The problem with writing a newsletter pretty regularly for the better part of six years is that sometimes it feels like I've covered all the topics. Remember Comic-Con? I went again, but didn't dance with any movie stars this time. And T and I are back on our summer Friday bullshit. Oh, wow, actually, a line from that newsletter, written in September of 2016: "I write when people will pay me for it, or when I feel like it. (A luxury, in part because I know it won't last.)" But hah! It will last! It'll last so long you'll run out of things to say about it!

Anyway, speaking of the past: in late June I went back east for the first time since Before. I spent most of the week in New York and then headed to a wedding in New Haven. I was back where I spent the end of my teens and the first half of my twenties, and I soaked in the wet heat and the intensity of my own nostalgia. A side effect of the pandemic that I hadn't quite understood until I got there: how long ago it's made that part of my life seem. Like, my east coast and west coast lives used to feel basically contiguous, but this felt like walking through a mirror or a portal, or, as I said to several people, like seeing an ex. (I did not see any of my actual exes.) I listened to Taylor Swift on the train and sent many deranged text messages to C & E. One was just the lyric: "we are alone with our changing minds / we fall in love 'til it hurts or bleeds / or fades in time." 

I've written about this before, too, the way time folds in on itself, the way we use anniversaries to keep it from doing that. While I was there I thought a lot about feelings. Like, I don't feel any type of way about D anymore. That's because I don't really think about him-- unless I'm on the east coast and listening to Taylor Swift, and then I'm swarmed with things that are feelings or ghosts, or maybe both, or neither. The memory of the way I felt about him, which is, after all, just a feeling, isn't it? Til it hurts or bleeds or fades in time. Unless, of course, it does all three. 

Here's Taylor Swift performing a different song-- Wildest Dreams. I love this particular version because the venue is intimate, and she has to hold still for it, so you can see the burn of intensity on her face while she sings. The song is at least half incantation, a spell cast over her former lover: you'll see me in hindsight / tangled up with you all night / burning it down / someday when you leave me I bet these memories follow you around. I wrote something once that I can't find now (another hazard of having been on the job this long) about how this is one of the things that makes Taylor Swift what she is: her insistence on oh I remember; on I remember it all too well. How it feels to know something used to exist but doesn't anymore; how it makes you feel and sometimes look crazy. Maybe that's why I'm so compulsive about recording all of my going on. 

Because back there, in a city that was same same but different, I felt a little crazy. On my last day in NHV, I walked around by myself, remembering how many long slow summer afternoons I'd whiled away on those very blocks. I visited my favorite restaurant, which is closed now, and my old apartment buildings, which are locked to me. I took pictures of their closed doors. They're stupid images, but I'm not ready to delete them yet. I like holding onto the record of things, to have something concrete to pin my messy mind to. 

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I have written a good bit since last we spoke! Almost all of it is about books. I covered the rise of the chef as romance novel hero for Bon Appetit, and interviewed Christine Kandic Torres about her debut, The Girls In Queens, for Shondaland. Then I reviewed two books for The LA Times: Elaine Castillo's How to Read Now, and Lio Min's Beating Heart Baby.