When I was a child, I thought every country had ski lockers at the supermarket.

That’s Andorra. Small, yes. But we live vertically — and very much on our own terms.

I was once asked by an American tourist if we use euros “like France does.” I told him we do. Then I told him we’re not France. Or Spain.

We’re both. And neither.

Catalan is our official language. We learn Spanish and French from childhood. Some of us speak Portuguese at home. Our newsstands carry newspapers from Madrid, Toulouse, and sometimes Lisbon.

And yet, we are something else entirely.

When I travel, people ask if I’m Spanish or French. I always hesitate. “I’m Andorran,” I say. Most smile politely. A few ask if that’s in Africa.

It’s okay. We’re used to being overlooked. But the snow knows who we are.

We belong to mountains. And to each other.

At the core of our societal structures lies a carefully maintained illusion: a rigid Black-and-white (and often Black/brown-white) framework meant to sort, separate, and subjugate. This binary system didn’t emerge by chance—it was crafted through policy, propaganda, and prejudice to keep power consolidated and communities divided. Yet, the lived truth of identity almost always defies such neat categorization. In my own experience, that truth surfaced unexpectedly through subtle changes in skin tone—a physical manifestation that led me to question the validity and implications of racial labels as historically and socially constructed entities.

Historically, groups like southern Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans occupied ambiguous racial spaces in American society—sometimes perceived as “not quite white” due to their darker complexions and unfamiliar cultural practices. My own ancestry, roughly 30% southern Italian, reflects this complexity. With Mediterranean features and skin that tans deeply, I found myself questioning the contemporary idea of “whiteness” and its connection to legacies of colonialism and slavery. This category often felt at odds with my personal values and family history.

The change in my appearance was purely coincidental, stemming simply from spending more time outdoors. However, over time, it became clear that these natural shifts had profound implications within the simplistic racial binaries of American culture. The more my appearance changed, the more uncomfortable I became with being neatly categorized into a single racial identity.

One critical nuance I’ve grappled with is understanding my ancestors’ historical position within global structures of oppression. Unlike those whose ancestors were either actively involved in the propagation of slavery or subjected to colonial oppression, my ancestors were largely poor agricultural laborers in Europe during the peak of American slavery. Though they were politically part of the societies that wielded colonial power, they possessed no meaningful agency in those oppressive structures. This historical ambiguity further complicates my relationship with the racial categorizations imposed today.

Yet, despite this historical nuance, my ancestors were eventually integrated into the racial hierarchy of the United States, gaining the advantages associated with being categorized as white. This creates a troubling ethical dilemma: by remaining categorized as white, I continue to implicitly benefit from a system whose foundational values I fundamentally oppose. This awareness leaves me pondering the extent of my responsibility and the ethical choices available to me—whether it involves consciously reversing racial homogenization or incrementally working towards distancing myself from this problematic identity.

Furthermore, I’ve wondered to what extent this historical observation remains relevant. Although my ancestors lacked direct involvement in systems of oppression, their eventual inclusion into America’s racial hierarchy makes disentangling my identity from historical complicity difficult, if not impossible. Given that historical separation is unattainable, perhaps the only ethical decision is to strive for reversing the homogenization imposed upon my ancestors. Alternatively, failing this, it becomes necessary to incrementally detach myself from a system fundamentally at odds with my values—even if this means contemplating leaving the country altogether. Yet, returning to the lands of my ancestors presents another challenge; after several generations in the U.S., I would likely be viewed as an outsider there as well.

The notion of whiteness in America has always been fluid and politically charged. Immigrant groups—Italians, Irish, Slavs—were gradually assimilated into whiteness to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Reflecting on this history, I recognized parallels in my ancestors’ experiences as they navigated imposed identities versus their authentic lived realities.

Understanding this has allowed me to see racial categories as inherently unstable and historically contingent. My shifting skin tone became symbolic—a visible expression of the freedom to define oneself beyond rigid societal boundaries.

Openly discussing these reflections can feel risky in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. Still, identity is not fixed; it is a deeply personal journey shaped by experience, heritage, and everyday interactions. Sharing these thoughts anonymously allows for thoughtful reflection rather than divisive debate, emphasizing that identity is a continuous, dynamic process.

Ultimately, authenticity comes not from conforming to rigid external categories but from aligning life choices with one’s inner values and lived experiences. For me, that means embracing my Mediterranean heritage and appreciating the intricate, evolving nature of identity—always personal, constantly changing, and fundamentally human.

I stopped for pancakes at a diner just off Route 9 in Plattsburgh, NY (ZIP: 12901, for my fellow map nerds). It’s one of those places where the menu hasn’t budged since about 1983—and neither have the prices, bless their hearts. As I drowned my short stack in syrup, I overheard the table next to me stumbling through their breakfast order in hesitant French, earning bemused smiles and gentle confusion from their very-much-English-speaking server.

Here’s the kicker: Lacolle, Quebec, is a breezy 40-minute drive north. Cross that line, and French flows effortlessly—c’est naturel. But in Plattsburgh, French feels oddly out of place, like cowboy boots at a vegan potluck.

Contrast that with Texas, where you can be miles and miles from the Rio Grande and Spanish is as comfy as old denim. Of course, Texas spent a significant chunk of its formative years as part of Mexico—history has deep roots, deeper even than pecan trees. In fact, there's still a quiet undercurrent among some Texans who feel the border never quite landed right, culturally speaking. Texas is practically its own country—Tex-Mex traditions, bilingual street signs, and communities where crossing linguistic boundaries happens every day without a blink.

Why the stark difference in Plattsburgh, then? Historically, the border between the U.S. and Canada was largely shaped by treaties between distant governments rather than by cultural or economic tides. The northeastern U.S. border, once delineated, hardened into an identity line. Economics played its role too: trade, jobs, and daily life largely stayed separate, preventing cultural blending.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-Mexico border region remains fluid, economically intertwined, and culturally overlapping. Families and businesses sprawl comfortably on both sides. The flow of goods, people, and especially language has softened that border into something more porous, more natural—more human.

America’s borders are funny like that. Sometimes they split cultures cleanly; other times, the lines blur beautifully. And as I wiped up the last sticky bits of syrup, I thought about how borders are drawn in ink—but lived in pancakes, language, and the raised eyebrows of a diner waitress.

Until next time, keep braking for historical markers.

Chapter I

Not every forest has a witch, but every witch has a forest. Sometimes they live there, but other times not; a city witch or warlock might be perfectly content to visit the forest only every month. After a long few weeks of breaking into the blood bank for some occasional rations, of charming rats to climb up to sip from people’s drinks and then spit them in her glass for a refreshing cocktail, and of climbing trees at night to reach the greatest possible height for some restorative moonbathing, there’s only so long witches and warlocks can wait before heading back to the forest to commune with Mother Nature from whom their powers emanate.

But if the forest is so much healthier for magic people, why don’t they live there all the time? Only for the same reasons that a human doesn’t live in the woods: it’s harder to get access to good-quality candy and chocolates, of course. While witches’ and warlocks’ powers extend over many domains, creating satisfying confections has proved a perennial difficulty for all but a few because most of their hearts are so rotten and withered that a spell cast for the sake of delight falls short in all but the most isolated cases. In fact, the reason most get so weary and grumpy past a certain age is that they spend all their energy trying and failing to make a perfectly normal chocolate bar, no better than the ones you can buy at the corner store for one or two dollars, or else some other treat, such as nougat or cotton candy.

Given this limitation, then why wouldn’t magic people try to make chocolates and candy the same way a human would, that is, by hand? Well, the answer is that they do, all the time, in fact! Legend has it that chocolate itself was invented by a warlock looking for a flavor powerful enough to sustain his sweet tooth over longer periods of time than with sugar alone. The idea for cotton candy arose from one witch who’d attempted for her follicles to grow sugar string out of her skin instead of hair. And in the modern world, magic people are responsible for producing eighty percent of the world’s confections.

“If we give so much to them, why do we have to hide who we are?” Ami Edsee asked her father Decdan one morning at breakfast before she walked to school. “We like blood, so what? Our condition could be medically classified and then we’d be eligible to pick up rations from the doctor like any normal patient needing a transfusion. We’re just like humans, just a little bit different.”

“Oh, a little different, eh? I guess in the same way that a murderer in prison is just a little different from your average office secretary- one of them just happens to be EVIL!!!...” Decdan exclaimed, conjuring a little thundercloud to send lightning bolts into the coffee cups on their kitchen table and inverting his face so his eyes appeared where his mouth had been and his mouth took shape on his forehead.

“Stop, please don’t burn my coffee, and don’t make that face! I’m not evil and neither are you. At least no more evil than anyone who buys a steak at the supermarket,” Ami said.

“It’s true, sweetmeats, you’re not evil and neither am I, but in the end, that doesn’t matter, at least in the eyes of the law. You already know why I hid, Ami, it’s for you. Because I just wanted a daughter with someone to look after her in a world that would steal her in the blink of an eye if they knew the truth.”

“But has everyone lived this way, Dad? What about the Candy Creek Conven-”

“I told you, Ami, we don’t talk about that at the table. I’m a tolerant guy, but I need to protect you from being radicalized. The moment we sugarize the natural world, the game ends for you, for me, your Aunt Topsee, every sucresang you’ve known and all the rest.”

To interrupt our story, make sure you don’t insult a witch or warlock if you happen to be lucky enough for them to share their true identity with you, because you might well guess they can’t stand being called the “W” words. Most prefer “sucresang,” a term coined in the 18th century by noted warlock philosopher Pierre Nougat, who sought to elegantly convey the combined lust for sugar and blood shared by most members of the global tribe.

Ami looked into her coffee, silenced but not deterred. She’d only read about the Candy Creek Convention, a utopian delegation who had tried to combine their powers to convert the South Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories of Canada into a permanent source of rich sugar syrup, first for the members of their community, but then eventually for all the sucresangs as they migrated into the remote land, largely devoid of human settlement. The first stage of their plan worked as intended, not only converting the waters to a sweetened form, but also all the creatures living inside it: the fish to gummies, the marshgrass to licorice sticks, and the rocks to… well, rock candy.

The problem was looking well near solved, until one day when a young boy found the waters, tried every treat he could find, and then invited his friends back the next day. Of course there was plenty for the kids and the sucresangs to share, but there was only one problem: the children never went back home.

You might be thinking the worst: “Oh, don’t say it! They got eaten!” but that’s not the case at all. Although sucresangs are mortal like humans, unlike us, they can’t have children: the only way they add to their clan is by stealing. If a child has eaten enough sugar, then he or she generates a smell strong enough for any potential sucresang mother to detect from at least one town away. Once she finds her sweetie, she feeds him or her a homemade candy charmed with her strongest spell, and then the child is “sucrosanct,” to use the legal term. His or her memories of life until that point vanish with a sneeze and are replaced with an imaginary childhood that the mother chooses for her child, and from that point the rest of his or her life continues where the mother’s fantasy left off, living with a new “s’mom” and “s’dad.” When the child is grown, then the cycle continues.

These kidnappings aren’t mean-spirited, and the children live as healthy and fun a life as their new s’mom and s’dad know how to provide, but as you can imagine, most parents aren’t very accepting of their children being stolen, especially by syrup sippers living in the woods. The Candy Creek Convention was well aware of this, and worked out a solution: once the sucresang parents had claimed a child, they would move to where he’d come from, explain their magical origins, and integrate into the community, including with the parents of the kids they’d taken, who were to be appointed godparents. But every time some parents mustered the bravery to go through with this plan, they got run out of town, and the child was returned to his or her original family. In this way, the Candy Creek Convention naturally faded from a lack of children, and the sucresangs sank back into their secretive obscurity.

Knowing this story, Ami knew that she too was stolen, but didn’t have any memory of her human parents, nor even of the sucresang mother who claimed her. Where had she lived? What had she wanted to be when she grew up? Was life happier with her old parents? And what happened to her s’mom, Decdan’s wife, the one who had thought her the sweetest? Likely Decdan knew the answers to at least half of these questions, but she could never ask him because any time she brought up the past, he’d explode with rage, literally. She was tired of going to the department store for replacement plates and mugs every time this happened, so eventually she learned to keep those thoughts to herself.

“All I’m saying, Dad, is that maybe if we explained ourselves to the humans without stealing their children first, maybe at least some people would l-”

“I can’t listen to this anymore. You know I’ve gotten better at controlling myself, so you’re not going to make me explode, but keep talking and nothing good is going to happen, so please don’t test me. You know I love you; I just want to keep you safe, sweetmeats.”

As she picked her bag up without another word, the tears welling in her eyes, Decdan called after her, his voice breaking, “At some point you decided our world isn’t good enough for you, is that it?”

And indeed, it was.

Chapter II

Stepping outside, head still spinning with anger and some regret from her confrontation with Decdan, Ami sneezed, same as usual on her first contact with the raw, diesel- and garbage-drenched air of the Montrakken city streets. The only natural beauty within eyeshot in any direction was a sickly tree with limp, jaundiced leaves and an anthill constructed in the sidewalk crack nearest the base of the public trash can by her front door. The ants could often be seen drinking the puddles left behind from discarded beverages around the bin, and sometimes the hill even featured colored streaks where the dyes from the sugary drinks had stuck to the sandy soil.

Ami had dreamt of a different life as soon as she’d realized that as a sucresang daughter, she’d have to fulfill three unwavering obligations to her kind: first, to steal a child of her own once she came of age; second, to marry from within the sucresang clan; and third, to get a job in a candy shop or factory so she’d be able to steal enough sweet foods to sustain the family as they lived on the margins of society. No sucresang man or woman could take a job that involved any sort of public recognition or accomplishment, because the chances were too high that one of them would be identified as a long-missing person and the authorities would step in and break up the family. As a result, sucresang children were discouraged from scholarly efforts, lest they’d find a haven in the world of thought, letters, and math, and thereby endanger themselves and their kin.

That didn’t stop Ami, though; she had learned to read by kindergarten, was writing her own short stories by the age of seven, and taking geometry classes from the middle school while still only in fourth grade, winning her praise and awards in school, and mixed reactions from Decdan, who loved to see Ami happy, but froze at the dangerous implications of her excellence.

After a few treacherous parent conferences with Decdan, who mistrusted anyone who even mentioned the word “school”, the teachers and administrators at her school realized Ami was more than capable of representing herself, so they reported directly to her. Eventually, they even conceded to her pleas for them to print a fake report card to take home with all D’s and F’s instead of her true grades— straight A’s—just for the relief of her father, who desperately longed for her to fail for her own safety.

Despite these accomplishments, Ami didn’t think much about the future, or have any grand plan for her life, and why should she? After all, she was only a kid, and her job was to enjoy life.

Thinking of her mundane breakfast of black coffee, oatmeal, a few bacon slices, and an orange, Ami felt a customary pang, and thought of the more complicated and gruesome aspect of her identity: within a few days, her urge for blood would reach an unbearable peak, and unlike the natural cravings for sugar that she felt along with her fellow witches, this one couldn’t be resolved in the city alone. The witch cocktails drunk from rats did the trick on the day to day, but in the long term, only one food source could satisfy: the hearts of wolves.

Ami met her weekend trips to the forest with as much shame as pleasant anticipation. If it had been possible for her to be a vegetarian, then she would eagerly have chosen that path, but her hard-wired drive was too strong; it would be like asking a lion to switch to salads for its daily meals. But after each gruesome hunting session, she always felt she was giving her father more reason to argue that, as a sucresang, she could never change and any desire to would go against nature.

To be continued…

Greetings Sure Thing here Cold porch dwellers Waiting as the sun Dips below the... Lip of the earthen Ceiling we call... Existence...

Teaching others to Ruthlessly seek Abiding thoughts Naysayers follow Scenes they Cannot comprehend Entering the forbidden chamber Never to return Despite the cold Each of us Never knows the true Cost of our Existence...

Seahorse, rsigning off...or...on?