Reflection: Margins
August 10, 2026

The rooms that I thought were colliding feel so far apart. I don’t have enough strength to bring them together and I’ve been looping Fred again for the past three hours. My niece and nephew keep changing it to a song called Waffle City and I wonder how all of this is going to impact my Spotify wrapped. “Let life happen, compadre!” a man shouts as he drives past in an old pickup truck billowing with smoke. I nod my head in agreement, put down my matcha and make the sign of the cross. I shave my head to mourn the life I left behind. I shave my head because I’m still bad at pickleball. I start writing in the margins of my own journal with a different colored pen so as to explain my thoughts to an outside reader but that outside reader is me. I write of the time I was held in detention at a Russian airport and I pleaded the fifth because I don’t speak Russian. They don’t have our amendments but they didn’t speak to me either. They let me go after a one-hour standoff but now I’m held in detention by the Texas heat and I wonder, to whom do I plead? Maybe to the mayor of Waffle City, I write in red ink on the side of a page.