I should start by saying: Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. 

In all honesty, I have no idea how to keep a blog, but I don’t think anyone else does either. My strategy as it stands is to commit to being painfully earnest, so bear with me. For this and for everything, thank you for reading. 

“Life is a sack — with holes — and you carry it, you carry it.”

– Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Ilya Kaminsky

I was gifted my first journal on my thirteenth birthday. It was a kitschy thing, with a quill on the front and an inkblot that spelled “write your story.” My grandparents probably picked it up at Barnes and Noble while they were buying me my annual gift card. It wasn’t meant to change my life. 

At that age though, everything changes your life, because your life is small. I could have learned to play the fiddle, or taken up competitive roller skating, or found any number of hobbies that would define my next decade. (And, I hope, the rest of my life.)

Instead, I got a journal and I started writing. It gave me, an already pretentious teenager who loved My Chemical Romance and reposting poems on Tumblr, an intense habit for introspection. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but at least I had the sense not to inflict it on others until now.

You see, I’ve been sitting on this URL for the last four years, since my computer-science-student-older-brother asked me if I wanted to set up a website one day in 2022. I didn’t really touch the thing throughout undergrad because I just didn’t know what I would want to write about. The things I wrote in my journal seemed so banal, and any attempts to imbue them with enough purple prose to constitute deliberate writing seemed, well, embarrassing. It was just my life, on paper. Who would read it? 

Now, I’m twenty-three, and I’ve discovered something teenage-me would never have imagined: that adult life is interesting unto itself. I have found myself writing about Chicago, about museums and diagonal crosswalks and public art, and even if no one reads it, I might put those writings here anyway. Life is composed both of study trips to Paris and walks down the street to the bookstore. Big joy and small joy are the same.

“It has been January for months in both directions.” 

– Kaveh Akbar

To tell the truth, I’m not built to live in a place where it snows in the middle of March. Snowflakes stuck to my eyelashes as I walked to the post office this morning. I’m living inside someone’s souvenir snowglobe of the Sears Tower, they pick it up and shake it every few days. Winter here has made me sedentary. I spend far too much time in my apartment, gazing out windows onto the moving world below. My building is so old that the windowpanes are full of bubbles. It always looks like it’s just rained. I’ve inherited my grandfather’s gigantic rolltop desk, and yes, forced my family to help haul it up to my apartment in the sky. I’ve sat here a lot this winter, wishing that the season would end but not doing much to speed it along. I didn’t write a single thing in February, I didn’t even journal, and now I can barely articulate why. I just had to wait for myself to be myself again. In the midst of sickness, of the bitter cold, of classwork, and of family visiting, I just didn’t have much to say to myself. 

March brought with it slightly warmer days. I can go outside now without the wind stealing the breath straight out of my lungs, but it’s still just too cold to go far. I’m myself again, and now I’m waiting for the world to catch up. 

This blog is part of that. 

I’ve been here for more than six months, and I’ve only crossed six things off the Chicago Bucket List I keep in my bullet journal. That’s a terrible showing, and I can only mostly blame it on the weather and homework. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve often done cool things just so I’d get to write about them in my journal. Memories are memories, whatever gets you out of bed. 

What I’m saying is that I’m excited to explore this city more, and I’m excited to keep this blog while I do it. I’m not going to treat it like a diary, you don’t have to worry about that. Instead, I want this blog to be a place to experiment, to get better at writing about the way I move through the world. There will probably be a lot of museum visits, which will surprise exactly no one who’s met me, but I also hope to write about travels and the books I’m reading and the people I meet. If any of that sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll join me.