Field Notes

Winter 2026

The Sunroom

To say it was a decision is to assign some specificity to a moment or place in time. And though I felt the shift, it didn't feel like a decision. A decision feels like a question was asked. Not binary or multiple choice necessarily, but more that there was a buildup to a point where a choice must be made. This was more like an invitation. Not spoken but felt in my chest. Like the opening of a liminal door. Unseen, but unmistakable. Once it appeared, I did not hesitate. I entered and felt it close behind me. Everything changed.

---

To understand this moment, I must take you back to a sunlit room. The back room of the apartment on Pershing Boulevard, where I grew up. This sunroom was the full width of the apartment and the last room of the living space, accessed by my mother's room on the south side and from my room on the north. Both entryways were French doors. This room was the beating heart of my imagination. With a built-in desk on the north side that attached to shelves that wrapped around the room, it was full of toys, record player, books, paper, pencils, markers, crayons, paint and everything else necessary to keep me fully captivated. Years and years of my life in this sun-filled room for an only child and latchkey kid with a fully attuned sense of creativity, imagination and wonder. My heart beat differently here. I'm not sure if it was a space tailor made to my psyche or if my psyche developed to match this room, but it did. It was a play space, imaginarium, studio, incubator of expression, but most importantly it filled the empty space around a child who spent a large portion of her childhood free time alone. No limits to my imagination. I wrote poetry, illustrated books, made up stories, painted, sketched, sang, danced, dressed up, and more than anything, I never felt alone. I felt enveloped in wonder. I felt held by a greater force, or muse that completed me and left me innocently oblivious to the isolation I celebrated.

---

Over the years, this house of me has had many expansions and additions. Some carefully crafted, some hastily conceived or badly decorated. Some rooms hold pain and they are rarely visited. Some have locked doors where the key has been tossed into a self-created sea. Some are lovely but dated, others don't have enough light or the colors are all wrong. Some are so familiar that I have chosen to live in them permanently, comfortable with the fact that so many go unvisited. That sunroom was one of the first and essential spaces, but over time, and in the haze of memory, I couldn't remember what hallway led to it, or was it at the end of this wing or that? Did I imagine it over the years because I needed it? Was it ever real?

---

50 years pass. A great whooshing noise. I've spun around the sun more than 18,000 times since I last sat, bathed in the sunlight of that room. I've grown up and grown old. I've explored, married, raised children, married again, and in time, lost all the people who know who I really am. I've worked hard, dreamed big, succeeded and failed. I've done all the things I need to do so long that I forgot the childlike luxury of only doing what I want to do.

And then in a moment, alone in the garden, I felt a strange beat of my heart. Not frightening but distantly familiar. A feeling in my chest, radiating out towards my shoulders. Like a fire in a room that as it warms, expands and takes over. A moment. Different from so, so very many that preceded it. That feeling of transcendent possibility that makes a little gasp to evidence its truth. The way your whole body changes when you see the one you love. Indescribable, but complete. Not a decision, but a doorway. That liminal doorway. Have I finally been afforded the luxury of rediscovering that sun-filled room in my soul? The sensing of it spreads over me like sunlight inching over my skin at magic hour. I am enveloped in childlike wonder. Again. Wrapped completely. Will I be allowed to stay or is this just a glimpse? Does this side of the doorway where I am need something of me that I cannot yet go in? A voice in my head says no. In my soul I take a step, and with everything I have, I submit to wonder completely. Did I find the way back or did it find me? It doesn't really matter, does it? This changes everything.

— Luli