 6 and 9 pm. And only in my wildest fantasy do I get home at 6 pm every day. When I do get home, I am mentally and physically exhausted. Brain feels like applesauce. Hips feel like a twelve year old Labrador. I want to sit and involute on my couch. I don’t want to speak to anyone. I don’t want to text anyone. I want to do something mindless because I spent the entire day thinking and stressing and pacing around under bright fluorescent lights. I want to dissolve. I do not want another task. Another chore. I don’t want to spend any effort preparing a halfway decent meal, cooking it, eating, cleaning the dishes, and so on. Can you imagine. Twelve plus hour day, you cook a good meal, then, my lord – the dishes. Hang me.

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