Vespers from the places that made her stay awhile.

I turned forty at the Tiffany & Co. NYC Flagship Blue Box Café, almost two years ago now, and I’ve decided that’s when my thirties officially ended. Not at midnight. Not with the candles. At the café, in that specific shade of blue that costs extra everywhere else in the world but there, where it’s just the color. We have history, me and this blue. So much history.

Here’s what nobody tells you about turning forty: it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like a receipt. You look up from the table and realize every version of you that ever doubted herself is gone, and what’s left is a woman who books a jewelry café for her own birthday because she never needed anyone else to.

I walked in knowing exactly what I was doing. This was a self-inflicted shopping spree, premeditated, unapologetic, planned the way I plan everything now: with intention and a budget line. Over $5,000 on jewelry in one afternoon. I tried things on and looked at myself in the mirror and made my decisions like a woman signing legislation. Yes. No. Yes. Definitely yes. The sales associates earned their commission that day, and I earned mine.

And then, because the era demanded it, tea. Proper tea, in that little blue box of a café, surrounded by other people’s birthdays and engagements and anniversaries, all of them wondering who I was there with.

Nobody. I was there with me. That was the whole point.

The waiter took a photo of me in my black corset, crown, and cat-eye shades à la Audrey Hepburn for “the apps.” He was so sweet about it, so careful, angling the phone like a professional, making sure the jewelry was in frame and the blue was behind me. And I sat there, glowing, five thousand dollars heavier around the wrists and throat, smiling for a stranger’s camera, thinking:

If only you knew.

If only he knew which apps. If only he knew that this haul, every piece of it, was paid for by the devotion of men who will never know my real order at the café but know exactly what I like in the dark. If only he knew that the men funding this table send tributes just to see this version of me: unhurried, bejeweled, drinking tea that costs more than their lunch, entirely because I decided forty years ago was enough waiting around to be celebrated by anyone else’s schedule.

That photo exists somewhere in my camera roll still. Me, the blue, the tea, the haul. A woman at the beginning of her most expensive decade.

Some women get jewelry for their birthday.

I became the kind of woman jewelry is made for. 💋

My first time in Chicago, and I’ll say the thing I’m not supposed to say: I liked it better than New York. That moment, anyway. I know what I just did, and I’m not taking it back.

Because here’s what I noticed, walking those streets with my girls, camera in hand: the food in Chicago has something to prove. New York restaurants know they’re in New York, so half of them stopped trying. Chicago’s rents run a little lower, which means the chefs there aren’t paying for an address, they’re paying for an idea and the chance to create, and you taste the difference in every single plate. The food culture is competitive in the way a hungry city is competitive. Every meal felt like it was auditioning for me. New York has never auditioned for anyone in decades.

We did it properly, too. Caught a comedy show one night, the kind of room where the laughter is a physical thing, where you leave with your face actually aching. Did a historic walking tour the next morning, slightly hungover, wholly delighted, learning things about the city that no skyline ever tells you. And then the boat tour, which I’d recommend to anyone who thinks they know architecture. You don’t know a city until you’ve seen it from the water, the whole skyline turning slowly around you while someone explains why it looks the way it does. Chicago burned down once and rebuilt itself into one of the most beautiful cities in the country. There’s a lesson in that I didn’t expect to find on a boat. Especially since boats and fires don’t mix.

But the real trip, for me, was through the viewfinder.

I took so many photos. More than I’ve taken in years. And somewhere around the second day I remembered what I love about photography when I’m not thinking about it at all: the act of it. The deliberate saving of a moment. Framing the light on the river, the old stone against the new glass, my girls mid-laugh on a corner we’ll never stand on again. My Nikon and I fell back in love on that trip. Every shot was a small decision about what was worth keeping, and I loved every moment of choosing.

That’s the thing I came home knowing, the way you only know things after you’ve been away: I need more city exploration in my life. More weekends that belong to nobody’s schedule but mine. More streets I don’t know yet. More chances to pull out the camera and enjoy the act of saving the memory in digital, frame by frame, before the light changes.

And maybe, one day, an upgrade to a 4K. A woman’s allowed to have a wish list. 💋

Chicago, you were a surprise. I don’t say that often.

I’ll be back.

I got recertified to dive, and I want to be honest about why.

Not for the fish. The fish are a bonus, and I’ll get to them. I did it because I needed to relearn a lesson I’d been teaching subs for years without ever putting my own body through it: you don’t get to skip the basics just because you think you’re already someone. My old certification had lapsed, and I could have done a “refresher.” Instead I sat through the whole thing, the theory, the skills, the pool work, the mask-clearing drills like a brand-new diver, because that’s the standard I hold everyone to and it would be embarrassing to hold myself to less. Turns out, relearning to breathe underwater from scratch is a very humbling, very useful thing for a Goddess to do. I recommend it.

Then Tulum. Then the cenotes.

I don’t have words for the cenotes. I’m going to try anyway, because that’s the job. You descend through a hole in the jungle floor and the world goes completely, impossibly still. The water is so clear it looks like nothing, like air pretending to be a swimming pool. Light comes down in columns through the openings above, and the stalactites hang like the ceiling of a cathedral built by someone with no interest in being found. Cavern diving, the guides call it, meaning you’re always within sight of daylight, and I understand why. There’s a line you don’t cross in those places, a place where the light stops, and you feel the line even when nobody tells you where it is. I stayed on the good side of it. I’m a Goddess, not an idiot.

A few of the details I’ll keep forever:

The silence. No fish sounds, no waves, no wind, nothing. Just your own breath in and out through the regulator, slow and even, the most meditative sound on earth. I went into a rhythm down there that I chase in pilates and never quite catch.

The light. Swimming through a beam of sun in that water was the closest thing to flying I’ve ever done, and I rollerblade, so that’s saying something.

The fish. In the cenotes, small and curious, unbothered by me, which I respect. Out on the reef, everything: a turtle gliding past like it had somewhere important to be, schools of fish moving as one organism, a barracuda hanging in the distance giving me a look, and a ray that lifted off the sand and flew. I swam the reef and felt like a guest in a kingdom far older and better run than anything up here.

And the mermaid thing. Yes. I said it.

There’s a specific joy, and I mean a specific joy, in being a heavily tattooed woman moving through turquoise water with her hair floating around her like ink. My black ink against the reef light. A gothic mermaid, which is what I called myself and what I will call myself for the rest of my life. I did slow underwater turns for no reason other than the pleasure of it. I floated on my back and looked up at the surface like a creature considering whether to go home at all. Some boys pay for the privilege of my attention; the ocean got it for free, and the ocean earned it.

I came up from the last dive of the trip and sat on the boat with salt drying on my skin, and I thought about how I’d been teaching a lesson for years that I only learned down there: real power isn’t loud, it’s controlled. Buoyancy is control. Breathing is control. Knowing where the line is, and choosing, every second, to stay on the right side of it, is control.

The reef doesn’t care that I’m a Goddess either. But I think it liked me. 🖤

I had a long layover, three hours, the kind where you’ve already eaten and the wifi is decent and the wine is free, which is to say: I had time, and I had material.

So. Ratings. Hotness, out of 10, plus the imaginary job I assign to every stranger, because that’s what a Goddess does when she’s bored, she profiles her fellow lounge guests like the world’s most glamorous HR department.

Stranger #1, “The Deal.” 40s. Navy suit with no tie, which is a power move, and a watch that costs more than my first car. Reading something on paper, actual paper, which at this point is either arrogance or a flex, and honestly? Both work on me. They order a coffee and a whiskey, at 11am. 7.5/10, and I want to be clear that I’m being stingy because they know they’re handsome and I don’t reward confidence without content. Imaginary job: They buy failing family businesses, fix them, and keep the original staff. The suit is for the banks. The paper is a letter from a grandfather whose name is on a building.

Stranger #2, “The Silver Fox.” 50s. Gray at the temples, tan in December, gold ring, linen shirt, the specific calm of someone who has never once been late in their life because people wait for them. They’re on a call, low voice, and I only caught one sentence and it was about a boat. 8/10, deducted one point for the shirt and one for the tan, and I’ll be honest, I’d have a drink with them just to find out what the boat is. Imaginary job: Restaurateur, three restaurants, all in different countries, all excellent. The tan is real and the call is about the boat they’re naming after their spouse.

Stranger #3, “The Architect.” Late 30s. Black turtleneck, black glasses, black coffee, black everything, reading something with diagrams. They have the hands of someone who draws. They glanced up exactly once, took in the room, filed it, and returned to their page, which I respect enormously. 8/10, the turtleneck is doing a lot of the work and I’m at peace with that. Imaginary job: They design museums, and one of their buildings is famous, and they’ve never told a single person at a party that they designed it.

The Twink. Early 20s. Designer luggage, immaculate skin, wearing what I believe is technically a scarf but functions as a whole personality. Ordered a rosé, at noon, correct. Told the bartender a story that made the bartender laugh so hard he stopped pouring. 9/10, the highest score I gave all day, and it wasn’t close, because the audacity of that scarf and the actual charisma underneath it is a combination I deeply respect. Imaginary job: Fashion publicist, obviously, but specifically the one who makes celebrities behave, and he’s terrifying at it.

The Muscle Mommy. 30s. Athleisure that cost real money, the specific build of someone who deadlifts for joy, and a face like a knife. She ate a full protein-heavy meal while reading a book in a language I couldn’t identify and I loved her immediately. 9/10. Imaginary job: She’s a physiotherapist for a national team, and she could absolutely take anyone in this lounge apart, and they all know it.

The Other Goddess. 30s. Tattooed, like me, but in a completely different language, floral, bold, sleeved. Silk scarf, oversized sunglasses indoors, black coffee, sitting with perfect posture and the specific stillness of a woman who has decided how her morning is going. We made eye contact across the room, and there was an entire conversation in it, a mutual “yes, I see you, no, we don’t need to speak.” 10/10, no deductions, I’m not a hypocrite, and I’m rating her against myself and I came out even. Imaginary job: Heir to something. Nothing loud. She sits on the board of a family company she doesn’t run and doesn’t want to, and her real work is unknown to everyone in the room, including possibly the company.

Final rankings: the other Goddess and I tied for first, the twink and the muscle mommy tied for second, the three executives tied for a respectable third, and the entire lounge tied for last because the wine was mediocre and I am who I am.

Three hours well spent. Next layover, I’m rating the pilots. 💋

New Orleans doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It just takes you.

Five days. That was the plan. Five days of October in a city that smells like rain on old stone and caramelized sugar and something slightly wicked underneath. I booked it on a whim, the way I book everything, because the flights were right and the season was right and I wanted gumbo the way some people want revenge: urgently, and with full commitment.

Let me tell you what I learned in those five days.

Day one, I learned that beignets are a breakfast food, a lunch food, and a moral question. Café du Monde, powdered sugar everywhere, on my black dress, in my hair, on the stranger at the next table who kept looking at me and my ink and my coffee and clearly couldn’t decide what terrified them more. I left most of the sugar on my lips on purpose. I’m a nice Goddess, but I’m not a merciful one.

Day two, I learned that creole and cajun are two different religions and I refuse to pick a church. Lunch was creole: refined, roux-dark, a gumbo that tasted like someone’s grandmother fought someone else’s grandmother over the recipe and won. Dinner was cajun: bolder, louder, crawfish and spice and a table of strangers who became friends because in New Orleans your table is never just your table. I ate until I had to undo nothing, because I dress for the life I actually live, and the life I actually live has room for day two.

Day three, the po’ boy. Dressed, obviously. If you know, you know. I ate it standing up on a street corner because there was no way I was making it anywhere sit-down, and a passerby said “first time?” and I said “does it look like my first time?” and they laughed and said no, it looks like every time. Correct answer, stranger. Correct answer.

Day four, fine dining, because I’m still me. White tablecloth, the whole performance. The waiter recited specials like poetry and I ordered like a woman who has never once been intimidated by a wine list. The coursed dinner took three hours. Three hours of turtle soup and Gulf fish and a bread pudding that made me close my eyes and go quiet, and if you know anything about me, you know my silence is either a punishment or a compliment, and that bread pudding got the compliment.

Day five, I was sad, and then I ate breakfast, and then I was less sad. That’s New Orleans. Grief and joy share a plate here.

The fleur de lis is everywhere in that city, on gates and flags and fences, and somewhere around day three I stopped seeing it as a symbol and started seeing it as a reminder: some places have an identity the way some women have a presence. Undeniable. Unbothered. Older than everyone in the room and better dressed too. I believe this so much so I booked myself for travel tattoo number 4, a crowned-de-lis.

I left with my suitcase heavier, my standards for seasoning permanently ruined, and a list of restaurants I’ll be returning to, because La Davina Emilia does not do things once.

Five days was the plan.

The plan was adorable. 🖤

I did it again.

I woke up one morning in November, looked at the gray sky, looked at my calendar, and decided winter wasn’t invited this year. Two weeks later I was landing in Mexico with too many suitcases, a plan that didn’t exist, and that feeling in my chest I get when I’ve made a decision that’s going to change everything.

I told people I was “riding out the winter.” That’s what you say when you don’t want to admit you’re chasing something. Warmth, maybe. Freedom, probably. The version of myself that exists when nobody around me knows my name, when I’m just a heavily tattooed woman drinking café de olla in the morning sun, speaking enough Spanish to make the abuela at the market laugh.

The jungle doesn’t care that I’m a Goddess. The jungle has its own hierarchy, and I respect that about it. The iguanas on the roof at 6am. The sound of rain hitting palm leaves so loud you have to stop your conversation mid-sentence. The way the heat wraps around you like a lover who won’t let go. I adjusted fast. I always do.

And then, somewhere between the third month of mangoes and my fifth sunset from the same rooftop, I did the thing I do: I stayed.

I bought a condo.

I wasn’t planning on it. I swear I wasn’t. But I walked through it once, barefoot, because that’s how you should walk through a home you’re considering, and I stood at the window and watched the light hit the jungle and thought: yes. Here. This one.

There’s something about buying a home in a place where you arrived with no plan. It’s proof that you trust yourself. That you don’t need certainty to commit. That I am exactly the kind of woman who decides her life with her gut and her feet, and then makes the paperwork catch up.

My good boys helped, of course. Some of them knew what the condo fund was for. Some just sent tributes because I mentioned I was “making a decision” and they wanted to be part of it. They always do. There’s something delicious about a sub across the world helping buy tiles for a bathroom they’ll never see, just because they want a piece of my life to belong to them, and a piece of them to live in Mine.

Now the winter I skipped is happening somewhere far away, and I’m here, in my own place, with jungle light on my floors and my ink shining in the heat.

Some people save for retirement. I save for decisions.

This was a good one. 🖤

Let me tell you how decisions get made in my world.

A friend mentioned, in passing, that Bad Bunny was playing Paris on the 4th of July. I said “fun.” Then I opened my laptop. Then I had a ticket. The gap between impulse and action, in my life, is measured in minutes, and honestly it’s one of my finest qualities.

So there I was, a heavily tattooed Latina Goddess in Paris on the 4th of July, which is a very funny sentence if you think about it, singing every word in a crowd of thousands while fireworks that weren’t for us went off somewhere over a city that belonged to nobody that night. The show was everything. Sweat and bass and fifty thousand people screaming lyrics that mean more in Spanish than any translation could carry. I sang until my voice went rough. I danced like the version of myself that doesn’t check her phone. When he hit the song, that song, the one, I turned to the stranger next to me and we screamed it at each other like old friends, and that’s it, that’s the whole point of live music, that’s the whole point of anything.

And then came the whim.

I was supposed to fly home. I looked at my ticket, looked at the summer light in Paris, and did the math, and the math said: what’s the rush? So I stayed. Two weeks. No plan, no itinerary, just a woman, a city, and a sense of adventure that was absolutely not part of the original budget and absolutely worth it.

I took the fast train heading west to Strasbourg. Into Alsace. Into wine country, into villages that look like someone painted them and forgot to let them dry, half-timbered houses with geraniums in the windows and vineyards rolling up the hills like the land itself was showing off.

And I stayed at a hotel called Madame C, and I need a moment even writing this, because.

Because it’s the kind of place that understands something most places never learn: luxury isn’t gold faucets. Luxury is atmosphere. Old-world, provincial, candle-warm, the kind of beauty that makes you lower your voice when you walk in. I wandered the halls in my linen dress with my tattoos on full display, and I’m sure the walls have seen a hundred women, but I promise you they’ve never seen one like me.

I pretended I was Belle.

Hear me out. Beauty and the Beast, but make her heavily tattooed, financially independent, and arriving in a train faster than your car instead of a carriage. The provincial life, but on my terms: mornings with coffee and a book in the garden, afternoons through vineyard villages with my windows down, evenings with wine that tastes like the hillside it grew on and dinners that I refused to rush. I read in window seats. I walked the grounds at dusk. I dreamed the French provincial dream, the books and the garden and the slow golden life, except my version comes with a passport full of stamps and a throne somewhere in the digital world, and honestly? My version is better.

On the last night I sat outside with a glass of Alsace wine and thought about how the trip started with a concert and turned into this, and I realized that’s my whole life philosophy in one itinerary: show up for the moment you came for, then stay for the moment you didn’t plan.

Paris for the music. Alsace for the soul.

And a very good boy somewhere paying for the wine without ever knowing which vineyard. 💋

Passport stamps used to be a thing. You’d hand over your little blue book and get stamped, a permanent mark of where you’d been, and I loved it the way I love anything that leaves evidence. Now most countries just scan you and wave you through, no ink, no proof, no souvenir. Efficient. Soul-less. Very modern.

So I started stamping myself.

My right forearm is my passport now, a growing collection of travel tattoos, one per place that changed me, chosen with more care than any souvenir shop ever could. This is the real one. The ink on the outside of me that matches the woman on the inside.

Here’s the collection so far, in order of arrival:

Salem, Massachusetts. Halloween. My first travel stamp, fittingly, and I got it in October with the whole town dressed up and witchy and cold and perfect. It’s a small, dark, old-fashioned piece, and it means: I go where the season is. I’ll be honest, Salem on Halloween is a tourist trap and I loved every single second of it, and I love that about myself.

A scuba tank with a sugar skull. Mexico. For the recertification, the cenotes, the reef, all of it. The sugar skull is the Mexico part, obviously, and it’s the most me tattoo on my arm, a gothic mermaid’s badge. It means: I relearned how to breathe underwater and it changed how I breathe up here.

A slice of key lime pie. Key West. No, I’m serious. A slice of key lime pie. It was the best thing I ate that entire trip, on a porch, in the heat, with the sun going down, and I decided right then that the tattoo would be the pie, and I have never once regretted it. It means: the small perfect pleasures count as much as the big dramatic ones. It’s also my favorite one to watch people react to. The confusion is delicious.

A crowned fleur de lis. New Orleans. For the five days of creole and cajun, the beignets in my hair, the po’ boy on the street corner, the bread pudding that earned my silence. The crown, because New Orleans is royalty and I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. It means: some cities have presence the way some women do.

A snail shell. Paris. For the escargot. I love escargot, I order it every time, and yes, the tattoo is a snail shell, because a snail shell is elegant and French and quietly funny if you know. It’s the newest, and it means: I stayed two weeks on a whim and pretended to be Belle with a sleeve and a rental car. It also means I have excellent taste and I’m secure enough to get a snail tattoo about it.

And there’s more coming. There’s a list. There’s a whole itinerary in my head of places that have earned ink, and I won’t tell you all of them, because some of them I haven’t been to yet and I don’t spoil my own surprises.

Here’s the thing about this project: people get tattoos of the places they went. I get tattoos of the places that worked on me. Every piece is a decision, and every decision is a little like the way I run my whole world: I don’t collect experiences, I keep them. Same as I keep my good boys. Same as I keep the things worth remembering.

Some people leave their mark on the world.

I have the world leave its mark on me, and then I decide which ones get to stay forever.

My passport is running out of room. My arm is just getting started. 🖤

Here’s something I’ve never said out loud until now.

New York is my home. And lately, it’s also just a destination.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because I love this city with something close to violence. I love the bodega guys who’ve watched me change my hair six times. I love knowing which train car to stand in. I love the specific New York winter light that makes everyone’s face look like a film still. Home is home. I’m not renouncing anything.

But I travel monthly now, and something happened that I didn’t expect. Coming back started feeling like arriving. The way it feels when you land somewhere for a trip, that first taxi ride, the “oh, right, this place.” And I noticed it the way you’d notice a tooth that’s slightly loose. You don’t panic. You just keep touching it with your tongue and thinking about it.

And the timing is funny, because everyone I know started leaving.

My friends are in Lisbon now. Some in Mexico City. One in Thailand, one in Bali, a couple in Spain, people I used to see for dinner every month scattered across time zones like a constellation I have to squint at to find. I get it. I’ve watched them go and felt zero judgment, only a kind of recognition, the feeling of watching someone do something you’ve already started thinking about doing. They left first. I noticed. That’s all.

And then the jungle did the rest.

Because here’s what the Mexico condo taught me: I don’t actually know how much of my life is a choice and how much is just habit. I lived in New York because I always had. Because it’s the default for a woman like me, ambitious, creative, in the content world, “of course she’s in New York.” But I bought a home in another country on a whim and it fit like a ring I’d owned forever. So the question stopped being “why would I leave New York” and became the more honest one: “why would I stay in one place at all, when every month I go somewhere and feel more myself than I do walking the same three blocks?”

So. I think it’s time.

I’m not announcing a move with a countdown and boxes, because that’s not how I do things. I do things the way I bought the condo, quietly, completely, and all at once when nobody’s looking. What I’ll say is: I’m looking. At places. With intention now, instead of curiosity. A base that isn’t a habit. Somewhere the light is better and the cost of living isn’t a personality test. Somewhere I could put down the same roots I have here, but chosen this time, instead of inherited.

New York, you gave me everything and I’ll never pretend otherwise. But you raised a woman who now knows how to live anywhere, and that woman owes it to herself to prove it.

Consider this the soft announcement. The hard one will come when there’s a key in my hand in a city you don’t know yet. 💋

I've been avoiding writing this one, which is how I knew I had to.

Everyone assumes the art of being unforgettable is about rooms and cities and strangers. It is. But there's a version of it that's harder, and I've been circling it for months: what do you do when the place that made you is the one place you can't casually return to?

Puerto Rico is my homeland. I say that word carefully, because "homeland" isn't where you were born, necessarily. It's the place that built your bones. The jungle, green and loud and alive in a way that makes every other forest feel like a suggestion. The beaches, the real ones, the ones locals go to, where the water is warm as bathwater and the sunset does things the sky has no business doing. The cities, the music spilling out of cars and doorways, the food, the culture that survives everything and still somehow knows how to dance.

And I miss it. Deeply. Constantly.

Here's the part that aches: the last time I went home was for a funeral. And the time before that, a funeral. It's always for a funeral. That's the pattern for so many of us in the diaspora, we return to the island in our darkest hours, dressed in black, grieving, and we leave before we ever get to be joyful there. The island gets our sorrow and never our summers. I carry that. Some of you who are also from somewhere else know exactly what I mean, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't sit heavy.

And I don't know when I'll be back.

Because I have to say the other part plainly, without softening it: the United States has been, and continues to be, terrible to Puerto Rico. I won't write you an essay, but I won't pretend otherwise either. The debt, the storms, the neglect, the way the island's crises get treated as footnotes while its people keep giving and giving, to the military, to the culture, to this country, and receiving so little back. We are citizens on paper and afterthoughts in practice. Watching it from the outside, from my life of comfort and freedom of movement, is its own particular guilt, because I could be there and I'm not, and the people who can't leave are the ones carrying the weight.

So I root. That's what's left, some seasons. I root for the survival of this island, loudly, the way I root for everything I love. The island has survived colonization, hurricanes, earthquakes, extraction, and every attempt to erase it, and it's still here, still producing music the whole world dances to, still producing people with a warmth you can't manufacture, still producing, for the record, me.

You don't have to stand in a place to be unforgettable from it. I am Puerto Rican in every room I walk into, in every city on my itinerary. It's in how I take up space, how I feed people, how I grieve loudly and love loudly and never once shrink. I am the island's ambassador in places that have never heard of the towns my family comes from. Every stranger in every lounge and club and vineyard who meets me and thinks who is that woman is meeting Puerto Rico. The island travels with me. It's the ink underneath the ink.

The homeland you carry doesn't need a passport stamp. You are the stamp.

I'll be back, Puerto Rico. Next time, let it be for a party. 🖤

I am counting down the days.

I'm going to Mérida for Día de los Muertos. And I mean going: dressed up, all in, immersed, a full week of it. The food, the ofrendas, the marigolds, the music, the whole beautiful thing. And I want to tell you why this trip matters to me on a level that goes deeper than festivals usually go.

Puerto Rico is my homeland, and I love it completely. But I have to be honest about what colonization stole, because you can't love a place honestly without counting its losses. Puerto Ricans were colonized incredibly thoroughly, first by Spain, then by the United States, and between the two of them, we lost so much of our original culture. Our language, gone. So much of our mythology, thinned to fragments. The Taíno threads that survived did so in pieces, in words and food and faces and stubborn little customs nobody remembers the origin of anymore. I grew up loving a homeland that is itself a survivor, and beautiful, and incomplete, and I feel that incompleteness the way you feel a missing tooth.

So here's what I know about Día de los Muertos, and why I'm flying to Mexico instead of just admiring it from afar:

Puerto Rico's indigenous mythos was Taíno in nature, and the Taíno world was deeply connected to the wider web of indigenous belief systems across the Caribbean and the Americas, beliefs about ancestors, about the dead remaining near the living, about cycles rather than endings. And Día de los Muertos, at its root, is the great indigenous celebration of exactly that: the dead are not gone, they return, they sit with you, you feed them and dance for them and keep them alive by remembering. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Taíno, my ancestors, had their own version of this. Their own days of the dead. Their own marigolds, whatever form they took. And if they did, it was taken from us before anyone thought to write it down.

Which brings me to Mérida.

I can't recover what Puerto Rico lost. Nobody can, and I don't trust any government or institution to do it either. But here is what I can do, and what I'm doing: I can go stand inside a living version of what my ancestors might have had. I can put on the dress and the face and sit in a plaza full of cempasúchil and eat food that took days to prepare and watch an entire city love its dead out loud. I can borrow the ritual back. I can experience the thing my own culture was robbed of, and bring the feeling of it home with me, into whatever I build and whatever I pass on.

Yucatán, for the record, is the perfect place for this, because the Yucatec Maya have their own relationship with the Day of the Dead, Hanal Pixán, the food of the souls, and Mérida celebrates it with a depth and pride that I'm told fills the whole city. There's something that moves me enormously about that: another indigenous nation, colonized by the same empire, keeping its relationship with its dead alive anyway. Every ofrenda in Mérida is, to me, evidence of something: they couldn't actually erase us. They tried everywhere. They're still trying in some places. And the ancestors keep coming back anyway, once a year, invited, fed, adored.

So yes, I'm excited. Excited to dress up and be gorgeous and eat like a woman who means it. Excited for the pan de muerto and the cochinita pibil and the marquesitas and everything I haven't discovered yet. Excited to be a tattooed Goddess wandering a city lit entirely in orange and purple. But underneath the excitement is something quieter and bigger: I'm going to a celebration of remembrance, to remember the culture I was owed.

The unforgettable don't just get remembered. They do the remembering. They carry what was taken, they celebrate what survived, and they walk into other people's sacred places with respect and open hands and learn the rituals their ancestors would have danced.

Mérida, I'm coming. Set a place for me at the ofrenda.

I'll set one for my Taíno ancestors when I get home. 🖤

There's a party in New York City soon, and I'm going.

A Femdom masquerade. Masks, velvet, candlelight, and a room full of people who understand what power looks like when it's worn openly. It's been a little while since I've been to an event like this, and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy the anticipation phase, the part where the night hasn't happened yet and anything could.

Let's talk about what a Goddess wears to a masquerade.

My look is themed, of course, because if the party is a masquerade, then I intend to be the deity it was thrown for. Gold and ivory, the mask delicate but unmistakable, the kind of outfit that makes people quiet when I walk past. There's a version of this where I describe every detail, but where's the fun in that? Some things you'll have to imagine. Or ask me about, if you're brave.

And yes, there's a contest. First place. I'm telling you now so that when I win, you can say you watched it happen. A decade of knowing exactly who I am tends to show in how a woman enters a room.

The outfit is for me. The view is for me too.

Because this party is CFNM, clothed female, nude male, and I intend to enjoy every minute of it. Fully dressed, heels on, mask in place, surrounded by men who are wearing nothing but their vulnerability and whatever collar they've been permitted. There is something delicious about a room where every piece of fabric belongs to a woman. The contrast does something to a man's head, and I like watching it happen in real time.

I'll be watching the slaves. All of them. How they kneel, how they wait, how they look at their owners for permission before they so much as breathe. A well-trained submissive is a beautiful thing, and an evening of watching them is its own kind of indulgence.

And Yes, I'll Be Looking

Here's the part you actually care about.

I'll be meeting people in person. Real ones, standing in front of me, hoping to be noticed. And I do notice, it's my best skill. If you're attending, understand what you're looking at: a Goddess who keeps what she acquires, who vets properly, and who is always, always watching.

If you catch my eye across the room, you'll know. And if you're very lucky, you'll get the chance to make your case.

Wish me luck at the contest. Though between us, I don't believe I'll need it.