The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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A suspicious death in London, England. How AI could unlock the secrets on ancient scrolls. The struggle to convey a massive glacier’s beauty. How plants experience time. And the hot mess behind the sriracha shortage.

1. A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld

Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words

I didn’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested—rather, I knew that I was going to like it so much, that it was going to be so annoyingly good, that I needed to crack it open when I had time to get lost in its pages. It was one of those leave-me-alone-I’m-reading books. In the case of PRK’s latest feature for The New Yorker, I waited two days to dig in: I finished a long, complicated edit, a bunch of admin work, and household chores, then found myself with a solid stretch of an hour to just read. The story is about Zac Brettler, a young man in London who posed as the son of a Russian oligarch and wound up dead in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gangster; his death appeared to be suicide, but it might have been something else, and we’ll never know for sure because the gangster, who was the last person to see Brettler alive, is now dead too. As I suspected, I had to read the piece in one gulp. Every inch of it is fascinating: the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, the portrait of London as a playground for conmen and fabulists, the revelations that stunned Brettler’s family after he was gone. Needless to say, when you can, clear your own plate and get to reading. —SD

2. Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?

Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 5, 2024 | 3,688 words

The Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls, were buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. To date, about 800 scrolls have been found from excavations at the site, but historians think there may be thousands more, which could shine more light on the world of classical texts and thought. Attempts to unroll them over the centuries, however, have been unsuccessful—in some cases, these fragile scrolls have literally crumbled into pieces. This entertaining story by Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet has all the elements of a modern-day Indiana Jones adventure, minus the villains: Precious artifacts buried beneath layers of volcanic ash in a villa thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. A Silicon Valley executive-turned-Roman history buff who holds a competition in which promising young programmers around the world race to uncover the secrets on pieces of papyrus that were last unrolled 1,900 years ago. A team’s breakthrough discovery of hidden ink, which opened the door to deciphering Greek letters on the scrolls using AI. It’s a delightful read that blends history, the classics, technology, and machine learning. —CLR

3. Glacial Longings

Elizabeth Rush | Emergence Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 4,468 words

In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier, a massive sheet of ice in Antarctica, one whose “calving edge stretches over a hundred miles.” What I love about this piece is that you get a deep sense of the thinking and struggle that went into writing about familiar geography so many have never experienced in person. I revelled in Rush’s attempts to get it right. And at first, the glacier defies her. “The words I conjure—cirque, serac, cleft, torque, ski slope, rampart—all slide off the surface of the ice, plopping one after the other into the bay right in front of Thwaites,” she writes. “I try out different words for white—plaster of Paris, opalescent, pearl—and blue—cobalt, cadmium, torqued turquoise—but none get at the way these colors come together to form a symphony of sorts, a polyphony of light and play, impossible to translate.” This piece is far more than a litany of discarded descriptors. It’s a fascinating account of coming face-to-face with a glacier and trying to comprehend its vast majesty; about grappling with how to convey that singular experience with precision. And in the end, reader? Rush ices it. —KS

4. A Clock in the Forest

Jonathon Keats | Noēma | Feburary 8, 2024 | 3,226 words

Count me among the people who didn’t know that plants experience time in variable ways. We may age trees by their rings, but their growth—and thus those ever-accreting concentric circles—ebbs and flows in response to the world around them. Trees have helped researchers mark climate change over centuries, even tying it to history-changing droughts. That’s why, as Jonathon Keats explains in this enlightening essay, a 12-foot-tall “arboreal clock” will be among the timekeeping devices included in a project he has been shepherding. There will be others, like a fluvial clock marking time the way a river system might. Taken together, they will underscore a crucial point: time is larger than humans, and by experiencing it as other beings do can help us reconnect to the larger natural world. “Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves,” he writes. “We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way.” I’ve recommended stories about time and measure before. None of them gave me pause the way this one does—a pause that, I now know, ripples well beyond any one organism. —PR

5. What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?

Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words

I started reading this essay in a cafe, with a bottle of sriracha sitting on the table across from me. Staring at the iconic bottle—the bold rooster motif, the cheerful bright green cap—I tried to remember when I first heard the rumors of the “Great Sriracha Shortage.” I believe the mutterings started at a dinner party, whispered tales of bottles selling for $80. Getting home, I opened my cupboard to check my stash—relieved to see two full bottles snugly in place. I would make it. Secure in my immediate supply, the sriracha dilemma fell from my mind, until I came upon this essay and realized I had no idea what actually caused the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to dish the dirt. She begins by artfully filling us in on the history of the sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (it’s never even run a marketing campaign), and the deal between two companies that secured its future with a quality supply of chilies. But this deal—between Underwood Ranches (the chili farmer) and Huy Fong Foods (the sauce maker)—ultimately led to the problem. An argument about money caused a fiery end to the 28-year relationship, costing both companies millions. As Sen writes, the two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though it leaves: “One man with thousands of acres of pepper fields, but nobody to buy his peppers. Another with a massive pepper factory, and not enough peppers to keep it running.” A Shakespearean-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read, and hold onto your bottles: it’s still a rocky road. —CW

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Why You’ve Never Been in a Plane Crash

Kyra Dempsey | Asterisk | January 22, 2024 | 3,422 words

The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations. —SD

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His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him.

Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond.

Always eager for his owner’s company, Waylon enjoyed following Austin around the family ranch and falling asleep on his chest after feedings. He loved red apples, rough belly scratches, and tender massages on his hardened, bony snout. Before long, the pig and the brawny farm boy were inseparable. “I just kinda became his parent, his dad, really,” Austin said. “Early on, I’d take him with me through the drive-thru at Whataburger and he’d sit in the front seat, happy as can be.” 

Waylon soon grew to be “two hundred fifty pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-sized NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time. 

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A Clock in the Forest

In Noēma, Jonathon Keats unspools a thought-provoking essay about time—specifically, about how every organism other than humans experiences time, and how one key to undoing humans’ ecological impact might just be appreciating those other experiences. To wit: an “arboreal clock” that measures and displays time from the perspective of a massive tree.

Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.

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‘If You Scream You Are a Dead Duck’: At 14, my Mother Left me Alone All Summer – Then the Man With a Knife Found Me

This excerpt from Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith is a disturbing read, but demonstrates Smith’s skill in getting beneath the skin of her feelings, pulling them out to lay them bare on the page. It’s gripping writing, and it’s all too real.

I left my shoes and underwear on the floor of his truck. Two men on the sidewalk shouted something at me. The way I hated them. I looked back to see if they were chasing me, if the truck was circling around for me. The way pain shot through me as I ran, and blood dripped down my legs and soaked the crotch of my pants. The way I bled for three days.

That Thursday night, for the first time, I piled three silver pots and some glass ashtrays in front of the door, like Laura Petrie did on the Dick Van Dyke Show. I began my practice of laying my head where my feet used to go, so I could see through the living room to the big front door with the too-little lock and my homemade alarm. That way I could sleep until it came crashing down.

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The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum?

The bus made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild,” has been relocated. Eva Holland explores the history of this former city transit vehicle—and how it came to hold a special place in people’s imagination. Will it be the same now it’s out of the wild?

I first read Into the Wild not long before the movie came out. At the time, I was around the same age Chris was when he died. It was early in my writing career, and I worked for a website blogging about travel news and trends. That’s how I learned about the dilemma of the bus, the hikers who sought it out and the rescues they sometimes required. Two years later, at 27, I set out on my own big, wild adventure. I bought an aging Jeep and drove west across Canada to the Yukon, where I now live.

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Rubble From Bone

Four months since Israel launched Operation Iron Swords, Tom Stevenson assesses the devastation in Gaza, situating it alongside the precedents and norms of modern warfare. This essay is a pitch-perfect example of letting the details speak for themselves:

Palestinian men and boys between the ages of 12 and 70 are stripped, cuffed, blindfolded and then loaded onto the backs of trucks to be taken for interrogation. Some have numbers written on their arms. Hundreds detained in Gaza have been transported to the desert prison of Ketziot, near the border with Egypt. Others have probably been taken to nearby military bases. Some men who were taken prisoner in Beit Lahiya were stripped and transported to fenced-off camps where for days they were tied up, beaten and tortured. Others have disappeared. The IDF has subsequently said that between 85 and 90 per cent of these detainees were civilians. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided UN schools and detained any men found inside. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented an incident on 19 December when the Israeli army surrounded and then entered a building in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City. “The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least eleven of the men, mostly aged in their late twenties and early thirties, in front of their family members.”

From the beginning, Operation Iron Swords has been an all-out assault on a captive and overwhelmingly civilian population. Israeli tactics have little in common with standard counterinsurgency doctrine or rules of engagement. The war on Gaza is at its core retributive: an act of collective punishment. Like all punishment, to ask whether or not it ‘works’ misses the point that punishment is often an end in itself. But the conduct of the war also has an orgiastic quality. The celebrations of the killing by Israel’s political leaders; the fantastic schemes for the removal of Palestinians to Sinai, or Europe, or Congo; the public figures signing bombs to be dropped on what’s left of Gaza; the gleeful recordings made by individual soldiers—all combine malice and mirth.

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What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?

In this piece, Indirani Sen dishes up the gossip on what went down between the two companies responsible for sriracha: their fiery dispute led to a shortage of this iconic sauce and cost millions. An interesting look at how a crucial business friendship turned sour.

Ominously, there were no unprocessed chilies on hand—none had come in lately. Part of the problem, Tran and Lam explain, is quality control: Freshness is what makes Huy Fong’s sauce better than the competition, and Tran says he often has had to turn away truckloads of that delicate red jalapeño because they didn’t make the journey from suppliers intact, were not properly refrigerated, or were picked when green.

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Misplaced Trust

This project expands on previous research on land-grab universities, as published at High Country News.

Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act used land taken from Native communities to fund public colleges across the US. For this project, a team of Grist reporters examined publicly available data to locate and map these trust lands. They also identify 14 land-grant universities that continue to benefit from colonization and the natural resources on stolen Indigenous land, including the University of Arizona, New Mexico State University, Texas A&M, and Washington State University.

State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.

In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.

Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. . . .

In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out. 

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The Year of Silt

In this feature for New Zealand Geographic, Rachel Morris writes about the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, which devastated the North Island of New Zealand in February 2023 and left thousands of homes filled with silt. As Morris reports, cyclone survivors felt abandoned, not receiving much help from the government or aid organizations like the Red Cross. Instead, silt removal was done almost entirely by volunteers. Morris spent several months with one of these volunteer crews, who provided help to some of the region’s hardest-hit residents.

Unlike the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which destroyed large swathes of the city, the damage from Gabrielle was intensely concentrated in a handful of communities on the outskirts of Hastings and Napier. Within a few weeks, the main urban areas had essentially returned to normal, while places like Esk Valley, Pakowhai, Omahu, Waiohiki, Puketapu, Rissington, Dartmoor and Pōrangahau remained little apocalyptic pockets, easily bypassed by those who preferred to avoid the mess. So it wasn’t surprising when, about five weeks in, the outpouring of volunteers began to ebb. (As one organiser observed, locals “wanted their weekends back”.)

It’s sweaty, strenuous work, but it was worse before the silt solidified. (“Like shovelling diarrhoea” is the most memorable description.) By now, Peni is a connoisseur of the silt’s geographical variations: in Pakowhai, it has congealed into bricks, like moist clay; in Omahu, it’s sticky mud; in Esk Valley, it floats through your fingers like fine sand.

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A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld

A security camera caught 19-year-old Zac Brettler jumping to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London. But did he commit suicide? Brettler’s parents’ attempts to answer that question led to shocking revelations, including that their son was posing as the heir of a Russian oligarch, and that he had fallen in with a known gangster, Dave Sharma:

The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.

Sharma, the last person to see Zac alive, told much the same story as Shamji: the previous Thursday evening, Zac and Shamji had come to Riverwalk; Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, joined them; after a few hours, Shamji and Dominique left; Sharma fell asleep, and when he awoke, at 8 a.m., Zac had vanished. In Sharma’s opinion, Zac had been a troubled kid who was “becoming suicidal.” Sharma noted that he was happy to talk to Strong, because he was a private investigator, but he preferred not to speak with the police, as he’d had some “bad experiences in the past.”

Sharma didn’t volunteer what those experiences were, but he did have a history with law enforcement. In 2002, he was arrested on heroin-smuggling charges. He was later implicated in the murder of a bodyguard turned night-club owner, Dave (Muscles) King, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003, as he was leaving a gym in Hertfordshire. It was the first time that a fully automatic AK-47 had been used to murder someone in England. At a high-profile trial, the judge described the assassination as “thoroughly planned, ruthless, and brutally executed.” The gunman and the driver were each sentenced to life in prison.

Sharma had been one of Muscles’ friends in the drug trade, but they fell out. When authorities arrested Sharma and others in the 2002 heroin bust, the only suspect they didn’t end up prosecuting was Muscles, and in front of witnesses in open court Sharma angrily called him a “grass”: an informer. Moments after Muscles was shot to death, the assassin called a mobile phone in France, which the police subsequently linked to Sharma. I spoke to a former official who was involved in the investigation, and he said that Sharma was a dangerous person. At the time of the murder trial, authorities had tried to locate him in France for questioning, but he’d gone underground. “I’ve no doubt Sharma was involved in organizing the shooting,” the former official told me. “But we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.”

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Glacial Longings

In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. As she reflects on the thrill of visiting the glacier, she recounts the gargantuan task of communicating the experience with precision.

I hadn’t imagined how profoundly apart this place would feel—how it would appear gigantic and fully formed, an entity all its own, well beyond the limits of human understanding and resistant to whatever language I might try to pin on it.

Afterall, this floating ice shelf is comprised of snow that dropped before the rise and fall of Rome, before Jesus or the Buddha were born, before the invention of the alphabet. Before sound became symbol.

At some point, I sprint to the galley, scarf down two hard-boiled eggs and half a cinnamon bun, and run back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Soon I am outside again, attempting to honor the ice by looking away as little as possible. Thwaites’s calving edge stretches over a hundred miles, and so it takes us hours to travel its length. Sometimes the margin appears steep and sturdy and sheer; in other places it loses its sheen, seems chalky and distressed. We turn a corner and the face rockets upward into a wall. A wild line twists along the top of the shelf, tracing gorges into the blue-white snow. Then, just as abruptly, the parapet has crumbled, cluttering the water with floating pieces of brash.

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How the Codpiece Flopped

A delightful essay about a small piece of history (sometimes not so small). Why did men start wearing pockets of fabric over their crotch? Why did they stop? Zaria Gorvett finds out with some attention-grabbing reporting.

Some time around 1536, Hans Holbein the Younger was finessing Henry VIII’s crotch. With a fine brush in his hand and a palette of watercolour paints beside him, the master artist took pains to give his client’s ornately decorated bulge its due prominence.

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Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?

In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed several ancient Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also buried the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls in an Italian villa, in the process. To date, about 800 scrolls have been recovered from site excavations, but classical historians think there may be thousands more. There have been unsuccessful attempts over the centuries, however, to unroll these fragile scrolls.

In this entertaining read for Businessweek, Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet describe computer science professor Brent Seales’ more recent quest over the past 20 years to decipher them. With the help of a former GitHub executive, more advanced technology, and a machine-learning competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, it’s finally happening.

Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.

The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.

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Meet Me in the Eternal City

A network state starts as an online community of like-minded people, connected by something—a big idea, an innovation, a commandment—then moves offline into the physical world. Consider Vitalia, a pop-up city on an island off the coast of Honduras that’s focused on prolonging life. Or Praxis, a VC-funded group that wants to build an “eternal city” in the Mediterranean, free from the clutches of America’s flawed democracy. Given the US’s history of “secessionist yearning,” this idea is not new, and “[i]n hindsight, the network state is clearly the dream that Silicon Valley has been building toward since the very beginning,” writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. In her piece for the Atlantic, she recounts her experience from another network state, Zuzalu, the two-month experiment hosted in Montenegro last year and organized by the inventor of Ethereum.

Other than that, the model is choose your own adventure. Hypothetically, Srinivasan suggests network states for people who eat specific diets (kosher, keto), for people who don’t like FDA regulation, for people who don’t like cancel culture, for people who want to live like Benedictine monks, for people who might want to limit internet use by putting public buildings in Faraday cages. It doesn’t matter what the state is based on, but it has to be based on something—a “moral innovation” or a “one commandment.”

These projects are pitched with a sense of grandiosity and grievance: The twisted bureaucracy of democratic governance is constraining humanity. Decades ago, we went to the moon; why don’t we have flying cars? Centuries ago, we praised frontiersmen and pioneers; why are they vilified now? Why all this disdain for the doers and the builders? Why all this red tape in the way of the best and the brightest?

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Flying Solo

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Kristina Kasparian | Longreads | February 2024 | 2,513 words (9 minutes)

“Are you traveling alone?” the agent asks as I hand over my passport.

“Yes . . .” A nod would have been louder. “Yes,” I try again, uncurling my shoulders.

I’m out of practice with confidence. I’m out of practice with a lot of things.

It’s late October and I’m flying to Milan to wrap myself in its chestnut-scented fog. I’m headed back to the city where I lived in my 20s, because I miss it, because I miss myself.

I move my carry-on behind my knees, partly to hide its size but mostly to stabilize myself. I’m such a fool; my angst is totally self-inflicted.

I must’ve been about 5 when my dad drove me to a playground to meet a friend. He parked across the street from a house that had just burned down. I have always been petrified of fire; I usually avert my eyes from anything to do with it. Somehow, that day, I forced myself to study the scarred skeleton in a curious, steady analysis of hurt.

I am prepared to mourn myself the same way in Milan by staring the loss straight in the face.

Just how much has this illness engulfed?

“Let it all in,” Ethan said earlier as we pulled into the drop-off lane. “I think you’ll find that your nerves are also excitement.”

In our 20 years together, I’ve never had to justify to Ethan that I feel six emotions in one breath. While so many others shame me for my emotionality, he considers it a gift. By all, he means: the joy, the pride, the grief, the fear, the giddiness, the awkwardness, the loneliness, the triumph.

He’s right—I am excited. I’ve planned a homecoming not only to Milan but to my other beloved northern Italian places: Cinque Terre and Venice, on opposite coasts.

“You’re planning to do all that? On your own?” My loved ones are concerned. They’ve witnessed every act in my drama, every tango between force and fragility. I’ve done it before; do they think I can’t do it again? Their doubts become mine. Or maybe they were mine all along.

I live on the fault line at the intersection of two axes—illness and wellness—and two planes: what is and what could have been. My body is the most unpredictable factor in every day. My decisions, however mundane, involve a constant negotiation of energy. My time is dissected into pacing and pushing, with episodes of hurling myself past the breaking point and paying for it, only to feel a semblance of normal, of able, of the before—if there ever truly was a before, a time when this beast didn’t inhabit me.

Resilience has a cost.

Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels.

“You’re leaving Ethan alone? Is there food for him in the freezer?” My grandmother’s notion of independence is one thrust onto her as an immigrant and a widow, not an elective independence like mine. “No,” I want to tell her, “but I’ve left him love notes in the sheets and in his boxer drawer.”

Our independence had always been our defining feature; we lived as individuals first and a couple second. Much of our story has unfolded on separate continents, with us chasing our own dreams. We honor our distinct cultures and faiths. Even our wedding bands don’t match—he prefers yellow gold, I prefer white.

My independence also once meant I’d take so many flights a season that I’d fall asleep during takeoff, unfazed—or debilitatingly fatigued, unknowingly, even back then. Predicting my future from the sludgy swirls at the bottom of my cup of Armenian coffee was an easy task for our elders. “There’s a voyage around the corner,” they’d say, seeing open horizons in patterns of coffee grounds, and they were never wrong.

But the weed inside me tethered my organs and bound my ship to its anchor. It suffocated the independence that pulsed through me since I last stood in Milan. I went from winning more scholarships than I could accept to watching my savings dissolve into medical debt. I walked out on a dream career in academia after my PhD and became self-employed to give myself breathing room between surgeries—a “choice” my Italian supervisor called a real shame for the field that had invested in me.

I asked Ethan for more and more: to do my dishes, to run my errands, to support me financially, to speak for me, to bend down for me, to pull up my underwear, to carry me back to bed. He dealt with the stress of being our household’s sole contributor. He dealt with our shared PTSD from medical appointments gone badly. He dealt with us being late to everything because I couldn’t get myself off the toilet. He dealt with our rattled intimacy, with my screams in the night, with the sight of me depleted, pale, immobile. With every thank you and I’m sorry that he collected from me, my individuality unspooled.

Through it all, he’s been more than stoic—he’s been loving. He swaddled me in acceptance long before I could even entertain the idea of acceptance myself. But I often wonder: How fine are we, really? How far can we bend without breaking? And so, when I remember, I refrain from complaining. I try to balance taking with giving. I test how long I can hold out without letting the word “pain” sneak into my sentences. I make myself lovable, to the extent possible. I’ve come to rely so much on Ethan. Do I even make sense without him?

I tuck my boarding pass into my passport. I’m flying solo to test my wings.

There’ll be no one to help lug my suitcase, my groceries, my body. But surely, Milan will feel good. . . . But what if I don’t feel anything at all? What if healing has left fragments and fissures that can’t be made whole? What will Ethan do with his time now that he’s unburdened by me?

My seat on the train into Milan has me going backward. Fitting, I think, to be pulled into my city in reverse, my life on rewind.

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Soon, I have an ornate key in my purse again and my address refers to a peach house with trees sprouting from its rooftop and balconies crowded with pots. Milan is a city of handsome façades and secret universes tucked backstage in interlocking private courtyards, and my neighborhood—Brera—is its artistic heart.

I have a type when it comes to cities; Milan isn’t it. Its dense smog veils the Alps and gives me a chronic cough that only disappears if I go to Switzerland for the weekend. Every intersection is a chaos of squealing trams, cars, scooters, and pedestrians, each fighting for their slice of space. Its only waterfront is along the banks of its murky Navigli canals.

But I grew up here. Milan was my companion as I befriended the voice in my head—the voice that was suddenly so loud when I left my parents’ nest and ventured overseas with a big red suitcase packed with ambition and anxiety. Milan taught me the art of being alone—really alone, before smartphones and social media strapped us into a permanent grid. Without Google Maps in my pocket, I’d rely on my hand-drawn scribbles of cross streets or, if I was feeling brave, my instinct. As we got to know one another, Milan grew smaller. Locals began asking me for directions. Dinner for one became comfortable, even romantic. I was unbothered by glances and poised for inspiration. I was free.

Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.

The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me?

When I step out, it feels as though I’m walking inside my mind, opening drawers and boxes I sift through often in my daydreams. I let my senses fill with all that used to be mine, and my chest might just burst open. I comb the streets that I knew better than those of my hometown. I didn’t expect such fuzzy memory traces. I know this once mattered, but I can’t tell why. I’ve forgotten the order of the subway stops. Left here, right there. Yes, now I remember. Milan is motor memory—a sequence of dance moves that primes the next, lyrics that form on my lips before my brain even wipes off their dust. I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.

Who knows how many times these shops and restaurants have changed before this iteration. I recognize the awnings and logos of the mainstays, but for all that’s new, only the structure of the space seems familiar—the bones, not the body. A whole new neighborhood has sprung tall with buildings that show no bruises or wrinkles. Milan is more vibrant than it was a decade ago. Am I?

I notice the uncertainty around my eyes in my selfies. I catch glimpses of my body in store windows—hunched, soft, off-kilter. I imagine the younger me reflected, slender and serene, maybe even sexy. I can feel traces of her lingering on these same street corners and in the routines I settle back into. I feel like I’m acting, playing her part.

The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.

My Italian is an atrophied muscle. I realize, when I meet my friends, that it has serious gaps: surgery, ovaries, miscarriage, egg donor, surrogate. These words were not in my dreamer’s vocabulary at 22. I also don’t pass as Italian anymore. I used to shock locals by revealing that Italian was not part of my mixed lineage. Here, I was a chameleon with my dark features and my accent, my otherness strangely more visible at home, in Québec, a province obsessed with monolingualism.

Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels. I can no longer repeatedly eat bread or pasta without consequences. I need more bathroom breaks and more downtime. I travel with my hot water bottle. My clothing is looser, longer. I’ve traded my heeled suede boots for sneakers that fare better with Milanese puddles and my tingling feet. On days where rain is imminent, I take pleasure in leaning on my umbrella for extra support. Before I unpacked, I moved a dining room chair into the entrance so I can sit while I tie and untie my shoes. When I go to the market to buy myself flowers, they call me signora instead of signorina.

I’ve aged before having aged.

But my Italian friends claim they don’t see it. “Ma non sei cambiata! Sei sempre la stessa!” They marvel at how I haven’t changed. I admit, that makes me happy. There’s a strange sense of pride in staying the same—consistent, unscathed. We are conditioned to grow, but not to age, to blossom, but not from wounds.

When I meet my friend Stella for lunch, we share our shortcomings over orecchiette. Stella has her own invisible disability to accommodate—a crippling fatigue that has been her shadow for years, wedging itself between her wants and her cans. With the Italian lunch hour whirling around us, we are cradled in a confessional safe haven. We talk about how foreign our bodies feel sometimes and how our truth inconveniences others. The need to draw boundaries to nurture ourselves is often isolating. Stella is more practical with her grief than I am, at least today. “When people ask, ‘how are you?’ I say, ‘I can tell you, but you won’t like the answer!’” We laugh, though we are both unsure how to navigate a society that conflates being real and being negative. Fifteen years ago, we had academia in common. Now, this.

I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.

The way I dreamed up this quest was fueled by my internalized ableism—to check if I can, to be disappointed if I can’t. My grandmother’s resilience is entrenched in my concept of self-worth. That life is meant to be endured with a brave face, and that rest—much like praise—is earned by plowing through pain. “Look what I managed to do at 92” is the underlying message of our evening chats when she tells me about her windows, floors, and thriving plants. “That’s more than I can manage in a day at 38,” I chuckle, secretly worried about getting to 92. My own look-what-I-managed-to-dos are photos texted to Ethan. I get a thrill when he’s proud of me, when he sees me on my own two feet, doing what I love. The snapshots don’t show the abandoned climbs, the turn-backs, the breathlessness.

Milan is my timepiece, my meter of selves past. I was prepared for my return to sting.

But I remind myself of what it is taking me a decade to unlearn: it’s not all or nothing. There’s triumph in staying in, in saying no, in resting before feeling floored, in getting groceries in three trips, in choosing the later train or no train at all. My limits make me more intentional. I start to send Ethan pictures not only of the things I did do, but also those I deliberately didn’t do and felt at peace not doing. I shift my attention to being instead. I can’t shake my limitations, but I can shake the shame and the inner turmoil. I can let my joy take the edge off the grief. It’s not about testing my wings, but about recalibrating them. I was and still am free.

I swing by the pasticceria for my usual brioche oozing with custard cream. I stand at the bar, face-to-face with a large mirror. I don’t like what I see, so I look down. No, that feels cowardly; I force myself to meet my gaze. I’m on this trip to spend time with myself, after all. Between sips of my cappuccino, I study the lines, the signs of swelling, the double chin that belongs to my mother. And when I least expect it, my insecurity melts into a smile.

I lean into Milan. I feel my posture lengthen and my jaw muscles soften. I was afraid the now would override the then. But her Milan coexists with my current Milan; my new rituals won’t erase hers. We are two selves, threaded close.

It was never supposed to be the same; I’ve become too much to go backward. Though I’m still reluctant to pick a new favorite gelato, on my next train ride, I make sure to choose a forward-facing seat.

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Kristina Kasparian (@alba.a.new.dawn) is an emerging writer, neurolinguist, and health activist advocating for social justice in health care, especially for disabling conditions like endometriosis. Her writing on identity has been published by Roxane Gay (Emerging Writer Series), Catapult, Newsweek, Fodor’s, the Globe and Mail, and a number of travel and literary magazines. Visit her website at kristinakasparian.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

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