Some people ask the why, the what, and the how we all get to a certain definition of something; how we create a meaning. My guess is that these questions relate to the importance of utterance and affirmation. “Do you love me?” we often ask. “Why do you always ask me, you know I do,” we would get as an answer. How much meaning we create by saying and how much by doing? An action without naming is open to any interpretation; as all declaration without deed falls flat. Relationships of any kind are based on a shared responsibility; I own fifty percent of what we become when we are together. It is not about someone being a determined kind of person; it is about what I can do to make something great from what we share. Creating beauty out of what we got.

I try to kill a giant waterbug with my red mary janes as I wait for an email I wrote to Victor to go through. The internet connection is specially slow tonight. The AC is on and its noise fills the entire room. My sweat is cold by now. I've been accumulating lots of stories to write about on the blog, but it is precisely today that I feel sad that I take the time to do it. It might have been the tone on Victor's voice, or that I'm tired, or possibly that last night I questioned myself too many times the why I'm here; some nights the longing gets deep into the bone. Today, after work, I went to the top of Rockefeller Center to get a view of the city from another perspective. It has always amazed me the number of windows, and how each of them represents different characters, stories and possibilities. This city is both beautiful and tough, and it gives you as much as it takes. Sometimes you can frame yourself as part of an abundant whole, or some days like today, a tiny bit of something that gets lost in oblivion.

I love the feeling of being in what is called the "deep South". Betsy and her husband took me to hear her son Charlie, a fiddler, play Old-Time music. We sat by a tree on a yard filled with antiques and flying june bugs to watch him and his friends perform old songs that must have travelled from Scotland and Ireland into the Southern Appalachians. "Most of these songs were not written down, they have traveled through generations, so each time they play it they do it differently," Betsy said. "Charlie plays for himself, he just loves it and if someone happens to be listening it's only incidental. It doesn't really matter." For me it was a soothing experience watching him play waltzes with banjos and fiddles as he followed the rhythm tapping his bare feet on the ground. For a moment I felt I could live here, where life seems so straightforward and simple. There are so many lives one could live, it's just a matter of choosing it.

Sunday in Alabama

It was warm and humid as Connie and I sat at her porch drinking chilled Rosé and nibbled on rice crackers. I asked her to show me old pictures, so her husband pulled a couple of shoe boxes filled with photographs from the top closet drawers. We looked at pictures of her teenage son who died a year and a half ago, their trip to Italy, her upbringing in Iowa, as a teenager with long red hair, her PhD graduation and a set of Connie and her two children snuggling in bed. "These pictures are filled with love," her husband said as he placed one over the fireplace. The quiet Birmingham breeze was blowing as she walked me through the memories behind the pictures and the fate of the people in them. It made me feel I was listening to the story of my family. I like how lives intersect, mine and hers, from such different backgrounds and still being able to relate. "Would you consider moving to Alabama after you leave New York?" she asked. "It could be. You never know."

On the flight to Amsterdam I read about an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois' fabric works opening in Venice this month. I found out then that she had just died a few days before. "Art is the guarantee to sanity", she was quoted in the article. For me, the search for beauty and art are core signs of humanity, a call for the resilience of meaning. I spent my birthday in Amsterdam walking by the canals, and must have crossed several bridges as I returned to my room at night. It was the perfect analogy to start a new cycle; now at 32 there are many more bridges to cross.