Lunar New Year

Today, 2/17/2026, marks the start of a Fire Horse Year. I only know this because for the past three months, every phone call with my white-bread friend has included some variation of, “Did you know we are entering a Fire Horse year?” Then, about two weeks ago, social media decided I needed a full-on Fire Horse brainwashing. Honestly, aside from knowing I was born in a Rabbit year and that my mom might be a Rat, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the Chinese lunar calendar that I didn’t read on a red-ink-on-white-paper Chinese buffet placemat. Why so many buffets use the same placemat is clearly some sociological phenomenon—probably a combination of “culturally relevant” and “cheap enough to order in bulk.”

And yet, here we are. A new moon in Aquarius. Lunar new year ushering in a Fire Horse Year. An eclipse. Astrologically, shouldn’t today be… fireworks? Maybe a parade? A small miracle? Nope. Beginnings usually look like making soup, going to work, folding laundry, washing your face, then reading before bed. Beginnings look like absolutely nothing dramatic at all. At least that's what my day looks like today.

Do you ever hear voices in your head? I do. Not the creepy ones from psychological thriller movies—just the ones that read your thoughts aloud like a tiny audiobook narrator. Today, as I read a short story I wrote, the voice said, “I could be a writer.” For about three seconds, I thought, “Wow, that’s a bold claim for February 17th.” Then I laughed. Of course I could be a writer—I literally just read something I wrote. I’m already a writer. 

Beginnings sneak up on you like that. Like a friend clinging to the lunar new year to drag herself out of depression. Like the infinite parade of social media prophets insisting that today—this exact calendar day—everything will be different. But really… we already had it in us. Fire Horse Year or no Fire Horse Year. Beginnings aren’t beginnings. They’re just the same old soup, reheated, with a side of cosmic sweet and sour sauce.

The Student Body

    Within thirty minutes of talking to Jaymie, I knew more about her than she knew about herself. I had met many women like her over the years, most often in a bar just like this one—ground floor of a mid-level hotel, the kind where men wore button-up shirts and chinos but no one wore a suit.  Jaymie described herself and her life in terms of absence: what she hadn’t had, hadn’t experienced, hadn’t done. She had never been outside this city, never had a passport, never held a job other than secretary at her father’s car dealership, never married.

    I had slept with many women like that, and it was comforting to know I could give them an exciting night—something they could keep, revisit, turn over in their minds for years. For me, it was routine: meet someone attractive in a city I was visiting for work. For them, it was once in a lifetime.

Her wide, curious eyes moved over my face, then dropped to my drink.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A martini. Haven’t you had one?”
She shook her head, smiling. “No.”

    Of course not. When would she have? While stapling sales reports for her father? Drinking with the same friends she’d had since high school, all of them circling the same few zip codes? I doubted she’d ever seen a palm tree in person. Probably never been on a plane. I wondered if she could even drive—certainly not a stick shift. She wouldn’t know what to do with my Porsche back home, parked beside my wife’s practical SUV, the one used to shuttle kids from soccer to ballet to school and back again.

    There was something irresistible about that kind of woman—sheltered, impressed by the smallest details, eager to be shown things. She didn’t have to be beautiful. What mattered was she wouldn’t question me. I could tell her anything. I could say martinis originated in Rome, subsidized by the Vatican in the seventeenth century, and she would believe it. She might repeat it someday, recounting the most exciting night of her life: meeting a man in a hotel bar and ending up in his penthouse suite. She would carry the lie without ever suspecting it was one.

“Do you know how martinis were invented?” I asked.
Her face lit up. “No. How?”

_____________________________________________________

    Jessica waited until the man beside her fell asleep. What had he said his name was? Jason? Jeremy? It didn’t matter. It probably wasn’t real. Jaymie wasn’t her name, after all.

    Once he started snoring, she slipped out of bed and gathered her clothes. She glanced around the room and smiled. He was so full of shit—from calling this deluxe room a penthouse to fabricating the history of martinis. He truly seemed to believe she’d never had one before. They were in Milwaukee, not some isolated farming commune.  

    She had certainly preferred other cities, but this year’s International Research Psychology Conference was held here. At least it wasn’t snowing.

    She’d attended just enough sessions to be seen, to shake hands, to ensure her colleagues knew she’d shown up—without getting trapped in Dr. Molorov’s presentation on adolescent vaping typologies or the panel on alcohol and intimate partner violence. The abstracts alone were exhausting. Years of funding, decades of expertise, all circling truths anyone with eyes already knew.

    Conferences looked good on her CV, but they had little to do with the bulk of her work: teaching six sections of Psych 101. Freshmen who didn’t want to be there and business majors who thought one psychology class would turn them into master manipulators. No, Jeremy—it just meant you might vaguely remember that someone once trained pigeons to play ping pong. Oh. That was his name. Jeremy.

    As the elevator descended, she felt a flicker of satisfaction. The sex hadn’t been good, but that wasn’t the point. What she enjoyed was the ease of it—how readily he accepted the version of her he wanted. The act always revealed the same thing: how many men assumed women were sheltered, waiting to be instructed. With a little more time, she probably could have convinced him she couldn’t drive, boil an egg, or open a PDF. He wanted to believe her lies.

    Back in her own room, she showered and dressed. She took the wedding ring from her purse and slid it back onto her finger. She should text her husband.

Long day at the conference, babe. Lots of networking. Think I found a potential collaborator for my next project. Love you. Headed to bed.

He replied immediately: a thumbs-up, a heart.

    She lay down, already dreading the flight home, but ready to be back home in Miami. Before sleeping, she answered a few emails—most earned a copied response directing students to the syllabus. In the morning, she would present her own research, which, if she were honest, mattered no more than most of what surrounded it. Years of studies, grants, students cycled through the lab, all to move understanding forward by the smallest degree.

She turned off the light.
Tomorrow, she would stand, unsure, at a podium, but speak with authority.
Tonight, she had played dumb—and it had worked exactly as expected.

If You Don't Mind Me or the Hole in my Socks

 "We can trust our inner yearnings, the ones we may have stifled in times past. We can realize our hearts' pure desires if we seek guidance."

    You know how they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions? I think it’s safe to say that every relationship I’ve ever had started with a good intention. Once, I even told a therapist about my most shameful hookup, and he simply replied, “It just sounds like the actions of a kind-hearted person.” How did I then hand over my $20 co-pay for that? It was never about the one-night-stand's feelings, but my own? You know—the shame I led the conversation with? Perhaps it was my fault for confiding in a man three times my age with those kinds of emotions. I thought his PhD in psychology would outweigh his gender and age.

    And he wasn’t wrong. Not really. Yeah. At the time, that sexual encounter was charitable. It’s what I thought going into it and what I thought coming out of it. It’s even what I told my friends. That was something—something I held on to.

When exactly did my feet get planted on the road to hell?

    Probably too young. In second grade, I wrote “housewife” on one of those little About Me worksheets under the question, What do you want to be when you grow up? As the only child of a single mother, my understanding of a housewife came from watching Married With Children unsupervised—no adult to say, This show is a little too mature for you. Peggy Bundy was a housewife who didn’t cook, clean, or even like or respect her husband. I could do that for the rest of my life. It seemed far more reasonable than my mother working full-time, going to school full-time, and peppering the few moments in between with standing in a food bank line.

    Even then, I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to be the first in my class to have one, despite being far too awkward—and poor—to afford that kind of attention for a few more years. It was work to craft and carve myself into shapes and personalities that boys found desirable. But even then, it wasn’t enough to keep them. More work was always required to be a woman men wanted to keep.

    In hindsight, it’s a tragedy that every man who ever said he loved me never actually had the chance to love me. They only ever knew a version of me I made palatable enough for him. Of course you love this me—I made her just for you. Like a bespoke suit, she always fit. They never saw the messy tailoring or the scraps of cloth left behind. You know—those pesky, stupid little pieces of me they wouldn’t like anyway. The pieces they didn’t need. Didn’t want. Could be discarded.

    And what can I even say now? That I’m reformed? Absolutely not. Perhaps I am, at present, at my worst: a necktie that can fit comfortably around any man’s neck. Even Windsor-knotted for the last decade, ready to pull loose and unrestricted at any moment—for a husband I cannot explain.

    My twenty-year high school reunion is this year, and even if I were in the same state—or wanted to see any of those people again—I wouldn’t go. My husband would want to come too. I don’t want those two worlds to collide: my husband and the people who remember an eighteen-year-old me. I couldn’t bear him asking, “What? Are you ashamed of me?” 

    The answer isn’t a simple yes or no. I don’t know how to explain a man twice my age and twice my weight to a couple hundred people who are essentially strangers, whose last memory of me is a bright, happy, promising girl.  But, it’s okay, though. I hadn’t wanted to go anyway. Anyone from high school I want to see, I still talk to. My marriage makes sense to the people around me—the ones who’ve been watching my journey down and find the outcome rational. And it's been easy  for new people to take it at face value having never known any other version of me.

    Before you feel too sorry for me, I should confess: this path is exactly where I want to be. For now. That’s why I’m furiously plotting, writing, organizing my thoughts in orbits around how to make this relationship last until he dies—whenever that is. It could be tomorrow. It could be twenty years from now. If I wanted out, I’d be gone. I know all the off-ramps. I’ve used them before. But sometimes the easiest, safest, most comfortable course is straight ahead—navigating by muscle memory alone.

    There used to be a lingering thought of what might have been—what could have been—if earlier in my life I had worried more about simply being myself, and less about becoming what a man needed or wanted at any given time. Maybe there could have been someone I fit beside as-is, off the rack, without a single tuck, trim, or hem altered.

    But that thought has been replaced with a quieter comfort: that after the funeral, after a respectable period of grieving, I might return to all the pieces I discarded in service of another’s whims and wishes. I could patch them together, become as complete an outfit as I can—holes worn in my socks from the miles I trekked—and be wanted just like that. As I was, as I am, and as I will be. A patchwork of my good and even my self-serving intentions.

Your Stalwart Girl.

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

—Octavia E. Butler

I don’t lack punishment; I lack discipline. I have probably been punished for every choice and action I’ve ever made in my life—even the good and right ones. What I lack is the kind of discipline jocks talk about: the ability to set a goal and train the body and mind toward it, to orient oneself steadily in a single direction. 

My accomplishments so far feel like waking up, hungover, inexplicably at graduation, having learned nothing, yet still having a diploma slid into my hand after a hearty handshake with a dean whose name I don’t know, the stamp from last night’s bar still wet on my wrist. True story.

I’ve been like this since I was a child. No rules. No boundaries. No organization. No structure. Never had a curfew or a chore. Parents like moody roommates that pay more than half the bills. So perhaps it’s unbelievable, even to myself, when I say that I am trying.

 

That’s the crux of my problem: how to convert a wayward child, bouncing from distraction to distraction, into a grown woman built on a foundational ethos of study. How to do something I don’t want to do in the moment—even temporarily—in service of something greater.

What would I even want at the end of all this, if not the easiest, closest thing, as I have always pursued? What is it like to be running toward something instead of away from something? And there are other questions I don’t need to answer yet—but will, eventually. I'm all questions and no answers right now.

But, just give me time. Baby, I’ll be your stalwart girl. Just give me time. I will figure it out. I don’t know discipline yet, but I know I can’t mess this up anymore.

Aperture

    Next time you see me, don’t be surprised by how different I seem. By the end of the month, I’ll bear stretch marks from all this spiritual growth. My aperture is widening, letting in more light, like a pupil learning the dark—pulling shapes from shadow.

    Don’t feel too bad if you don’t recognize me. These days, I scarcely recognize myself. I reread my journal—not so old—and meet a self from not long ago. I blush, uneasy in the presence of this stranger’s thoughts. Who is this? Not me. Not anymore.

    She was forlorn, studying all the ways she might fold herself into the corners of your life. Hansel and Gretel, following a scatter of crumbs—proof that something had passed this way, that it might pass again. Each small fact about you became a tool: how could she shape herself to slip a little closer, inch by inch, into your orbit? The sweet delusion that she might someday become something you would want. Somewhere in that careful craft, she vanished.

    Her thoughts and actions bent toward becoming someone you’d choose. It never—not once—occurred to her that she might already be whole, intact, meant for someone she hadn’t yet met.

    I couldn’t read much more about this former self—an apparition lingering at the grave’s edge, dead but not yet gone. Gathering the artifacts of who I was before I met you, the image shifted. The foreground sharpened; the background softened into blur. With the aperture adjusted, a figure emerged—steady, undeniable. I had always been here. I had only forgotten how to bring myself into focus.

Turn Hope into Faith

“We have seen too much defeatism, too much pessimism, too much of a negative approach. The answer is simple: if you want something very badly, you can achieve it. It may take patience, very hard work, a real struggle, and a long time; but it can be done. That much faith is a prerequisite of any undertaking.”

—Margo Jones

faith /fāTH/ noun

1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.

On the phone, my friend said, “I’m just disappointed that I got so hopeful.”

At the time, I couldn’t quite relate. I have been disappointed in myself plenty—regretful, resentful, angry, almost always turned inward. But I had never felt disappointment over being hopeful. Hope, to me, had always felt like a virtue, or at least a harmless survival instinct. Something necessary to wake up tomorrow.

Her comment stayed with me for the rest of the day and sent me into a quiet meditation on hope itself—specifically, on how much I enjoy being hopeful, and how much I value being seen that way. A few years ago, in a moment of questionable judgment, I recorded myself reading aloud from my journals and sent the audio to a girl I barely knew. I remember apologizing, worried that I sounded too negative. She told me I didn’t sound negative at all. I sounded hopeful. She said it felt like, at my core, I was hopeful in every situation.

Hearing this gave me a deep, private satisfaction. I continued to repeat it to myself often: At my core, I am hopeful in every situation.

Even in situations where no rational person would have held out hope, I did. I clung to it stubbornly, convinced that optimism itself was a kind of moral strength.

Lately, though, I have begun to feel disappointed in hope itself. I’m not sure if this is what my friend meant that Friday afternoon, but hope now feels insufficient—too soft, too passive. It waits. It wishes. It leaves room. Hope holds space for a “no” it pretends not to secretly expect.

I have hoped for many things, and some of them came to pass. But lately, hope has also left me feeling stuck, like struggling in quicksand: the harder I hope, the deeper I sink. It feels as though hope has worn out its welcome, and I need to transform it into something more substantial——something with weight and consequence. Like water turned into wine. Like cream skimmed from milk, churned into butter, and spread thickly on bread. 

Something with weight and consequence. Something that acts rather than waits. Something like faith.

I am not religious, but religion speaks often of faith, and faith seems to be hope sharpened into a blade. Fortified hope.  Hope without contingency. Belief without hesitation. An insistence rather than a wish. Certainty. In this sense, faith becomes almost coercive toward reality itself. Make-it-so manifestation.

Consider the difference in language. You tell someone you are going to do something, and they respond, “I hope you do.” Now imagine they say instead, “I have faith you will.” The first allows for failure; the second pushes it away.

Hope, it seems, carries a quiet admission of doubt. We hope for the best, but somewhere beneath that hope is the suspicion that the best may not arrive. Faith, by contrast, insists on assured belief even in the absence of evidence.  

I don’t want to doubt. Even if belief makes me foolish. Regardless of if the thing I put my faith in never comes to pass. I want to believe fully, with the conviction of the most faithful pilgrim—certain, unwavering, and unashamed—and to live as though that belief requires something of me in return.

As the Bible says, "Faith without works is dead" sounds an awful lot like "Faith without work is just hope."

By the Throat

I accept the worst
and still expect the best.
But the lukewarm
I will spit from my mouth—
not one tepid second
as I take the future by the throat
and let it choke on my refusal.

The future will come.
But my patience is not ash;
I will not swallow it quietly.
I will not bow to delay again.

What I was warned of has learned my name.
I press myself into what will be
and force it to answer.
Let what comes next be clean and unbroken.
I will not soften—I have carried fire in my bones
longer than most widows know how to mourn.