Tonight’s guest is a ghost.

Not like that — nobody died, there’s no séance happening here. This one’s dedicated to everyone who didn’t feel like coming, or couldn’t, for whatever reason. So instead of canceling, I decided to just talk to them the way you talk to someone in your head. If you don’t know what that means, honestly — are you even human?

We all have a little graveyard of people like that. The college roommate whose wedding you found out about through a mutual friend’s Instagram story. The work best friend who was your whole personality for two years, until the project ended and so did you two. The person you dated for a handful of months who still, somehow, likes your posts at 2am like nothing happened.

Tonight was for them. And for a few real, current ghosts too — people who said “I’d love to, but I don’t feel comfortable,” or “I don’t have time right now, ask me in a month.” I want to be honest about something: I’m not mad at any of you. And I mean that — not the version of “I’m not mad” that actually means the opposite. Anyone gets to close a door. Nobody owes anyone, me included, an open one forever just because it used to swing easy.

Some of those doors, I’ve left cracked on purpose. If you’re one of the ghosts who actually wants to stop being one — you know where to find me.

I could tell every one of these stories the other way — make every “no” into a villain, cast myself as the woman who got left, said-no-to, ghosted by half of Los Angeles. That version exists. I could write that letter too. I just don’t want to.

I’d rather be the person who wants good things for people, even the ones who didn’t choose me. Because I’ve done the grudge version before, and here’s what it actually costs: nothing, to them. They’re out there living their lives, blissfully unaware I’ve been renting them space in my head, rent-free, for months. The only person who ever pays rent on a grudge is the one holding it.

I’ve built this whole podcast around being the woman who writes letters — most of which I never send, because sending was never the point. The point was saying the true thing out loud so it stops living in my chest, and then closing the notebook. Tonight, I just did that into a microphone instead of a journal. Same thing, louder room.

And then, near the end, my brother gave me the ending I needed. He keeps a photo album with room for ten pictures — and he always leaves one slot empty. I asked him why, once. He said: that one’s for the best picture. It hasn’t happened yet.

The empty chair is the slot my brother leaves open — space held for the guest who’s still coming, the ones who’ll walk through the door someday because they want to, not because they were asked. I’d love that, genuinely — someone showing up one day just to say I love your podcast, put me on it. Until then, the chair stays empty on purpose. Not sad. Just waiting for its picture.

If you’ve got a ghost of your own — someone who left, someone who said no, someone you’re still quietly rooting for from a distance — do what I did tonight. Talk to them. In the car, in the shower, wherever. You don’t have to send it anywhere. You just have to say it.

That’s it for now, from Nightnight at Laura’s — a podcast about everything and nothing…

Good night.

We met at the Rainbow — the rock-and-roll landmark in West Hollywood, sister venue to the Whiskey a Go Go — at Jowell’s 39th birthday party. She was quietly telling a small circle of friends that she was finally writing the book she’d been carrying since she was 27. I was in that circle. I said, wait, I can help — do you need my help? And that’s the whole origin story of this episode: two strangers, one book, one very fated party.

Jowell wanted to be a rock star as a kid (remind you of someone? lol) — she has a letter she wrote to her best friend in elementary school saying so, but she can’t sing, so the dream took a different shape. It became Imperfect Rockstar, her brand, her coaching practice, and now her memoir, all built on a mantra she loves so much she has it tattooed on her skin: perfectly imperfect.

The book is really about growing up first-generation Middle Eastern in Los Angeles, inside a version of “supposed to” that left very little room to actually be a person — perfect grades, perfect marriage, perfect obedience, perfect everything. She told me she didn’t understand how not American she still was until she started dating someone who was — the exact cultural whiplash I felt getting my own citizenship here, discovering which parts of me were still entirely my own culture, even after a lifetime in this one. Neither of us grew up in the same place, but we both grew up between two worlds — which, fittingly, is a chapter title in her book. She thinks it’s less about which two cultures you’re straddling and more about the specific ache of straddling any two — and I think she’s right.

She almost wrote this book at 27, right after a breakup, and didn’t. Life gave her ten more years, another relationship that reopened the same old wound, and — she said it herself — more maturity to actually write it whole. Turning 40 became the finish line she set for herself, and she made it.

The part of this episode that’s really her, underneath the branding, is what she does with the pain she’s already survived. Her nonprofit, Show Me the Truth — named for the Audioslave lyric — was born out of the same week in 2017 when the music world lost two of its own to suicide. She’d already been planning a small charity show for mental-health awareness; she had to remake the flyer twice that week. What started as one bar show became Midnight Wonderland, now heading into its tenth year at the Whiskey a Go Go every December, raising money for the Midnight Mission of Downtown LA — which she was careful to point out isn’t just a homeless shelter, it’s a place people choose to walk into to get clean, get a GED, get counseling, get their kids a safe place to sleep.

That’s the whole shape of Jowell, if you ask me: someone who took her own hardest years and turned them into other people’s exits. What a star! Actually, rockstar!

She told me she’s a little tired — it’s been a hard year, and she’s ready to close it with a bang and breathe a little in the next one. Fair. She’s earned it. Book, wellness retreats, and Midnight Wonderland’s tenth anniversary, all landing at once — that’s not overwhelm, Jowell, that’s a rockstar’s year.

I hope we’re doing round two once the book is actually in our hands, so she can read us her own chapters in her own voice and I can’t wait.

Thank you, Jowell. Perfectly imperfect, exactly as advertised.

Good night,

— L.

Find out more about Jowell and her work:

* Jowell’s Instagram

* Jowell’s brand

* Jowell’s jewelry line Stone and Relic

* Jowell’s coaching — imperfectrockstar.com

* Midnight Wonderland (Dec 13, at the Whisky a Go Go) @midnightwonderland_

* The Midnight Mission (who Midnight Wonderland benefits): midnightmission.org

* Show Me the Truth Foundation — showmethetruthfoundation.org

* To Write Love on Her Arms — twloha.com

I spend my life trying to catch things in words, and I always feel like something gets lost in the translation. My friend Matteo catches them in light. So I asked him the question this whole show is built on: can a photo say something a sentence can’t? And he gave me an hour I didn’t want to end.

We met at Boston College in 2015, one of a little group of three. He’s the kind of friend I’d lose to time and then text out of nowhere, and it’d pick right back up, which is its own small proof of the thing I keep saying, that real friendship just stays there.

But the heart of it was photography, and how he thinks about it, which turns out to be a quiet rebellion against AI. His argument: a machine can only reassemble what already exists. It’s read every poem, seen every painting, and it can remix them into something that looks new, but it didn’t come from anywhere. It didn’t cost anything. And for him, the cost is the whole point. Great things are hard, he said and if they weren’t hard, they wouldn’t be great. He compared it to a marathon: the people who finish two hours after the winner aren’t happy because of the medal. They’re happy because they did the hard thing. AI hands you the medal without the miles. You didn’t win.

Great things are hard; if they weren’t hard, they wouldn’t be great. Matteo

(I’ll cop to the irony here, because he was too kind to press it: my podcast cover is AI-made, and I got laid off from Verizon partly because of AI. He just smiled and said AI is fine for your laundry — he’d just rather it not write the poems. Fair. Deeply fair.)

Then he told me about an ice cream shop. In Rockport, Massachusetts, he found an ordinary little storefront and something about the light stopped him cold, so he went back. For three days and four hundred photos. No joke. He stood in one spot for three hours watching the light change minute by minute — morning, sun, dusk, the artificial light coming on — because he wanted to catch the exact instant it all lined up. Of four hundred photos, he loves maybe two or three and the wildest part is that he said the experience of standing there was probably better than any photo he got.

That’s almost like a storyteller’s dream. We think of a photograph as static, one frozen click, no story. What he’s describing is the opposite: a photo is the last page of a long, invisible story. I told him I wish every picture in the world came with a preface — this took me three days and four hundred tries. Wouldn’t be cool? He mentioned captions and those not being useful, but that’s not really what I meant…

He walked me through the rest of his religion of light. The word photography means “writing with light” — that’s literally all it is, catching light on a sensor. Edward Hopper is his patron saint, the master of a window lit at exactly the right angle. And his favorite analogy, the one that got me because it’s my world too: light is the script, and the subject is the actor. A great script lets an ordinary actor shine; a mediocre one, and even Bryan Cranston can only do so much. The light, he said, elevated the performance of that little ice cream shop. (Yes, you can giggle at the Bryan Cranston’s reference, lol, I did too!)

The answer to my real question came right after: can a photo say what a sentence can’t? He said: every medium has its limits, and the art is learning to live inside them. Writing, photography, music… none of them is perfect, none of them closes the whole gap between what you felt and what you can hand to someone else. Trying to bridge that gap anyway is the entire fun of it. And, he pointed out, grinning — this podcast is exactly that. A guy talking about photographs, on a show you can only hear. No pictures. Just us, trying to make you see something you can’t see. He even likes the idea of not showing you the photo, so you build it yourself.

I asked him one other closing question: if he handed his younger self one of his photos, which one would it be? And instead of choosing one, he opened a door I wasn’t ready for: he told me he’s afraid of forgetting. He watched someone he loved lose their memory near the end of their life, lose it completely, and it marked him. So he photographs to keep a way back, like a proof that the moment happened, something to return to when the details start to blur. Travel and photography are so fused for him now that he can’t imagine going anywhere without a camera, because the camera is how he refuses to lose it. Bittersweet is the right word, and it’s the right note to end on.

Grazie, Matteo. You catch the light before it leaves. I catch the words before they do. Same instinct, different tools, both of us just trying to keep something from… slipping away.

Good night, everyone.

— L.

Matteo’s PhotoInsta

Matteo’s Portfolio

Some guests are just sent from the Source. I swear.

Today I had the honor to talk to my friend Narae, and I just wanted to keep talking but we’ll do it in person, without microphones. She’s a friend, an artist working in immersive storytelling, and a tech co-founder building VR for pain and anxiety management, but what the episode is really about is the thing she and I both circle constantly: how you protect your inner state, and what you let in.

She said her whole life — the art, the tech, the way she moves through people — sits on three connected things: who she meets, what she eats, and how she feels. Social connection, nutrition, meditation. Mind and body as one system, given outward to the people around her. It’s the most coherent way I’ve heard anyone describe living holistically, and it came out of her like she’d known it forever.

Then we got into boundaries, and she said something that reframed the whole idea for me. Her green flag isn’t charm or chemistry — it’s someone who can say no in a way that’s kind, and tell you why. Someone who protects themselves cleanly enough that you trust they’ll respect your limits too. She’s noticed that boundaries are contagious. When you’re around someone who does it naturally, you can suddenly do it too. When you’re around people who never do, you spend the whole time braced and guarded. The skill is the room you’re standing in.

The centerpiece of the whole conversation was a story her therapist pointed her to, from The Four Agreements — the smoky mirror. The idea that we each see everyone through our own reflection; that when someone’s cruel to you, they’re not really handing you a fact about yourself, they’re offering you a drink of their own poison, and you get to say thank you, but no. You can recognize the offer, even honor the intention behind it, and still decline to drink it. I told her about the man who screamed at me at a gas station on a good day, for the crime of existing near him, and how, years later, it’s still lodged in me. Her answer was gentle and devastating: that anger was his. He just never named it, so he handed it to the nearest person instead.

Because that’s her real practice: naming the feeling. She learned in therapy that when you name a bad emotion, it shrinks and loses its grip and when you name a good one, it grows. But she couldn’t always find the words, so she found another door. She’s a visual person, an athlete who grew up in a culture where you endured feelings instead of speaking them, so when she can’t write the feeling, she draws it. Doodles, colors, jagged lines or round ones. She gets the thing out of her head and onto the paper so she can look at it from the outside and ask: is this anger worth three weeks, or three minutes?

Is this anger worth three weeks, or three minutes? —Narae

And then she told me about the letters. Yes, she writes letters too! When she’s furious at someone, she writes the letter. The long one, the real one, revised until it says exactly how she feels. And then she reads it back and realizes she doesn’t need to send it. She already got what she needed: she knows how she feels now. Sending it would just cost her another day of her own energy. So she closes it, and moves on.

Narae. I’m the woman who writes the letters she doesn’t send. I’ve built a whole podcast on it. And here you were, on the other side of the mic, telling me you do the exact same thing, for the exact same reason. Different countries, different lives, same instinct: say the whole true thing, out loud or on paper, and then let it go. We were meant to meet. Period.

We ended, of course, on the animals. Her two cats, ten years old, who draw boundaries better than any human she knows — they take what they want, refuse what they don’t, and do it so cutely you can’t be mad. She taught me something I didn’t know: cats don’t meow at each other. They only meow at us. They invented a language just to talk to the humans they love. Which felt like the truest note to end on, these small creatures building a whole vocabulary to reach us, and us barely noticing they’re speaking.

Thank you, Narae. Same instinct, different tools, different worlds — and somehow always the same conversation. I feel very lucky to know you in this lifetime.

Good night!

— L.

Find out more about Narae and her work at the following links:

Narae

* Website / portfolio: kimnarae.com — her art, immersive/VR work, exhibitions

* On Instagram

* On LinkedIn

Her work

* Flowly — the VR app for pain and anxiety management she co-founded with Celine Tien and Julien Soros; she created the app’s virtual worlds; founded 2019, went through Y Combinator, it’s on Instagram

* Rallie — a social tech platform that helps friend groups turn every “we should hang out”

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Three and a half years ago, a guy named Gianluca won the green card lottery, quit his job in Luxembourg, and moved to Los Angeles with no plan, no job, and — his words — “go big or go home.” We met in the Italians-in-LA Facebook group, back when he was panicking, surrounded by Americans, hunting for anyone who’d speak Italian with him. This week he came on the show to tell the whole story… in English.

The thread that runs through all of it is a mentality clash he keeps bumping into. In Europe, he says, you work for a stable salary — you sign the contract, you’re safe, you’re maybe a little mediocre forever, but you don’t panic. In America, people work for passion — they’ll grind in the field they love even when it’s not paying, enthusiasm through the roof, because they actually love the thing. He landed with the European operating system installed, and the whole episode is him slowly, reluctantly switching over.

It cost him something to get there. Three months burning through savings. A job he found (partly thanks to a $45 round of three spritzes with me — a price that now sounds like a bargain). Watching coworkers disappear one by one until he got laid off himself — and the strange relief of it, because sometimes it’s easier when someone else makes the decision for you. A car-rental business with a friend — three Fiat 500s, three Mustangs, a Volkswagen — that turned out not to be profitable. And, finally, finanzamille — the finance platform he built with his business partner Amedeo, where people can actually learn how money works.

Here’s what I want to flag, because he was careful about it and so am I: finanzamille teaches — it breaks down the news, analyzes a stock a week, shows you their reasoning — but as he said himself, plainly, they don’t give financial advice, because they can’t. This episode is his story, not a stock tip. Nothing here is advice; it’s one immigrant’s road from accountant to aspiring financial planner, studying at UCLA, chasing a genuinely big dream.

I also asked him whether showing your face online actually matters. He didn’t hesitate. In an age when everything’s made by AI, he said, showing your face, being visibly human, is more important than ever. People don’t follow a product. They follow a person, they want to feel your emotion.

The human factor wins over everything else. I keep saying it, episode after episode, and my guests keep saying it back to me.

His advice to the version of himself who started with no audience and no proof it’d work? Be consistent. Follow the passion. You’ll find your people eventually.

Grazie, Gianluca. From a $45 spritz to a 50-million-dollar dream — go big, my friend.

— L.

Buona notte.

You can find Gianluca here

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Years ago, I taught a serious, intense, wildly motivated Italian soldier how to speak English. This week he sat across from me in California and told me — in that English — that learning it didn’t just change his job. It changed who he is.

That’s the whole episode, really. The teacher, interviewing the student who took the lesson somewhere the lesson never imagined.

Gianluigi is an Italian Army Sergeant Major with almost three decades of service. His specialty is being the voice between two worlds that move at completely different speeds — the ground, where everything is chaos and adrenaline, and the air, where everything is exact. He’s one of the few people who can do that job, and a huge part of why is the language. Right now he’s in Coronado, training with the US military, nine hours from home, the only Italian in the room.

We got into the thing this whole show is secretly about: the difference between learning a language and living one.

He said classroom English is safe — you can pause, rewind, correct yourself, make mistakes with no consequences. But operational English, the real thing, is fast and compressed and unforgiving. “In the classroom, English is a subject. In the field, English is a weapon.” And the moment he understood that was standing on a radio with US pilots talking so fast there were no pauses, no “say again,” just pure flow — and realizing that if he couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t part of the solution, he was part of the problem.

He talked about landing in America and discovering that fluency wasn’t enough — that his humor didn’t survive the crossing, that his timing was off, that jokes which would kill in Italy came out flat or serious or confusing. “It’s like having the instinct, but not the tools.” Like a part of your personality is locked behind a door that only opens in your first language. Nobody warns you, he said, that learning a new language means temporarily losing yourself — your humor, your spontaneity — and slowly rebuilding it in a new form.

I told him: 100%. Same. Because that’s the thing I’ve been circling for fourteen episodes, and here was a soldier saying it back to me from the inside of a military base.

He talked about the accent as a filter — “people hear it before they hear YOU” — how his directness got read as anger, how being taken for “less” until the language proved otherwise is its own quiet battle. And how English didn’t just open doors for him; it changed the way people listened when he walked through them.

And the line I can’t stop thinking about is “In English, I can be clear. In Italian, I can be me.” We always get to that “human factor”… every single time, my friends. This is why this podcast exist. Emotions. Everywhere.

He doesn’t think the second language replaced who he is. He thinks it expanded it — gave him access to new versions of himself. More adaptable, more patient, more open.

After ten years, he said, this is the man I became. His one regret this trip: his wife couldn’t be here to see it.

Grazie, Gianluigi. The last time you needed me, I was correcting your grammar. Now you correct the space between two languages for a living. I’m so proud of you I could cry.

— L. Buonanotte.

I met Sarahi at the front desk of the wellness place I go to: Arc Of Life, in Redondo Beach. She and Liz were the two who’d look up when you walked in — smiling, warm, glad you were there. The light at the door. I remember thinking, the first time: these two always welcome me with a smile on their faces, like a friend, or family. And Dr.Ivan and Dr.Sabrina do the same, and they are the column of this big Arc of Life family. Amazing people.

What I didn’t know is that she’d been thinking the exact same thing about me.

That’s how this episode unfolds: two people confessing they each walked in and saw light in the other. And then it goes somewhere I’ve been circling this whole season without ever landing on it: the girl who always smiled who is, obviously, little Laura, my inner child.

That warm, bubbly, light-at-the-door thing? For both of us, it’s partly a mask, the face you put on so the person in front of you doesn’t feel uncomfortable. And I told her the thing I’ve never said on here: that somewhere along the way, someone taught me the girl who smiles like that gets read as dumb. Silly. Superficial. Not a deep person. So the girl who always smiled… eventually stopped.

And Sarahi looked at that same smile and saw the opposite: she saw light. Sometimes it takes a stranger at a front desk to hand you back the very thing you were taught to be ashamed of.

We got into all of it. Chosen family — she said “with my family, I can’t be myself,” which is the exact inverse of what I always say, that with family you don’t hide. And we found the place where both are true: sometimes you have to build the family you get to be yourself with. Inner-child work, and the thing I figured out literally the day before we recorded, which is that little Laura never needed me to visualize her. She needed to see me take action, to watch me do the thing. We talked about Internal Family Systems, the online community I joined to help with a difficult time, about the book No Bad Parts, about the parts of us that take over when we get flooded. And about Into the Wild — the line that kid wrote at the very end: happiness real when shared.

She’s from Mexico, four years into LA, building a whole new chapter — social media, plans, design — and doing the brave thing of getting to know herself in real time. She also told me I should finally show my face and do video. We’ll see about that. (There’s an illustrated me now. Baby steps.)

This one’s tender. Two women who lead with a smile, figuring out loud what’s underneath it. The universe put us at the same front desk for a reason.

I’m keeping her.

— L. Buonanotte.

Music by Robert Miles — Children

Gracias, Sarahi. Keep shining bright and remember my inner child says: hi!! To yours.

Find Sarahi on Instagram

* Sarahi’s Insta Page

Mentioned in this episode

Books

* No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model — Richard C. Schwartz — publisher page

* Into the Wild — Jon Krakauer — publisher page — the source of “happiness is only real when shared.”

Watch

* Into the Wild (2007), dir. Sean Penn — the film adaptation — IMDb

Learn about

* Internal Family Systems (IFS) — the “parts” model of therapy we kept referencing — IFS Institute

* Inner-child work — a good plain-language overview — Cleveland Clinic

Catch up on the podcast on Spotify

* Episode 1 and Episode 11 (the two Sarahi listened to).

Let me start at the very beginning. Not my beginning — the beginning. Roughly fourteen billion years ago, everything that exists was compressed into a single point, and then it began. And here’s what they don’t tell you at school: it didn’t begin with light. Light came later. It began with a sound. A vibration.

We are, all of us, the echo of that note still traveling.

I didn’t make that up to sound deep on a podcast barely anyone is listening to — I wrote it in my early twenties, as the first line of my university dissertation. I walked into the room, sat in front of the examining board, and played them the sound of the Big Bang. Because I already believed that sound isn’t something that happens to us. Sound is what we’re made of.

So this one is an ode to music. But when I say music, I don’t just mean a playlist. I mean the thing the universe is built out of, and the thing that, at one point in my life, was the only thing that could still reach me when nothing else could.

I have a treble clef tattooed on my shoulder even if I’m not really a musician. It’s there because it’s the symbol of what saved my life, and keeps saving it, day after day. Yes. Really.

This episode exists because of that and because of the song I wake up with every single morning, different every day, that I’ve decided to treat as a message instead of a malfunction. The gift I have for chasing a fragment of melody until I find it. The people who each left me pieces of music — my brother, my friends, the ones I loved, the ones I lost — so that music is the language of our souls, that keep talking to each other even when we, humans, don’t. Coldplay and my grandmother. Linkin Park finding me in a rental car in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Oh and a patent I filed for a tool I invented, because if sound can heal a person, maybe it can be built into something that heals more of them.

You are made of vibration. Which means you are tunable. On the days the arrangement goes wrong, there’s a sound out there that can move through you and set it right. It won’t fix everything. But it’ll sit with you in the dark and stay until it passes.

Our song isn’t over. It will never be. Stay for this one, or I’ll see you in the next.

Good night.

—L.

music by: Cellist jenny - Vivo per lei (instrumental)

Mentioned in this episode:

* The Music of Life — Hazrat Inayat Khan

“What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music: our mind and our body, the nature in which we live, the nature that has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music. We are close to all this music, and live and move and have our being in music.”

* Divine Attunement: Music As a Path to Wisdom — Yuval Ron

* My Thirty Seconds to Mars “Closer to the Edge” fan video

* Blackbirds - Linkin Park (fan video)

* Cages (DTLA) (OMG I found the recording too!)

This episode touches, gently, on being in a very dark place. If you’re there right now: please reach out to someone you trust, or a local crisis line — you can find one for your country at findahelpline.com. Your song isn’t over.

Eleven episodes in, and I’ve told you about my accent, my grandmother, my coffee order, my bone marrow match, my brother, my letters — and I have never once actually introduced myself.

So this one’s my résumé with some zest of… feelings.

Eleven is my number, by the way. Eleven and twenty-three, which is just eleven wearing a different outfit, and before I list anything, I have to tell you about a magnet I bought years ago that says:

“Sometimes on the way to a dream, you get lost and find a better one.”

I hated it because I believed there was one dream, and if you ended up somewhere else, you’d failed. It took me a long time to learn the other thing: that dreams do come true, they just change, because we change.

So here’s what I’ve actually done, and you can decide whether it’s a woman who couldn’t stick to anything or a woman whose dreams kept getting better: north of fifteen books in two languages, a thriller trilogy, poetry, a children’s book, a road-trip memoir, philosophy, an Italian textbook. Eight screenplays. Songs. And a day job writing the words inside the machines you interact with…

A few things in here I’ve never said out loud before: one of my books is published under a pen name. Another one is credited to my dog, who gets top billing over me, correctly; or why I have “…what a smile can hide;” tattooed on my shoulder.

There are also two books on my shelf that aren’t mine. One I translated as a promise to a friend after he died. One I edited for a friend, because it deserved to exist.

If you got lost on the way to your dream, don’t get scared. You’re changing, you’re evolving, and your dream is changing with you. You’ll find your way back to it, just trust the process.

— L.

Everything’s in one place: laura-storyteller.carrd.co — the books, the screenplays, the lyrics.

* 📚 Books — Amazon

* 📖 Goodreads

* 📷 Instagram — @lauraandella · @angelikasarts

* 💼 LinkedIn

* 🌿 Whole·istika

Mentioned in this episode: The Aleph by J. L. Borges. “A point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion.”— from "The Aleph".

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Tonight I wanted to talk about …something. Ghosts? Spirituality? Something. So naturally I invited the one person who told me flat out she doesn’t believe in any of it — no God, no religion, no ghosts, nothing. And she was the right guest for a very specific reason: her name is Michela.

The kindest people I’ve ever known have, over and over, been named Michela and that name has come to mean grace to me. So this episode is a roll call of my Michelas: the English teacher from second to fifth grade who made me love the language and taught me to grade in every color but red, because red is for wounds. The dear friend who read the Bible with me, never to convert me, just because she knew I was thirsty for knowledge. And the Michela I lost at seventeen, whose presence I felt for years afterward — the one whose song came on in a bowling alley on a school trip, and a classmate said, “Michela’s here,” and he was right.

Then I handed the mic to the living Michela across from me and asked my skeptic friend the real question: do you think they’re sent to me for a reason?

I won’t give away her answer. I’ll only say she turned the whole thing around on me in a way I didn’t see coming and that her name, it turns out, means “who is like God,” which is a very funny thing to land on the one guest who doesn’t believe in one.

Whether the Michelas are a message from the universe or just a name that kept landing on kind people, I notice it. And I’ve come to think the noticing is the whole thing. Paying attention to the grace that keeps showing up in your life, giving it a name, and saying thank you to it, I guess that’s my spirituality.

At the right time, those you’ve lost may come back to say hi, and let you know they’re still with you. Who knows.

— L. Buona notte.

Grazie mille, Michela — for the pushback, the grace, and the reminder that sometimes the skeptic is the kindest one in the room.