21

I started this blog when I was 16. 

I'm about to turn 21. 

I keep thinking about what I would tell my naive and dreamy 16 year old self, or what I would say to my future daughter, if I had one. What I would want those girls to know. 

I want to tell them: 

Be hungry. 

Do not be afraid to be hungry. 

Because being hungry for your next meal and hungry to live a full life, these are basically the same thing. 

Because food is connected to love and lust and happiness and depression and every emotion and experience, all the weddings and all the funerals. 

Because eating is tangled into the fabric of being human.

And yet. 

There are girls who are afraid to eat. 

Who exist solely on salads and cigarettes. 

Who only eat a meal and a half a day.

Who starve themselves, or throw up what they've eaten. 

Who don't eat in front of boys, because maybe the boys will figure out that they are not made of air. 

Who say they were "bad" because they ate a cookie instead of an apple. 

I have known all of these girls. 

Maybe even been one or two of them. 

And I just want to tell that future daughter of mine, or my 16 year old self, that there is no shame in having a real appetite. 

That there is no shame in being hungry and then eating until you are full. 

That no one actually cares if you are a little fat or a little thin. 

That eating and drinking and enjoying it, and really owning the hunger, goes so far beyond the table. 

Because there is no better way to be present in the here and now than to enjoy a meal. 

And being present feels like the opposite of being dead. 

And what is the point in being anything other than fiercely, rudely, gorgeously alive? 

That's what I would say.

So I'm about to turn 21, and that thought makes my stomach curdle a little bit, because adulthood suddenly seems like a very imminent, and very near reality. 

But I can't think about that. 

I'm too focused on getting from city to city, bed to bed, meal to meal. 

But sometimes, like right now, I stop and drink a coffee and write to you and stare out a window and try to appreciate the beauty. 

And I want to cry and I want to kiss you and I want champagne. 

Because it's all so beautiful, and I am still so young and so naive and so hungry, and because I just ate maybe the best sandwich of my entire life.

It was an inspired sandwich. 

So I'm about to turn 21. 

How incredible. 

I love you. 

I love you. 

I love you. 

xoxo

m 

Black pudding

This morning, I walked in the London sun. 

And I felt brave. 

The sky was very high, and very clear. 

And I felt brave. 

Very alone, but very brave.

Lately, I've been haunted by this line from a Mary Oliver poem-- "Tell me," she says, "what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?" 

My one wild and precious life. 

Tell me. 

I'm trying to tell myself, trying to figure it out. 

All the time.

The next step, the next train, the next meal. 

It is so much. 

Sometimes the things I carry are so heavy on my shoulders. 

Abiola told me that there was nothing to be afraid of. 

Luca told me to just enjoy making the decisions.

Which is all simple and true and correct. 

But sometimes making all the decisions means you eat very weird British things like black pudding. 

And black pudding is actually fried congealed blood. 

I didn't know, so I ordered it. 

I ate fried congealed blood-- of my own accord.

Yet. 

It's really those moments-- the mistakes I make on my own, that are mine, that only I can correct, that make me feel brave.

The proof is literally in the pudding. 

So maybe right now I'm listening to too much Beyoncé, or wearing too much black, or am too trusting that I'll find the way, or even telling you too much. 

But fuck it. 

My one wild and precious life. 

I ate congealed blood. On accident-- but I ate it. 

And freakishly, I liked it. 

This morning, I walked in the London sun and I felt so alone. 

But I felt so brave. 

I felt flawless.