A story about foraged flowers.

The Core Stories | A story about quarantine.

The only sound is the snickering of candles we’ve arranged on the edge of the sink and the closed toilet seat, their flames flickering gold on our forehead sweat. Is the occasional swoosh of the shallow water that we swirl with our bath-puckered hands, just to sense movement. Is the steady tide of lungs, inhaling and exhaling the thick steam and incense smoke. It’s as if we’re cocooned in this small apartment bathroom and in the smooth edges of its bathtub, smaller still. I start thinking about how four square walls can be a jail cell or can be a cozy nest, depending on context. 

…

In October, just a week and a half after I first met Lauren, I started a Masters program in Urban Sustainability — a discipline that marries environmental concerns with those of social justice — at a university on the west side of Los Angeles. It’s a low-residency program, meaning that most of it takes place online during the evening hours. But at the beginning and middle of every semester, all of the student cohorts assemble for a full-time, in-person residency on campus — a jam-packed week of class discussions, interactive workshops, group projects, lectures, and panels, with lunch and snack breaks squished paper-thin between the learning blocks. 

We spend a lot of time talking about…heavy shit. About all the ways that capitalism conspires against collective good and the good of the earth, how it eats us from the inside like illness. About the imbalances of power and privilege that spread perniciously as virus through our infrastructure and our economy. About the systemic nature of just about every societal problem, plus every true solution. (Everything is connected. This is beautiful and also hard.) 

When you look, you can’t stop looking. You start to see the sickness everywhere, including within yourself and your own behaviors. You, too, purchase mass-made socks off the internet, even though you’ve just done a whole presentation about the hidden costs of fast fashion and you recognize the traumas to both human and earth that were integral to each pair’s sourcing, production, and transport. You sometimes do your grocery shopping at Whole Foods because you like their rosemary-flavored almond flour crackers and their sugar snap peas, even though you know that the company and its parent company are capital-B Bad. You’re addicted to consumption, just like everybody else, and when you use an online carbon calculator to compute your carbon footprint, you discover that your choice to opt out of meat and dairy for a vegan diet doesn’t make up for your international flights and your frequent drives back and forth across Los Angeles to spend time with your girlfriend. 

These things are sort of your fault, but they are mostly the fault of the system you’re in; still, their weight can feel smothering. You watch the NASA videos of the polar ice caps melting, you see the stories about the bush fires burning millions of acres of land to bits, and you feel stifled by being in a human body. To be awake and aware is to sometimes feel suffocated by it all.  

… 

The sun shimmers her hazel eyes to amber. It drenches our notebooks. A thick slab of it slaps itself across her worn black jeans. The sun through the window is its own sort of sacred, because of the way it spills through a selective frame, the way it gifts our small internal spaces with its sweet, focused heat. 

Outside, the birds play call-and-response with the off-and-on whirring: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, unidentifiable electric tools, a helicopter bellowing somewhere above. Every machine still grinds in motion, as if there’s not a pandemic happening. But in the small nook of her bedroom, we’re quiet and still: her in the plush embrace of the green velvet chair, me seated on the floor below her with a pillow wedged my back, my chin the same height as both her knees and the window sill. 

This is the same little alcove from which she’d often text me photos during our first few weeks of dating, giving me glimpses into her moments of solitary reflection. Now, we settle in here together every morning, drinking our French pressed coffee from tiny porcelain mugs as we take turns pulling tarot cards for the day — a tender new ritual to swaddle our first waking hours with softness. The smallness of the space nuzzles us from all sides. Nestles us. 

…

Just after I met Lauren in October, just after I started the grad program, I got gaslit by a roommate who manipulated me into moving out with two weeks’ notice. She wanted to offer the room to her friend, so she insisted we’d previously agreed I’d leave on November 1st. (We hadn’t.) In half-hour breaks during my 12-hour days at school, I guzzled cans of La Croix while maniacally searching the internet — Facebook, Craigslist, everywhere — for a new place I could move to in 14 days, 13 days, 10, nine…and the worst part was not the inconvenient stress so much as the confusing manipulation. But I found a new spot. I moved. I recovered. 

In November, two days before Thanksgiving, I came down with what I presume was the flu.  It was the sickest I’d been in years, feverish for two days, in and out of sleep for infinite hours while splayed sideways on the bed like a marooned fish. I missed Thanksgiving and instead, shriveled alone under the covers, scrolled through every last stranger’s Instagram Stories featuring baked sweet potatoes with perfectly browned marshmallows and family game nights and dining tables lined with laughter, and cried. I made it to my family a day late, sleepy and stuffy, but standing. I recovered. 

In December, I rear-ended someone for the first time in my life. I was distracted and tired, a mere few minutes from home. It was the sort of accident that almost happens all the time, but doesn’t, and this time, when it did, it took minutes to accept its reality. The Jeep-style wheel on the back of the other driver’s car crunched the whole front hood of mine, like a piece of printer paper crushed by a fist. For seven weeks while it was in the body shop, I lived carless in a city that all but necessitates a car. But I eventually got it back, recovered and shiny as new.

And. One night in January, Lauren and I were making ourselves a bath. We wanted to relax after 48 hours that involved her own flat tire and expensive car repair, plus my bloody mishap with a kitchen knife that stole half of the tip of my left index finger. The lights were off in the bathroom. The candles were lit. We were filling the tub, already undressed, when a subtle dripping sound behind us erupted into a roar. The flexible pipe connected to the back of the toilet had torn itself from the wall, which now spouted water, and as Lauren forced it back in, both of us shrieking, it split from the toilet instead. The thing gushed as it writhed around like an agitated snake and rapidly drowned the tile floor. The torrent surged around us, into her bedroom and out to the hall. It was as if we were being drowned in a tsunami of our own making, hopeless to stop it. And I could not stop laughing. The whole thing was so absurd, the timing so exquisitely horrendous, that I could not stop laughing. Eventually, somehow, through maniacal hysteria and the blinding force of the gushing, my hand found the knob to shut off the valve. And we looked around ourselves, everything soaked, and we looked at each other, shocked and soggy, and I kept laughing, and I kept laughing, and when I stifled the laughter, I started laughing again. Because it was a truly exquisite mess. A magnificent metaphor, perfectly executed by life. 

Later that month, during my second and most recent grad school residency, I scribbled a phrase in the margins of my notebook, circled it with messy asterisks, and dog-eared the page: “FALLING IN LOVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.” Because it can feel like that, when much of your attention is devoted to contemplating the climate crisis and all the ways that humanity is both entirely capable and ludicrously incapable of tackling it. Because it can feel like that, when life seems to dole out one ripple of micro-crisis after another: uprooting, illness, collision, explosion.

The absurdity of it: falling in love as the world ends. I wrote it down to remind myself to dig into the absurdity of it. That we can grin at each other giddily as it all swirls and shatters. Like we’re tending to one delicate rose that’s blooming, unfathomably, in the eye of the storm. 

…

We are all accustomed — acclimated, even — to a different kind of pressure: the pressure to choose, to perform, to produce. The pressure to remain in perpetual movement, pushing us from all directions. There is a different, disorienting pressure in forced stillness: how four walls can become claustrophobic when you’re not allowed to leave them, how the skull can suddenly seem far too small to hold the massive clamoring of solitary thoughts, how the expansive nothingness of time spent at home alone can begin, antithetically, to close in on you. Fear and grief can narrow one’s vision, too. 

But life has always held us captive, is the thing. We do time here only temporarily, and there is so much — perhaps more than we can bear to consciously recognize on a regular basis — that we can’t control.

Maybe we must learn to let limitations be soft, warm, and honeyed. Maybe constraint can be a kind of snug embrace — a cocoon within which we disassemble and remake ourselves. There are kinds of growth that can only happen in large-scale stillness, which renders micro-movements more perceptible. 

In this captivity, I submit the final papers for my first semester of grad school. In this captivity, I pick my journal up again and remember how the muted scratch of pencil on paper can transport me home to myself. In this captivity, I start recalling my dreams and recording them and discovering myself through them.  

In this captivity, Lauren and I have our first real fight and reconciliation. We make a life-changing batch of vegan chilaquiles; I perfect my creamy cashew cheese sauce for a baked chickpea pasta, while she invents a crusted tofu recipe I can’t stop craving. I beat her at Sequence, and she beats me at Scrabble, and we complete a 1,000-piece puzzle, and we start working our way through a chalkboard list of movies we want to watch. We melt wax on the stove to make cinnamon-scented candles with rose petals crushed on top. We celebrate an anniversary. 

We take walks. I’ve started to crave walks more than runs. She asks me how quarantine is changing my experience of spring, and I have to think on it: would I have spotted that wild chamomile on the edge of the sidewalk and toted it home to transplant into a pot? Would the birdsong have sounded so joyously loud? Would the pink skies have seemed so necessary? 

In this captivity, I develop a new hobby. I begin scavenging for flowers around the neighborhood and arranging them in miniature bouquets, which we place in tiny jars and glasses to disperse all around the apartment. Plucked pink hibiscus blossoms, sprigs of bougainvillea, morning glories painted purple like bruises, lanky green weeds with froths of yellow petals at the tips — they bloom forth from their small containers, stretching their necks towards the window’s sun. 

A story about the chives you’re here to chop.

The Core Stories | A story about the chives you're here to chop.

It began as jumbled mumbling before it crescendoed to a regular, raucous chorus in the background music of my mind: Write more. You must return to writing. You are a writer, and a writer must write. 

…

The same day I moved into my tiny (more like teeny) home in Santa Barbara in October, after three weeks spent dragging myself between different cheap motels and inns and Airbnbs every other day in just about every neighborhood and neighboring town while I searched for an affordable long-term housing option that was not, you know, a children’s playhouse in a random family’s backyard (but *~GREAT LOCATION!!~*), and one week into my new job that drew me to California in the first place, my dog died. 

That morning, I sat — no, I collapsed like a soggy sock — in the front seat of my car in the parking lot at the hotel I’d just checked out of, with a styrofoam bowl of dry Fruit Loops from the free breakfast buffet balanced precariously on my lap, and I sobbed until all of the tie-dyed morsels were mushy. And then I ate some of them with my fingers while continuing to sob. And then somehow, miraculously, I reassembled myself and drove my car to the teeny-tiny home, and I unpacked all of my physical and emotional baggage into it, and I crawled up onto the lofted bed and cried some more. 

I’d already sobbed for at least an hour and a half that morning, crumpled up under the curdles of the milk-white hotel sheets with a pillow shoved into my mouth to muffle the noise, so as not to alarm whoever was attempting to sleep in the adjacent rooms. The day before, I’d started crying so hard while driving to work that I had to pull over, so I could properly heave into the steering wheel. And the day before that, walking down the beach, I made a sniffling, sniveling fool of myself in front of all of the perfectly placid couples and families on their Saturday afternoon outings, and then I started missing living in New York (where crying on the subway is no more than a shrug-inducing rite of passage, whereas crying publicly in this palm tree paradise is a conspicuous anomaly), and that only made me cry harder. 

All week, knowing what was coming, I was human soup, the way a cocooned caterpillar goes to mush as its young self disintegrates before it reconstructs to winged butterfly. 

My dog was 17 years old, and mostly deaf and blind and immobile and uncomfortable. It was time. I hated that it was time. I hated life for being life and doing what life does: take things away. I didn’t want to lose him, even though I hadn’t lived with him full-time since moving away from home for college and leaving him to my parents. I hated that I couldn’t communicate with him in spoken words, that I knew he was going to die for weeks but couldn’t talk to him about it. I hated that I couldn’t be there with him in person in his last moments, the way he’d been there for me throughout my whole childhood, when he slept on my feet every night and healed me from heartbreaks and from the frustrations of chronic illness and from any ache of loneliness and need. 

And that’s what I was feeling when he died: all alone, and needy, and exhausted. I was exhausted from the drawn-out mourning. I was exhausted from tearing my suitcases apart in my car’s backseat for three weeks straight, just to find a sports bra or contact solution or a pencil. I was exhausted from not being able to feed myself nourishing meals without access to a refrigerator or stove. Through all of this, I was exhausted from attempting to adjust gracefully to my new farm-to-table restaurant job, which included some days growing and harvesting vegetables on a rural ranch in an unfamiliar climate and others preparing them at the restaurant — my first-ever experience in a professional kitchen, where I was trying to learn all of the complex lingo that nobody actually teaches you directly while simultaneously paying close enough attention to my cutting board to not chop my finger off with the carrots.  

I felt so heavy and so untethered at the same time, like I was caving in on myself. And I wasn’t doing the one thing that could have propped me back up, which was writing, because I was too exhausted to do it, and because I didn’t know what to say, and because whatever I could say was too painful. It’s still painful, three months later. You don’t think I just spent 45 minutes flipping back through old photos of my dog, sobbing again, before returning to this long, blank page on my computer screen and the pulsing cursor asking, “And?” 

And. And, I have never been a crier, but this past year of my life cracked me open like a seed. I joked recently to a friend that age 27 was my Year of Tears, but maybe what I was doing was watering myself — saturating the split hulls at the core of my being so that all the new selves I’ve collected this decade could sprout. Or, I’ve been the cocooned caterpillar, steeped in her own liquified sludge as her DNA reassembles and all of the outgrown traits — “non-crier” among them — convert. 

…

The walls of the childhood bedroom I once shared with my dog were slathered with shiny magazine tear-outs. I was hopelessly enamored with fashion, with the quirky creativity of it, the colors and textures, all the ways it allowed you to decide whom you wanted to seem to be. It was a way of dabbling in different identities without needing to permanently commit. 

My first job out of college was with a New York-based public relations company that specialized in high-end footwear, and free shoes were one of its few perks. I took such care in compiling my outfits each morning and matching them with whatever most recent pair of shoe samples I’d inherited. Somewhere on my computer, I still have so many of the photos I took of myself in front of the flimsy mirror that hung on the door of the office bathroom, where I’d pose and smile, pretending that those heels and that life made me happy. 

A few days ago, as I was lugging a heavy crate full of just-harvested kale up the hill at the farm, I looked down and realized I’d paired my cherry red Crocs with neon green socks like a horrific throwback to Christmas season. There could be no worse combination of eyesores. I snort-laughed at myself and kept walking. 

It’s not that I’ve stopped caring about the costumes I wear. It’s just that the caring doesn’t eclipse all else. The fanatic obsession — all of that time and energy spent on studying and perfecting the craft — no longer grips me. Fashion doesn’t belong to me anymore, just like New York doesn’t belong to me anymore, or I don’t belong to them. I was theirs and they were mine for a long while, but now, they’re like exes I’ve stayed chummy with while we’ve watched each other move onto new things. 

Exactly what have I moved onto, though? How did I go from spending most days with my head of painstakingly straightened hair stationed just a few inches in front of a computer screen, with my heels clacking against the hardwood floor to the rhythm of the thronged sidewalks of the Flatiron District that thrummed behind the shut windows of that third-floor agency, to spending hours julienning onions in central California, which might as well be Disneyland, with my short curls tugged into a sloppy half-bun, my nails (and all my shirts) permanently dirt-stained, in the span of just five years? Is this who I am now? How can anyone lose and gain so much and still stay grounded on this earth? 

…

There is so much I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know. There is so much I’ve failed, so much I’ve let go, so many places I’ve thrown up my hands and surrendered. 

This is why I must write, though. Once recorded, a compendium of failures is also an encyclopedia of resiliencies. 

I’m starting to get confused about whether this has been brave, all of this allowing of self-transformation, or whether it’s the opposite — whether I’m just a commitment-phobe disguised (so she thinks) as a bold shapeshifter. I haven’t been writing because I’ve been afraid to admit all of my most recent confusions, but it’s the only way I know how to understand myself, to grasp my roots in the mud, to see that I’m still miraculously grounded here. I could be sunflower or blackberry bramble, butterfly or snail — at the base of my DNA, I am still the same, still Writer, always, thank Mama Nay who made me, always Writer.

…

After one of those yearly “30 under 30” lists came out at the end of 2018 — cringe-inducing at best, and panic-provoking at worst, to all of the rest of us who are still trying to figure ourselves out — I saw this comforting Tweet by a writer named James Hamblin, who said, “I’d be more interested to read like 60 People Under 60 Who Were Totally Lost at 30 But Figured Out What Makes Life Meaningful Without Being Obsessed With Their Careers But Also Still Paid Down Their Student Loans and Managed to Afford Real Estate in A Major U.S. City.” (Amen. Amen. Amen.) He followed up by sharing a reply he received from a stranger in response to his original post: 

“James, at 30 I was a former big firm attorney trying to figure out my life. In my 30s I became a junkie. Then I reconnected with my passion for theater. I auditioned for, and got cast in, several plays. I started studying the Meisner technique when I was 42. I kept studying my craft. I am 58, teach the Meisner technique in NYC, six full classes and personal coaching, and have a place in Point Pleasant, NJ. My recipe? When I was about 38 my therapist said, ‘Ted, every time you talk about theater, you sit up straight.’ So I followed the things in life that made me sit up straight. I still do.” 

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

…

My supervisor at the farm-to-table restaurant is brilliant. He’s one of only two from his culinary school class who’s still cooking professionally and now holds the title of Chef de Cuisine at a highly lauded establishment. (I say “still,” but he’s younger than I am.) His technical skills amaze me, but more so, his mind. He can rattle off the names of countless iconic chefs like they’re mere marbles tumbling from his mouth — Do you know this person who founded this restaurant? That person who jumpstarted that culinary trend? This other one who wrote this cookbook? I always have to respond, “That sounds familiar, but…not exactly,” and then he explains everything, every date and detail, with giddy enthusiasm. 

When I went to deliver that kale I was harvesting the other day, he was in the process of preparing a cheese plate, and no sooner had I placed my crate on the counter than he was teaching me about the source of each cheese variety, gushing over the clothbound cheddar from a particular dairy co-op that has won a particular award for a particular number of years in a row, passing me small slices across the metal counter even though he knows I don’t eat cheese, because he couldn’t help himself. He can wax poetic about veal broth, about fermented radish tops, about homegrown oyster mushrooms. He can brandish his knife with the finesse of a ballet.

I…can not. 

I can cook well. I adore cooking. I’ve been cooking for other people for years. But I do it based almost entirely on intuition, because that’s what feels good to me, and with purely plant-based ingredients, because that’s the palette (and palate) I personally believe in. I resist written recipes and precise technicalities. I’ve been known to burn things slightly when high heat fits my mood. I throw the ugly, uneven coins of the stems in with the broccoli florets. I am interested in nutritious soul food and in the energetic exchange that occurs when you place a steaming bowl of something you’ve just stewed in front of the person who’s going to eat it. The expense of my stubborn, narrow-minded approach is my limited grasp of the full depth and breadth of the culinary world and my lack of reverence for its rules that surely exist for good reason. 

There’s this story I keep telling people when they ask me about the job. One day in November, during one of my first few weeks, I’d been assigned the task of chiffonading chives (a verb too specific for even spellcheck to recognize) to be sprinkled (there’s no fancy term for that one, as far as I’ve learned) on the two varieties of deviled eggs that are among the restaurant’s most popular appetizers. I was halfway done when my supervisor, who was in the middle of butchering a hunk of meat, glanced over at my cutting board and literally gasped, then stepped in to stop me.

“I have to show you how to do that. Oh god. Oh, thank god I caught you.” He laughed and looked up at me with his earnest smile. “No offense, but that is literally the worst handling of chives I have ever seen, ever.” 

He laughed again, and I laughed and threw my hands up and did a tiny curtsy and said, “Thank you, thank you very much!” 

I got out of the way. He demonstrated. I’d been slicing those wispy green threads too wide, like shrunken penne noodles when they should have been shaped like tiny ant-sized hula hoops. And I’d been forcing the knife down too bluntly, bruising the edges of each verdant little ring. His blade bobbed up and down, buoyed on air, with enough graceful cadence not to necessitate pressure. 

“See the difference?” he asked, and I nodded. But something in me said silently, I see, but I don’t care. I love that you care, and I wish that I cared, but I do. not. care. how the chives are sliced. 

That was also one of the first times I heard the inner voice insist, Write. Write. Write. 

…

Walking on the beach the following weekend, I spotted a seal drifting in the ocean, just mere meters from the liminal space where the surf hit the store. I stood there, squinting at her gray head floating above the surface, unsure whether I was hallucinating or confusing a seagull for something it wasn’t. Nobody else seemed to be watching. 

Just when I was almost certain I was seeing straight, she would retract her head back beneath the water, then show up again within a minute or two, a few extra meters to the right or left. It was as if she was biding her time, patiently waiting for someone to meet her so both could retreat together to the depths. 

Seals symbolize subliminal creativity. As totem animals, they urge us to listen to our own quiet insights and to allow imagination to arise. They show up, supposedly, to encourage us to pursue our wild and watery dreams, but also to teach us to attend to our natural bodily rhythms the way they surrender their own big bodies to the undulations of the tides. 

I just kept staring at the mystery of her, the same way I’d been watching my true self pop her head above water with increasing frequency. “Write,” that seal was saying to me. “To stay buoyant, you must write.” 

…

A week later, a great white heron came to visit me in the garden. It was the flap of her wings I heard first — the three slow thhhhwwwacks, like a deck of cards being shuffled, and then a soft landing. I’d been…what was I doing? The moments at the farm have all swished together now, all the times I’ve tugged doily bouquets of mallow from the edges of the pathways, plucked bubbling froths of nasturtium blooms from their vines, scraped earth (heavy, so heavy with clay) into raised beds for planting, and planted, weeded, planted, weeded. And on the farm, unlike in the restaurant where the full kitchen staff moves in hurried coordination like a crew of ants, I work alone, slowly, drowned in the cacophony of my own thoughts. 

In the moment that the heron landed, I think I was standing with a shovel and rake, piling soil into a raised bed for beets. I turned, and she was no more than ten feet behind me, over by a once-majestic floral shrub that was wilting its way towards winter. She looked at me sideways with one beady black eye as she lifted a spindly leg and stepped across the cabbages, the sharp point of her sweet marigold beak pulsing forward like an arrow on that white bow of her neck with each light-footed stride towards — what? If the seal seemed to be waiting for something, the heron seemed to be searching for something. Her aimlessness felt intentional. 

It was bizarre. You’d expect to see a heron at the edge of a marsh with her feet in the water, not within a garden plot. They eat fish, not plants, don’t they?

You don’t belong here, I thought, and then smiled. This place wasn’t exactly a native habitat that any guidebook would have placed me, either. Besides, that’s what’s special about herons: they can reside in any element, whether with their wide wings whipping air, their knobby knees bathed in water, or their long toes on earth. She wasn’t as out of place as she seemed.  

She stuck around for at least an hour or two. I’d get back to work, then turn again to see she’d wandered to a different spot. At one point, she was paused just a few feet from me, facing the fence she could so easily have flown over, with the whole perfect pitcher of her body balanced on just one of those two gangly matchsticks. She lowered and lifted her opposite leg, gently padding the foot on the ground before raising it again, over and over, like she was trying to find the ideal soft spot to place it before stepping forward — just feeling out the texture beneath her, calm and cool as silk, while looking up and ahead. 

Whenever she eventually flew off, I missed it. 

The spiritual significance of herons, then. Those with herons as totems are built to dabble — to experiment with diverse activities and explore multiple dimensions of life. To most people, they can look like oddballs as they follow their unorthodox paths, where they comb for opportunities that would seem too off-course for others to grab. 

To hunt their finned food, they stand in the shallows, grounded to the earth while simultaneously exploring the watery realms. And the longer their legs, the deeper they can immerse themselves.

Those skinny limbs represent the capacity to evolve and progress. It’s their peculiar legs, not sturdy, muscular pillars, that maintain their steady balance and stability. The heron-inclined human must also learn to trust the inherent security in standing alone on their own two feet in a myriad of contexts and capacities. Their wings carry them distances, yes, but it’s their legs and feet that somehow, in what looks like an illogical impossibility, support them where they land. 

…

Write more. You must return to writing. You are a writer, and a writer must write. 

One of my earliest visual memories is of the giant Big Mac made from multicolored poster cutouts that was pasted on the wall of my elementary school classroom. It was a visualization of the “hamburger model” we were taught for writing paragraphs, with the intro as the top half of the bun, the conclusion as the bottom half, and all the meat and garnishes of the subject matter sandwiched in the middle. 

This structure was so blatantly obvious to me, and so natural and easeful, that I was mystified by how much my classmates struggled to comprehend and implement it. Their confusion made no sense to me. How can you not get this? Can’t you see? 

I still have zero tolerance for slapdash writing, for sloppy commas that chop sentences in the wrong places, for unrefined phrasing. I handle words the way my supervisor handles chives: with a meticulous and insufferable obsession. It’s just who I am. It’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the most consistent thing I always come back to land on, even as all other facets of my work and world transform. 

It’s how I know I’m not lazy for not caring how the chives are sliced. Chives do not belong to me. Words do. Which does not mean I’ve mastered them, or even come close, or ever will. It just means that they’re mine. 

And it’s infuriating. It’s infuriating to care so much about something so isolating, so time-consuming, and so economically impractical as a professional path. Writing is an entirely preposterous vocation, the way a heron’s eyelash legs are preposterous. It’s a seemingly nonsensical and flimsy foundation on which to base one’s life, but it is still, somehow, the only thing that holds me up straight.

That’s how you stay steady as life takes, and takes, and takes away. It’s how you lose and gain so much and still stay grounded on this earth. You figure out the thing you must do, the thing you must do, the thing you love to do so much that you almost hate it, and you do it. You keep coming back to do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s making 12-layered eggplant parmesan or mastering Dance Dance Revolution or plugging stethoscopes into your ears. If it involves hula hoops or Elmer’s glue or 13 times your bodyweight in books. Whatever. Seriously, whatever. You have to own what’s yours.

It will infuriate you in the magnificent way that writing infuriates me, in the magnificent way that cooking probably infuriates my supervisor, because it will not seem to make sense in the context of all other practical obligations. It will seem too whimsical, or maybe too laborious, or maybe both. It will seem too particular. But you have to do the thing you can’t not care about. You can only abandon your legs for so long before that voice starts mumbling at you madly, or else shouting. You have to teach other people the way to chop the chives. We can’t chop the chives the way you chop them. You must do what you do. Please stop slouching.

A story about the salty sweetness of connection.

We clink through the glass mason jars on the shadowy shelf in the cellar, squinting to read the Sharpie labels in the dark, and select an intriguing pint of pickles, prepared and preserved from last summer’s cucumbers we weren’t here to witness being grown. The stems of dill wriggle in the dusky brine like jellyfish tentacles. We carry the jar upstairs to the kitchen counter, plopping it next to the sink that’s spilled with sunlight from the wide, square window above it, and crack the metal lid with a knife, then take turns dipping our fingers inside to fish for soft, slimy spears of pimpled green.

While we munch slowly — your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn — we whisper a deliciously clandestine conversation, craning our necks towards the outskirts of the window view to watch for anyone who might be coming, pausing when we hear a sound that turns out just to be the dog in the other room. In minutes, we’ve managed to finish the full jar without meaning to. We laugh, shake the piquant secrets and pickle juice from our wrists, leave tiny pools of it behind when we return to work. The salt, or at least the memory of its brief and bizarre delight, lingers on our tongues.

…

Later that day, we stand on opposite sides of fruit trees in the orchard, plucking off the leaves that have been hit with a fungal disease. The disorienting thing is that the blighted leaves look beautiful. Their edges contort to ruffles as they turn to surreal shades of magenta and maroon, shiny and lovely and alien, like they’re covered with strawberry candies.

As we make our way down one row after the next, dropping stems in buckets with dull thuds as we go, we talk about our own past afflictions: the heartbreaks, the traumas, the terrible things that happened by way of other people before we, here, knew each other. Each event, now permanently stained into each one of us, can only be imagined by the opposite like a watery and two-dimensional film scene rippling across a screen.

This exchange of storytelling is the giddy initiation of intimacy. It’s a process of recalibration to fresh relationship.

To explain oneself to others is to reexplain oneself to oneself. To discuss a past emotional experience is to soften it, helping to fade it from its original bluster down to something gentler, something smoother, to the scar or scent left behind by it. To say “here’s what I’ve been through” is to remember, “I’ve survived, I’ve survived, I’ve survived,” all while knowing that this new person, too, might cause hurt.

This is always the risk and the source of excitement — choosing trust like cliff-diving while blindfolded, throwing one’s body deeper, deeper, deeper into the muddy waters of human connection.

…

The six of us share a home and a spacious greenhouse across the highway (always rushing with an echoing river of cars) from the farm fields where we grow the majority of our organic vegetables, fruits, flowers, and grains and produce our honey. We share everything. We share food, coffee, and cases of beer; clothing, books, and cars. We pay for communal purchases without ever asking to be paid back. We settle into the groove of a shared sense of humor, comprised of running jokes that would make sense nowhere else. (The dog’s name is Peaches, but we call her Peachy-Pochy — why? Why do we enact that strange accent with the word “couple,” which we use often when we mean we want three or four or so of something instead of two?)

We live on a literal island — Long Island, New York. It is also a metaphor. We are distanced from the outside world where leaves and soil and shovels are the stuff of sloppy child’s play instead of work, where lettuce comes only from the grocery store in plastic bags requiring being ripped apart with scissors or teeth, where overalls or cargo pants and rubber boots or Crocs could never serve as professional clothing, let alone bare feet in the grass and mud. Ladybugs and chickens count as coworkers here. The weather is the truest boss, and she’s a capricious one.

Some days, we are sweat-drenched with blistered palms and sore arms and sun-pink shoulders; other days, it rains, so we call quits on the morning and return to our couches in the living room, where we curl up like fiddled ferns in haphazard tangles and read books aloud or rest in silence, our heads on each other’s laps or shoulders, our hands on each other’s heads. Someone voices a craving for bagels, and suddenly everyone is desperate for them, so a caravan takes a trip to the store and returns with a lumpy paper bagful. The poppy seeds remain scattered when the sun reemerges from its clouds and we return outside. 

I miss bits of current events that other friends and family seem to catch, and I often press “delete” on my New York Times email dispatches (though guiltily) without reading them. I neglect text messages for days. Those things are so far away, and I feel so anchored here in what I’m sometimes certain is an alternate reality. Other times, I’m sure this is what real life is supposed to look like, and everybody else is stuck in the fake.

We are more cognizant of time and seasonality, knowing summer is largely to thank for this sticky-sweet sort of group intimacy we’ve sunk into (like it is for that unique kind fostered at summer camp), because it’s why we’re here, and only temporarily. (Are we consciously aware of the temporariness? Not yet. That always happens later, halfway through a season like this, when the wave has reached its peak and you realize it will soon crash downward.) We watch our personal and interpersonal progressions mirrored by the plants — the stems of tomatoes that started scrawny and have now climbed their way upwards towards the greenhouse ceiling, the once-imminent nasturtium blooms that have burst bright red like fireworks, the melons and squashes we started from seed now transferred outside and opening leaves like hands to the sun, the toddler stalks of corn we could swear doubled in size overnight. We sense our energetic shifts more seismically, our moods and motivations swelling up and sinking down in accordance with the day’s demanded tasks, mirroring Mother Nature’s own ebbs and flows back to Her. And we’re more gross and weird and honest at work than most jobs allow, because where we work is also where we play is also where we eat is also where we shit is also where we sleep. And this feels good. It feels like being oneself consistently, instead of swapping in and out of disguises for different environments and scenarios. Or, at least it feels like being human consistently. Carnal. Connected.

…

“What are you afraid of?” I ask, because I can sense the resistance to releasing a tight-held truth. 

“I don’t know, I guess I’m guarded, I’ve been hurt before, you know, I’ve been hurt before, that’s all.”

To be guarded is to don a disguise, to raise a shield, to build a wall, to duck for cover, to protect oneself against an assumed threat that may never arrive but seems always to be approaching. The hurt always does arrive, I guess, but not when or how it’s expected, not in the form we’ve prepared for. 

“Everyone has been hurt before. Literally everyone has. Literally everyone.” Tell me more, I mean. Just tell me your full truth, including the gloppy bits. I want to understand.

…

Okay. So we are still swapping in and out of disguises, whether we realize it or not. This is what it is to be human: to be made up of gloppy bits — slimy, slurpy, salty, sour-sweet — contained necessarily in a permeable but solid facade.

…

I understand other people. Owing to both nature and nurture by way of a pair of therapists for parents, I can pick up on people’s psychology like a sixth sense. I see actions and predilections for the emotions behind them; I sympathize easily with the inability to be one’s best self, because I comprehend the sensitive reasons for resistance in a sort of objective way.

This does not mean that people are always — or ever — willing or ready to accept whatever advice I know to offer next. And I am a person, too. I am also resistant to changing my ways. I can also convince myself I’m being entirely open when there are still secret traumas and correlated insecurities I’m holding back behind my walls.

Like: when this sixth sense fails — when I can’t put my finger on the motives beneath the surface of another person’s behavior, which happens particularly when my own wishes are involved — I get nervous. If I can’t figure you out, you might abandon me before I’ve had a warning or a chance to understand why. I am afraid of being unwanted and abandoned without understanding why.

No, that’s not right. That’s not my full truth. I’m afraid I’ll understand why, and I’ll know the reason from the start, but I’ll move towards the cliff dive anyway, like a lemming so biologically wired to follow other lemmings that it walks the plank to its own drowning.

…

Every morning, we ride two golf carts across the street from the house to the field. At lunch time, we ride the golf carts back across the street from the field to the house, toss our muddy boots off in piles by the door, and enter the kitchen like a dust storm, throwing slices of bread and butter knives and plates and torn kale leaves between bowls and coffee mugs still left from breakfast, with the various utensils of metal and porcelain dinging ditties to each other. We eat and then sit for a few moments in the living room, savoring the luxury of the couch cushions, sometimes hashing out to-dos for the afternoon and sometimes shutting our eyes briefly.

One day, I stretch out on the rug on the floor with a pillow under my head and fall asleep so deeply that when I wake up, there is nobody there. I’m disoriented, startled, unsure what time it is. Silence, except for that echoing river of car traffic and a sporadic bird chirp. I check my phone, which tells me 2:12pm. No messages.

Quickly, I put shoes on and stumble outside, where I see that there’s one golf cart left behind for me, so I drive it across the street alone and find everyone there already. I was out so hard, they wanted to let me be, they explain. While I was snoozing, they have managed to catch a rogue swarm of bees that had arrived in the field, and tens of tiny wings still swirl in dizzy spirals overhead, searching for the rest of their crew, like the remnants of whatever dreams I have already forgotten.

“I was so confused. I feel so bad for being late! You guys could have woken me,” I say  too many times with too much odd frustration in my voice. I am afraid of being abandoned without understanding why, remember?

…

When a bee colony is large and strong enough, half of the group splits away in a swarm. The roving gang of wings and stings searches for someplace safe and warm where they can start building fresh honeycomb and raising a new brood, communicating by way of specific bodily movements imperceptible to the untrained human eye.

A beekeeper delights in finding a wild swarm temporarily settled somewhere together — on a tree branch, or beneath a bench, or in our farm team’s case the other day, in the triangular space beneath the wheels and belly of a wheelbarrow — before constructing their new nest. The worker bees cluster around their queen, dangling from each other’s limbs, laced and linked from leg to leg like one giant body. In this state, which is called “festooning,” the insects tend to be fairly peaceable and can be gently lowered, scraped, or shaken into the beekeeper’s box, bag, or vessel to be relocated into a manmade hive. These cleverly designed wooden boxes are stacked inside with trays for comb-building, egg-laying, nectar-noshing, and honey production and storage. Bees, like us, live and work and eat and nurture in one space, in one intimate crew, and we can watch ours — the just-caught swarm and eight other hives — swirling in and out of the boxed homes we’ve given them and scouring our blossoms for pollen in the collaborative creation of honey.

…

Occasionally, during quick trips to town, I hear shreds of spoken Spanish, and I am suddenly uprooted by the memory of Mexico and by the melancholy of missing it. At a coffeeshop, I listen to one customer converse with the cashier completely in Spanish, just the way I ordered my coffee for months with hard-won linguistic familiarity; and then, the white woman behind him in line makes her complicated request and snaps at the same cashier for not getting it immediately, while a white man complains to the barista that his latte is lukewarm but says, “Whatever, I’ll take it anyway, but you guys are really off the mark today.” And I want to shrink. Or, I want to stand up on a table and raise my arms wildly and renounce myself from this country that was always home and return immediately to the one just south of it.

On a bike ride, I pass a barbecue in a stranger’s front yard. There’s smoke billowing around the boom of Latin music, and everyone’s roaming the lawn with beers and plates of half-chewed food. The scene is so reminiscent of Oaxaca, I am startled into an almost-sob.

There was this person I dated in Oaxaca, starting just a couple of months before I had to go. I didn’t realize I cared until I realized I cared, which happened when I explained that I was going to be leaving soon because I’d accepted this summer job on a farm in New York. I watched the cheeks fall, the eyes sink, the whole face succumb to sadness quickly dismissed with the polite offer to go get me another drink. And then the sadness hit me, too.

Later, I decide to be the one to admit this. “I feel sad,” I said in my rough Spanish. 

“Why?”

“I feel sad because I am going to leave. I do not want to leave you.”

“That is the reason why I try not feel bad things anymore.” The switch to English was a kindness.

“Why?”

“Because sad feelings do not help me to be better.” A pause. A strange smile. “I will miss you.”

The next day, the texts slowed, until they gradually stopped coming. There was a part of me that believed it was because I’d prodded at a bit of vulnerability that this tough-skinned human did not want to feel or release — because the caring was too much to bear. There was another part of me that believed anything — everything — else: I am ugly, I am dumb, I am boring, I was never wanted or cared for in the first place. I had been abandoned. I was abandoned before I could ever do the abandoning; it was ruined weeks before I left, and I still don’t fully understand it, or don’t want to. Which is it? I left it behind either way. There’s still the salt of it on the tongue, sometimes — the moments when it felt good, when I couldn’t tell if our subtle intimacy was a more poignant reality or an alternate universe, like a dream.

…

Years ago, before farming was even an idea in my mind, before this job and home and life could have seemed plausible, there was the punch delivered to my ribs:

“I don’t ever want to talk about it, and I’m not going to dwell on it here. I hope you understand that I’m a completely different person right now, that I’m happy that I’m different, and that I’m trying to move on.”

It was a thoroughly unordinary breakup (though all breakups seem unordinary as they happen, I know) with the first girlfriend I ever dated, and secretly, because neither of us had admitted our queerness to others, and so the wound had to be a secret, too. Wounds scar sharper when you can’t (don’t) enlist other people to help heal them through tender care and conversation. I told only one close friend about it, and that friend abandoned me, too, just a few years later, spontaneously and sans explanation. That was another gash gone to a scar.

I forget these scars all the time, but I know that my unconscious doesn’t, in the invisible and buried spots, inside where I’m murky. They are among the collection of scars I carry around and continue to build, the way we all do.

Nobody here knows these stories yet or could imagine them, because why would they? The closer you get to other people, the more you realize how much you still don’t know, how much remains mere glint and twist beneath the surface.

…

“Colony collapse” happens when the vast majority of a colony’s worker bees abandon their home, their honey, their queen and just a handful of immature lingerers. Humans don’t know exactly why this occurs, but a few potential causes may be at play: pesticide poisoning, starvation, attack by outside pests like mites, and odd weather patterns sparked by climate change, for example, could be the threats to incite the untimely disbandment.

One week, we harvest a giant bucketful of honey from a hive that has left it behind. We use an electric hot knife to shave the waxy caps off of the hexagon-shaped cells packed with the amber nectar, and then place the trays in what is essentially a giant salad spinner, whose centrifugal force expels every drip from tray to tub. There is sticky-sweetness everywhere, between our fingers, on our pants, in our hair, both delightful and uncomfortable at the same time. And the whole world, for these several hours, smells like pastry and goodness.

We transfer it into jars, dripping sloppy drops to the floor where the ants find them and watching the way it pours from spout to glass — all the viscous murk of ocean, thick and soft. Each taste is cloying, but addictive. Why do we call cloying a bad thing? Are we sometimes afraid of how sweetness might slice through our tough shells, just as much as pain?

I keep thinking about the bees the whole time we are doing it. What a glorious mess they made and left behind.

…

“It’s a lucid dreaming herb. You can make a little sachet of it and put it under your pillow.”

We’re talking about mugwort, which is one of the most dominant invasive plants in the field right now. It’s conveniently medicinal, sometimes incorporated in teas and salves, but overly pervasive and difficult to rip from the soil once it’s grown tall. There’s a day we spend hours weeding a row of blueberry bushes that is jam-packed with mugwort, and by the end of it, my palms are sore and shredded from the stems, and the tangy scent seems seeped into my skin.

“It’s too bad we don’t have any of it around here,” I joke. “I wonder where we could possibly find some.” We chuckle subtly.

“I mean, if there’s one messenger that nature is trying to send us right now, it’s gotta be through the mugwort.” I reflect on this for a moment: the invitation from the earth to muddle the intuitive fluid of dreams and with the astringent awareness of daily life, to make molten the boundaries between fantasy and reality, to turn wooly moments to lucidity together.

“I kind of can’t even stand the smell of it anymore,” I say. “It’s so potent.”

“Oh, I love it, I love it.”

“I mean, I love it, but I also kind of hate it, because there’s just so much of it. I love-hate it. Or I hate-love it.”

A snorted half-chuckle again. “That’s always what happens eventually when you spend too much time with something or someone. You start to hate it.”

I smile coyly. “Is it? We’ll see.”

…

We often laugh so hard that we curl over like our garlic scapes, folding in on ourselves in hysterics.

That’s a thing I didn’t do so much of in Mexico: laugh like my cheeks might split in two. It’s hard to joke in a dialect that isn’t your own, because jokes sprout from the subterranean foundations of a shared language, poking at unspoken truths through twists and turns of precise words (like the meaningful air-danced swirls of the bee colonies). Jokes are how we sidestep the sink of what’s sappy and how we dodge the sharp edges of what hurts. In a joke, it’s what’s not said that matters, and I think this is comforting — to remember that intimacy doesn’t always require careful, conscious intention. That it’s built into the human experience.

And that it doesn’t always always feel like dark depth. It can be light.

…

I keep thinking about that morning with the pickles. I keep wondering about the bees that went away. There is so much that hasn’t happened yet, and I keep trying to stop myself from trying to imagine it, from trying to picture what we’ll abandon when this seasonal job ends. But until then, everything is salt and sugar, glop and brine, an odd deliciousness. It is difficult to describe and define to anyone not also living on our small island. Perhaps it’s all a lucid dream.

…

P.S. An editor’s note — June is Gay Pride month around the world, which served as a crucial bit of inspiration for this essay. With one exception where it was relevant to the story, I’ve intentionally excluded explicit gender markers from the piece to prove a point: regardless of where anyone might fit within the spectrums of gender and sexuality, we all share a common language of intimacy. To be human is to crave connection, and belonging ought to be a birthright. 

A story about breaking through.

I know that it’s not permanent. I know that there are way worse injuries than broken ankles, and that even broken ankles are often way worse than mine. I know this. People break bones all the time. Children break bones all the time. But maybe it’s easier for children. They get neon casts for the other kids to sign. They have to worry about missing out on basketball games, but they don’t have to wonder whether their coworkers secretly consider them lazy for being less productive this month; whether everyone else on the sidewalk resents them for their sluggish pace; whether the forced inactivity will cause them to get fat, and why it even matters if they get fat, why they care, why they’re so shallow, why, why am I making this such a big deal?

Why: because we are a culture that praises efficiency at every turn. We place virtue on productivity. One is supposed to be able to do all the things, all the time, without breaking a sweat (except when dressed in sleek athleisure apparel — an entire subset of the fashion industry we’ve created explicitly to equate fitness with luxury), in order to be a valued member of adult society.

I am an adult. Leave me alone. I can do this myself. I can get my own coffee and open my own door and tie my own shoe. No, wait, I can’t. I can’t, actually. Help. I am an adult? Help!

[Read more…]

A story about a movement.

The Core Stories | A story about a movement..

This is not a big deal, he said. It’s all a hilarious spectacle. “Nothing bad is actually going to happen.”

It was the day Trump took his oath, and I was trying to swallow my breakfast. I crossed my legs under the table and twiddled the silver spoon between my fingers, staring down at the frozen blueberries — leftovers saved from last spring’s harvest at the farm — floating in their muddled pool of coconut milk.

Besides, he said, towering over the kitchen counter with hands punching marble, “He won fair and square. Fair and square.” He said the problem with liberals is that they focus too little on logical facts and instead overreact, forgoing economics and practicalities for their lofty ideals. They are far too emotional.

Are we? I’m the daughter of two psychotherapists. As a kid, whenever I came home from school with a gripe about a classmate who had copied my crayon drawing or hurled an unfair insult or otherwise transgressed my perception of good morals or manners in some small, childlike way, my parents always offered the same response: she or he is just “insecure.” I never knew the true definition of the term, but I took it to mean that beneath every offense, there’s a heartache, however conscious or unconscious; that every person’s inner life warrants acknowledgment and respect; that untangling the world’s knots of conflicts begins by compassionately considering the emotional experiences of any adversary. Emotions explain and expand understanding; they elucidate the true logic.

I’m sorry you’re upset, sweetie. But remember, he didn’t mean badly. He’s just insecure.

My mom and dad insisted that I voice my own feelings, too, even as I repeatedly resisted, wanting to be an independent individual without the mushy gushy mess of self-revelation. At age 12 or so, I recall curling up like a bug in my seat in the back of the car with my frowning face towards the splotched window, sad or jealous or pissed about something but insisting that I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Just because you like discussing your feelings, doesn’t mean I do. I’m not like you.” Not true. We have to talk about what hurts. To discount one’s emotions is to deny one’s humanity, to lose touch with what makes humans humane, to reveal sharpness, sourness, or bitterness instead of softness and warmth.

I looked up from my blueberries, which were staining violet swirls in the soupy bowl. “I disagree,” I said. I don’t think that those perturbed by Trump’s presidency are “too emotional.” I don’t think that cold, keen economics can solve societal puzzles in tidy mathematical equations. I don’t think it’s ever wrong to take morals and ethics as seriously as detached rationality. (As if any of Trump’s actions have been “rational” at all, rather than based in emotion, in insecurity. As if any supposed solution that leaves no space for empathy, generosity, or basic morality could ever be “rational.” As if emotions weren’t what earned his votes.)

Think about the people who have specific reasons to feel threatened in ways that you might not, I told him. Consider the father who lost his six-year-old to gun violence. Consider the daughter who spoke up about her sexual assault after years of scared secrecy, only to be shushed. Consider the mother who moved her family across the border from Mexico and works tirelessly so that her children can obtain the education she never had, and the one whose kid’s future depends on federal funding for students with learning disabilities. Consider the son who held his boyfriend’s hand in public for the first time when gay marriage was ruled legal. Consider the brothers and sisters and friends of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and so many other black Americans shot dead by police in 2016. Consider how they must ache. They are not “too emotional.” Just insecure, too. Just hurt. Just scared. Just trying to find a way to move through it.

By “too emotional,” what he meant was, too empathetic. Too sensitive. Too easily moved, instead of steady, unshakeable, fixed on success and stability at any cost.

[Read more…]

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