In the country I reside, they call me alien. A return to the country I was born does not yield a change in language. I traded one for another, so what I have gained becomes loss. My existence is marked by an attachment to negation. I attempt to claim space, but dark matter cannot be seen. I walk through the world, and the world walks through me.

I'm stateless.

My imagination is the only place where I find refuge for my existence. It is there, where I can conceal the holes in the roof, plaster over the rotting walls, and imagine the warmth of wood burning. My cheeks are singed with awareness, the heat reminds me of something I've only ever felt in passing.

The Earth promised safe haven. It gave me water to drink, and leaf to suckle, but it did not promise me protection or actualization. I walked through treacherous jungle and vine, and made it to shore, because I believed that only on the sand could I commune with the other side of my family. Mother gave me life but how could I explain that the shrubbery, and the domineering branches of the trees, shrouded my ability to look upon the only things remaining which could promise me a full life? I tried to put flame to incense, but it could not replicate the sting of the suns ray.

Water rushes over my feet, sometimes softly, sometimes with aplomb, but no matter its temperament, it leaves silt on my toes. I offer the grain goodbye each time the tide begins to rise. Sun gives way to moon, but still I stand, eyes low, sometime high. I know I can't hold onto this forever, but what's next is unclear.

There's water in front of me, and jungle behind. The shore is my only reprieve but it leads to diametric dead ends. What then do I do?

It's 4 am and I am in the airport. The bottom sole of my right shoe has fallen off. I spent time the night before super glueing it. This did not matter. Past Departures, past TSA, past countless gates, C12, C13, C19, C21, I have walked without it. My gait is unbalanced, I limp along on a left foot that's been sore for days, but now in my time of need, it has stepped up, shouldering the responsibility of carrying my body along where the missing sole has removed an inch of working length. C24. I tuck what's broken at the top of my clothes in my carry on luggage. I can't explain it and maybe it's just the fake deep in me, but it feels somewhat symbolic, this excision of the bottom of my shoe. It's almost like a physical representation of what I feel after attending my first wedding.

The wedding was nothing short of amazing. Epic. Refined. Elegant. It was a dream.

I cried at the speeches. My throat caught at the first dances. I felt jubilant for the bride when she was unveiled, her dark hair sliced and diced into a wavy bun, dress flowing long as the sounds of Beyonce and John Legend set the stage for her presence. I was in it fully, and I took it upon myself to relax into it so as to give the space the reverence and the energy that it required. We ate well, drank well, joked, and bantered amongst one another. To be there was an honor and for some time I really understood why marriage is such a momentous event.

So why did I feel empty afterwards?

Because as mentioned, we had a grand old time. (Chile, put a plate of jollof rice, a scenic lake, and an open bar in front of me, and a time will be had, I'll tell you that much!)

But I'd had a dream about weddings. An idea of the affair I'd kept close (maybe) because it was the last remaining part of my ties to the institution of marriage which my condition removes me from. But when faced with the ideal conditions for this fantasy to come to fruition -- I found myself out of body. When the lights came up and the stage was deconstructed, and the stomach ache that had been slowly building for the last few hours began to strike its most heavy hand, I understood for the first time that I didn't want any of it.

Not the grandeur, not the luxuries, certainly not marriage. It all felt like a huge production. There I was sitting a table alone, clutching my stomach, so sensitive to the smallest ingredients both physical and mental, when a question came to my mind: Who is all of this for?

It could be said it was for the couple, but it felt as if they were only on the periphery of the whole day, swallowed by the intricacies of it all, of being both party hosts and party favors, of being both guests of honor, and responsible for honoring guests. Love was on display but what was the love we were meant to understand? Was my role as guest to project my own ideas of love onto them, thereby associating the vignettes with something that cannot necessarily be defined but named as romance?

Or was it to enjoy it all as a party, a way to convene with old friends and new ones alike?

As a general rule, I expected a wedding to be something that the couple enjoys, a day(s) where they get to have fun and celebrate their union. But how can fun be had when so much of the day requires that the ones who are getting married make sure that all must go to plan? How can fun be had when the wedding must be rehearsed beforehand, prepared like a weekly show on Broadway where a song played too early in a scene disrupts its very meaning?

The parts of the day that really impacted me were the glimpses of the familial ties between the marrying couple and their respective families. The calm sway of the father and daughter as Whitney Houston crooned in the background. The mother of the groom miming Regina Belle lyrics to her son leaving the metaphorical nest. It was deeply impactful because there was a sincerity to them that no open bar or appetizer can ever produce. It was raw, simple, and descriptive of a sort of openness that would not otherwise be expected in daily life.

But had these moments too been rehearsed? Were these too apart of the show?

I always dreamed of weddings precisely because of this kind of indulgence. Even as I'd discovered my aromanticism (or something akin to that), I still had not shed my desire for this big day, or for this form of celebration that we were promised. I said, I don't want to be married, I want to have a wedding. In my visions, I would want to be in Italy, or Greece, or maybe somewhere in West Africa, somewhere with nature around us. There would first be jazz, and later DJ's, emotional private vows, champagne and slip dresses. I envisioned glamour and finesse, open mouth laughs and raucous banter, all in between flashes of deep eye contact and connection -- manifestations of twenty something odd years of my Hollywood indoctrination.

So why, when I got it, did I feel off?

It's kind of like when I realized Santa Claus was a farce. How can a person, magic or not, travel all of North Carolina in one night, let alone the entire world? Your honor, that's cap!

It was life shattering for a little girl with so much imagination and so much trust in this world to tell truth, a little girl who had not yet learned that there were forces larger than her that determined what she desired and understood and not that her thoughts were necessarily natural. Had my idea of weddings been all the same, implanted in my mind and needing to be severed to claim a part of reality that had been closed off from me?

I'm in the airport. I think, man, how am I going to walk around LA Union Station with the sole of my shoe missing? I wiggle my toes and listen to the family of five in front of me joke around about something I wasn't around for. A family of five. Wow. This makes me think about marriage. I think about the wedding.

Then a flash of something different. Do people notice my shoe is broken?

A part of me thinks that they do, that they stare at me this time not for the reasons they usually stare, but because they notice that something is off that they can't quite put a finger on. I'm interested in the explanations they come up with for why my shoe is broken. Quickly, I release this thought because I realize I don't care and it's not particularly productive. I just need to buy a new pair of shoes.

Huh. It's not something I'd ever considered being in an airport until the most unlikely thing to ever happen to me happened. I know they sell gray hoodies with cute abbreviations of the city printed in navy blue, and scarves for those who may be walking out of the airport into chilly weather or onto an airplane with drafty air conditioning. But shoes?

I do a search on my laptop and find that there's a store that may have some. I leave my bags at C24 and saunter around again without balance, a left leg elevated to support the other that has been severed unexpectedly. Pain shoots simultaneously from my injured left foot and my still calming stomach. I walk around looking for a shoe, but I also think about the wedding.

Have I been freed or am I now even further adrift, floating further and further away from all the places, and things, that I'm expected to enjoy and participate in in order to be a part of the collective us?

Why couldn't the super glue have just worked?

I find a pair of sandals in a store at C6. I slip them on and carry my broken shoes in my left hand as I walk back to the gate.

The moment my fingers tippy tapped out that HTML code in class in tenth grade, I knew that mama was going to be a software engineer. (Well that and a writer, and a dancer, and a professional soccer player, and a chef, and a...you get the gist.) So when I got to undergrad, I walked right onto campus with my freshman lanyard and just knew that I was going to be the next Steve Jobs. My major was booked honey, call up the registrar and let her know that I, Analog Gurl, will be declaring Computer Science. It was practical, it paid well, and I had a knack for it -- the end!

That desire however quickly shifted when I realized that a large part of Computer Science involved physics and math classes that I was not willing to waste my precious youth pretending to care about, and like the lazy girl I am, I quickly pivoted to an adjacent tech degree, Information Science, which would allow me to still code but also learn about this hidden third thing I'd never hear about -- the human side of design. This decision is one of the first things in college that changed my life. It was here that I was first introduced to the workings of how social technologies, tech companies, and product design, worked and where I found that this space was first and foremost a profit and pleasure industry.

I was shocked that behind the cool gadgets and the social media theatrics, were a conglomeration of engineers far removed from the people and the society for whom they were designing their technologies. The software engineers and the bros in the think tanks were not necessarily interested in the impact of their work on the lives of everyday people and the overwhelming diversity of people who would be using their devices. They were interested in creating technology for the sake of newness, for the sake of fixing and optimizing life into digital form.

This felt wrong to me. So I decided that my space within this space would be to join the smaller group of voices of reason. If the powers that be refused to acknowledge the hegemony in their design choices, well, I would show them the way, or at least theorize for the plot.

But the problem with being a critical technology researcher is that the critique is often lost under the deluge of tech bros hammering on ad infinitum about machine learning, and optimizing workflows, and chatbots, and LLM's. Speaking up in this space is like being a background dancer for Sabrina Carpenter, as a dancer I respect your work, but the average Jess is not paying attention to you popping and locking my friend.

I remember having a conversation with my mentor's mentor at a conference last year. Begrudgingly, like the introvert I am, I explained to him the research that we were working on, and he nodded and hummed along like a diligent listener. I'm giving him this long winded explanation about this tech that I focus on in my work, and the impact on these groups, and that and the third, I'm really giving him some of my best oratory work, and finally, I release him from the listening holding cell. And he takes a breath, leans a little to the side, and responds with a cheeky smile and a small chuckle, "Who cares?"

I don't really know why I stuck around with this field, hoping to be the voice of reason about this thing that I love, even when a part of me has always known that the gripes I had with it would never come to pass. Because why would it? It's always been about profit and pleasure.

Still I wasn't immune to its trappings.

At the same time that I was studying it, I was finding small success on Youtube and Instagram, where hair videos, fashion, and grainy selfies were my claim to micro fame. The analytics were my friends, I would check them early and often, analyzing the market like a stock broker checking the best times to post and the hashtags that seemed to get the most response. I was building my own empire, using my personality and my looks to get me...well I didn't really know what I was trying to get, financial security, autonomy, fame? I also knew that I wanted to get creative freedom and that by building a following online I would be able to get access to doors in the creative industry that I would never get by way of being a girl without any connections. For all intents and purposes I was on my way and after four years I was finally starting to get sponsorship requests, consistent likes, consistent new followers.

Then the pandemic happened and I temporarily deactivated my Instagram. I bought a guitar on the last day of lockdown and starting learning how to play it. I started taking vocal lessons. I started producing my own music. I cut off all my hair. I deleted my Twitter. I quit my full time job. I had an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, an existential crisis, an existential crisis. I moved across the country. I started my Phd. I starting growing out my hair again. I started therapy. I reactivated my Instagram. I spent a summer in Europe. I posted on Youtube. I went to Havana. I created a spam Twitter account. I found success as a researcher. I became disillusioned with research. I had a spiritual awakening. I found feminism. I made music. I had an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis. I found Reddit. I found Lipstick Alley. I scrolled but never commented. I didn't make music. I had an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis. Elon Musk bought Twitter. I deleted Twitter. I read Digital Minimalism. I logged off of Reddit. I logged off of Lipstick Alley. I sold my television. I played guitar in my living room. Every day in July as the sun set, I listened to my downstairs neighbor play the sitar. I found my first love again, reading. I went on walks. I found success as a researcher. I became disillusioned with research. I started watching shows on my laptop. I had an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis, and an existential crisis.

I posted on Instagram again for the first time in three years and immediately logged off. I felt disgusted with myself, why had I gone on, why did it feel like I was selling my soul? Even if I knew that my desire to become a self-sustaining artist required that I create a persona, even if I now understood that I had to sell some part of myself to get the life that I wanted? Why did I feel this way about posting pictures on a screen, why was I waiting to record Youtube videos until I felt that I looked my "best"? Why did it have to be that way and why did nobody in my discipline see our space the same way I did? Do.

I bought a flip phone. And it has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. But I cannot say that I am free of the shackles of technology. I wish to be free, on a personal level. I only wish to interface with it when I need to for my research and for my writing and my music. But I still find myself searching on Google, looking for pages to swipe down, looking for content or celebrities to appease something within me that has been broken by these systems. I bought a flip phone and I still spend hours on my laptop, so I find it hard not to feel poorly about my progress even if Twitter and forums are no longer my drug of choice. I search the internet for laptops for digital minimalists and although I already know the response to the question, I still find myself disappointed that they do not exist. Sometimes I dream that I invent one. But mostly I feel sick. I feel victory for detaching myself from my iPhone, only using it for maps and exercise apps, but also feel anxious to sell more tech pieces (maybe my iPad), offload more, get offline more. But it gets harder, the deeper I go, the more I feel detached from my loves' states away from me, from my generation, from popular culture. How far am I willing to go to free myself from the jaws of social technology, from convenience? I want to stop watching television, but I love television, I even write television. How do I reconcile these two parts of myself?

I hate the idea of taking the long way around, even if that has been the only pathway life has taken me. I don't yet have the answer to these conundrums and I guess that's what beautiful about life. It's not linear. I'm trying to give myself grace as I figure out how to navigate being anti-tech in a tech work field. I need to figure out how to give myself grace as I figure out being authentic on unauthentic platforms.

And the best part about writing on a SubStack that nobody who knows me knows about, and that has no followers is that I have the space and the comfort of yelling into the void. That's gnarly.

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So soon again? No, no, let me clarify, these are not sighs of annoyance or melancholy! It's not that I didn't miss you old friend, quite the contrary, I look forward to convening with you every year. It's merely that time seems to be floating past so quickly these days that I didn't realize that I hadn't marked the calendar for your arrival. But alas, I'm glad you're here, give me your coat, I'll hang it up for you.

Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays. What can I say, I'm a lover gurl. Even though the days of getting candy grams at school are no longer, I still get giddy in anticipation for February 14. Every year, I serve up a rotating lover inspired dish: red velvet cake, pasta, branzino, sometimes even a glass of wine, really whatever my tongue's spirit feels that year. I turn on a candle (even though I always have a candle on) and my R&B playlist, and bask in the simplicity of a good meal -- alone. Some years even, I've switched it up, gone to a movie (When Harry Met Sally in 2024) and dinner out on the town with a group of girlfriends (those kinds of Valentine's nights are more rare, but surprises I cherish nonetheless).

I've never spent a Valentine's Day with a romantic partner. And in my twenty six years of life, I've never been in a romantic relationship, or have even been close to getting into one. But even without the heteronormative romance, Valentine's Day is still one of my favorite holidays.

Now, you may be wondering, how could a stud like myself possibly be single?

Well.

It's because I'm aromantic.

Coming to terms with your aromanticism as a Black woman in her 20's is almost like being a communist in the 50's -- it feels as if I'm under threat of public humiliation at any moment.

Everywhere I look, there are messages reminding me that to be a member of this society, I must be yearning for, actively working towards, or already within, a romantic relationship. I mean Valentine's Day is one of the more blatant demonstrations of romance propaganda and that's saying a lot as the agenda is everywhere hiding in plain sight.

It's in the music, Summer Walker crooning about the heart of women, it's in the films, Bridgette Jones whining for three movies (in a poor British accent) about finding a legitimate male partner. It's on social media, with the viral posts and video essays about the outlandishly expensive price tag some famous person bought for their paramour (I mean, can we have a dialogue about paying 5 figures for a rock?). It's even in the advertisements, which do so well in expressing that life is meant to be lived with two people, two kids, and one shaggy dog that I'm allergic to. Like why is Honda lecturing me about getting a man?

But to be on the aromantic spectrum, is to feel confounded by all of the expectations out there about what it means for a relationship to be legitimate. It also means that I often question what romanticism even is, and by proxy, aromanticism, because what is the difference between love and romance? What separates the love I have for friends, for community, for the vegan ice cream at Dear Bella near Hollywood Boulevard -- from the love we're told to expect in exclusive heteronormative partnerships? What separates the love I have for self?

Bell Hooks in her classic meditation, All about Love, defines love as an action and not a feeling. Yet, the definition of romance that I often get is, "It's a combination of friendship and sex." But to be aromantic is not to be asexual, even though the two are often conflated. An aromantic person can absolutely have sex with a friend. Is that romance?

Or does romance have to include commitment? Does romance have to come with what Amy Graham calls the "Relationship Escalator", whereby the unspoken goal of all relationships is to move towards marriage and happily ever after? Can you "date" your friends and it not be a sexual relationship?

This is where I struggle to get a grip on the attributes between love and romance. See I'm in a unique position on the aromantic spectrum. I have the capacity to recognize and feel the lure towards romanticism but I do not have any desire to participate in it. But I am deeply devoted to loving. Pure, unadulterated, love. Quiet moments spent in the car with a family member, loud obnoxious laughter with old friends, memes, and long held memories, airport pickups, late night conversations, movies, dinners, book clubs, shopping, vacations, staycations, nieces, and nephews, toy trucks, and problematic jokes. I share these moments with a bevy of people and we all actively, in differing degrees dependent on the nature of the relationships, work towards maintaining an action based definition of love. Are all of those things I just listed not what they say romance is? What about the love found within community? Good mornings and how are you's to the cleaning ladies in my apartment building, conversations with Trader Joe's cashiers, chance encounters with classmates in the hallways -- there's a romance to all of these things.

Or simply taking a long walk around a park alone, the sound of children's laughter bouncing in between the sqwuaks of the mallards, the sky a deep baby blue, clouds sparsely fluttering in between. Romance.

It's what the great poets of past, of smooth jazz, of rom-com, describe as what one can do within a romance, with that special person, a soul mate, the one. But close kinship has offered me the opportunity to see the world from my friend's eye's. Is this not romance? To me, it is.

In my view, to love, and to romance, are one and the same. Loving requires the same devotion and intention as romance because I do not prioritize or rank relationships based on their constituent parts as there is no use for labels in love. Love is a universal word, and so is romance, it encompasses all relationships where parties decide to treat one another with mutual respect and admiration. If I go to lunch with a man I'm attracted to, and go to a lunch in the same restaurant with a friend, why is the former a "date" or "romance" and the latter, simply a lunch with a friend. In my view, these two are the same event -- like I had the same exact meal both times.

So then what is the true difference between love and romance? My inability to understand may come from my being aromantic or it may stem from the general confusion in our society to aptly name a thing what it really is. But that's the first conundrum of aromanticism.

This is something I want to continue to unpack. It will take time to sink my teeth into all of the complex parts of this topic, but I hope that on the other side of this, clarity will be mine. Until then, I've found a recipe for tagliatelle bolognese that I'll be pairing with red velvet cupcakes (or brownies and ice cream, I'm still deciding) this Friday. Because Vaalentine’s day for me is a celebration of love and what better to celebrate?

Happy Valentine's Day.

Because if love is weakness then I denounce strength. If love is a burden, then I will stay until swatted away. But love is more than pleasure, and the desire to give pleasure, it is a constant war between ideals, upbringings, attitudes, and alliances. It is a constant unlearning and relearning of the person, of communities, and by extension, the world. To choose to love is a gamble because if the person I am today will be different tomorrow, how can I ever speak of forever?

I do not know who I am.

I cannot yet know where I, you, we, are going. 

But maybe it is this line, this existential dance between knowing and guessing that characterizes the magic of love.

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