I didn’t come to Lisbon looking for love. I came tired. Tired in the quiet way that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. The kind of tired you carry in your chest, in your decisions, in the way you keep moving even when you don’t feel moved by anything anymore. I told myself this trip was just a birthday. Just a few days away. Just rest. But Lisbon doesn’t meet you at the surface. It waits. And then, slowly, it begins to soften the places in you that life has hardened. It

This trip didn’t go how I expected but maybe it went how it needed to. I thought I was coming here for connection, girlhood, laughter, shared memory. Instead, I ended up spending most of it with myself. And honestly… I think that was the real assignment. I learned how to choose me without guilt. How to move at my own pace, even if I’m the only one moving. How to communicate without yelling, without shrinking, without overexplaining. I realized I can say this isn’t working for

Dear My People,   The system is broken. I know this from lived experience, from study, from what the world already sees.   It failed my father. It failed my mother. It failed me, it failed you, it failed Black and Brown bodies everywhere.   They patch us with scraps, Band-Aids just enough to keep us moving— and then they act surprised that we are still in survival mode.   But survival is not living. “I’m alive” is not enough. Joy is our birthright. Abundance is holy. God is l

Dear Ma,   I wish you had shared more of your truth, more of your pain than your anger. I wish you had truly let me in— so, I could understand you as a girl, as a woman, as a human.   I’m sorry for the things I may have done that triggered you without knowing. I didn’t understand how deeply you suffered until you were gone.   I always knew your value. I saw you as omnipotent. Before you left, I told you; you were my Earth angel. I meant it.   There is something about a mother

Dear Atlanta, You were the first city I moved to outside of my hometown — and then you became my home. I’ve spent a decade with you. You...

London, you met me not with the gray chill I expected, but with heat — the kind that made me sweat through two outfits a day and crave...