Monthly Archives: January 2022
Blood Oranges
I have been carrying a lot of ghosts around with me today, some friendlier than others. Chris, as every year, is called to mind in January when blood oranges are in season.
I have a test day on Wednesday at what I hope will be my new workplace- I made blood orange macarons for the interview and they came out perfectly, like biting into a fresh orange. Like an escape from the winter to someplace warm. Topped with a sparkling slice of candied orange, died blood red. What a sparkling haunting. What promise seems to hang in the January air. The wind has been so strong recently, and everyone’s cheeks are bitten red.
I am filled with hope, and anxiety, and sugar. I am bundled up in scarves and sweaters.
Chris was not the first person I lost to suicide, nor was he the last. We’ve all seen too much death.
We’ve all been bitten by the cold.
…..
Crisis Hotline Austria: 142
National Suicide Hotline USA: 1-800-273-8255
A brief comment before bed.
Every time I go to crop a selfie it offers me the prompt to “straighten” the photo, and it always makes me laugh. Because I can edit all I want, but this bisexual disaster is always going to slant a little bit queer.

L’espirit de l’escalier
I don’t want to eat,
I want to sit around being fragile
And subsist on sparkling water
I want there to be something left in my day
That glitters.
I want to turn the internet off, open the windows,
And listen to yesterday’s thunderstorm.
I want the rain to wash the sidewalks away with the hours,
To return me to the twilight of yesterday, before we…
I want to do yesterday over again:
To do nothing. To do more, to do less,
To speak up when I was hurting.
When you were hurting me.
I want to have never started, or to have lingered
In the moment, after the first time I asked you to stop
Before I said “Where is the dominant guy who threw me over the desk?”
I want to have stayed there- in your surprisingly gentle arms,
To have fallen asleep.
I want to be the worst kind of hypocrite, I want a cigarette.
After your tobacco breath and all my complaints-
I want to hang my head out the window and blow the smoke into the January air,
Watch it curl toward the cobblestones on the courtyard
Like a woman descending spiral stairs.
The French have a word for this. Usually, it’s the Germans,
Coming in with vocabulary lacking in English.
But today it’s the French:
L’espirit de l’escalier
The ghost of the things we should have said.
I have so much left to say to you.
I want our story to keep going, too.
…
An addition to the poem:
I remembered tonight that my ultimate dream vacation
A trip aboard the Orient Express,
Runs from Istanbul
to Paris.
Maybe one day we will go.
Maybe one day I will look back and realize I was always heading toward you.
Screaming to the rooftops that I am CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC
This blog is slowly becoming a love letter to anxiety, as anxiety is slowly becoming a long-lost-lover of mine.
Look at me, chubby and smiling and feeling absolutely gorgeous.
Look at me, dare I say it, relaxing.
I’ve been listening to love songs as ever, but for the first time in forever there’s no longing. Just the comfortable exhale of a woman who trusts that he is going to call her.
I trust this one, he’s got me glowing.
The resident demon reconsiders her ways.
You make me want to wait.
You make me want to erase
every man before you.
You make me want
to be a good woman.
You make me want to be holy.
A Midnight Waltz
Evidently, if you play your cards right, the locals in Austria waltz at midnight. So I spent the first minutes of 2022 gasping from laughter, swept off my feet in the emerald green silk gown I chose to wear.
I waltzed my way into midnight.
2021 was a trash fire, and I am standing beside it basking in the glow, but 2022 is looking awfully good from here.