I turn left down a paved road I’ve always passed by. The sky is the color of exhaust, the plateaus to the north a soft red and cream. Aside from a pinprick sized semi-truck in the distance, I am alone. I have time.

There’s a crusty pickup truck on a wide dirt lot to my right. An empty vehicle left in the desert is always one of two mysteries, a “what went wrong” or a “what did they find.” Sometimes I slow down and crane my neck to try to solve it. This time, I keep my pace.

The eighth Emma M. Lion audiobook is playing in my car. I’m on the chapter where Vicar Hawkes steps into the fighting ring on May Day to pummel the strongman out-of-towner who’s cheated his way to victory, the women of Saint Crispian’s flushed at the sight of so much bare male skin. I’m so rapt in the story, I almost don’t see the reaper-red face of a turkey vulture in the street before it’s too late. I brake, I swerve, it lifts its dark weight into the sky. I watch it fly over a hay field and will it to come back as I catch my breath. It’s lucky to be alive. I want to see the way it interfaces with death. I want to see the flesh hanging from its beak.

I’ve always found this aspect of myself to be funny and slightly bizarre, that I love teacup, corset, and bonnet formality as much as I love the macabre. That part of me loves what is refined and controlled and part of me loves what is wild. It’s perhaps, in every instance, the defining pursuit of my life, choosing between the two.

I’m driving and listening to my book again. One moment there are empty fields. The next, I’m cutting through red rock into the belly of a valley with a large marshy lake. I take the sign towards the Ouray National Wildlife Sanctuary, a place I’ve never been. Before I’ve even entered the sanctuary, two things occur consecutively: I see an osprey peering over the edge of a large nest atop a pole and my “check brakes” symbol blinks on my dash.

I’m yanked back out of Saint Crispian’s and into Leota, Utah, where the yards are dusty, all dogs are to be bewared, ducks chatter in the cattails, and a prey bird cocks its head at me as I pull over and rifle through my car manual to figure out how much time I have to get to a mechanic before I’m royally screwed. The osprey has flown to a nearby tree, wary but protective of its roost. It’s joined by another. I’ve never seen two together. Ospreys always strike me as wildly solitary.

It’s a Sunday. The closest, open mechanic is in Heber, two hours away. Caution forces me to turn around, drive slow. I don’t reach the wildlife refuge. I watch the ospreys grow smaller and smaller in my rearview. I wish, not for the first time, that I could be a bird. That I could see where every single path leads and choose them all.

That I could land somewhere and it was still natural to fly.

One pill at 2 am. Two pills at 5 am. One pill at 8 am. Two pills at 11 am. One pill at 2 pm. Two pills 5 pm. A whole civilization dead, never to be brought back again, at 8 pm. One pill at 8 pm.

The SLS rocket carrying the Artemis II crew splits the atmosphere like a paring knife days before my lingual tonsils are serrated from my throat while I sleep on an operating table, which happens days before the president of the United States threatens strikes against an entire country (“strikes” being the anesthetized way of saying to shear the skin and limbs off 93,000 individual human beings with fire and shrapnel until the muscle and blood they live in—love with—remaps their home country in trails of death).

I coast back into my body as the Artemis crew coasts to the moon, my eyes blinking open to see what for me, in that moment, is the whole world: a nurse at my lefthand, my boyfriend at my right.

My legs spasm. My tongue is lead. I’m told my mouth is really small, but surgery went well in spite of limited acreage. I’m told to rest for at least a week. The nurse calls my boyfriend the wrong name. I’m prompted to get into my street clothes and into a wheelchair before I’m fully ready. The sun outside the hospital feels too bright. The bumps in the road acute. I’m given my timekeepers for the next week: acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and oxycodone. The only way I really tally the hours.

That night, we’re see images of our cloud-shrouded world taken through the Orion capsule window. On Easter, Earthside, we’re given threats and a deadline by the sitting president: Tuesday at 8 pm. I am in bed and I’m wondering if I’m going to watch the world end in bed.

My life is pillows and books and medicine and Stardew Valley and NASA’s Instagram. I leave the church with David Archuleta, I win the Hunger Games with Haymitch Abernathy, I accidentally eat Void eggs and turn green. I almost memorize each strand of Christina Koch’s frizzy braid floating near her forehead. She looks out a window with wonder at our planet suspended in space. For three days, I wake up and wonder what it will feel like to see a nuclear holocaust from up there. To know the Earth you’re returning to is furiously and immediately being eaten alive from the inside.

Someone filmed a video of Charlie Kirk being shot in the head and the visceral image of the blood leaving his body gave silent people their voices back. Would they find their tongues if they could livestream what nuclear bombs do to human bodies? Would the distance between the US and Iran close if they could see entire families turned to ash?

In between my naps, we get a colorful image of the moon, one that shows more clearly its compositional makeup. It feels like seeing her for the first time. It feels like seeing her for the last.

My brain is running on oxycodone and Gil Scott-Heron: ten years from now I’ll be paying still while whitey’s on the moon. How dreadful a thing a rocket becomes when it isn’t aimed at space.

Tuesday comes, staccato.

8 am: pills

5 pm: nuclear war (I’d forgotten about mountain standard time)

11 am: pills

5 pm: nuclear war

2 pm: pills

5 pm: nuclear war

5 pm: pills

5 pm:

A new deadline. Two weeks.

I lie back down in a swath of sheets. Lebanon is lying in rubble. I sleep soundly for the first time in days. I shouldn’t. I can do nothing else.

They name the brightest spot on the moon Carroll after an astronaut’s love. I forget that places can be given names out of love and not the insatiable need to own. It somehow becomes the most beautiful, human place in the solar system, that crater, that cabin.

Cradled by pillows, I see a whole universe pass by me: food shortages are expected by the middle of the month, the administration is strong-arming satellite providers into hiding imagery of what’s happening in Iran, influencers are doing fit checks for Coachella, Whitney Leavitt’s bringing dirty soda to New York City, and thousands have been killed in the Middle East. The Orion capsule falls from the sky. Every chute deploys. Christina Koch steps back out onto Earth for the first time in nine days, rocked by the moon’s tides. I cry.

Starving to escape gravity, I think that’s what this feeling is.

There’s rain in Taipei on January 23rd, so Netflix delays broadcasting Alex Honnold’s climb by a day. Risk of death makes for good television, after all. Not a death march. Not pushing a man into a loaded gun.

Taipei 101 is 1,700 feet tall, all glass, concrete, and steel. It’s almost floral in its shape, walls pluming upward and out, coalescing into a long stem at the top. Alex, famous for his free solo ascent of El Capitan, looks on with an excited grin at the start of the live feed. His partner Sanni’s smile is tighter.

If successful, Alex’s ascent of Taipei 101 will be the largest urban free solo in history. If unsuccessful, he’ll have fallen to his death, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The question, if that happens, is when will the producers cut the feed. The second his fingers slip from the steel? Or when he’s in free fall, a live-streamed Icarus whose wreckage only the bystanders will witness?

I talk to friends and colleagues about it, consumed by the ethics: is it wrong to watch when you don’t know if he’ll walk away from it? The bystanders in Taipei seem less concerned. Three minutes in, you can see them amassed in throngs outside the tower and pressing their cell phones against the glass inside to film him. If Alex makes one wrong move, it will be captured from every single angle, millions of people watching him fall over and over again.

7,150 miles away. The same day. Another live stream. Another Alex. This one is an ICU nurse, three years younger than Honnold. His friends call him kind. Bystanders with phones capture multiple angles. They don’t smile and wave. They scream.

In one video, Alex Pretti holds his phone against his chest while an ICE agent pushes him backwards. In another video, a woman is shoved by an ICE agent into a snow-covered curb, and Alex steps in to help her. Alex is pepper sprayed in the face. Alex turns to once again help the woman on the ground. It’s the right thing to do. It’s his one wrong move.

“Free soloing is not something that’s super comfortable to watch.” Alex is thrown to the ground and an agent wraps his body around his legs. “It feels like we’re normalizing something that’s not normal.” Alex is beaten by multiple agents with their faces hidden. “There’s no room for error.” The gun Alex concealed-carries is wrenched from his waist.“The danger level keeps growing and growing and growing.” Alex is shot by an ICE agent. “Alex is trying to conquer this villain. Can he do it?” Alex is shot again by an ICE agent. “That is not something you feel like you’re supposed to see.” Later, they’ll confirm there were at least ten gun shots. “Will Alex continue, or will he tap out?” Alex isn’t moving. “This is a once in a generation moment, and we all witnessed it together in realtime.”

I watch the video on mute in the passenger seat of my partner’s car. My breath grows short. My stomach sours. Is it wrong to look away when I know he won’t walk away from it alive?

ICE can’t cut the feed before Alex’s body hits the ground. They can’t make it go dark when fingers slip off the trigger. Risk of death makes for good television, but murder doesn’t. So they lie. They spin. They do exactly what they were hired to do, exactly what Congress lets them do without consequence. They tell us Alex was a domestic terrorist. They tell us ICE agents acted in self-defense. They roll out the same script they had for the murder of Renee Good two weeks prior. They can’t doctor someone else’s footage so they have to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw. And if that doesn’t work, they have to make a new spectacle—“Quick! What’s that over there??”—banking on the fact that we will never not look.

I watch Honnold’s climb when he’s safe in the arms of his family. My breath grows short. My stomach sours. He’s a red dot against a blue and green Taipei in miniature. Every time he approaches a new problem, the audience gasps. On the overhangs, the crowd goes silent as death. History. The commentators grow almost heady and drunk on the word.

One Alex makes it. The first thing we hear him say is “sick.” One Alex doesn’t. The last thing they hear him say is “are you okay?”

Jane Austen hits differently when you’re I-can’t-sit-on-a-backless-chair-at-the-bar-anymore years-old. I read all of her novels in celebration of her 250th birthday last year, and more than anything, I was left with the impression that Austen isn’t for the girls—she’s for the thirty, flirty, and thriving (or barely surviving).

Austen handles age in a way that is incredibly relatable to women like me who grew up in a high-demand religion that conditioned girls to get married and start families young. Not one woman in my own immediate family (that I know of) has not been married before age 30.

Enter me. The anomaly.

This year I turn 34. I’m not single, but I am one and a half years away from being “vastly old” and “decrepit”— if Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood has any say in the matter. I’ve already reached “the years of danger” — if Persuasion’s Elizabeth Elliot has anything to say about it. More pressingly relevant is my approach to the dreaded “fertility cliff” red-pilled contemporaries like to prattle on about in the same hissing tones they give to the phrase “childfree woman.”

I don’t give two dumps about what incels have to say about my biological clock. My body, however, is chatty and lately, she’s been persistently pressing me about kids.

Had you asked me in my mid-twenties if I wanted to have kids, I would have told you my best family Halloween costume ideas, what theme the smash cakes would have and the list of boy and girl names quietly saved on my phone. Ask me now and it’s a very complicated, more painful question, one enmeshed with the shrapnel of religious conditioning, one that circles hungry-eyed around the thing whose loss I don’t actually know if I could bear: autonomy.

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I love the way the English name their houses, though most of the names I know come from fiction: Pemberly, Inverness, Thornfield Hall. Names, it seems, are always given to some great house, which is why I suppose I never named my last place out loud.

It’s still got electric tape over the front window where hail cracked the glass three years ago and a black tarp nailed over the downstairs shower because a leak in the ceiling caused it to bubble and burst four years ago. Everyone always commented on the living room ceiling being sparkly and I wondered if I was going to drop dead from asbestos one day. There hasn’t been actual grass in the yard for years, and the corners collect cobwebs, not entirely from disuse, but from the sheer number of spiders who’ve found their way inside (you can deal with a lot when your rent is $400).

Quietly, I called the place the Ivy House.

Draped like a fondant on the southwest corner and west side of the house, a swath of ivy curls and twists down the wall and in front of the kitchen window so that, in mid-day light, it feels like the understory of a garden. Sometimes I read there and felt like Elisabeth Bennet. Inside, a stubborn strand of ivy has pushed its way into the kitchen somehow, peeking its leafy little head through the stair that leads to the basement. I clipped it sometimes. Sometimes, I let it grow, delighting in the idea of ivy slowly devouring the house from the inside out.

I can remember taking a detour on my way to Logan years ago and falling in love with the way Mount Olympus’ finlike silhouette rose up above Foothill. That was the view outside my living room for six years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere as an adult. It felt like kismet to end up here.

When I first moved to Salt Lake, I couldn’t wait for my first summer in the city. Instead, I spent summer with my roommates behind the Ivy House’s brick walls, praying they were strong enough to keep a pandemic out. It was where I felt my first earthquake, too stupid in the moment to do anything but run upstairs gasping in awe. It was where I kept safe from a windstorm that lasted three days, crashing over the house like an ocean, and I can still feel the green front door hard against my back the night a neighborhood house party was interrupted by gunshots. The neighbor’s house had bullet holes in the brick the next morning, blood on the sidewalk. For days afterward, I quietly watched reporters, warped small by the glass in the peephole, come up to the front door and knock. Four years later, I will tremble in fear at the sound of unexpected fireworks and balloons popping, but I never again trembled in fear behind that door. It was somehow still something safe.

The Ivy House was where I had church for a year, and it was where I lived when I left. No other place, not even a chapel, has as intimately seen my belief.

At the Ivy House, I coaxed stray cats who made their way into the wilds of the backyard. At the Ivy House, I cried in the arms of a best friend after having my heart re-broken by a letter I probably deserved and texts I know I didn’t. At the Ivy House, I swung in a hammock and read beneath the soft light of summer. At the Ivy House, I stayed up late laughing and ranting with roommates. At the Ivy House, I accrued so much outdoor shit that it’s a miracle my bank account survived. At the Ivy House, I was ten minutes away from some of my best friends, five minutes away from the canyon. At the Ivy House, I learned how trauma feels. At the Ivy House, I healed.

For the first time in my life, I’m living on my own. I don’t have a name for this new place yet, only that it’s mine. Maybe “mine” will suffice.

Maybe I’ll sneak into the backyard of the Ivy House one of these nights. Maybe I’ll take a clipping from the wall and carry home a little leaf to keep in my kitchen window. Maybe I’ll clip it. Maybe I’ll let something new grow.

Alone in a dark room with strangers at the foot of what I mistook for a red pentagram was not where I expected to be in Spring of 2024. Then again, where was?

I was 31 years old and single—the only woman on both sides of the family to be unmarried at this age. I’d left the LDS Church a year or two prior (also an unpopular route), and I was traveling the East Coast alone to see the total eclipse.

The Witch Museum in Salem was just a fun little oddity in a series of them.

Salem in April is spooky. You get the autumnal bare bones of the trees and that ocean gray feeling in the air that proceeds the warmth of spring. There aren’t that many people milling about in the chill. I paid $13 to go through a small spook house in the mall and the scariest thing about it was that I was the only one in there.

I didn’t know what to expect at the Witch Museum.

My hot girl walk had taken me past the statue of Nathanial Hawthorne and right to the foot of the Witch Museum’s gothic, red-brick facade. I had just made it before the next tour. We were led to the dark room where a grotesque cast of wax figurines looked down at us from above, simultaneously making my blood curdle and giving me the uncontrollable urge to bully them. By the end of the tour, I was solemn.

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If you haven’t been there, the Witch Museum tour takes you through the timeline of the Salem Witch Trials, then you’re guided to a room where you learn about modern witches, witch hunts, and witchcraft. You learn about Glinda and Elphaba, but you also learn about contemporary feminists and the way witch hunts are weaponized against marginalized communities. It’s a fascinating experience, the first time I’ve ever thought that it would be a compliment to be called a witch.

It wasn’t until after my trip was over that I realized a truth that thrilled me to my core: I absolutely would have been burned at the stake if I’d been in Salem 330 years earlier.

Consider: I was 10-12 years older than all of my aunts and my mother were when they got married, and I was single without children. Most damningly, I’d defied the Church (they probably would have hated this Church, but it was in fact a church). In spite of the fact that my greatest sin up to that point was sneaking smut home from the Bookmobile, I was a woman soaked through with Puritanical scandal. I could see the banner ads now: “Ministers hate her!”

What tickled me even more was to think about what those Puritans would say if they found out I had traveled hundreds of miles alone just to see the moon hide the sun for three minutes. My body would be buried in stones.

The more I’ve read about witchcraft and women’s rights, the more comfortable I’ve felt with the conclusion reached by many that witch hunts were a fear-induced response to women stepping out of roles of submission and disrupting the societal status quo. When you read about the individuals who were accused of witchcraft, in Salem and beyond, you find accounts of women who were loud and women who were too quiet, women who were assertive, women who were financially independent and self-educated, women whose bodies were “deformed” or women considered beautiful, women who seemed more at home in the natural world, women whose spirituality was called into question, women who lived alone, women without children, women who dressed funny, women who practiced medicine, women with children out of wedlock.

We talk often about the fact that women can never win—if you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore, if you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a whore…ibble person and all that. The witch trials seemed to exacerbate that idea. Writers like Mona Chollet in her book “In Defense of Witches” have perhaps rightly concluded that the witch trials were an example and consequence of mass misogyny. A lot of those prejudices have not left women alone all these centuries later, especially as we’ve gained more freedom.

I think about my own life. It’s free, but it’s odd to other people, something they sometimes react to with suspicion. People often ask me how I can travel alone, some with curiosity, others with disapproval or fear. My friends and family members who are in the church don’t often ask me why I left it, which is how I can usually tell they disapprove or are afraid. I’m a woman who, with the help of Lexapro, is getting better at answering to herself, and that scares people, I think. That, above all else, is what makes a woman witchy.

So catch me dancing in the woods in my nightie.

This month, like many former gifted children I know, I got trapped in Curriculum Tok aka I Don’t Need Grad School, I Just Want Structured Learning Tok.

For those not in the know, Curriculum Tok is a trend where you essentially pick a few subjects you’d like to learn more about and then create your own independent learning curriculum around said topics.

My curriculum for the month (because of course I’m doing it) isn’t very sophisticated, but I decided to do a historical exploration of gothic literature and its impact on modern culture, which is rapidly expanding into an exploration of gothic literature, women, and The Church.

I owe a debt of gratitude to PBS’ Arthur for many reasons, and one of those reasons is it introduced me to the young brilliance of Mary Shelley, who I consider the mother of Goth. I’ve learned, however, that the very first gothic horror novel (that we know of) was published 54 years earlier.

“The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole is the first book I’ve read in my exploration of the gothic. With spectres, dark castles, knights, virgins, and a skeleton, it’s definitely got the ~vibe~. I’m delighted by how much Shakespearean influence exists in it. I think what added to the mystique of Otranto was that, when it was first published, Walpole pretended it was a real, old manuscript he had discovered that was written in Italian. Funnily, critics seemed to love or at least by fascinated by it until the second edition came out and Walpole owned up to having written it.

SPOILERS AHEAD (the book’s been out for 261 years, but you do you)

Otranto is bananas from the jump: a massive, plumed helmet falls from the heavens and crushes the young prince Conrad on the day of his wedding to Isabella (The Summer I Turned Dreary, amirite). Distraught at the thought that an old curse is coming to fruition to end his family’s reign, the elder Prince Manfred begins what I, a woman with a bank account who knows what weaponized incompetence is, consider the ultimate horror of the book: a horny nighttime chase through the castle to entrap Isabella, secure her hand for himself, and somehow convince his devoted but infertile wife to divorce him, a wife who is so submissive, she lets her husband convince her separation is best.

The intemperate Prince experiences multiple visitations in his pursuit, which are supposed to be omens but which he ignores five seconds after they happen. It takes him mistakenly murdering his own daughter in a jealous rage to wake tf up.

Truly, this is a book of horror for women. I don’t know what horrifies me more, Isabella being pursued by a father figure in her life who wants to marry her against her consent or Hippolita, the Princess, becoming so small and submissive in her marriage that to call out her husband’s abuse would be an act of impiety and disrespect to her.

What I find fascinating about this novel is the role of the church. Isabella flees to the church for protection from Manfred, and for awhile, she is protected from him, but later in the novel, Manfred’s daughter Matilda is murdered in the church by Manfred. The forward of the book mentions that Walpole’s ultimate moral in this book is how the sins of fathers revisit their children for generations. I can’t help but take away, with a contemporary lens, the message of how the sins and abuses of men impact women. My deconstructed fomo (former mormon) lens is also a bit fixated on the concept of the church being meant to protect women, but it ultimately doesn’t do that, does it? Not consistently.

What makes gothic literature what it is, in part, is that the sublime and the supernatural collide. I don’t know that gothic could exist without the church. I’ll be fascinated to trace that as I read through gothic history.

Also, the next book on my list is by a woman who starts her novel by saying “I can do what Walpole did but better,” so I’m excited to keep reading.

Let’s she if she goth bossed too close to the sun.