Cosmic residue
A year of grief and surprises
My year started off with wild fervor and ambition, as full of potential as a twenty-six-year old who’s just landed a bomb internship, and it ended with sixty-six freshman composition essays; an excessively trained Australian Shepherd puppy; and a promise to myself to anticipate absolutely nothing.
It’s been a ride. In January, I signed up for a Portuguese class, fairly confident that I’d win the significant fellowship I’d applied for. I spent the spring semester learning Portuguese, writing and researching for a major project, ferrying ten-deep stacks of books home on the 61C. I was all go go go; all future, baby.
In May, Elena and I went to Spain for a month – an adventure I’d signed up for after a writer friend of mine decided to start a radical community there for women and children. It was a transformative experience, the first time I'd lived in such intimacy with other women and traveled solo for an extended period with Elena. It seemed like the perfect launching pad for the next phase of my life. It was all happening!
And then things crumbled quite swiftly. I was on a terrace in Oaxaca sobbing so hard I was almost throwing up. Life did its thing of reminding me it’s not a story, it’s life. We drove to the beach, the wild Oaxacan beach, baby turtles and puffer fish, lanky long-haired surfers and crocodile inlets and roseate spoonbills shining pink in green lagoons. A place where grief gets absorbed by the sky, becomes weather. A place where the body is small, precious, insignificant.
I finally understood years ago during Covid, also a time of grief, why the beach attracts so many lost souls – sun-crisped gringos selling magic brownies in sheds, beautiful girls with shaved heads sculpting mandalas with bare feet. The beach is vast enough to hold whatever feels like too much, wild enough that one’s human suffering is just another wave, another salt-lapped boulder.
We retuned to Pittsburgh and I took on a lot of work. A friend, the kind who understands everything, asked me if I was writing, and I said no, and she said, you don’t even want to go there, and I said no.
And I didn’t. I read. I accumulated big stacks of books on the coffee table and I remembered, in a time when writing felt like sharp, accusatory grief, how much I loved words. I started reading poetry again: Joy Harjo, Ada Limón, Wendell Berry. I read novels that had nothing to do with anything, no clear purpose for my own work, just stories. Of trees and people. Of human consciousness and beauty and struggle.
I stood in front of the 5th floor copier at 6 pm waiting for the 48th copy of “The Banking Model of Education” to print, drinking the cheapest drip coffee from the student coffee shop. I trained my dog to stand like a meerkat. I picked my daughter up from school and took her to the coffee shop to read through the winter dusk.
I surprised myself by not falling apart completely. I surprised myself with grace. Strange how, in these dark periods that crash down all of a sudden, something can emerge that feels like it’s almost not me – a resilience tucked deep within, a sort of cosmic residue of endurance. Life persisting, life insisting.
It emerges regardless of my own flailing, my own insistence on my unique suffering. It simplifies things to the scale of a human life, the meaning of a meal, a single sky, a walk sipping tea.
The most important lesson of meditation is to recognize when you’ve been caught in a story, a thought, a desire, when you’ve been yanked out of your life into the future or the past, and to return to the breath. To recover, grounding again in the present, the air rising warm through your nose. Each time you recover, you learn a little more: about your own mind, about the nature of the mind, about grace and humility.
It seems like the meaning of things is in the doing. In one’s greatest feats. But recovery is also an awesome feat. Messing up, then redoing, returning. The older I get, the more I respect recovery and the people it softens, who build stories and habits that heal.
On Christmas Eve I made Jorge and Elena read poems aloud from Joy Harjo. Did my child roll her eyes and find this extremely cringe? You betcha. But she agreed to flip through the pages of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light until I said “stop.” She landed on “Prepare,” which she read beautifully. It felt divine that her finger had wound up there.
“Let go that which burdens you
let go any acts of unkindness or brutality
From or against you
Let go that which has burdened your family
Your community, your nation
Or disturbed your soul
Let go one breath into another."
That cosmic residue stirred. A smudge of something starry, something tough, there in spite of the part of me that wants to wail and wallow.
In the first half of the year, I went through a little spell of watching horoscope videos from prestige astrologers on Instagram. I watched one and then the algorithm hurled them at me nonstop. They all promised grand things, great things, huge shifts in May and then June and then August. None of these things, as I imagined them, materialized, and now whenever I get served up one of these videos I throw a little tantrum and bitch at the screen oh yeah, oh yeah January is gonna be a HUGE month, right, for what? Mediocre student essays on Wendell Berry?? Baking sweet potatoes?!? Folding socks and playing Settlers of Catan??
I surprised myself this year by being able to find this just a little bit funny in spite of my self pity. When my sister told me I absolutely crushed Christmas, I texted back, “Hahahaha all it took was for all my other dreams to die!”
Every December, I answer Courtney Martin’s end-of-year reflection questions. One of the 2025 questions was, “What surprised you the most this year about yourself?” I answered, I did okay. Is the bar for me right now winning the National Book Award? Nope. The bar is functioning with grace. Lighting candles in the morning and writing in my journal and taking my students on nature walks and not freaking out when they say professor I totally didn’t realize the final draft had to be different from the original? and hiking in the rain with my girl and playing “Find Elena!” with Little Fuzzy Man (what we’ve come to call the dog) and cooking and meditating and shedding another layer of the ego. The light returns. The sun returns. The year turns.
In An American Childhood, one of my favorite books of all time, Annie Dillard writes, “When everything else has gone from my brain, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”
It is uncanny that I fell in love with this book in high school, that Dillard single-handedly made me want to be a writer, that I read and worshipped her in Oaxaca and China and on rickety buses around the world and I ended up becoming a writer in…Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Dillard grew up and where An American Childhood is based.
I applied to six MFA programs all around the U.S., where I didn’t live and didn’t particularly want to return, and told myself I’d only go if I got funding. I was rejected from five of the programs, one by one. The last one, at the University of Pittsburgh, offered me full funding and a teaching assistantship. I now live right next to the park Dillard roamed as a child, that inspired her lifelong love of nature. I hike in it daily.
“What does it feel like to be alive?” Dillard asks in An American Childhood. “Living, you stand under a waterfall…It is time pounding at you, time.”
So I open my mouth. I drink.
Hello, friends! If you’ve enjoyed Terms of endearment this year, consider a paid subscription for 2026. For $30, you get a year’s worth of thoughtful, carefully crafted essays about culture, art, motherhood, travel, and life’s big questions. Support art, support perspectives and styles outside of mainstream media. Thank you so much!
My deeply nostalgic and romantic writer self loves nothing more than a good end-of-year reflection. I invite you to share a moment, experience, and/or insight that stands out to you from 2025. I’d love to hear from you.
You do such a wonderful job reflecting on and capturing the tensions, paradoxes, and waves of life. By that I mean your own life, but also the universal experiences of life. Thank you!
My standout experience: I gave birth to my second daughter in December 2024, so I spent 2025 getting to know her but also getting to know myself as a mother of two. I spent the year largely feeling scattered and having less time to myself than ever. But in spite of those things, I feel deeply that this past year has made me more "myself" than ever. I'm finally shedding some of my youthful self-consciousness and enjoying being a woman in my own right. Remaining dedicated to reading for pleasure has been one key to that, I think. Speaking of which - re-reading Homing Instincts is on my list!
Just stumbled upon your post and kismet! Loved & identified greatly with so many things (mom, Dillard, univ Pittsburgh, MFA..) that I have to ask (because I’ve been toying with the idea and your post makes me think you’d have great insight & advice) - what resources might you recommend to begin a meditation practice? Thank you & excited to dig in to more of your work!