It's been a while since I've written here. In the past months, I put on an event for work to a rough degree of success, I struggled some days for many reasons (personal, professional, political), and I put down the pen for a little bit only to get really excited about coming back here.

Things are looking on the up and up these days, which makes me feel ridiculous that I felt like such a mess just a few months ago, but hey emotions, they are what they are.

In other news, did you know that Las Vegas is incredibly beautiful? I didn't, until I went there this past weekend to chase the sun and go on a climbing trip with my boyfriend for his December birthday. I don't want to speak too soon but after climbing with my boyfriend for the past year and a half, often times begrudgingly, I think I have finally caught the climbing bug. Those rocks above did it; and also maybe the realization that I can do things that I think I can't.

While my writing practice has waned these past few months, I have kept up reading as much as ever, and devoured Francisco Goldman's "The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle" a few weeks back, deciding that it was my favorite book of the year. The book blends travelogue, memoir, and the political into one, which I think is a wonderful, perfect mix. The way he describes the country-wide grief in Mexico and how it simultaneously informs his own personal grief after tragically losing his wife is stunning.

A few years ago, I read Goldman's novel "Say Her Name," which chronicled losing his wife due to a swimming accident off the Pacific coast, and while it was beautiful, it was almost too heartbreaking to ever want to read it again. But as Goldman continues on processing his grief, his latest writing is a bit easier to digest (although the subject matter in "The Interior Circuit" is often just as dark). Some particularly gorgeous passages:

"Concentration and hours to write come more easily to me in the DF than anywhere else, especially when it rains. Time in Mexico City, at least to me, seems somehow slowed down, so that days feel twice as long as they do in New York. A mysterious energy seems to silently thrum from the ground, from restless volcanic earth, but it is also produced, I like to think by the pavement-pounding footsteps of the millions upon millions who labor every day in the city, by their collective breathing and all that mental scheming, life here for most being a steadfastly confronted and often brutal daily challenge, mined with potential treachery, but also in the best cases, opportunity, one sometimes hiding inside the other as in a shell game; also by love, desire, and not so secret sexual secretiveness, the air seems to silently jangle with all that, it's like you breathe it in and feel suddenly enamored or just horny; so much energy that in the late afternoon, I don't even need coffee."

"Though I will never be able to comprehend Aura's death, I do think I live with it now with less resistance, less corrosively, with less inner panic than before. Aura has her place inside me now, I told Nelly, though I hate that phrase and its false impression of gardened cemetery, neatness. What is Aura's place? Death and memory, never neat or orderly, always a forest and an ocean."

I mean, how perfect are those words?

In a few months, I will be off to Mexico myself for a month-long writing residency. I've been planning a trip to Mexico for a while now and am that glad it's working out, though there are many anxieties surrounding it (money for one, and also the fact that I'll be alone every day with my thoughts and a blank page. Fun!). Still, I'm excited for change and a new year and a few posts heading your way with more of my favorite writing of 2017.

Glad to be back.