There is a memory that has been haunting me for several days — The four of us waded into dark waters in the night. The moon was out, but not enough to make the darkness of water any less frightening. It was early summer on the East coast, late June on Cape Cod, at an inlet on the Buzzard’s Bay side. Mild days…

An ode to the meditative power of train travel — After one horrific Megabus experience in 2012, I began taking the Amtrak everywhere instead. What’s better than staring longingly out of a train window, Sufjan in your earbuds, a vast landscape stretched before you? It never mattered where I was going, Lollapalooza 2015 or a wholesome coastal town — I…

How a pre-pandemic whale swim brought me eye to eye with a humpback — and my own mortality — The whales are playing hard to get. It’s a sunny day off the coast of Vava’u island group, and my father, sister, and I have set off in search of humpbacks. The Tongan archipelago is known for a migrating population of over 2,000 whales who calve and mate in its…

Love is strange — I fell in love with a guy from New England before I knew anything about him, except his art. This is a dangerous practice, as anyone who has spent time with an artist of any sort can surely tell you. I should know better. I do know better. …

First lesson: A house is not a home — When I was a senior in college, we went to Mexico. I remember the flight being turbulent, and that was the start of my lifelong fear of planes. I wondered if we’d plunge into the ocean and what that would feel like — metal breaking the surface, a body tearing…

Seriously. — California is America, only more so. That’s its burden and its gift. It’s so big and tiny, crowded and empty, foggy and smoky yet bright and shining, and it shakes. If you drive the whole length of the thing, 770 miles from top to bottom, you’re going to need some…

When 14-year-old Jacob wins a flight to Hollywood, every grown-up (including Nicolas Cage) gets in his way — Fourteen-year-old Jacob has won the prize of a lifetime: an all-expenses paid trip from his home in England to Hollywood, to appear as an extra in the latest Marvel movie. …

I’m the only hafu in the onsen, and I get to decide what that means — Hadaka no tsukiai is a Japanese saying that roughly translates to “naked friendship.” It describes the bonding that occurs whilst bathing with another in an onsen, or Japanese hot spring. In this communal setting where members of the same sex are all vulnerably naked, the public selves that we project…