Day 163 – That’s the sentence. Not because the whole neighborhood is haunted. Not because every sidewalk corner is dripping with symbolism like some overwrought novel trying too hard to prove a point. Most of the time, the area…

Day 162 – That sounds obvious now, but I don’t think it used to. I think I used to imagine safety as something bigger. More official. More visible. More dramatic. Like a locked door. A clear answer. A person with enough certain…

Day 161 – Not love in some grand sweeping form. Not clarity. Not a breakthrough. Not healing with a soundtrack. Not a big lesson or one perfect sentence descending from the heavens to explain my own life back to me in emotional…

Day 160 – Then it gets real very fast. Because in theory, community is warm. Supportive. Nourishing. People showing up, meals appearing, understanding flowing naturally, everybody somehow already knowing how to hold one another…

Day 159 – That’s the energy. Not in some dramatic “new month, new me” kind of way. Please. If I ever wake up talking like a scented candle with Wi-Fi, somebody sedate me with a weighted blanket and a very direct friend. No, thi…

Day 158 – April did not come to play. That is the first thing that needs to be said. This month arrived in heels, carrying spring in one hand and a folding chair in the other, and proceeded to drag me through transition, visibility, family, my birthday, being seen, not being heard, grief, womanhood, identity,…

Day 157 – Respectfully, grief is weird as hell. I know that is not the classic poetic framing people reach for. They want grief draped in velvet, looking out a rain-streaked window, saying something profound about love and loss while a cello suffers quietly in the background.

Day 156 – Good women leave evidence. Not in the criminal sense, though honestly some of them should be investigated for how effortlessly they alter the emotional chemistry of a room.

Day 155 – Grief is strange the day after. Or maybe grief is always strange and I only notice it more clearly once the initial shock puts its purse down and starts settling into the furniture.

Day 154 – Today brought the kind of sadness that doesn’t arrive loudly. It just changes the air. A good friend passed today, my girlfriend’s mother, and even writing that feels strange and wrong in the way death always does. Like language should be stronger for moments like this and yet somehow it always arrives…