perceive this!

warning: I wrote some poems in this. proceed with caution.

Nov 11, 2023

I’m late to post. You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve spent the past few weeks traveling, briefly battling food poisoning, selling clothing at Hester Street Fair, and quitting my job. Constantly in transit, I’ve been leaving my suitcase strewn across my living room floor because if I try to shove it back under my bed in its storage place, I will just have to wrangle it out again.

Even though I haven’t sent anything out, I’ve been writing a lot, just little thoughts here and there on digital documents. I went to an Italian restaurant with Brian and my new friend Maddie to write last Wednesday night and just spent a quiet hour documenting things that I found interesting. I find it so difficult to consider myself a writer. I can feel embarrassment paint my face when I call myself that, maybe it’s because I’m afraid no one will believe me when the words come out of my mouth.

This is simply a little collection of musings. I hope you enjoy. Thank you for being here.

💘With love 💘

One Mysterious Stranger

When I traveled to a state I had never been before to visit Brian for the first time, something was lingering on the plane and in the airport. I only managed to put my finger on it later after a few visits. It was the anonymity of being somewhere no one knew who I was. I would do something routine, like take my book to a coffee shop or go to a yoga class and I could feel people looking. Maybe I imagined it, but even still; was I morphing into the mysterious woman I always wanted to be?

How many times have you been on the train or in a bar and wondered, “who is THAT?” We fantasize about mysterious strangers all the time, so often that we analyze these people and wonder what their story might be, who they might be waiting for, what they’re doing solo in a neighborhood full of families with strollers and beefed up retirement accounts.

It’s similar on a plane. Everyone’s getting on that flight for a different reason and you’ll most likely never know any of them. The power of anonymity is the thought that someone close to your age could be the love of your life, the person two rows in front of you could be moving across the country, the guy in the middle seat could be battling cancer. We have no idea who these people are, and we spend however many hours in the sky sitting with a group of total strangers with the only commonality of needing to get to the same place.

There’s a word for this phenomenon now, it’s on the newer side, but it’s called Sonder, or “the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own.” This guy that was on my abroad program brought that up during a lesson in class once and everyone thought he was so pretentious. Look at me, using it all these years later.

The word holds true, though. Everyone has an urge to be one of those fleeting strangers. It makes sense, our entire lives exist on a glowing box for the entire world to see. Isn’t it nice to keep some things to the imagination? When I pose this thought, I can only think about Instagram. It used to be posed photos of friend groups or idyllic thirst traps. Pictures that gave information about who you were; what you look like, who you’re friends with, where you go.

Now, it’s ten pictures in a carefully curated “dump” of the month. Artistic landscapes, zoomed in pictures of like a license plate or something, and a shot of half your face in the mirror. Anonymous settings for anonymous people; no one wants to be perceived anymore. The thought of someone looking at your social media journal and not knowing what you might be like has a certain allure. You’re a mystery that is waiting to be solved.

I think that’s the human experience, though. Trying to get close enough to another person that they are able to figure you out. Strangers are just strangers — until they aren’t.

a note: I tried really hard to tie these elements into this essay; I wanted to go many directions with the idea of what makes us who we are and it was clunky and too many words and I said “I” too much. So I shortened it to a few haikus that probably say more than the 2000 word essay I wanted to send. please enjoy, I’m a poet in progress.