I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

There are times we just send out messages into the world and hope they are received with the intention they were sent, but we can’t always count on the attitude or the generosity of the recipient. There is a certain benefit of the doubt we must give to messages transmitted electronically. We cannot read the sender’s expression, we cannot hear their

We learn from them, but also, they tell us we can. Without even knowing it. Enter here. Start here. Begin now. This is why it’s always important to be reading. This is why we must always chew on the words of others. It’s nutrition. Eat your dinner.

An attraction to that which was absent. A sketch, an outline, never fully formed, but still, it existed as an idea. Filling in the imaginary blanks with information I did not have but found I could invent quite easily. A thing we do as writers. If we just give ourselves permission. But also, there was something about simply feeling the sense of the

When you are instantly protective of someone, a sliver of a bond forms. I have always felt protective of other women. And I have always trusted them on impact and given them all I could. For while it is men who I crave and desire, who I would like to lie down next to and smell their skin and allow them within me in an intense and foreign way, it is

ha. I make a deal with myself that the first thing I will do upon entering every hotel room is unpack my dresses. I invent a ritual for safety. If I do these things, if I hang these clothes, if I keep them clean and neat, if I tend to them, then it will be the same as tending to myself. I mistake control of my outward appearance as architecture for

I had been the one to impose all the hard work on myself; I was also the only one who could impose the time sitting still.

I had started meeting with a new therapist, a young woman—my first in probably six years—but felt lackluster about the experience, as I usually did when I tried that sort of thing, only ever lasting a few months with each one. (I always felt like I was trying to entertain them—this was my fault, not theirs, of course—but surely the right therapist

At sunset, I walked down to the water and I sat at a small table on the edge of the Gulf of Naples, and out in the distance was Mount Vesuvius and I had an Aperol Spritz and my bloodstream was a good 30 percent Aperol Spritz by that point in the trip but I felt like I would somehow be betraying something if I did not have just one more Aperol Sprit

I loved. I had lovers. I was loved by others. I knew it, that feeling. But I didn’t have true partners. I had collaborators. I had people I made shit with. I had people to talk to. I had people in my life who understood me as much as I could be understood. A few mentors. More substantial than romantic love, I had friendship. That I knew best of all

Ghosts, the other, the unseen, these are intangible things. They are just possibilities. But those possibilities were thrilling to me. It was the same as dangling my pen over the first blank page of a journal. A whole unknown world. I wanted a life of knowing the unknown.