may 10, 2026

i’m sitting on my sofa, feeling like i’ve just emerged from some kind of fever dream. it was raining when i woke up in rome this morning and now above my home a thunderstorm is roiling, too. i wonder if they are the same clouds, migrated 500 miles north, or different ones from somewhere else. either way, it is a smearing of the canvas.

the faces of my friends, new and old, flash into my mind. i won’t let them become ghosts, but i’ll admit it’s quiet here. i think of the long walk down a precarious balcony, around the corner to a kitchen buzzing with laughter, sips of mate, and the gentle pangs of guitar strings.

something special happens when you find the people who accept you as you are. when you don’t have to explain yourself, when your bursts of joy are reflected back to you instead of flicked away.

two weeks of feeling like i could be wholly myself seems like it’s healed something in me. some deep cracks across the plaster of my past have been spackled and painted. perhaps some kind of renovation took place, too, because i saw how long-buried layers were illuminated, how they glinted gently with their suggestion of more to excavate.

when you’ve spent your life feeling like you don’t quite fit, the moment when you find a place where you do gives you that, “oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like?” moment.

you are at once convinced life is worth living, yet simultaneously horrified knowing how much time you spent walking in misaligned directions, simply because you never quite knew what you were looking for.

i am starting to understand on a new level what people mean when they talk about the importance of community, which always felt abstract to me. and it’s clearer than ever that we need to fund the arts. we need to fund spaces where people can blossom. our capacity for expansion grows tremendously when we finally see what is possible. when we get an inkling of how beautiful this life can be when we have time to express ourselves and meet others at new levels of depth. when we are empowered to explore the fullest expressions of who we are as creative humans, we create a chain reaction of joy.

in rome, we were gym rats, singers, city crawlers and dreamers. it felt innocent and light and wholesome and pure. it felt like a yell from the universe to keep going: keep finding this! your people are out there, and they’ve spent their lives hoping you exist, too.

i felt love in a new way i never have before. i felt part of something. i felt inspired to create, to collaborate, to contribute my voice to a brilliant hive mind half constructed of pizza and laughter.

there’s nothing sweeter than filling your life with the kind of days you just don’t want to end. but you’ve found them once, and you’ll find them again.

thank you kismetcasa.xyz for everything you do, and for enabling me to contribute to this page of the story.