Writing With Light
Where do you go when novelty gets old?
Everyone seems to be both tortured and motivated by lasts. Enjoy every meal like it’s your last. Live each day like it’s your last. Love like it’s your last.
But I’m preoccupied with firsts.
ROME
I’m in Rome for the second time for a layover. The first time I was here I fell in love with Pigneto, an eastern suburb. I offered photos to a restaurant and promised the owner I’d see her again one day, when she opened her second location in New York.
I was running half-marathons in every new country I visited. I decided it would be a good use of my budget (and invincibility complex) to run in Adidas - a decision that resulted in IT Band Syndrome. I played soccer with some children on the street, ordered a pinsa and went home with my waiter. I returned home at sunrise and felt a breeze that made me realize I was over my ex - and the one before him, and the one before him.
It was one of those days that make life feel long. You yearn for it and it yearns right back.
What I most remember about that trip was looking out the airplane window and feeling something I haven’t felt since. There’s nothing like traveling when you’re young, my grandma put perfectly over the phone. Youthful novelty. The effervescent curiosity of the openhearted, undergoing those great and irrevocable firsts. Placing the body, mind, and spirit in a new corner of the world, and seeing what surfaces.
I was 19 when I saw Europe for the first time.
Now I’m 25, and blessed and bothered to say, over and over, that I’ve been here before.
MADRID
My favorite Spanish phrases this week: No hay prisa. No tenemos prisa. We’re not in a hurry. There’s no rush.
Es curioso que no apreciemos del todo a los corazones amables hasta que nos lastima uno cruel. Busco personas con corazones amables en este momento de mi vida. Y las estoy encontrando.
I went salsa dancing at La Cucaracha with a Costa Rican friend I met clubbing in Madrid years before. We’ve had a sweet international friendship ever since - lending a couch, calling from Rio. There was a dance competition and we placed low (fue mi culpa) but two of his Puerto Rican and Venezuelan friends won a bottle of Don Julio, which we passed around like little baby birds.
And people were kind, which matters to me more now.
PARIS
Dim, orange window light pressed against a deep, navy sky. A ray from the Eiffel Tower circling, and guiding your attention over the city, seen from below but begging you to wonder what might be seen from above.
The morning sun, low and beating down on the people and their storefronts, their little plots of land, vignettes, vertical, passing bread, a row of portraits; the streets of Paris.
Fast evenings, slow mornings, prosciutto, prosciutto, prosciutto.
Every gesture is quaint; humble. The toilet paper holder suggests the same - it need not brace for American force. We make our cars big and industrial, it seems, so as to handle us when we slam their doors.
I can spot an American from a mile away. In the place of any willingness to adapt to a place is instead a loud expectation that a place adapt to them. The English are similar, Germans too. Sometimes Australians. If they’re not in a Starbucks, you can find them in an international cafe that caters to the rising hegemony of digital nomadism, in a Canva font.
I smoked my first cigarette in Paris on June 20th, 2026. It was today. I’ve smoked dozens of times before, if not hundreds, bumming cigarettes here and there, mostly in Europe on nights like these. But I never fully inhaled, until today. I let the carcinogen move through my mouth and throat and lungs and blood. I don’t know what changed.
I guess I want to live while I’m alive.
I’m not afraid to get tattoos anymore; I’m not so precious about purity. I’ve been many places, done many things, and been many people in my almost 10,000 days on earth and I’m okay to look like it - I’m okay to feel like it. Life in your mid-20s feels incredibly long and unspeakably short.
I’m at the point where, if I’m going to smoke a cigarette in Paris, I’m really going to smoke a cigarette in Paris.
IBIZA
On the road to our lavish agriturismo, gifted by a guilty conscience to my cousin, Ibiza lit something in me. The experience of something new. A new landscape, a new culture, a new accent, and a new taxi ride:
¿Dónde vais? Asked our driver. She used vosotros and played Teddy Swims and Coldplay.
The sun is setting on the island, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a palm tree in Europe before. It reminds me of Miami, although I’ve never been. Miami or Las Vegas, but mediterranean, like Greece, with white, square homes and blue accents. Spain is felt, and France, Mexico, and Hawaii.
My cousin used one word to describe the people on the flight from Paris to Ibiza: soulless. We did what you’d expect us to do in Ibiza: club. But I’m sick of the partying because after three years of looking, I saw what is behind the curtain: nothing.
Not just nothing, but a vacuum of emptiness, with rhinestones falling off. The secret behind its mystery is an illusion of exclusivity, and a promise of everything it lacks.
I heard a whisper in that taxi while I watched the sky soften so sweetly over this dry, mediterranean landscape: Morocco. I hadn’t expected it. I hadn’t even thought of it - I had thought my next trip would be to Asia: Japan or Thailand. But it was Morocco.
My cousin and I talked about it over dinner. We had originally planned to roadtrip through the south of France. But we had each traversed Europe forwards, backwards, and sideways, and although it would’ve been new because it would’ve been us, it would have also been… familiar. And familiarity seems to be my biggest rival at the moment, with novelty as my greatest friend.
She was admittedly relieved to hear about this whisper, and told me it was time for her to go home anyway. Go, she said.
Then, with a view of that Balearic desert and a glass of wine in hand, she asked me about life. She’s my younger cousin, a sagittarius as well, so our lifelong dynamic has been teacher-student. But now we’re both swimming in the pool of adulthood; the years keep cycling. Her questions were solid gold, but I have run out of things to say.
Maybe I could’ve strung something together, but it wouldn’t have been felt. With someone who listens, either my words are meaningful, or I won’t speak at all.
In some seasons, the plot is strong, I found myself saying. In others, it’s soft. A cycle of becoming, and unraveling, so that you can become again.
I didn’t know I needed to hear it. I thanked her for bringing it out in me. I realized I’ve been unraveling while trying to hold myself together for a while now.
I want to tear the script apart. Start over, clean slate. I want to stop writing forever and then maybe when I sit down to write again I will have something to say that feels worthwhile, something that feels true. Maybe this is it. But even if it’s not, at least I’m still in the ring, curious and unfinished.
MOROCCO
I don’t think the wonder of air travel will ever be lost on me, I thought from my window seat, looking over the African continent for the first time.
A father from New Zealand offered to take a pair of my shoes so that I wouldn’t have to pay Ryanair’s extra bag charge. I ran into him and his family again after currency exchange, while ordering a taxi. He politely reminded me about modesty in Morocco, and I threw on a long overshirt and wore it almost every day, not because I felt unsafe, but because I wanted to show respect.
They offered to share their taxi and tipped the driver to take me near my accomodation. There, I walked up to the entrance of the Medina, the historic, old town, which reminded me in many ways of the Brazilian favela. I met Mohammed, a young man from Tangier who runs the building I was staying in with his father. We went to the roof where he taught me a few phrases in Arabic and gestured out over the water.
That’s Spain, he pointed, and behind that mountain is Portugal - Lisboa. His eyes lit up and moved his hand from right and left: Tangier is where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean.
I reflected on how both my taxi driver and Mohamed speak Arabic, Spanish, French, and English. Tangier really does feel like the center of the world. Boats docked at the port below glistened with multicolored lights and seagulls flew overhead. We looked around at the homes stacked on top of one another in this historic, and culturally rich neighborhood. The coastal wind blew and I felt a chill for the first time in a long time. I was in a new place that was not quite Europe and not quite Africa and entirely a part of the Arab world; the Maghreb. We reveled: him at home, and me far from it.
A tangier blue. A cat sleeping on a roof. A prayer heard over speakers. A memory: sufism. A phrase: you deserve more of this. A cigarette from Paris, my last one, I promise. A view of Spain from the African continent. An hour of wordless soccer with a Moroccan boy, my neighbor. A sleepless nap. A tear, a diamond. Blue again.
I was having a mint tea with dozens of Moroccans along an overlook in the Medina. A few cafes lined a long walkway, and cats and kittens crossed the ledge that served as a collective table. I was writing down Arabic phrases I had learned that day, when I heard my name.
I turned to see Soufiane, a friend I made yesterday at his family restaurant at the end of that walkway. He was on a motorbike. Are you busy? He asked. No! Come sit, I said. He is 28, and a restaurant server and history teacher and lives with his parents outside of Tangier. We had virgin mojitos and rode around the city. We went west along the coast and shared a Nutella crepes and cigarettes along the water, near the food trucks where locals hang out.
We spoke Spanish mostly: ¿Los niños no duermen aqui, no? I asked. The children were playing soccer at midnight. No, nadie duerme en esta ciudad. No one sleeps in Tangier.
He drove me back and I got us lost but pretended I was near my place. He dropped me off and I successfully meandered the labyrinth with no GPS signal and complete trust in my internal compass.
Nights like these make me think I was born to travel. But as I read and write now, mornings like this make me think I was born to show. To go, to ask, to learn, and to inform. To share these experiences, because they don’t feel isolated or singular. They feel like a piece of the universe experiencing itself; as if that which is personal is international, and that which is international is personal. And it all is belonging to all of us - everyone. And I’m just a vessel for this ellusive truth and collective experience, perpetually curious, writing with light.
I don’t think I’ve experienced a full moon quite like this one. Hundreds of seagulls swarming, and the wind, ceaseless and unnerving. It opened my door and rattled my windows. It scared me, and maybe it normally would’ve have if my mom hadn’t called, worried as she sometimes gets when I travel alone. I was asked if I had a husband twice tonight and a man told me not to stand outside the mosque.
How does it feel to be a distraction from God? My friend Ryan asked when I told him. His girlfriend had a similar experience here, saying that, being pretty feels like a privilege in New York, but a sin in Morocco. Ryan replied, Now you know how it feels to be Black.
A young Moroccan girl, trying to sell souveniers to tourists, pointed to the crucifix on a bracelet. Christian! Christian! she said.
I didn’t like what I wrote today. It was like I was writing a script loosely based off my last movie, and the one before that. Another sequel. I was on the back of a motorcycle in a new country last night, and as cool as that sounds to some part of me, I thought to myself, we’ve seen this movie before. We are always on a train, the next train, a train again. I’m sorry, I keep wanting to say. To whom and for what I don’t know.
I read something recently, something about the “unenlightened philosopher.” The one with a library of knowledge, a priori1. The one who recognizes everything and has little sense of curiosity. The all-knowing one, perpetually unsurprised, who hasn’t walked the streets they wax so poetically and politically about. They speak of foreign danger without ever having feared anything worthwhile. Or maybe they have, but have since forgotten - like a heart that once broke but healed too quickly, and therefore not completely. Their responses don’t seem wise anymore. So sound, so whole, recycled, and finished.
But nothing is finished for the living.
I reflected on a new feeling emerging - the feeling of wanting to stay, not necessarily in Morocco, just to stay anywhere long enough to call it home. And to grow roots and build something meaningful as a product of the staying. A feeling accompanied by the beginnings of a promise that my next chapter will be more dedicated. I have been so focused on expansion, and now I am truly craving depth. I’d like to have a dog, I thought. Go back to school, do lasting and meaningful work, commit to partnership. I’m 25 now, which isn’t old but it isn’t as young as I was and maybe I will never be ready for some things so maybe I am ready now.
Tonight, I am reborn. I say it all the time as if it’s a first. Maybe one of these times it will be true. Or maybe, in some subtle, nameless, or senseless way, it is true, every time.
On my last night in Morocco I danced on the roof, like I had in my first apartment in New York, and my second, and third, and fourth. An eternity of rooftops to offer a first dance.
LOS ANGELES
It’s family time. I went to help my grandparents, who just moved to an assisted-living community in Orange County. We saw comedy night on the bulletin and went.
Aging sneaks up on you, said the comedian. I felt it this morning, when my body made the same sounds as my coffee maker.
An older woman left a voice memo recording in her purse. The recent text read: Glad to hear your mom is improving! One day at a time.
I was running errands with my grandma while she scheduled another MRI on the phone. Over dinner at the clubhouse with a friend, she said: we lost him too, last week. Researching a cremation service in the kitchen, it wrote: All-inclusive cremation $995. No hidden fees. 24/7 support. Affordable, stress-Free Cremation. Call anytime.
After a 20-hour journey from Morocco, I had an interesting conversation with my Uber driver from LAX. His name was Abbey and he moved from Iran to the U.S. 20 years ago to become a film score composer. He hasn’t been back since. He gave up everything to pursue music.
You have to choose, he said. Heaven or the western world.
Then he said,
And heaven is only a promise.
I used to think meaningfulness was to be found, sought out for, somewhere out there. But it’s here, and it’s now, among the novelty and familiarity and memento mori2. It’s everywhere between the first and last.
A seagull suspended, against the stars, close enough to touch. I couldn’t help but think it wanted to know me. I’m not who I was. Chain smoking in Morocco, dizzy and delighted, relentlessly curious, writing a history, writing with light, on a long page or a new one.
And radically unfinished, for as long as I live.
A priori ('from the earlier') and a posteriori ('from the later') are Latin phrases used in philosophy and linguistics to distinguish types of knowledge. Theoretically known, versus experientially known.
Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning 'remember you must die'. Memento mori is an artistic symbol or trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.