I had a dream recently about a man I met in my early 20s. I haven’t thought about him in years, but he appeared in my dream and asked me whether I was still alive through a multimedia projection in some museum foyer. Dreams are strange and I have many, many strange dreams. And I am grateful for all the strange dreams I’ve experienced, just as I am grateful to still be alive after such a horrific year.

Last week was the anniversary of the first lockdown. It’s now becoming so clear that we’ve all lived through one of the most bizarre and terrifying experiences to occur, outside of war, to the majority of us. A collective trauma. I don’t know how you’ve been effected by it, either directly via personal loss or struggle, or indirectly through some form of existential crisis, but I know that we are all changed by this.

I recently noted that 2020 feels as if most of the year didn’t exist. There is this dividing line between the pre-pandemic months and this now we are living in that seem to almost be a blip. As if I fell asleep into a waking nightmare that lasted a year of my life. Did this really happen, I ask? Did this year slip away from us or was it only a dream? But no, it was very real. All the suffering we’ve witnessed was very real indeed.

One thing I want to note is that I’ve been feeling incredibly nostalgic for my younger, carefree days. Even though those days were not always the happiest. We can’t go back in time to correct the mistakes we made though, we can only go forward. One of my favorite songs reminds me of this.

I don’t often write here but I have been working on some interesting things. Announcements to come in due time.

In other news, it is world poetry day and I posted this a few weeks ago on my Instagram. It reminds me of who I was in my 20s living in London and in New York. We’ve all been that woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall. And yes, joy is coming to us all.