September 17, 2025

I have been thinking a lot about the flattening of things. You all remember Flat Stanley? A bookshelf fell on a kid and he turned paper-thin. An assignment we had in elementary school was to take Flat Stanley on an adventure. He traveled to the backyard investigating the critters, off to Target to buy wares, and even ended up in an amusement park. The records of these adventures are probably lost in one of our moves. His story represented something about my dream. The frame captured everything. At the time, I was living a less than glamorous life. I was the kid who was moving across the suburb, sometimes being able to afford a house other time not. When we moved into a house that was a block away from my friend’s house, I was so excited to take a school bus. The issue was that I could not seem to get the documents in order, so I was stuck waiting for my Dad at drop off. In one of these moves I was in an apartment. In the fifth grade while reading a book set in New York, my teacher asked a class of thirty of us who lives in an apartment in a way to engage us with our lived experience. I raised my hand and looked around. It turns out I was the only one. All the apartment buildings in this suburb are closer to the train tracks, and my mom always had a way of making sure we stayed in the same school. On my way out that day, two kids said, “I’m sorry I hope you get better and have a house like us.” Months later when we did for a few months, to celebrate my brother and I jumped around because we finally were on the ground floor and had no downstairs neighbors to worry about. Flat Stanley deserved a house and a white-picket fence. He deserved the yellow school bus and the merry go round. He deserved it all. I wanted to present Flat Stanley the way I wanted to be perceived. So, there I went with my mom’s point-and-shoot and did so.

September 27, 2025

Today they took a journalist. Yesterday they fired the FBI officers who kneeled during George Floyd protests. The “good” ones are gone. It is a weird feeling seeing from afar. I tell myself I know what is real and what is not, but I feel suspended. I wonder what I will think of myself looking back at this moment. I wonder with the weight of history, what will they say of me. I feel like my body is the sand, blown away, present everywhere watching, but nevermore. Me the voyeur, at the bathhouses barely grazing, but never one of them. The fear is there, always of the microscopic, macrotopic, but never of the “right-here.”

This week, my mom came home in a fit. A woman threatened to call ICE on her because she apparently over-charged for an $80 insurance policy. My mom is fully Syrian, from Argentina, and speaks English with an accent. It was the first time I heard my Mom be openly racist. “Sometimes you meet people and you think yes Black people deserve what happened to them.” She always said it starts in the house and I am her product. I wonder now how tolerant I was raised? I never knew there was true difference in this world until I left.

September 28, 2025

The only advice I seem to get these days is to not read the news. Can you change it… no? Then why do you care and waste your time? I get in bouts with my Mom because I read the news and bringing in the storm alone is no simple homecoming. She demands me to be happy, choose something that brings me happiness regardless of what is happening. Insulated sweetness. Climate change, oh well, disappearances, oh well how does it affect you? Palestine, oh well what can we do? My issue is that I care too much and do not do enough. Starving that piece of myself means to not look to closely at how this world was built, take it for granted. Fall back into myself and self-improve. Pour into myself, like concrete that needs setting. This is not the time to think—bide my time and see what’s next. Keep my cards close and build the scaffolds for the next step. Breathe deeply and move on in that insulated sweetness.

October 1, 2025

I am going on a date tomorrow. I was tested. I am simply tired. Please rest James.

October 9, 2025

I went on the date. Then my great aunt died. I saw him again, and then once more. I did not click with him, but I am not sure if it was because of where my head is or simply because there was no romance. The handful of awkward silences and apologies for existing as myself led me to tell him I did not feel a romantic connection. He blamed himself but in truth maybe it was me, but I am sick of excuses. A small death, a road that will never be traveled, and our intimacies held and let out.

I went on a long bike ride with oldest friend today. He spent his whole life doing this, the going along the busy road and cruising fast downstream. My front brake is screwed so I took things a tad bit slower. His favorite thing he said, was being able to ride in all the streets and smell the smells of each house. The curries and the roasts—only for a split second and then finding ourselves back into the drone of tires on asphalt. Even with a nose chained around my throat I forget that it’s important to smell, especially here of all places.

Oh, the Other eats too! I thought.

October 27, 2025

I believed the whole day that it was actually the 26th. I wrote it a million times in my journal. I do not write to myself in the same way that I used to. I no longer need myself. It is an odd thought, but it is true. Before, I was challenged—faced with the other. Here, when you ask “who gafs?” no one answers, just an echo.

November 24, 2025

Almost a month has passed since I’ve written at this laundry list of qualms. I write differently here, I enjoy hearing my voice differently. The technological and analog. I can dispute one, but not the other. Here, I air it out with no care if it is cloned a million times over—the other a locked box.