Blue Notes #8: I'm engaged!

And why I'm accepting congratulations :)

Whenever something big happens to me, I need to be in my own zone for a while.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner!?” friends ask, but I take some time to integrate all thoughts and feelings into a big pot and let them simmer before serving.

In that spirit, the morning after I got engaged, I went on a long solo walk around the East Village, my first neighborhood in New York. It was one of those fuzzy dreamlike walks where you’re accompanied by something so present and so obvious, and yet no one else knows. (I kept earnestly wondering if everyone was looking at my ring.) (They weren’t.)

Manhattan looked like a movie, and I walked through it like I owned the place.

I’ve taken a dozen of these walks in my lifetime: the one after I got terrible news, the one after I got life-changing news, and the one after I met the man who is now my fiancé.

These walks are sacred pilgrimages that begin in the past and end in the future. They are epochal journeys, marking the end of an era and inviting in the new. Nothing will ever be the same.