Aaaaand, fin.

Hi. It’s been way too long since I’ve sent one of these out. For that, please forgive me and take this (wild) update: I’m typing this on my way up to Bronxville, where I’m about to read an excerpt of a short story from my thesis—you can read it the end of this email if you’d like—to an auditorium full of people. Tomorrow, I’ll stand in the hooding ceremony. And then I’ll be done.

I can’t tell you how much this degree means to me. 

Not the diploma that will come in the mail or the string of letters I can now claim or even the thesis itself. I’m proud of all of those things, but mostly, I’m proud of the mental and emotional work it has taken to get here: learning to trust myself, to be vulnerable and open when it feels impossible, to take risks, to hold myself accountable, and to turn to others for help when I need it.

I don’t know what my career will look like, what my *life* will look like, or even what shape the next year will take. And somehow, in spite of all I’ve learned, my first instinct is to be completely okay—or at least, to act as if I am—to not burden anyone with these doubts and fears and hard feelings, to hold these problems close until I’ve solved them on my own even though, if I’m being honest, I’ve been a fucking mess the past few weeks. Which I guess goes to show that life is really just one big lesson we learn again and again and again.

So, I’m writing to you exhausted and proud and worn down, and also so very grateful for the community I’ve found. For such incredible mentors and friends who make me feel seen and cared for when I need it most.

Thank you. And here’s to looking forward.

---

from “Hunting Season”

The emptiness of the house was a relief. Hollowed out, free of Julia or Whitney there to take note of me, I came back to myself for the first time in ages. 

It was strange; I loved them both. With them, in many ways, I felt seen for the first time in my life. Like I truly belonged somewhere. But I couldn’t deny the feeling of return that washed over me that first morning I was alone.

I pulled the white ceramic kettle from the stovetop and dumped its stale remnants before filling it with fresh water and clicking on the gas burner below. While it heated I poured an unmeasured heap of whole beans into the hand grinder and savored the feeling of my biceps, soft from days in bed, tightening as they cranked the handle around and around, pulverizing the coffee into a fine dust. 

I made an entire carafe for myself knowing that one cup would never be enough, that I’d get down to the dregs and still wouldn’t be satisfied. When I’d finished, I carried a mug to the sunporch where my easel and an already-stretched canvas sat waiting. The easel’s legs scraped across the gray planked floor and I took my time positioning it perfectly, lining up tubes of oil paints in various shades so they’d be ready when I needed them. 

And then I sat back on the wicker couch and tucked my legs under me, coffee warming my hands, and allowed myself to gaze at the blankness with unfixed eyes. 

This was how I’d always painted, and if I sat for long enough and didn’t try to force it something eventually came to me—though some days I couldn’t shake the fear that it never would, that I’d already painted everything I had in me. On those days, my heart raced and my breath was shallow. The only thing that helped was to pick up a book and read until I’d escaped my own mind and my hands were free to begin moving across the canvas. 

If Whitney’s stories were incantations meant to conjure her ideal self into being, my paintings were the opposite. I’d stopped trying to make anything beautiful and instead created as if I was scooping the deepest flesh from parts of myself even I did not know. 

I aimed to slice surgically, an adequate cross-section of the range of selves I contained. 

To lean too far one way—to be annoyingly self-deprecating without also giving light to the joy, kindness, and strength I sometimes managed, or to present myself as a finished product when I was, reliably, a mess—seemed lazy and boring. But I found it nearly impossible to get all of that on the canvas at once without just covering the whole thing in a mess of colors blending to black. To no color at all. 

Some days, back when I was still living in Brooklyn, I’d wake up and I’d know instantly—today is a day I need to feel the ocean in me. 

And so I’d take the LIRR to Montauk, or the A to Far Rockaway, or, if I were really pinched for time, I’d settle for Red Hook and the Bay and the knowledge that, though tempered, this was still the sea’s water, salty and eternal. 

This was my least favorite thing about the whaling town upstate. It promised the ocean but in reality, it was a world away. I mourned the sense of invincibility I’d held in the city, the awareness that should all transit stop my own two feet could always carry me wherever I longed to go. 

Rising from the couch, I set the coffee down and got to work mixing blues. If I couldn’t walk to the sea I would paint it, would take a page from Whitney’s book and form it myself. I would make something both roiling and dark and frothy and bright. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the ocean at its most alive, its most mine. 

I drew it from the inside out, trying to bring to life, if not its unknowable depths, then at least its secret and untamable heart. 

I drew all the seas I’d loved just as they’d been when I’d needed them most: the Mediterranean, impossibly blue from where I’d sat on the rocks above and contemplated jumping not as a way to die, but as a way to become it, to cease being myself. The Pacific as it pummeled Ocean Beach in San Francisco in the days I realized I was truly on my own, when it was cold, relentless, nearly unbearable. 

And my favorite, my most sacred: the Atlantic on one of those spur-of-the-moment train trips to The End of the World. I’d gotten into town just as the sun was setting. Running over top of the dunes, the off-season beach completely empty, I’d hurled myself into the waves with abandon. In that moment, anything was possible and I didn’t feel alone at all.