I wanted to share this diary on March 31st, but when the time came to write this introduction, I struggled to come back to its entries. Perhaps it’s all still a bit fresh. The diary, I suppose, has finally caught up with itself. The chaos that began in February only continued through March, and because of this, I had more time to write, but less energy to do so. March felt long, grueling, a bit monotonous — not in the sense that I was adhering to routine, but because the cycles of chaos kept repeating themselves to the point that the outrageous eventually became boring and mundane.
I’m a bit unsure about what I can say on the matter. I can say, however, that this month I started more seeds, that I got my hands on some mulch, that our dining room has turned into a sort of greenhouse. Zak brought a monstera home that is just a little too big for every corner of our apartment. On our desk rests a money tree I got Zak for Valentine’s Day and a Calathea Hybrid he got me in return — both from the plant store two blocks down. On the top of our dining room bookshelf is a philodendron whose vines span three or four feet, and near the window is a ZZ Plant who recently sprouted two new stems that have since grown a handful of glossy, dark leaves. Our umbrella plant sits on the window sill. It’s small with few leaves, but steadily growing upwards. Our peace lily is browning at the tips, despite us drowning it every few days like we have been told to do. I’m convinced that the dryness of Chicago winters can be too much for most living things to bear. I write this as lotion sits thickly on my face and on the skin between my fingers.
In short, I’m antsy for spring. I’m ready for my tomatoes to sprout so I can prove to myself that I can take care of something from seed. I’m eager to feel, for the first time, like I’ve built something.
March Diaries
3/13/2025
This month I’ve been making a book. I’ve been going on runs, or I plan to. I’ve been making full and well-balanced meals, making so much of it that I always seem to have leftovers. I’ve been reading, going to community events, writing to the people I admire.
But despite it all, I can’t necessarily say I’m doing well. My dear friend Vinh wrote a great Substack post about wellness today. Like Vinh, I’ve been bouncing from appointment to appointment, trying to make sure all of my vitals are in check, and that if they are, trying to figure out what the hell could be wrong with me then. I’ve been doing my physical therapy in a way that makes me feel strong, an effort to alleviate pain I’m not sure is really there. It’s a long, laborious, and expensive process to figure out if my body is deteriorating or if my anxiety, once again, has convinced me I’m dying. I’m tired of doctors and I don’t want to see another one for a very, very long time.
I hate to write about OCD because it often feels shallow and overdone. It’s the same feeling I get when I read a poem about someone cutting open their own stomach, or eating someone else’s heart, or getting fucked by something unreal and extra-terrestrial, or anything related to bone marrow — all body horror really. But it's fervent — my OCD — as it is when things are in chaos. I know it’s hard to live with me in these moments: when nothing makes me feel clean, when all of my options moving forward feel like the wrong ones. A few times this month I’ve found myself sitting on the kitchen floor while Zak makes a chickpea roast or stew, staring forward, weighing my choices, and deciding that, in that moment, I can do nothing but feel the entire weight of the world collapse in on itself.
Last week a pipe burst above our bathroom, causing it to flood. A man is working on replacing our bathroom’s drywall now, and so I’m sitting in a coffee shop, listening to a woman talk about getting weekly exorcisms and developing a new type of facial napkin. She tells her friend about how important it is to find a man who makes you laugh, about all the work it takes to heal your inner child. Her forehead is creaseless and her hair is pulled back, tight to her skull in a high ponytail.
When the pipe burst, I cleaned my makeup products with a Clorox wipe, lined them up in rows on my coffee table, and cried something uncontrollable.
3/15/25
Yesterday I listened to Stephen Colbert talk about his suffering, how he’s grateful for it, how it helps him empathize, how it’s self-actualizing. I think this is a very Catholic way of looking at things — the belief that suffering is at the heart of the human experience, that one’s suffering gives their life meaning. There’s nuance to this, of course, as there is with all dogma. But as I listened to this interview, laying in bed, post-shower, bloated and happy from a large Detroit-style pizza, I began to think about suffering as a means to becoming fully human.
For months, I’ve been avoiding this work — grappling with uncertainty, accepting my bruises, allowing what comes. I know that it’s in doing this work where I’ll learn to feel safe in the precarity of my body and in the unpredictable life that surrounds it. I know this because I’ve done this work before. I’ve just been too foolish to think that the work is both ongoing and collaborative — not something I can do fully on my own, nor something I can leave up to a brain surrounded and created in chaos. A lot of this just means I need to go back to ERP therapy. I suppose I will, when the time is right, when I have a job I can trust and an insurance that will cover it.
3/16/25
Yesterday I watched thousands of adults in leprechaun hats and Irish flag t-shirts — Chicagoans and travelers alike — celebrate the river getting dyed green by climbing the top of the Clark Street Bridge and drinking Guinness on the city’s river walk. By mid-afternoon I saw two girls with cheeks stained black from smudged and tear-streaked mascara. One girl wept after vomiting into the arms of a very loving and generous friend, the other wandered the masses alone, her pace quick and her head down.
I was careful where I stepped and what I touched. The sidewalk was littered with cans and empty vodka shooters. The road was covered in shattered glass where cars had run over what looked like a half-empty bottle of Baileys. The police officers were controlling traffic, and so we crossed the street when they told us to. As we waited anxiously on the sidewalk’s curb, the officers stood on the median and poured green liquid out of repurposed water jugs into the sewer grate beneath their feet.
It all felt incredibly dirty, which I suppose was the appeal. Perhaps if I, too, had started drinking at 10 a.m., I would have settled into the party’s pulse, perhaps I would have even fostered a kinship with the people and their celebration. But, instead I was too busy fixating on the fluids on the ground and the way the forest fire smoke in the air caused my skin to itch.
We spent hours standing on the river’s North bank, looking at its greeness, drinking Heinekens and watching folks board and deboard the Michigan Avenue Water Taxi. I was growing acutely more aware of the redness of my skin — burn marks from the zit cream I had used the night before — and the empty, pizza-shaped hole in my stomach, and so, once the last Heineken of the six-pack was drunk, we left for the train.
We crossed the river and posed for one last picture, but as we turned the corner heading west, my eyes met those of a man covered in blood. His face was so smeared — beginning from his hairline, dripping all the way down to his chin, and smothered evenly on both cheeks — that Zak had initially thought it was facepaint. But a gash framing his left cheekbone informed us otherwise. The tops of his hands were just as red, one of which was extended in front of him, a dog on a leash pulling him steadily along as he fixed his gaze ahead, his brow furrowed and his eyes flat and furious. The man was followed by a crowd of high school boys who chased him with their iPhone cameras. As we passed the hoard, more boys continued to appear from the alley, all congratulating each other and comparing videos.
I thought about this man as we boarded our train home, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with folks who were all a bit nauseous. It was on this train, sitting in front of a man who dipped in and out of consciousness, that I realized the lingering repercussions of downtown partying didn’t always stay downtown. With each stop, more and more people squeezed onto the train car, and so I sat on Zak’s lap and thought about how my neck was exposed, that if this man were to get sick from the train’s jolting, he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to find a bag beforehand and that he’d vomit all over my back. When the train stopped, I found a new spot to stand, attempting to distance myself from the wreckage that could ensue. As soon as I resituated myself, the train’s conductor took hold of the overhead speakers and ordered the entire first car to exit at the platform. Perhaps someone had gotten sick, perhaps the rowdiness was all too much for the conductor to bear. For the rest of the way home I took short, shallow breaths, a vain attempt to protect myself from anything airborne.
We deboarded the train to an empty, gray neighborhood. It had gotten cooler since we’d first left for downtown, though the air was still smoggy and my skin still festered from the smoke. I thought about how eager I was to wash my hands, how dry my body felt. For dinner, Zak and I ate pizza and I thought about how the last time I was in a crowd like that was when I visited him in Milan during his semester abroad, when Inter Milan fans rushed the Duomo’s plaza to build barricades and set fire to things and shoot firecrackers into the sky. But in the heart of Milan’s city center, there was a sense of unity that came with the chaos, whereas Chicago’s river dyeing left people drunkenly stumbling home alone. There was no fire to hold hands around — just a lonely river, dyed green, empty cans drifting slowly in its current.
3/17/25
I went to work this morning — with hesitation but in uniform. It was a complete and utter disaster, and so I left early, and now I am eating a bagel that is perfectly crunchy and drinking a tea that is both sweet and warm.
After work I spoke with a friend on the phone and tried to convince her to move to Chicago. In doing so, I reminded myself why I love it here, which made me feel secure in place, though only briefly. We talked about how terrifying it is to be this age — how naïve we are, how inevitable this naivete is, how every decision feels like the biggest decision of our lives and how stupid that makes us. I am not stoic in this anxiety, though I wish I could be. I’ve never been stoic in anything, really. I was once told I have a loud face, which I get and think about often.
As we talked, I looked over my apartment building’s courtyard that doubles as a walkway and watched my neighbors come and go, bundled, their faces turned upward towards the sky, their eyes squinting from the sun. I thought about how slow life has been lately. For the longest time, my life had been defined by school and all of its expectations. I’d spend all day thinking about papers and projects and smart questions. And now I seem to be doing what I want to do — writing, that is — and yet I’m overwhelmed by the silence of it all. I navigate the world mostly alone now. I sit alone at coffee shops, or at parks when the sun is out. I go on walks alone and try to quiz myself on old Lady Gaga lyrics. And yet, I seem to love the city I’m in and the home I’ve created here — despite the monotony of it all, despite the uninteresting ways my life is trying to unravel itself, despite the mind-numbing chaos that comes with a world completely enveloped in smoke.
3/18/25
Yesterday I read a substack post that absolutely devastated me. I sent it to everyone I know.
3/19/25
I’ve been naked most of the day, swaddled in nothing but a robe my aunt got me from Old Navy once. It is so soft, and I am so clean, and my house is so clean, and I don’t know how this situation could get any better, unless, I suppose, if the sun were to come out. The sky is gray and the temperature has dropped five degrees since this morning. I woke up to such beautiful sunshine and so I went on a run — my third this month. It was painful — not as easy as the first two had been — probably because I lollygagged this morning and allowed my food to settle. Now, I am tired and can’t stop thinking about how many hours there are left in the day.
Winter has been making me break out in a way that makes me feel like a child. A few days ago I watched an Instagram reel where Hailey Bieber described going to bed looking like a “glazed donut.” I’m usually not one to fall into beauty traps, but I’m tired of hiding my face in discrete and subtle ways, and so every night this week I’ve been falling asleep with Cetaphil lotion smeared onto my skin like frosting. I do not want to know whether this is right or wrong — for now, it’s making me feel in control of something that is largely elusive.
The darkness of today is throwing off my rhythm. It’s barely midday but it feels like the evening, and I’m starting to feel anxious about what spring has in store. I went to the garden yesterday and the garlic has sprouted. We smothered the new shoots in compost to protect them from the rocky weather ahead, and then we built trellises around them so our future tomatoes have something to climb.
3/29/25
March has been ridiculously long, riddled with appointments and meetings and conflicts yet to be resolved. The birds are chirping now, and they’re doing so in a way that makes me think they’re saying, “Ruby.” It’s 62 degrees and overcast and I’m thinking it might storm. I’m sitting on the couch, drinking coffee that’s mostly milk, and waiting for Zak to finish reading a book about Saint Paul’s Grand Avenue so we can finally finish the last two episodes of Severance.
Severance, at this time, is one of the few things that’s keeping me going. I don’t know if this means my life is sad, or if I’m just exhausted, but I do know that Zak needs to read his book just a little faster.
In love in love w you my shiny friend 🙌🏼❤️