Dear Molly,

Thank you so much for coming to San Francisco this week to share your wonderful book, stories, and recipes! It was such a pleasure to meet and laugh with you about your truly LOL-worthy first kiss story with Eggboy.

You are, without a doubt, the happiest human I have ever had the joy of meeting, and I wish that I could bottle a little bit of your effervescence to keep in my pocket whenever I feel down. (When more than one person in your life has compared you to Eeyore, you know it’s a thing.)

It’s been sort of an unusual week, one of those weeks where you find yourself being about ten times more emotional about the smallest things like Pusheen gif-videos, restaurant closings, and book endings that are a little lackluster and not worthy of tears. Actually, I take that back — restaurant closings are very sad happenings and not just small potatoes, but you get my point.

It’s been the kind of week where you try to make yourself cry by finding the saddest YouTube videos you can find, little balls of homemade marzipan with sprinkles are automatically the highlight, and people’s words mean everything.

Things have felt a little raw. A little uncooked, unrefined, and rubbed red where it’s at that stage when you’re not sure if you’re supposed to put a Band-Aid on it or not.

I met up with an acquaintance-friend yesterday (I say “acquaintance-friend” because we’ve known each other for four years, but yesterday was the first time we’d ever made a point of seeing each other outside of class.) to talk about a play that she’d written and put on at UC Berkeley.

The premise of the play is perhaps best expressed in the words of my friend, the playwright, as she wrote in the program, “…what would happen if I took our fear of being expressed and turned it on its head, by having characters that always expressed their anxieties. …what would happen if…feelings alone could be reasons, and they were the driving force behind everything.”

It was a context that inevitably called for us to dive into our own emotions — about writing, about friends, about living — that felt therapeutic, uncertain, and raw — but good.

Talking to her was good, and I don’t mean “good” as just being a filler adjective. I mean “good” as in this was a conversation I needed. There were things I realized as I was talking to her that needed to be vocalized, and there were things I needed to hear from someone else that made it good.

So because of this conversation, our conversation, and your advice to me about finding my niche through sharing a bit of my daily life in a mock letter to a friend across the country, I find myself coming back to embrace my emotions as the blanket to my cold-weather-blanket-burrito of cooler weather and holiday commercial capitalism.

Wishing you all the best and all the marzipan,

Courtney