Kat’s Musings

Tag: dailyprompt

Beyond Survival: On Near‑Death, Recovery, and Feeling Truly Alive

What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

Surviving my own near-death experience should have been the moment I felt most alive. That is what the stories promise, is it not? The white light, the sudden clarity, the gratitude that crashes over you like a second heartbeat. Instead, I woke up the way people wake from anesthesia—disoriented, heavy, bargaining with a body that no longer trusted me. It took years before I understood that survival and living are not the same verb.

A person walks barefoot through the shallows of a misty lake at dawn.

I have been addicted to losing weight since I was eleven. Not in the tidy, magazine-friendly way that gets turned into before-and-after slides. Addicted to the high of control when everything else felt unmanageable. Now for sixteen years I lived inside the sentence “when I can walk around again.” It was both promise and postponement. Walking was the future tense I kept conjugating so I would not have to inhabit the present one. Hospitals, mobility devices, the particular ache of a body that has been asked to carry too much for too long—those were the actual days. The walking was always later.

Later has not arrived yet, Only in Physical therapy. The first steps that felt less like triumph and more like negotiation. Muscles relearning their jobs. The strange, ordinary miracle of carrying my own weight from one room to another without a plan for how I would rest. And still, even then, a part of me keeps scanning the horizon for the real beginning.

An inviting reading nook opens onto a lush garden through wide windows filled with morning light.

Now add the fact that I am not physically with the person I love. Not in the abstract, not in the “we will figure it out” sense, but in the same space, the same bed, the same domestic gravity. His hand on the small of my back when I stand up. The way he notices when my breathing changes before I do. It should feel like arrival. Some days it does. Most days it feels like I have stepped into a room I spent decades decorating in my head and am waiting to check whether the furniture is real.

So I have to wonder—have I ever actually felt alive before?

The question sits with me the way certain aches do: not constant, but reliable when I stop moving. Alive, I suspect, is not the same as busy, or productive, or even happy. It might be closer to the sensation of being inside a body that is no longer primarily a project. For so long the body was the obstacle and the assignment. Every meal, every step, every number on a scale or a chart was data in service of a future self who would finally be allowed to start. Even after the near-death, the old script kept running underneath the new one: survive, then optimize, then live.

Being with someone who wants the version of me that already exists—not the lighter one, not the more mobile one, not the one who has finished recovering—keeps interrupting that script. He does not wait for me to become more alive before he treats me as if I already am. That is both a gift and a kind of vertigo. It forces the question into the open: if life is no longer waiting on weight, or on perfect walking, or on some final medical clearance, then what is it waiting on now?

A sunlit garden path winds through blooming flowers, twisting vines, and whimsical brass clockwork.

I still catch myself postponing. I make plans for when energy is better, when the residual pain is quieter, when I feel more like the person I was rehearsing to become. The difference is that the postponement is shorter now, and I can usually see myself doing it. Some afternoons I sit on the edge of the bed longer than necessary, yearning to listen to the ordinary sounds of another person moving through the same rooms, while I practice the small, unspectacular choice to stand up and join him before I feel ready.

Maybe aliveness is less a peak than a practice. Maybe it is the gradual refusal to keep treating the present as a waiting room. The near-death experience did not hand me that practice fully formed. Neither did the walking, or the love. They only removed some of the more obvious reasons I had for staying in the hallway. The rest—the decision to stop narrating my own life in the future tense—is still being learned, one ordinary morning at a time.

I am not sure I have ever felt fully alive. I am more certain than I used to be that I am willing to find out what it feels like when I stop waiting for the feeling to arrive first.

October 13, 2026
5 No‑Equipment Home Exercises for Strength, Balance and Control

What are five simple exercises to do at home?

For my workouts, I generally rely mostly on my physical therapy sessions rather than on a separate gym routine or a self-designed program. Those sessions set the structure, and my physical activity is fairly simple and consistent: long walks, climbing stairs, and the strengthening exercises that have been built into my day. Taken together, those pieces account for nearly all of the movement I get when I am able to be up and out.

When I am homebound and cannot manage the walks or the stairs, I shift the work to the floor. I get down and move through a small set of exercises I can do without equipment: leg raises to work the hips and lower body, tall-kneel crawling to practice controlled weight-bearing and coordination without worrying about the strength of my ankles, one-legged bridges to strengthen the glutes and challenge balance on a single side, and planks to hold the trunk steady. I also spend plenty of time stretching, working through the ranges that feel restricted so the joints and muscles stay usable between sessions.

A sunlit home workout space combines yoga equipment with warm, inviting decor.

Alongside that, I use a mirror exercise whose purpose is less about building strength and more about retraining the brain. I watch myself and practice matching the left side to the right, reinforcing the idea that the left side of my body can function the way the right side does. The repetition is deliberate: see the movement, copy it, and give the nervous system another chance to treat the two sides as equally capable. In that sense the floor work is both physical practice and a form of motor relearning, filling the gaps on the days when therapy and outdoor activity are not available.

A welcoming deck overlooks a colorful garden and peaceful woodland path.

I also take a walk on the back deck every day after my afternoon rest. It is not a long walk, and it is not meant to replace the longer outings I do when I can leave the house. The point is repetition in a familiar place: a short circuit I can manage at the end of the day, when the rest of the work is already done.

Along that railing I gradually train myself to let go. At first the hand stays close, ready to catch the rail if balance shifts. Over time I practice taking steps without holding on, then more of them, so the walk becomes less about the support and more about the legs doing the work. I also stop at the end of the railing and simply stand there—not gripping, not leaning into it, not bracing with a hip or a shoulder. The task is narrower than it sounds: stay upright, feel both feet on the deck, and try to trust my own two legs and feet to hold me without the rail as a backup. Some days that stand lasts only a moment. Other days it holds a little longer. Either way, it is part of the same slow practice as the floor work and the therapy sessions—asking the body, and the balance system that governs it, to rely a little more on itself.

October 2, 2026
Just Do It

What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

I believe in spontaneity—flying by the seat of your pants. You feel it. Then you do as Nike says and just do it.

There is a particular electricity in deciding before the mind has time to assemble a committee. Before you can overthink. The body knows first. A sudden urge to love someone, take a different road home, to say yes to a last-minute invitation, to start the thing you have been circling for months. Spontaneity is not chaos for its own sake. It is trust that the present moment contains more information than the spreadsheet you made last Tuesday.

Over-planning has its place. Maps are useful. Budgets matter. But when every decision is pre-approved by fear of looking foolish or wasting time, life flattens into a sequence of safe rehearsals. You end up living a well-organized version of someone else’s idea of a good life. The seat of the pants is less dignified and far more honest. It is the part of you that still remembers how to move before it has justified the movement.

Nike’s slogan works because it is almost insultingly simple. “Just Do It” does not promise a perfect outcome. It does not require a five-year vision board (although I make one every year) or a mood board or a detailed risk assessment. It assumes the feeling is already there and that hesitation is the only remaining obstacle. The phrase is a permission slip to act while the spark is still hot.

That spark is fragile. Wait long enough and the inner critic arrives with questions: Is this practical? What will people think? What if it fails? By the time those questions are answered, the original impulse has usually cooled into a memory of something you almost did. Spontaneity is a race against that cooling.

This does not mean every whim deserves obedience. Some impulses are hunger, boredom, or avoidance wearing a costume. The useful distinction is between the cheap thrill and the deeper yes—the one that arrives with certainty rather than a loud craving. You learn the difference by acting often enough to notice the aftermath. Some spontaneous choices leave you lighter. Others teach you what not to do next time. Both are data.

People who live this way collect stories instead of regrets about missed chances. They remember the night they stayed online and met someone who changed their trajectory. They remember booking the ticket before the price went up and before they talked themselves out of it. They remember starting the project on a Tuesday afternoon because the idea would not leave them alone. The planned life can be admirable. The improvised one tends to be more alive.

There is also a humility in it. Flying by the seat of your pants admits you do not have the full picture and that you are willing to find out by moving. Perfectionism pretends otherwise. It waits for certainty that never quite arrives. Spontaneity accepts that some of the best decisions look reckless from the outside and inevitable from the inside.

So when the feeling comes—clear, uninvited, a little inconvenient sometimes —treat it as information rather than an interruption. You do not need a manifesto. You need a small act of follow-through. Feel it. Then just do it. The rest of your life writes itself after you start moving.

October 1, 2026
I feel at home in his arms.

What’s a place you visited that felt like home?

My Red Sox lost in the Wild Card series—on the road to the World Series so let me focus on something else…

I feel at home in his arms.

Not the kind of home with the walls all scratched up via my wheelchair or the kind you decorate for the holidays. The kind that arrives after years of being in doorways that never quite opened. When he holds me, the rest of the world does not disappear so much as it loses its sharpness. The noise thins. My shoulders drop. My breath remembers how to land instead of hover. I actually smile. I am not performing calm. I am not bracing for the next disappointment. I am simply there, against him, and that is enough.

For a long time I dreamt of a love like this without knowing its shape. I only knew the absence of it. I knew the particular ache of lying awake and feeling too much and not enough at the same time. Anxiety has a way of making a person feel both crowded and abandoned. Loneliness does the same. I spent years searching for someone who could ease that double weight, not by fixing me, but by staying close enough that I no longer had to carry it alone.

I looked in the usual places and in the desperate ones. I learned how to hope carefully, which is another way of saying I learned how to protect myself with hope. There were nights I cried until my body felt wrung out, not because one particular person had failed me, but because I could not shake the suspicion that I was the problem. That I was too much. That I was not enough. That the kind of love I wanted existed only in stories written for other women.

Then we met online. I was not searching for anything. Neither was he.

It did not arrive like fireworks. It arrived like recognition. Conversation after conversation, something in me unclenched. He did not rush to complete me, and I did not have to shrink to be understood. I could tell him about the trembling parts of myself without watching him look for the exit. For the first time in years, the old story began to loosen: the story that said my loneliness was proof of my unworthiness, that my anxiety made me unlovable, that I would always be waiting just outside the warmth.

I started to believe, slowly and almost against my will, that the long season of crying might actually have an ending.

When we finally met in person, the body confirmed what the heart had already begun to trust. There is a difference between imagining a person and standing close enough to feel the heat of them. There is a difference between written affection and the moment a hand finds the small of your back and stays there. I had wanted this for so long that part of me expected to freeze, to second-guess it, to ruin it with my own fear. Instead I felt something simpler and more startling: relief.

Eventually he held me.

Not as a gesture. Not as a performance. He held me as if he had been waiting for the same thing, as if my body was not a question he needed to solve but a place he already knew how to inhabit. I melted. That is the only honest word for it. The tightness I had worn for years softened. The girl who used to apologize for needing comfort stopped apologizing. In his arms I was not a collection of old wounds trying to look presentable. I was a woman being received.

He feels like a cozy home.

Unfortunately, I still know what loneliness feels like. I still know the old reflex of bracing. But now I also know this: there is a kind of love that does not ask you to earn rest. There is a kind of holding that tells the nervous system, at last, you can come down from the watchtower. I dreamt of that love for years. Then I met him. Then he put his arms around me, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had arrived.

September 30, 2026
Make Time for Self‑Care: Rest Without Apology

How do you make time for self-care?

It is so important—vital, even—to make time for self-care. Not as an afterthought squeezed between everyone else’s needs, and not as a luxury reserved for the rare day when nothing is demanded of you. Self-care is the necessary act of remaining whole.

Do not pour yourself out completely into someone else. Love generously if you choose to, show up fully, give your time and tenderness without keeping a ledger. But do not empty the well so thoroughly that there is nothing left when you turn back toward yourself. A person who never refills cannot keep giving without eventually resenting, fracturing, or disappearing. The most sustainable kindness you can offer others begins with the kindness you first offer yourself.

Self-care does not have to be extravagant. It can be a long soak in the tub while the water cools around you and the day’s noise finally recedes. It can be getting your nails done, not because anyone else will notice, but because the small ritual of being tended to reminds you that you are worth tending. It can be an hour spent watching something pleasant that asks nothing of you except your presence. It can be returning to a hobby you once loved and then quietly set aside—painting, reading, walking without destination, cooking something only you will eat, sitting with a podcast that belongs only to you.

A steaming cappuccino, open journal, and fresh flowers create a peaceful bedroom reading nook.

These moments are not selfish. They are maintenance. They restore the part of you that gets worn thin by caring, by housework, by the constant low-level negotiation of other people’s feelings and expectations. When you regularly take time to relax and enjoy yourself, you return to your life with more patience, more clarity, and more genuine warmth. You become harder to exhaust and easier to love—including by yourself.

A serene watercolor landscape pairs smooth river stones and greenery with flowing blue water beneath a glowing sun.

Make the appointment with yourself the way you would make one for anyone else you refuse to disappoint. Protect the hour. Close the door. Put the phone face down. Let the world wait. You are not abandoning anyone by doing so. You are simply refusing to abandon yourself.

Take the time. Spoil yourself a little. Rest without apology. The version of you that emerges on the other side of that rest is the one who can keep showing up—not emptied, but replenished.

A charming garden bench invites quiet relaxation among blooming flowers and lush greenery.

September 29, 2026
Beyond Karma: Ego, Suffering, and What the Universe Really Tests

Do you believe in karma?

The idea of karma has always sat uneasily with me. On the surface it feels simple, almost tidy. Be decent. Do not be cruel for sport. Do not treat people like they are disposable. The universe will eventually even the score. If you are rude, selfish, or vicious, something will come back around and collect the debt. That version of karma is easy to repeat because it sounds moral and useful. It also flatters us a little. It suggests the world is keeping score, that character is not wasted, that meanness is not free.

Then the obvious objection arrives and the whole neat story starts to buckle. What about children? What about babies who die of disease before they have had a chance to form a lasting thought, let alone a pattern of action? If karma is personal payback aimed at the child, the idea becomes grotesque. A three-month-old does not have a ledger of cruelty. A toddler with leukemia is not being taught a lesson about last year’s gossip. I do not believe the sick child is the one being sentenced. That picture is too small and too cruel. It turns a baby into a moral invoice.

A winding mountain trail leads through lush hills toward a glowing sunset beneath stormy clouds.

What I do believe is harder, and I know how it sounds. I think the test is aimed at the parents. I think the punishment, if that is the word, is meant for them. Not because every grieving mother or father is secretly a monster. I am not saying that. I am saying the blow does not land on the child as a completed person with a history of choices. The child is the point of impact. The parents are the ones left standing in the blast. They are the ones who have to keep living inside a world that just proved it can take the one thing they would have died to protect. That is a test of a different order. It does not ask what a baby deserved. It asks what the adults become when the worst thing they can imagine stops being imaginary.

I hold that view loosely because I cannot prove it, and because it is ugly enough that I would rather be wrong. But the popular story — that disease is the child’s karma — has never made sense to me. The child’s body is too new to be the courtroom. The parents’ lives are where the sentence continues. Sleep, marriage, faith, work, the sound of a quiet house, the question of whether they still believe anything is watching. That is where the weight stays.

A rustic woodland balance scale contrasts natural treasures with scattered broken mirrors.

The same cheap version of karma gets applied to ego. A lot of people talk as if walking around with an inflated sense of yourself is a spiritual crime, something the universe will eventually tax. Be humble. Shrink. Remember you are nothing special. I have heard that sermon my whole life, and I do not buy it. I personally believe ego is good. Not the kind that needs to crush other people to feel tall, but the kind that looks in the mirror and decides, without apology, that you are the greatest. That belief has helped me more than being “humbled” ever did. Being told I was a piece of shit never made me kinder, stronger, or more useful. It just made me smaller. Believing I was exceptional gave me a reason to act like the work mattered.

I think the universe tests us. Not always individually, and not always fairly in the way a courtroom is fair. Sometimes the test is private: loss, illness, humiliation, a long season of being unseen. Sometimes it is public and collective. A flood, an earthquake, a plague, a famine. Those events do not look to me like the universe picking out the guilty children and smashing them. They look like pressure applied to the people who have to answer for what happens next. Pressure builds diamonds. Who runs toward the wreckage. Who hoards. Who lies. Who builds again. Who uses the disaster as an excuse to become smaller. In the case of a sick child, the wreckage is a crib, a hospital hallway, a diagnosis. The test is not the infant’s character. The test is whether the parents collapse into bitterness, vanish into numbness, turn on each other, or somehow remain capable of love in a world that just showed them it does not negotiate.

Rough stones and brilliant diamonds illustrate how pressure can create lasting value.

That is not the same as saying the suffering is good. It is not. The point is not that a dying child is a gift wrapped in pain. The point is that the event exposes the real architecture of the people left behind. Comfort hides it. This kind of grief does not.

There is an old line that keeps coming back to me: the toughest soldiers always have the heaviest cross to bear. It mixes two languages, military and religious, but the meaning is plain enough. Capacity and burden often travel together. The person who can carry more is often given more to carry. Not because the universe is sadistic for sport, but because weight reveals strength that lighter loads never would. I will not pretend that makes a child’s death just. It does not turn a nursery into a proving ground for the baby. If there is a soldier in that picture, it is the parent. The heaviest cross is not laid on the one who never got to live long enough to understand the metaphor. It is laid on the ones who have to carry the body of the story afterward.

Ego belongs in that picture too. A crushed self does not carry a heavy cross well. A person who has been trained to think they are worthless will fold under pressure and call the folding humility. I would rather go into the test believing I am built for it. That does not mean I think the universe owes me a soft life. It means I refuse to enter difficulty already defeated. If I ever had to stand where those parents stand, I would rather meet it as someone who still believes he is capable of greatness than as someone who spent years practicing self-erasure and then called that wisdom.

Maybe that is why karma never quite settled in my mind in its popular form. The slogan wants a clean moral physics. Do wrong, get hit. Do right, get shielded. Get proud, get slapped down. The child gets sick because the child earned it. Life does not behave that way. Good people drown. Vicious people die rich and admired. Infants get sick. Whole towns vanish in weather. And sometimes the blow that looks aimed at the smallest person in the room is actually aimed at the adults who have to outlive it.

If there is any pattern at all, it seems slower, wider, and less personal than the slogan — except in this one terrible sense, which feels personal to the bone. The child is not being punished for thoughts they never had. The parents are the ones inside the trial. The universe, if it is doing anything, is not grading a baby. It is asking what kind of people remain when the thing they loved most is placed on the altar and not given back.

I still think we should be better. Not because a cosmic clerk is watching the receipt printer, but because cruelty adds weight to a world that already has more than enough. Kindness does not guarantee safety. It does not buy immunity for your children. An honest ego does not guarantee safety either. Nothing does. What remains is the manner of the response. And if the universe is testing anyone in the death of a sick child, I do not think it is the child. I think it is the parents — and, after them, everyone who watches and decides whether to look away, explain it too quickly, or admit that some tests are not meant to make us humble. They are meant to show us whether we can still stand.

September 26, 2026
The Real Reason We Secretly Root for the Villain

Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

I have always preferred the villain.

Not in the cheap, poster-on-the-dorm-wall way. Not because of the dominatrix vibes— leather looks good in low lighting— or because a monologue about destiny is more interesting than a speech about believing in yourself. I prefer the villain because the heroine keeps asking me to pretend I am someone I am not.

You know the one. She sings to animals. Birds land on her finger as if they have been waiting all morning for the privilege. Mice stitch her a dress. Squirrels pause mid-scamper to receive her wisdom. She is luminous, unguarded, and permanently slightly out of breath from all the hope. My own mother talks to the squirrels we see out the window. She does it with genuine warmth, the way some people bless the mail. I would never. I watch the same squirrel, note that it is fat and opportunistic, and go back to whatever I was doing. That is the distance.

I am, for the record, extremely optimistic. A vibes gal. I am generally whimsical. I believe in second chances, late-night plans that should not work, and the possibility that something beautiful is still unfolding even when the evidence is mixed. I am not cynical. I am just not going to perform enchantment on command. You are far more likely to find me rolling my eyes and swearing under my breath about the thing that is actually happening than composing a verse about how the forest loves me.

The classic heroine often feels like a demand. Be bubbly. Softer. Be more grateful. Be astonished by ordinary animals. Let the world rearrange itself around your goodness. The villain, by contrast, rarely asks you to lie about your temperature. They are allowed to be irritated. They are allowed to want something specific and then pursue it with unpretty competence. They notice the machinery. They do not pretend the castle is kind just because the lighting is flattering.

That is the real seduction. Not evil. Attention.

Heroes in the old template are frequently written as if awareness itself were a moral failing. To see the cost of the system, to name the bargain, to refuse the song—that is framed as corruption. Villains get to keep their eyes open. They get strategy. They get a private language. They get the dignity of not having to make every feeling edible for an audience of woodland creatures.

I do not actually want to poison the kingdom. I want permission to be complicated without being recast as the problem. I want a character who can love the world and still find it faintly ridiculous. Who can be hopeful and still say, out loud, that this particular meeting, this particular speech, this particular expectation that I will melt at the sight of a deer is nonsense.

There is a version of “relating to the villain” that is just edgelord cosplay. That is not what I mean. I mean the relief of a figure who does not require me to flatten my voice. The heroine’s sweetness is often a costume the story needs her to wear so the plot can stay simple. The villain’s sharpness is frequently just the story admitting that people have interiors.

My optimism is not the singing kind. It is the kind that survives the eye-roll. It is the kind that swears, then keeps going. It looks at the squirrel and thinks: impressive little opportunist, truly, and also I am not having a conversation with you. That is not bitterness. That is proportion.

So yes. Give me the one in the darker coat. Not because I want the throne (although I do). Because I want the room to be a person who can see the joke, keep the hope, and still refuse to perform a duet with the wildlife. The forest can keep its chorus. I will take the character who notices the wiring.

September 24, 2026
The Year I Would Relive Has Not Happened Yet

If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

An open window reveals a moonlit valley while a cozy chair invites quiet reading.

I keep turning that sentence over in my hand like a stone I found on the beach. Smooth. Heavy. A little warm from being held too long. Most people, when asked which year they would live again, reach backward. The summer they were twenty-two. The winter everything still felt possible. The year before the diagnosis, or the accident, or the slow unfolding of whatever it was that rearranged their life. I understand the impulse. I have my own catalog of almosts and if-onlys. There always seems to be something I would like to change.

I would never do it though.

Glowing coral and gold lines converge across a moody blue textured background, evoking movement and inspiration.

I say that with the same half-superstitious firmness I use when I knock on wood. Everything happens for a reason. I have repeated the phrase so many times it has worn a groove in me. Some days it feels like wisdom. Other days it feels like a lullaby I repeat so I will not scream. Both can be true at once. The body learns to live with contradictions the way it learns to live with weather.

Still, I froth at the mouth when I envision my future.

A vintage chair rests beside an open window as sheer curtains drift in the sunlight.

Not the glittering, cinematic future. Not the one with applause or sudden wealth or a body that has never known limitation. Just a simple little life. Ordinary in the way sunlight on a kitchen table is ordinary, which is to say: almost unbearable in its tenderness if you look at it long enough.

With him.

The sentence does not need embroidery. With him. The two words sit in the center of the picture like a house with the lights already on. I see the unremarkable days first: grocery lists, the sound of an espresso machine, the particular way someone who loves you says your name when they are only half awake. I see the quieter victories. Getting through a morning without bargaining with pain. Walking a little farther than last month. Laughing at something stupid and not having to pay for it later with exhaustion. A life that does not constantly announce itself as a project of endurance.

And without disability.

A luminous winding path flows through a dreamlike blue landscape toward the rising sun.

I write that last part carefully, because I know how it can sound. I mean the specific, private longing for a version of days that do not require so much translation. Days in which my body is not a burden Days in which the body is not the first negotiation. Days in which “simple” is actually simple.

I froth at the mouth thinking about it. The phrase is ugly and exact. Anticipation that is almost feral. Hope that has teeth. I am not serene about the future. I am hungry for it.

An open journal and fresh coffee create a peaceful, sunlit writing retreat.

The paradox is that I would not go back and unscrew the past to get there. I would not trade the particular chain of hours that led me to this exact now, even the hours that hurt. Everything happens for a reason is, in my mouth, less a philosophy than a truce. I will not pretend the suffering was decorative. I will also not pretend it was meaningless. Meaning is something we make afterward, with whatever materials we have left.

So the year I would relive is still ahead of me. It has no date yet. It might look, from the outside, almost dull. A rented apartment or a small house. A person I already know how to love. Mornings that do not begin with inventory. Evenings that end without calculation. The ordinary miracle of a body that cooperates more often than it argues.

I want that year so badly I can taste metal.

A winding path leads through a flower-filled meadow toward a glowing sunrise.

And if it arrives, I will not spend it wishing I were somewhere else. I will try to live it the first time the way people live the years they later want back: imperfectly, gratefully, with both hands.

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

I am still walking toward it.

September 6, 2026
Dinner with F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Allure of Literary Luxury

Which author would you love to have dinner with?

If I were to have dinner with an author, it would be F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because of the obvious masterpiece everyone names first—The Great Gatsby—but because he understood luxury as a temperature, a texture, a way of moving through a room. He did not merely describe wealth. He lived inside its shimmer and its hangover, and he wrote as if both were equally sacred.

A richly appointed library lounge invites quiet reading beneath a glowing chandelier and tall arched windows.

I have never been especially moved by stories that ask me to stay where I already am. Many people prefer fantasy worlds they can visit and leave, or novels that feel “relatable,” which often means ordinary kitchens, ordinary disappointments, ordinary weather. I have always been drawn the other way: toward silk, late hours, expensive mistakes, and the particular loneliness that arrives when the party is still going and you realize you are the only one who notices the light has changed. Fitzgerald paints that picture better than almost anyone. He makes luxury look not like a shopping list but like a climate.

The Great Gatsby is the public cathedral. It is the book of the green light, the orchestra, the rumor. It is magnificent. But The Beautiful and Damned is the private room. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert are not striving toward a dream so much as they are already inside one and slowly ruining the furniture. They are beautiful, idle, certain the future will keep paying their bills because it always has. They drink, they quarrel, they buy a second house they cannot afford because the idea of a gray country house is prettier than the math. They treat inheritance like weather: something that will arrive if you wait long enough in the right clothes. I recognize that hunger. Not the poverty of wanting more, but the more dangerous appetite of people who already have enough to be ruined by taste.

Dried roses, scattered letters, and golden dust create a hauntingly romantic still life.

Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived the same plot in public. Newly famous, they took over hotel lobbies as if the city were a set built for them. They spun in revolving doors, slid down banisters, jumped into fountains, arrived at parties on all fours, locked a jazz band in a bedroom and made it play until morning. They crossed the Atlantic with too much luggage and rented villas above the Mediterranean because New York had become too loud and too expensive for the kind of living they refused to scale back. He wrote about living on practically nothing a year while still ordering champagne. The contradiction is the point. Luxury, in Fitzgerald, is never only possession. It is performance, mood, and the brief conviction that beauty can postpone consequence.

A warmly lit fireside table is prepared with champagne, flowers, and handwritten invitations.

That is why I want dinner with him rather than a seminar on his most famous novel. I do not want the monument. I want the man who knew that parties are intimate precisely because they are large, that the very rich are different because they possess early and grow soft and cynical in places the rest of us stay hard, that “eat, drink, and be merry” is both a philosophy and a slow form of suicide. I want the writer who could make a cloth-of-gold dress and a platinum ring feel like plot. Zelda once advertised The Beautiful and Damned by listing the clothes she could buy if enough people purchased the book. That is not a joke to me. That is the aesthetic I live toward: art that funds the next beautiful object, beauty that funds the next sentence.

Dinner would not be modest. I imagine a table that looks casually expensive and is, in fact, carefully so: low light, heavy silver, something cold and gold in the glass, a room that smells of perfume, cigarette smoke, and citrus from a bowl no one will eat. He would talk too much and then go quiet in a way that makes you lean in. He would notice the cut of a jacket before the content of a confession. He would be funny about money and then suddenly exact about it. He would understand, without needing it explained, why some of us do not want stories that return us to the life we already know how to survive. We want stories we can project onto the life we are trying to inhabit: the late dinner, the borrowed glamour, the risk that beauty is both the prize and the damage.

The Beautiful and Damned is that projection. It is not a cautionary tale I read in order to become more responsible. It is a mirror I hold up when I want to see the version of myself that still believes atmosphere is a moral category. Anthony and Gloria fail, of course. They waste time, money, youth, and each other. Fitzgerald knew the bill always comes. He just refused to pretend the evening was not worth it while the candles were still lit.

More stories about that, please. Not more worlds of dragons or more kitchens of quiet endurance. More rooms where the lighting is unforgivable, the clothes are too fine for the bank balance, the conversation is half seduction and half autopsy, and someone at the table still believes that if you live beautifully enough, the universe might keep the lights on a little longer. Fitzgerald made that belief look like literature. I would like to sit across from him and see whether, for one night, it still looks like a plan.

August 30, 2026
Coincidences: Are They Signs from the Universe?

What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

The Universe Doesn’t Whisper Twice

I do not believe in coincidences. Not the small ones that make you smile and shrug, and not the large ones that rearrange your life. If something is meant to happen, it will happen. It will find the crack in the schedule, the delayed train, the wrong turn that somehow becomes the right street. It will arrive wearing the face of chance so that those who need to dismiss it can do so without discomfort. I have stopped dismissing it.

Everything is a sign from the universe. Not in the loud, cinematic way people imagine when they talk about destiny. There is no booming voice, no sky writing, no sudden spotlight. It is quieter than that. A whisper. A particular song playing at a particular moment. A sentence overheard in a café that answers a question you have not yet asked out loud. A person appearing in your path with the exact piece of information, or the exact kindness, or the exact friction you needed. Most people walk past these things. They call them random. They keep their eyes on the ground and their minds on the next task. The whisper is easy to miss when you have already decided the world is only noise.

I used to miss it too. I treated life like a series of isolated events that happened to me rather than through me. Something fell through and I called it bad luck. A conversation ended abruptly and I called it timing. Even my brain injury somehow managed to lead me to my twin flame. I could just shrug it off and say that my brain blew up because of a bad diet, stress, bad luck, a body that finally called in a debt I had been ignoring. That version of the story is tidy. It keeps the event inside the realm of cause and effect I can name. It lets me treat the injury as an accident that interrupted my life instead of a rupture that redirected it. But if I tell it that way, I erase the chain that followed. I would never have found myself scrolling my life away in the aftermath, half-present, half-searching, desperate for a face or a voice that felt like home. I would never have been cracked open enough to look that hard. I would never have been still enough, or raw enough, or lonely enough in the particular way that made recognition possible when it finally arrived.

Dried leaves, dark berries, and fine threads create a moody autumn-inspired still life.

The injury did not feel like a gift when it happened. It felt like theft. It took language, stamina, certainty, the old version of myself that knew how to move through a day without having to invent the day from scratch. And still, something in that wreckage made a path. Not because suffering is noble. Not because pain is always a teacher we should thank on the spot. Because the life I had been living was not going to bring me to that person. The uninjured version of me was too occupied, too armored, too convinced she already knew the shape of her story. The universe did not cause the injury so that a romance could bloom. I do not need the story to be that clean. What I know is simpler and stranger: the injury happened, the searching began, and the person who felt like a missing frequency appeared inside that searching. To call the whole sequence a coincidence would require me to pretend the seeking never mattered.

The more I paid attention, the more the pattern revealed itself. Not a rigid script. Not a promise that every desire will be granted or every wound will be explained. Something subtler: a conversation between the inner life and the outer world. When I am restless, the universe sends restlessness back to me in the form of unexpected delays and unfinished conversations, as if to say, sit with this. When I am ready to move, doors that were locked for months swing open with almost embarrassing ease. People I needed to meet appear in places I had no logical reason to be. Opportunities arrive wearing the clothes of inconvenience. Losses arrive wearing the clothes of protection I only recognize later.

A winding woodland trail emerges from shadow as golden sunlight breaks through stormy clouds.

It is easy to romanticize this and turn it into a slogan. “Trust the universe.” “Everything happens for a reason.” Those phrases can become another way to avoid looking closely. I am not interested in comfort slogans. I am interested in the texture of the moments themselves. The way a certain light falls across a room at the exact second a decision crystallizes. The way a stranger’s offhand comment lodges in the mind and will not leave until you act on it. The way the same number (17,27,37), the same image, the same phrase keeps appearing until you finally stop and ask what it is pointing toward.

Many people fail to notice because noticing requires a kind of stillness that modern life does not reward. We are trained to explain things away. Coincidence is a tidy category. It lets us keep our sense of control. If the meeting was random, then we remain the authors of our story. If the meeting was a sign, then something larger is participating, and that is both comforting and unsettling. It means we are not as separate as we pretend. It means the world is speaking, and we have been talking over it.

I have learned to treat the whisper with more respect. Not superstition. Not the desperate search for meaning in every fallen leaf. A quieter discipline: when something repeats, I listen. When an opportunity arrives wrapped in inconvenience, I consider whether the inconvenience is the point. When a person crosses my path more than once without an obvious reason, I stop assuming it is nothing. Sometimes it is nothing. Sometimes the universe is simply dense with possibility and not every thread is meant for me. Discernment still matters. But I no longer start from the assumption that the thread is accidental.

If something is meant to happen, it will happen. That sentence used to sound passive to me, as if I could sit still and wait for life to deliver itself. I still kind of hate it when my boyfriend approaches our relationship path this way. But it is not an excuse for inaction. It is a recognition that timing has its own intelligence. Effort still matters. Showing up still matters. Doing the work still matters. But the work is not only the visible kind. There is also the work of becoming the kind of person who can recognize the sign when it arrives, and the kind of person who can act on it without needing the entire map first.

The Milky Way glows above a mountain trail traced by flowing light trails.

The universe does not shout. It does not compete with the noise we generate. It waits. It repeats itself politely. It leaves small, persistent traces for those willing to look up from their phones and their plans and their certainty that they already know how the story is supposed to go. Most people will keep walking. That is their right. I have decided I would rather not miss the whisper again.

It has been speaking the whole time. I was simply too busy calling it coincidence.

August 29, 2026