I love the smell of sunscreen. I love that it’s sweet and syrupy and a little medicinal. I love when there are notes of coconut or banana or rum, though these are but window dressing to the flawless foundation of sunscreen. I love how migrating sunscreen can coat the corners of your mouth, slick your tongue and slow your speech down to a gentle summer hum, when no discussions of great importance will be happening anyway. I have an obsession with the idea of drinking sunscreen, which I know would be an ill-fated adventure, so instead I love drinking things that taste like sunscreen. I love the coconut La Croix and sparkling coconut water in the green can from Cookbook and the Vacations sunscreen smoothie from Erewhon. I love imagining my insides slick and slow-moving and smelling like coconut.

I love the saxophone and the color pink and ice cold Diet Coke and baby cucumbers. I love scary movies. I love the movie theater. I love my bed. I love holding hands and new tattoos and being underwater. I love children’s books about fairies. I wish there were more adult books about fairies that weren’t the porn that some of you guys are reading which is not for me but God Bless. I love air conditioning and I love the sound the ceiling fan makes when I’m staring up at it from the floor. Sometimes I feel so sad I close my eyes and imagine a little goblin or otherwise small creature sneaking into my room through a hole in the window screen while I sleep and scooping out all the sadness from my insides with a tiny silver spoon. Sometimes I feel so sad I wish I was a little mouse or a bird, a wild yellow canary who lives in a hollow tree. Sometimes I lose myself in elaborate fantasies where I take that guy to court like I could have and I take all the stupid money he made at his stupid AI company. But then what would I do with it? Take my rape money and buy a house and then I live in my rape house for the rest of my life? No thank you. Sometimes I wish I could will the world into shape but I love that I can’t because I don’t think I should be in charge of that kind of stuff.

I love summer. I love summer rain and I love it when it’s hot. I love when it’s so hot that getting dressed is an exercise in how little you can wear without being arrested for indecent exposure. I even love sweating, which I do an inordinate amount. I love summer in New York and summer in Idaho and my hometown and Western Massachusetts, where I spent that one summer working on a ranch and riding horses and sweating. I love summer in Los Angeles most of all because I live here and it’s happening and I love what I’ve got. I love going to hot yoga and walking out and it’s so fucking hot that there is essentially no difference between the inside and the outside. I love it when yoga teachers say shit that makes no sense to me, like “Depression is stored in your armpits.” Last summer in Chicago my mom and I took a yoga class together. She surprised me all the way from Portugal when I was on the road. We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas and weren't meant to be together til the following Christmas. My aunt who often takes this instructor’s classes warned us that she was kind of obsessed with death and dying. “She’s just going through something right now,” she told us. The class was bookended by the recitation of a poem about death and dying. “Summer is over, and death’s cool breath welcomes itself into our days, whether or not we are ready,” or something anachronistic like that. All my sympathies to that lady re: the death and dying she was going through but it was August 16th or something and summer isn’t over til I say it is, damn it. I love to be reminded that sometimes even when you’re balls deep in the swamp of your own suffering, sometimes there are categorical realties that contradict your view of the world from the swamp. August 16th is still summer and no part of me belongs to anyone but myself and nobody dies of a broken heart. After all, it’s not the broken heart that kills you. It’s the humidity.

a pool of clothes on the floor 

with no girl-insides to hold them up. I

climb out of the shower having washed away

all my options. I don’t know this yet;

All I know is I’ve been living in sin. 

I wonder just how I’d spend his money

after I wring it out of him 

in Schrödinger’s courthouse. 

When I was a girl my mother told me

to shake the ghosts from your rearview mirror,

Take three left turns, then drive to the firehouse. 

But there I find only empty pools of clothes

with nothing holding them up. So I turn around

to see who else has been living in sin

This was the year I learned to love being alone. I went to the movies alone, I hiked alone, I logged hours in a corner booth at the diner on the corner with a late night cup of decaf with cream and sugar. This was the year I tried to sidestep the Faustian bargain of such little indulgences as cream and sugar in your coffee. This was the year I realized it’s futile to steer people away from damaging habits like smoking or anorexia by saying those things “actually aren’t that glamorous,” because sometimes they are. Sometimes it is glamorous to destroy your life piece by piece from the inside out, and if you lie and say it isn’t, you surrender all credibility. More to the point, glamor is a hollow pursuit. Pick a different one.

This was the year I let myself get really angry, and I started looking for a home for my anger. I moved into a studio apartment in January 2025, which is really helpful on the “talking to myself” front. I have circled this apartment over and over, perfecting my rants for people miles away. Yesterday I told someone that “the sycophantic cult of personality [they] cultivate has some really ugly cracks” and that’s why they’re inclined to call women crazy. I remarked to myself that that was a good one and had to forcibly remind myself I was alone folding my laundry. This was the year I found buried in the off-site storage of my psyche a scythe with which to cut through some serious emotional undergrowth. I have a long fuse when it counts. This was the year I stopped pulling my punches.

This was the year I somehow became an even more militant feminist than I was before. It has always been a Faustian bargain to be an angry woman but this was the year I (bravely!) re-upped my lease on the Planet of Angry Women, in a charming apartment in a shitty neighborhood. This was the year I almost got in a fistfight with a guy outside Abby’s show at Permanent Records. He overheard me say that I love Bruce Springsteen and interrupted my conversation with my friends to quiz me on my favorite songs. I rolled my eyes and gave him my top three of the moment (Racing in the Street, Devil’s Arcade, and Youngstown), at which he scoffed, calling it “such an obvious answer.” Not sure in what universe a 2010s non-single Springsteen deep cut is “an obvious answer” but it’s pretty easy to spot a guy from Planet Misogyny. Then I put my beer down directly to my side and he walked past it and his hands and my beer both disappeared for a second from my line of sight. I was tipsy and seeing red so maybe speculating beyond reasonable doubt but I didn’t pick that drink back up again. I didn’t actually almost get into a fistfight but I was pretty mad for a while.

I grew up in a house where we argued for sport a lot (hello lawyer parents), which resulted in my growing up to be a Contrarian Motherfucker. I still love to spar; in fact one of the hallmarks that I might really get along with someone is their willingness to lob my serves back to me. A lot of people find that really annoying and I’ve made my peace with that. I am far from everyone’s cup of tea. I’m always trying to find pockets where sparring doesn’t feel like foreplay. I’m always trying to listen more than I talk. I’m always trying to find things about myself that feel mutable. I stand in front of the mirror and try to pretend that I am someone else. It is not hard. I watch my own mouth move in the mirror like it is someone else’s mouth, someone else’s crooked teeth. I try to ask her what it is she wants from me. I’m not a diplomat but I am a politician. I want to give her what she wants.

Jake said once he notices that when I talk about myself, I do it with a finality. He worries that it might be antithetical to curiosity, and I think he’s probably right. In an interview with Lorde on a stupid fucking podcast, she said something insightful which I found really annoying because I had resigned to the notion that nothing said on this Stupid Fucking Podcast would be. She warned the listener against allowing your identity as your armor to rust onto yourself, because then it becomes harder to take off. It’s so hard to let the world wash over you. It’s so hard not to find yourself with your heels suddenly dug in. This year I began to wonder if there’s a secret third way to be acquainted with the Planet of Angry Women besides being a resident or a defector. I haven’t decided yet. This wasn’t the year for conclusions.

This was the year I realized looking “nice” does not necessitate looking feminine. I came to a well-intentioned friend’s house before a show dressed in a large Blood Orange t-shirt and a plaid skirt, knee-length. It felt masculine to me, obscuring the outline of my decidedly female anatomy. “Is that what you’re wearing on stage?” I blinked and an hour had passed and I had been dressed in a full-length red skirt and frilly cropped blouse. I looked nice, but I didn’t look like me, which I didn’t see a problem with. I’m a young woman, a singer-songwriter whose music often touches on the plights of femininity under patriarchy; the world doesn’t want to see masculinity from me. That would be the wrong kind of subversion.

I used to feel empowered by the angelic and high-femme silhouettes I wore on stage, sometimes if only out of muscle memory. I imagined my audience as full of straight men: how can I subvert your expectations when my words are full of venom? How beautiful can I look when telling you something ugly? But straight men don’t really come to my shows, and I’m grateful to the people who do. You’re teenage goth girls, liberal arts college bisexuals, weird little freaks. I’m one of you, I love you, I don’t want to antagonize you by assuming I need to look fuckable for you to care what I have to say. When I put this to words, it feels so obvious as to border on trite. But in practice, this transgression from traditional femininity can feel like flushing good money down the drain. Adherence to patriarchy is currency. I don’t like it, but I wanted to be flush, maybe even more than I wanted to be myself. On tour, I packed baseball caps and jeans and sweater vests, a structured houndstooth blazer, and finally I got comfortable up there.

I didn’t write as much this year as I wanted to, probably because I was spending a lot of time buried in the Self. Most of the summer was traveling and touring and running around and when I came back to Los Angeles I dove headlong into a very intensive course of EMDR therapy. This is a specific kind of trauma therapy that seeks to map the brain and create new neural pathways, to allow the patient to remember trauma without reliving it. During sessions you hold a pair of small plastic buzzers that go back and forth, back and forth. It’s the bilateral stimulation of the brain and body, mimicking REM sleep, that is said to unlock some drawer in the mind so you can root through memories some part of you would rather leave undisturbed. After sessions it was all I could do to drink whiskey and sleep all day. The Self is such a warm cradle. This was the year I failed to get out of my own way but I’m going to try again tomorrow.

Credit where credit is due! This year I wrote a play and a half, an album (and recorded it, too), twelve love letters, three hate letters, approximately fifteen thousand emails, too many texts, a handful of Substack entries. Next year I hope to do more. See you sooner than later. Journey’s end in lovers meeting.

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The Boise house has white French doors that lead to the garden. The windows in the kitchen look out onto a tiny forest that grows in the narrow space between two brick walls. The floors are a dark wood and the light is gold. The walls are covered in art pieces that have stories; they’re all by “some young man who was passing through Boise” who my uncle took such a liking that there were exchanges of money for art, art for lodging, conversation for meals, compassion for understanding, something like that. There were always new paintings on the walls. The built-in shelves, the mantle, practically every surface was covered with pottery made by a friend of theirs, one we all know well, the only other gay man with a cabin up in the little mountain town where I spent summers as a girl, the town with no gas station or cell service and one bar that closes when the bartender gets tired and wants to go home. The Boise house has piles of dirt in the yard; my uncle Joe is always “moving dirt around” in ways nobody else understands. The garden is always beautiful, though. Whatever pitch he’s swinging at, he’s gotta be hitting. The Boise house is a blinding white and to step into the sunroom is to be suspended in mid-air. They’re helping with the arrangements for their landlady, arrangements that will evict them from that blinding white cradle. They are better people than me; better people than most.

The Boise house is often the one in which I appear in my dreams. I’m walking with my shoes off across the cold hardwood floors. Every room dissolves behind me when I enter the next. The heart of the house is a little dark hallway between the living room and the kitchen. Art books, photo albums, piles of letters and memories are stacked high. In the dream I sink to my knees and leaf through them, flipping through a life that is mine and not mine. What makes a place belong to someone? What makes a person belong somewhere? In the dream I look back over my shoulder at the room I’ve just left but it isn’t there anymore. We are all going forward; none of us are going back.

I have a long fuse when it counts. I’m cleaning the kitchen for The Family when the grandfather makes a passing comment about my “seeming domestic” and I roil but say nothing. I don’t scream at you when I want to because I don’t want to. I don’t want to relitigate the past, not when none of us are going back. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and the metallic taste makes me laugh so hard it almost floods out everything else. I tell you it’s one of my big dreams to, in the heat of an argument, break a mostly-full wine glass. Nobody gets hurt in this fantasy, I reassure you. I’m gesticulating wildly and it just happens. Anyway, I’m laughing when I tell you that Jake promised that if I haven’t had the opportunity to do it, he’ll cheat on me for all my trouble. You offer to let me break a wine glass over your head, right here and now. I call you a coward in my head and say nothing with my mouth. I wonder if it freaks you out that I’m sitting here laughing uncontrollably while we arrange the end of this endless year, but it doesn’t occur to me to care. Shockingly, I’m uncomfortable here, with my chest cracked open. I laugh because there’s tension that needs diffusing. I laugh because I can.

In the dream the Boise house is sometimes full of people. I remember big garden parties from when I was a girl, where everyone had interesting jobs and had just come back from Casablanca. Everybody drank cold wine and strong coffee and begged me to play the piano for them even though “good for a ten year old” still isn’t very good. The house across the street is haunted; a little girl was shot to death there by her brother playing with their father’s gun. I walk around that house with my eyes closed and try to feel her. When I open my eyes I’m back in the sunroom across the street. I blink again and I’m in Los Angeles, my apartment cracked in two and flooded with light. It’s a packed house; I’m in the producer’s seats, just watching myself in some play. The actress looks like she wants to go home and lie in her bed all day.

What do you do when you come to a closed door? What does it take to cross a threshold? Surely more than just picking the lock. Surely more than merely deciding to move your feet. Surely more than seeing the light come in. When I tell you “You should probably go”, what I mean to say is “Stay, because the longer you spend sitting there, the longer we say things to one another that neither of us want to hear, things neither of us can take back, the longer we can negotiate the size of the wound, the depth, where salt might be poured. When you get up to go it’s all been decided and I must begin to tend to it. While you are still sitting here we can continue to arrange things just so.” The tending is dreadfully boring. I don’t want to relitigate the past. I want to blink again and be in the sunroom, suspended in mid-air.

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The bartender was whistling at me during my murder ballad because he didn’t like what I had to say on stage. I’m donating 10% of my merch revenue to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Foundation. I’m proud to be doing this. I’m not saying this so you clap for me; I’m saying it to provide context and because it’s true. After I play my song Dollface which is about my experiences of violent rape, being groomed by old guys on the Internet as a child, and the removal of agency from young women until we are pliable enough to take any shape we are asked to, I say to a crowd of attentive (mostly) teens something I think we all already know, which is that the greatest acts of violence against women are currently being carried out in occupied Palestine.

The bartender went so far as to threaten the guitarist in the headline band if they were to do the same. “Don’t go to the bar,” Michael told me when I came off stage. “There’s a guy over there who really doesn’t like you.” As he recounted the story I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled. I wanted to reach over the bar and grab him by the collar and dare him to say it to my face. “Or what, big man?” the Hana in my head said. “What are you gonna do if we say something you don’t like?” I didn’t do it for a number of reasons. 1.) It wasn’t my show to make a scene at 2.) The venue handled it swiftly and the band had my back 3.) I didn’t really want to know the answer to that question.

It is not a crime to disagree with me. It is a violation of international law to slaughter civilians, children, journalists, to intentionally starve a population, to ethnically cleanse a region, but this guy was slinging whiskeys at a bar. He’s not going to be tried at the Hague. If he disagrees with me, fine. I don’t care. But when he started whistling at me, I was reminded of the intersectional principle I was referencing in the first place: all struggles are interconnected. He whistled at me because he disagreed with me but also because I’m a woman, because I have opinions, because he wanted to sexualize, degrade, trivialize me. Would he have done the same if I were a man? I don’t think so.

I work very hard for your attention. Musicians are in the pleasure business and in order to provide pleasure I must first crawl up your nasal passages into your brain to spray paint the inside of your skull. While I am in there I am going to tell you what I think, because that’s what I’m getting paid to do. I am not now nor ever going to shut up and sing. I am not just some girl with a guitar.

Just two more shows to go. If you’re around in Cambridge or Brooklyn today and tomorrow you should come. It’s going to be so weird to go home and attempt to reassimilate into my normal life. Thank you if you’ve been to a show already, if you listen to what I have to say, even and especially if you disagree with me. Thank you if you have bought merch or donated to the PCRF. I think anything we can do to make the world even ten cents safer, it’s our responsibility to do.

Below (can’t figure out how to add captions on my phone fml) are some friends with signs, Monkey, NO PAGING IN THEATER! See you soon I hope

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Dear Maeve,

I am rereading your book. I told you when I read it that it was my favorite thing I had read that year. It was only August so perhaps this was subject to change but it didn’t. It remains my favorite read of last year, and I’d like to give it the opportunity to be my favorite read of this one too.

Sometimes I skip around to the parts that I’m in, because I’m an egomaniac and because I love you and I love being reminded of our brief and fleeting moments, often with years in between, however fictionalized in this context. I think I remember when you texted me Sontag’s “Piety Without Content” and I texted back “fuck u”. Or maybe I remember being told that happened.

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I’m also reading Ben Lerner and I’m thinking about you, thinking about the ways our lives are not always a culmination of causes-and-effects into a future that would certainly arrive. When an assumed future fails to materialize, remembering the past that seemingly would have enabled it become like reciting fiction, or poetry, or Lucy Dacus, “songs [that] feel like covers/dedicated to new lovers.” I wonder how that kinetic energy would have dissipated if we had never kindled a friendship built on mutually raised single eyebrows in a classroom full of people with bad politics. I wonder if that kinetic energy would have landed somewhere else, maybe culminating in an explosion of one of us saying, “Did you actually read the book, though?” Thinking about that Alex G lyric, “Infinite futures become a single past.” Thinking about Didion, On Keeping A Notebook, narrative truth versus emotional truth. Maybe it is not literally narratively true that you sent me “Piety Without Content” but it feels like it could be. It conjures to mind a you and an I that look familiar. Maybe it is not literally narratively true that I took my first steps under the Banyan tree that burned to the ground on Maui last year, but I think I remember being told that and I’d like to avoid being corrected.

We get to Minneapolis in three days. I’m excited to see where you live, and to see your family again. I’m also really excited to eat vegetables and sleep in a real bed.

All my love,

Hana

2.

Dear Mama,

I love it when you answer the phone and I can hear immediately you’ve been spending time with your family. I know, of course, that you’re in Virginia, but when that latent accent you deny profusely you have slips out on Facetime it makes me smile. “I look like shit right now,” I said, and you laughed. “No way! Look at that beautiful scenery behind you. You look like you’re shootin’ a music video.” I love watching those videos of you and Dad, when you’re pregnant with Makena, when both of you have those thick Texas accents, Dad’s certainly more put-on than yours. People can call me a country cosplayer all they like; it’s in my blood!

I wonder if you feel the way I do when I’m back home, suddenly dissolving out of temporality. I feel washed in all the choices that led to our singular present. I think about you leaving Virginia, leaving Texas, leaving the States, leaving in the middle of the night with a packed bag, leaving out of order, leaving for the apartment I helped you find when I was in high school, leaving and never looking back. I think about the way leaving does and doesn’t preclude coming back. You can always stand with your feet on the earth. You can always hike up the canyon and listen to the water ripple and the birds through the trees. You can always slip back into your old accent.

Love and miss you,

Hana

3.

Hello,

Thinking about that bit in Jeremy Strong’s GQ Ten Essentials where he talks about Wallace Stagner, about The Spectator Bird, and the pain in every choice. Youth is a world of infinite possibility and to get older is to collapse choices. I wrote about this in a letter I never sent you shortly after I moved into my little apartment, shortly before you came to visit my little apartment, shortly before we fucked on the couch in my little apartment. “Getting Older Is About Collapsing Choices And Buying A Fridge.”

Sometimes it seems to me that you are more afraid of the prospect of infinite possibility than their inevitable collapse. We’re different in this way; we’re different in several ways. This is not to say either of us is more correct. This is not to say I am not also scared.

Lately I think that maybe worse than convincing yourself you are no longer young when you are twenty-three, twenty-six, is spending the entirety of your youth convinced you are always in its twilight. I am guilty of this now, noticing the minors creaks in my joints while standing with my face to the sun in American gas stations, sad hotels in beautiful shitholes, bumfuck nowhere. “Drink this in now, Hana,” I say to myself, “because touring’s gonna start to suck soon. Your body’s going to break down. This will all be over soon.” Nothing lasts forever. Not weather or sickness or even the I-80. But to sacrifice the present to a perpetual anticipation of nightfall is to part that beaded curtain in advance, fix your gaze on the contents beyond the doorway, fail to feel your skin, failing to keep your eyes fixed on the dawn.

Certainty is an empty promise. A cracked skull, unspooled shoulders, a wet open mouth. A bottle of wine or three. A story told over and over again. No future is promised, not even when you sign a year lease in the city where you live.

-HB

Michael and I debated the Overton Window and letting Republicans dictate the scope of our sociopolitical conversation on the walk to the venue’s sister bar. We had pretty shitty burgers and I drank a heavy pour of Maker’s. “Is that just whiskey?” he asked me and I nodded. “You are a fucking wildcard,” he told me, which I liked. I’m a lot less mysterious than I’d like to believe so whenever someone sees me as unexpected in any way I totally bask in it.

On our walk back to the venue there was this beautiful little upright piano on the street outside a music shop. We stopped and played a few songs and some people stopped to listen. We all got to talking and told them where we were playing, inviting them to come, not expecting they would. When the guy in the glasses showed up we were touched if a little unnerved. Eventually it was the end of the night and he wouldn’t leave, he was just lingering by the merch table, and I had to go get one of the guys from the venue so he could ask him to go. When he got outside he started shouting, I don’t really know what about. In the van ride back to the hotel Justice said, “It’s hard because he wasn’t really doing anything wrong; he was just staying too long. So if I tell him to fuck off then I’m the asshole.” We all agreed that it was a situation that could have turned weird really fast but yeah, he didn’t really do anything wrong. He was probably just excited to hang out. He probably just wanted to be included. Many things can be true at once. When it was just me and Justice downstairs it definitely felt like a “lingering guy around two young women” situation, though I’m definitely inclined to view everything through a lens of patriarchy. There’s that idea from Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words by Sharon Marcus about how patriarchy isolates women by instilling fear in us, removing us from community. Sometimes my fear of men is the thing that gets in the way of connecting with them. It doesn’t always feel safe to try and extend empathy when someone’s overstaying their welcome, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t factually safe. Again, it sucks that we’ve let Republicans dictate the parameters of the “fact vs feeling” conversation because I think there’s something really interesting there.

I do love talking to strangers, honestly. After asking Lingering Man to leave, the guy from the venue asked me for tips on talking to fans at the merch table after the show. I was flattered that he thought I was good at it. Princess of small talk, etc.

In Portland, I stayed with my friend Alli, who I met in dance class when I was fifteen, and an old friend from home came to the show. I think the last time we saw each other I was like eleven. Touring when you’re broke (read, touring) means getting scrappy about lodging, but the silver lining of that is getting to catch up with friends you haven’t seen in years. It’s a nostalgia tour of America. I’m reminded of past lives in which I was even more addicted to being the youngest person in the room, a habit that still afflicts me, but one that becomes less possible all the time. In LA you stop being young at twenty. Or maybe you stop being young the first time you stand up for yourself. Anyway by all of these standards I (23) am not LA young anymore. Just regular young.

Summer is a season of the body. I brush my teeth on the side of the road. Jake and I make plans to hit the gym together; he promises to spray me with the hose if I start going twice a day or any crazy shit like that. Live music is ephemeral and intangible, an extant form of leaving the body. Maybe I feel like an alien creature when I look at photos of myself after shows because I want to stay that way, hanging in the air. Maybe that’s too frilly and I’m just a guy with a disease of the mind and a job to do. Probably the latter.

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Over the bay and under the sky. I am lacing up my shoes and chewing gum and blowing bubbles and smiling. Jake and I debate the other shoe, when it might drop. Good things have a ceiling, but bad things have a floor. It’s what you do in the negative space. It’s how fast you run on the canopy. It’s what you do in the meantime.

Summer is a season of the body: Here in this stillness/Asleep in the car. I’ve never known this quiet/I’ve never swam this far

See you soon,

HB

All night, I’ve been burning like a low-grade fever, bubbling under the residual heat of the lights in my apartment, all of which have been turned off for hours, so I peel myself off the floor and walk down the street to that sweet sweet oasis in my desert wasteland city. If I got to personally design heaven it would be a grocery store. I fucking love the grocery store. I guess it represents possibility, a single vessel for the building blocks of any recipe. You need a keen eye to eke these things out, though, I tell myself. Food is greater than the sum of its parts, I tell myself, and actually believe. I learned to cook in my late teens as a concerted effort of exposure therapy to cure my anorexia. It didn’t really work but at least now I have a skill, as well as the constant benevolent presence of my true love the grocery store.

I have not always loved the grocery store. A child of the early aughts, I had no good examples for how to relate to food. I knew how to read a nutrition label before I could read books. Like all lifetime latchkey kids, I became particularly adept at the after-school routine: ungodly snack prepared by unwashed hands (Saltines with honey drizzled on top come to mind), eaten sitting on the countertop, book I wasn’t allowed to read pressed down with my knees to avoid stickying the pages. Food was a hurdle to be cleared. Pleasure was something to be attained in solitude, before I heard Mom’s keys rattling in the door and I dashed upstairs to my bedroom where I’d sit quietly on my knees and pray to God or my Taylor Swift posters that I hadn’t left behind any evidence that I lived in the house at all. Sometimes when I’m in the grocery store trying to decide between the 2% and the 1% Greek yogurts I lose myself to a rabbit hole of parallel truths, that these are memories of standard adolescent asociality and that my childhood was, simply put, not standard, and I am under no obligation to pretend it was. I am under no obligation to play defense for the people for hurt me to the judge/jury/executioner of my mind. I try to hold both these things in my hands at once but they rub together like Styrofoam and I forget that I can only buy one container of Greek yogurt.

For a while, the grocery store, like restaurants or dinner parties, was like porn. There is a list of attributes we have all agreed upon as desirable. Crunchy greens, crisp apples, tomatoes and sausages with skin that snap. Creamy sauces with flecks of spices and herbs. Waiters who fret over you, who notice an untouched plate and worry you aren’t enjoying the food (and of course you aren’t, but through no fault of the kitchen). Crisp white napkins meant to be soiled. Salt fat acid heat. So out of touch with my own desires, I knew about this list only through a shotty game of telephone.

Now I pace the aisles and pretend I am a private chef to a beautiful young woman who happens to live in an apartment that looks just like mine. This young woman in my mind has a job like mine, one that keeps her busy and her body always tired at the end of the day. She works nights and weekends and stays up late poking the smoldering embers of her various creative enterprises with a stick. As a nanny, I’m well acquainted with caring for others, far more so than caring for myself. I can cook for her, feed her, because she is not me.

To offer to yourself after spending a decade in artificial scarcity is a difficult mountain to scale, so sometimes instead I spend hours in the grocery store, steeped in possibility, untouchable by mess and practicality and actual consumption. I am a clean girl with a slicked back bun in the grocery store. I could go to pilates later. I could drink coconut water. I could set up camp amongst the dry goods and never leave.

Whether or not you believe in the eternal power of the written word to change the world, and I do, such a belief does not exist when you’re doing the actual writing, or at least, it definitely doesn’t for me. It doesn’t exist on the couch hunched over your laptop after you finally put the kids to bed. It doesn’t exist at the stoplight vomiting your thoughts into your notes app. I write because I love it; I love the act of it as much as I love getting people to care about what I think. But the ego necessary to convince oneself that their thoughts ought to be committed to paper is inextricable from the process, and wherever I write there is a little voice in my head that says “shut up shut up this does not matter at all.”

I don’t know if that voice is me, or a shitty ex-boyfriend, or even some imagined version of my mom (who would never say that to me), but it certainly does not live in my kitchen. To me, a devout home cook, food is the artform least burdened by ego. Cooking is humble; it’s an offering. At the end of the process, you have made something with your hands, something you can offer to those you love. I’m a good host at least in part because I’m very type A, and I’m incurably nervous. Even at other people’s parties I find myself running around refilling drinks and lighting cigarettes. I will always offer to go out for ice. I will go out for ice for my imagined beautiful girl who is just like me, to whom I am the private chef.

The song ends and the chaos from the front of the store leaks into my ears in the interim. That guy calls someone a faggot again. Get out of my happy place! You can’t say faggot in my mind palace! I turn off the indie folk and put on a playlist of meditative frequencies. I don’t know the science behind that shit, or if there even is any, so it kind of just sounds like ambient music to me.

By the time I reach the produce aisle I am totally blissed out. Whether it’s the meditative frequencies or the sight of pure unblemished radicchio, I don’t care. I’m going to make a meal for the beautiful girl later, in her apartment that looks just like mine; it will be complex and bright and seasonally appropriate. I’m going to sweat a little over the stove in her galley kitchen, delighting in the sensuality of doing something with my hands, making something for the beautiful girl. Then she’s going to sit at her dining room table, the one from the house she grew up in, the one her family never ate at, and she’s going to eat there and it’s going to feel like an orgasm. It’s going to feel better than an orgasm.

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I love springtime. I love new shoes. I love coffee ice cream. I love asparagus, and frozen blueberries straight out of the bag. I love appointment viewing television; I love days off that revolve around my appointment viewing television. I love having a plan that is beholden to no-one but me. I love getting cold phone calls from people I haven’t heard from in a while. I love when I have a new little girl in one of my ballet classes and at the end of class she runs up to give me a hug. I love spreadsheets and white wine from Trader Joe’s. I love the idea of borrowing candles from the grocery store even though I don’t do that anymore. I love when people tell me I smell good when I’m just wearing Old Spice deodorant. I love when Ruby gives me clothes she doesn’t want anymore because I usually want them. Also I love that she hasn’t asked for that white top back yet because I wear it like once a week sorry Ruby. I love kismet the experience and also the restaurant on Hollywood Blvd in Los Feliz. I love the cello. I love the idea of getting a tramp stamp that says something like “Is this thing on?” or “NO ONE GAF!” I love getting new tattoos on a whim and going to the movies on a whim and running into friends in the grocery store parking lot. I love when my friends introduce me to their friends and I love when those people challenge me to see the world a different way. I love kissing and I love sex. I love being a little sweaty while I’m cooking dinner. I love hot yoga and boxing. I love writing little stories and sending them to a few trusted friends and going Is this bullshit. I love it when they tell me No this is good I want to read more about the guy who goes to space and I love it when they tell me Yeah this is just The Bear but bad. I love writing, even more than I love having written. I love it when my friends send me their writing. I love working too much. I don’t love failing to water the flowers of my friendships or stuff like that but I do love scheduling myself within an inch of my life. I love giving babies kisses on their bald little heads and I love sending letters. I love playing music, both on stage and when I get to pick a record to put on that everybody might enjoy when there are lots of people in my apartment. I love it when there’s lots of people in my apartment. I love the idea of giving my best friend a key to my apartment even though I haven’t done it yet. I love when people tell me things about myself and it aligns with the ways I’d like to be, the ways I’d like to be seen. I like it when people understand in me the things maybe I don’t want them to see, or at least don’t fit in to the perfectly crafted Flat Stanley I have of myself in my head. I love the concept of the Flat Stanley, devised by myself and I think my friend Maeve when we were discussing memories of ourselves held by people who aren’t in our lives anymore, at least not functionally. Maeve and I went to college together and I only stayed in school a semester and a half. She’s going to graduate in the spring. Maeve mentioned running into someone who asked her how she knew me because I don’t know maybe they saw we follow each other on Instagram or something and I remarked how weird it made me feel that people at a place I sprinted away from remembered me at all, that even in seasons where I feel like a ghost I do, in fact, tangibly exist. Anyway we decided that one’s Flat Stanley is the two-dimensional version of yourself other people can carry around in their pockets with them, rather than being burdened to imagine you completely because we just can’t do that with everybody, especially not people we knew for five months three years ago. I think she said that they remembered me as smart and funny but mostly just really sad while I was there and I think at the time I was charmed by the tortured romanticism of that Flat Stanley. I think I probably said that that was the perfect Flat Stanely to have. Now my idea of the perfect Flat Stanley is different. I think the healthiest thing would be not to think about your Flat Stanley much at all. But who knows, I’m pretty baked. Happy Easter.

I’m in a diner in Kettleman City. I’ve been driving almost four hours at this point, with another two, two and a half to go. It’s 9PM, late June, nearly 90 degrees even with the sun setting behind the curve of the distant hills, endless flatland on the other side of the freeway, orange groves and convenience stores. My car, an ancient sedan from my grandmother that I get running daily with a prayer and a swift kick in the balls, needs an hour to cool down, and I need coffee desperately. I love this drive, the one that takes me from my new home in Los Angeles to my truer home in central California. I also love diner pancakes.

I’m trying desperately to avoid getting caught Shazaming whatever early 2000s indie rock they’re playing for myself and their one other patron, an older man, a truck driver. In an imagined version of events, one in which I flatter myself, he wonders what this tired-looking young girl is doing with her fingers flying over the keyboard of her MacBook in a Denny’s. There’s a joke my friends and I like to make that doesn’t have a name but could be called “Los Angeles 2, American 10”, for when the sheer density of beautiful people in Los Angeles makes us weary. “I’m a Los Angeles 2,” says Ruby, my truest friend and among the most beautiful women I have ever laid eyes on, “but I’m a Madison, Wisconsin 9.” In this Kettleman City diner bathroom mirror I spend a moment sizing myself up before remembering my server cares far more about the size of my tip than that of my waist. The song is, as it turns out, a deceptively catchy Christian rock ballad. This bums me out a little bit but not enough to dissuade me from adding it to my playlist of songs I think this little monkey would listen to from his post in a still river.

Soon, I’ll be back on the road listening to a book about the Vietnam War. For now I am here in this stillness, thinking about the upcoming risks I am taking. I am spending the summer without a lease, never sticking around in one place longer than a week or two. New York, Idaho, a farm in Massachusetts, every inch of my beloved California. I’m cobbling together billable hours from my various occupations: writing and caring for babies and having pictures taken of me and singing for money. My grandmother seems concerned when I tell her she can’t mail me a birthday card because I don’t have an address. I implore her not to worry about me and send her a picture I took of the sunset.

02/28/2025

The six year old I pick up from school made the gymnastics team, so I take her to get pancakes for dinner. She orders the birthday cake ones with sprinkles and I tell her she has to get eggs too so her mom doesn’t get mad at me. I give her a tour of her plate: “Eggs have something called protein in them, which helps your body make your muscles grow bigger. Bananas have potassium which is good for your heart, and they’re good for your poop.” That makes her laugh; it doesn’t take much. “Pancakes have something called carbs in them. They give you energy so you can run fast. And sprinkles are delicious and fun. We want to try to have all those things in our bodies because they do different things for us.”

I’m doing this for her and also for me. Lately I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts about nutrition. This wouldn’t be a bad thing except I do it while sipping a Celcius, the only thing that gets me through my long work days of chasing after kids and teaching them ballet. Orthorexia buzzes around my head like a fly I can’t kill, but I try to tune it out.

She makes a face at me: “But it has sugar in it.” My heart goes fast. “Yeah. Everything has sugar in it. Your body takes food and breaks it down into tiny tiny little pieces of sugar, and that’s what gives you energy to do gymnastics and practice reading and stuff. Man, these are good pancakes. Do you want to play family when we get home?”

They always play weird music at Denny’s. It’s hard for me to think over the sound of Electric Feel by MGMT, but then she puts her head in my lap and says, “This is the best day ever.” I’ve been picking her up from school since she was four. I ask her if we’ll be best friends even when she’s a grownup and she says she thinks so.

10/6/2024

Ruby has a new boyfriend. We’re eating diner pancakes at this place on the corner in Los Feliz. Ruby sort of always has a new boyfriend, but this one she insists is “the one” even though it’s only been a few weeks. I’m inclined towards skepticism but I also love her and thus am trying to be an optimist. My mom got married when she was 21 to a train wreck of a man, a drug addict who was evil to her. To encourage us to avoid making the same mistakes she did, my sister and I weren’t allowed to watch Disney Channel as kids. “Those girls have boyfriends,” she’d say and change the channel to PBS or a cooking show or something. She was trying to keep her daughters from becoming “boy-crazy,” which worked a little too well because now we both date women.

When I was younger and angrier, I wanted to eliminate the presence of my parents from my life altogether. I didn’t call home unless I had a question about my insurance or something, or one time in college when I cut the tip of my finger off while slicing an apple and called my dad to ask what to do. That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to call your dad for, even if you’re still pissed at him for that time he threw a batch of cupcakes you had just made into the yard. But it’s an arrogant notion that one could exist completely outside of the context of their upbringing (coconut tree?), and what actually ends up happening is you overcorrect. My father was angry, so thus I must never be angry. My mother got married young, so her children will never care about romantic love even a little bit. What you think is creating an immutable, unique self is actually just a foil to the very person you’re trying to forget, which elevates their presence further. Anyway, sometimes I envy Ruby’s openness to connection, and then I remember what it feels like to be shaken like a snow globe in love and I don’t envy it anymore. This guy seems really nice though.

12/22/2019

My toes are bleeding into my socks as I curl up in a booth with my sister, the boy I love, and his brother Chris. It’s Nutcracker weekend, the exalted tradition of my young life. My hair is slicked back into a neat bun and my shoulders glisten with sweat. I haven’t eaten in a week to prepare to look trim in my costume and I think if I don’t get pancakes in front of me in the next five minutes I’ll die, like actually just die.

The boy I love and his brother came to see me dance. I was fine. I had dreams of being a professional that were quickly dashed by my subpar feet, visible scoliosis, and general lack of skill. But he came because he loved me too, even though neither of us were saying that out loud yet. It was all very chaste and Victorian, or maybe just classically adolescent. He gets up to grab something from the car, a book I lent him or something. My sister, his brother, and I keep talking.

Chris asks me if I’ve ever been in love. I don’t remember how it came up but years later I wonder if he was probing me for his brother. Anyway, I respond in some precocious seventeen year old way like, “I never let them get close enough,” which is true, but makes me sound like a character in a country song and not a virgin attending Mormon high school in central California. He looks at me kind of funny like he knows something I don’t, which he probably does.

I asked him the same question and he gets a dreamy expression on his face. “Yeah, once.” I ask him to tell me the story. He was a freshman in college, and she overheard him playing the piano from across the hall. He hums a couple notes of a song from a French movie I pretend to have heard of. I’m seventeen and I don’t know anything, but I think I understand what he’s saying. Love is witnessing and being witnessed. Love is seeing something out of the corner of your eye, hearing a few notes you recognize from the other room. Love is chasing down the source of a feeling even when you don’t know what you’ll find. I forget how the story ended. My pancakes come.

3/15/2025

My friend Kellen is visiting me in my new apartment. We all went to see a woman play the Great Organ at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. Over diner pancakes, we all confess that we probably fell asleep at some point or another during the hour and a half of ambient music. “It was just so meditative!” Maddy says, and we all laugh. While listening to the music I stared up at the ceiling of the church and tried to think about God, but I never feel God when I’m at church. I get closer when I look back at the console, at the two bodies sharing the bench. There are a few pieces written for four hands, which feels like an extension of the metaphor of the organ itself: there is one piece of music, one console, but seemingly infinite pipes surrounding us in this room, swallowing us in sound, greater than the sum of its parts.

I love when people come to visit me because it gives me an excuse to play tourist in my own city. Kellen and I take a drive through the Hollywood Hills because she wants to see David Lynch’s house. With the windows down, Joni blasting, she takes a photo and sheds a tear. I can’t meet her there emotionally but she trusts me enough to let me witness the moment, which is almost as intimate. We go dancing and eat at my favorite restaurants. Kellen and I met in college, when I was crazy and sort of in love and always hungry.

It’s the Everyone I’ve Ever Met Convention in Los Feliz tonight. Friends trickle in and I put lipstick stains on their cheeks. I avert my eyes from someone I went on two dates with, though I’m not sure he remembers me, thank God. On the drive home, Kellen says something to the effect of, “Your friends are so nice.” This is my favorite thing to hear, first and foremost because it means I have brought people I adore together, and they see all the same things I see. I hope, more than anything, that I am reflected in the company I keep. Diner Pancakes is a piece of music played by 12 hands, crammed into a corner booth, punctuated by thoughtful questions and Ruby’s laugh, by bits committed to and words misused and Tom Waits on the drive home.

Kids have always liked me, probably because I have big expressive eyes and a loud laugh. I think it’s also because I earnestly enjoy doing the things they like to do: I like the park, and coloring, and playing pretend. At the bar with my friends, I feel like a new mom, forcing everyone to look at the endless collections of pictures of my kids on my phone. “Last week,” I can hardly get the story out because I’m laughing so hard, “Jake came inside and he had wet his pants. So I said, ‘Oh, buddy, did you have an accident? That happens. Let’s go get you some new clothes!’ To which he responds with an incredulity I didn’t know a three year old was capable of, ‘No, Hana, I didn’t have an accident. I was being a pretend dog and I went potty in the yard.’”

I usually feel like I have a “fake job.” But when asked to qualify the fakeness of it, I waffle. It’s not that it’s not hard; the number of times per week I return home exhausted and covered in drool, banana, and pee is a testament to that. Usually my response ends up sounding something like, “Well, teenagers do it.” My Logic Self (Internal Family Systems therapy enjoyer here) doesn’t believe this. That version of me is a principled socialist who knows that domestic labor makes all other labor possible, that our capitalist overlords have vested interest in the proletariat at large undervaluing our skills to keep us subservient. My Emotional Self, however, cowers among her friends with college degrees and office jobs (despite the fact that even if I was working full-time in my field, I wouldn’t need either of those things. Musicians and writers, my night jobs, don’t wear suits to work, unless you’re Matty Healy or David Byrne.) I feel compelled to qualify my gainful employment so nobody notices I’m not a real person.

“Those are fancy shoes,” said my nanny dad to me one morning when I showed up to work in my Tabi Mary Janes, which I dutifully slipped off upon entering the home. “I know,” I replied, unsure if it was a compliment but deciding to take it as one, “thanks. I feel like I never wear them, so I-” The mother interjects: “You just have to wear them to the places you go. I like them!” I smile and acknowledge their divisiveness—my own mother, for example, doesn’t care for my hoofed footwear. I scoop up the baby from the floor so he can push the buttons on their espresso machine while I make myself a coffee. We talk for another half hour, some about the baby (he’s had 3 ounces of formula so far and his poop was weird), some about my date from the night before. The dad: “I think you need to stop being so nice to the people you go out with. What would happen if you cut off his 45 minute story with the weirdest sounds you can possibly make?” All four of us, myself, the baby, and his parents, take turns giving examples until the baby says something that sounds like my name, which makes me cry. “Is he going to start walking while I’m gone?” I ask, preparing to spend a week working on music out of town. “You better not, jerk. I wanna be here for that.” The baby responds by pulling my hair.

When I first arrived to LA, I was nineteen with only part-time childcare experience and a semester and a half of college under my belt. Brand new to the city, knowing almost nobody, I spent most of my time with the family I had come to work for, a couple with three boys. The oldest was 2 and a half, and the twins (yeah) were 7 months. In truth, I have no idea how I performed that job at all, much less well. I think I blacked out for the whole year I was with them. Nobody broke any bones or stuck their fingers in any light sockets, so I’ll count it as a success. These days, I’m the date night or after-school sitter to a large consortium of east side Los Angeles families, but I spend my mornings here, with Chris, Bianca, and baby Leo (names changed for obvious reasons).

I started to work for them this past fall, shortly after my return to LA following a summer spent working on a horse ranch in Massachusetts, writing a play in Manhattan, and depleting my small savings. I desperately combed through all the nanny sites, which are structured disconcertingly like dating apps, for a new way to pay the rent I suddenly found myself owing again now that my nomadic chapter of couch-surfing had come to a close. I fired off an obscene amount of messages that all began, “Hey there! Seems like I could be a really great fit for your family,” until I found a listing where I could actually mean it: a couple of musicians with a 6-month old looking for a morning sitter. This essay is far from a guide on how to get a a nanny job, but if there’s one tip I can give, READ WHAT THEY WRITE ON THE JOB LISTING!!!!! This seems painfully obvious to me, but when I came to interview, Bianca said it was what pushed my application to the front among literally dozens of others. We clicked instantly, and it quickly became my favorite of the many nanny jobs I’ve worked. They are good and genuine people. They imagine me as a person, not a service, and they pay me fairly, both of which are a rarity even (maybe especially) among wealthy Los Angeles parents. When I left to go home to Northern California for a week over the holidays, we were all sad to be apart for so long.

Any good leftist, or any adult with experience working in food service, knows that “here, we’re more than your workplace—we’re a family” is a dogwhistle for exploitative practices. Families go the extra mile for each other and are rarely compensated, which is simply not how the exchange of labor for cold hard cash is built at a workplace. But when you’re a nanny, you’re in someone’s home. You might be drinking their coffee or eating their snacks, handling their laundry, washing their dishes. Most of all, you’re put in charge of their most precious thing: their child. Lines get blurred. Boundaries must exist, but they can’t be the same ones that might in an office. Over my years in childcare, I’ve worked up a script for interviews with new families: one that acknowledges that I must, literally, integrate into part of their family, while retaining considerable autonomy. It’s generally agreed that money and friends are like oil and water, so nannying is a necessarily a peculiar workplace environment that only becomes stranger when you really truly love the people you work for.

I moved into a studio apartment on January 6th (and if the liberal coup had in fact occurred I would have had an airtight alibi). On January 7th, LA caught fire. I sat on the floor of my couch-less new place, glued to the TV as it splashed endless images of my beloved city on fire. By the grace of God, I’ve spent my life fairly insulated from the direct effects of natural disaster. This time, I felt its breath on my neck as two of the neighborhoods I hold dear went up in flames: my father’s native Pacific Palisades, and baby Leo’s Altadena.

Whether it was proximity to actual flames or just the crushing yoke of the lead particles in the smoke-filled air, nearly everyone who could leave was driven out of town. Late Wednesday night I climbed in the car that had been my grandmother’s, my father’s mother, and drove to San Diego. “You can sleep on the pullout couch at the end of our bed,” texted another beloved nanny mom, “if you want to join our apocalypse vacation.” I arrived that evening with a hastily packed backpack overflowing with gratitude. I went for a run on the pier and drank a smoothie at a beachside cafe blaring surf rock in the early morning, marveling at the view of the ocean, equal parts breathtaking and dystopian. I had called out of work for the weekend, the ballet classes I was to teach had been cancelled anyway—how many of my neighbors didn’t have that luxury? How many were here because their homes had turned to ash? I counted my blessings in between sobs and they were many.

Across town, baby Leo and co had evacuated with a few friends. “Can I come by?” I texted. “I figure you can use an extra set of hands.” I was eager to help, but had a selfish ulterior motive: I needed to be around adults. Real adults, not the sorry excuses for grown-ups myself and my similarly-aged friends are (sorry guys, love you!). If I’m being honest, this is half the appeal of a nanny job in the first place. I don’t come from a family that sits down for dinner together. My parents and I are close now, but my childhood was tumultuous to say the least. If this kind of language didn’t make me want to throw up, I might say I’m “reparenting my inner child” with every shift. I wouldn’t say that, but someone else could! Upon my arrival to their “apocalypse vacation” Air BnB, a glass of wine was put in my hand by a benevolent and childless cohabitator. We talked about life and music and Los Angeles until Chris and Bianca came through the door, baby in tow. Their entire neighborhood had burned to the ground. They are amazing parents, so they kept on happy faces for the baby, but if you knew where to look, you could see that they were tired, and devastated.

“I know this wasn’t what you hoped for in your first year of parenthood,” I said.

“Nor of home ownership!” Chris responded, almost smiling. The youngest daughter of an emotionally turbulent household, I’ve always felt my role in tension-diffusing during high pressure situations is to try to make everyone laugh, even when they really don’t want to. Maybe that’s part of why I love kids so much: they’re always down for a giggle, even with blood dripping from skinned knees.

A few days prior, before I left town, I asked the six year old I pick up from school if she was having feelings about the fires. “We couldn’t play outside today,” she responded matter-of-factly. I nodded and thought we would leave it at that—it’s a big deal when you’re six. But she wrinkled her nose, and looked up from her bowl of blueberries at me. “Do you have feelings about it?” I paused and thought for a long time. Moments like these feel exceptionally important to me. As one of the primary non-parent adults in a child’s life, you don’t get to make decisions about the direction of their rearing, but you do have to meet the moment the best you can.

“Yes,” I replied, remembering that when all else fails, honesty is, if nothing else, the easiest thing to remember. “It’s scary that it’s happening. I feel sad for the people who are closer to the fires. But what’s really important to remember is that my body is safe, and your body is safe, and everyone we love’s bodies are safe. My home and your home are safe, too. I feel grateful not to have to worry about that. But I feel sad, and scared for other people I love.”

She nodded. “I think I feel like that too.”

Like with most things, I oscillate between two violent extremes: either I have a fake job, or mine is the only real job in the world. In the days just following the most devastating fires ever to hit my city, I settled into a happy medium. I am here because I can be. I am good at this, and I am filling a need that must be filled. We must give each other all that we can give, and there are limitations on that well, but it is deep. Pain is the price we pay for love.

“My name’s Hana. Can I tell you guys a secret?” Half a dozen young families crammed around the fire pit in the backyard of the Apocalypse Vacation Home. When kids walked in, ages ranging from 3 to 7, a switch flipped inside of me. “My job is actually to hang out with kids just like you. So you know what? I know a lot of good games we could play.” I taught them Miss Mary Mack and Go Fish. There were a few spirited rounds of hide and seek. I can’t fight fires, or navigate the maze that is insurance red tape. But I can be kind to children.

Here are some things I am prepared to confess: I am twenty-two years old, I live in Los Angeles, I am a nanny. As a child I, like many others, anticipated quicksand being a far larger issue in my adult life than it has proven to be. The nature of my job is such that childlike wonder is able to maintain dominion over considerable real estate in my brain. I write letters from the Tooth Fairy. Upon entering a room I case the joint for potential hide and seek spots. It’s a Friday in February and the baby and I look for shapes in the sky. “I see a lobster. That one is a mermaid. There, a group of monks climbing a hill. What do you call a group of monks? A monastery?” The baby didn’t answer for obvious reasons.

Days prior: I sip whiskey neat and shiver. I like being outside even in February because it feels wrong to cower indoors when California winters are so forgiving. I rebuff advances of affection: “I keep my feelings and desires locked away in jam jars in off-site storage.” He doesn’t think this is as funny as I do but, much like when talking to babies, most jokes I tell on dates are primarily for me. In college I cried an average of three times per day. Now, my best friend earnestly described me as having “a coastal coolness,” as “sometimes unaffected.” In college I believed my life would never look any different from the way it did then, getting a dance degree at a liberal arts school in New York. Now I know that like most things you believe at age nineteen, that wasn’t true. I tell my best friend over the phone that the date and I slept together last week. “Why did you wait to tell me that?” I tell her I don’t know even though I do. “Were you afraid to tell me?” I tell her no even though it isn’t true. I am a private person now but my face betrays me. She jokes that I’m the Serena Van der Woodsen of traumatized women: “You’re always saying ‘I have to go.’” I have my fingers on the floodgates and I know when their structural integrity is threatened. I’m a private person now; I know when to extricate myself.

Cloud watching is a Rorschach test. On Friday I see lots of evil dogs, baring their teeth and snarling. I am a writer; I am oriented towards words. There are corners of my heart, long echoing hallways, that end in TV static. I have nothing to say about these corridors. They have no names. I am a private person now—I have secrets even from myself. I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, but my face betrays me. Am I forgiven yet? I ask God to turn me into a flower. “That one looks like two lovers kissing,” I tell the baby, “or maybe they have a secret.” Cloud watching is a Rorschach test and I am bifurcated again. I whisper to the baby, “You have a whole universe inside of you. Your heart is constantly expanding. In seven years when all your cells turn over your body will be essentially new but still you will remain.” He doesn’t respond because he’s busy building a neural network. He doesn’t do anything just because he likes the idea of being the kind of person who does. He, too, is a private person.

When you finish dissecting the animal, when the autopsy has been dutifully performed, there comes a time when it’s just mutilation to continue digging your hands into the soft belly of a once-living thing. The snow melts in your hair. Your other halves take a path you wouldn’t want to follow. Your heart is wide and tender, constantly expanding. You hold a baby. You watch the clouds. You see the Vatican and white water rafters, snarling dogs and the Sydney Opera House and lovers meeting. God turns you into a flower.

City of angels! City of evil! City of writing and working and kissing and perpetually downsizing my cumbersome worldly possessions, I missed it less than I thought I would. An incomplete list of things I missed are as follows: Ruby, Juliet, Taylor (even though I saw you in New York!), the kids I look after, their moms, the Silver Lake reservoir, the Vista Theater, Wednesday night karaoke at Club TeeGee, listening to the AA meetings at the church across the street from my apartment, my car, singing in my car, sitting in my car for fifteen minutes after I get home looking at my phone, traffic (yes, really), talking to myself in traffic, the stillness traffic provides, saying “I brought that bottle we like”. An incomplete list of things I did not miss includes the smog and the desperation and the heatwaves and the extent of my vanity which lives only here and my friends’ ex-boyfriends and all the beautiful girls and the bookshops that contain no one reading and the inescapable reality of being suspended in mid-air between stages of your life, of being paralyzed by your own desire, of being conscious of the suffering around you and being powerless to stop it, and the westbound 10 exit towards the 5.

On the note of my cumbersome worldly possessions: I am the daughter of two people with varied skills, who are also very nice and cool (I am trying to meet my required compliment threshold after asking them to help me move not once but twice this year). The skill I most admire in my father, though, is his ability to Tetris various belongings into a 5x10 square storage unit (below). They live abroad these days, so the aforementioned traffic lets me call them over their breakfast at 2am Pacific time when I’ve been sitting motionless on my way to the West Valley for upwards of an hour.

On the couch of someone I was kissing, I told them I had parted with the bookshelf from the bedroom I grew up in. It had a gaping hole in the back and Ladybird-style crossed-out etchings of teenage crushes’ names. My dad and I had painted it together in the backyard, a shade of deep purple to match the floral bedspread I spent my babysitting money on. On hearing this, they earnestly apologized and I, too, was a little shocked at how little I cared. “I don’t know, it didn’t remind me of anything good that I can’t find in other things,” I replied truthfully. It was the first time I had felt insufficiently sentimental. Weeks later, Ruby and I excavated a few things from that cavernous mouth of my storage unit, including a Chagall print that used to hang over the upright piano in my childhood home, the out-of-tune one that belonged to my great-grandmother. When I helped Ruby hang it on her own wall (its temporary home til I have a permanent address), I cried and stopped worrying I didn’t feel enough. (Ha!)

Lately when I write songs I’m really just finishing old ones. I cracked into one last month about Dock Ellis, the major league pitcher who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter on LSD. Another featured the chorus below:

The last couple months has found me ghosting my friends to go to the movies by myself several times per week. I like the AMC at the Americana in Glendale because there’s nothing to be discovered. There’s one garage where you have to pay and another where you don’t, or at least I don’t know where to and have never done it. I walk around between the Brandy Melville and the Crumbl cookies thinking about how there is a difference between liking the living you’re living and living the life you like. I walk around and think I recognize every third person I pass. I liked seeing Saturday Night by myself (not necessarily because it was good but because watching Gabe Labelle as Lorne Michaels, short and in a sweater vest and very, very nervous is the most gender envy I’ve felt in a while) and disliked seeing The Substance alone (because I had no one to discuss the insanity of the third act with, to confirm that I hadn’t fallen asleep in the recliner and dreamed it up).

Anyway, I’m working on an album and a play and my bone density and where the hell I’m going to live month after next. It’s still hot here sometimes but these days the sun feels warmer than the air around me, and that means autumn has arrived, and will probably be over before I know it. I used to love Halloween and now I don’t like it much at all, but one of the babies I nanny turns 1 on Thursday. I hope his first words will be “Yankees suck!”

the plane, quilts! Like 

puzzles: the man beside me in a 

fresh-pressed gray suit (who still flies in suits? 

Who writes letters, in verse, by hand,

who does he call when he lands?)

The man 

beside me 

says he’s from a farm town, 

too. 

His affection 

for linen came later, 

but come it did; 

the man beside me notes the 

alkaline soils, tracing careful lines in

perfect crop circles.

To every thing, a 

season. Every winter, 

thaw—

I’m writing to you from my friends’ beautiful duplex in Silver Lake, where I have spent the last week cat sitting whilst they tour. I’ve been spending every morning listening to Paul Simon, drinking the worst cappuccino you’ve ever seen, because I’m not good at making them, and writing in the breakfast nook. Nothing I’m going to let you read yet because none of it is good! Here’s where I wax poetic about “turning on the tap” and “putting your ass in the chair so you’re present when lightning does eventually strike,” though the true beauty of my writing practice is much simpler: it’s something to do other than my taxes. 

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It’s like the title says! I’m introducing paid subscribers on here. It’s $8 a month, or $80 a year. I’ll still be publishing free things now and again, but the paid subscription will give you access to extra posts every month. That’ll probably look like letters like this, music writing, exclusive merch listings, or even the occasional demo. It’ll be basically the same as what’s on the free version, but more of it. 

Obviously this is completely optional! Just wanted to give y’all an opportunity to support my work if you feel so moved. The first paid post will be up later this week. Thank you so much for reading my writing.

Love,

Hana

On Tuesday, my best friend and I both had bad tastes in our mouths. Traffic was bad, as it always is in LA, but as we sat on the highway coming back from work, we both felt our respective griefs bumping up against the walls of our hearts. This is among the many feelings for which Ruby has given me words, collecting loose change wisdom regurgitated by a friend as heard from a podcast or read in an overly-familiar personal essay in The Cut. (In return I had the pleasure of telling her that it is not, in fact, “taken for granite.”) So when the combination of smog, sadness, and everyone’s “indie folk solo projects” became too much for us to bear, we packed a few days of clothes and coffee into her new car and drove north. 

I have spent most of my life in California, save a brief stint in New York. My mother’s government job took her to Sacramento a few years ago, leaving my childhood home to some other family with two children, so Morgan Hill feels less and less like home with every passing season. Instead I feel I am from those long stretches of the 5 freeway, lined with orange groves and hills that seem they could go on forever. As a child reading The Hunger Games in the backseat, on one of those tedious drives back from Grandpa’s house in Los Angeles, I used to image making camp out there and foraging for my own food until my inevitable demise from eating the wrong mushroom or shitting too close to where I slept. 

There are many places in this great state of mine that are difficult to understand. There’s a gas station bathroom off the Grapevine with a laminated print of The Birth of Venus on the wall. There’s 8 million dollar houses in towns where the median income is $30,000. Morgan Hill is not one of those illogical places. But in order to accept that it’s a place that makes sense, I have to surrender the Jugian symbology of my hometown, as well as my firm grasp on The Narrative and my place in it. I came to this realization while walking around the Silver Lake reservoir, California’s most logical body of water: endlessly under construction and kept behind bars. (Despite the epiphany, I still failed to free myself from the voyeur of my own mind, developing a convoluted metaphor about being a cartographer, rather than a novelist, in relation to the story of my life. This elicited little more than a “Sure!” from the therapist with equal measures of excitement and thinly veiled confusion, but of course knowing is different than doing, and all of this is beside the point.)

“This song is about California, and it’s also about love: two things that are so vast that you could spend your whole life traveling through and never see, much less understand, every corner,” I told an audience of a song from my new project, which for now lives only in a Google drive (and will be yours before the end of the year). As Ruby and I drew closer to my hometown, I felt exposed, like I was stripping down in front of her. Despite our relatively recent friendship, I didn’t think there was any untread emotional territory between the two of us, but I was wrong, because there’s no substitute for the way we spent those two days. 

We cruised past my high school, and my dance studio. We ate soup at my grandmother’s kitchen table. I pointed out the spot where in high school I blew a tire slamming into a curb because I hadn’t eaten in two days. I took her to the reservoir where I hid when my father’s violence shook the walls of my childhood home. We drank bad coffee and sat quietly. We listened to the playlist I made my boyfriend when I was sixteen, when I was convinced that I had discovered Bon Iver circa 2017.  

On those roads I was reminded of just how unlikable I have been, explaining music to crushes from the passenger seat. (“Do you hear that little synth arp tucked in the back of the mix? Gives it so much body.”) I thought about how big my dreams felt, when the pond was still so small. Now they feel at once minuscule and impossible, because they’re the same as everybody else’s. (“I want to make music and not have another job and not be hungry all the time. I want to maybe own a home someday. I want not to have commitment issues.”) Then I wondered when I became such a cynic, and tried to spend at least five minutes not wondering anything at all. 

Inexplicably, I felt unable to shed my hosting hat. I am not a natural host. I do not feel comfortable in most places, so my desire to make things comfortable for the people I love usually comes off as somewhat disquieting. “Are you having a good time? Would you rather do something else?” I didn’t want to be asking these questions, which I knew would be met with a baffled shrug. “Hana, this is why we came up here.” But this is where I’m from, and my teenage self was escaping from the quiet box in my chest where she happily resides on any normal day. She appears in the stories I tell to Ruby, but they have never met face to face. 

But as always, Ruby makes it impossible for me to retreat into the corners of my memory, for whenever I turn my cheek, there she is, smiling at me. 

Another phrase Ruby has given me is by way of Al-Anon: “I am keeping you at the distance I need in order to continue to love you.” I often wonder what it would take for me to be happy living here, among the horses and expansive farmland and phantom pains from a complicated childhood, as all childhoods are. For now, I am comfortable this way: moving quickly through it, head down, and always leaving feeling a little older than when I came.