Spinning Like A Girl In A Brand New Dress

I didn't realize it until recently, but I've always seen love as something requiring sacrifice, selflessness, patience, and generosity- to ask for nothing is to be the best person I can be, small and quiet and never in the way, always happy and helpful, self-sufficient and present when desired.

It's only as an adult, now, that I'm beginning to see the selfishness of wanting nothing.

I cut my friend's hair in my kitchen the other day. They wanted a trim and I had the skills, so I offered, and was genuinely excited when they stopped hesitating over "bothering me" and took me up on it. It was a peaceful afternoon, and we had tea and chatted for an hour or more.

My brother and I shared popcorn at the movies a while ago. When I came time to pay, I pulled my card out like a wild western sheriff and slapped it on the machine before he could fight me for it first. The satisfaction was delightful.

Someone called me crying on the phone the other day. Kept apologizing for disturbing me at work, talking about how they were bothering me on my lunch break. I was telling the truth when I told them that really, I was flattered and honored and relieved, knowing that if they were hurting I would know, that I didn't have to worry in silence. It felt good to hear them slowly come down, and to know that they knew it would be better soon, and to hear them laugh wetly on the other end. We're getting together for a visit next week.

It's hard to need things, if you've trained yourself not to. It's hard to want things, when you don't know how to want anymore. Trusting people is difficult, and so is relying on them, but I don't know where I'd be without the people who rely on me.

I've heard a lot of people say, "Nobody will love you unless you love yourself". I've had a lot of thoughts about it. It's not right, but it's not wrong, either, I think.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... I've always taken that to mean, "You will not be lovable until you develop a positive view of yourself as a person".

Now, I think it's sort of inside-out.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... because nobody can show their love to you in a way that you can accept until you treat yourself kindly, and learn what you need, and what you want, and how to ask for it, and then give that vulnerability away.

Love, for me, is someone I ask for a ride to the airport. Whether they end up doing this or not is irrelevant.

it’s about growing up, leaving home, building a life elsewhere, and realizing that return doesn’t restore anything—it only reveals what’s been shifted. the buildings are still there, your old haunts are still there, the people still recognizable, the past still intact in its own way, but something in the way you meet it has changed. you have changed, and in that change, no longer fit in the same way.

what the album keeps circling is not any one moment, but an accumulation: missed conversations that never fully reopen, relationships that continue but subtly drift, versions of yourself that still surface in memory but no longer really exist in the present tense. a yawning gap that forms not in rupture, but in time.

and layered underneath that is something sharper: the way separation isn’t just geographical or relational, but expressive. the voice itself changes. what you want to say doesn’t come out the same anymore—filtered through distance and everything that has happened in between. life lived apart. time that has left everything slightly out of sync with itself.

and so even the attempt to reach becomes something else: not return, but translation. not closure, but articulation across a space that no longer guarantees being heard properly—at all like before.

time doesn’t heal all. success doesn’t overwrite where you came from. leaving doesn’t undo what you still carry. it just changes what you’re able to access, and what only exists now as something you can look at but not step back into.

what emerges is separation as lived condition: the strange experience of loving what you no longer fully belong to, of still recognizing who you were without being able to become that version of yourself again—a version that once fit here, without question.

I'm pleased to hear that your mother has recovered. Oh, yes. My mother was...very much back to her old self. That is a good thing, is it not? Oh, well. No. Yes, but... Well, in her strenghtened state...