I wake up with the sun in Sand Pond and do morning pages. I write about how wrong I feel. Incurable, flawed.

Then I walk down to the lake and swim out to the middle of it. And it is just me alone in this warm water, being lapped by waves, the leaves of the trees blowing in the wind. And I look out at them, all of these billowing leaves around me, swaying in the breeze and think: how can any of it be wrong? For a branch on a tree to be flawed. It’s not possible. It just is. It flows and sways in the breeze. Just like me. And by that logic, I cannot be wrong. I can only be judgmental; that is what is separating me from the trees. My mind, judging reality as if it can control it. It cannot. The only thing it can do is keep me from enjoying the wind in my hair or the sun on my face.

I take the train back to New York, a peaceful two-hour journey that I use to obsess over whether or not to buy a pair of $115 leather sandals. Decide not to.

Get back home and start eating a bar of frozen chocolate. On my second bite, I feel a burst of pain and watch as a little off-white rock tumbles onto the placemat in front of me. It takes me a second to realize it’s my front tooth. Or, the veneer for it, at least. I call the dentist.

Tuesday

Get my veneer re-cemented back into my mouth, onto the third of tooth that remains from the fall. The nerve is exposed, it’s painful. The dentist injects my gums with a long needle of anesthetic and for the rest of the day, half of my face is frozen like I’ve had a stroke.

After work, I go meditate for twenty five minutes in the dark, in a little basement lit up with Christmas lights with a room full of strangers. I close my eyes and try to breathe into the soft parts of my body that feel hard. The hardness is mostly concentrated behind my eyes and in my forehead. I keep breathing into it, into all of that tightness, and then around halfway my body starts to feel less like a combination of different parts (in which my feet are just a concept) and more like a whole. My pinky toe as much a part of my awareness as my face. It all feels soft and gooey.

An image cuts through the stillness: an older woman, smiling. She’s running a comb through my hair, the hard teeth gently tapping my scalp. Comforting, calming. All is well, her smile says.

God? Is that you?

When I realize what is happening, the image—dream or vision—is already gone. I try to conjure her back, ask her what I should do. But then the tightness returns to my body.

Afterwards, under the red glow of the twinkle lights, someone shares that when they’re living in the moment, flowing down the river of life like Huckleberry Finn on his raft, they feel light and free.

I exit the meditation den and see a baby bird on the sidewalk. His downy feathers are fluffy and soft like a golden retriever puppy. He hops around, chirping anxiously and failing to fly. I pull out my phone and google: baby sparrow on street nyc should I help?

No, AI Google tells me. The bird is learning to fly.

I hear another, louder chirping and look up to see a big, fat sparrow in the tree above me. It watches its baby with a close eye.

I give the fluttering fledgling one last look before walking away in the pale June night.

Wednesday

Meditate, go to the office, finish Yesteryear. Hate it. Felt like an insult to my intelligence, an abuse of the sacred trust between reader and writer.

Stress eat greek yogurt and sour cherries during the Croatia England game. Afterwards, go salsa dancing in Washington Square Park, where I learn to mambo with a group of strangers in the early evening sun, still surprisingly strong at 6. All the worries of the day (am I Bad or Good, am I on the right path, what do these people think of me) disappear as I am faced with a very real problem: not knowing how to dance.

I am reminded, once again, of the answer to life’s imaginary problems: get a real one.

I walk from there to writing group at Evie’s on a bustling Orchard Street and think about the impending end to my twenties. Make a note to dance more in my thirties.

Thursday

I get up at 6 AM and blame my poor sleep on Denis, whose fault it was not. The real culprits: hormones, leaving New York for the summer, the looming end of my twenties and my own mortality. I walk to the gym in a half-asleep state, try to squat but all of the racks are taken. Make a mental note to cancel Equinox and switch to Crunch in the fall. Come back home, meditate, shower, make myself a smoothie with frozen blueberries. Go to the office where we have cod for lunch. Say thank you to god for that. On my walk home, the streets are warm and swampy with the breath of a million Knicks fans.

After work, venture to the West Village for a $28 massage in a little basement room that shakes and rattles when the 1 train goes by. My masseuse, David, does not speak English but does speak the language of the body. He knows where all of my tight spots are. I lay on the table and try to breathe into the pain, sticking my tongue out like a dead dog through the face hole as David compresses my spine like a tube of toothpaste on its last legs.

Afterwards, I go to Greenwich Letterpress, a tiny, brightly colored stationery store in the West Village that reliably makes me feel just as bright. Pick out a card for a friend, a Father’s Day card, and a birthday card for myself. On my walk home I come across a boxing match inside the fountain of Washington Square Park, two men with gloves on, sweat trickling down their bodies in the heat as hundreds of people gather round. A group of girls jump rope nearby. I am incredulous that all of this beauty and this life is my backyard. Yes, I think, living in New York is worth every cent.

Friday

I wake up early again, at 6. I cannot sleep. It is my last Friday in New York until the end of the summer. I get up and go to the gym and am pleased to find a squat rack empty.

Afterwards, I meet friends for coffee at Madman. I ask them to write me little notes to put into my birthday card that I will mail to myself in Croatia. I contemplate whether or not this is self-obsessed or not and do it anyway. Have German class online, feel utterly stupid and blissfully smart at the same time as I find myself constructing sentences in this strange language.

At night, Denis and I host a dinner for friends. I attempt to make oatmeal cookies, which melt into one big puddle that we eat like a pancake.

Saturday

Wake up, feel awful. No sleep, once again. I meditate and my thoughts are loud, violent. I feel certain I will have an awful day and an even more awful life. I want to get back into bed and not move again. Decide to take opposite action instead and put on my running shoes. I set a goal to run one lap around the park, which feels like the most evil torture I could submit myself to in my present state. Every step is pure pain, and I keep looking at how big the park is, thinking: I’ll never make it, I don’t have the lung capacity. My legs will give out, I’ll die before I finish. Decide to start reciting poetry in my head. I have five poems memorized now. I recite them over and over, continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

Before I know it, I’ve completed three laps around the park. I am amazed. My legs and lungs both feel fine. I am reminded, once again, that it is my brain that is the problem. I reflect on how poetry recitation is probably a form of mantra meditation. A guy walking by me yells: “stick your chest out, you’ll get less tired”. I glimpse my reflection in the mirror of an NYU building. My shoulders are rounded forward, slouching.

I come back home, happy to be alive with my new PR of three laps around the park. Shower, eat lunch, and go to Dakota’s book swap. I bring Yesteryear (poor soul to whoever takes it) and come home with The Oldest Bitch Alive, which is exactly how I feel walking around the Lower East Side.

At night, I walk through Times Square to see an off broadway play about gay gorillas. Even after eight years of living in Manhattan, it still feels like a spiritual experience. Times Square, not the gorillas. I stand up straight as I walk through the neon lights, sticking my chest out. I feel different, proud. A middle aged cop winks at me.

Sunday

I wake up, make breakfast. Again, no morning pages. Feels freeing. Go to group meditation. My mind is racing, once again.

For lunch, Denis and I make salad and tuna sandwiches. Halfway through, the tuna starts to taste abhorrent, metallic and bloody. I finish it with a plugged nose.

I walk down to Soho to see if I should buy anything before my travels. I am afraid to leave for the summer, afraid of the unknown, afraid of my birthday. Like a squirrel preparing for winter, I go into a variety of stores in search of nuts: a pair of cork sandals from Dolce Vita, a Glutathione supplement from Happier Grocery, a turquoise cotton top from Brandy Melville.

I think of the woman with the comb and put it all back. Push my shoulders back and take a breath.

Mine were normal, they didn’t stick out too far at all. The earlobe was detached, which I deemed not preferable in an elementary school lesson on dominant and recessive traits, but they were fine. Just fine.

But today I was walking down the hallway at work, and the doors all around me were made of dark glass. I could see my reflection in them—not the exact features, but a general outline. And my hair was pulled back, and I noticed all at once—my ears. They were the same ears I’d always had, normal shape and the same angle of external rotation away from the head, but they were large. Larger than I’d ever remembered them to be. In proportion to the rest of my head, they took up more real estate than ever before.

I rushed to the bathroom to get a better look at myself in the brightly lit room.

Yes, it was plain: my ears had taken on a life of their own without me knowing.

When had this happened? I wondered. Was it between ages 25 and 26? Or had they been steadily growing in the background, all along?

It’s not so much that it bothered me, the new size of them. Not really. I kept my hair up in a bun for the rest of the day, letting my coworkers gaze at my expanding auricles all they wanted.

It’s just that…I don’t know. I felt betrayed.

I’ve made peace with my changing face. My forehead, which has turned bonier. The hair loss around the temples. My nose, which is crooked, and has always been crooked, but the crookedness used to not be so apparent because of the thick layer of youthful fat covering the S-curve of it, like a snake. I’ve made peace with my pores, ever widening. Even with my eyelids, slowly dropping, causing my mother to tell me: you look tired every time we FaceTime. My lower back pain, the fat from my cheeks moving down to my jaw. I’ve made peace with all of these changes that aging has brought me: weird and, initially, unwelcome—but ultimately just changes; neither good nor bad. An indication of life lived, of time passed.

But my ears?

I don’t know. I really thought that we had an understanding, my ears and I. Just stay out of it; that’s what I thought our mutual arrangement was. They were just there; like a bed or a table, some kind of inanimate object. Unobtrusive. Not like my nose, or my forehead, or my hooded lids—all of which I’d had such turbulent relationships with, with no help from TikTok. Love, hate, love hate. Acceptance.

No, ears were never part of that deal. Ears just were. Kind of like how I felt about being an only child: I had no opinion on it. It was just an unchangeable fact of my life. Didn’t like it or hate it, it just was.

But now they’ve gone and changed and I hate to say it, but I’m hurt. I am. Hurt that even the body parts that I never had an opinion of decide to change, even when I thought we’d come to a mutual understanding that we were just fine coexisting.

I guess this is life. The sooner I make peace with my growing ears, the better. Although I do have to admit that I thought briefly about googling plastic surgery for ears. Notice I said I thought about googling, I didn’t do it.

But strange. So strange, to be witness to the changing of one’s own body. To realize that autonomy is just an illusion. That one is not one’s fleshy vessel. Because if one was, one would! not! accept the growth of one’s ears. That’s for certain.

When you are young, presuming that you are healthy, you think that your body is a natural extension of your soul. That there is no difference between one and the other. You think that you are your youth.

And then, when things change and grow in ways you don’t like, that you weren’t expecting, it becomes very clear that you are two very separate things, actually. And that’s good. Makes you question who you really are then, if you are not your nondescript ears or your chubby cheeks.

And that’s when the self gets some shape, I guess. Almost as a response to the change of the body. A reaction. Because if we were our bodies, if our bodies and our consciousness were one, then clearly they would not be breaking, changing and growing against our will. I do not want to break! Look! I am not my sagging lobes. I am not. I am my beautiful thoughts, can’t you see?

A question forms, when one witnesses the changing of one’s body in unwelcome ways. If I am not my body, what am I? And that’s where self exploration really begins, I guess. Perhaps for each break in our body, a new breakthrough of the soul emerges. Perhaps that is why so many very young people are so dull: they have not yet realized that they are a soul, a thing separate from this corporeal existence.

And so I look at my ears, enlarged and drooping in the mirror, and I realize: I am the kind of person who thinks deeply about things. Huh. And that is beautiful.

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I’ve been spending my Sunday mornings meditating with Buddhist monks at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. It’s a little sanctuary on the fourth floor of a Chelsea office building. You have to buzz for them to open the door for you, but the last time I went, two women in yoga pants were there at the same time as me, and held the heavy door of the building open for me, smiling. They must be here for the meditation too, I thought. I tried to look at them with kindness, signing that I, too, wanted to rescue all sentient beings from suffering. I followed them in and made my way to the elevator automatically, but froze when I noticed they walked right past it to the flight of steep stairs. Of course. Of course, the stairs! Very zen of them. Advanced practitioners. I followed suit, not wanting them to think me an enjoyer of this materialistic realm. We climbed the steep stairs single file, our winter boots squeaking on the vinyl. But once we reached the landing, they veered left. I glanced up, surprised. Had the Zen Center moved? No, they were going to Humming Puppy Yoga, the door indicated. I sighed.

Yes, this was why I needed to be meditating.

I’ve never been to Humming Puppy yoga, but I can imagine it’s quite a lot different than the zendo (the meditation hall). Our two-hour session begins with a series of bows and chanting in Japanese. Everyone is dressed in black. Then we sit on our cushions and face the wall, where we meditate for thirty minutes. Then a bell rings and we walk around the room for ten minutes, taking a half step for every breath. Then the bell rings again, and we’re back to our cushions, with another thirty minute meditation facing the wall. It’s a whole lot of fun. I’ve become more closely acquainted with this 12 inch square of white wall than with most people in my day-to-day life. I can tell you exactly where the paint bubble is, and all about the slight curved line to its right. After this, there is more bowing and chanting, and then a dharma talk. It’s nice. I imagine this is what church is like to people for people who don’t have any kind of religious trauma. By the end of the two hours, my back is stiff but my insides feel like a nice place to be again, like a warm bath instead of a roiling jacuzzi or an ice bath.

And I leave in the elevator. Because that’s a practical, normal thing to do from the fourth floor of a building.

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The doorknobs of the bathroom closet are thin. Slim. Too slim to be practical, yet there they are. The handles of doorknobs, the shapes of fingernails: these are the things that can, lately, shift my mood with their shape. And these slender handles of the bathroom closet door have, today, affected me positively. For their shape, too thin to be practical, hints at something greater in life than utility. Hints, perhaps gestures, at beauty. Could it be? In this corporate office, on the thirty-first floor of the World Trade Center? Not beauty outright, no. But the hint of beauty—the hint of impracticality? The installer must have done it on the sly, when he thought no one was looking. Who would notice, on the doors of the closet in the private bathroom on the thirty-first floor? Dreams of being a Michelangelo, relegated to construction. This, his great revenge: the handles of the closet of the private bathroom on the thirty-first floor of the World Trade Center.

Not that the building itself is not beautiful. It is, in a certain, imposing way. Not my style, of course. But a certain kind of beauty it does project–a monstrous, heaving sort. The outside, at least. All glass and sleek. Something respectable in its blockishness, its singleness of purpose. Honest.

But the inside, of the thirty-first floor—to this, at least, I can attest—is devoid of such redeeming qualities. Greyish blue chairs and white desks and grey carpeted floors. Teal walls, so drab the mind does not process it as color at all. Orange light fixtures hang from the white ceilings, the only hint of warmth in the whole space, only to be drowned out by a blast of white overhead lighting. They never stood a chance, those orange lights. All of this causes me much pain.

Except for the handles of the doors on the closet in the private bathroom, a bit too thin to be practical. Almost whimsical, gleeful in their shape. Today, my saving grace. But I cannot stay, as much as I would like, in the bathroom all day. Like I did when I

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