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

No one deserves anyone else’s bad day.

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.

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

But what if we let time pass, looking at an incident in the rearview mirror rather than at the moment of impact? We can wave goodbye to it, but still see it so clearly, captured in a pristine reflection. And what do we gain? Perspective, wisdom, and perhaps not acceptance—some things do not deserve to be accepted, after all—but at least a sense of

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

To experience joy through the joy of others. He sees that as a gift for him. My sweet friend.

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

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

It was hard for me to imagine there being that kind of a memory already that old for my much-younger friend. But eventually we all have past lives.