I love the way our CNC machines hum, like tantric meditation. Some afternoons, I take a lap around the factory floor in Torrance to clear my mind. Robotic arms glide up and down the floor, fetching and feeding raw metal into the machines where they will transform into precise components, destined for assembly inside rockets, satellites, drones, and submarines. Shelves are laden with fresh, shiny parts ready for quality inspection, and technicians and engineers move about with quiet focus. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it will take more than even our factories in California, Arizona, and now Alabama to recover the national manufacturing base eroded over forty years. But Hadrian is a good, eponymous start. Every industry has its arena, and for the first time in my career, I can actually hear mine.

My job now is to help Hadrian grow—structuring deals, building financial models, forecasting the headcount and capital expenditures required for the next factory. When I was in private equity, the numbers I modeled rarely materialized into anything I could witness firsthand. A portfolio company’s revenue grew, margins expanded, and I watched through monthly financial reports from a desk in another city. Here, the spreadsheet comes to life. The warehouse gets leased, the machines are ordered, and one by one they begin landing on the factory floor. Our recruiters gather technicians and engineers, and suddenly there are new desks and computers, more cars in the parking lot, and fresh faces in the snack room. All of Factory 3, for example, was once just numbers on a page, line items in a budget; now it’s a real factory cutting parts in Mesa, Arizona. That transformation—from Excel to concrete—is something PE rarely offered and never at this proximity. Someone has to translate what happens on this floor into a language that capital understands, and I’m good at it. But here, unlike anywhere I’ve worked before, the language translates back.

When I joined Hadrian, we were still relatively small, maybe a hundred and fifty people with crisp Series B bills in the coffers. I was close to everything, from helping different departments budget for the year ahead to preparing board decks and evaluating potential acquisitions. As the company has scaled, the scope of what we’re building has expanded in ways I couldn’t have imagined during my first walk-and-talk interview on the factory floor. There are more factories going up, more programs in the pipeline, more people contributing to something that has outgrown any one person’s fingerprints. My own role has evolved alongside it—less individual architecture, more execution—which is not as romantic but no less necessary. The mission gets bigger, the work changes shape. That’s momentum, and on most days, it feels exactly right. But on afternoons when I take my laps, I sometimes catch myself thinking about how I got here, and whether the path I took was the smartest one available.

Before Hadrian, I spent seven years in banking and private equity. Private equity has often sold itself as an arena—barbarians at the gate, leveraged buyouts, skin in the game. Former banking analysts arrive believing they’re training to become gladiators. What the industry doesn’t advertise is that the job, at its best, is often about buying good businesses and staying out of their way. The skin in the game is real, of course, with funds’ capital deployed and at risk, but the game is surprisingly hands-off. I left for reasons I’ve never been able to rank honestly. The work had stopped mattering to me, and the path to partner was narrowing. The alpha that made the industry legendary had been competed away, and I was bored in a way that scared me. Not the restless boredom of too little to do, but the deeper boredom of performing competence in a context I didn’t care about and performing it well enough that nobody thought to ask whether I should stop. I suspect the honest answer for why I left the arena is whichever reason I happen to need on a given day.

Even beyond finance, the ambitious always have the arena on their minds. In his famous 1910 speech at the Sorbonne, Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the man in the arena—dust, sweat, blood, striving valiantly, erring and coming up short again and again. Back then, Roosevelt was talking about civic courage—war, political ruin, and the risk of genuine destruction. I left a finance job for a startup. While these are not the same thing, I’ve felt the difference in my body between advising on an outcome and living inside one, and I don’t think that difference is nothing, even if calling it an arena flatters it. In a less famous and shorter speech during the final episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White understood something about arenas that Roosevelt didn’t. The arena itself, the feeling of being measured and meeting that measurement, can become the addiction. Walter, a high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin, proved this with his life. “I did it for me,” he explained to his wife, Skyler. “I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really alive.”

Walter’s tragedy is that he left his startup, Gray Matter, too early, watched his former partners become billionaires, and then spent twenty years poisoned by the knowledge that he’d stepped out of his own story. The PE lifer’s tragedy is the mirror. They make partner at forty-two, keep telling themselves the next fund will be different, and wake up at fifty-five with a beautiful house in Greenwich and the quiet suspicion that they optimized their career for a game that stopped being interesting twenty years ago. Walter left too early, the PE lifer stays too late (though plenty stay and thrive). I left somewhere in the middle. On most days, I believe I timed it right. But some of my former colleagues and friends remain in the industry, just waiting for the right future seat. When they eventually step into a CFO role or a VP title at a company they believe in, they might arrive with more authority and a larger stake than the one I began with at Hadrian. I still don’t know whether I left with insight, or with impatience wearing insight’s clothes.

I joined Hadrian because the mission is real. Domestic aerospace and defense manufacturing has genuinely weakened. The parts on our shelves go into systems that protect people. American hegemony is sustained, in part, by the ability to build things at home, quickly and efficiently. There are more factories to build, and the urgency is not manufactured. Our founder recognized this urgency before the rest of the American market caught up, and he built a company around it. While I didn’t originate this bet, I joined it, but I also joined because I did the math on what early equity could become. I’ve exercised some of my own options with my own cash, which is either conviction or the most expensive diary entry I’ve ever written. I wanted to matter, and I wanted to build something, but I also wanted to get rich doing it. Pretending any one of those is the whole story is its own kind of dishonesty—courage with a backup plan, conviction with an IRR target. Roosevelt, who was a former politician and President when he delivered his Sorbonne speech, would understand the arithmetic even if he wouldn’t have quoted it.

I take my laps around the factory floor because the hum recalibrates something in me that the spreadsheets cannot. It reminds me that the work is real, that the mission is physical, that somewhere downstream of my models and memos, a machine is cutting metal that will fly or dive or defend. The machines don’t care about my equity or my ego or my career narrative. They hum the same whether I’m there or not. But I chose this arena, I’ve helped build it, and I’ve bet on it with more than just my time. The doubts visit, as they do for anyone who has traded the predictable for the possible. But then the robot arms start loading, and the shelves fill with parts that didn’t exist that morning. For now, the machines haven’t stopped humming, and neither have I.

In Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the hitman Anton Chigurh cuts a bloody path along the Texas-Mexico border as the story’s Grim Reaper, in search of a satchel of cash vanished from a drug deal gone wrong. He is not the only hunter in the story. Another player named Carson Wells ventures down from Dallas to join the fray, commissioned to recover the money and kill Chigurh. Wells even locates Llewelyn Moss, the protagonist on the run with the satchel, and offers him protection in exchange for it. But Chigurh finds Wells first and traps him in his hotel room. At gunpoint, Wells pleads for his life, but Chigurh says, “You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.” Wells does not admit it and is dead shortly afterward.

As a reader, it’s easy to judge him for this—to sit with the novel and think, just admit it, what’s the cost of admitting it now? But Wells has a shotgun pointed at him; the cost is that he is still going to die. Most of us will never face a moment that clarifying, a situation so unambiguous that the only remaining question is whether we will meet it honestly. Most of us enjoy the considerable luxury of ambiguity, of no gun, of the daily option to look away from ourselves at no apparent cost. I have long considered myself an exception.

My family immigrated from India to America in 1996, leaving behind everything legible about their lives—language, proximity to family, the chaiwallahs who knew their orders by heart. My dad endured long daily train rides into downtown Philly and later Boston, while my mom tutored me every day so I could run academic circles around most kids through high school. Like many immigrants, we were in America on a specific bet: that if I got into a good college, then career, money, marriage, family—the classic elements of a successful life here—would fall like dominoes. I was the firstborn, which meant I was also, in some sense, the designated return on investment.

Until five years old, I was the only child, graffitiing our apartment walls and eliciting noise complaints from our downstairs neighbor. My mom spent afternoons filming me with our camcorder as I built Lego sets or danced around the room to my favorite Bollywood jams. Then my brother arrived, just before we moved to Boston, where he found friends on each floor of our new apartment building in Newton. When we left for San Antonio five years later, he somehow had a street full of neighborhood kids who seemed to have been awaiting him specifically, and he assumed his rightful role as ringleader.

As he spread his social butterfly wings again and rebelled against curfews, I eased my parents’ stress and retreated to my obedient seat in our rarely used dining room, where Algebra, Calculus, and SAT textbooks gathered over the years. While my brother was a regular troublemaker in school, teachers sang my praises during parent-teacher conferences. By fifth grade, I realized I was relatively smart, that math and writing came easy to me, and everyone would reward me so long as I remained studious and calm. I behaved as though I had no option to look away from the horizon my parents had pointed me toward, as though the gun, if not exactly aimed at me, was at least visible from where I stood. Their vision became my own truth: I studied hard so that I may get into a good college (preferably Harvard, ultimately UChicago), become a neuroscientist (a plan that died after one summer in a drosophila lab), and drive a Ferrari someday (still on the docket). My diligence and good behavior warmed me to friends and teachers alike, but it was also a way to ensure my parents still paid me close attention while my brother’s photos filled our refrigerator door (there are still only two snaps of me there today).

It was around this time that my parents enrolled us in Hindu Sunday school classes. My class read a comic book version of the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic about a war between cousins over a kingdom, where I first encountered the myth that would give my competitive strategy its cosmological cover. In the story, Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandava brothers, floated a few inches above the ground because he had never told a lie. I was fascinated by the logic—there was a cosmic accounting ledger, truthfulness had a return on investment, and the return was altitude. While I did not yet have the self-awareness, real or performed, to understand why this detail felt so personally relevant to a ten-year-old who had recently decided to become the responsible one, I appreciated that the floating was earned.

Later in the story, Yudhishthira eventually came down to join the rest of us mortals. During the war, while fighting a just battle, he allowed himself to be the vessel for a half-truth. In order to break the formidable enemy general Drona’s spirit, Yudhishthira claimed that Aswatthama had been killed. However, he technically meant the elephant named Aswatthama was dead, not the warrior who was Drona’s son, but the damage was done: Drona laid down his weapons and allowed himself to be killed. Yudhishthira therefore came down for something larger than his own purity, which is either noble or convenient, depending on your read of the situation. I have always preferred the noble. It is, after all, my preferred interpretation of my own reasons, on the occasions when I myself come down.

Where Yudhishthira gave me cosmological justification, Joan Didion provided literary rationalization. During junior year of college, I came across her essay “On Self-Respect” where she explains that self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind, and that people who have it are willing to accept risk, to know the odds, to invest something of themselves with full knowledge of the possible losses. Obviously, I immediately counted myself among those people. What I glossed over—with impressive consistency across many rereadings—was the paragraph about the other kind: the people curiously determined to live out others’ false notions of them, who dress up the compulsion to please as generosity and call it empathy. I glossed over it the way you skip past the side effects on a prescription label—not because you didn’t see them, but because you’ve already swallowed the pill. It would take another decade before I understood that the essay I had been citing as my favorite, the one I had been using as a mirror, had been reflecting the wrong half of itself back at me the whole time. Didion was describing people in thrall to the expectations of others—parents, friends, anyone whose approval had ever felt like oxygen. She was describing, with considerable precision, a firstborn son of immigrants who had learned to mistake the performance of virtue for the thing itself. While there would be more dignity, Chigurh might note, in admitting this earlier, I am admitting it now, even if it took a while.

The problem with self-awareness, as I have recently learned, is that it’s inert by itself. It’s not a corrective, nor a warning system, really, but more like an acute sport broadcaster’s color commentary on your own life: accurate, articulate, and ultimately as relevant as commentary ever is to the outcome of the game. Some time ago, I met a woman. At the time, she was dating someone else, the kind of fellow who forgot to Venmo friends for a weekend at a Hamptons house rented in his name and could walk away unscathed from a totaled Porsche. She had uncovered his infidelity earlier that year, so with the primitive justice of an eye for an eye, we had an affair. The fire started in New York and crossed the country to Los Angeles to the very night of the Palisades burning down, when we were clubbing together. Several friends knew, so I painted a self-portrait of the artist as a blameless bystander who happened to float between an unhappy couple doomed to separate anyway. When asked if we might end up together instead, I dismissed the notion, citing practical issues such as long distance and her desire to be in New York long-term, explaining how I’d continue to remain above the messy logistics of a relationship. I catalogued the objections fluently, the way you rehearse an argument you have already decided to lose.

We dated anyway, wining and dining from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach that summer. Distance kept our hearts fonder; on weekends together, we saw friends on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, met each other’s parents, and even looked at rings together one Sunday afternoon before lunch. When back in our usual cities, we raved about our recent memories and anticipated the new ones ahead, celebrating our energy and aliveness together. Meanwhile, I was aware that the aliveness I felt around her was not entirely clean, that some portion of it was the simple animal satisfaction of having been chosen over a man with deeper pockets and resources. My parents told me plainly she was not someone they could imagine in our family’s future, and I wondered if I was betraying their dreams for me. Sometimes I replayed the memory of a best friend wishing me “good luck with that one” after he met her at Ludlow House. These thoughts only echoed louder when she suddenly called things off after Labor Day, and we went our separate ways, me still in Los Angeles, her destined for Manhattan. And yet, things never fall apart quite so cleanly. What followed were months of blocking and unblocking, emotional infidelity, floating and returning to the ground, and virtually no change in either of our geographic situations. Self-awareness cannot outrun loneliness. It takes two people to make a mess, as Didion quotes Jordan Baker in her essay, and we made a good one.

Before Chigurh shot Wells, he asked, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” For months, I asked myself the same question about my self-awareness, a habit of mind cultivated since I was eleven years old in San Antonio, dressed in Yudhishthira’s altitude and Didion’s discipline, maintained across three decades and several time zones and one or two situations where the color commentary was particularly articulate and particularly useless. If seated across from Chigurh now, my honest answer would be that the rule was not really a rule, but a story. A good one—internally consistent, well-sourced, delivered with conviction at dinner parties in New York—but a story nonetheless, constructed by a fifth grader who needed something to be good at after his brother stole the room, and maintained ever since by a man who found that people liked him more for it, which was—if you go back and read your Didion carefully—the problem she was describing in the first place.

I think about Yudhishthira coming down from his floating and find I am less interested than I used to be in whether his reasons were noble. The more interesting question now is whether he knew, somewhere, that he was always going to descend eventually. That the floating was never really the point. That the point was the war for justice, protecting his brothers, wanting things badly enough to compromise the altitude. Hindus believe in reincarnation—that the soul returns, cycles through many lives, working off what it could not resolve the last time around. You keep coming back until the lesson takes. I find this cosmology strangely comforting, in the way that deadlines are comforting: there is always another chance, which is also to say there is always another excuse. I obviously have not broken the cycle in this life. I know this the way I know most things about myself: clearly, a little too late, and with excellent sentence structure. Somewhere, down the line, Chigurh is waiting for me. I imagine he is very patient. I imagine he has heard the Didion before.

There’s a line from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris that has remained with me longer than most things I’ve encountered at two in the morning, which is when I first heard it, watching the movie on my high school laptop instead of preparing for an AP exam the following morning: nostalgia is denial of the painful present. It’s delivered during a tour of Versailles by Paul, the insufferable pseudo-intellectual who spends the film lecturing everyone within earshot, and whom the protagonist’s vapid fiancée eventually falls for, which tells you everything about her. Paul is the last person you’d want to be right about anything. And yet the line rings true. The denial, when you’re actually inside it, doesn’t feel like weakness, but instead the most intelligent response available.

I am thirty-one, recently single, and have spent the early part of this year in a quietly irrational relationship with the past. Not dramatically, though. I haven’t shown up anywhere uninvited, mailed letters I should have trashed, or sent “you up?” texts. I’ve simply found myself, when confronted with the ordinary bleakness of dating apps and first dates that go nowhere, drifting back toward people and places I already know. The way I used to retreat to Basta Pasta in Chelsea on Sundays after nursing a long hangover, ready for the peace of a squid-ink tagliatelle and prosecco. There is a woman in Boston I’ve known since college. Let’s call her S. I haven’t bought the plane ticket yet, but I’ve mentally penciled in the trip, begun living as though it’s already happening, imagining our conversation over dinner and wine, noting that it will probably still be a little chilly there. She doesn’t know how thoroughly I’ve already arrived.

That’s how nostalgia works, like a tenured executive assistant: quietly, administratively, booking things on your behalf before you’ve consciously agreed to them.

Many years later, as I face the firing squad of my memories of relationships past and an unsatisfying potential present, I recall the first time I saw S walking down South Hyde Park Boulevard, wearing jeans and a blue jacket, just outside Broadview Hall. She knew me before I had anything to perform, before the job titles, the velvet jackets and Louboutins, the Porsche, the careful adult life I’ve assembled in Santa Monica with its routines and ocean views. She met me when I was an economics major in Old Navy henleys and Lacoste sneakers, minoring in creative writing, which is another way of saying a kid already negotiating between who he wanted to be and who he suspected he would have to become. She liked the writer. Everyone since has mostly met the other guy. You cannot manufacture that kind of witness with someone you met at thirty. History simply isn’t transferable.

But I’ve started to appreciate that this isn’t really a condition unique to people who are single and adrift. It’s just more visible in those of us less cushioned by the daily architecture of a shared life. Consider the happily married man or woman, for instance. The kind who wakes up and chooses the same person beside them in bed again without hesitation. Each still has someone filed away somewhere. For the man, there’s a woman from his mid-twenties. Nothing he’d act on now, just a memory that surfaces occasionally in the specific early morning quiet before his day starts requiring things of him. How that girl always asked him for a back massage as the sun crept in through her Brooklyn walk-up’s large window. He feels it briefly, the way you sense a change in pressure before rain, and then he gets up and makes coffee and proceeds. His wife now doesn’t ask for massages, but she has never forgotten the electricity she once enjoyed in a Greenwich McDonald’s the morning after a wedding, when her date rested his hands on her shoulders as they waited to order McCafé’s. Both husband and wife have figured out, through the ordinary accumulation of years, that you don’t have to resolve every feeling you’ve ever had. Some things you simply carry. The ghost doesn’t need to be exorcised, but just needs to be acknowledged and then left alone, like a restaurant you loved that closed and will never return.

What nostalgia understands, and what the present tense rarely bothers to mention, is that some things are irreplaceable not because they were the most intense but because of when they happened, before you calcified into whomever you are now, before the story of yourself became so well-rehearsed that you stopped noticing you were telling it. S, for instance, is partly preserved by the fact that nothing between us ever fully materialized, which means she exists in my memory in a state of permanent, flattering potential. I cannot say with certainty that the actual person, across a dining table in Boston, will be the same as the one I’ve been carrying around since 2014, like a photograph hidden inside a soldier’s helmet. She probably will be, more or less. But nostalgia is always editing, preserving what was luminous, shedding what was merely hard, unresolved, or ordinary, until the gap between the symbol and the person becomes wide enough to fall into without noticing.

In the movie, Gil Pender, the protagonist, keeps slipping back to 1920s Paris because the present feels thin and the past feels vivid and alive. What he eventually must reckon with is that everyone, in every era, finds their own present insufficient, that nostalgia isn’t a portal to something real but a mood that flatters whatever you point it at. The 1920s Parisians he falls in love with are themselves nostalgic for the Belle Époque. Homesick turtles, all the way down.

By the end of the film, Gil is walking in the Paris rain with someone new, someone present, having finally let the 1920s be the 1920s. It’s the right and healthy ending, one that makes narrative sense and would satisfy any reasonable therapist. I’ve seen the movie, I get the arc.

But to hell with it. Boston is the most beautiful in the Spring.

The last time American fashion felt this relaxed, Ferris Bueller was skipping school. Late-Cold War America carried a very particular kind of confidence. It was playful and expansive, and it had no interest in explaining itself. Power was settled enough to be casual. You could wear loafers with jeans, throw a sweater over your shoulders, and assume the future would still recognize you. This was the aesthetic byproduct of a country that knew exactly where it stood in a multipolar world and trusted itself to endure within it.

This year happens to mark the fortieth anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which feels oddly appropriate. Not because the film needs celebrating, but because the sensibility it captured moved easily, felt confident, and never seemed anxious about what came next. That posture has been largely absent from American culture for a while. And last Friday, it reappeared on a runway.

After years of relative quiet, Ralph Lauren staged its first Autumn / Winter runway show since 1995, which felt like a reminder. The clothes were familiar: tailored jackets, soft knits, denim, eveningwear with Western undertones, worn-in leather, and relaxed tailoring, but nothing read as nostalgic. Everything felt current in the way Ferris still does—like it already knew where it was going. Everyone looked good because they made sense. The show assumed a cultural shift.

This is an important detail. Nothing in Ralph’s show was trying to convince you it mattered. There was no irony buffer, no defensive styling, and no need to justify itself. In a moment where fashion (and culture more broadly) is saturated with self-awareness, understatement is confidence.

And that’s Ralph Lauren’s modus operandi. His brand doesn’t chase fashion so much as codify an American self-image. It assumes continuity, prioritizes comfort, and moves with ease. He sells stability: clothes that look like they’ve always been in your closet and will continue to exist long after whatever TikTok trend cycle we’re pretending matters has passed. He doesn’t dress for disruption because it’s all temporary.

That’s why the brand’s original cultural peak—from the late ’80s through the mid-2000s—lines up so cleanly with a period when American identity felt coherent. During that time, capital was ascendant, and our institutions felt durable. American fashion didn’t need validation from Paris or Milan; we exported our own grammar. Anna Wintour’s Vogue made taste a downstream function of American capital, not European tradition. Maybe Paris still made clothes, but New York decided what mattered. We dressed like America—and our place in it—would still be legible decades down the line. Until that confidence was broken.

After 2008, we suffered a long time in a world optimizing for frictionless globalism. Fashion flattened, logos disappeared, and irony replaced ease. Everything was technical, modular, deliberately (and annoyingly) anonymous. Identity was abstracted from place. Clothes no longer assumed continuity, but signaled distance from tradition, from hierarchy, from anything that felt fixed. The aesthetic mirrored a system promising openness and efficiency, but increasingly felt hollow.

Thankfully, friction eventually returned.

Later in the 2010s, we experienced trade wars, and at the start of the new decade, we entered a pandemic, where supply chains snapped and geopolitics hardened. The fantasy of a single, borderless system collapsed. As the world drifted back toward a multipolar reality, an appetite for legibility returned with it. People wanted clothes that looked like they belonged somewhere. Clothes that assumed the future instead of hedging against it.

This is what I mean by AmericaMaxxing.

AmericaMaxxing fashion isn’t patriotic cosplay (though there’s nothing wrong with the ol’ Stars ’n’ Stripes). It’s dressing as though American coherence still exists and matters. It’s a return to fit, restraint, and familiarity over novelty. Henleys. Jeans. Crewneck sweaters. Oxford shirts. Straight-leg pants. Topcoats. Bomber jackets. Loafers and boots. Nothing precious, nothing ironic. Nothing that needs to be defended in a paragraph.

This is dressed-down luxury, but it’s also more than that (read: not quiet). It’s luxury disguised as normalcy. It signals stability without showing off. It doesn’t scream wealth, but implies order. In a moment where everything feels fragmented and provisional, that implication carries good weight.

Ralph understands this intuitively. His brand offers an American identity that looks open but remains coded. Anyone can wear the uniform, but belonging requires fluency. You must understand the grammar: ease, proportion, and restraint. The point isn’t to stand out, but to move comfortably within something that already exists and always will.

That’s why the brand works right now. Ralph is promising persistence, a version of America that looks calm because it assumes America will still be here. In a multipolar world, where power is diffuse and certainty is scarce, that kind of quiet self-belief becomes aspirational again.

So, when American fashion feels relaxed, it isn’t because the world has become simple, but rather because simplicity is being chosen as a posture. In a world that increasingly resembles the late Cold War in its tensions and rivalries, confidence shows up as ease.

Last Friday’s runway reminded us how to stand. Loafers with jeans. A sweater over the shoulders. No anxiety, no explanation.

That’s AmericaMaxxing, baby.
And Ferris would’ve understood the assignment.

I woke up in my childhood home last Sunday to the news that Brigitte Bardot had passed away. Her death arrived quietly, after a life that had already settled into memory. Most people had remembered her for decades without needing her alive to do it. Myths have the strange power of outliving their sources and eventually detaching from them entirely. In the 1950s and ‘60s, the world decided what Bardot meant almost immediately: beauty as rebellion, sensuality as freedom, and youth as destiny. Her image traveled faster than her voice ever could, and Bardot inherited a narrative shaped by the expectations and limits of her time. She lived inside it, stepped away from it, and eventually made her peace with it. That was simply how the machinery worked then.

What matters is not whether Bardot suffered or thrived, but how completely she was flattened into an idea. She became secondary to the world’s projection of her. Memory preserved the outline and discarded the context. Nostalgia operates similarly, like a butcher keeping only the cuts that sell and disposing of the rest. Over time, Bardot became less a woman than a shorthand for desire itself.

In contrast, Claudia Schiffer arrived decades later in a similar silhouette. Early in her career, she was considered a “Baby Bardot,” another blonde European face onto which culture could graft its longings. While they shared a resemblance, their conditions were different. Schiffer entered a world that had already seen what that kind of projection could cost.

Before being scouted as a model, Schiffer expected to become a lawyer like her father, a detail that matters less for what she chose than for what she could have chosen instead. She benefitted from timing, infrastructure, and precedent in an industry that had learned, however imperfectly, that icons needed exits. Her career stretched across decades without spectacle, sustained more by continuity than rupture. Where Bardot was written into a role, Schiffer seemed able to negotiate hers.

The difference between them is not moral, but structural. Bardot lived a life shaped by an image the world chose for her, while Schiffer inherited that image with enough hindsight to live alongside it. History did not repeat itself, instead offering an example.

Home is where those differences stop being theoretical. The holidays collapse past, present, and future into a single conversation, forcing you to answer whether you can recognize the difference between a narrative you’ve inherited and one you’re actively choosing. The question beneath all nostalgia—whether you’re living inside someone else’s story or writing your own—becomes unavoidable when you’re surrounded by people who remember every draft. That was the frame I carried with me when I returned home for Christmas, without fully realizing it, into a house where the people who know me best have always been able to tell the difference.

Being home compresses time. You are who you were, who you are, and who you might become, all under the same roof where you once did your homework and dreamed of becoming a writer. The future stops being theoretical when you are seated across from people who have already watched you make and survive your mistakes.

On Christmas Eve, an old relationship resurfaced with a text. It arrived briefly and unexpectedly, carrying the particular intimacy that only shared history can revive, even when one person has not fully left the present. We reminisced. We caught up. We spoke in shorthand, the kind where old dynamics reassert themselves as if no time had passed. Nostalgia rarely announces itself as a problem, arriving instead disguised as familiarity.

I told myself the reconnection was harmless, that time and distance had done their work. That I had acquired maturity quietly, without needing to test it. I mistook familiarity for alignment and memory for evidence. It felt adult to engage, reasonable even. Only later did I understand how much of that confidence came from the version I wanted to believe and not the one actually in front of me.

My parents knew we were speaking again, but they did not stage anything dramatic. During a Trail Blazers game on TV, we had a conversation that unfolded slowly and seriously, the way meaningful ones usually do. They asked questions I had avoided. Not about how it felt, but about how our rekindled relationship might work. What I could expect. What consequences those expectations carried.

They pointed out that she was reaching back toward me while still dating someone else, and that overlap is rarely an exception and usually a rehearsal. Patterns do not stop simply because someone is sincere, especially when they have had time to repeat. That was enough information to make a decision, a recognition of what I could and could not build around.

They were not interested in the romance of the situation, focusing instead on trajectory, weighing probabilities to outcomes that only become visible when you stop treating instability as circumstantial and start recognizing it as directional.

What finally clarified things for me was realizing that her life was not constrained by a story written by the world. She was choosing it, repeatedly, with more agency than she seemed willing to acknowledge. I did not want to build a future inside those choices, one I would have to defend later.

I did not argue, negotiate, or ask for more time to think. I chose not to continue contact. The feeling afterward was not relief, but stillness, the absence of momentum. Growth can often feel subtractive, like choosing not to keep a door cracked open simply to prove you can handle the draft.

Brigitte Bardot lived a life shaped by an image the world chose for her and adapted to it within the limits of her time. Claudia Schiffer stepped into a similar mythology with the benefit of foresight and options and built something that endured. Neither path is a warning. Both are instructions, offered decades apart.

I realized that this is what my parents were giving me: a chance to edit the story before it hardened. To choose coherence over intensity. To understand that allure and sustainability are not opposites, but they are not synonymous either.

Being home for the holidays is often framed as regression, a return to old roles, habits, and arguments. But sometimes it functions as a checkpoint where narratives can slow down enough to be examined. It is only when things stop moving that you can see the current you’ve been swimming in. Nostalgia will always be persuasive, speaking fluently in images, memory, and longing. Home teaches a different language, one that values continuity over chemistry, and lives that can be lived rather than admired.

I left home with fewer illusions than I arrived with. That felt like a good Christmas gift.

Last month, Esther’s Wine Shop & Oyster Bar closed, and I lost my usual Sunday afternoon spot in downtown Santa Monica. I liked stopping by with a Márquez novel or, on more ambitious days, the first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Heavy reading paired well with my heavy order. Esther’s had happy hour prices all Sunday, so I’d get both the meat and cheese boards, open a bottle of Riesling, and snack and sip my way through a chapter or two while the afternoon slipped by.

When you’re thirty-one, you take local institutions like Esther’s for granted. Some people have churches and temples; I had cafes and restaurants. During the week, I’d walk past the windows, wave to my favorite servers, and scan the day’s patrons like I might recognize someone. On Sundays, I’d wake up sore and hungover from dancing at the Lincoln the night before and decide that sunlight, literature, and the hair of the dog were my cure.

In Santa Monica, routines like that can make time seem frozen. After 1 P.M., it’s usually sunny, breezy, sixty-five degrees. Leaves don’t fall, and seasons don’t announce themselves. You only realize the year is ending when it’s time to book flights home for Thanksgiving.

Admittedly, cracks had been emerging in this illusion for some time. First, Cassia shut down, which was the Southeast Asian spot next door. On the Promenade, storefronts vanished every month, and Nordstrom leaving the mall felt like a retail obituary. The rooftop at the old Shangri-La hotel changed hands so many times I started calling the building cursed. While most of these closings didn’t interrupt my life, losing Esther’s in November felt like a tiny heartbreak. Outside of Sundays, I never really stopped by for dinner or drinks, preferring my usual haunts at Bodega Wine Bar or Wally’s, but it was nice to know Esther’s was always there, like a 1 A.M. text option buried in your contacts.

The timing didn’t help. Only weeks earlier, in late October, Basta Pasta in New York had closed after nearly thirty-five years. If Esther’s was an institution, then Basta Pasta was a basilica. It opened on December 7, 1990, under the ownership of Toshi Suzuki, whose sense of humor justified a Japanese restaurateur opening shop on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. When I was born, Toshi had already been tossing pasta in Parmesan wheels for four years, and by the time I first walked in, a small army of actors, novelists, musicians, and socialites had already passed through the dining room. In the decades between, Basta Pasta survived recessions, the financial crisis, and the pandemic, holding its ground on 17th and 6th as entire blocks turned over into Pilates studios and upscale retail. It was older than me, and unlike me, it never once pretended it might stay forever.

I discovered Basta Pasta backwards. Most people went there before ending up at Bar B, its sister wine bar on 15th and 7th. I found Bar B first in 2017 with my old roommate, shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter because it was standing-only. Any night at Bar B, you’d hear someone explaining that Basta Pasta “was the original spot,” pointing out the tall Japanese man in the corner as Toshi and insisting you go there next time. That’s what great restaurants do: turn customers into unpaid evangelists. Regulars drifted into Bar B after dinner at Basta, and on some weekend nights, they went right back for jam sessions with Toshi, the staff, and his musician friends. When Bar B was too crowded or closed on Sundays, I went to Basta instead, where I could usually count on a familiar face at the bar.

I brought people there. Friends. Their friends. Second dates (all my first dates were at Bar B). My parents when they were in town. But I also liked going alone. I’d order a lychee martini and the tagliatelle nero they eventually took off the menu but still prepared for me. Sometimes I admired whatever new art Toshi was showcasing; other times, I people-watched or brooded about the week ahead, trying to drown my Sunday scaries with martinis. In five years in New York, Basta Pasta saw me through two job changes, various romantic misadventures, a relationship, and then the only heartbreak that ever really stuck. So, when I heard Toshi was closing doors, I made a point to go one final time. While I missed the farewell party on Halloween weekend, I went the week before and saw him toss the Parmesan wheel one last time. That was enough.

I don’t live in New York anymore, and neither does Basta Pasta. Esther’s is gone, too (and so is Pono Burger, for those still counting in Santa Monica). People move, menus change, and restaurants close. Some places last thirty-five years, and others don’t make it five. The point isn’t to remain nostalgic for the past, or to pretend permanence was ever promised. The point is to keep showing up somewhere. To find another barstool, another corner table or booth, and another owner with a crazy vision and a wine list. To honor the next spot by giving it what the last one had: your time, your appetite, and your presence. And if you’re lucky, a few people to bring with you. That’s the job of a patron: to sit down again.

If I had a Raya profile, it would say I’m looking for Lady Brett Ashley. Not because I want to relive The Sun Also Rises, chasing ghosts through Europe, but because she’s the last kind of romantic I still believe in. And I haven’t found her in Los Angeles.

The irony is obvious. Dating apps exist to erase geography. You can match with someone across town in seconds or even set your radius to “worldwide.” But that doesn’t mean you’ll collide. Connection still needs friction: proximity, timing, accident—all the natural glitches that software tries to debug.

Back in New York, I used to run into women like Lady Brett Ashley. You could see her twice in one week, usually at Raoul’s or Joyface afterwards, often late, but always bringing fresh gossip for the doorman or maître d’. She worked too much, slept too little, and had a grand plan of becoming a painter that she was half-following, half-fleeing. Sharp girl. Restless soul. A dancer. Good fashion, great fun. For whom the bell tolled when she left the party. You lingered with her on empty streets, half past three, because you wanted to see what happened next. It wasn’t love. It was contact: life brushing up against you, fast, fleeting, and electric.

Los Angeles is different. The same energy exists here, just diffused. Everyone’s still trying to make it: writers, actors, musicians, founders. But distance dilutes tension. Exchanged phone numbers and Instagram follows are sound and fury signifying nothing when freeways divide you. You hear about their ambition, but you can’t just bump into it. It hums behind hedges, hills, canyon turns, studio gates, and soundstages. LA may also run on imagination, belief, and delusions of grandeur, but it hides them better. Spontaneity and chance often fall victim to the city’s eternal traffic and geographic segregation, and most streets feel too creepy for lingering, anyway.

I now live in Santa Monica, where tech salespeople outnumber creatives nearly five to one, but I get to enjoy the sweet ocean air and quiet. I can play beach volleyball or go hiking at a moment’s notice. I’m a regular at Wally’s, where I order a spicy variant of the Last Word known to their bartenders as “the Usual.” Some weekends, I head up the PCH past Malibu to Point Mugu, where the mountains break into the sea and my phone loses service. Occasionally, I spot dolphins or sea lions while I meditate above the crashing waves. It’s all peaceful in a way that New York never was. But if you’re not careful, peace can blur into stillness, and you mistake calm for contentment.

I left New York because I was crashing out and needed a break. Too many afternoon investment committees for payments companies we would never buy, too many nights on Seventh Avenue ricocheting between Bar B, La Noxe, and Peter McManus, and too many mornings that began with Advil and regret. I had ended one relationship, but then a Lady Brett Ashley broke my heart shortly thereafter. In my final drinks, dinners, parties, and exit interviews, I explained I was leaving for a similar job at a bigger firm better suited to my career interests, and I was—but the truth was simpler. I needed a graceful exit, which LA offered: a great job in a Tier 1 city, with fewer distractions and a chance at embracing stability.

Three and a half years later, I have built a good life, maybe even a better one. I procrastinated leaving private equity, but I finally found work that feels closer to purpose. I suffered a disc herniation, but I adapted into a consistent exercise regime with more tangible results. My fiction reading has severely declined, but my X consumption in the past year has more than doubled my stock portfolio (for now). I have made great new friends, I see my parents more often, and on most days, I catch the sunset by the beach. Yet now I wonder if the relative chaos I cured was also what made me feel alive. After all, you can’t burn out without being on fire first.

In these three and a half years, I’ve still never fallen for anyone here. The women I’ve pined for live elsewhere, usually New York. It might be nostalgia, laziness, or the illusion that I left something unfinished. But the thought echoes nearly every day: she’s there.

While Lady Brett Ashley is a fictional character, she is not a lie. Hemingway built her out of the parts of people who live too much and settle too little. She’s who we imagine when we want to believe that freedom and connection can coexist, even when we know they can’t. What I ultimately seek isn’t literally her, but what she stood for: the gravity of someone in motion, the spark that renders stillness temporary.

LA certainly has people like that too, but I rarely find them. Geography boxes me in, but I also built the box myself. I choose to live by the ocean in Santa Monica because I could never enjoy such an experience in New York. On clear days, I can see the edge of the world from my kitchen window, and that still feels like a miracle. Lady Brett Ashley may be imbibing at a bar inWest Hollywood, reading in Los Feliz, or allegedly dancing in Silverlake, but I tell myself that this view is worth the distance, that trading potential spontaneity for the guaranteed Pacific is a better deal. Maybe it is. But perhaps this calm I have chosen is just another kind of confinement.

When people ask if I miss New York, I quip, “My wife is probably there.” What I mean is that I miss proximity: the possibility of running into someone who changes your day, or your life, or just your mood. I miss the city’s density, the way it forced you into other people’s stories before you had time to decide. My mother reminds me how much I used to complain about New York too, and she’s right, I did. But nostalgia edits the reel. It trims the hangovers and keeps the momentum. What I really miss isn’t how easy it was, which it wasn’t, but how possible it felt, how infinite each day could seem.

LA teaches you stillness. New York teaches you pursuit. Out here, everything stretches: the roads, the days, the time between one thing and the next. Back there, everything collides. People, plans, chance. And maybe that’s what I need again. Not chaos, but contact.

Whenever I return, the city feels the same: loud, impatient, alive. It never remembers you, but it always dares you to start again.

My wife is probably in New York.

And like General MacArthur, I shall return.