Updated: Dec 29, 2025
I was talking to Kimi on the phone the other night, and she was genuinely excited because she ordered a box of string cheese. In bulk. She’s hoping it’s over a hundred pieces. She swears it’s the best mozzarella string cheese she’s ever had, and the pure joy in her voice was unmistakable. I love this for her.
There’s something quietly beautiful about that kind of happiness. The kind that comes from a simple pleasure, especially for someone who has worked hard, lived fully, and understands that life isn’t always about big milestones. Sometimes it’s about accepting that this is living. Finding joy where you can, when you can.
With the New Year approaching, it reminded me of another New Year’s Eve over twenty years ago. It was 2004, and Kimi and I were at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco. The kind where everyone is slightly drunk, overly sentimental, and pretending they’re totally fine standing in someone else’s kitchen, clutching champagne glasses, waiting for midnight.
As midnight crept closer, Kimi casually mentioned that the woman she had just started seeing was at a club across the city. We were somewhere in the Castro. The woman was at Fairy Butch. Somewhere in the Mission. Because of course she was. That single sentence turned the night into a romantic emergency. Because we were romantics back then.
Suddenly, this was no longer a party. This was a sapphic Mission Impossible, with fewer explosions and zero Tom Cruise. Tess and I immediately agreed that the only acceptable outcome was Kimi kissing this woman at midnight. We started making excuses to leave that were dramatic, unnecessary, and deeply unconvincing. Someone needed cigarettes. She didn’t smoke. Someone forgot something important. I think I finally just announced, “We have to go. Kimi needs to kiss this girl,” as if that explained everything.
We said rushed goodbyes and bolted. I had recently rewatched Notting Hill, which explains a lot.
This was 2004. There was no Google Maps. No calm voice rerouting us. There was only our collective, deeply unreliable knowledge of San Francisco streets and Tess, who drove like a New York cabbie with someplace urgent to be and absolutely no patience for nonsense. She said she could get us there. Trust her. We did.
We piled into the car with fifteen minutes to spare, watching the clock inch toward midnight, fully aware this could go sideways at any moment. Tess made aggressive turns, treated yellow lights like friendly suggestions, and rattled off street names from memory. We shouted directions based on vibes and half-remembered shortcuts. Left here. No, not that left. Okay fine, this left. Traffic was chaos. Streets were blocked. The city felt like it was actively working against us. At some point we accepted that the only viable plan was to drop Kimi at the curb, shove her toward the club, and let destiny sort it out.
We screeched to a stop outside Fairy Butch with minutes to spare. Kimi and I jumped out and disappeared into the line. Tess and her girlfriend at the time went to find parking and ended up kissing in the car at midnight, which feels right. Kimi sprinted inside, adrenaline fully engaged. Now all she had to do was find one woman in a packed club before midnight.
No pressure.
That night, the universe was on our side.
Against all odds, they found each other. They kissed as the ball dropped. And 2004 became 2005, and in that moment we were absolutely convinced we had personally intervened in fate.
I wish I could say they lived happily ever after, however they were together for eight years. Kimi’s breakup with the woman she once kissed at midnight was painful. As breakups usually are. But now she’s happily single and finding genuine joy in string cheese, which is honestly abso-fucking-lutely wonderful for her.
Time has taught me this, having beautiful memories with someone doesn’t mean you forget why the relationship ended. Sometimes people love each other and still aren’t ready for each other. Sometimes timing matters just as much as feelings. And that’s okay.
What I know now, and what I’m carrying into this New Year, is simple:
Don’t stay where you’re not wanted.
Don’t beg someone to choose you.
Don’t make yourself smaller to be loved.
You deserve to be with someone who cherishes you. Someone who chooses you freely, again and again. Someone who would race across the city just to kiss you at midnight. And who has a best friend who wants that kind of love for you, too.
You are not an extra in your own life. You are the main character. You are the prize. And that person willing to run across the city? They’re out there. Don’t settle for anything less while they’re on their way.
Take care of yourselves and take care of each other!
I stumbled across an old blog post, I wrote back in 2002. When I was twenty-eight and still trying to figure out what love was supposed to feel like. I didn’t know then that I was already questioning the version of love I had inherited, the one shaped by fear, scarcity, and the old idea that you had to earn affection by giving parts of yourself away.
At fifty-one, I see things through a different lens. bell hooks reminded us that “Love is an act of will, both an intention and an action.” But intention and action require vulnerability, and vulnerability is something a lot of people avoid like it’s a global pandemic. We live in a world where everyone is terrified of being seen for who they actually are, terrified of saying “I want this” and risking someone saying “I don’t.” And yes, that feeling is awful. Rejection stings. Judgment stings.
But hiding from connection has a cost too.
Decolonizing love means unlearning the idea that we have to perform worthiness or hide the softest parts of ourselves to stay safe. It means being brave enough to show up anyway. It means choosing people who meet us with clarity and consistency, and letting go of those who only meet us with confusion or fear.
I’m not looking for a love that demands sacrifice or makes me smaller. I’m looking for a connection where two people stand fully in themselves and still choose each other. It’s not impossible, but we’ve been taught to believe love must be all-consuming, binding, suffocating. That isn’t love. That’s manipulation. That’s control. That’s something else entirely.
Love should feel expansive. It should feel like freedom, not containment. Honesty, not mind reading or code-breaking. Courage, not avoidance. Not hiding.
And here’s the thing I’ve learned after all these years, don’t waste your heart on people who can’t hold it. But also don’t let the fear of being misunderstood keep you from offering it to someone who actually can.
We talk a lot about protecting our peace, our energy, our boundaries, and that matters. But protection isn’t the same as isolation. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is step toward the person who makes you feel seen, even if your hands aren’t steady.
Love might not be guaranteed. Nothing is. But if you trust yourself to seek what brings joy, what makes your heart sing, what helps you grow into your best self, the whole world shifts. Love isn’t about ownership, it’s partnership. Two people sharing something magical, mystical, beautiful, and real.
Connection isn’t guaranteed. But if you build your life around honesty, courage, and reciprocity, the right people will recognize themselves in your words, your actions, and your intention.
Maybe that’s what I couldn’t articulate at twenty-eight. Maybe it took living, breaking, healing, and trying again to understand, a decolonized love is one where you choose with your whole chest, not recklessly, not carelessly, but bravely, because some people are worth the risk.
And if it’s meant for you, it won’t need forcing, convincing, or negotiating. It will come in clarity. And it will stay in truth.
As above, so below. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.
"Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop." — Rumi
Life is an endless dance between holding on to what matters and releasing what no longer serves. It takes courage to do both, to endure through hardship and to let go when your heart feels heavy.
Fall is a very melancholic time of the year for me. Two close friends moved on into the void around this time, and my dad’s death anniversary always brings me back to that space between love and forgiveness. He was a complicated man, stoic, stubborn, brilliant, difficult, and extremely flawed. He never said “I love you,” not once that I can remember, not even when he was dying. But he did say he was proud of me, and maybe that was his version of it.
He named me after himself and made sure we shared the same initials. It’s strange, like he wanted me to carry him forward, to be a reflection of him. To carry on his legacy. And maybe, in some weird way, I am and I’m not. He was hardworking, driven, and a little narcissistic, the kind of man who believed the world bent to willpower. And maybe that’s the part of him that lives loudest in me: that relentless belief that I can make things work, that I can rebuild even after ruin. It’s both my gift and my burden, a mirror of the man who made me. Both a blessing and a curse.
He showed love the way men of his generation often did, through work, provision, and persistence. He taught me devotion to family, the immigrant determination to make the best out of difficult situations, and the unshakable belief that you can rebuild from anything. He also taught me what silence costs, what happens when love gets buried under duty and pride until it turns into something unrecognizable, and even toxic.
At the end, he wanted to know if he was a good man, a good father. And I told him he was, even when he wasn’t. Because love isn’t easy, and people aren’t either. He made me both hate myself and believe I could do anything I set my mind to. That contradiction lives in me still, the rebel and the conformist, the dreamer and the realist, the lover and the villain.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to quiet kinds of love, the ones that show up instead of the type that speaks up. The ones that hide feeling behind function. But I’ve also learned how that kind of love, when pushed down and hidden, can twist itself into strange, self-protective shapes. Love unspoken becomes love undefined. Love unwritten.
Fall has a way of reminding me that letting go can still be beautiful. That even the most complicated endings can hold grace. That we’re all just trying to be good, good people, good parents, good partners, good children, even when we fall short. Especially when we come up short.
My dad taught me that. He wasn’t always right, but he kept showing up. He kept making it work. And maybe that’s all any of us can do: to keep trying, keep forgiving, keep growing, to let go of what’s no longer good, and believe that even after the hardest seasons, we can still be good again.
My friend Kimi thinks it’s weird that I still grieve my father. But I loved him. As messed up as he was, and as complicated as our relationship was, he was still my father. In his quiet, convoluted way, I knew he loved me too.
No one gets to tell you how to grieve. No one gets to decide for you how long is long enough. And no one but yourself gets to know your grief.
Grief changes over time, but in the end, it is still grief. What I’ve learned from knowing grief and knowing love is that you get one life, one weird, unpredictable, beautiful, magical life. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste it thinking you aren’t good enough, or that you aren’t deserving of wonderful things. This world is stupid and sucks a lot, and so what if it does? This is it. This is what we have to work with.
So, in the words of teacher, mentor, and fashion guru, Tim Gunn: “Make it work.” 👔✨
