In the late nineties, we lived on the first three floors of a mint-green brownstone on 90th between Columbus and Central Park West. It was the only splash of color on a block of brown buildings, all softened with flower pots and scattered toys, which should have told me something.

Living in the city meant learning the rules—the ones adults taught us, and the ones we absorbed just from living there. Yellow Safe Haven stickers on storefronts. Keys between your fingers at night. I memorized the streets within a tight perimeter of our home: the pizza place on the corner, the D’Agostino’s around the block, the small radius where my older sister Taylor and I were allowed to go together. Max at the bodega down my block slid me strawberry Hi-Chews and a lottery ticket nearly every morning. I'd linger by the machine, working in 413, my birthday, into the numbers on my slip while he told me I'd be late for school.

By then, Taylor and I could navigate Zabar's alone. Everything bagels, swiss cheese, tomatoes, white fish. We'd meet back by the lox. It was vivid freedom. Responsibility and agency on streets that felt like the center of everything.

But navigating the city with Mom was different.

I was seven. I knew better than to say “Mom” at the fish counter while she was deciding, but I did anyway. Her head turned, and I felt it. That look.

She'd changed her mind again.

“The lox. No, wait.” She held up a finger to stop a woman trying to edge past. “Excuse me. Just wait. Hold on.”

People huffed behind us. Someone checked their watch. Bodies shifted weight. My shoulders climbed toward my ears. Every time, we stayed until she decided. I prayed to disappear. It never worked.

A few years later, we moved downtown to 15th Street, between 5th and 6th. It was the fourth apartment I'd lived in by age nine. Mom liked change. Dad moved to the Upper East Side when they separated, making it enemy territory.

“The Upper East Side. For uncreative rich people who don't know the first thing about being happy,” Mom said, and I believed her.

I fit with her. Most visits when I was in lower school, I'd lock myself in the bathroom at Dad's and wait until she came to pick me up. And when she'd ask how my Sunday with Dad and Taylor on a day trip to New Jersey had been—riding horses Western-style, stopping at the Palisades Mall—I'd shrug and say it wasn't much fun, knowing she needed to hear that her world was still the better one.

Then came the missing persons posters plastered over every surface after 9/11. On subway walls, phone booths, mailboxes. Each face staring back with someone's last hope printed in block letters. The first week after, my whole family stayed together at Dad’s place uptown. All of us under the same roof for the first time since the separation. We stayed up late those nights, my parents talking in low voices in the kitchen while my sister and I sat too close to the flickering TV.

Later that September, Mom let me stay up to watch Saturday Night Live for the first time. Eighteen days after the towers fell, Reese Witherspoon walked out onstage.

“This matters.” Mom said with a soft smile as tears fell from her eyes.

When Mom, Taylor, and I went back home downtown, we returned to our routines. Most nights, Mom cooked for my sister and me. Her lobster fra diavolo filled the apartment with the smell of garlic and tomatoes. She'd stand at the stove, wooden spoon in hand, singing off-key to whatever was on the radio. When she caught me laughing, she'd sing louder. She'd call me over to taste whatever she was making, asking if it needed more salt, as though my opinion mattered as much as hers.

In the year after 9/11, as talk of war intensified, antiwar protests surged through Washington Square Park. Even as a kid pushed to the edges of the crowd, I could feel it—the weight of the world moving through our streets, like everything that mattered was happening right here.

As I grew, on special days, Mom would take me to the Boathouse in Central Park, and I'd order crab cakes and Shirley Temples. She never ordered the same thing twice or sat at the same table if she could help it. After the Boathouse, we'd make our way to Magnolia's on Bleecker Street for vanilla cupcakes. Always my order, at least.

Mom had this way of twisting her hair around her finger when she talked, a habit I copied without realizing it. She always looked impossibly put-together in a way that made people stare. You knew something was off when she pulled out her worn Calvin Klein overalls and baby-blue high-top Converses.

To my friends, she wasn't like the other moms. She was Diane. Sister Diane. Di. Di-Di. When I played Simba in The Lion King at day camp, she brought me sunflowers after both dress rehearsals, clapping in an empty theater like I was on Broadway. She slipped effortlessly into Magenta and Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Diane Keaton from First Wives Club to cheer me up when I was feeling blue, taking my hand and spinning me through the apartment until I was dizzy.

But Mom wasn't always the vibrant person my friends knew. I'd receive AIM messages like “Tell Di I love her!” I'd read the message, then look up to see Mom staring at nothing, and I couldn't help wondering if she was the same woman from the night before.

Friends didn't hear the two a.m. weeping.

As early as age eight, I stood outside her door in my oversized Rugrats shirt, hand on the doorknob. I counted to fifteen, trying to decide. When I finally opened it, she looked up from the edge of her bed, blank, like I was interrupting a stranger's crying.

One morning she dropped a plate on the floor and just stared at the shards. Not upset, not apologizing, just staring. I knelt down and picked up each piece while she stood there, watching. Then she walked away without a word.

The night before my jazz recital at Steps on Broadway, I'd already gauged Mom's sour mood. She'd have to sit with other parents the next day, so I spent the evening dropping hints about how nice every parent looked at these recitals, how much I loved their blazers and long coats, and pulling similar pieces from her closet to show her. I knew that, when she was in her moods, she didn't care what she looked like. But if I planted the right seeds, maybe she'd remember to try.

The next day she showed up in a chic floor-length light pink wool coat. Beautiful. Stylish. I should have felt proud to be her daughter.

Instead, I just felt tired.

It took time, but eventually I could predict her moods by how she held her coffee cup. Both hands wrapped tight meant welcoming. One hand, barely holding on, meant I should know better than to bother her for anything. A knot began to form when I couldn't read her. I rehearsed asking permission with the intensity most other kids reserved for studying for tests—except the test was my mother and passing meant I got what I needed without setting her off.

Sometimes I'd lie in my bathtub fully clothed, a type of quiet sanctuary that became my favorite reading spot. I started reading everything I could find at home: novels, her half-finished books, magazines left open on the coffee table. I scribbled in journals, trying to be honest about what I was feeling, then tore out the pages before anyone could find them. I'd cut out pictures from magazines and paste them into notebooks, writing fake Teen Vogue articles about celebrities and their outfits.

I was sixteen when I first read Joan Didion's essay, “Goodbye to All That.” She writes about moving from California to New York young and hopeful, then returning west years later when the magic wore off. She warned that “not all of the promises would be kept.” What promises? I wrote in the margin. I'd annotate the romantic parts about possibility obsessively, skipping entirely over her warnings about trying to escape parts of your life. Besides, at sixteen, I was sure she was wrong that New York could ever be anything but everything.

New York was energy and life, not heartbreak. I'd lived here long enough to know, I told myself.

In acting class the summer before my senior year of high school, we learned the character questions: Who am I? What do I want? What is my need? I could build a whole person by how tight their laces were, the scuff marks at the top of their shoes, whether they could look someone in the eye when they talked, the way they fidgeted. But when it came time to answer for myself, I couldn't.

I was the one who would put on skits with my friends and edit them on iMovie with chipmunk voices, who got kicked out for laughing hysterically at Juliet's soliloquy as we performed in English class. I'd walk through the city inventing lives for strangers: the woman in the crimson coat running late to Carnegie Hall, the man with the worn briefcase quitting everything to hike Patagonia with his secret lover.

It was always dramatic. New York just made sense to me in a way nothing else did.

With Mom, it was different. Once my high school boyfriend sent me flowers while Mom was in one of her moods, so when she asked what they were, I said I had gotten them for her.

Her face softened. “You got these for me?”

I nodded. She held them close, breathing in the pink petals, and I felt relief.

I was eleven when she woke me at 3 a.m. on Fire Island during a lightning storm. “You're going to want to see this,”  she said, and we ran to the beach, just us and our golden retriever Max. We sat on the steps eating chocolate fudge from the local town candy shop, Ice Castle, watching the storm. The warm air smelled like salt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wiping away a tear.

“What's wrong?” I asked. That knot.

She smiled. “Sometimes everything is too damn beautiful, and I can't stand it.”

Then she ran down the steps to the beach and screamed into the storm. Told me to do it too. I couldn't. I was mortified we'd wake someone—she was acting like a child, a type of freedom that felt wrong. But she wouldn't let me leave until I did.

When I finally screamed, nothing bad happened. We laughed. We ran to dip our feet in the ocean, the sky so illuminated from the storm. Max barking, our silhouettes cutting the sand with each lightning strike.

 

Theater was a place where none of that mattered. She'd take me to shows, and for those few hours in the dark we'd both just watch and listen. When I was younger, the dream was always Broadway. As I got older, it shifted to film and TV. But it was always performing, becoming someone else.

By senior year of high school, when I got the email that a short film I was in had been accepted to a festival, I sat in my baby pink childhood bedroom, reading the words over and over until they felt real. Something clicked. Not certainty, but possibility. Maybe I could do this.

I sat at our circular glass kitchen table with two browser tabs open: Backstage.com and the Common Application. Mom's voice drifted through the wall, rising and raspy, ready to ignite another argument with a telemarketer, customer service, anyone.

The casting call read, “Seeking authentic, vulnerable performance.”

The Common App asked: “What obstacles have you overcome?”

Mom's voice spiked: “Jesus Christ, are you dense? You don't understand anything!” I closed the Backstage tab.

I typed, “Growing up in New York, I learned that finding yourself in a city of eight million people means first learning how to get lost.” Even then, I couldn't write about myself without writing about this city.

I went to college seven hundred miles away. When I graduated, I moved back into my bedroom at the Battery Park apartment. Our old patterns settled back into place, easily, inevitably.

Back in high school, a talent manager had approached me on the subway and handed me his business card. I'd tucked it into my wallet, unsure what to do with it. The card stayed there through all four years of college. Sometimes it'd slip out with my debit card. I'd look at it, then put it back. Acting became a “maybe someday” I'd mention casually, but I’d slip it back in before I thought too long about it. Then senior year of college hit, and as everyone around me geared up for job applications and interviews, I couldn't shake it.

That fall after graduation, I finally pulled it out. I got new headshots taken. I chose the one with the hunter green shirt that made my eyes look equally green, and printed my résumé on the back for the first time. The manager started sending me to auditions. Some I taped in New York, others required flying to LA.

In early 2017, while I was still in New York, I booked a lead role in a low-budget horror film inspired by The Exorcist. They'd made a short film version, secured funding for the feature, and after I auditioned multiple times, the role was mine. Filming was set for late April in Ohio, a four-week shoot. I thought this was it. Everyone always said you just needed one, and I believed them.

Then a bigger producer came on. They wanted bigger names, more credits. They fired me and the director in the same twenty minutes over the phone. I was supposed to leave in three days. My bags were already packed.

My best friends surprised me with a plane ticket to New Orleans. They'd booked it for what should have been my filming dates, thinking I'd need the distraction. I went. I refreshed Instagram obsessively, watching updates from the set. My replacement in my costume. The crew I'd never get to work with. I studied each behind-the-scenes photo, torturing myself with what scene I'd be filming that day if I were there. I'd spent months disappearing into her. Now someone else got to.

When I got back to New York, I stayed in bed. Days blurred together. I couldn’t find a reason to get up. Two weeks later it was Memorial Day weekend. I went to Florida with my boyfriend to see his family.

The call came when I got back from the beach, my phone battery at two percent. Dad's name on the screen.

“There's been an accident,” he said.

Or maybe he said something else first. I don't remember. What I remember is the word “trapped.” Something about the gate at my grandma's assisted living facility, the car door, Mom visiting and Mom not breathing and then—

I know I must have dropped to the ground. My phone slipping from my hands. Everything spinning, the pavement hot against my knees, my boyfriend's voice somewhere far away, like he was underwater, or maybe I was.

The concrete burned my skin, and I let it.

She'd been visiting my grandma in Melville, New York. The gate sensor. The car door. Asphyxiation. The words came in fragments that wouldn't piece together into something I could understand. And then she just was gone.

I rushed back to Battery Park. I had forgotten Mom was getting the apartment repainted. All of the photos were off the walls, rugs rolled into the middle of the room. The air was stale and humid. Her clothes still hung in the closet. Her laundry was still in the basket. Why was her laundry still in the basket? A to-do list for the week sat on the table next to an uncapped pen.

My sister, Dad, and I moved around each other like careful strangers, all too afraid someone else would break if we spoke too honestly about what we'd lost. Coping was strange. I’d never felt more alone. Without her moods to navigate, I didn’t know what to do with my own.

Going through her things that week, I kept finding half-started tasks. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, dog-eared at page 179. A folder from her real estate studies—she'd just passed the exam a few weeks before she died, wanting to get back to work. I don't know what she wanted before she had my sister and me. She never talked about it. I never asked. But I wonder if part of her restlessness, the need to never order the same thing twice, never sit at the same table, was that she'd stopped asking herself those character questions: who she was, what she wanted, what she needed.

The rabbi at her funeral—the “Paul McCartney of rabbis,” as the funeral director called him—stood at the podium and said things like, “Her smile will light up the sun for the rest of time” and “Her purpose on this planet was to be a mother to her two daughters.” Mom would have walked out. She'd have told him, “Really?” given his lack of imagination and smug little face.

Or more likely she’d have told him to go fuck himself.

Three days after the funeral, I sat cross-legged in front of her closet, staring at her clothes still hanging as if she might walk in and choose an outfit. I couldn’t think straight. I'd forget why I'd entered rooms, which hole in my shirt was for my head.

The first time I walked past Zabar's after she died, my shoulders hunched forward with that old tension. Then I caught myself feeling grateful I'd never have to awkwardly wait for her to make up her mind at the fish counter ever again.

I was devastated she was gone. I was also free.

On my phone, I made a pros and cons list of Mom dying.

Con: I miss her. She's my mom.

Pro: I won't have to sacrifice my own happiness to make sure she's okay. Won't have to manage her moods while suppressing my own.

I stared at the screen. The list stayed. As did the guilt.

For days, I couldn't leave the apartment. I'd get to the door and freeze, like I needed her to tell me it was okay to go. Except she was dead, so the permission never came. I'd stand at the front door, then turn around and sit back down on the couch. Then I’d unzip the North Face down puffer I’d pulled on, forgetting entirely that it was early June.

I used to watch people on the street and invent their whole lives. I used to enter Broadway ticket lotteries. Now I didn't care.

I'd walk past the Shubert Theatre and not even look up at the marquee.

I'd sit near the Boathouse behind big sunglasses, watching other mother-daughter pairs walk in together, judging their outfits.

I used to know how to move through this city. I loved everything about it—how it never fell quiet, not once, how there was always someone awake, always a light burning somewhere. Now people smiled at me, and I stared back, with nothing to say.

For three months I couldn't sleep. I'd open my laptop at four a.m., searching through Zillow listings I couldn't afford, million-dollar homes perched in Laurel Canyon. In my dreams, I was already driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in a red 1960s Mercedes convertible, silk headscarf whipping in the wind, already living in a cliché version of what I wanted it to be. I binged Actors on Actors until I could no longer force my eyes open. Pulled up scripts from Girls and Catch Me If You Can and read along as I watched, studying where the camera would cut. I pictured myself on a talk show: “Well, I think the best part about acting is the humanity of it. Whether you like them or not, you can’t play them without empathy, right?” I'd replay it in my mind until it felt natural. I didn't know if I could make any of that come true, but I knew I could get to California, like “Goodbye to All That” in reverse.

But mostly, I was building a way out of this apartment, where her laundry still sat unwashed in the basket.

After those three months of planning, I finally called two of my best childhood friends who were living in West Hollywood to tell them I was serious about moving. As it turned out, their third roommate might be leaving. What had been careful, wishful research became urgent logistics. Leases, moving dates, plane tickets, all set within a week. My sister would stay in New York. She had her own apartment. Dad would move to Mahwah, New Jersey, and eventually Boynton Beach, Florida. At least in LA, I could stop pretending I knew how to be around them.

Los Angeles was no longer a fantasy. It was my way out.

The plane touched down four days before the August 2017 eclipse. In the Uber, I stared at a photo taped above the radio: a little girl in a bumblebee costume. The driver, Damien, caught me looking.

“She just booked her first commercial,” he said.

I congratulated him. He asked if I was an actress. When I said yes, he kept talking, but I barely listened, clocking everything through the window: billboards stacked three-high advertising lawyers and YouTube shows and movies opening soon. The car smelled like coconut sunscreen from someone else's beach day. Sand on the floor. I cracked the window. The heat hit my face. It was dry.

Nothing like New York. Exactly what I needed.

It was quiet in LA. The type of quiet that wasn’t drowned out by white noise, just quiet. A car door three houses down. Someone's sprinkler system clicking on. Someone talking on the phone outside my window. In New York, noise layered on top of itself until you stopped hearing it. Here, I'd wake up to birds and think the world had slowed down. I'd walk past a stretch of restaurants, then turn a corner into a residential block and hear leaves brushing against each other. Just that. It felt easy to learn how to move through this city.

The floors in our apartment were concrete, always cold to the touch. The dryer and washer broke constantly. The lobby reeked of eucalyptus and lysol. We lived near a power plant, construction noise filling the apartment at seven a.m. most mornings. But all I saw was the Hollywood sign and clear blue skies when I lifted my blinds.

I found a babysitting job in Santa Monica, an hour each way on the 10 in a leased Toyota I barely qualified for. I loved calling it the 10, feeling like a local. The car became my new sanctuary. I'd blast Broadway showtunes, singing at the top of my lungs in a way I never could in a shared New York apartment with thin walls. Sometimes I'd pull over after work and park under a tree on a suburban street, listening to an audiobook. In New York, being still meant being vulnerable. Here, I could just sit.

Some days after nannying, I'd drive down the PCH toward Malibu just to see the ocean. I'd park and watch the surfers. The same guy kept falling off his board. I watched him get back on twelve times. I smiled when he finally rode one the whole way in.

One Tuesday morning, my friend texted: “Want to go to El Matador today?” In New York, no one I knew just hung out on a Tuesday. Everyone was working on a set schedule. Here, people made their own. I texted back: “Yes.” For the first time in months, I could just say yes. When I jumped into the ocean, the cold shocked my entire body. This was what I'd stared at on Google Maps at four in the morning. Salt dried on my skin as we drove back, sun dropping low over the pier, Bee Gees blasting in the background.

During my first month on the West Coast, I walked into Margie Haber Studio and claimed a folding chair in the corner. Eleven other hopefuls filled the circle—some fidgeting and shy like me, others carrying themselves like they were already famous. When our teacher asked us to introduce ourselves, I listened as each person rattled off their credentials: signed with Paradigm, repped by UTA, just booked a co-star on Law and Order: SVU, just finished a first draft of a script they'd been working on for years and ready to shop it around to producers now. My eyes jumped from person to person. They said these things casually, like it was just part of who they were. Someone mentioned they had to leave class early to get to set in Manhattan Beach. The new Avatar movie. He said it the way you'd say you were grabbing lunch with a friend.

The woman diagonal from me I'd watched growing up on America's Next Top Model. Her hair was bleach blonde, more damaged in person than I remembered from the screen. Or maybe it was just that the last time I'd really looked at her, I was in middle school screaming at my friend's birthday party when she won her season. It was surreal to meet her. In a class, no less. I never became friends with her. She intimidated me, so we only spoke peripherally. But I watched her audition tape like I was twelve again, wanting to see if she was actually skilled or if it was just the editing.

My jaw unclenched. Something loosened in my chest I didn't know had been tight.

When it was my turn, I heard myself say, “I just moved here from New York, and I'm ready to just go for it!”

Just go for it? I almost believed that person.

After class, I drove down Sunset with the windows open, the warm air and sun hitting my face. The air smelled like jasmine. LA felt like a city where everyone was working on the next version of themselves, and for the first time, that didn't feel delusional. It felt expected.

We were given a scene from the film Short Term 12. A scene where a worker at a group home learns that one of the kids has been sent back to her abusive father. Twenty minutes to prepare outside, then we'd be called in one by one for a mock audition.

When my name was called, I sat in the metal folding chair in front of a small camera, twisting the ring on my finger. My first attempt as a supervisor at a group home for at-risk teenagers was careful, controlled—a performance that stayed safely on the surface.

“Stop,” my teacher said. “You're playing it like someone else told you this story. Find a moment when someone was supposed to protect you but couldn't…”

I pressed my thumb into my palm, between my middle and ring fingers. The fidgeting started before I realized it was there.

“…When they were right there but not really there at all. Now let us feel it.”

I closed my eyes and let myself feel something real, even if it wasn't the character's pain. When I opened them, the camera was just a camera, not a judgment.

“Action.”

“I am on the floor every day with those kids. And last night, that girl sat next to me, and she cried, and she tried to tell me—” my voice broke “—the only way that she knew how.”

When I finished, the room was quiet.

“Breathe,” my teacher said. “That's it.” She hugged me.

The room felt different after that. I was met with warm smiles, head nods, moments of validation that I was doing something right. I was in awe of those that moved me too, that were putting themselves out there, that didn't hold themselves back.

I loved self-tape auditions. I could build entire worlds for characters with three lines. Ava, the apocalypse survivor, got twelve pages of backstory: dead brother, baby pink bedroom, Santal 33 perfume from Le Labo. Her breakfast order. Her relationship with her mother. Ava didn't even have a mother in the script—I just gave her one anyway. Every character got a complicated mother. I could do infinite takes until I disappeared into someone else. Walking into rooms for live auditions was different. Three minutes to show hours of work.

My manager introduced me to an agent who told me I had “a good look, very girl-next-door,” before asking if I'd considered a nose job. “Before you get big,” she said, pulling up before and after photos of other actors on her iPad. She thought I was going to get big. At least, that's what I heard.

That night I found every before and after photo the internet had to offer. I pulled up my headshot and put my thumb over my nose. I'd never thought about it before. Now I wondered if it would keep me from getting work.

A year later, I'd had three months of callbacks for an HBO show. I was at Gelson's when the call came.

“They're going in another direction.”

I stared at the paper-wrapped salmon fillet in my hand. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Someone's cart squeaked behind me. Everything went quiet.

Three months of callbacks. In one session, the director stopped me mid-scene. “Shake it out,” she said, gesturing at my whole body. I thought I'd been hiding my tension so well. It wasn't until I opened my mouth I felt the sore from my clenched jaw. She made me physically shake, arms and legs and head, like my limbs were jello. I appreciated it. I was also bothered by it. The fact that she could see exactly what I was working so hard to conceal.

The director had asked my name again as I walked out. A minute earlier, she'd called the performance “transporting.” I could transport someone, and they still could go in “another direction.”

Behind me, the line had grown. The man at the counter waited. The woman behind me sighed and I saw her check her watch in the corner of my eye.

 My face went hot. I was seven years old again, shoulders climbing toward my ears while strangers huffed behind us at Zabar's. Mom changing her mind. “No, actually the lox. Maybe some mussels.” People shifting their weight.

I placed the fish on the glass. The man behind the counter looked at me, waiting.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm sorry. I don't—”

I sat in my car, hands on my steering wheel. The air smelled like gasoline. A family unloaded their groceries into the trunk of their Volkswagen. The young boy, kicking the back of his older sister's legs so they'd get wobbly. The older sister, screaming.

I drove home the long way, past the stretch of quiet residential micro-worlds I used to find so charming, the ones where the leaves brushed against each other and everything went still. But now the stillness felt different. Not peaceful. Empty. In New York, the city kept moving whether you did or not. Here, when I stopped, everything felt like it was stopping with me.

The auditions continued, but something had shifted. I wasn't disappearing into characters anymore. I was watching myself fail to disappear.

By 2020, I'd reached out about adapting a memoir I'd read about a woman and her volatile mother. When I learned it had just been optioned, I sat on the couch staring at my phone. My friend asked why I was so upset about not being able to tell someone else's story. “You have your own,” she said.

But writing about someone else's volatile mother meant not having to admit that I'd been partially relieved when mine died. That I'd made a pros and cons list. That I'd stolen my dad's sleeping pills at her shiva. That I was still bothered and angry at a dead woman. That I didn't know how to go on without her. That for once, I would have to figure out what the hell I was thinking and feeling. At least with someone else's story, I could be sympathetic. Objective. Not complicit.

Of course I had my own story. But that memoir felt like something I could shape. Beginning, middle, end. A narrative I understood how to tell. Mine was still happening.

Maybe I just didn't want to look at mine.

I started writing the night someone else's memoir couldn’t be mine.

I got up at three a.m. and opened my laptop. I sat cross-legged on my bed in the hunter green sweatshirt I'd worn all night, the only light coming from the screen. I never wore outside clothes to bed, but I didn't care enough to change. It poured out. Not carefully, not constructed like those character backstories. Just out.

At first, the essays came out raw. I kept coming back to the funeral. The rabbi's eulogy. How generic it was, how it could have been for anyone:

“The greatest mother and the luckiest daughters,’ he’d said. ‘Diane really was one of a kind. She was not a PC. She was a Mac. User-friendly! She loved to dress her daughters up as dolls. Remember, Taylor and Tara? No pants, just dresses. Oh! And that smile, let’s not forget about that warm smile.”

I had absolutely no idea who this ‘user-friendly’ person was or who these lucky, dress-wearing daughters were that he was preaching to. His ability to conjure up make-believe scenarios of my mom’s personality and reputation was top-notch, albeit slightly delusional. Who the hell was this stranger talking about? Did he even care to know the truth? Did anyone?

When I stopped writing, it was 5:27 a.m.

My first piece was published in January 2022. I wrote about missing her and wondering if my life was better without her. About being devastated and relieved. That was as far as I could go.

Other essays came out carefully, constructed. Something I published from 2023: “Life is easier when you believe in the unprovable. Though I was always a proud skeptic—dodging spiritual methods and solely accepting tangible evidence to back up any claim—my cynicism only deepened in the throes of grief.”

 When I read it back months later, I didn't recognize myself in the writing. I'd never say “in the throes of grief” out loud. Even then, I was still performing grief the way I thought it should sound.

By 2024, I'd been writing about her and myself for three years. I thought I'd figured out how to do it: treat it like building a character. Backstory, emotional beats, arc. Keep the distance.

I'd finished a draft I wanted to publish. I was with three friends from childhood when they asked me to read an excerpt out loud. I'd never done that before. Read my essays out loud. We sat in the dimly lit room, and I started reading the way I always read my work: like I was on the outside looking in.

Halfway down the first page, the words went blurry. My throat closed. I couldn't get through it.

I tried to explain through tears, “Sometimes I forget this is me. I spend so many hours breaking my life down into scenes, I think my mind has to dissociate from it. It feels like a character study more than my actual story.”

I stopped. Heard what I'd just said.

I looked at them. Three people who knew me, who knew her, who'd been there. “But sitting here with you, reading this to you, everything's different.”

I had to skip over parts because I couldn't get through them. I'd been so good at turning her into someone I could control on the page. So good at turning myself into someone I could control. Until I spoke the words out loud to people who remembered she was real. That I was real.

 

Five years out, at a friend's bachelorette in Mexico, the bride toasted her mom. Her mom sat two seats from me, crying the good kind of crying. Two minutes before I'd been dancing. I excused myself to the bathroom and counted tiles on the floor the way I used to count to fifteen outside Mom's bedroom door.

I kept writing. Some mornings I'd type for hours and delete everything. Other mornings the truth came out in twenty minutes, and even though I was terrified to keep it, I did.

Acting wasn't working. Writing was. I was grateful I didn't hate it in spite of that. One night I wrote about the pros and cons list, the one I'd made on my phone the week she died. I wrote it without flinching.

Most Fridays, we'd host dinner parties in our Los Angeles apartment. I'd fold the navy blue napkins into triangles the way Mom used to, press the creases flat with my palm. I'd catch myself doing it and have to stop for a second. Then I'd keep going. A few tealight candles along the table, testing them all to see if the wick would catch, replacing the ones that didn't. Pinot Noir in everyone's glass. Shrimp, orzo, and beets leaving stains on everything I'd just pressed flat.

Some friends were old ones from home. Most were friends I'd made here after Covid, when the world started opening back up. The kind who'd climb onto tables with me, who'd stay until three a.m. to talk about their childhoods and their therapists.

Someone mentioned their Saturn return. Twenty-seven to thirty, when everything shifts. I was twenty-nine. So.

Y2K playlists turned to Broadway showtunes. Someone groaned. I was already on the table, wooden spoon in hand, belting lyrics I'd memorized in middle school. My friends were laughing. Then others climbed up. Their feet landed heavy next to mine. We were all singing. I could feel the table shift under our weight.

Someone would suggest the bar on the East Side, a random house in the hills. Sometimes we'd go. Most times we didn't.

“I booked a Hulu pilot!” my friend Riley announced in class. I auditioned for it, made it to round two. My throat tightened. I texted congratulations after. One exclamation point instead of three.

At dinner with friends that week, people talked about their managers, their agents, music producers, press, award shows, the business of it all. I grew frustrated hearing only about the industry, never about the work itself. Or maybe that's just what I chose to hear. Maybe they talked about both and I only heard what I wanted to. Easier to tell myself I was different, that I cared about the art more than they did. Easier than admitting their dreams were happening and mine weren't.

But then alone at night I'd open my journal: I miss her. I don't miss her. I'm not really sure about anything. Some nights I'd wake up already crying, my face wet before I remembered why. Other months, nothing.

In New York, I could tell you the exact smell of the D'Agostino on 90th Street in summer. In LA, I drove the same route to auditions for three years and couldn't tell you a single street name. It wasn't that LA didn't feel real. Some of it did. The friends, the dinners, being grounded in nature, the nights I stood on tables singing. I was in a curious position in Los Angeles. It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. I never truly believed I'd stay.

But as I kept writing through 2023 and into 2024, I started asking questions I'd been avoiding. What if she hadn't died? Would I have ever left?

Thirty felt like the first time my mom really didn't know me anymore. She was thirty-four when she had me. I began to worry that, if I didn't write it down now, I'd lose her to time. The way she held her coffee cup. Her voice was always louder than it needed to be. Sharp, like her defenses were permanently up.

One afternoon, I came home to dishes piled in the sink. The shrimp smell from the night before. Tealights burned down to nothing, wax hardened on the counters.

“The dishes in the sink are disgusting,” I said when my roommate walked in. “I see bugs. Clean it up.”

I heard my voice, sharp, cold.

I drove to Fryman Canyon the way I always did when I couldn't sit still. I left my phone in the car, no headphones, just the crunch of dirt under my feet and the hills stretching out in every direction.

If I'd booked that Netflix show, or anything else I was on the brink of getting, I'd be writing about how Mom's chaos made me a better actress. How I used her unpredictability as material. That version might be true, too.

I stopped at the first bench at the trailhead into the canyon. A couple passed me heading up, talking about their weekend. I'd taken a chance on LA because I was twenty-four and had nothing left to lose in New York. But I'd grown up watching things vanish—towers, people, even my mother could disappear while still standing in the room.

I knew exactly when it was over, not from one big moment, but from the accumulation of small ones. The way I'd started feeling bitter when friends booked jobs. How I introduced myself as a writer now, not an actress, how new people I met asked what I was working on, not what I'd booked. The email came in at nine a.m.: audition canceled, role already cast. I was in bed, alarm set for seven a.m. to run lines. I turned off the alarm and went back to sleep until noon. It was time to book my flight back to New York.

A week later, a friend texted, “There's going to be a solar eclipse over New York on April 8th.” I stared at my phone. The day I'd be flying back. Seven years after I'd left before the last eclipse in 2017.

I wanted to text back, Of course there is. Like the universe was mocking me. A neat little ribbon to tie around seven years.

I packed up my bedroom. On the top shelf was a bin with scripts and annotated plays, the headshot with the hunter green shirt on top. I studied that face from seven years ago. I flipped through my character notebooks. Pages of invented backstories for one-scene roles. Nine lines of dialogue, hours of work. I closed them and dropped them in the garbage bag.

Then I reached back in and pulled out two. I didn't want them to mean anything. I just wanted to keep them. I set them on top of my suitcase. Not in the garbage. Not in a box to store. Just with me.

The plane lifted off on April 8th. I pulled over after I landed, looked up through those flimsy eclipse glasses. It was cloudy. I barely saw it. Barely felt a thing.

The next day, I walked from downtown all the way to the Upper West Side. I thought it would feel like spring by now, but it was chilly and gray, hazy. Garbage bags lined the streets. Everyone went about their day.

At Magnolia's on Bleecker Street, I stopped. Looked in the window at the cramped line inside. A mother and daughter sat at a table by the glass, the daughter, maybe seven, with chocolate icing everywhere but her mouth. Neither of them looked up.

Someone else's flowers. Someone else's moment. But for the first time in a long time, I didn’t resent seeing their joy. I kept walking uptown.

A mom carried her daughter's neon pink L.L. Bean backpack, hand on her head, stroking her blonde hair, loose strands escaping from a lopsided ponytail. They laughed together. My shoulders dropped. I exhaled, then inhaled the familiar scent of city streets.

I rounded the corner. The brownstone wasn't mint-green anymore—just the same shade of brown as every other one on the block. Pink and yellow geraniums sat in the windowsill. A man came out the front door with a stroller, maneuvering it carefully down the steps. He didn’t look at me.

I stood there for a minute. Maybe longer.

I stared at the building, then turned toward the 96th Street station.