I have been around. Not here, I realize, and for which I apologize. But, if it makes you feel any better, I have only been around in the world at large in a sort of dream state of excitement and fear and weariness, trying simultaneously to withdraw from the big-city-over-stimulation and also to fling myself out there full force, open to friends and strangers, before it’s all gone. My head is spinning with the move down South, which bread to buy each night, how pretty the late-Summer evenings are, how perfect and perfectly accessible Jane Austen is, how my hair is finally getting longer again, how well my mayonnaise came out this time, how lovely it is to have a dog you can walk, occasionally, in New York on a crisp afternoon.

I’ve been eating dinner in my empty room, with the fan blowing, a few overstuffed boxes scattered about the floor. Tuna & chickpea salad with lemon, garlic, basil, and chile. Plenty of olive oil. Spaghetti with roasted red pepper and eggplant puree and toasted pine nuts, fennel seed, grated parmesan.

I’ve been eating my lunch at the foot of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in the sunshine with the chimes reverberating down 112th and Amsterdam, and hordes of old people with chunky cameras and bright, ill-fitting pants flitting up and down the steps. Lunches of red leaf lettuce with cherry tomato, boiled egg, and chickpeas; or, the heirloom tomato salad I had today; it was damp and fragrant, smelling like sun & earth, ripe tomatoes and spicy basil, pungent garlic. Better yet, it became a two for one—tomato salad and a panzanella; in the beginning I eagerly sopped up the magical pink liquid—juice, lemon, olive oil— that pooled at the bottom with a foccacia roll, only to wipe the sticky dressing off my fingers, tear the thing up, and go all in. The bread was at once melting and sweet, salty & crusty.

I felt awake, for a moment.