Flourish by Olivia

This is not the version of this newsletter I intended to write, after the better part of a year away from writing about my life with any semblance of an audience. That version went something like this: New York is hard, but it’s everything I ever dreamed, I swear. Just look around! See the cherry blossoms in spring, hear the three-piece band playing jazz into the gold-green night, drink Chardonnay on your fire escape and marvel at what a younger you would think of your life now.

Long time, no newsletter, huh? I’d like to think I’ve had a few pretty good excuses for being MIA, including becoming an aunt to the most perfect little girl, and embarking on a long-awaited road trip spanning six states, five national parks, 3,000 miles and two weeks of much, much needed vacation. The points I wanted to hit along the way — Tucson, Marfa, White Sands National Park — had been clear for months, as was the final destination: Austin, Texas. Somewhere different, somewhere new.

It’s the shoulder season, those languid last few weeks of August into September, not quite summer according to the calendar and back-to-school sales, but still far too humid to be fall. The sticky-hot last gasps of an unbearably shapeless summer have made New York City feel like the tropical terrarium exhibit at the zoo, and I, for one, am fed up with figuring out how to dress for it.

I am relearning how to speak in Spanish, and how to write in English. It has been years since I have done much of either, and I am rusty at both. My Spanish comes out stilted and childlike, and in the moments when my mind goes blank I feel mute, utterly helpless, empty. I desperately will the words to come to me as effortlessly as they once did, having spent the better part of a decade neglecting communication I was once quite good at in favor of things that seemed more important at the time.

Where did I leave you? Back in Texas, I suppose, in the yawning, cicada-soundtracked early days of July. There was two-stepping and the best tacos of your life, hot springs and hikes on the green belt, humidity that felt like the most comforting warm embrace. There were easy friendships and instant connections, plans to stay into the fall, patio drinks and pedal steel guitars and a life in which I wore cowboy boots without irony. But then there was 7/7, already always a banner day in my brain.

About a month ago, sitting cross-legged on the grass during a blue summer dusk in Central Park, I looked up at the pencil-thin skyscrapers and the papery sky—and noticed for the first time dark streaks floating across my eyes. Disconcerted, I chalked it up to the seasonal pollen floating like confetti through the park that made my eyes feel like sandpaper.

For months I have meant to write about winter, and now it’s nearly spring. But then, this was a winter in the truest sense: grueling, bitter, relentlessly dark. No shortcuts, no escape routes — the only way out was through. Maybe it’s best viewed in hindsight anyway, drawing back the curtains to shed light on these shapeless, endless months I’m trying to parse meaning from even still.

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ―Mary Oliver Summer, as we typically imagine it, is a time for reveling in the lushness of life; verdant greenery, long, syrupy days and endless balmy nights. It symbolizes the fruits of our labor, our reward for surviving the endless gray annals of winter and spring.