The Things You Thought You Wanted

2026

As I write this, I’m sitting in a boat where I am temporarily living. I’m renting this vessel where I sleep atop the Sound just a few feet above the ocean’s surface. When I open the small port sliding door next to my bed in the morning, I can see the tawny-colored sea just there when I look down. I’m renting this place while I do a search for home and studio. The trees in the areas of land around me are so tall they look like mountain ranges when they overlap. In this unexpected place to temporarily settle after selling my house and leaving Philly, it feels surprisingly peaceful. 

Ziggy sleeps on the sofa next to me. The low sun washes over him that is coming in from the glass panel on the door and the large west-facing window. Coffee has been made for a late-afternoon pick-me-up in the online searching of spaces and reading that Josh Kline article on NYC’s prices (but like, didn’t we all know that already?). 

Three and a half years ago, I went on a quest to own a home. When I got it and moved to Philadelphia, I realized that I was living somewhere I didn’t want to be. I wanted to buy a home because I knew that having stability in my home cost would help my studio practice instead of being in the unknowns of rent prices and landlords. I just didn’t plan for it to all take so much time and I didn’t plan to end up somewhere that I hated living. I based my home decision on the idea of cheaper studio rent and being in what I thought was close proximity to New York. In reality, it was so costly in other ways. In addition, I found myself never wanting to get on a bus and spend hours in traffic just to go to an opening. 

So, here I am. Years after this whole thing started and not quite coming full circle, but more like a new beginning that sort of has a circular curve on one end. 

Power Outages

2023



Due to a storm last night, I didn’t have power or air conditioning this morning in this place that I’m temporarily at. I woke up at 4am in the humid air and figured that I could toss and turn or just get up. After quickly remembering that the stove was also not working in order to make coffee, and I had a dead cell phone, I figured that I’d get into the car and go find coffee and charge my phone. I mean, I fully realize that this sounds pathetic but being in a hot bedroom unable to sleep with no power was not the better option. 

Not many things bring you into a contemplative and almost meditative state like driving on empty roads in a rural place. It’s a right brain activity. While I was driving, some recurring thoughts around outdated beliefs made their way into the driving and forward moving rhythm. If I can keep driving I can move them forward into a resolution and leave them out on the road somewhere. For anyone that has battled with outdated beliefs (like all of us, come on, at least once), when we really stop to think about them, we realize that we are the ones inflicting ourselves. We are owning them like a hair shirt that we got on the clearance rack. And why? These are the things I was asking myself as I was driving around with my Cumberland Farms bold roast in a styrofoam cup the liminal stages of the morning on empty roads with my phone reaching a 50% charge. None of this was environmentally friendly. But it was friendly for bubbling up old excruciating beliefs and feeling into how to best banish them. 

Just when the sun started coming up, I was passing a scenic overlook and I pulled over. I closed my eyes and drank from the hot cup. I looked at all that expansiveness. Then I closed my eyes and took all that weight and cast it into the mountains. The fog was just coming through. An enveloping soft space to claim them until they dissolve. 

The sun started coming up full on as a I drove off. A nearly charged phone. Humming Auntie Aviator under my breath as the bright green fields and hills went by out of my open window. “zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom…”

Glass Globes

2024



I am tired of smiling pretty, putting bobby pins into my hair, telling people what they want to hear. I am simultaneously livid and bored with trying to want what people are supposed to want. Like those wound up and packed strings of Christmas lights you see curled up into glass globes and placed on shelves as decoration. I can mold myself into a very neat package on the exterior, a very neat package indeed. 

What happens to you when you try to fit into boxes that you have never fit into and you have tried to fit into those boxes for a very long time, unsuccessfully? People always see through you.  The intuitive ones do. When I was seven or eight my grandmother would read me Miss Manners. There were little illustrations in it and paragraphs about sewing and eating. I was a fat kid and liked wearing lace dresses and eating chocolate cake for breakfast.

I have never dreamed of picket fences and weddings. I have dreamed of someone fucking me hard in other countries and through hotel rooms and who wants to tie me up while reading Dostoevsky. Ok, maybe not Dostoevsky, that sounds pretentious. But reading me some nice story, something domestic and warm and cozy while they are tying me up and running their tongue over my bottom lip. We would just keep on like this until we were old, of course. There would be no ceremony and just vows to promise to eat chocolate cake in the morning and cross borders to go have bathroom sex in Vilnius on a yearly basis.

But I would like a front porch and some kept promises and orange juice and toast in the morning brought out on a plastic tray and the sounds of ocean in the background and a newspaper on the front steps and two pairs of slippers next to the bed, just laying on the throw rug by the sliding door. 

On Moving

2021

I can’t remember when I started moving. I lived in the same house in Connecticut from the time I was born until I was seventeen, when I moved into an apartment with my friend Jennifer. 

Then came the moves. I recall one sunny spring afternoon when I was about eighteen, standing outside by the picnic tables at work wearing a pair of sling backs and a black-and-white matching vest and parachute pant thing (it was the 90’s). I was in the back of the salon I worked at which was in a small house. Everything was just coming into bloom and it was the first beginnings of warm weather after a long winter. I was dreaming of what it would be like to take off that afternoon, leaving work unannounced and driving off on an adventure. I stayed instead and eventually went back inside and continued with giving manicures and acrylic nail fill-ins. But I think right there, in that moment, the transience began. Then it never stopped. Not even when I wanted it to. I recall buying a bumper sticker for my red 2-door car that said “Thelma and Louise live!”. 

As I unpack I think about that time and these objects I’m holding-the box I’m unpacking from, the little objects inside from kitchen, holiday ornaments, candle holders. Each box carries my present, history, and necessities. Each move a little something extra gets discarded that doesn’t fit or I realize isn’t worth storing because there isn’t the right storage. Each move some additional things are gained because the old table or lamp doesn’t go in that spot and so I need a new one. Home gets unpacked and packed again and set up in a new zip code. 

While unpacking, I think of the future home where we put down roots. But not this house, not this time. I get rid of a couple of kitchen chairs, an ornament. I save a couple of brown cardboard boxes. I fold them neatly and jam them into the only closet.