I miss wonder.

Several human-sized brightly colored alebrije sculptures made with paper, gathered on a white balcony at the Museo Artes Populares

I miss Mexico too, which was what I originally meant to write about, when I thought about returning to writing on this site. Looking over my pictures from my Mexico City visit in November 2016, though, the thing I realized that I missed above all was possibility and that sense of looking.

On that trip, I took pictures of my teapot at breakfast, a bike in the background against the brick entryway of the cafe’s courtyard. Of spicy corn puffs being sold in tall, upright, cylindrical bags on tables on the sidewalk. Ads pasted on walls. Vendors selling tiny wrestling rings at a lucha match. Food and drinks, shiny garlands over streets, dozens of alebrijes in museums, everything sold in mercados, everything everything everything. I was immersed in somewhere new, and my brain was alive, gorging itself on color and art and all of it at once, or things slightly familiar but suddenly in front of me in three dimensions and colors so vivid that I couldn’t completely comprehend them immediately. So vivid they seemed to vibrate in front of me. Things that shook my rods and cones, and things that rearranged my brain.

A vendor in a crowd at a lucha show sells a tiny lucha wrestling ring

My boyfriend and I, quarantine buddies here in my apartment, talk sometimes about where we want to go, you know, after. The real answer is everywhere. The answer is also Mexico. Philadelphia. Montreal. Paris, again, always. Los Angeles. Vietnam. Peru. Iceland, as he’s never been. Anywhere but here.

In the perpetual habit of the employed and guilt-laden, I think fairly often that it could be worse. It can always be worse! We usually aren’t literally on fire, so yes, it could be worse. But I am not currently afraid for my job, and I have a good home situation in the form of a one-bedroom I share only with someone I love and with one cat, perpetually annoyed with us. I think a lot of people are facing some realizations about their lives right now, things that felt tolerable when they could be outside 40 or 50 hours a week but absolutely are not fine when they’re immersed in it almost every hour they’re alive. Mostly, I’ve had the realization that I’ve had a nice meeting of good planning and good luck.

It’s all true. It can be worse.

And also, worse than I usually am, I am buried in FOMO. My last trip was in the second week of March to go to my niece’s first birthday party, which meant going to Canada. I was less than confident about getting home according to our initial plans, bought with credit card points in a completely different era. Concerned but not quite fearful, I had brought cash and some tentative knowledge of alternative ways of getting across the border, imagining grounded planes and disrupted movement. I brought resources to fund a frantic game of Ticket to Ride meets Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as I would try to get us back across the country in a time of unknown panic and danger. Alternatively, we could have stayed in my stepsister and brother-in-law’s spare room for a few extra days, taking over cooking and diaper duty while waiting out uncertainty, so as to be decent guests. These were the two forks in fate I foresaw.

Instead, we boarded our plane, cleaned our seats and trays with alcohol, and adopted the handwashing rituals that are now part of what it means to be human and even vaguely careful and conscientious. On that flight, watching Rocketman in the dark and occasionally peering around the emptiest plane I’m likely to ever see, I had the strong feeling that this would be our last flight and trip for a while. I had already flown less in 2019, in part because I was trying to wean myself off casual air travel for environmental reasons, to approach old habits in a newly mindful way. So it had been a while already since my last significant international trip.

I didn’t fully understand what a while meant, though, on that quiet Air Canada flight. A couple of months? That’s a long time, right?

And so I think about the things I could have done, if I’d ruthlessly overstuffed my life before all this with things I couldn’t energetically fit in. I changed jobs in December; I could’ve gone to Europe for a couple of weeks between gigs, instead of taking just a week to do a little personal admin. I could’ve taken a long weekend somewhere in January. I could’ve just flown places last year, like anywhere, I could’ve FLOWN FUCKING ANYWHERE AND I DIDN’T JUST DO IT CONSTANTLY, WHAT WAS I FUCKING THINKING, FUCK FUCK FUCK–

And other thoughts while spending 23.5 hours a day in an apartment. I am lucky: my apartment is literally my favorite place in the world. What I’m discovering is that, like with my favorite people and experiences, I can only really enjoy my apartment when I get a break from it sometimes, when it isn’t mandatory. We don’t want cake for every meal for days on end, you know? It needs a carrot contrast to be a treat.

Shiny garlands stretch across a view of the sky and trees from below

I split my time, outside of my blessing of a job, giving myself space to do nothing productive or useful – and getting ready for things, when I have the ability to do so joyfully. I’ve returned to learning French, because my god I am going to Paris for at least two weeks once we can travel safely again, and I am going to be able to understand at least 20 percent of what people say to me! I exercise a lot, because my god I will not have my next trip spoiled by back fuckery! I read and I plot and I cook and I put aside some of the money I usually spend on going out. (Not all of it, of course. I keep some flowing to the people who make food or provide wonderful entertainment or other important parts of being human. I put some money toward preservation, so that we have something to look forward to when we emerge, so people with jobs that were put on hold don’t all get pulled under by this.)

I watercolor and make clay animals and sometimes try to write, the things that always light me up but so often get set aside with work and showing up for people I care about and going to other places and then being at them. It’s what I have. This is what I have. It turns out that being a self-regulating and misunderstood kid is great practice for having to amuse yourself while also keeping from circling the drain too hard. I don’t believe in silver linings; I believe we’re a really adaptable species with a skill for making the most of what we’re handed. I’m adapting. I generally feel salty, and I treat myself like I’m approximately 20 percent rage by volume as a baseline these days, but I’m adapting nonetheless.

Frida Kahlo's glitter collection, on a wood counter in her house, in front of a paint set

I keep having this vision of how it’s going to be when people can go outside again. It looks a lot like this, only more exuberant. For me, I wonder if it’ll look like a quick DM to my manager saying, at the same time as all my other coworkers, that I’ll be back in three weeks, that my passport and I are on a train to SFO, and I’m going to just run to an airline desk and see where they can take me that roughly matches the three outfits I frantically stuffed in a tote bag.

Do you know what I really want? It’s not adventure or thrills or amazing new cultural immersion (though I will take that too). I want to fucking people-watch. I dream of doing it in my own neighborhood, of having a coffee at a sidewalk table and getting to see people without being scared, without them being scared of me. I dream of other people being microcosms of possibility instead of the vector that might lead to my death, or being the cause of someone else’s sickness or horrible death. I dream of it so much that I realized a few days ago that I miss talking to strangers.

I mostly do not like talking to strangers. Or, to be more precise, I don’t like it when strangers talk to me unbidden.

Usually. But, in the way of humans, something is forbidden to me, and now I want it more than almost anything. I want to see people enjoying the spring flowers as much as I am. Instead, the blooming irises and wisteria in my neighborhood are my new soap opera, viewed mostly solo; I go out not quite often enough and check in, seeing them rise and blossom and wither, and I have sunny thoughts about infinite possibility and gloomier ones about the circle of life and death.

I’ve spent a lot of time there lately. The first couple of weeks of the quarantine were also the two weeks I spent saying farewell to one of my cats, my first cat, my buddy who’d been with me since 2009, my friend who I loved beyond description or measure. I spent those two weeks periodically exclaiming, “It feels like the end of the fucking world!” and Sean would assure me that it wasn’t, not in total, while I laughed darkly in the way I do when I’m immersed in grief.

But seeing restaurants and all these other places we go to be alive together close while watching my buddy wane before me, the entire outside world and almost my entire heart closing up shop at once, it felt like being buried in armageddon, like everything actually was on fire, like these were things that would never be redeemed or healed. Like my new state was hurt, and there wasn’t anything that could temper it, let alone end it. There was only through, to walk forward and forward and keep enduring.

I’m still alive. And the only useful thing I can do now is stay inside 23.5 hours a day, possibly a little more. The same place we all are, mostly, if we don’t have one of those essential but often curiously badly paid jobs that requires that we go outside and keep the world moving.

I don’t have any resolutions or even any conclusions, not yet. Maybe the only ending now is the way all emails and previously light encounters end now:

I hope you’re safe.

I hope the people you love are safe.

And I hope to see you again someday.

In the meantime, I’ll be here, making polymer clay nudibranches and dreaming, trying to stave off the despair long enough for the world to enter another kind of spring, all of us blossoming safely together again.

Marigold-covered looping shapes in front of a purple-lit wall

Artifice Can Scour Your Soul ’til It Shines Like New

When a simulacrum of Rome shines from across the street and compact, artificial Venice is next door, what persists from the reality I left behind a few days ago is given a renewed heft. If it can keep being heard over the sound of slot machines and background music and the excited hum of thousands of strangers, it must be real. It must be heard.

Heart mural on Las Vegas's Fremont Street

In Las Vegas, I look at the people around me and quickly account for how we are different. This isn’t much of a departure from my usual MO, but it’s heightened here.

They are happy. They are bro packs, intent and at least dimly malevolent, toothy predators in striped, collared shirts, sheep’s clothing. Bachelorette parties and sash-wearing birthday girls, three and five and nine and twelve of them, staggered and staggering across the sidewalk and the casino corridor. People who take the opportunity of being in Las Vegas as a chance to dress like they are somehow acquainted with sex work, or at least a distinctly 70s-flavored version of swinging, all cleavage and embroidered denim jackets with rhinestones and everything short or tight or lavishly embellished or all three. Families with small children, everyone drinking sweet, brightly colored slush of different proofs from strangely similar vessels. They are here to cut loose and see shows and run wild and let their hair down and have what happens here stay here. They want to quote The Hangover and eat a thick steak or a shrimp cocktail and let their woohooooooos echo down the street like thin, waving, fluorescent ribbons, dancing in the sky, evidence that they lived and lived it up and had fun with their boys/girls/various people in their lives.

I take pictures of intersecting architectural lines and contrasts that make me laugh, trying to capture what I noticed at even half the potency it had in person. I try to figure out the stories of the people walking by me. I take pictures of myself reflected in doors and windows, wondering if what’s inside of me is visible on my face. The set of my face is a little melancholy even on ordinary days, though, so I can’t tell if today is different.

It would be inaccurate to say that I have a love of over-the-top artifice, but it’s fair to say that I find it absolutely fascinating. I have seen enough marketing plans and mood boards to be able to get a sense of the feeling a hotel or restaurant is trying to give, the thesis or phrase that powered their plans visible in this lushly striped wallpaper or that ornately cast fake column. This is, of course, a state that makes actually experiencing what the creators intended impossible. But I am an observer, and I feel at least somewhat outside of things most of the time. In Las Vegas, it goes into overdrive; I feel like the child in the crowd in The Emperor’s New Clothes, except I’ve long since learned what happens to that child, telling truth to power. Her sticky remains get washed away with the next rainy day.

But, joyfully unavoidable: I also love lights and neon and glittering strands of crystal drops and unlikely spaces made with conscious opulence. Vegas is for me too, in that way.

These days, though, I walk through an intersection of real and intended. What was once meant to be, among other things, a trip to introduce my significant other to my family is instead a family trip where I have the luxury of a room to myself and the unparalleled sting of one fewer person to text before takeoff and after landing.* I had thoughts and loose plans around what it would be like to mix these two parts of my life that had never touched; instead, I’ve been largely content to go along with my family’s ideas, offering suggestions to bolster their plans more than my own specific ideas. I don’t have many specific ideas right now; I came here feeling almost startled after finding myself sitting on a plane somewhere over the desert, trying to count the steps that led me from my immersive school to seat 8C. For the last three months, I’ve been buried in semi-relocating and then learning and then trying to find a job, all processes that have been at least somewhat frantic, a constant race against a certain idea of self dissolution. I have been absorbed in computer science, heartbreak, and a growing likelihood of real relocation. As such, I had researched no restaurants or attractions. I made no loose itineraries. And, without the usual preamble of thinkery, anticipation, and research I usually go through before a trip, I felt dumped headlong into it.

Really, though, that’s how I feel about most of my life right now. A little startled, a little groggy, and another sprint to try to adjust just enough to get the most out of what I’m doing.

Circus Circus door; faux-surly author

It’s a time of triage, of unpredictable levels of energy and feeling. And it happened that I ended up in one of the weirder places on earth just as I’ve started to feel like I might be happy again someday, with a life gathered in one place, me, my cats, and my stuff all under one roof with a good yearlong lease ahead of us. Sometimes, I can kind of see it.

In this trip, I’ve eaten speakeasy pizza. I bought art from a vending machine. I’ve seen Cirque du Soleil twice.** I’ve drank regrettable slush. I roamed, drunk and alone, through the back hallways of Circus Circus. I walked past a street full of different bands covering different decades of American pop music, all just a half block from each other. I’ve visited multiple make-believe versions of multiple great cities, gazed at gondolas and passed a Colosseum and strolled imaginary, indoor versions of New York streets. And the only money I lost to a machine was when I tried to buy stamps and only succeeded in losing eight quarters.

My regular life right now is about making large decisions. I think often of steering a large ship, something so big that there’s a pregnant pause between spinning the wheel and seeing the bow turn against the horizon. Where shall I be, and what shall I be, and who shall I be with, and what shall I do, and what shall things look like in three and six and twelve months?***  Switching to questions like “Do we want another buffet meal?” and “Do we see the show with the naked people or the acrobatics?” and “Do you think we can fit Hoover Dam and the Neon Museum in one day?”**** are a nice change.

Which I guess is what traveling is for: contrast of a most heightened kind, departure and a return that one hopes brings perspective. Now: to find out what that perspective will be.

*Nothing shows you the stark reality of your life like realizing how many or how few people you have to text from a runway. It’s a quick, sharp accounting like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. Whenever it shifts, I end up breathless the first and second time.

**My second-biggest goal for this trip, despite the lack of planning. Seeing more Cirque du Soleil is always a goal of mine. The actual goal of this trip: hanging out with my family. It’s rare that I get to lure them west, that I get to make the easy trip, and it was even better than I thought it would be.

***Your guess may be as good as mine. Maybe it’s better, because maybe you have a better ability to be fanciful than I do right now.

****No. Or we didn’t, anyway, because we like to actually relax on our vacations.