sure

rebrands, rebirth, regrowth...and saying yes anyway

It took a minute, but I decided to stop letting everything die off. Not sure if it means anything, but I watered my houseplants for the first time in months. I found a handful of fatalities - a snake plant, a pilea that I bought from Facebook Marketplace, an orchid received as a gift - but most of them had clung to life, albeit half-dead and far from a healthy green color. I felt like a murderer, but truthfully, I hadn’t felt the time pass. Negligent homicide.

It’s been months since I last wrote to you. Honestly, I think I got scared - the piece of work that brought most of you here was a sprawling personal essay on how I’ve come to terms with my age, and not only have I struggled with topping it, I haven’t even been taking my own advice.

I default to boring-ass behavior when I become angry with the world I’ve built. I don’t even want to write about it. Lately, I’ve been unnerved with the idea that the life I have built is a size too big for me - as though by acting older than I am, I’ve saddled myself with a balance of responsibilities that I am debatedly too immature to handle. Thinking to myself, is this normal? I’m in my mid-twenties and working in the third windowless office in three years. I’m planning my wedding - and the number of fellow New Yorkers who have raised an eyebrow to my age? Staggering. It’s a strange feeling, although not entirely unexpected. Nobody in my immediate or extended circles - nobody my age (who isn’t religious, right-wing, or both) - has gotten married.

Just wrapping my mind around these things - just trying to swallow these pills - feels like a feat. And I’m still scrambling my means together. But where’s the balance, you know? I want to sneak tallboy roadies onto the subway and wear short skirts with my friends. I want to spend my money on tattoos and little trinkets. I want to go to graduate school for something intellectually stimulating and capitalistically useless. I want to feel smaller than everything around me so I can care about the bigger picture. Is this the opposite of being developmentally arrested? Seeking out maturity and finding yourself jaded instead? Maybe. Did I give myself enough time to fuck up and be messy? Is there still time to be that way if I want to?

Truthfully, I think that there is still time for me - I’m just bad at claiming it. It’s incredibly sobering to realize that you are holding yourself hostage; that if I tried, I could take the last few months, roll them together in my palms, and reduce them to a few shakes of lucidity. Drunk on the A Train, thawing my frozen hands in the pockets of my downy coat. Sugar-rimmed glasses and the overlapping chatter of the girls I work with. Brushing past the flower shop in the Rockefeller Center station, every morning and every night. Wind so bitter that it scoured my face red and raw. Only now have I moved past the evening routine of shedding a snakeskin of winter layers in my studio’s corner, smoking myself into an oblivion, and folding into a little ball on the couch. Boring-ass behavior, like I was saying.

But it’s a waste of time - a waste of finite space and years in New York, where I can reach through a wall and find inspiration, to resign myself to something as silly as the passage of time. Same goes for the imposition of societal structures around the next phases of my life. I need money, so I must have a job. I found a life partner; I’m happy and excited to marry him. I’m in no rush to give up on my dreams of living off of performing and creating alone, nor am I in a rush to reshape my lifestyle into something that no longer resembles that of my peers. I have got to stop spiraling out and just make - just create - my way through it. And so I have - journaling, fumbling my way through an improvised key at jazz open mics, singing to nobody but myself. Going to yoga and drinks when my friends ask me to. Carrying a camera everywhere. Taping receipts and tiny watercolors into the pages of notebooks for safe-keeping. Recording my dreams, if I remember them (lately, they’ve felt plagued by plane travel, vaguely unsettling sexual scenarios, and my real-life fear of getting pregnant unexpectedly).

I wrote the first bones of this piece when my friend Paige was at my apartment on a Thursday night, and in between our quiet co-working, she mentioned that you don’t always have to give an enthusiastic yes to everything. You can sometimes just say sure. Maybe the thing you’re agreeing to has an unshakeable downside - as most things do - and it’s okay, you can acknowledge that reality at the forefront of whatever you’re embarking on, as long as you still say sure. I’m not an easily excited person, honestly. I hate to admit it, but I’m a closeted pessimist. But I can handle being a sure person. That sweet spot of agreement to life tends to be where inspiration and surprise pocket themselves. I’m trying to say sure more often.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

I’ll wrap it up for now at this point - there’s much more to say and to share, but I ought to save it for the next one. I want to say an earnest thank you to anyone who has read, subscribed, and stuck around. miaephemera has existed for over a year now - as a creative center for me, and as a peripheral speck of dust in your media consumption. It’s an honor, so thank you. To have your words and work become known by others is a way for your existence to fragment and expand, and I do indeed feel broken into tiny pieces, scattered, and full of a feeling I don’t have words for when I think of this living, breathing body of work. Again, thank you.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Things I’d like to do with this platform include the introduction of an audio/podcast component, interviews, blog updates note-style (a la one of my favorite writers, Mackenzie Thomas), advice columns for inquiries that I am inherently unqualified to address, and creating a home for my visual art to exist and reach you. Please, if you have it within you, hold me accountable. I care far more about pleasing others than I do about fulfilling my own self-spoken goals. More than anything, I’d like to shake off the idea that producing unpolished, disjointed art is something I should be afraid of, god forbid someone thinks it’s cringey. Cringe is a victimless crime. Embrace it. Let it reach the wrong eyes. Let shitty friends pull it up at dinner tables behind your back to prove something. To exist strangely - and create accordingly - is liberating.

For now, I’d like to start an experiment: here is a spotify playlist I’ve created. You have full access and ability to add to it for the next 7 days (!!!!!). The only rule is to add music you actually listen to. Would love to hear what you’ve been enjoying lately. :)

(rebrand :) )

Still in the mood for something ephemeral?

• actually I’m a sweetheart and I do have time

• body horrors

• not a lot, just forever