Description of a photograph I saw on Twitter of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos being detained by ICE.

1. There is a child in this photo.

2. The child is wearing a Spider-Man backpack.

3. The child looks to have a heft I could easily imagine in my arms. I can basically lift the kid in my mind, feel the knock of his little Velcro shoes and the way a five-year-old still intuitively tucks itself into the swell of an adult’s hip. It is a motion as old as the human people: adults carrying children, children settling in, trusting where they’re being taken.

4. The child looks afraid.

5. The car that the child is being led into is covered in white chalky stripes of melted snow and road salt. All over this country, family cars are covered in white chalky stripes of melted snow and road salt. This could be anybody’s car. This is not anybody’s car.

6. There is a big pink hand hooked on the back of the child’s Spider-Man backpack. The hand is connected to the lower half of a body. The body is dressed in black. The picture shows no other identifying features. This is on purpose.

7. In Minnesota, it is negative twenty degrees. In Minnesota, adults are protesting and being arrested. You cannot see this in the photo. What you can see in the photo is that the five-year-old is wearing a bright blue bunny hat with paws at the ends of the chin strings.

8. I have a friend whose dad made her wear brightly colored hats as a kid so he would not lose her on the playground, on the subway, in the snow.

9. In lecture, I learn about labor union strikes in 1930s Minnesota. I learn about the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. I learn about Native Americans slaughtered off their reservations so their land can be turned into soccer fields. I still cannot see the man in the picture.

10. The backpack straps are red.

11. There is snow on the ground.

12. There is a child in this photo.

Donate to the Immigrant Defense Project - IDP

Sign the ACLU Anti-ICE Petition - ACLU

Know Your Rights: If You Encounter ICE - NIJC

What to Do if ICE Invades Your Neighborhood - WIRED

All down the coast, people are cold. It is dark at four; we sleep until noon. For this and other reasons, the country is hopeless. The feeling pulls inside us, wallowing around our ankles, icing our toes and waterlogging our chests. Some things hurt; some help. A five-year-old detained in Minnesota. Zohran Mamdani in custom Carhartt. The extinction of the snow day. Neighbors towing each other out of drifts. Each refuses to win out over another. Times are too tumultuous; too much is at stake. Instead, the good and bad ebb and flow, pulling in and out of us, a people bobbing in their own wake.

When I am hungry or bored, I boil water in my kettle for Maruchan. I wiggle the bent cardstock takeout container out of my window and bite off chunks of frozen chicken, spitting the pieces into my open ramen container. You’d think it’d taste worse than it does.

If you also feel hopeless, here are some ways to contribute and read. Showing up to local activist events, especially physically, is one of the most important things you can do.

Donate to the Immigrant Defense Project - IDP

Sign the ACLU Anti-ICE Petition - ACLU

Know Your Rights: If You Encounter ICE - NIJC

What to Do if ICE Invades Your Neighborhood - WIRED

your microwave in my storage locker, and behind the perforated plastic door

you squirreled away the toiletry crate

small and compact

left behind in your rush to get out of here fast

and the whole case fermented for eighty-one days

so that when i unpacked your microwave

in my dorm and plugged

it in it smelled a little like

apple cider shampoo and

fresh greens thickening conditioner

and torn hair and a cap

that won’t close all the way

so it hangs from itself like

a tooth

my microwaved water

(i left my kettle unpacked)

smells a little like

Aveeno and gooed hunks of Dove and when i breathe in the steam

the radiation makes tea of it all

and the air smells a little

like you’re over my shoulder

wringing drops from your hair and

watching me sip from

our cup

Here is a list of things you’re allowed to do when you’re stuck at home with the flu:

1. Nothing.

That’s not true. I can sit in my room. I can read a book. I can freak out because the book is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and it’s better than anything I could ever write and why the shit do I want to be a writer when the country and the world is literally falling into fascism or the ocean or something and I’m here in my snotty childhood bed trying to write sentences that no one is ever going to read.

Except one person is going to read them.

That person is my Uncle Wayne.

I adore my Uncle Wayne. He’s a podiatrist out on Long Island who wears a guitar pick necklace and perennial surfer’s garb. In his free time, he makes candle holders out of driftwood. His grandkids call him Papa Doc, which I vaguely imagined was a Bugs Bunny reference until last year, when my pre-med friend deigned to point out the obvious. Uncle Wayne is married to my Auntie Iris, who taught me how to blow a bubble with chewing gum and took me for my driver’s test, since the only place a native New Yorker can actually pass the exam is on Long Island. She’s an original Beatles groupie and one of the most surprising badasses I know.

I don’t see them enough. I don’t see anyone enough.

I make such a point of coming home for the High Holy days and Passover that my uber-lax, reform family likes to joke that I’m barely enrolled in college. I like going home. I like seeing my family. I like talking to my sweetheart Tribeca uncle about our Grown Up Jobs, and listening to my aunt and her daughter Lindsay bicker like two halves of an eight-legged soulmate-being from Plato’s Symposium. I like my cousins, Jacob and Julsey, who lock each other in the bedroom closets, who throw foam footballs and play Clash of Clans on their gummy-cased iPhones. I’ll say the unthinkable for a born-and-bred Manhattanite: I’d give anything to be on Long Island right now.

I miss my cousin Skylar, who’s a coloring book corporate girlboss, and my cousin Kyle, who relentlessly runs for and promotes all of our Cystic Fibrosis fundraisers (I respect that man so much). They refer to themselves as Skyle, and their baby’s new favorite hobby is bonking his teeny dome against an Ottoman. I like to bonk my head against stuff, too. I think we’d really gel, if I ever get out of influenza quarantine.

My grandparents are also absent from this year’s Thanksgiving, so we’re hanging out together over videocall. Right now, we’re trying to find the Yiddish translation of Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah that these Brooklyn baby boomers grew up with. Technology is a blessing, I think. Especially when it’s marvelously funny. Especially when we’re all yelling over each other about the intergenerational ways of pronouncing the brand “WhatsApp.” Sure, it would be better to see my grandparents in person. But I guess I’ll take what I can get.

I’ll make it all up, of course. Saturday lunch with my grandparents. Sunday brunch with my cousins. And I’ll see the rest of the family in a month if we manage to get our shit together enough to do Hannukah. But it still sucks, sitting masked and alone in my parents’ apartment, picking over a spreadsheet for work and trying not to picture everyone else playing with the new baby.

It’s just that I want to be there so badly. I want my cousin band in our usual positions: my brother on the drums, Elan on the electric guitar, Miles on the piano, and me on vocals and lyrics. I want to calmly practice ASL with my Uncle Noah and use explosive hand gestures while I joyously bicker with my other Uncle Noah. He’s also the family member who texts me the most, and even though I never respond (iabsolutelyhateiphonesimsosorryitsnotpersonaliswear), every time my uncle texts me, I let the notification linger for a week so it can cheer me up whenever I check my phone.

This reminded me to text my Uncle Nonie.

Okay, I texted my Uncle Nonie.

This isn’t a great night, but it’s not a terrible one. Even though I’m benched, my family still surrounds me. I’m typing under a post-it that my aunt wrote to me — “Chloe - Dream Big, Laugh Often, and Wear Good Mascara! Love ya, Marci” — that’s on my list of things to save from my apartment in case of a fire. Her husband Rob gives the best hugs of the entire family, and that muscle memory sustained me through my dinner of microwave soup. Last night, I told a friend a story I’ve told a dozen times about how my cousins Shawn and Lauren used the Knesset’s money to throw a dinosaur-themed birthday party. It’s the best story ever, tied with my Uncle Josh and Auntie Julie’s Model UN meet-cute. The tale is sweet, but the subtle and convicted way they tell it is totally unmatched.

Writing this post is such cope. To translate for my relatives, that basically means that writing this post is a poor substitute for what I really want, which is to see you. If we don’t get our shit together for Hanukkah this year, I think I might die a gruesome and horrific comic-book death full of sharks and volcanoes and cyborgs and poison. I know I’m being silly, but I don’t care. Family is the original matter of life and death. And even though this is one holiday in a sea of many holidays, and I’ll literally see you all in a month, my stubborn conviction remains. I want to see my family.

Tropical Cafe is a fluorescently lit health bodega with vinyl countertops styled into sticky, unconvincing imitations of wood. The storefront faces several traffic lawn triangles and a gas station where I once bought mango punch mixer. It smells, always, like a Wendy’s. Tropical Cafe is a zero point one mile walk from the apartment that Hakeem Nagi will live in next semester. It is the same apartment where Prithika Kaul and Astrid Ozeki-Goldman live now. I want to be familiar to Tropical Cafe. I want to be familiar to Astrid again, and Prithika. I want to be familiar to Hakeem.

I want to bake my influence into 807 Orchard. I want to drink lukewarm tap water from one of Prithika’s Jane Street mugs. I want to leave fresh germs on the lip of the clay. I want to gripe about the neighbors’ sex. Like a visitor, I want to brush my teeth with my pointer finger. But I want to use someone else’s toothpaste without feeling the need to ask.

I want to have the type of relationship with that apartment that feels precious to unsentimentals. I want to kiss the drywall goodmorning and goodbye. I want to pick the cracked paint over the bathroom sink. I want to hug the couch when I’m trying not to hug Astrid. I want to squeeze the doorframe when what I really want is to squeeze Hakeem.

I want to notice things like fresh soaps, early bedtimes, routine changes. I want to feel empowered enough to touch a poster peeling from its wall. I want to tap the paper back into place with two fingers, grind the clear packing tape into soft, floured paint. I’d fix the trio’s poster just well enough that it lasts a whole day, maybe two. I want this because, more than fixing their things right, I want to keep fixing Hakeem and Prithika and Astrid’s things forever.

But I also want to be fixed, again and again. These tenants owe me apologies. I want to feel their atonement in lent books and deodorant, in texted invitations. I want Prithika to preserve my forgotten earrings in a neat little stack on the coffee table. I want Hakeem, on a carpet of his unwashed clothes, to offer me his last clean sleep shirt. I want Astrid to scour the apartment for Advil as their quicksand couch consumes me, drunk off biscotti Smirnoff and explicit care. In the morning, when I wake up cottonmouthed and blinking, I want Astrid to offer me sips of their peanut butter breakfast smoothie.

I made friends with a baby in a ramen restaurant, but the ramen part is not important. I think none of this is supposed to feel important, but this baby has haunted my last few days, and I don’t know how to let this go except to write about him.

He had rosy cheeks like bitten strawberries and a doughy face and a gurgling laugh. It was too easy to imagine his weight in my lap, solid and perfect like a paperweight; how I’d scoop him onto my thick hips, primal and cavewoman-pious. And how easy, how humiliatingly easy, to imagine a farmer’s market in Fort Greene, Brooklyn: me, holding our doggie bag of compost; you, wearing a baby holder the color of a Utah arch, two chubby legs hanging from the bottom. How embarrassing, to know exactly how your flannel would bunch under those thick, reinforced straps; to smell, almost perfectly, the springish waft of your aftershave, the city-spits of trodden clover. My soles, with disgusting vividity, sliding in my Birkenstocks. The radiated heat off the sparkling sidewalk, the graze of concrete against my knuckle as I bend down by the SNAP stand to scoop up our baby’s fallen sunhat.

Back in the ramen joint, my ice clinks in my glass. I realize that my hand is shaking. Two nights ago, I tried to wrest genuine eye contact from screenshots of your Instagram. All I accomplished was making my pillow taste like the ocean. It was gigantic and warm from my radiator headboard, so when I buried my head in its middle, I almost felt like I was holding your chest.

None of this is supposed to feel important. I should run to the gym. I should write in my journal. I should count five things I can see and four things I can touch and one thing I can want with a terrifying fervor. Eggshells and sudsy coffee grinds, carrots from some farm up the Hudson, and how you said my last name along with my first like you were stamping me into existence.

Would we play our guitars more or less, as parents? Would we own glossy-paged baby books or thick-edged touch-and-feel cardboard? What would make us proud of each other? Would we get along? We don’t get along anymore, but two days ago I met a baby in a restaurant. He turned my chest all jammy and raw. I want you as keenly as any wish.

She smells of urine and sun-cracked tire. Her suit sleeves are torn, and she wears strips of rag for ribbons. She is grey-toothed and white-gummed and scabs. She calls me Intern. Intern, wrench the rebar from the plastics pile. Intern, fetch me coffee grounds, warm as a hand. I gather banana peels in a pasta strainer, and she slurps them down. The days are hot. There is no shade. Get in the cabby and drive me around. I clamber into a rusted Volkswagen Beetle, hollow and fragile as a cicada shell. Where to, Madame Mayor? My big meeting, she says. I grip the air at ten and two. Are you wearing your seatbelt? Do chickens have lips? I make the sputtering engine sounds with my mouth. We can’t be late! I pretend to swerve, and it is like I am swerving. She chews on her fingers, squeals with delight. After a while, I tell her we’re here. Good Intern, she chirps. She sticks a thumb in my ear. The pad is wrinkled and damp. I don’t get paid, but nobody does.

The Girls by Emma Cline, 2016.

“If the climate clock hits zero, it signifies the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to stay below a 1.5°C increase in global temperature. It doesn't mean the world will end immediately, but it indicates a high likelihood of irreversible and severe consequences.”

Google AI Overview, 2025.

To the ginger waitress with the industrial piercing,

I was at a work lunch, so when you touched my arm, all I could do about it was blush.

It’s summer of twenty-twenty-five in Manhattan, and even the iced matcha sweats. We are in a ‘moment ’: canvassing for Zohran Mamdani while bootleg succession streams on Twitter. Everyone’s watching The Handmaid’s Tale and stopping for obvious reasons. We read the new Hunger Games book instead. Distraction is no longer possible.

I am a D-1 field researcher in the anthropology of girls. Who they read, how they philosophize, which instincts they choose to ignore. How they match their Temu rings to their Mary Jane buckles. What do the girls think of All Fours by Miranda July, of Yellowjackets on Paramount Plus? When do they feel understood, and how, and by whom? I am consumed, fanatic with what girls see. With what girls see in each other.

I’m learning how to drive in Union Square, which is a paralyzing Thunderdome of bikers and buses. The climate clock ticks in my rearview mirror. Time’s up in four years, thirty-three days, twenty-two hours, forty minutes, and thirteen seconds. Everyone is learning ASL or going to Japan. I listen to Big Thief and Time Bug and Slaughter Beach, Dog. I bought six copies of The Girls on thriftbooks.com to give to women in the wild, as spontaneous and intentional as tote bag Tampax. Today, dear waitress, I’m getting my ear pierced like yours. We’ll match, and you will never know.

The girls at the Gentlemen’s Club say the market is going to crash. Lamb over rice from the truck is ten dollars. We kick against the tariffs, the price of eggs. Time’s up in four years, thirty-three days, twenty-two hours, sixteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds. In the belly of this sweltering city, four friends on the green line link arms. One of them snorts when she laughs and I have to close my eyes so I don't look at her grin for too long. I feel a certain way about girls, about you, but even though I’ve been out since thirteen, I can’t make myself say the word.

I am old enough to fuck twenty-eight years olds and to buy my own subscription to The Paris Review. I am old enough to panic behind the wheel and to fly cross-country without permission. After I walked out of your place of work, I looped I’ve Just Seen A Face all the way to the train. I couldn’t tell if I was old enough to ask you for your time.

I am telling you this because it is terrifying to want what you can't imagine growing old with. Kissing girls at thirteen is a different beast than wanting women at twenty. Allow me to pose a challenge: name one sapphic couple in 2010s television with a home and a child and a collection of mugs acquired, haphazardly, from a long, shared, storied life. Hell, name two female characters from a piece of popular media that were dimensional enough to be shipped with conviction. I grew up learning girls were a fling for the young. I was never shown that I could grow old with one.

And growing old itself is a dangerous hope. The everyman realized that the ice caps were melting around the same year I was born. As I got older, species dropped into extinction like literal flies. Now, cities sink and forests burn. The climate clock launched when I was fifteen. By my twenty-fourth birthday, we will have lost the race against time. The dread is crushing, debilitating. And yet here I am, stalling, sweating, pressing my fingers to the place where you touched me.

It’s summer in Manhattan, and the city is gluey like sticker residue. I like Pinegrove and girl dick and electric Citibikes. I hate boys who send wordless likes on Hinge as if their profiles speak for themselves. Don’t they realize how disgustingly arrogant it is to not try to know, to be known? When faced with the fear of the end of it all, I realize what’s worth wanting, worth trying for. We have four years, thirty-three days, twenty-one hours, eight minutes, and nine seconds. I can’t waste any more time.

It’s summer in Manhattan and it will only get hotter. Dear waitress, let me tell you the key rule to driving. Never stop flicking your eyes to your mirrors, but don’t let them distract from what’s right in front of you. Today, I am going to brave the heat. I’ll walk to my parking lot and turn my ignition. I’ll drive shaky and slow all the way to The Smith.

This time, I’ll leave my name on a napkin.

1. egg salad sandwiches

2. tuna salad sandwiches

3. the concept of pasta salad or tuna salad or any other ridiculous kind of salad

4. midwestern salads

5. the fact that we collectively went through an absurd, huge jello phase in the fifties

6. tupperware parties

7. the illegal fireworks all over california last fourth of july

8. road trips

9. The song bill and annie by chuck brodsky

10. dinky roadside attractions

11. the fact that americans are well-traveled within our country, and the fact that europeans don't understand that

12. long island iced tea

13. long island tattoos (lion heads and roman numerals and hearts with ‘mom’ written over them)

14. the lower east side and its history of immigration

15. our weak silly bagged tea

16. making fun of europeans

17. the fact that, in large part, our country was founded on audacity

18. religious diversity

19. midwestern graffitti

20. the abandoned factories along the rust belt

21. the culture of hospitality

22. smiling at strangers

23. the american dream, real and imagined

24. product placement in movies

25. using products as proper, descriptive nouns in fiction

26. extremism

27. horseshoe theory

28. the pure ridiculousness of daylight savings

29. breakfast sandwiches

30. sausage patties in the shape of little disks

31. summer camp

32. jewish summer camp

33. racial diversity in public schools

34. chalkboards

35. schoolhouses

36. invisible man by ralph ellison

37. folk music

38. banjo and plucky guitar

39. psl (plains sign language)

40. asl (american sign language)

41. the seven o-clock cheer for healthcare workers during the pandemic-era nyc

42. islands made on literal garbage

43. powdered drinks with a little plastic scoop in them (lemonade, punch, kool-aid, sweet tea)

44. uncontrollably overgrown mint plants

45. worn paper bills and grimy coins

46. audacity

47. weeaboos at convention centers

48. feeling like there’s nothing to do at an overcrowded state fair

49. that disgusting weird gas station smell

50. the ivy league

51. culture-specific dating apps (j-swipe, muzz, etc.)

52. stupid-specific dating apps (mouse mingle, the league, etc.)

53. dating someone from the same culture and realizing you have really unexpected instincts in common

54. dating someone from the same culture and then realizing that you don’t need to, here

55. dating someone from a culture so different than yours that you can feel the whole world open up in every minute of their time

56. furry dating simulators

57. the allergy kid in elementary school

58. the weird kids in middle school

59. high school soundcloud rappers

60. turning on the ac in summer while you also have a window open

61. that one ridiculous climate change protest organized by nyc high school students where a bunch of us splashed in the washington square fountain and gave youth protests a terrible rep

62. “west coast best coast” / “east coast beast coast”

63. loud voices

64. lack of decorum

65. the timothee chalamet lookalike contest

66. the contest where one guy ate like a million cheez balls

67. that one tweet that calls washington square park a public roblox server

68. finding old glass bottles in the woods

69. aboveground pools

70. 70s-era speedos

71. white people tanned orange

72. dressing to express yourself

73. liberal patriotism

74. conservative patriotism

75. elections unfolding over twitter

76. transgenderism

77. pop culture bible stories

78. “that funny feeling” by bo burnham

79. “that funny feeling” by phoebe bridgers

80. that funny feeling

81. game show hosts

82. college improv and improv comedy

83. intra-generational culture

84. sticker sheets from the dollar store

85. people who wear a mask under their nose, specifically in settings where no one else is masked

86. urbex in abandoned public school buildings

87. asbestos

88. utah mormon mommy influencers

89. baseball caps, especially worn ones

90. a plastic basket of mittens and scarves by a household’s side door

91. older women who wear tacky, caked-on foundation and too much blush and gummy eyeliner

92. debate kids

93. annoying gay tweens in middle school theater (i was one of those kids) (those kids are gonna save the world)

94. getting too close to your english teacher

95. teacher influencers on tiktok

96. tweens who wear funeral black the day after an election

97. geocaching

98. a receipt sticker, gummy from condensation, peeling off an iced drink from dunkin donuts

99. murder mysteries

100. a24

101. sex scandals

102. silver jewelry multipacks from amazon

103. denim work jackets, worn genuinely

104. denim work jackets, worn by some bushwick dude who will break your heart and almost certainly give you chlamydia

105. showmanship; getting people in seats

106. the big apple circus

107. twisty straws

108. twenty-year-olds who have a favorite beer in a kind of pretentious, kind of folksy way

109. student protests

110. teaching someone else’s baby how to wave

111. undergraduate short story workshops where all the pieces were obviously written by americans

112. waterproof watches

113. the absurdities of third-party voters

114. the necessity of third-party voters

115. chicken tenders

116. costco meals

117. excitement about free stuff

118. birthday rewards from huge companies

119. workplace holiday parties

120. middle school boys who dress like highlighters

121. virtue names

122. long, long hair

123. thinking our country is ancient (it isn’t)

124. aquariums

125. tacky stuffed animals

126. the backrooms

127. a sandwich with a bag of chips and an apple and maybe even a chocolate chip cookie

128. deli meat

129. campfires

130. the occasional romanticization of alcoholics anonymous

131. breaking bad, better call saul, and euphoria

132. twins in paradise by vewn

133. the girls by emma kline and yellowjackets on hbo

134. 123movies

135. dunk tanks

136. megachurches

137. this textpost (see below)

138. the germy tradition of bobbing for apples

139. bogs of cranberries

140. screaming at drag shows

141. tipping a waitress fifty percent of the bill

142. we were built on bad bones and we have bad bones now, but i swear there’s something in here worth saving.

Caleb is a gentle converter, so gentle that I’m not sure he realizes he’s converting me. He’s sharing, starry-eyed, about the undeniable proof of the existence of Allah. In my lap is a gifted Quran — felty-cornered, simple in language, a perfect gift from Caleb — and I thumb the book’s edges as I lean forward in my chair. Am I being spiritually called? Or am I just crudely, mortally jealous (although it’s mostly just admiring) of the certainty of Caleb’s conviction?

I finish my cookie, and Caleb moves on to morality. Islam tenderly convinced my friend that he is good in a way that is inherent, earned, and complete. His self-assurance relieves me. I’m a red-blooded American, overly familiar with Christian guilt and peeraged damnation. The appleseed’s poisonous aftertaste stains even my Hebrew tongue. Most American religions go for the sinner angle, but my dear friend is safe in the arms of Islam. For this, I am grateful. And endeared. And embarrassingly eager to don a Hijab.

We move on to the afterlife. In my Quranic literature class, hell is terrifying and inevitable. A worthy Muslim life, or so I’ve gleaned, is lived on a ceaseless razor’s edge, barely safeguarded by meticulous ritual practice. Judgment Day is similarly merciless (a weighted word, I realize, to use in a religious context, but that’s what I feel I’ve been taught). One Hadith tells the story of a heavenbound woman who watches, apathetic, as the Mizan (scales of ethical judgement) tip from her son’s favor. This woman has lived her life. She has fought for her reward. Her child’s damnation is no longer her problem. But Caleb is notably a practicing Muslim, not a literary interpreter for a secular university. To him, the Islamic afterlife is a different story: one that gazes skyward.

The lowest heaven, Caleb says, is for anyone, self-declared Muslim or not, who stumbled through their life as a monotheist. This is the first of two easy criteria: believing in one god will earn me half a ticket to low-tier heaven. This afterlife, Caleb says, a congregation in the night sky’s bowl-bottom, is relatively mediocre. To climb the rungs to better heavens, one must pledge oneself to Islam and live in a mindful manner. Caleb is going for the super-reward: basking in the light of God’s face, criss-cross applesauce in the Almighty’s palm. But a lowly afterlife among the stars is more than enough for me. Unlike Caleb, I don’t want God. I just want my parents.

Two years ago, during a DPDR episode, I invented my answer to the afterlife. When I was in the throes of psychosis, nothing felt real or reliable. Behind every closed door was a black, hungry void, barely detained by weak, hinged wood. It seemed completely plausible that, at any given moment, my body could blink out of existence. I stopped believing in the past. I didn’t know who — or what — I was. There was only one upside. If I could subconsciously convince myself that everything outside my immediate field of vision was an evasive void of TV static, then I could also consciously force myself to believe any story. And what I wanted to believe in most was the fate of being my parents’ daughter.

I told myself that after I died, I would backstroke through time. I’d be reborn to Steve and Melissa Shiffman on December 11th, 2004, at Saint Vincent’s Hospital on West 12th Street. The cycle starts in the cradle of Manhattan Island, ends somewhere in a river or ditch or a hospice cot, and then spits me back, red-skinned and grasping, into my young father’s arms. Even in my psychosis, when I couldn’t recognize them, something more me than myself knew that I loved my parents. In my more lucid moments, I even loved them like a daughter. What I needed to believe in, more than reality itself, was that my family could always belong to each other.

My mom has Cystic Fibrosis, a terminal illness in the lungs. I grew up with expert attunement to her — and, to a lesser extent, my father’s — mortality, impermanence, and miracularity. So it makes sense why the afterlife I invented and choose to believe in is built entirely around an eternity with my parents. No matter when the three of us die, I’ll be their daughter again.

But now, in MOTW Coffee, Caleb gave a new answer with an easy procedure. For someone so trained in forcing her own faith, I’m amazed that I missed the obvious answer: Heaven. Believe in one God, said Caleb, and you can stay your parents’ child for eternity.

But then Caleb teaches me the second requirement. All I have to believe, he says, is that the Abrahamic prophets existed. Caleb is gentle, glowing, aware that I’m on the hook and confident that this softball will reel a soul that he cares about into the Islamic embrace. I can’t remember if Caleb told me that I had to believe these men were divinely chosen, or just believe that they were alive, but it doesn’t matter. Both interpretations were equally unreachable.

As previously mentioned, during that bout of psychosis, I stopped believing in the past. Although I’ve gotten exponentially better in the last two years, I still have a hard time grasping abstract or faraway concepts. I joke that I don’t believe that outer space exists, but behind my jester’s tone is cold truth. I cannot touch the moon. I can only see it. And seeing the moon doesn’t mean anything, really: for all I know, that dot in the sky could be a sticker, or a scab, or a massive prop made from cardboard and paint and hung by a piece of fishing line. History is equally as unprovable, ergo: no prophets. No heaven.

Embarrassed but unable to lie to this sweet, earnest Murrabi, I apologetically explain my conundrum to Caleb. He seems confused, but like a good converter, he rises to the challenge. Caleb tries to break it down into easier things to grasp. Do you believe that the sun came up in the East this morning? No, because I wasn't looking when it rose. Do you believe that you walked to this coffee shop? No, because the universe could have snapped us into existence mid-conversation, and what we think are real memories are actually planted. Caleb can tell he’s losing me. Poor Caleb. Poor me. What about this cup, he says, more concerned at this point than confused. Your hand and this cup can’t exist in the same space because of the laws of physics. Right, Chloe?

I am so goddamn disappointed in myself. I wanted to grant our hopes like wishes. Caleb, that he could help the soul of his friend. Mine, that Cystic Fibrosis isn’t the monster I know that it is. That death can’t hurt my family in a way that ultimately matters. But losing my parents is a fact of life. And no matter how hard I try to convert myself, there are some things that no amount of faith can change.

Donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Here!!

The names in this piece have been changed to protect anonymity.

🜲

“There are no premature endings. There are no wrong decisions. There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings.

This is a love story.”

- Slay The Princess, Black Tabby Games

Your name is Chloe Solomon-Shiffman. You are twenty years old. You attend the seventh-most prestigious university in the world. Your country is sliding into a dictatorship, your secret society kicked you out, and you have just been diagnosed with something that threw your life into stark, relieving clarity. Two weeks ago, an old-friend-turned-failed-situationship-turned-new-friend-again recommended his favorite game to you: Slay the Princess, a choose-your-own-adventure novel by Black Tabby Games. You have a thousand urgent things to do. You choose to play instead.

Slay the Princess opens on a wooded path. The frame is grayscale, sketchy, and delicately animated. Black twiggy branches curl from the left of my screen. Through my Beats, I hear the soft pluck of strings and piano. I’m surprised, then soothed. My stomachache softens. I’d forgotten that video games have music.

The Narrator: You’re on a path in the woods. At the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess. You’re here to slay her. If you don’t, it will be the end of the world.

The game gives me way more options than I expected. I can fight with the narrator, wax nihilistic about the world ending, or rejoice at the prospect of killing a monarch. I can ask about a reward or stalk toward the cabin or try and pass the task off to somebody else. I can question the princess. I can question the game.

YOU choose [Turn around and leave.]

The Narrator: Seriously? You’re just going to turn around and leave? Do you even know where you’re going?

YOU choose [Quietly continue down the path away from the cabin.]

I feel charmed that the game lets me affirm my choice. I'll bet it’s an unpopular pick for first-time players, and catnip to returning protagonists. I wonder how many times my friend chose to walk, too.

The Narrator: Fine. I suppose you just quietly continue down the path away from the cabin.

The scenery changes to a slightly different sketch of woods. A new type of text unrolls.

Voice of the Hero: Good. What we’re being asked to do here is wrong. Better to wash our hands of this whole situation than to take part in it.

This is not the reason I chose to walk back into the woods. The Voice of the Hero’s presumption annoys me. But whatever.

The dialogue continues.

The Narrator: Ignore that annoying little voice. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Amen.

The scene changes. Now, I am facing a cabin.

The Narrator: That’s strange. It looks like this path also leads to the cabin. How convenient! Everything’s back on track again. Maybe the world can still be saved after all.

There is a story to be played here, actions to be taken, a princess to kill or save or fight. But I have already lost the game I care about. I want to live quietly in this one for a moment. My friend is not here, but traces of him are. The foliage is beautiful; the music, soothing. Stars warble in the black, faded sky. Winning, now, is just quietly being where he's been. That is enough for me.

YOU choose [Turn around (again) and leave (again.)]

The Narrator: You’re really keen on wasting everyone’s time, aren’t you? It’s remarkably selfish, if you ask me. I’ve already outlined the stakes of the situation. If you don’t do your job, everyone dies. Like, dies dies. Forever.

I’m supposed to have something to say. The game supplies me with kinetic dialogue: indignant moral reactions to killing the princess, rails against the obviously unreliable narrator. I choose the shortest, least typographically dynamic option. I have to scroll to the bottom of the list to select it.

YOU choose [Quietly continue down the path.]

“Your silence is deafening,” complains the narrator. But this Carraway deity is only a program. He can’t hear the uproar in each wooly fir, in the plinking keyboard, in a single gray frame. My heart rushes in my ears as I sink into my bed, propped and double-chinned on a musty pillow. I feel overwhelmed, verklempt. This is already enough of a story for me.

But I click to continue anyway, and after piloting me back down my original wooded path, the game spins me back to the cabin.

‘It seems like the Universe itself is doing its best to bring you to your fated confrontation with the princess,” says the narrator. Please. Why do you think I’m playing Save The Princess? The universe has led me to my actual Prince over and over and over. The same universe has also led me away. Or maybe that was me, or maybe both were me, or maybe me and the universe are warring with each other, scrappy and heartbroken and trying, desperately, not to lose. My Prince, as they say, is in another cabin. I re-downloaded Steam to pretend to feel distracted. Right now, I’m supposed to just play a game.

Save The Princess gives me an ultimatum: either go into the cabin or hack my way through the wilderness. The word “quietly” is no longer an option. Both choices reek of action and adventure. But there are infinite ways to play a game.

I fullscreen the frame of the cabin on the hill and lay my computer, open-screened, by my headboard. The volume mellows to a soft medium. I unplug my fairy lights, swallow my Lexapro, and tuck myself into bed.

Backlit by somebody else’s cabin, I quietly fall asleep.

So this is Essex Crossing. Fifty years of vacant lots, of Robert Moses’ broken promise,1 finally culminated in a climbing gym, this coffee shop. Georgie’s is made only from modish materials. The floor is glossed stone, the countertops maple. It smells like warm grinds and honey-washed pork buns. Banks of monstera and fiddle leaf fig cut the floor, windows, and squat bar’s roof like a drier Amazon Spheres. Open concept. Mammoth windows. If there was dust in the air, I’d be able to see the motes.

Georgie’s is modern, massive, and forested, so the coffee line is Long. There’s a classy amount of pineapple buns in the counter display case. The bar is tiled in sand green. Vines hang on lattices over the counter and brush Cool Barista no. 1’s knitted kerchief.

When I order, I ask them about the headpiece and tell them I’m writing about the bar, about them. Flustered Barista no. 1 smiles into their chin. It was a gift from a friend, not quite a headscarf. An open-concept balaclava, we joke. It is lopsided, and this is the point, we like this. From the counter, my phone spits up an email from my dean, something about the housing draw for rising seniors. I order a fresh ube cookie and Sweet Barista no. 1 smiles goodbye. I’ll join you soon, I think.

I’m sitting at a wooden bar on a black metal stool. The bar is too short, the stool is too tall, and my back clenches after writing one paragraph. I swap out the barstool for a metal chair that puts the wooden slab right above my tits. This is great until I try to write and my arms have nowhere to go. They splay out on the bartop, elbowing my neighbors, like the most impolite fisherman dining at sea. Don’t let the giant monstera trick you. This bar was not designed for real people.

My hydro flask is flush with colorful stickers, and the sun is making it look beautiful. There are many things I want to say but few which I can publish. Imagine you are the sun and I am big bright windows. Imagine you pass through me and imagine I am grateful. Imagine I get to watch the vinyl saturating, the alocasia keening to the light, both satiated and delighted to grow. Imagine that I miss you. Imagine you were inside me all along.

My cookie is black until I hold it to the sun, and then it is twenty different purples

.

This place is closing in twenty-nine minutes, so I think I will have to be quick. I wanted to work at the new tea bar down the street — a minimalistic, surprisingly friendly place called CHA & — but every single seat in the joint was taken and I don’t know the Saturday baristas. It’s no biggie. I’m actually thrilled for the owners of CHA &. But I’m definitely in plan B territory right now, so I’m writing at Partybus Bakeshop.

One thing I love about Partybus, though, is how well the bakers and baristas get along. They talk about the music they play on the speakers ‘if I was listening to a song that was about me, and I thought it was about me, I’m actually not vain at all’ and their siblings ‘who on earth doesn’t like sugar-cookie scented lip balm?’ and youtube videos of women falling off bikes. All of them look as cool as L.E.S. transplants are biblically intended to look. Twenty something, layered clothing, sweetly earnest posture. I wish I could join their cohort, actually, even though I grew up down the block. Damn my native Manhattanite superiority complex. They look like they’re having fun.

I’m drinking water out of a plastic red cup that I really fucking adore. It’s the same kind of marbled, tinted cup that you find in older American diners. Anna Kendrick used one like it in the Cup Song music video. I know this might sound like I’m fishing for material, but I’m really not. I like this cup. And little things make me happy. My best friend’s favorite quality of mine is that I’m “easily impressed.” That, also, at first glance, sounds like an insult, but it isn’t. Being easily impressed means finding joy in the overlooked, like collecting chestnuts in the pockets of your pants, or singing the praises of a mediocre stretch, or not shutting up when someone else’s dog likes you. I’m a happy person, and my joy makes him happy, which makes me happier, and such and such. It’s a rare quality, and a fantastic one. So yeah, I love this cup.

Another thing I like about Partybus Bakeshop is that they sell buttered baguettes. One slice cost me six bucks, which is curbside robbery, but I still respect the sale. I’m validated by our shared insistence that bread and butter is a perfectly legitimate snack.

“Here You Come Again” is playing on the speakers. This bakery has Dolly Parton wallpaper. I really don’t know what to make of it. It’s this repeating pattern of teeny paintings of Dolly sprawled atop these ugly, stone-grey minivans. She and the car are wreathed by flowers and teeny painted baked goods. The background is baby pink, but the paintings are colored regularly, which makes the pink look like it’s aesthetically floundering. None of the features gel. It’s such a weird, fugly choice that I can’t help but respect it, too.

The barista-baker cohort is hawking golden baguettes, the bakery’s Saturday special. Golden baguettes are pretty yellow loaves made with turmeric, onion, ginger, and black pepper. Someday I’ll be rich and have an infinite stomach and buy every single pastry from Partybus Bakeshop. Or maybe I won’t be rich. And maybe by the time I’m a ‘real’ adult, Partybus will have closed down.

I consider buying one of their surplus doggie bags from Too Good To Go, but I don’t want to spend the six dollars. I’ve made too many overindulgent financial choices lately. I bought a fourteen dollar mocktail yesterday and ate out for every meal. Two days ago, I got my present (not future) read by a woman in Grand Central station. It cost thirty bucks that I paid to her metrocard. I chose to get a reading because a man jumped into the tracks, so I felt a little loose and my train was already delayed. The reading was fantastic, though. I don’t regret the cash.

Now, the cohort is singing along to the aux and talking about an Ohio toddler who was mauled to death last week. In four minutes, I’ll have to leave this fine establishment. I’m debating whether or not I should tell the Partybus staff that I’ve been writing about them. I kind of trashed their bakery in this essay, but I only have sweet things to say about the people. What would I want if I were them? Does the flattery of being written about outrank the way I’ve written their shop? Does anyone actually want to hear about themselves the way they are honestly, incompletely perceived?

The Partybus Bakeshop team has started putting the leftover pastries and golden loaves in tupperware. I have three hundred words left in this entry, and I want to keep going more than I want to stop.

It takes me twenty minutes to move to a new cafe.

Dimes Deli is surprisingly cool. It has a skinny little bar maybe three feet from the ground. The chairs are all stools, and they’re playing the Magnetic Fields. I’m in a L.E.S. offshoot neighborhood called Dimes Square, a gen-z-gentrifier-indie-playhouse wedged between Chinatown and Seward park. These transplants dress to be discovered by Instagram streetwear accounts. I always thought myself too young and too poor for this place, but my banger outfit and big-girl money and newly minted twenties suit me perfectly to the Dimes Deli. I really don’t know how to feel about this.

The bar(ista? tender? it’s five p.m.) gives me a tin cup of tap water. The water is complimentary. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a cup like this; like a prisoner’s cup or a child’s tin toy or some other cool vintage relic. I order a chai and I sit down to write.

I really like this cup.

990 WORDS.

I’ll start with noticing, for now.

I’m in a sports bar, at the bar. This is my first ever go as a legitimate sports bar patron. I drank a fourteen dollar spicy orange juice and broke somebody else’s glass. I think if the staff cared, they could tell I was only twenty. There are middle-aged tribeccaites around me, loud and white, sitting under the bar tee-vees. They look up at the screens with unexpectedly big sweet eyes like cocomelon children. When I’m not looking at the patrons their voices grate, but when I put in the effort, I can find them sweet. On-screen, two men in foam Duke’s mayonnaise hats rip into turkey legs with medieval fervor. I think they’re supposed to be sportscasters. I guess I’m not much one for sports.

The bartendress, a calming woman who looks like Leslie Kritzer in Beetlejuice, tells me in a firm, gentle voice that she’s going on her break, and would I like to close my tab? Calming is the wrong word to describe The Bartendress. It’s not an inaccurate word, but an incomplete one. The Bartendress has the clear, directional tone of a teacher with the cheeky, ‘we’re choosing to buy into this performance’ undertone of an ASMRtist. She makes me feel indulged, but also accountable. Babied, but kept in line. I understand why some men are so obsessed with older female bartenders, now. So many things to learn, in this life. So much I don’t know I don’t know.

My receipt comes on a little tray and I pay it with a physical card, which makes me feel very grown-up. The server name on my receipt is Annie P. She didn’t tell me her name, and I think it would ruin her aesthetic to acknowledge I know it, so in my mind she’ll stay The Bartendress.

I’m so sleepy. I rub my eyes and tug my eyelashes. They’re bricked in mascara and the corners itch. The MTA texting bot says it’s late-oh-clock, so no more buses are coming for a while. I hunker down and keep writing.

Sometime around ten fifteen, I get smacked with the citrusy kick of wings slathered in what must be Frank’s Red-Hot. The smell tangs my nose. Hot, thin spit pools under my tongue. When I glare down the bar, I notice that the hot wing culprit also has a tin dish of ranch and a little pile of celery. I gotta admit, it’s a pretty satisfying sports bar moment, but I’m still totally wiped. I want to go home.

Right now, my college friends’ slang of choice is Sweetie Pie. Dan from the bar is a certified sweetie pie. He asks me what I’m writing, which is new and adorable: usually I’m the one striking up conversations with strangers, but the flip side is fun and it’s marvelous to feel chosen. Dan is a capital-R Reader. He pulls Heartburn by Nora Ephron from the pocket of his coat and stacks it on my Norwegian Wood and A Manual for Cleaning Women. I love this paperback pyramid.

When Dan got to undergrad, he quit writing and started advising other people’s writing instead. Now, he tells me, in malty, lulling breaths, I think if I started to write, I’d just copy things other people write. I’ll read Heartburn, and think ‘oh, I could write that,’ and then realize ‘no, I could only write a copy of it. And that copy would probably be worse.’

Dan drapes his arm on the back of a barstool, and his screensaver flickers on. It’s a photo of two kids, obviously siblings, obviously recent, a boy and a girl. Either they were lightly bundled in autumn clothing or wearing halloween costumes. It feels like I’ve been flashed the sweetest secret, like I’ve seen two rats share a pizza crust instead of scrap over it, like I’ve seen a crush’s stretch expose a slice of midriff, like I’ve glimpsed Annie P’s name on my receipt. I decide that I adore Dan.

I give Dan a writing assignment that he is obviously hungry for and he promises to read my mini-1000 on substack. I want to give him a hug, but that would be weird. We exchange numbers, and then we part ways.

I am so sleepy. The next bus is coming in seventeen minutes. I could go home and tuck in for the night, let the mini-1000 bleed into tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and gradually taper into another undone, well-intentioned assignment. But tonight, one person will read my substack post. One whole person. One person with a lockscreen of kids that I’ll bet are his children. One person who talks to sleepy, bigger children writing stories in sports bars because just seeing a laptop with words on it made Dan curious enough to do something courageous. One whole person who I think, deep down, still really wants to write, and who, based on a ten-minute interaction, I truly believe could surprise himself. One whole person. One whole reader.

I hope this will be one of those moments I look back on in ten, fifteen, fifty years (as I write this, I knock on the wooden bar). When I’ve written books that lots of people read, when the numbers of readers are just digits on my substack ledger or rankings in literary magazines or nominations for dinky, grand prizes, I want to remember how I feel right now. I want twenty-year-old-me to shake my big, old shoulders and show myself the gratitude and glee fizzing in my chest like my bubbly orange big-girl mocktail. As of an hour ago, I have one whole reader. He’s not one of my mom’s friends, or a kid from my classes, or a professor who believes in me but is also obligated to read my work for other reasons. My first stranger-reader is Dan from the bar. I’m totally verklempt. What a blessing!, I’ll remind future me. And she will remember, and understand.

What a blessing! What a blessing! What a blessing!

1009 WORDS.

An adult man, two cans of V8 deep, watches ducky cartoons on his seatback TV. The sleeping beard behind me wears a tee-shirt like the platonic ideal of an Amazon banner ad. Sarcastic text, neon green lettering: ‘DON’T RUSH ME. I Get Paid By The Hour.’ A Gen-X-er’s massive airpod case dangles from its charging cord. Its swinging, gentle and orbital, reminds me of a Reiki pendulum. I like to imagine that her lump of tech is reading chakras buried in the tray table.

I write this letter every time I fly. I’m afraid until I’m sedated by my passenger peerage, by this blasé sonder. By the saintly companions who smell my fear and choose to soothe a perfect stranger. My flight attendant, Patricia, who sneaks me plastic wine bottles in perfect miniature. My seatmate, somebody else’s aunt, who lets me tuck my face into her fleece.

I am one teeny bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, two biscoff cookies, and one messy draft into this flight. It is not as turbulent as I thought it would be. I haven’t cried, not even once.

Patricia, in her red neckerchief, smiles huge when I tell her I’m not afraid anymore. She’s really a fantastic flight attendant. I need to get her number and send her this essay. I am an ardent follower of Jeffery Lewis' Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song: strangers should know when they’re written about, when they’re loved a little in prose. They should feel noticed for their little mitzvahs. Not that it matters, but if our roles were reversed, these sojourners might do the same for me.

KENNY

i used to do yoga every day in the grass before the park closed down and the cranes came in and the cardstock protest signs from cvs (too pink, too yellow, covered in ladybug stickers and washable marker: there is no planet b, eric adams started the fire) all got warped from the rain and starched from the sun and tore like loose bunting along the chainlink till some good samaritan or construction worker finally took them all down. now i don’t go out that much except for eggs and beef and gluten-free challah and glass jars of mt. olive kosher dill chips. before the pandemic i walked the thirty minutes to the wholefoods in union square, stocked up on butternut squash and long-grain rice, but the keyfoods down the street is closer and no one gives you weird looks if you shop in tabasco-stained pee-jay pants. the cat food is mealy and the toilet paper only comes in one-ply but my pets and i don’t seem to mind.

the dogs and i try to go out most days (i may not take care of them as well as i want to but they really do have to be walked) and it always feels a bit like a festival, like a fulton street debutante ball. i put on my cleanest shirt and clip the girls into their harnesses, trying not to put the thick leash on the small dog or the thin leash on the big dog or make some other catastrophic and irredeemable mistake. we take a breather at the doorstop, dressed to the nines, and practice our lines for the neighbors (she grew up like crazy / yeah, i saw what he tweeted / sorry sir, i don’t carry change) and after seven minutes when the girls start pawing at the door we turn the brass deadbolt and walk downstairs. sometimes the doorman mr. bart waves hello and sometimes a stranger outside looks at us and then looks down but mostly we’re left alone, our little team of three, sniffing at pee in the street. while we walk i sometimes look at the forty-something man who follows me in the lacquered steel of parked subarus and hondas. he warps from beanpole to midget to beanpole again as the tires eat into the doors. he is tired and and gaunt and stringbean skinny and his mountain goats t-shirt droops off of his collarbones and his maintainable buzzcut is moldy with grey and i wanna kindly ask this man to get his act together but i hit a no-park zone and he disappears.

sometimes i run into angie with one of her kids at her knees, a crayon or something shoved into its nose, and she’s always rushing, rushing, rushing somewhere but still gets so excited to talk to me. i say hi how are you angie and she says i’m good im good yknow a little all over the place i’m baking muffins for carla’s class their bake sale is on friday which do you think they’d like better chocolate chip or raisin and i weigh the options in my head, quietly agonizing over which is the lucky lotto winner, until she says what the fuck am i talking about they’re fourth graders of course they’ll want chocolate anyway kenneth how are ya doing? and i say good i’m good just hanging around with the girls i like to say they keep me young even though i don’t really say that to anyone except for maybe angie. i smile a little and i can tell that my smile looks pathetic but she smiles right back without any hesitation and it’s so big and bright that mine can’t help feeling a little less bad.

then i go home with the minty-fresh eyes of a man who has just been outside. i look at the house and i want to clean it up real nice, take the boxes off the couch and the dust off the lampshade and really make the whole place feel open, and then maybe i’ll invite angie and mr. bart over for dinner and make them a very nice veggie lasagna. so i unleash the girls and i take down the duster off the cabinet over the tv but the dogs come up to me panting and shaky and i remember i haven’t given them water yet today and maybe the day before that so i put down the duster and go to the kitchen and pick up the porcelain bowls that i bought as a two-for-one deal at keyfoods. they have the wrong names on them, fido and spot, and my dogs names are darlene and postman pat after my aunt who died when i was a kid and a television program i loved growing up. there’s a dead fly in one of the bowls so i wash out the bottom with soap and a sponge and then fill them both up with water and then lay them back on the tile and then wring out the sponge and place it back in its laissez-faire spot on the lip of the sink. the dogs drink all sloppy because they were real thirsty and sometime i’ll have to wipe up the puddles of water on the floor but right now i’m starting to feel quite exhausted like the helium let out of a birthday balloon. i think i’ll just lay on the floor for a minute and then i’ll get back to the dusting. the tile is lovely and cold and a little bit sticky and when i rub a finger over the grout my skin comes up smeared with grey. i should probably mop for when angie and mr. bart come over but they aren’t coming over, really, and even i know it, me who doesn’t even know the steps to make a passable lasagna or have anyone to show me how.