Sensitivity, soft serve, etc

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

(She would climb trees and speak to flowers)

She was, in her own words, too sensitive for the world.

(I’ve wondered almost every day since what would have happened if all of us weird girls had known each other back then)
(Would the internet have helped?)
(Or would it just have been further weaponized against us, as it is against this newest generation of young girls?)
(Would we have fallen into the same Sephora marketing riptide they’re in?)
(Would we, too, be trying to get a “youthful glow” on our already literally youthful skin?)
(Or would/could we have found each other?)

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

I think about her a lot these days, especially as I try to make sense of this current world where grief is often the most familiar room in the house.

(Because she and I didn’t find other weird girls back then)

Instead, every few years we found a kindred spirit here and there. A patchwork family we stitched together where we could. We never felt like we belonged and walked with bruises from a world not made for us.

(I can’t speak for Katia, but I shifted most of my pain and discomfort into aggression)
(A delightful sentence that always answered itself, a protective feedback loop)
(It’s still difficult sometimes to speak to the few people who knew me then)
(Feels like they grab for that version of me out of nostalgia)
(As if they prefer to see me in the shadow box version of myself that existed only as a defense)
(Unhealed, easy to pity, easy to control)

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

These days Katia is a pretty glorious adult. She’s arrestingly beautiful and powerfully magnetic. And, wildly, she moved from Altadena just months before we did (albeit hers by choice), to rural New Jersey.

I call her while on a walk because I have hit a PTSD moment. Canadian wildfires have brought smoke down to us, the mountains obscured, the air dense and grainy. I’m walking with a mask again. My brain knows it’s not the same. My body doesn’t.

(I try to tell myself as the ash coats me that this cloud isn’t full of asbestos, just trees)

But there is, admittedly, a comfort and a safety to grief alongside its devastation. I wrap myself deep in the blankets of what was for a moment.

(The coterie of women)
(The clementines on our daily walk)
(The mountains standing tall all around us)

I look around at these new mountains, try and explain it all to Katia. Wildly the most painful part as we speak isn’t this Canadian ash, it’s the absence of women like her in my new life. I used to have everyone within 20 minutes. There’s a glorious roadside soft serve place here. I desperately want to have a friend 20 minutes away to share it with.

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

Weird girls grow up, they find each other. And, if they’re lucky, they build softer rooms to live in. Rooms where we can be exactly as sensitive, exactly as much, as we are.

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

She listens quietly, then tells me what she’s learned about moving to New Jersey: that she has found different modalities for female friendship. That I have to remember the awkward, nascent beginnings. To hold my inner frightened weird girl, to start small and keep showing up, to be patient with myself.

(But there is, admittedly, a comfort and a safety to grief alongside its devastation)
(I wrap myself deep in the blankets of what was)
(It has felt easier to mourn)
(To measure every single person up to Anna, Danya, Molly, Abby, Paulina, Katia)

Katia’s voice reminds me that I don’t need to recreate the same constellation, just trust that new stars will appear.

When we hang up I stop and look at the Catskill mountains, still blurred by smoke. Their Altadena mountain cousins were my spiritual teachers once. Massive, alive, stoic, brilliant. I meditated high up in them almost daily, always returning to one charred tree. I called him my “survivor teacher.”

(I’ve written about him here before)
(A burned out king of a tree, likely damaged in a former fire)
(Once a towering giant, in 2024 more skeleton than tree, he stood as a symbol of resilience, scorched but standing)

I admired that even in “death” he continued, at that time a perch for the birds, a symbol of resilience in a landscape scarred and remade by fire and time.

(Could I have known it back then?)
(That he was giving me a template for how to begin again, even scorched and unsure, even with the air still thick with smoke?)

I think of Katia and me as kids. Little weird girls talking to flowers, climbing trees, carrying hearts too tender for the world we were in. And I think of all the others, the little boys, theys, and in-betweens, the small wild spirits who didn’t quite fit anywhere.

(Maybe we were always searching for each other, drifting through the world like lanterns hoping someone would see our light and not be threatened by it)

Katia once told me she was a weird kid.

The difference now is that we know how to see each other. We know how to hold out a hand, to steady the ladder, to say, “Keep going, I’ve got you.”

And maybe that's what beginning again really is. Not erasing the grief or pretending the air isn't currently thick with smoke, but remembering that even scorched trees can become perches for new life.

Katia once told me she was a weird kid. I was, too.

Weird kids, it turns out, grow up. We find each other, and (hopefully) learn together how to be gentle with the tender parts.

(I’ll keep you posted on if I find someone to go to soft serve with me!)
(My order is vanilla with rainbow sprinkles, since you asked)
(And until I have a lady friend I still have a pretty excellent best friend)

More next week.
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