I read recently that transformation, when resisted, is not gentle. The end of 2025 was not gentle with me at all. I visited the graves of my grandparents and asked for guidance. The next day I discovered a large snake dead in our driveway. I recognized its appearance as a sign that I was going to change, whether I wanted to or not. Snakes have been a common theme in the year of the snake, as last year I encountered more than five or six. Change is something that I often embrace, as I desire to expand and grow, even if it is sometimes painful. We are also ending Neptune in Pisces. Neptune is my ruling planet, a place of illusion, confusion, murkiness. It’s been a 14 year long karmic cycle. I am hoping the karmic cycles are done with me. Many of the lessons have been brutal.

The future feels uncertain, as I don’t know what to expect when the lunar new year comes. I will be turning 45. The conditions of our current surroundings feel hotter, more combustible. I spend most of my days taking care of my parents, and when I can, I read. I recently started reading Rickey Laurentiis’ Boy with Thorn, and its been keeping me present. I am trying to prepare, spiritually and emotionally, for whatever is coming our way. Once February arrives, I fear things will accelerate quickly.

I had my tarot cards read a week ago, to gain some clarity and grounding. The reader told me I was elevating, but I needed to accept the changes necessary to cross into a new boundary.

How do we unmake and make what is needed? Genocide has not stopped. ICE continues to act with impunity. And even the threads of our existence are bound together, even when we resist. I am trying to move with the energy, to where the divine is taking me. Even if it is alone. There will be a lot of rubble, but I hope we can still find what we need to build again.

The end of the Gregorian year is approaching. Much has happened this past month. Recently I read a memoir by Loubna Mrie, a Syrian photojournalist. There is a moment when she is covering the protests against Bashar Al-Assad that she finds a sign that reads: ““How can I love you if I’m not free?//Can I give you my heart if it is not mine?” Political freedom, her friend says, is connected to all parts of life, not just love. The words came from Garcia Lorca, assassinated under Franco’s regime.

I am trying to recall when I started believing that liberation was bound up with love. Perhaps I always felt it, but I didn’t articulate it in a way I could understand until much later. Maybe my late 20s or very early 30s. God knows it took me awhile to practice it, to embody it. It took a special kind of love to make me believe it was even possible. And I have had to grieve that this year. But I know grief really never leaves us.

I stumbled after my break up and took a lover, and it ended the way those things tend to end, and I found myself processing two very different heartbreaks. My body has been a wreck and I have been pushing through anxiety, insomnia, and old trauma. There is not just the loss of my lovers, but of friendship, which for me, is equally important. My Venus is in Aquarius. I cannot have lovers that I cannot have conversations with, that I cannot be friends with. The older I get, the more I recognize how important that is to me. My ex who still calls herself a saint was never my friend, and I keep thinking that had we been friends, maybe it would not have ended as badly as it did, but it does no good to think about what might have been, only to understand what is. My friend keeps reminding me to stay in the material and not get distracted by the ethereal. It’s hard sometimes, when I move between timelines and realms. I can still see other universes where the things work out differently. There are things I desperately wish for, but I understand that what is for me, never misses me. I have to cling to that because if I do not, I will shatter.

I have been asking myself what will be required of me in the next year… what am I being prepared for? My work has always been the most important thing in my life. And I understand that parts of me becoming this person have been ugly and messy. And I return to the words from Lorca again. My heart has never been mine to give to anyone. It has long belonged to the divine, to my purpose, to an invisible force pulling me towards god knows what. I have known that since I was young. Someone described Susan Sontag as difficult and unyielding, and intense. I can also be unyielding and intense, and perhaps difficult to some.

One night, my ex lover and I were watching Set It Off, and when Cleo (Queen Latifah) sacrifices herself to save her friends, she started crying. I asked her why, and she said that because she recognized me in that moment. So maybe that is what I am being prepared for — a redemption for all the mistakes I have made. We are moving politically and socially towards some darker times. “These violet delights have violent ends,” said a character in Romeo and Juliet.

For now, I am listening to sad love songs. I can’t go back to the way things were, but I can only try to make things better going forward, to be ready to be ugly against empire. Because I still believe that love is one refusal against the ways empire and the state tries to condition us, socialize us, oppress us, kill us. It is an immaterial part of us that they cannot take away if we do not let them. And so despite my losses, I still love.

Concrete by Orion Sun

Last Monday, December 15th, I flew to Houston for a reading at a local bookstore. Outside of a chaotic 48 swing in LA where I read in a vampire den, this relatively new bookstore was my only other in person reading of 2025 (if we do not count one I did at my university for my book). It was also the 8th anniversary of my abuelita’s death. She died in 2017, after several long weeks in the hospital. My last visual memory of her was putting a pair of green Christmas socks that resembled elf shoes on her feet. She laughed and thought they were so funny.

2017 was a bad year. It was the end of my friendship/relationship with a longtime love. My abuelita died. I had a public breakdown at a bar. One night a fox went and sat on my doorstep — not a good sign. I was not stoic that year.

Welita, as she liked being called, passed at my aunt’s house, in comfort. I was having a cocktail in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel with a friend when my aunt called me. I always sit on the couch in the corner, away from the bar and the fake cowboys, but where the ghosts can still hear me. They heard me scream inside, collapse. I have never been the same since.

Chris Cornell also died in 2017. I must have listened to “Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart” hundreds of times. The day of my abuelita’s funeral, I went to work. I didn’t tell anyone, but I bought a bottle of bourbon and after work, I sat in my car, parked across from my house and I drank and cried inside the car. My brother called me and we cried together on the phone. I didn’t tell anyone for weeks. That month I barely remembered anything, except a Christmas party where I was a volunteer. It would be the last time I saw my ex. I’ve heard that once someone completes a role in your life, the universe makes sure y’all never see one another again. It must be true. I have never seen any of my exes again after our break up, even the one who moved into a house on my bike route to work. I would ride a mile out of my way to avoid the house and became a recluse that year. I stopped going to parties, even before the pandemic. Mostly I sat in my friend’s living room, disassociated and watching movies.

This past week I tried to be stoic. It is usually my default. I do not like to be bothered by my emotions — yet they eat my world up on the inside. My body remembers past Decembers. My abuelita’s death. Sick for days with bronchitis in the apartment in Elmhurst. Flying into Detroit for the final time last year. The Christmas a karmic lesson texted me how much she loved me and wanted me only to find out her boyfriend was with her and her family the whole time. The December I fell in love in a hookah bar on Airport Boulevard with a tall beautiful woman who loved doing puzzles and singing Selena in the car with me. I don’t where she ended up.

This December is hard. There is much uncertainty. In all aspects of my life. I am trying to conjure up the cocky rooster. I am trying to pull up the faith that keeps me grounded. Tonight is the winter solstice and I kept seeing TTs about some European ritual of writing 13 manifestations on paper. No need to emulate a European tradition. I have my own. Instead, I sip my green tea and try to breathe, listening to music and reading Rumi.

“Be Drunk in Love//Since Love is Everything that exists.”

No matter what has happened, I still intend to meet the new year with love. My welita would not want anything less of me.

in 2025, I spent a lot of time with friends whom I adore, and perhaps in many contexts the things we did sound romantic. But in 2026, I want more. Here are some things that sound nice (tend to work): read to me, long conversations, book recommendations, reading or writing together, eating fruit together, or anything snacky, watching movies or TV shows, send me songs, letters or hand-written notes, hearing “I’m thinking of you..” and sweet things (small gestures, mint leaves… and how could I forgot protesting?