In the morning, we sit in a coffee shop for two hours talking about life philosophies, family, love. No one else is in the cafe. We try various pastries, chocolates, and croissants. Later we climb the towers of an old church. Two or three hundred stairs into the sky, we step out onto a panoramic balcony for a stunning view of the city. We climb back down through the belltower to the tune of bells twinkling on the hour. A choir is gathered on the steps outside and we watch them for a moment.

For lunch we stop into a restaurant burrowed into a rock cave. We sit and ask for a menu. The waiter hands us a booklet of drinks and asks how many chickens? What, we ask. Again she says how many chickens? I ask if there’s anything I can eat. This is a chicken restaurant, she says. We serve chicken. She offers me a chicken salad with no chicken. The others feast on entire roasted chickens and fries which, according to them, is superb. On the walk to the train station we pass a continuation of the music festival in the park; a woman sings a cover of MJ’s Billie Jean.

On our first day in Zurich we stop by a cafe elaborately decorated with flowers and vines. Cafe Felix, it’s called. More like Cafe Expensive. We pay out the nose for coffee. My Swiss hot chocolate with espresso comes warm and gooey and rich. I’m annoyed that it’s almost worth spending the 10 Swiss franc on. Then Chey and I split off from the boys to shop around. We visit two churches, Fraumunster and Grossmunster. We read about the establishment of the Fraumunster. According to local legend, two devout princesses from a neighboring town in Germany would brave the forest in the night to come to a clearing and pray. Eventually a white stag with candles on its antlers came to guide them through the dark and would stop in a particular clearing, refusing to move further. When the king learned of this, he thought there was no way a church could be built there since it was by the oft-flooded riverbanks. Then angels came down bearing a rope to mark the spot, and of course the church was built there. Later the two sisters each became abbesses of the church at different times. Under each twin church are fascinating crypt-museums with local religious history. We marvel at the Chagall windows and then meet up with Aidan for a raclette lunch. In the afternoon we take him back to the churches and then, outside the Grossmunster, the others try to teach me to ride a bike. It does not go well. Many people come by and laugh––some more openly than others. I am in hysterics and eventually call it quits.

The next day I leave the others behind and take a bus and a train back into the city. I explore the museum’s collections for most of the morning and then go exploring again. I return to the local raclette restaurant for more cheese and on the way there get a 100 franc ticket for losing my bus pass. Ouch. When I finally get to the restaurant, the lady recognizes me from yesterday. Double ouch. I spend some time knitting by the water before I visit the Zurich Opernhaus to see the Zurich Ballet perform a new interpretation of Romeo & Julia(et). My father gifted me tickets as a father’s day gift (I tried to say that’s not how father’s day gifts generally work but he insisted and I’m not one to say no to the ballet). The choreography, the costuming, and the set are modern, fresh, and stunning.

I take a rest day, do some laundry by hand in the bathtub because the washing machine seems to be broken. My clothes dry almost instantly in the thick heat. I explore the little town, have a German pastry at a bakery and grab some food at the Aldi to make dinner. Since it’s so expensive here, we decided to save some by splitting a small rental apartment in a small German town on the border and cook at home. I make a pot of shakshuka for dinner while the others tell me about their hike through the alps.

On day fourteen, our halfway point, I visit the Lindt Home of Chocolate––an experience I can only describe as Swiss Willy Wonka’s factory. I’m augustus glooping, I text the others as I walk around diagrams of chocolate machines to study their engineering, simulate ancient methods of chocolate making, and sample my weight in specialty chocolates. I try to bring some back for the others but the heatwave liquifies them in my bag before I get to them.

We spend the evening on a train to Luxembourg. I realize the reception closes before we are off the train to collect the keys to the apartment, so I call and ask how else we can check in. You can check in in the morning, the woman tells me. But where will we sleep? I ask. Inside, of course, she responds. There’s no lock? I ask. Of course not, she says, it’s a tent. What? It’s… a tent? With no lock? It turns out what we thought was glamping was in fact a large tent.

I wake up in a pool of my sweat. It must be at least ninety degrees. I get up to check my phone. In fact it’s 99º, and about ten or fifteen degrees hotter inside the tent. Cool. I feel sweat pouring down every inch of my body. The heat is still and suffocating. I drench my shirt in cold water under the faucet and put it back on––momentary relief. We decide to take a forest hike to cool off; it must be at least a little nicer under the trees, we think. After a quick ice cream stop, we take a bus to the trail head and play around in the water park. We grab lunch at a little restaurant there and then head off. We spend the day bathing in a waterfall and creek along the trail, ice-cold and so refreshing against the heat. We end up heading home early because torrential rain comes to relieve us of the sun. It takes us four hours to get back because Chey (bless her) is even worse at reading a map than I am.

In the middle of the night two of Chey’s friends join us from their study abroad in France. We spend the day in the city, easily accessible through public transport despite our rustic accomodation. We start at another yarn store to buy Cheyenne some knitting needles so we can both knit on the trains. The place has even more fabulous yarns on clearance, this time for 3 euros. I can’t resist; I buy two more skeins. Then we go to the coffee shop next door where I put the others onto a drink I love and can hardly ever find abroad––espresso tonic. The response is mixed. The new girls need a backpack and I know just the place. I take them to Decathlon and we all take another shopping break.

Then I split off to visit the church and castle. I walk around the balcony to a view of a gorgeous building that was, at different times, a monastery, a church, an orphanage, a prison, a nazi occupation center, and now is a museum. I meet back up with the group for mezzes at a Michelin recommended restaurant. Chey and I finish off the day with ice cream sundaes at the campsite.

Day seventeen is a travel day: Luxembourg to Amsterdam, with a layover in Belgium. Amsterdam has a significant Moroccan immigrant population so almost everyone we’ve met as of our first day here has been Moroccan. During the first Uber from the train station to the hotel, a friendly driver is eager to tell us about the Moroccan neighborhood in which we are staying. He pulls up to some traffic and says we wait in no line as though deciding out loud. Before I know what’s happening the driver has pulled into the tram tracks and moves to tail the tram to the hotel. We are terrified while he makes casual conversation––I like this restaurant, good pizza for 8 euros.

After surviving the journey to the hotel, we go to the pizza place the driver recommended. Well, it’s more of a kebab place that has pizza but as promised the pizza is 8 euros and we’re not ones to complain about cheap food. It was indeed very good pizza. We capitulate our options for the evening before Aidan suggests seeing the MJ biopic at the royal theatre. We all agree and soon thereafter find ourselves in a gilded building with Chinese art all around us and couches in the screening room. We have some sangria and hum along to Thriller.

After the movie we explore the city by night before taking another Uber home. Before long, a small white car with club music shaking the windows pulls up to the pickup spot. We tentatively ask if he is here for us. Why, of course he is. We clamor in and the driver asks if we like the music. He is livestreaming some sort of DJ set, all English and Latin music. We nod––after all, what kind of 305ers would we be if we didn’t like Pitbull? The driver takes this as approval and dials the music to 100. We ask him if he’s ever been to Miami. I AM SYRIAN I KNOW WHAT NONE OF THIS MEANS I ONLY KNOW BOOM BOOM!! he responds enthusiastically.

We have tickets to see the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, so the next morning we find ourselves standing at the base of a Portuguese synagogue whose design is inspired by a possible floorplan of the temple in Jerusalem. It’s gorgeous––gold leather and bronze furnishings. We take an audio tour, supplemented by my explanations of the synagogue’s layout. Generally American synagogues face east, but here we’re facing southwest towards Jerusalem. That’s the women’s gallery. Contrary to popular explanations, the women’s gallery is not here because women are less holy but because we have unique mitzvas.

The tour takes us through the main and winter synagogues, chevruta spaces, mourning rooms with a “no entrance for Cohens” sign tacked on the doors (generally members of the rabbinic class are not permitted in the space meant for the washing of the body in Sephardic tradition, the audio guide explains), and the Mikveh. I take issue with the audio guide’s explanation of the mikveh as a space women visit to “become clean for their husbands.” Going to the Mikveh is a mitzvah one completes for themself––water is a spiritual threshold in the Jewish tradition, I argue.

We have a nice Italian lunch and stroopwafel ice cream for dessert. Then I split off from the others to visit the royal palace and a lovely gothic post office-turned-mall. I spend the evening in the expansive central park, knitting and updating my friends at home on my whereabouts.

Morocco won a world cup match against the Netherlands around 5am last night, and Aidan was up watching them celebrate in the streets. It was absolute craziness, he tells us later––smoke bombs, motorcycles, kids on shoulders. Thus he is still asleep in the morning, so Chey and I grab a breakfast of dutch apple pie before heading to the Rijksmuseum. Chey spends all day at the Rijks (she tells me later she spent six hours on the first two floors and had to speedrun the rest of the building before they threw her out and closed up). Medieval art isn’t exactly my speed, so I spend a few hours there and move on to see the other museums Amsterdam has to offer.

I try to visit the Van Gogh museum but they’re sold out for the day. I buy tickets for tomorrow and visit MoCo instead. It’s small but well-curated and powerful. The art is incredible. I’m not usually big on Banksy but their collection is admittedly impressive. I tour the rest of the building, spending the next two hours on the three floors of the small house the collection occupies. I cry at Keith Haring, as I always do. I cry at Robbie Williams. I cry a lot in general. Something about contemporary art does that to me. I spend the rest of the evening in the nine streets, or the shopping district, exploring cute boutiques and shops.

I spend the next morning alone, once more the only one awake and ready to explore. I visit the Anne Frank house but can’t go inside, having failed to acquire tickets when I tried last month. As expected, I cry. I read all the stopelsteine along her street and leave a stone on the base of her statue. I don’t think it looks much like her but I pay my respects anyway.

On my way to the Van Gogh museum I pass through the shopping district again. I didn’t buy the cute clogs I saw the first time I was here and have been severely regretting it ever since. They were on clearance for fifteen euros, a deep blue vegan leather with comfortable rubber soles. I returned yesterday to a closed store, but today the boutique is open and I sweep my clogs off the shelf immediately. The woman at the counter compliments my choice, showing me her own matching gray clogs. They are so comfortable, she reassures me. I hurry to my time slot to see the Van Gogh museum. I take a self-paced tour, intended to be ninety minutes. Two hours pass, and then three. I cry at Almond Blossoms, at Wheatfield With Crows (scarily reminiscent of my years in Michigan), at Tree Roots. Van Gogh, like most of Amsterdam so far, strikes a chord with me. I stay until I am informed by a tired employee that I have stayed too long and the museum is closing.

I go off exploring afterwards towards a new area of town. I have a lovely dinner at a local restaurant with vegetarian spins on Dutch classics. The waitress, a Peruvian woman who is excited to learn I also speak Spanish, tells me about the street festival happening today to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of slaves. That explains the throngs of people and music and street vendors I had to push through to get here. I end the day at Satellite Sports Bar with the others and their friend who came to visit from Copenhagen watching a world cup match.

The next day brings a train to Hannover, a midsize city in Germany we are visiting because the Roshers’ grandmother grew up there. Chey and I run off to have a Bavarian dinner––beer, jager schnitzel, spätzle, pretzels. In the morning Chey and I take the tram downtown while the boys sleep in again. We visit the old town, see a protest. It’s cold enough here that we have to stop into a store so I can buy a pair of pants. Then we follow a painted red path to all the historical monuments around town. We want to see the old town hall, but it seems someone is getting married there, so we give them their space. We stop into a busy cafe for afternoon tea and cake. The portions here are absolutely huge––at breakfast I had a coffee the size of my head––so we split a piece of traditional German cheesecake with fresh cream. Then we follow the red thread to the gorgeous new town hall overlooking a historic park with a lake. At least seven weddings are happening here today. We take a slanted elevator to the top of the dome for a panoramic view of the city, then finish the day with gigantic shawarma sandwiches.

After a mid-morning train to Berlin and checking into our hostel, Chey and I go for a lunch/dinner of ramen and a late night dessert of tiramisu at the little italian place by the hostel.

First on our itinerary for Berlin is the Boros Collection, a former nazi bunker (the Reichsbahnbunker Friedrichstraße) which over the course of half a century was also used as a red army war prison, textile warehouse, storage for imported tropical fruit from Cuba, electro club, rogue art and theatre shows, and now home of the private collection of the Boros family. A family friend who works in the art business recommended we take a tour, and so spend our first morning inside the bunker. The guide talks us through the art and history of the building. It is a haunting, suffocating air that greets us inside the bunker and follows us around all morning. I touch the original oak handlebars. I marvel at the art. All of it is incredible. The guide talks about myth and legend and philosophy.

Inside a reflective glass octagon, I watch myself watching myself inside the art on the wall behind me. The scene of the portrait is violent in its aftermath: danger looming but never witnessed. The guide describes the room as a critique of Foucault’s panopticon: the viewer becomes the witness and the surveilled. You cannot look away. You can look at the art directly, or you can turn, placing yourself in the frame.

I have always been fascinated by Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, the internalised coercion of social structures. I think more about Foucault on an afternoon walking tour of the city. It’s hard not to consider and reconsider the social consequences of history when you stand and live inside of it. In these cities, I am confronted with historiographies of exile and mass murder and constantly rising tension. People live here. It’s hard to imagine learning to walk and speak in such a place, among such blunt recognition of what has happened here. Walking every day along the stumbling stone. The names, even, are discomposing: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Topography of Terrors, Palace of Tears. I imagine learning to speak a language of violence. We produce our own histories, and in a certain way they produce us. How do we emerge if not from our own history?

I try to take a morning tour of the jewish quarter. I wait and wait at the meet up spot and when no one shows, I call the guide. Oh, the man says, I’m sorry. The tour was canceled––you were the only one that signed up. How poetic. Instead I decide to just walk around the area by myself. I see the historic cemetery, more stopelsteine, and stop to look at public art. Or rather, I stop to look at nothing. It’s called the Missing House, a memorial to all the homes of jews bombed and destroyed. The monument itself is an empty space where someone’s home once was. The building was split down the middle and half crumbled into rubble after an air raid, and between where two new buildings stand is a line of exposed brick and the names and occupations of the people who lived there. Then I follow the golden dome to the New Synagogue, also destroyed during the war but saved from burning completely by a police officer on Kristallnaght. Small parts are original, from the 1800s. Everything else is a reconstruction. We lose so much to our own violence. Who knows what’s been erased?

In the afternoon I meet up with the others to take a walking tour of the history of communism and socialism in Berlin, told through traces of art and propaganda that remain on the walls of the city. The tour is three hours long and we are fascinated the whole time. By the end we are exhausted and starving. Aidan finds a nearby vegan Thai restaurant on the Michelin guide (I’ve learned he has a knack for finding great, cheap restaurants) and then we try tiramisu ice cream at the place next door. We finish the evening at a pub to watch the world cup.

We wake up exhausted from the long walk and the late game, so we sleep in a bit before Chey and I run off. We try an incredible breakfast club right by the hostel and then spend the day shopping. We peruse a well-stocked thrift, local boutiques, and a giant craft store where I find a thousand varieties of yarn including a glow-in-the-dark skein which comes home with me. We have a chill evening at Holzmarkt, a unique area on the river not far from the East Side Gallery. It feels almost post-apocalyptic––spray-painted shacks and canopies surround various picnic tables, a tattoo shop, several bars, little restaurants, and a mini-disco. We hang out at the biergarten and watch the Argentina v Egypt game, cheering and gasping alongside two or three dozen Berliners.

Our penultimate day in Berlin brings us to the New National Gallery, which has five excellent exhibits on show. My favorite is Gerhard Richter’s 100 Works for Berlin, which indeed contains one hundred works for Berlin. I borrow some words from Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to describe it:

“The central work in the exhibition is the series Birkenau (2014), consisting of four large-format, abstract paintings. Birkenau is the result of Richter’s long and in-depth engagement with the Holocaust and the possibilities of representing it. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which the artist transposed with charcoal and oil paint to four canvases before gradually painting over them abstractly. With each layer of paint, the depiction of the original drawing disappeared a little more, until it eventually became invisible. The work also includes a large four-part mirror, which is positioned opposite the four Birkenau canvases, creating another level of reflection.”

The exhibit is gripping. I think of my own family, their murders at the same place the photos depict. I think of the families of everyone in the photographs. Hundreds of families. The audio guide plays a frequency to describe the horrors; to replicate the number seven million. Can art capture it? I wonder this because I myself struggle to understand the gravity of it. I think of standing at the base of the reichstag, which today bears no scorch marks. No indication of what it once meant. Is it better to be surrounded by monuments of our disasters or to clean the ash off the buildings?

I think more about this over a dinner of traditional German potato soup, cheeses, and blonde beer mixed with orange juice. I try the clubs to take a break from thinking about it but do not succeed. Even the party culture emerges from travesty; the bareness of the city after the fall of the wall gave it the physical space to become something almost-new in its own ruins. These walls, too, bear the marks of their past. The clubs take up old factories, refineries, and bunkers. This, I am told, is because after the wall fell artists and squatters moved in on the now-abandoned and dirt cheap city, bringing techno records from the west and expanding into the space they found in the east. Someone described it to me as a symbol of reunification: a fusion of the west and east into a new era for the city. How much ruin does it take for us to reinvent ourselves? I think of the earthquakes in my motherland, of the politics in the US tearing open like a valve of the heart; always danger looming. Must we tear apart to become something better?

I return to the breakfast club I so enjoy and then head downtown. It’s my last day in Berlin, and at large in Europe. There in the center of Mitte I find the Berliner Dom, or the Berlin Cathedral. I don’t have much time to spend inside but I marvel at the gold and green, the painted ceilings, and the baroque masterpieces sprawled across the dome. Then I visit the site of the first prussian palace, blown up by the soviets and turned into the “people’s palace,” then demolished once more and turned into a replica of the first palace. It’s now a public museum. In the afternoon I meet with a friend of my mom’s for apple strudel and then a tour of the public art around the city. We end at the East Side Gallery, take selfies in front of the portrait of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing (whose actual title is My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love), then spend the evening at a food market in a residential area which reminds me a little of Budapest.

At three in the morning, we begin our journey home: a train to the airport just outside Berlin, then a flight to Warsaw, then a ten or so hour flight to Miami. I listen back to all the episodes of my favorite podcast from the last two years. I knit. I write. For the life of me I can’t seem to sleep. The bathroom of the airplane has a pink flower in a small vial attached to the mirror. I notice this on my third lap around the plane in my desperate attempts to keep myself occupied. My friend starts and ends her ankle surgery while I’m on the flight, and her mother texts me updates and videos of her high on anesthesia. After we finally land, I lose the others in customs. My father picks me up from the airport. The trip ends without a goodbye.

Day three is spent downtown. We go to one of my father’s favorite stores, Decathlon (an REI-type outdoor gear brand) to buy walkie talkies and towels. We galavant around the city, communicating via walkie. It occurs to the others that we are A, B, C, and D names and so naturally we refer to each other as Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta, and to the group as chat (because we are gen z truly). Then we all hang out in a cafe while the boys study and I catch up on writing. In the evening we catch a flight to Barcelona.

We have one day in Barcelona to satiate Chey’s desire to see the city. Obnoxiously, I much prefer Madrid. Barcelona is nice but underwhelming. Las Ramblas is under construction, Mercado de la Boqueria is closed, and we can’t get inside the Sagrada Familia.

At lunch, I am asked why I care so much about family. You’re so serious, Dakota says. I explain that in Latin America, and in Jewish culture, everything we achieve is thanks to the people that raised us––there is no such thing as a “self-made” man. Life is fleeting, I say, and so impermanent. The only thing that outlives us is our village. This, I think, is where my recent baby fever comes from: a longing to have the opportunity to be so selfless. To contribute to a continuing thread of human existence. We eat good peaches, hike a mountain for a view of the city and enjoy the skyline (mostly the Sagrada) from there.

Day four we catch an early train to Toulouse, connecting through Narbonne. The train is at 8 and 40 minutes away, so I wake us up at a bright 5am. I feel like my mother when I turn on the lights and say up and at ‘em! When no one wakes up I go down for a coffee and say if you’re not up by the time I come back I’m leaving without you. I watch the Stanley Cup Finals while the others get ready––8pm EST start time means the game is still on when I wake up. Luckily, this means I get to call all my friends screaming when an early lead becomes a shut-out. Get up bitches, I announce when the third period time reaches 0. The Canes have won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 20 years and I am in an unkillable mood.

We make it to Narbonne in perfect time. That’s not the problem. The problem is that a train has gotten stuck on the only track between Narbonne and Toulouse and there are no trains moving in that general direction indefinitely. We wait for hours at the station––11am becomes 3 and then 5pm. I learn that our train tomorrow has also been canceled. Perfect mood time of death: about noon. Eventually we find ourselves Ubering to catch a bus instead. Tensions are high and tempers hotter. By some twist of luck the bus, too, is delayed. Awesome.

Eventually the bus finds us and I make small talk with the girl seated next to me. I learn she’s from Nice, where we are headed after Toulouse, and ask her for a list of recommendations. She’s excited to practice English and is incredibly kind. She writes me a list of all her favorite places. For two hours we talk about our studies (she’s in her first year of her master’s degree studying museums and French heritage), our hobbies, national parks, places we love, TV shows, Substack, Instagram, and beaches. I get her Instagram and am sad to say goodbye.

In Toulouse my aunt picks us up at the bus station. Well, she comes running and screaming towards me before swallowing me in a hug, and then picks us up from the train station. We check into the hotel, which takes a while because for some reason it was listed as a hostel on my spreadsheet and thus I did not book enough rooms. At dinner my aunt and I share a glass of sans chagrin Chardonnay. We have Indian and Asian cuisine at a food hall; the others try African stews and slurp from giant bowls of ramen. We discuss Macron, feminism, and needlepoint––I tell her I made the patch on my sweater and she gifts me her first needlepoint project, a beautiful bouquet of flowers embroidered on a brooch. Chey and I explore the city by night, all lit up and picturesque. We peek in a Macdonalds to see how different the menu is and can’t resist ordering their macarons to see if they are any good. They’re fine. We enjoy the city some more, take some pictures while discussing self-conception and the fragility of things.

It’s late when we get to bed, and in the morning I find myself communicating between three different languages trying to book a new train. It’s 12:45 when we board our next train to Cannes, and then 4:50 when we make our connection from Marseille. We make it all of 20 meters when the train slows and comes to a stop. We apologize for the inconvenience, but the train is stopped for safety reasons until further notice. Well, shit. My aunt insists that one day this will all be funny. We will laugh in hindsight, she says. Right now though, I’m tired and grumpy and haven’t been able to eat since yesterday.

On our first day in Cannes, Cheyenne and I wake up with a mission: today is girls day. More than that, today is bob day. We wander into a cafe for good coffee. I’ve noticed that most places that offer coffee have the same automatic machine which makes espresso macchiato that is subpar at best. Now I gasp at the sight of a real espresso machine. The man behind the counter is Romanian; we make easy conversation. When he learns we are American he tells us when I first moved to New York I went to a restaurant and ordered a steak. When it came it was so big I couldn’t believe it was mine. I stared at it for fifteen minutes before the waiter told me it was mine and that I should eat it before it got cold. The girl across the bar laughs when he tells her he hates her for going to the beach without him. We compliment her bob and tell her we’re on our way to cut our hair too. It’s great, she says, more room for kisses on the neck.

We wander into the hair spa we saw on the walk to the hotel last night. Bobs! we squeal when we clamor inside. We ask the woman at the desk if she can give us matching ones, and she informs us that she cannot, but the stylist is over there and she can cut our hair. Noy, we learn, is her name. She doesn’t speak very much English and we speak no French, so we communicate through a combination of photos and hand gestures. Here, we say and point at our necks. Yes! she says. She takes us across the way to the salon and into a private room in the back to wash and cut our hair. I go first. Noy washes my hair, which is in desperate need of TLC after all these hostel showers, and then sits me in the chair. We chatter excitedly, and Noy matches our energy by chiming in with oui! and no! Le fringe? she asks me. No! I tell her. We’re having so much fun we barely notice when multiple ladies from the salon come in to see what all the squealing is about. Cheyenne facetimes her parents when it’s her turn. After we’re done, there’s a mountain of hair on the floor and we laugh and dance around with Noy, who also has an incredible bob.

I decide to get my nails done while we’re at the salon––french tips to match my french bob in the French Riviera! Chey calls Aidan and we decide that in order to shock him, we must convince him that Cheyenne in fact did not get a bob. She chickened out when she watched me cut mine, I tell him over the phone. He sounds so devastated I almost feel bad. You want me to walk all the way there for just a trim, he asks. Well yes, I tell him. He’s so dejected when he sees me he doesn’t even notice for several minutes that Cheyenne does, in fact, have a bob.

We use our second day in the Riviera to visit Nice, where we follow the girl from the bus’s recommendations. She cooked with this one, we keep saying––at the bakery where we try her favorite treats, at the beach when we hear the water make a twinkling sound as it washes over the stones, and at dinner when we try her recommended dishes. We have socca, a flat naan-like bread made of chickpea flour, and pissaladiere, focaccia topped with caramelized onions, at her favorite restaurant. As she promised, it’s incredible. I make a mental note to thank her.

We spend the evening drinking aperol spritzes and laughing about random stories from our adolescence. That’s insane, I say as Dakota finishes a story––how long have you known this, Chey? About five seconds, she responds. Somehow the subject of Dakota’s deviated septum comes up. I bet I could un-deviate it, I say in reference to our recent bickering. You know what, sure, he says. That’s how I ended up punching my travel buddy in the face. Long story short, I did not un-deviate his septum.

Back in Cannes, we decide to spend our third day in the riviera kayaking to a little island with a castle on it, Ile Sainte-Marguerite. The view is gorgeous, the water crystal clear and easy. Snow capped mountains behind us and a wedding on the island in front of us. Dakota jumps out of the kayak to climb the boulder on the coast. We pull our kayaks ashore and wander the cemetery we find there. Marble swords rise as headstones from the red clay cracking underfoot. According to our rough translation, the cemetery commemorates the battle of crimée. What does crimée mean? Was this from the Crimean war? Or were these political prisoners? We have no signal and cannot look it up.

I cannot help but think of L’Heptameron and Marguerite de Navarre while the others climb rocks and jump into the water. Too sunburned from Nice to take off my coverup, I begin to wonder again about her life. I suppose I too would be so inspired as to invent a genre if I lived somewhere as beautiful as this. Was she involved in the politics of her country, or did she spend her days wandering aimlessly as we do on this island? What, I wonder, did she want to speak about? What secrets did she die with? My friend asks for advice on whether she should ask out the boy she likes. Do men just need a push, or am I stupid for even asking? she asks. Say it now, I tell her, or die wondering.

Across an ocean, another creature draws breath: an old friend from my time in Venezuela has had her baby. She is precious, small. Clean and curled up like a little lamb against her mother. She shares a birthday with Agnes. How special, says Agnes when I send her a picture. From that angle she looks just like my mother.

I read Kierkegaard on the plane back. In high school I considered myself an existentialist. This was perhaps because I considered myself too much. It took until now, though, for me to get around to Kierkegaard because as into classical theology as I was, in true teen girl fashion I was reading Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir––notably less than theistic characters. Now though, I consider the argument against moral dualism: if the facts indicate one thing is true, and my internal reality proves its opposite, then both things can be true. This is what the essayists have always said. I think of my nonfiction professor in high school, Emmett, who taught a class on the question of reliability. Truth, he’d argued, is relative to the experience of the speaker and to the argument made against it.

I think about this while I traverse the city with a friend from my writing life who has come to visit from New Orleans. I last saw her in December in Nola, at a vampire-themed cafe where we drank mocktails from IV bags. I saw her in Philly the year before and in Gambier, OH another year before. The beautiful thing about such friendships is that because our visits are so fleeting and spontaneous, we always pick up right from where we left off.

This week she and I are running about Miami, largely in circles because I cannot read a map. I have always been a terrible navigator. I keep saying left when what I mean is right, or right when what I mean is no. We keep ending up in the wrong parts of town. This worries my mother, who sees my trip through Europe as dependent upon my ability to navigate the train system. This is true, but it’s also true that navigation is not synonymous with successful navigation and that I will be “navigating Europe” one way or another. My mother is not pleased with my Kierkegaardian argument.

The rain limits us somewhat, but we relax in a salt cave, see a bruja, go to the tip of the bermuda triangle, visit farmers markets and art galleries, and eat several pub subs. Despite my horrific instruction, we make it around the city and back in one piece.

The day after my friend leaves I fly to New York, where my cousin and her boyfriend graciously let me crash on their couch. We catch up a bit––her boyfriend walks along Museum Mile with me while my cousin takes a meeting and we have Greek for dinner. I have 12 hours in the city before I have to be at Newark. I manage to make my way through the city without getting too turned around thanks to its grid system. I grab bagels in the morning, fresh and warm and soft. They make me miss my bagel place in Chapel Hill, which is undoubtedly better and cheaper. These ones are good but too salty. While I eat I think of lazy mornings at Brandwein’s––Gray Squirrel cold brew and a caprese bagel with Kay or my dad or Hillel friends.

I sit in central park for a bit and talk hockey while I watch for birds. My mom says she’ll buy my ticket to whatever museum I’d like if it’s one I’ve never been to. I choose the MoMA and an hour later find myself downtown, pink ticket in hand. The art is gorgeous: a glass crib, a pine-scented installment of sewn-together blobs of stuffed animals, a stage set of an opera about Frida Kahlo’s life adorned with her work. I sit and write some. It’s been a while since I’ve written a poem just for the pleasure of it. I write about James Rosenquist’s F-111.

In the afternoon I meet up with my friend, who’s in for the summer on a Warner Bros. internship. She tells me about the hairdresser she had been staying with, the spiritual healer her mother sent her to see. I tell her about the bruja who told me I needed to clear the garbage energy in my sacral chakra from the last boy I dated and she wishes me luck with doing so. It’s a nice reunion, even if brief. We have good coffee from a local place she says all the actors love, and then I head to Newark.

I find Aidan, Cheyenne, and Dakota in the airport around 6pm and we board our redeye to Lisbon shortly thereafter. We land around 9am, surprisingly bright-eyed for people who have barely slept. We leave our things at the hostel and trek to a nearby cafe, where we have breakfast and coffee for 3 euros each. We explain to Aidan the different ways to take your coffee––macchiato, capuchino, latte––over soft, sweet pastries and shrimp quiche. We meander the old town where shops spring up like flowers from the pavement, each building a distinct pastel. At an old news stand converted into a boutique with a coffee bar, I stop for a macchiato while the boys play foosball on a glass table.

We stop by the Leica store to look at cameras and the pictures taken with them. The men in the store eagerly tell us about the festival happening tomorrow for the patron saint of Lisbon and of lost causes, St. Anthony. They recommend a place for dinner––going to Lisbon without going to Ramiro’s is like going to the beach without getting in the water. We stumble upon a book fair after that and explore for a bit, sampling ciders and trying activities in the park.

After a full day of walking through walls of hot air, we decide to spend the evening at the beach. We choose Cascais, recommended to us by some girls at the hostel. When the Bolt car turns the bend, we gasp. It looks as though the whole world drops off into a great blue right in front of us. We stop at a castle-turned-beach with a freshwater spring feeding into the ocean. I watch our things while the others explore, befriend a duck while I chase our sandals, constantly washed away in the tide. Before dinner we walk along the cliffs. Giant rocks tumble into the water, red sand cascading into the water. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. How blessed are we, we say over dinner––the only words we have left. I feel so lucky. I can’t believe we’re here.

I count the hours on my fingers. I write some. I would edit my book, but there’s not much to work on until my editor gets back to me. I finish every show I’ve been meaning to watch. I catch up on my movies. I read, then get bored again. The dog and I have this in common––always searching for sunny spots in the house and always getting distracted before finding them. I sew a sweater, lace up my shoes and then decide not to go anywhere. Last week I bought a new pair of running shoes and now I stare at them, all pearl white and wrapped up in a blue box. Perhaps I will take them out. Perhaps I will find a new show.

The second week of summer brings more playoff games. The Canes ran an undefeated first two rounds, the first in NHL history to sweep 8-0 before the Eastern Conference Finals. Game one was a rusty 6-2 score for the Habs and clearly 12 days off between round 2 and ECF held some unspeakable horrors for them to be playing this badly. Historically the Canes have not done well in the ECFs and they must be in their heads. Relieved to finally have something to do, I bedazzle an evil eye on my jeans, for luck, while I watch game 2. To ward off the Canadiens.

We make an early goal. Freddy Anderson, the goalie who during the regular season is a brick wall, lets in a goal for the Habs. Freddy Swiss Cheese Anderson, comes a text from my friend’s boyfriend. The game is stressful, but at least it’s something to do. The ref calls a major on the Habs, then turns it over to a minor. I briefly consider that it is impossible to really be impartial. In overtime, I lean forward, steady. The thing I both love and hate about hockey is the sudden death of it all. The commentator rambles for a moment, then interrupts himself. GOAL––Ehlers makes it in for the win! I scream and drop my bedazzler onto my pinky, burning the skin clean off. My dad comes running from the other room to see if I am okay. Sorry, I say, I was watching hockey.

My family thinks it’s incredibly ironic that I, a writer, have gotten into sports. I live in the south, I say like it’s an explanation. It is. In the south you pick a god and you pick a sport. No sport means nothing to talk about. I picked hockey because my friend took me to a game and I could only feign interest in football for so long. I like the pace and the excitement. I think of a professor I had one summer who taught a class called Sports Narratives. I never did get to take it. Now I wonder what I’d write if I were going to make a sports narrative. I consume many these days, but I’m not sure what I’d do if I had agency in one. I wrote a paper on masculinity theory last semester, used hockey as a case study. I wonder if that counts. I wonder if that professor would have liked it.

This summer bears the presence of two new creatures in the house. I spend time with both between long hours. My brother’s rabbit, a 21st birthday present, hangs out under his loft bed. His name was Kodak, until my mother found out who Kodak Black is. Now we call him Kody. We worry that he’s bored back there––rabbits are highly social creatures, I read. We buy him toys, a playpen, a hay holder. The second animal is a foster fail we couldn’t bear to give up. After the last dog died, my mother swore no more. The rescue asked her to board him until they could find a family. He was sick, docile. I knew as soon as she told me a dog was home that she would keep him. Now, he rests his slobbery head in my lap, asking for attention. Drool seeps out of his mouth and into my shorts. I pat his head halfheartedly.

Outside I hear the neighbor kids screaming, playing in the pool. Three little girls under 10, still green and happy to play pretend in the yard. Their high voices carry over the lake between our houses. I think of the photos of myself at that age, printed and framed around the house. When you used to be cute, my mother says. We find ways to record our lives in this way––frames, photo albums, journals. The girls will one day look at the photo their mother snaps today and say I used to be cute. Snapchat memories floating in the notifications on my phone: today in years past. The idea that today happens every year has never made sense to me. The past and the future are cleaved by the present. They are shifting categories, but they are distinct. What was true then is not the same as what is true now. Then was an entirely different status of being.

Each year of my recent life separates itself into categories. There was the renaissance, then dark night of the soul, and summer of love, and my year of rest and relaxation, and Strega Nona. This year, I think, is Speak or Die. I have been thinking about Marguerite de Navarre, princess of France. The 1558 posthumously published L’Heptaméron (which recounts ten flood-stranded travelers who tell stories to pass the time) is considered both a battle of the sexes and the originator of the short story. Many consider the work to be based on court life as it unfolded around Marguerite. In day 1, tale 10, Amadour assails Florida’s honor and then confesses his love. She resists and, upon her husband’s death, takes the veil at the convent of Jesus. It’s ironic, almost, that Amadour means one who loves. I have been thinking, in particular, about this passage:

one day, while leaning against a window, spoke thus to Florida—

“I pray you, sweetheart, counsel me whether it is better for a man to speak or die?”

Florida forthwith replied—

“I shall always counsel my friends to speak and not to die. There are few words that cannot be mended, but life once lost can never be regained.”

The story is also mentioned in André Aciman’s 2007 Call Me By Your Name. Elio asks Oliver about the French poet who asks is it better to speak or to die? The question remains open at the end of the novel, when Oliver marries his girlfriend from back home and their love remains an omnipresent fact in the background of their lives. The Heptaméron is, in its own way, an act of speaking. This year I am thinking about the world into which I’m speaking. Is it worth speaking if doing so will not change the outcome? Is it more honorable to speak or to mend the problem without announcement? Or to let things unfold as they will?

This summer I will spend a month in Europe with my friend from middle school, her brother, and her boyfriend. We organized it all ourselves. Lisbon, Sintra, Barcelona, Toulouse, Cannes, Nice, Geneva, Zurich, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Hanover, Berlin, maybe Prague.

As the days between now and Europe shrink I grow increasingly terrified. I am thinking of delays, missed flights, hotel mixups. I imagine every conceivable way things could go wrong. At the Israeli restaurant by the jeweler, my mother is telling me it’s what you do with the fear that counts. Most people don’t see the world not because they can’t, but because they are afraid. Unwilling to make it happen. It’s not seeing the world I’m afraid of. I know it will be a good trip. I will do good living, good writing, meet good people. I will also be entirely responsible and agent in a way that is unprecedented and unfamiliar in a strange new landscape.

Fear is a mental event, my psychologist says. In order for good things to happen you must first place yourself in the moment when good things occur. You can take yourself there. Everything is a spatial metaphor when it comes down to it. You position yourself somewhere in every situation. A girl on substack wrote that you must increase your surface area for luck to hit you. You must traverse the town. You must see the world. I’m not expecting to discover myself in Europe. I don’t know that gazing out at the landscapes passing by will show me something inexorable and entirely novel about my nature, but perhaps somewhere in the movement I will find what compels me to speak, and consider what is dying.

Often I am asked why I write so politically. It is not by chance that I do so. It is not by chance that I have learned the value of speaking. The thing I mean to say is that my art is not a part of my identity but an undercurrent to the community that raised me.

We all know that Miami is latin fusion, coladitas, and a vibrant art scene. But Miami also is made up of the people who came here in exile from tyrannical governments. We understand deeply what happens when we do not speak––not because we read about it, or because we heard from some other city, but because we witnessed it. Our family stories are ones of resistance to forces that try to silence us. This is what fuels our culture—great methods of life come from understandings of what is at risk. We laugh, live deeply, and speak loudly because we know what hangs in the balance.

All my friends and neighbors were artists from the moment I moved to the US—they took us in, filled our house with color, and created the sense of community I have come to understand as definitive of my hometown. We know that art is a part of life because it is our practiced, effective method of speaking. It is how we resist, how we communicate, and how we connect. We are a community deeply woven by a core appreciation for the power of voice. We speak because we can, because we haven’t always been able to, and therefore we must. We speak because our community is made of ancestors whose voices were silenced. All of it is political.

In the age of terror, masked men with federal titles come for our neighbors, and they come for us. They seek to scare us because we are people who have seen terror before, who have been silenced, and we can recognize it. We know how to fight it. My Miami is constituted of artists who lead movements.

I am not afraid of our president because I know that he is uncreative. These times are terrible but we know how we must respond. In thinking of the place I love I remember our legacy of resistance. Our generational thought is that better times are always coming.

It is with pride that I say I am raised in Miami. Being from here is a constant process of becoming. It’s with pride that I speak our fusion into existence to friends who have not heard the way a Miami girl says liiiterally mami. It’s a legacy of speaking. Our voice is our own. We come to Miami not to become “American” but to become a truer version of ourselves. We don’t come here to become something else. My town is not a place of transience but a place of permanent work towards freedom.

What I mean by art is not the modest western imagination of a small portrait above the couch found in a Marshalls. Our Miami is art that speaks because this is how we create and defend ourselves: through bold flavors, bachata, salsa, spray paint flowering up the walls, sculptures morphing into buildings. This is the culture that forms us. There is no such thing as a home with no art on the walls. There is no such thing as a gathering with no dancing.

Ask me why I believe in grassroots movements and I will explain that I was raised by grassroots people. This is how I have always understood culture. You pick someone up from the airport. You invite a friend of a cousin to holiday dinners so you are sure they have somewhere to go. You send everyone home with food. You watch each other’s kids and open your home to guests because you know that when the time comes—and the time will come—your neighbors will pull you out of whatever burning building you are trapped in. Ask me why I have hope for a liberated Miami and I will say we are already liberated. Our culture is not surface-level but a deep solidarity. No polite smiles, but the thing you need to hear.

To be from Miami is to be from Miami and from-from somewhere else. Even “native Miamians,” even if you were born here, you know your lineage traces lines throughout the world. It is an understanding that the thing that makes us is not the division between land and land, or land and water, but the lengths to which our culture will stretch.

ICE may try to infiltrate our town but they will never erase our Miami. It’s not a group of “illegal immigrants” that live here. We are a long tradition of consciousness beyond a group of specific individuals. They cannot get rid of us as they conceptualize an ideal “immigrant target.” We are a community in a way that transcends the idea of the one versus the whole. We’re just not formed that way.

Today I am thinking of our long tradition of speaking ourselves into existence. This is why we celebrate our community. It is not enough for placid, western activism to say well I voted, now let’s wait for my representative to read my mind and hope that with goodwill he might possibly know and consider my best interest. The latin tradition is one of practiced, strong resilience. It is a nuanced articulation of justice: goodness and truth are not cleanly split and identified, but an ongoing process. Resistance is artistic because we know that nothing is black and white. American activists ought to take note.

We mark ourselves not just as a geographical dimension but as an ongoing body of culture. I have faith, always, even as we are gerrymandered and radicalized, because our Miami cannot be erased.

Happy 305 day, Miami.

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In Chapel Hill I’ve been circling campus, watching the birds swarm low under gray sky. Their red bellies, round and raw, scrape against the branches. I watch chipmunks dart into bushes––I had never seen them before, in person, and thought for a while that they were baby squirrels. This is to say that life here is peaceful. I am glad to be stable, on constant footing. I plan events at Hillel. I make flyers on my friend’s Canva premium (and will never go back to regular Canva).

At my new job at the makerspace (beam.unc.edu), I design my apron and make a name tag on the laser cutter. My coworkers tell me about laser-engraved bread, pancake brunches, beach trips. We wonder if it’s possible to make a surfboard using our tools. I hang back after my first shift, thrilled by the discovery that I now have access to a bedazzler.

Back in Michigan, we were surrounded by woods for miles, contained by unending forest. Here I have agency. We have cars, things nearby. Danielle and I are going curling next week, convinced that after one lesson we’ll be olympic material. My little and I are hosting shabbat at her lake house. When my mom came to visit it occurred to me that for the first time, she was here just to visit. I had already done all my errands that week, having access to town on my own. There is a particular freedom to it––having time, energy, access. I call it agency but what I mean is control. I’ve realized I can do anything if I want to.

The running bit has become that I’m taking Woke 101 and Liberalism 420––being the only humanities major out of most of my friends, they take physics and chemistry and I take Gender Communication and Women in Politics. In my voice class we twist on the floor and pull on our tongues while sighing and counting. I write essays on Federici, Foucault, De Beauvoir while they memorize formulas. They get annoyed when we do homework together. I don’t think my work is unimportant, though. There is something to be learned about history and society from studying Early Modern Witchcraft. There is something to be gained from the wall lunges. This is another kind of agency I have come to appreciate: I get to decide what I study, who I am with, and who I learn from.

It’s a charming, comfortable rhythm I have fallen into.

Last week was my sorority’s family weekend and my friends and I led services. I gave the d’var and have been having thoughts on the Torah as an IKEA instruction booklet.

The parsha, or torah portion, was Terumah––in which “God instructs Moses to collect gifts from the Israelites in order to build a [Mishkan, or] Tabernacle so that God can dwell among the people; God describes to Moses the vessels and structures that comprise the Tabernacle.1” Reading it, I wondered why so much attention was placed on the detail of the Israelites bringing gifts to build the tabernacle––God says “Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.”

Initially, I read the emphasis on gifts. You shall accept gifts for me, God says. I struggled to understand this because by this point in the Torah we had already come to understand God as a divine power––why would God need us to gift God any material object? But then I considered that perhaps this translation (being an act of interpretation, as Rabbi Larry reminds us) was meant to place emphasis on something else. God says; From every person whose heart is so moved. Maybe what we’re meant to pay attention to here is the presence of community in this portion. That community in itself is a gift. God says “And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”

My mom and my therapist both like to remind me that you can’t do everything in this life alone. This is true. My mom is a very wise woman and Dr. L knows his stuff. But what if we reframe? It’s true that we don’t have to take on great projects alone. No one must build a tabernacle by themself. They share in the labor, and they share the tabernacle afterwards. Perhaps this is why we are here now. Nothing obligated all of the people in the room at services to sit there and listen to me yap. In theory they could all have been at home watching TV or at parties or asleep with the dog. But we came to Hillel because there’s a certain gift you give and receive when you expand your community. Hear me out:

I take credit for my mom having met many of her best friends while waiting for me after dance or picking me up from school or any of her ten thousand mom duties. I try not to be too embarrassed when they say I knew you when you were two years old and you hated me (I was a terrible toddler) because I’ve realized that this is a way of making tangible the gift of community. To tell me they chased me around the patio when I was too young to remember is to say we came into community so long ago and here we are all these years later with the same gift. The thing that’s made me so excited about family weekend has been introducing my mom to my new community here––and introducing my Tar Heel fellows to a member of the community that raised me.

I think about being in the Jewish Learning Fellowship here at Hillel last semester; Allyson recounted a story during the week entitled “God question mark.” In Hebrew school she went on on a scavenger hunt with her dad during their own family day to look for where God might be. In the parking lot? In the bushes? In the trash can? Nobody was completely sure. Allyson’s Hebrew school teacher concluded that God is everywhere.

I would go a stretch further (no shade to that Hebrew school teacher) to say that God is everywhere that community is. Maybe that’s why the parsha emphasises the specific acts being done by multiple people. Maybe the thing we’re meant to understand is that the act of community in building the Mishkan is what brings God into the space. We are instructed to place jewels and gold at the center of the structure, silver around it, and copper as the perimeter. The Torah asks us how we guard the things that are most valuable to us. A Mishkan isn’t meant to be permanent. It’s not dug into the ground and set with cement. Only the people, the community, and the culture that live within it are enduring.

Distance covered (on foot): 13.7 miles

Jet-lag drags us away from our bodies in the heavy afternoon. We visit the Madrid Book Fair, where we walk 400 booths––one of which is dedicated to Venezuelan authors. We eat rice, tomatoes, and the boys gorge themselves on shrimp and ham. Paella, the friendly waiter explains, is the name of the dish, not the rice.

We explore a monastery, el Escorial, and castle gardens overlooking the valley sprawling out below us. In Toledo, we walk through the medieval city. Three cultures, everyone tells us––so rare that they live together. We walk through the Sephardi synagogue. In the women’s gallery, we observe the artifacts: tallits worn centuries ago in this synagogue, traditional dresses, torah scrolls. I buy a brooch and trip repeatedly on the cobblestone.

Prague, Czech Republic

Distance covered (on foot): 29.2 miles

In the old town square, my mother stares up at the sky. It never gets old, she says. We eat goulash and potatoes, wondering how our ancestors survived on this much stew. There are castles and palaces, graffiti, art halls. At home the historic parts are separate from the city, preserved and specifically zoned. Here, everything is historic. Medieval art falls like a layer of dust over the city. There is coffee––good, local coffee––and the Starbucks next to it.

I thrift two jackets, both authentic leather, for $20. I wonder how many people have been here before me.

We visit windows for my mother to enjoy the view and for me to see the windows. Defenestrations, the pamphlets say, sparked the thirty years’ war. I see a photo of Kafka and remember having heard, in passing, of the fact that he’s from around here. We visit the square he was born on, the building long gone having been swept away since even before the Nazis came through. In his old office, a woman promises she’ll sell my book if I ever finish it.

We spend a day in the Jewish quarter, where I think about ancestry. Jewish Theatre and Literature, some plaques are titled. A cavernous synagogue built in 1270––the oldest in Europe still in use. A fourteenth century synagogue covered in mosaic, gold and ornate tile exploding from the ark. A burial ground, where we overhear a tour explaining the Jewish diaspora, why there is an Italian princess resting here in a crypt more ornate than that of the rabbis. Purple flowers open through cracking stone. In the Shoah memorial, thousands of handwritten names bloom across the synagogue walls. Without their bodies, they explain, we lay them to rest in the most holy way we can.

I look at artisan pencils, invented here, and visit the Lennon Wall, beer halls. There is something to be said for the gothic charm of it all. These are streets and buildings that have witnessed all of history.

Budapest, Hungary

Distance covered (on foot): 50.3 miles

Two cities, I learn––Buda and Pest. Our first impression is, say, underwhelming. A thick layer of black soot blankets the ancient buildings like once-shiny toys forgotten in the attic. In this town we eat more goulash, and my mother recalls her own family. Lisa still speaks Hungarian, she says. She tells us stories about Lisa’s mom’s cookies, about babushkas, and goulash parties everyone remembers the beginning but not the end of. Here’s what I can’t figure out: the streets always smell like flowers, even at midnight when the drunk guys are out and madness is law.

We visit the baths, my father’s request, to sit in saunas and spring water. It’s unfiltered, I realize as chunks of dirt and phlegmy pollution float past us. I hide my slight nausea behind a neutral smile. It is, at least, a nice temperature. They ask how I like it. It’s not an experience I wish to repeat, I say plainly.

The next day, we decide to take a tour instead of wandering around––at least we’ll learn some history, we say. We hike Buda castle and meet a man who introduces himself as Ignacio. He tells us about his family, the local history, and its global context. There are bridges, parks, dozens of monuments to the princess SiSi. She was from Vienna, but we love her because this was her city. She was always here. She had an affair with our prime minister and learned Hungarian––do you know how hard it is to learn Hungarian? So she was ours, really.

The St. Matthias is beautiful, topped with thousands of patterned tiles in the Hungarian flag colors. Ignacio explains the porcelain is made in one factory only, out east, and that the tiles are worth 250 euros each. A fat black spire stands in the middle of spindly green ones on top of the cathedral––the Nazis occupied this cathedral during the second war, and it was bombed. We added this black spire during reconstruction to honor the thousands of Hungarian victims.

From the fisherman’s bastion, he points out his favorite places in the city. St. Stephen’s holds the mummified hand of St. Stephen and the body of the country’s favorite football player––lucky left and lucky right! And Simplaz, he says, is a must-see. He explains why the party district is in the Jewish community––after the wars, our city was destroyed. Much of the Jewish area was never built back. The abandoned buildings were occupied by rebellious youth in the 2000s. So the ruin bars were born.

The city really is beautiful when you know what you’re looking at. Another guide takes us by the shoah memorial on the bank of the Danube, where 20,000 Jews were killed. She explains the story gently, but firmly. This is not easy to talk about, she says, but we must account for all of our history. I say the kaddish, add to the hundreds of pebbles surrounding the cast metal shoes. The river is centuries older than humans, civilization, love, hate. It runs through four capital cities. The neo-gothic parliament towers over it from the Pest side. The guide says Freddy Mercury thought it was so beautiful he tried to buy it.

We see an opera in the state opera house entirely impulsively. It is stunning––a flying chapel, elevated steps, a boat, real rain, and (because it is set in Venice) the stage was inset and filled with several inches of water. Gioconda delivers her final aria in front of two rotating castle walls.

Vienna, Austria

Distance covered (on foot): 60.2 miles

Neutrality. This word keeps coming up. The agreement is that Austria is neutral. Safest city, most livable. We take another tour. The guide is phenomenal––attentive, interesting. He assigns us roles; you are SiSi, he says, and you the emperor. Here, they avoid talking about Hungary. Neutral, they keep saying. It’s not Hungarian tile; it’s bohemian. We walk through gardens, old bastions where the city walls were torn down, and fountains where early irrigation brings us Alpine spring water.

We push through throngs of thousands of people covered in rainbows and body glitter––the pride parade, we realize, is happening in the city and we are caught in the middle of it. Protesters rush like water around us. Here, too, the Danube runs fast and deep through the city. If we preserved all the ruins, there would be nowhere to live. / So we filled it all in. / This is what remains. / Vienna is more metropolitan than I was prepared for.

At the opera house, we hear stories of cotillions, high society, children listening to the orchestra in awe. This is the home of classical music, the guide says. The art is our legacy. We were home of all the greats.

We hear chamber music in the hall where Mozart performed for SiSi at six years old. At another concert, an orchestra accompanies what could be considered a classical variety show––a character duet; opera solos, duets, and arias; a pas de deux; music made with anvils, bird calls, slide whistles.

On the flight to Greece, we discuss our travels––this city is so freaking expensive.

Kos, Greece

Distance covered (on foot): lost track

There is something to be said for the oldness of it all––the old town where ladies selling big glass eyes say kalimera, the ancient tradition of sweltering in the morning and freezing by night. The wedding of a dear family friend is three days of utter extravagance: open bars, dancing, screaming. Six hundred people frat flick to traditional greek music remixed with house while lasers shoot into the sky. We smash plates and I change into sneakers to dance. Mixed opinions, mixed drinks. I hug distant cousins, friends of friends who held me when I was a baby.

In the mornings I walk the town and think more about time. I buy beautiful pieces from our friend the jeweler. We talk about art, oceans. I’m inspired by the water, he says. I explain then where water girl came from. Do you ever think about how all the water that will ever exist already does? Do you think about where it all came from? I think of what Ross Gay says of happiness and its inextricableness from sorrow. I read Love, An Index and then I read it again. “Someday,” she says, “I hope I can become resigned to knowing it’s not knowing I must bear.”

Post-script

Dear ones,

Thank you for reading, your well wishes, your recommendations. If you’d like to support my work, I invite you to join me at one of my upcoming events:

June 30 at 11 am ET: “Meet a Poet” series with the American Center in Moscow—stream it here

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I don’t have much to report from the office. I file papers while children scream gleefully outside, the plastic of their toys crashing into each other.

Some highlights

3/1-3/3

The week of carnaval I spend with the family of a classmate and friend of my father’s. It’s a national holiday, so the office is closed. I arrive in the afternoon for shabbat, oil candles already burning on the mantle. They are Sephardi––their traditions are different from those of my Ashkenazi roots. We feast on challah, made by the matriarch of the family, and recite blessings. The grandchildren are classmates of my cousin. On Sunday there is a brunch for their grandmother, Esther’s birthday. We prepare tablescapes, slice bagels, poach eggs. I make my mother’s famous brownies––they’re different, I explain, because they’re made by the hands of Jeffries’. Really though, my mother changed the recipe years before I was born.

3/4

Today my aunt, my cousin, and I go up the mountain in a gondola to the small village at the top. In El Avila, small wooden booths offer strawberries and cream, cachapas, handmade jewelry. My cousin and I take a picture from the lookout point. It’s a foggy day, the first in weeks, and the city just barely peeks through the clouds. The Humboldt, a fancy hotel at the peak, looms over us. It looks like we’re floating.

3/18

I’ve been meeting with my grandmother Tuesdays and some Thursdays to record our family history. It’s a slow process. Some days she’s more lucid than others. We go back and forth over details, who’s who––this is a photo of my grandson, Nolan. / No, that’s Dylan. Today, she pulls a manilla envelope of papers from her shelf. Her nurse hands it to me. Scrawled in red ink, handwriting I don’t recognize: Dora e Isidoro. It’s documents from her own parents and grandparents, dating back a hundred years or so. Immigration papers, military IDs for my great-grandfather––who we didn't know was military––and my grandparents’ things, too: marriage certificates and old photos. My grandmother gives me permission to bring them back to the US to preserve them.

3/29

I’ve discovered that my aunt has, hidden away in her office at the back of the house, a small wooden table with an old sewing machine bolted to it. It’s Dora’s, she tells me––her own grandmother’s; my great-grandmother’s. It still works. So this week I set out on making my dress for graduation on it. We visit the fabric store. The whole building is four stories and bigger than a mall, with fabric lined in aisles across the floor. I could live and die here, I think. I buy a pattern off Etsy and more yards of fabric than I’d like to admit.

Next week my father is coming and we’re going to Los Roques with some family friends. Then we pack, say goodbye, travel home. College tours, decisions, and graduation await.

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This weekend I turned eighteen and heard back from colleges & scholarships. My dad’s best friend from school took us to Morrocoy, the national park we visited frequently when I was a kid. On the boat we pick up trash as we tour the islands, except we forgot a trash bag so we have to use an ice bag someone on a different boat gave us. The beaches are stunning and each completely different. La Piscina is calm and pretty, and five minutes away reggaeton radiates from Los Juanes like a nuclear power plant. Then there’s Bird Island, where dozens of black birds swarm over the mangroves. At nightfall, we eat tiramisu topped with a tea light (because we had no birthday candles) and then my cousin announces to the table that I have moved up her list and am now Favorite Cousin––pretty successful day if you ask me. I did call my brother to brag.

On the way home, we decide to stop by our old house just outside the national park. We turn down a familiar dirt road, gravel grinding underneath the tires. My father is quizzing me about what’s special about the road.

It’s paved but feels like it’s not, I say.

No, he says.

It hasn’t been repaired since it was put in.

No.

The car stops. I stare for a second. There’s a tree in the middle of the road. My dad laughs and makes a right. We try to look through a hole in the fence to see if anyone’s home. It doesn’t look at all like what I remember. I don’t think this is it, I say. It’s abandoned, he says. Go to the next street, just to see, I say. We pass the tree in the middle of the road and make another right. We knock on the fence, and a second later we are greeted by the neighbor who used to care for our house, who immediately recognizes us. She takes us around, takes a picture of me in front of the tree my father almost burned down with a lantern. She has a precious two-year old daughter now, and the boys who used to play with my brother are out back clearing a pasture for one of the cows, now 20 and 25. My father can’t believe it.

1/27

Today I gain a level of respect higher than I previously thought was possible for my parents and the caregivers who work at FUNDANA. I arrive bright and early, exhausted from the day before to find that the kids have so much more energy than usual. One of the older girls is deceptively smart and kind of sassy, so obviously I love her. Let’s call her “Sally.” This morning she discovers my apple watch and is fascinated by the way it responds when she swipes at it. She grabs my wrist and pulls it up to her cheek so she can talk into it and listen for a response. I think she thinks it’s a spy watch, but to be honest I’m not sure how she knows what that is because the kids only watch educational, spy watch-less videos.

When we go to the baby gym, Sally continues trying to play with my watch until snacktime. I see the woman arriving with a tray and realize all too late that today’s snack is jello. Purple jello. Sally devours her jello, which I’ve learned is her favorite thing on planet earth. The combination of sugar and preexisting energy makes these kids absolutely bounce off the walls. They’re turning, jumping, crawling, bouncing, and singing. I turn to give another kid a toy and when I look back at Sally there’s a puddle of purple in front of her and all down her front. Great. I run back to the room to find that because the laundry is still being washed, I have one bib left to clean her up. I can’t really be mad because her little toothy smile is straight out of a cartoon, and she immediately returns to dancing and running around. Two boys keep stealing the same toy from each other as though there’s not like thirty other toys within reach of them both.

At lunch, Sally decides that today she does not like soup and she is having none of my “here comes the airplane” tricks. Fine. I put the soup down and feed her from the other bowl of chicken and rice. I get the first spoonful in her mouth and she chews for a moment, considering. Then she sticks her hand in her mouth and pulls out the half-chewed food. I have to coax her into swallowing her food, grain of rice by grain of rice. She decides that she really, really wants to feed herself, so I end up letting her hold the end of the spoon while I hold it upright so she doesn’t turn it upside down on her fresh pajamas. The process is long and messy but finally she finishes her food and goes down for her nap.

Later, in the car, I’m so exhausted and hungry I can’t remember the hyperbole “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” so instead I’m listing progressively larger animals that might satiate my hunger. An elephant, my aunt suggests. That will do, I say. We go to pick up my cousin from basketball, and my aunt suggests we might find some coffee and an elephant to eat inside. Unfortunately the food stand does not have an elephant but they do have churros which I accept because I would’ve eaten anything at this point. I eat them in the bleachers and watch my cousin finish practice. I give her a churro, and offer one to her friend. Care for an elephant, I ask. He looks at my cousin and says who told her that’s what that word means?

1/28

My accent is becoming apparent enough that everyone wants to know where I’m from. This, and the fact that I remain extremely pale.

1/29

Keeping socks on these kids continues to be a sisyphean task. They all really, really hate wearing them and every time I pick them up to pull them back on they look at me with pure disgust and hatred. One girl especially loves to take off her socks and chew on them. I ask her if they taste yummy and she looks at me as if to say duh.

Recently the kids discovered a game called “how many times can I drop my toy from my high chair and scream until someone brings it back to me only to immediately drop it again?” and let me tell you, it’s their favorite.

1/31

Three more babies have returned from being sick and now there are socks flying through the air and vomit all over. One kid hasn’t been sleeping and only after getting him calm enough to take a nap do I realize the incredibly uncomfortable position I have put myself in––but the kid is finally asleep, so I dare not move. My neck hurts for the rest of the day.

2/4

Who needs rollercoasters when one can drive two hours up a mountain to Colonia Tovar (“the German village,” as my dad calls it) with my father? We drive past a park in which my father had all his baseball gear stolen around his tenth birthday. He gestures in the direction of a plot of land he used to own. Around two, we pull into a hotel whose restaurant my father says is the best. A blonde woman in a pink dirndl brings us caprese, soup, some fruit. Most things are closed but we walk around anyway, take pictures of the scenery. It’s beautiful––old German architecture overlooking the mountains and the city below. Behind us, my father points out, there is water. We buy good bread, apricots, pan dulce. The day is quaint, slow. In the evening, I make dinner with the grandmother of the family I’m staying with. We fry potatoes, whisk eggs, chill gazpacho over conversations about college, how I’m liking it here, and my trip to the village.

2/5

Today “Suzy” has decided she’s a biter now that she has teeth. Yay! Here’s an incomplete list of things she has bit, hard, today:

1. My finger

2. A baby’s entire foot

3. A toddler’s face

4. Another toddler’s head

5. My watch

6. Another one of my fingers

Things she has not bit:

1. Her food

2/9-2/14

A week of terrible illness. Vitamin C can only do so much when you work with kids.

2/14-2/16

My aunt, cousin and I leave on Friday afternoon for Puerto Azul, a beach club about two hours outside of Caracas, where we meet up with a friend of the family. She remarks more than a few times that I look just like my mom and if she closes her eyes when I laugh it’s like Julie’s across the table from her. I take many naps on the beach. Overall it’s a delight. I return on Sunday only a little bit burned, which is a huge win for Mrs Blanquita.

2/17

Today I spend the day with the HR ladies of Fundana helping with archiving paperwork. I am given a hole punch and a pile of binders (which I am like, a normal amount of excited about) and set free. The ladies are fun. I take note of how different the working culture is here. People are happy. Cubicles could never. We eat cake two separate times and in the afternoon we sing happy birthday to a fabulous lady I’ve never met, then eat more cake. I am very much looking forward to hopefully working with them too.

In the evening, I accompany the family I’m staying with to a tournament of Padel, a racquet sport played with stringless carbon fibre or fiberglass rackets in a glass-encased court. The game lasts several hours but I remain thoroughly entertained.

I’ve noticed that life is slower here in a way I very much enjoy. People aren’t rushed. We talk life advice over dinner. It’s entertaining but it’s also fulfilling in a way I can’t say the same of living in the US. Maybe there are problems, but there are also so many beautiful things.

From the balcony after another day of my name always being mispronounced in new and interesting ways,

Bella

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1/12

The night before I leave for Venezuela is unceremonious. There is a lot less sentimental mess than one would expect and more of a frantic search for my papers, which for some reason we cannot locate even after tearing the house apart.

I spend the day with my almost 11-year old dog, and my mother with her studies. I am looking through my scrapbooks in some futile attempt to locate my birth certificate. On the bright side, I also am not done packing.

1/13

At the airport, my mother is hugging me the same way she does before any trip. My father snaps a photo while the man directing traffic glares at us.

This trip doesn’t feel any different to me. I’ve been flying in and out of Miami International since I was born, literally, and as annoying as this place is, I’m used to it. My father argues with the bag check attendant about return flights. I compliment her earrings and pray she doesn’t notice my suitcase is four pounds overweight. I wait for the officers to check my camera by hand, because the x-rays damage the lens or something. At least, that’s what the internet told me. It’s my last flight before I turn 18 and it feels no different than the dozens I’ve already taken to and from school this year.

My father insists on screwing around and I ask my mother if this is karmic justice for how I behaved in airports as a child.

1/14

I arrive at midday in Maicatia. After I am let through immigration, we drive through the mountains to Caracas.

If Americans love their flag, Venezuela is addicted. It’s everywhere—hanging from the ceiling, lampposts, large boulders painted and arranged to look like the flag, art, graffiti, polyester graphic t-shirts––everything.

Another thing I notice quickly is the outline of the country, which also is plastered everywhere. In every map I have seen until now, the border of Venezuela ends at Canaima. Here, the silhouette stretches eastward, a second peninsula-type shape reaching downward like a second leg to the country. I realize after a moment that this is the land the US recognizes as Guyana, which is a hotly contested border.

1/15-17

The next few days consist mostly of errands––we visit the military base to get my ID which here is called a cedula. It's literally a laminated piece of paper and looks like the fakest ID you've ever seen in your life, but alas it's real (and crucial). Unfortunately for me, my cedula photo is awful. Good thing they ask for it literally everywhere!

1/18

Today is my brother’s 20th birthday. My cousin posts on her story, “happy birthday to my #1 cousin” which I obviously find horribly offensive. She says that he is her favorite primo and I’m her favorite prima. Alas, primo includes all her cousins and I’m her only female cousin on the Rotker side so that makes me her second-favorite cousin. My aunt and I refuse to let her forget this.

1/18-19

This weekend we fly in the tiniest plane I've ever seen in my life to Puerto La Cruz, a beach town west of Caracas. I follow my father around to a thousand work meetings, nodding placidly at about a dozen work dinners. Then we go out on the boat. We go first to a small beach off the coast and then a little further to a slightly larger beach to eat. This one has at least a dozen of the cutest, sweetest dogs roaming around. They are definitely pets because their teeth were well taken care of and they were washed (and trained and they only pee on people who were mean to them). If you say hi to them they sit and offer a paw. I think they mainly love me because I am holding an armful of cheese, but still a win in my book. We pass around plates of fresh oysters, entire fresh-caught fish, tequeños, arepas, platanos, and bottles of frescolita. If I have one more conversation about sourdough, I may tear my hair out (sorry SJ). The day ends with a horrific but worthwhile sunburn.

1/20

Today I started working with FUNDANA, the nonprofit I'm volunteering with. I started with a tour of the facilities and then spent the morning with the babies 0-12 months, who were nothing short of adorable but very interested in trying to grab my sunburn. They were pretty well behaved, and besides the fact that one kid fell asleep in his lunch, the morning was pretty smooth.

I'm honestly really impressed by what they’ve done. The organization is organized and everyone is smiling and happy to help with anything. The facilities look relatively new and the sounds of toys and laughter fill the courtyards. I meet speech and movement therapists of every kind, social workers, all types of education workers, and they all know the names and personalities of each child.

After the babies go for their naps, I join my coworker in the administrative offices, where I'll also be helping with marketing, communications, social media, etc. It's currently just one person doing all the communications so she’s pretty excited to hear that I was able to help (and I equally excited to do so).

1/21

At my grandmother’s, I make a joke about being my cousin’s second favorite, to which my grandmother replies that she, too, has favorites. My aunt told her to stop talking, and as anyone who knows me is aware, if you tell a Rotker that you won’t have a moment of silence for hours, As it turns out, I’m her second favorite too, so two silver medals for me!

Later, a bunch of Macaws decided to come greet us at the window. We saw them in the distance and my grandmother’s home nurse said something to the effect of “watch this” and stuck some bread out the window. Next thing we knew, some very talkative birds were on the windowsill demanding more. My father said it was unlike anything he’d seen before.

At dinner, my father remarks that he’s surprised my cousin and I get along so well. It’s almost like we’re cousins, Leah says. Pure Rotker, responds my aunt.

1/22

Another day at Fundana with the babies, who are just as precious as usual. While we feed them breakfast, a carer asks how old I am. 17, I tell her, but I turn 18 in four days. She asks if I’m doing service hours for university. No, I explain, I was born here and haven’t visited in 14 years. I’m here because I finished my classes in high school and wanted to be of some use to the community. While the baby I’m feeding spits his food at me, she tells me these are the moments to live for, to not let go of my youth too soon, to seek happiness. Here is where you should experience these milestones, she says. She asks me how to say that in English. Next to me, a girl learns to walk.

1/23

Today begins with a frantic rush to get ready, only to find out there’s traffic and my aunt is running late to take me and my cousin to her friend’s bar mitzvah. The service itself was pretty. There were a lot of leg workouts, as my aunt calls them, or sitting then standing then sitting then standing. We read some 150 pages of Torah and then I am presented to every woman in the synagogue.

The party is preceded by several days of my aunt telling me the party will be simple and small. The first things I see upon arriving are a coffee bar, pool tables, dessert tables, ice cream machines, three flavors of slushee, servers passing by with hors d'oeuvres, a DJ, and four tables of food being prepared fresh. It’s a dairy meal so as to have options for everyone. If this is simple I am afraid for what’s to come.

I’m pretty convinced at this point that I’ve been presented to at least thirty percent of Caracas. A few of the boys at the bar mitzvah are very interested in getting to know me and I am tasked with a way to explain gently that they are prepubescent and I am of age.

Afterwards, I attempt for the second time to get my passport and after presenting ten different documents and posing for a photo for twenty minutes, they tell us they’ll give it to us in ten days.

1/24-26

This weekend my father is taking my cousin and I to Morrocoy with his best friend from high school and longtime family friend, Harry. My father is utterly shocked to learn that I still remember what Harry’s house looked like and that he keeps a zoo living with him at all times.

On Sunday I turn eighteen and also will hear back from several colleges, a superb mix if you ask me.

So far, I’m thrilled to be back. It’s not often an experience is what you wanted it to be, but so far (and knock on wood) it’s been all that and a bag of chips. Here’s to eighteen in Venezuela. More to come.

In search of muppets (and college decisions),

Bella

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History #iamanerdsorry

In thinking about history there's a fun game Americans like to play that I call “where were you when." That is, where were you when X happened, what were you doing, who were you with, etc. For every decade or so there's at least one event that everyone can remember with absolute clarity. Either some big historical moment everyone knows is important as it happens, or something more personal. A milestone, a loss, etc.

I remember being in middle school and asked to do an oral history project with my mom for the anniversary of 9/11. It was about 18 years after 9/11 and yet somehow my mother was able to remember every detail about the day. When she put her brother on the phone, he too could remember every detail about the caravan that he drove across the country because he could not fly.

I guess this has to do with our innate drive to tell stories as humans, our drive to remember what’s important. I've heard 2020 lockdown becoming its own version of this game. When I play it, here's some of what I remember: a Friday. March 13th, 2020, after my middle school play has just closed its last performance. The PA system came on and started listing names that were to report to the media center to pick up a Chromebook in case the school shut down. I had an orthodontist appointment that afternoon and saw a sign on the door about wearing masks and not entering if sick. There are a lot of things I don’t remember about my own life but this day I remember with absolute certainty, down to the white mercedes who caught us in traffic on the way home.

Let’s play this game now (and hopefully I’ll remember to play it a few more times through my gap semester).

For my purposes, we’ll synthesize this game into an “I Remember” format a la Joe Brainard.

I remember November 4, the day before the election. I remember setting up a substack after months of nagging by various people in my life. I remember how in my theater class, we talked about the mentions of WWII in the Noel Coward play we saw last weekend.

I remember planning an election night party with pizza––I printed way too many electoral maps in the library. I remember sewing a gift for a friend, and chuckling uncomfortably at a remark about today being possibly the last day of relative political peace in America. I remember filming one of those “when we fight we win” type videos for a friend of mine who asked for an endorsement.

I remembered the Sen. Raphael Warnock DNC speech, a guilty favorite of mine, and tried not to spiral as his voice rang through my computer into the pink dorm room––a vote is a kind of prayer for the world that we desire for ourselves and for our children.

I remember spending more time in the campus library than usual and more time thinking about the way time passes. I remember writing a poem, one of my first in months, about hunger, and called it Arbitration.

Tonight, I will write a history paper and think about the fickleness of America. I will make infographics for my social media internship. Tonight, I will do what I have not done in years––I will remember how to pray.

Monday November 4, 2024

I don’t know how to write these things. I guess we’ll find out soon if this is more for me or more for an audience of what I’m presuming will be at best an army of family friends and like five writer friends. For now, fingers crossed.

Today is November 4th, the day before the American elections, which I’m trying not to think about.

After four years studying creative writing at Interlochen, I’ll be spending this spring in Venezuela, my birth country. I’ve been asked a few times to make a blog or newsletter or something of the sort so people can stay updated on my life. I guess the finsta isn’t “professional” enough so here we are.

About me

For the inevitable crowd of strangers to whom I am allowing access to my life, it feels necessary to contextualize myself at least a little bit.

You can find my formal intro and other writing-related contexts on my digital portfolio, bit.ly/bellarotker. I try to keep it as updated as possible. I write poetry, script, nonfiction, and hybrid.

I’m a member of the Venezuelan diaspora and 305 local, having moved from Caracas to Miami in 2010. I’m a Best Of The Net nominee and three-time Scholastic Art & Writing National gold and silver Medalist and three-time YoungArts winner in Spoken Word and Playwriting. I’ve worked with or received recognition from various institutions including Princeton University, DePaul University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program (for Poetry), the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and the Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop.

One of my prouder achievements is having served as Youth Lieutenant Governor of Michigan from 2023-2024. I represented Michigan at the Conference on National Affairs which, not to be dramatic, was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Ask me about it and I can ramble for hours. I’m the youngest member of the Writers for Democratic Action national steering committee, where I also chair the youth branch. As of right now, I’m the head student archivist at the Interlochen Center for the Arts Archival Resource Treasury and work in social media marketing at Miami Freedom Project, both of which I enjoy very much and consider to be pretty cool gigs.

I have an older brother who attends Purdue, a senior boxer dog named Aero, a crocodile who lives in the backyard, and my multicultural family. I have a deep love for all things Miami. I was raised on Miranda Lambert, Hozier, Bad Bunny, Tito Puente, etc.––an interesting mix to say the least. I like shadow puppets, dogs, cafecitos, plants, my roommate, bad movies, DWTS (#teamarnoldpommel), and my dinosaur backpack.

I guess I’ll see how this goes and figure out what this substack will look like as I go along. For questions, suggestions, concerns, etc., my email is bellarotker@gmail.com.

Someone please teach me how to do substack #iamverylost