Dear reader,



I regret to inform you the me you once knew has now died. I think about the girl I used to be and she doesn’t live here anymore. I’ve stolen all her memories and I’ve tricked her into telling me all of her secrets and I killed her with a candlestick in the rose room’s bathtub. She died peacefully amongst the bubbles of shallow waters. She died in a state of soothing calmness. She died in a blue bathroom.



The noose around her neck was held in her hands only. I pulled the strings and yanked the ropes. In the end, it was an ending of me. I have always known when to kill, when to die and when to bleed out. I did all three and birthed a new me, nine months later. What was once one is now two at the end of my nine. 



I’ve been thinking too much again. I’ve been a little girl, imagining her future world. I’ve been thinking about who I want to be and it’s not who I was. It’s not the place I landed before my world exploded. It was time to come clean. To wipe the grease of New York’s concrete off the skin that contains the blood of my grandfathers hard work. 



I’ve been thinking about how I got here, how any of us got here. To this place that feels like we’re playing on a field that’s below the earth and under the ideas we had about love and life as a child. I’m thinking about I didn’t dream of a wedding as a young girl. I dreamed of a family to call my own. A family of my own creation, using my own womb, under my own house. I wanted what my mother had before I ever wanted what my father had. I wanted a house to play with my children in. I wanted to play dress up with the clothing my mother made me. I wanted a love like the one I have with my brother. A love that knows no bounds because it transcends time and place. It is beauty without conditions. It is loving someone when they look their worst and loving them when they can’t love themselves. A love that doesn’t wane with the tests of time passing by - it grows stronger. A love that fights. A fighter for a wife. A father who fights for family. A love like no other. 



I’m thinking about what it means to be a woman now and what it meant to be an ancient woman. I’m thinking about how my body doesn’t look like the ones on the internet but its shape fills every gallery space in museums all over the world. A womanly figure of beauty, love, bread, water and wine. I dream of a holy world. The one my grandmother told me all about in the basement kitchen of her three story apartment in the bronx.



As I walk up the stairs from her living room to the pink bathroom upstairs, I watch the pictures of family and I see the figurines of religious belief. I think about how there is something higher, there’s something above and not only below. There is light to be shined on top of us and darkness to be felt and everything at the center is the heart of a city. I marvel at my surrounding as I was my hands clean and grab the pink towel to dry off. With pink roses all around me, I think about love for the first time when I am twelve years old. 



I knew brides wore white but I still hadn’t dreamt of a wedding. I’d worn the white costume dress and I kissed the stuffed animal dog as I said “I love you” but I still hadn’t dreamt of a wedding. I was just beginning to dream about a love like no other. At twelve years old, I was just beginning to learn about my father on the long drives to play sports. I was just beginning to dream about a partner that could love me the way my father loves me. Beauty without conditions. A love that knows no bounds. A love like a baby being born from the woman you love. 



I’ve been thinking too much. As I float in the land in between flesh and bones, a mother’s womb, the moon moves in the dark of night, as I lay bleeding in the tub of my own shallow waters I blacken like the center of my hazel eyes. A flame alights from the ashes of my body suspended in bloody dark waters beneath the bubbles of life and all I can think about is the glowing orb of a lasting love hanging in the evening sky.

🕊️