In October of 2019, I saw a psychic in Sedona. At the time, my former partner and I were on a break, and I was on a trip with two dear friends, searching for answers that might guide my heart and mind into a steadier place. The psychic worked out of the iconic purple building on the corner of Sedona’s main street—the

The evening sun draped velvety over the tall dry grasses around Wonderland Lake in north Boulder. It was April of 2016, the darkness mere centimeters away, bringing a wet taste to the air, the orange orb slipping behind the foothills. This in-between time, a cradle, a pause.

The Layers We Shed

Over the two weeks between Substack posts, I collect ideas. Mainly in the Notes app on my phone, scrawled at random times throughout my days when something strikes me.

There’s a stretch of time after something ends and before something else begins that’s hard to describe. The liminal. No one really talks about it. There’s no ceremony for it, no “how to” guide. It’s not quite grief. Not yet living into what’s next. It’s the part where you feel emptied out but still somehow overfull. Disoriented, porous, unfinished.

Every year, the stretch between June 20 and July 5 holds a quiet, aching weight. June 20 was my dad’s birthday. He died just two weeks later, on July 5. The span between those dates always feels suspended in time—sunlit and sticky, marked by memory. Even when I’m not thinking about him directly, my body knows.

I landed back in Taiwan this week, almost exactly a year since I was last here. I was raw then, from the fresh wound of separation with my former partner. That summer, grief moved in like the rain that tips from the ever-gray sky in June in Taipei, waking me at 3 a.m. sharp. I learned later from my therapist that grief has a time zone. Between 3 and 5 a…

On May 21, 1981 at 11:57am in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I was born under an almost full moon. My parents’ firstborn and ‘just in time for lunch.’ I was brought back from the hospital, all 8 pounds, 10 ounces, to the Cape Cod on Whipporwill Drive, my nursery freshly peach with little stenciled white bunnies. I didn’t cry a lot, my eyes were big, and I lov…

I was somewhere between BWI airport and my mother’s condo in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when the highway gave way to winding country roads.