I’m so not controversial. I barely ever drink. I don’t really do drugs (except for the same two meds every night, forever and ever, amen). I’ve taken Adderall but I never got high or thin. I don’t enjoy drama. I try never to yell. I don’t believe in deceiving people. I’m open about absolutely everything. I’m not ambitious. I’m not glamorous for the sake of other people’s good opinions. I’m bored by most people’s conspicuous consumption. I practically never get jealous. I’m not quite white enough to be passive aggressive and not quite ethnic enough to get away with being aggressive aggressive. I don’t go places just to be seen.

Sometimes I think I’ll make the most boring New Yorker. But it’s time. I’ve spent enough time being a glamorous Tucsonan.

I’m people who know people who know people–close enough to know things most others don’t know, but far enough away to marvel from a distance without getting my hands dirty (if they do get dirty, please let it be with Mark Ronson, please). I’m smart and quick and educated but not pedigreed. I’ve seen my share of things, at least enough to know what I’m missing and intuit the details. The things that have happened to me are close enough to absurdity that I usually carry around photographic evidence, just in case my truth is confused for bluster. I’m easily underestimated. It’s my favorite personal quality.

In my past life, I aimed at being respected and appreciated. I wore my “fuck you” pearls and carried my “you couldn’t afford this” purse. I confused status for happiness and validation for self worth. Validation…the only thing that mattered because it was the only thing I never received. At least not from the one person who relished in withholding it. So I drank poison and waited for him to die. For years.

And then…I don’t know why…I just stopped caring. I put the pearls in a box and the purse on a shelf…well, purses, there were many purses. I dyed my hair every color under the sun. I wore makeup when I wanted and clothes that made me happy. Five inch high jelly platforms. I started living for me, mostly because there wasn’t anyone else around. These were small, insidious acts of revolution. A civil war in my head for an identity. Good vs. evil. Me vs. him. Me vs. the me he’d told me I was. And I won. I won.

What were my prizes? A sense of wonder and need for freedom. I started to venture out. Tucson. Nogales. Rome. Oaxaca. Mazatlan. Rome again, but this time Bologna and Ferrara, too. L.A….twice. London and Paris, NYC. NYC. NYC. Where I witnessed things that weren’t in the tour guides or on anyone’s Pinterest boards. And when I shared them with Facebook friends, I found out that I’d tapped into a zeitgeist that I’m still not completely able to define. All I know is that people noticed. And they liked what they saw.

So I became this thing for people. A pristine, marble goddess on a pedestal to some, an inspiration to others and a reminder of days gone bye to a select few. All just by being the most human me I could be. I was a voyeur’s delight. Friends I’d known for years, who’d known me in all of my iterations, who never thought to invite me to coffee or check up on me, all suddenly began to say the same thing: “I follow you.” As if I had some intention of leading.

My life–a succession of events only pertinent to me–became something people wanted to know about in vivid detail. For every endeavor I wrote about on Facebook, I received two invitations to drinks. “Tell me everything,” they’d implore as soon as the waiter left the table. Sometimes I wondered if the “me” on Facebook was more sophisticated and exciting than the “me” in person. Fans who’d never met me before told me more than once that I was different than the person on the page. It wasn’t as though I’d exaggerated any detail. If anything, I was vague. And that vagueness gave readers the opportunity to fill in the details with the “me” they imagined. Or the “me” they needed me to be.

Drinks became lunches and two Michelin Star dinners in the Upper East Side or a night at The Standard in the East Village, New Year’s in L.A., winter in the Bahamas, spring in Oaxaca, the occasional yacht off La Jolla. Not because I had “fuck you” pearls, but because I had a “fuck you” attitude that gave me immediate credibility, and a way with a story to rival Eva Luna.

And then everyone began to ask, “When are you going to move to New York?”

So here we are…about to enter April 2019…and me in my countdown to move to NYC. Brooklyn to be exact. On the other end of this countdown is the unknown. I’m not new to the city and the city is not new to me. But this time it’s for realsies. I’m betting it all on black. There are lovers to be considered and jobs to be gotten. Friends to be enjoyed. Stuff I don’t even know exists that will have to be tackled or fallen in love with or respected and feared…like a NYC winter, for example.

As I’ve been forthcoming with friends about the move, they ask me, “For good?” Or, “Are you finally going to do it?”

Fuck yes, seguro que si, oui, bien sur. But I won’t be alone. I’m bringing you all with me. So let’s get this show on the road.