The Handrail Is Lonely

I’ve noticed something at train stations. Nobody uses the handrails anymore. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. Everyone is gripping their phones, their coffee, their bags, their existential dread. But the handrail? Absolutely not. I assume this is a lingering COVID-era thing. We spent two years being told […]

Not everything is a battle

What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught? I sometimes wish schools taught common sense the way they teach calculus. Not just facts, but strategy for living. The kind you usually learn the hard way, mid-conversation, mid-conflict, mid “I should have handled that differently.” One of the best […]

A surprisingly heavy echo

I’m still deleting emails. It hasn’t gotten old yet. This quiet excavation of a life lived in subject lines and timestamps. Somewhere between “no longer relevant” and “why did I save this,” I keep brushing up against memory. Not the dramatic kind. The soft, ambient kind that hums […]

A summer night  A storm, and A bathtub

I’m writing this from my bathtub. Not metaphorically. Not “I need a moment to myself” bathtub. An actual, porcelain, slightly-too-cold, mid-thunderstorm, power-is-out, phone-at-17% kind of bathtub. The lights snapped off about twenty minutes ago. One dramatic flicker, then darkness like a stage cue. Outside, the sky is doing […]

Change doesn’t ask for permission

There’s a Dostoevsky-adjacent line that has followed me from job to job, like a slightly unhinged little companion: “they insulted me in seventy lines and only the spelling mistakes bothered me.” It shouldn’t resonate as much as it does. And yet. Because here’s the thing about being a […]