2018 has been a year of incredible highs and heartbreaking lows and I can’t decide if I want to tuck it away for a cold day with a cup of courage or watch it burst into flames in a bonfire. I’m so tired and so heavy but still trying to find joy and love and hope in the small things, as I always do. Right now I’m sitting in the only coffeeshop I could find open on New Year’s Eve, and in typical last minute fashion, trying to reflect back on a year I desperately want to forget. I am sitting underneath a neon sign proclaiming Thinking of a Master Plan and right now I’d like to think that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’ve been told the unofficial uniform of New York is everything black. My closet color scheme has always been anything but, focused more on light colors. I tend to navigate toward monochrome nudes, whites, camel, usually avoid black like the plague. Perhaps it was my Algerian mother who engraining in me that I should embrace bright colors in my youth, that for some reason, in our culture, wearing black ages you. According to her there is one thing an Arab woman with bare hands in her mid-twenties shouldn’t do — age herself. 

It’s 74 degrees. I’ve been waiting for this weather. You’d think a Texan would be accustomed to heat, which I am, but I’m not accustomed to actually walking in the heat. Bathing in the heat. Sweating in the heat. Tones of the Sahara has now been coaxed out of my skin and I’m embracing long hidden melanin. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have the pale cast of sunless hospital halls, but I’m welcoming this sand.