Raja and I spent hours stringing together backpacking routes through Cerro Castillo National Reserve, Parque Patagonia, Jeinimeni National Reserve, and Tamango National Reserve. For our two weeks in these places, we decided to cross through the land on foot, with buses, ferries, and cars thrown in only to bridge the divides between trailheads.

In Utah, a canyon unfurls from a mountainside. Arching walls rise up from either side, glowing orange under the southwest sun…

In early July, I remember waking up on a sticky morning and seeing a headline that a 41 year old Broadway actor, Nick Cordero, just died of Covid. I paused as I sipped my coffee but kept scrolling…

Last night the sunset made the horizon glow like it was on fire. But it wasn’t. The next morning, the sky was blue and the air clean and the trees cloaked in leaves…

The waves keep hitting me. One after another they pound into me, lifting my feet off the sand and flooding my mouth with salt water…

Growing up on an island, the ocean was never far. I caught glimpses of it on the drive to school, it was a family tradition to haul home live lobster to boil and then devour on the rocky coast, and the smell of salt-doused wind and the sound of seagulls reminded me of home…

I keep looking back at my photos from Patagonia. The last days of carefree bliss in late February before the world turned upside down…

In late March, I fled my apartment in DC to my parents’ home in Gloucester, Mass. As I traveled north, I watched the life I had created in the city slowly disappear in the rear windshield.

All of these times, I learned that letting go is an exercise in deflating the ego and getting humble and real with yourself. Each time you let go, you are, in some ways, admitting defeat. You pursued a path, labored towards a goal, tried to follow the right advice, but in the end, it didn’t work out.

But by being apart, we’ve had to learn to really be there. We’ve had to learn how to show up for ourselves, for each other, and for our relationship. We’ve learned to be more open and more honest, more empathetic and more forgiving, more courageous and more resilient. We’ve learned that love doesn’t come handed to you on a silver platter tied up with a bow.

I had anticipated an easy day exploring gullies and hidden paths between buttes, but as I descended slabs that veered into steep drops, I imagined slipping and tumbling off. As I maneuvered the crux unroped with open air beneath my feet, my fear of heights made my calves quiver. I was in one of the most beautiful places I had ever been and yet I was too tense to feel excited. ⁣

Pico de Orizaba towers at 18,491 feet. A white island on the horizon visible for miles across Mexico, it’s the most prominent volcanic peak after Mount Kilimanjaro and the third highest mountain in North America. On the day we drove from Mexico City through the arid countryside, clouds circled its top and I couldn’t tell where the snow stopped and the clouds begun. Orizaba rose endlessly into the sky…

The sun was beginning to set as we roped up on the glacier. Our camp was somewhere far above, hidden in the clouds that rolled down the mountain, lapping at our feet…

Raja and I were the only ones stupid enough to sleep at 16,000 feet on Orizaba. The wiser climbers were tucked in at 14,000 feet at a hut below…

I remember a hot summer day when I was seven years old and my family piled into the Subaru to drive to the beach…

When Raja and I decided the bail the climb, it felt like a failure. In the simplest terms, it was: we turned around. Retreated down the rock instead of standing on Seneca’s summit…

Living in DC, I began to forget what winter felt like. Sure, it snows in the city, but snowbanks quickly turn gray with grit and sidewalks become slides of slush…