Whistle

I've known for months about this departure, my departure, and still as date approaches, I feel blindsided and gobsmacked and, oh Tina Brown, there has to be a better word for this.

I'm writing this on Friday, we drive down to Virginia on Sunday, and I will be there four weeks. I know I am taking too much, too many clothes – What does a writer even wear? The same things over and over. – so I'll go through everything I've piled on top of my suitcase, and reduce. It looks like it'll be warmer in Virginia than up here, even hitting sixty on Wednesday – but it might get cold again so I have to account for that, too.

My young self is present as I pack, the twelve-year-old who cried every day of sixth grade for at least four months and then somehow found her mountain goat footing – made a friend, made a crush who sat across the aisle on the school bus, found refuge at the school library, where she shelved books, and in an elective where she was writing a novel called "Ghost of a Tragedy" – only to be uprooted that June, to move back to Belgium. Without much context for or comfort about starting over, again. In Dutch! After she'd already earned her English.

That twelve-year-old girl took a piece of oaktag, the stiff poster sheets their mother bought at the drugstore for school projects, and folded it in half and passed it around to her classmates so they could write her well wishes. Her crush, who was gay, unbeknownst to her, took up one whole side, and she read his loopy note so many times that summer in Belgium that the ink faded.

But what did it say?!

*

Yesterday I went for a haircut in the East Village. The place is called Whistle and it's tiny. I was late for my appointment, I threw my stuff down and popped into the bathroom. When I came out, there were twelve teenagers crammed into the narrow room.

One of their number was getting his hair cut, and his friends thought they could mill about out and wait for him, all twenty-four of them, because the wall-length mirror multiplied them.

They got the boot.

I got my hair chopped off.

When I put on my glasses and opened my eyes, I panicked – who was this person staring at me? I did not know her.

The stylist registered my panic and explained her thinking, etc., and said "Let me know," as if giving me permission to say that I didn't like it or wanted her to fix it or lie and say I love it, I love how I look, I look beautiful?

I've had enough haircuts by now to know that I always feel like a stranger in the immediate aftermath of one. I know I have to give it at least a week before I do anything about it.

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I'll be writing at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) February 9 through March 10. I'm considering pausing Divinity School during time, if I do so, I'll pause subscriptions. (Will she, won't she?)

Save the date – March 25 – for a launch party for SEARCH WORK: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, edited by Rachel Meade Smith (OR Books, 2026), available for pre-order now.

JUNCO AND WOLF, a story inspired by my year studying in Moscow, is forthcoming in Issue No. 33 of A Public Space, stay tuned for a pub date and order link.