write me well

Author: Kathy King

  • Hash Browns

    One of my longest held beliefs is that nothing says I Have Today Day Off like going out for breakfast. Whether we’re talking breakfast burritos, pancakes, omelets, or hash browns. Country potatoes, biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs, or French toast. I truly think there is no way to thoroughly and joyfully announce to the world that the day ahead is yours and yours alone than hitting up a greasy breakfast joint. It is the taste of freedom.

    Today I had the day off, and so when I suddenly became absurdly hungry while wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the morning – like, unbearably hungry – I took it as a sign. It was coming on 10:30am and my body knew that I could not waste this opportunity of a Day Off by not treating myself to a diner-style plate of breakfast food. Nothing else would do, so off I went.

    Maybe it’s because I had no choice for a large part of my adulthood, but another long-held belief of mine is that going out to eat by yourself is an experience that everyone should enjoy from time to time. I lost count well over a decade ago how many meals I’ve gone out for on my own, and being alone at those meals is something I’ve never regretted or resented. But for some reason, today, I had this completely unbidden wish I wasn’t alone. After ordering my biscuits and gravy with a side of hash browns, drinking my coffee in my own little diner booth, I suddenly pictured my dad sat across from me, and imagined that this breakfast was a long-awaited catchup after not seeing each other for just over five years.

    This does happen from time to time, as I’m sure it does with anyone who has lost a loved one. I’ll just be bopping along and then I will be absolutely zapped with the sensation that my dad is nearby. The first time was while working at the Anthropologie in Spitalfields – to this day I have to remind myself that the vivid image I have of my dad seated on a bench outside the store, one arm stretched over its back, watching passer-by and waiting for me to finish work, is not real.

    I can think of at least three not-so-random reasons that this happened today. One, just over a week ago marked the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, and it was the first since he died that came and went without me even realizing. Two, this morning, like so many mornings, I happened to look at my phone at 11:11am and thought of him. And three, I have a distinct memory of going out to breakfast at IHOP with my dad sometime during 2012, seated in a booth very similar to the one I found myself in this morning. I remember writing a Tumblr post about it, because as I added salt to my hash browns that morning and caught up with my dad – who in 2012 was really having a tough time – I thought that no matter how difficult and shitty things had become, I wouldn’t trade him for any other dad.

    So, I spent my breakfast wondering at all the things I would say to my dad if we were, in fact, having breakfast together for the first time in five years for some unknown reason that was interesting and mysterious rather than sad. There would be SO much to tell him.

    Nope, I don’t live in London anymore. Moved back in 2021 in the midst of a pandemic that you were very lucky to miss experiencing first-hand. I left retail! Yes, I know you were always proud of me no matter what I did, but I like to think you’d be extra proud of me for finally achieving that goal. I’ve moved about five more times, moving is still the worst. And I got married! Yes, to that boy you hated when we were in high school, but I promise he has become a very responsible adult that has more in common with Grandpa King than you ever would have guessed was possible, and it makes me so happy that you knew him. I wish I could’ve been more supportive of you when you needed it, but man that’s easier to see in retrospect than it was in the moment. I love you and I miss you very much, but I’m also glad you didn’t have to endure the insanity that has been (and continues to be) the world since you left it in mid-2019. Thank you for buying a ridiculously fancy video camera in 1985 and recording so many random childhood moments, but also – would it have killed you to get out from behind the camera more often! It’s okay though, hearing your voice is still the best. (Even if what you’re saying is an exasperated “See, now that’s the problem!”)

    What a breakfast that would’ve been. Don’t get me wrong: my biscuits and gravy and (extra crispy) hashbrowns were delicious, and I devoured them in less than fifteen minutes. I still have the rest of the day off and the humidity has calmed down, so it is a glorious and breezy seventy-five degrees. Life could be a whole lot worse right now and my grief has mostly receded and turned into a nostalgia that is more warm than sad. But getting to share this morning with my dad? That would’ve been a pretty great way to spend a day that was mine and mine alone, and I think I’m just going to pretend I got to do it anyway. (You ordered the chicken fried steak – the “Big Chicken” version. Neither of us knew what it meant but it seemed like the right thing to do.)

  • So Much Blue

    Things I love: sunshine, tacos, the ocean, and great driving.

    Things we experienced on our four day vacation across the California coast: all of the above.

    This trip was originally planned so that we could visit Aaron’s family for Father’s Day, which we did and had a fantastic time doing. But after we booked the flights and reserved that Sunday for family, we decided that we were deserving of a bit of a treat vacation on either end of it. So one by one, we booked extra plans to really make it an escape: one night beachside in Cambria, two nights in Aptos within walking distance of the Cement Boat (or, at least, what’s left of it), and a bright red mustang to get us both of those places in between visiting friends and family in a very fun way.

    May was a pretty garbage weather month here in Washington, so we were very much in need of sunshine. California, ever faithful, delivered. Aside from an atrocious hour spent in airport security last Saturday morning, we had four near-perfect days of road-tripping, hangouts, and laughter. We ate tacos and burritos and chips and salsa, we played mini-golf on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, we watched surfers catching overhead waves off of West Cliff. We saw elephant seals and moo cows and horses, all living their best lives, and countless rolling golden hillsides up and down the coast. After our night in Cambria, which I had never visited before, I left with a much fuller appreciation of why Aaron is so eager to return there – if I had spent my last year of college getting to do a daily run along Moonstone Beach, I too would measure every other place I lived against that almost unreachable standard.

    What always strikes me about time spent in the sun is how blue it is. Sunshine, in my mind, is a bright and blazing yellow. When I try to illustrate it with words I reach for butter colors, bursts of citrusy lemon, maybe something akin to mustard if we’re talking sunshine in the fall. But in photographs, and in life, I really feel like sunshine turns out to be very blue. Sunshine is a cloudless azure sky, a rolling turqouise wave, cold clear splashes in a cobalt snowmelt river. And after the soggiest of Mays, we spent four days savoring an almost intoxicating amount of it, whether exploring Morro Bay at sunset, killing time and grabbing iced coffee in Morgan Hill, or driving up Highway 1 near Ragged Point with the windows down.

    We are making a concerted effort to be better at things like taking vacation because, in a truly American turn, it is not something we excel at prioritizing. But a mere four days spent on the road together, surrounded by so much blue, was a wonderful reminder that even simple escapes can go a long way.

  • De-gramming

    I have been on the internet since about age eight. My first distinct memories of it take place in Costa Mesa, California, logging onto America Online from my dad’s office computer and playing Scrambler in AOL chat rooms. The only thing people asked you for was your A/S/L (a little horrifying in retrospect, but 1997 was a different time – or, at least, it certainly felt like it) and all that mattered was how quickly you could reArRanGe a bUncH oF leTtErS. There wasn’t a lot of creativity involved beyond inventing my first screen name, but one thing was for sure: the more of the internet I experienced, the more I absolutely loved it.

    Designing my first Geocities website on the family PC and using it as an online portfolio for my would-be novels (so many would-be novels). Graduating to having my own PC, in my own bedroom, where I lived my best life on Neopets and built out websites for my Redwall-themed RPG guild and personalized my pet’s pages with pastel hex codes and a healthy dose of Comic Sans. When Myspace arrived on the scene, I dove right in, coding and curating my profile page down to the <p>’s, because why wouldn’t I? A shiny new place to express myself while forcing people to listen to the dulcet tones of Rivers Cuomo as they scrolled through my About Me section? My friends, the absolute dream.

    For the most part, in the intervening years from those eclectic little slices of the web right up through recent times, I still have mostly loved the internet. As someone with almost exclusively long-distance friendships, the internet was an integral part of my early adulthood – the whole humanity-changing access to an endless stream of information part notwithstanding. From Sacramento to Norwich, San Diego to Santa Ana, San Jose to London, the existence of the internet and the prevalence of its offspring social media made my twenties possible. 

    This was, it feels important to note, before social media was so obviously commodified, when the groundwork and data collection for that commodification was still being meticulously laid and covertly hoarded. I saw my various profiles as easier ways to stay in touch with the world. Rather than updating a website or a blog, I could just have a social media account. It meant less writing, but what started out as a con of these accounts quickly became a very clear perk: their convenience, which only ever increased as more app updates arrived, was unmatched. Social media took a multi-step process that often involved several creative decisions (posts are serious business) and more than one session of staring at a blank Word document for thirty-plus minutes and reduced it to, at its simplest, three clicks or taps, from posting to posted. 

    The result of that aesthetically-pleasing convenience? The last 12 years of my life as documented online on my Instagram, and up until about 2019, on my Facebook as well.  

    Now at this point, well into 2024, Instagram has been a highly profitable marketing tool for many years. I am not naive, and this is not new information. But it’s been either enjoyably so (I do love pretty things and do not mind them being advertised to me) or easily avoidable, so it’s never stopped me from using it.

    As I continued to scroll, there were obvious advertisements. Then there were slickly sponsored posts. And then there were so very many attempts to make Instagram into TikTok through reels and search page updates. Still, in-between all of that, there remained photos of my old friend’s sprouting spring garden, stories from another’s trip to Vietnam with her family, posts with another’s job announcement or their walk to work or their latest curbside find. They all came together to make Instagram worthwhile. The good always outweighed the bad.   

    Then, about two weeks ago, I tapped the search icon so I could look up a specific account…and something new happened. Where previously a harmless magnifying glass had sat, a blueish non-M now swooshed and swirled. When I typed in my search query, I suddenly found myself not in a sea of near-match account names (because I can never remember how to correctly spell usernames), but in conversation with a robot.

    Instagram had replaced basic search with Meta AI. That was my last straw. 

    I could handle the ads. I had managed my impulsive purchase habits and made my account private when I got tired (so tired) of blocking porn bots. I gave up on ever being able to afford the suggested content because the algorithm, smart as it was, never picked up on the fact that this gal cannot afford a $348 chartreuse dress (as much as she desperately would love to). The invasion of something that I have struggled to get behind since its inception, that has been nothing short of pervasive in every section of the web and its online watercoolers, was too much.  

    All I want from Instagram is to share my life and see my friends’ lives. Meta AI had no place in that purpose, no business in my search bar. Seeing it there, realizing how little choice I had in this social media app with which I was daily choosing to engage, made me sit back and really reassess my online presence for the first time since, well…quite possibly, since 1997.  

    I still haven’t fully decided how I’m going to portion off my use of Instagram. There is no alternative to replace such a widely used way to stay in touch with the wonderful humans I’ve met across my many jobs and even more many moves. Right now, it would feel like a real loss if I just shut it down and stopped participating.  

    But what I can change about Instagram is my own intentionality. After a lot of thinking about what that might look like, I arrived here, at the dusty old URL that I have on autopay and so continue to accidentally pay for and might as well use. Instagram will remain a place where I go to find others. But I am going to try and make my own Instagram simply a jumping off point for here, where I am investing in my own little space on the internet. I have downloaded all my photos from my Instagram account in case it disappears off the face of the planet tomorrow, and I’m going to try and be more intentional about what I upload. Ideally, most of it will land here instead.   

    The truth is, I am aware very few people end up on this website. I often joke that I don’t have a readership and that I’m just writing for myself. But what is also true, and I also say every time, is that I don’t really mind. I enjoy having a website for the same reasons I enjoyed having a five-colored room in high school, for the same reasons I enjoy getting tattoos, for the same reasons I enjoy decorating our home. It’s a form of self-expression that I really value and have valued for twenty-seven years. Sure, this is a bit more involved than typing my A/S/L into a chatroom and playing internet Boggle, and maybe it’s a bit weird that I’m sending this self-expression out into the void for pretty much any human to read. But I get to pick the bits I share, sharing those bits makes me happy, and honestly – who doesn’t just love a pretty thing? 

    How we connect with the internet and with social media is one of the many unforeseen challenges modern humans have been blessed with confronting, and frankly, it sucks. I am so over Facebook it hurts, but I can’t delete my account because I’ve been seduced by Facebook Marketplace. I just wrote an entire post about grappling with the trials and tribulations of Instagram, involving many thoughts and initiatives, none of which involve deleting that account either. Even my Tumblr, derelict since 2018, I hang on to – although that one is more like a very specific shrine to the years I spent alone in my twenties, and less a place I actively spend time.  

    The internet, for better or worse, is currently inextricable from this millennial. Time to at least try and make it for the better.  

  • Breathing Out

    If I ever do arrive at the game, I am late for it.  

    Not sports games. As a rule, I do not sport. It’s one of my favorite things to submit when “Did you see the game last night?” makes an appearance in a conversation: a short laugh, probably more akin to a bark or cackle than I would like, and that exact sentence. “Oh no, as a rule, I don’t sport.” 

    The game I’m referring to here is the intangible one. The conceptual and trend-based game of new restaurants, new smart technology, that sort of thing. And this game that I arrived at in January of god’s year 2024, I am so very embarrassed to say, is one that’s been around for quite some time: the library. 

    To those of you already well aware of this fact: how good is the library? It is SO good. THE BEST. It is such an undersold source of joy and adventure and solace, not to mention that librarians truly are superheroes. If you don’t have a library card, let this be your sign to get one. It’s my favorite thing on my keychain, and I’m not just saying that because it has a sasquatch silhouette on it (in case I forgot I’d moved to the PNW). 

    Since January, at a cost of $0.00, I have borrowed and read ten books. I reactivated my ancient Goodreads account so I could keep track, 80% to gloat to myself, and 20% because I once read a book in high school that I loved but cannot remember the name of, and still search for to this day, and live in constant fear of having this occur again.  

    I wanted to share the two books that I’ve read so far that I just could not put down, the only two that since rejoining Goodreads I have awarded five shiny stars. I set an earlier alarm so I could read them before work, I read them through my lunch every day, and I forewent nightly tv shows for them for days straight. They were The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane. 

    They are very different books that have nothing to do with each other, but what a beautiful thing to be reminded, that there are books and stories and people that can make you feel that way. That you want to squeeze extra minutes out of your day so you can devour more pages, that you are tempted to call out sick just to stay cocooned indoors with nothing but a book and tea and the rain outside. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book like that (well, at least, one I had not already read ten times before), and it’s brought me so much joy, joy that I’ve felt very lucky to begin experiencing these last few weeks.

    In early March, we went through truly the only non-negotiable downside of pet ownership: we had Chevy put down. She’d been in Stage IV kidney failure since May of last year, and while we were happy to do everything we could to keep her healthy and in our company for as long as possible, on Saturday, March 9th, one year to the day from when we arrived at our new home here in Washington, she had her last afternoon nap in the sun.  

    I know it’s not possible, because while Chevy was many things, she was not capable of reading a calendar (what cat would want that skill). But part of me still feels like she knew she was unwell, but she decided she could give us one year in our home, three-hundred and sixty-five days to make sure we were settled and would be okay, and then that was all she had. Then it was her time.

    It was a rough transition, going from a house filled with her too-loud yowls and perpetually under-foot tendencies, to one with just Aaron and me. A three-member family is a small thing; to cut it down to two is brutal, no matter how long you’ve seen it coming. To get through it, we prioritized the things we had put off in the past year while we focused on Chevy’s extra care: we spent whole days together outside of the house, starting with building a set of raised garden beds in our backyard.  

    We bought the lumber, dug out the foundations, filled in yard after yard of soil. We put in some starter plants and decided to wait to fill the third bed with seeds that are currently in the early stages of growth on our back patio. And we started to make plans. We made a long-awaited trip to visit Aaron’s best friend just outside of Austin. We started going on motorcycle rides and generally just spent more time doing things. Slowly, we found the beginnings of our new normal.  

    As a carer – and by the end I would say we definitely qualified as such for Chevy – it takes a lot of grace to fully process the twins of relief and sadness that come with the end of the life of your charge. But there is comfort in knowing that as cat lives go, once she found Aaron, Chevy’s could not have been better. She was loved from that first moment and returned that love in the fullest measure. And, now that she’s gone, in the worst moments, it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I have roughly 1,000 photos and videos of that silly little four-and-a-half-pound cat being her ridiculous, perfect-circle, half-racoon self that I can revisit as often as I need.  

    So yes, I’ll take some joy, late to the game or no. Because it’s not just from reading more books and travelling some. A lot of that joy is rooted deeply in a sense of stability that has felt a long time coming. The amount of transition and upheaval 2023 saw for us is in many ways impossible to measure, and I am very glad to put it behind us. 2024 will have more to come, sure, but it can’t compare to the twelve months that preceded it. (Universe, I would so love it if you did not read that as a challenge to be accepted.) We may not have Chevy with us, but we’ll get through whatever it may be. Throw in a promotion at my job, upcoming friend and family visits, and impending summer and gardening plans – and I’m just feeling content in a way I’ve been waiting to feel for a long time.  

    And hopefully, with that, I’ll be here more. 

  • Blue Sprinkles 

    Habits are funny things. Good or bad, I always find mine to be a security blanket of sorts – those I’ve maintained for the longest time bring me the warmest comfort, and even when they fall temporarily by the wayside, I tend to find my way back to them, the same way you can misplace your favorite blanket because you forgot you wore it as a coat into that one part of the house one time and left it there, only to rediscover it weeks later and once again become inseparable for the foreseeable. 

    On so many of my days off in London, I would take the tube to Leicester Square and walk down the road to this little sushi chain across the street from the theater that was always showing that Harry Potter play, the one where the logo looks like a child is sitting in a weird copper nest. I would buy the same sushi roll to go, which wasn’t really even sushi as it was mostly comprised of avocado and fried shrimp and those stupidly delicious crunchies, and make my way down the street towards Foyles, eating it as I walked. The amount of time it took to stroll from the sushi shop to the book shop was exactly how long it took me to finish the roll, complete with using the lid to dip each piece in a tiny pool of soy sauce before consumption (I had this all perfected).  

    Once at Foyle’s, I’d do a cursory wander through the medieval history section of the store for new arrivals before heading up two flights of stairs to the café and ordering a frosted coconut and lime bar and a pot of English breakfast tea. I would take that tray of food, walk over to the bar height seating that faced the store’s skylit central atrium, and get out my laptop and write. Long fiction, cover letters, plot outlines, blog posts, I would just write. Sometimes I would get a second pot of tea, sometimes not. But I would spend hours there, and this whole ritual, from the moment I set foot on the platform at Leicester Square Station to the moment I cleared my tray and began walking down the six floors of laminate stairs back out to Tottenham Court Road, continues to be one of my favorite and most enduring memories of my time in London.  

    I’m finally in a place where I feel like I can develop new habits, habits like that one, habits beyond the weekly grocery shop and completing a Monday through Friday work week. So while this morning was a lazy Saturday spent with Aaron and the cat, in the afternoon I set off into town to try and find that blanket that I’d accidentally worn as a coat into that one part of the house and left there.  

    The town of Sumner is about a fifteen-minute drive from where we live. Its Main Street has that classic Historic District feel, where for a good two hundred yards you can walk past brick Gold Rush buildings, pick through some vintage malls, and peruse a used bookstore before ending at a coffee shop next to the train tracks. It is one of the places I take anyone that comes to visit – my bestie and her partner last June, my sister in October, my mom a month into living here last April – because while Seattle, yes, is only half an hour north, the truth is that Aaron and I don’t really have much to do with it all that often. Sumner is tiny and unknown and quiet, but it still boasts views of Rainier and is honestly a more realistic interpretation of where we live. And now, in the most unintentional way because of an unintentional habit with all of our visitors, it reminds me of people that I love that don’t live nearby. 

    Laptop out and a Word document open, I was halfway through my latte and on the last bite of my apple pie donut from the coffee shop by the train tracks when I discovered a solitary blue sprinkle stuck in its frosting. And even though there was nothing blue or sprinkled about that coconut lime bar I would religiously consume at Foyles, there was something about that moment, and that sprinkle, and all of the memories in between, that just really brought me a feeling of joy. For habits near and far, long lost or yet to happen. Just a sudden, comforting feeling of warmth.  

    It’s been an afternoon well spent.