Azalea Dolan's Blog

It’s a relic of a different time really. Conceived of when there was still an Alamo Drafthouse on 6th street, when Craigslist still hosted personal ads and missed connections, when rent in Hyde Park was $800 a month.

This book started the way they all do, really, for me. One little page of prose, imbued with enough meaning to birth a world. I was 19 and experiencing much of what is now the foundation of my life for the first time. In the middle of learning lessons that needed a good two year...

I wonder if I’ve been ungracious to 31. And yet I have avoided this blank screen. It feels as if all the nice things I could say about that year are covered in a film I don’t want to touch. But that is not scorn for the girl who was 31, it is what can only be described as pity. Shining fruits sitting in her palm that hid their rot until she bit into them.

The girl who was 31 had a beautiful wedding, wore a beautiful gown, danced to Octopus’s Garden with her dad in the botanical garden he too...

I’ve grown weary of writing about my life. What once felt like a ground strike of purpose, the filling of a great pool one cupful at a time, has become a meretricious dance of expectancy. I no longer observe my life in poems and find narratives in my woe. I gaze up at a moment of irony or a spring of hurt and eye it with the jadedness of someone who has too long felt obligation to such a thing.

But weariness has been the cool current that has moved me through the entirety of 31. A creature o...

The girl who turned thirty was 6 days into her next big adventure. She’d been laid off from the comfortable place she’d been perched just 6 weeks before. She’d called a friend for lunch who had canceled the morning of and she’d never heard from her again.

She was terrified and hopeful and praying it exceeded her expectations. It didn’t, but she grew.

She published her third collection of poetry – her favorite title yet. She sat under a total solar eclipse – watching for hours as the sun di...

The year has gone in two clean halves. The first was a ghost I buried and mourned, one who lingered graciously until the summer months to fulfill its unfinished business. It was indulgent, that half. The easy forgetting of the thing that fell it. The hopeful carrying on of someone too blind to the circumstances to understand the foolishness of it all. 

The second was the cool, absent oblivion that continued once the ghost had gone. The truth, and the fear of it. This is what it will be, for s...

$9.35 is the cost of peace.

Postage on a package that carries the last leverage you’ll ever have and the last words I ever need to say. The sender and the recipient read the same, because no matter what, it needs to make it to you. I won’t be taking it back.

For less than $10 I can be done with what ails me. And for you, that might be a loan never repaid, a shirt never returned, a plan never executed. Peace is always available for a price. 

We’re often too remiss to pay it. It feels wro...

If this title is vaguely familiar to you, you’ve been here a while. I wrote a blog post called the same thing February 18, 2021. One of the absolute worst months I can remember having. To be honest with you, I never revisited that post. I just reached the end of my thoughts and I thought of a name, one title that could summarize the feeling I had, and I never forgot it.

Love is not one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse because it’s not something that plagues us at the end of days. It’s ...

We as a species have decided that time means something. That no one in their twenties is responsible enough to plan for the future and no one in their thirties is lively enough to stay out past 10. Forty is when you stop caring what people think and sixty is when you’ve paid enough dues to be released from the indenture of society. And because we’ve been endowed with a heretofore unseen hair of foolishness, we assign our own personal time especial meaning. 

It’s Thursday and in 3 days, I will...

There are still 2 more months for me to be 29. So this reflection on being is potentially premature. But there are only a couple more days left to be in 2023–and besides, I have a feeling that I’ll have something entirely new to say by February.

2023 eclipses 2020 as the year that required the most work. A different kind of work, anyhow–less scaffolding, and more plumbing. More electrical, more structural. The kinds of things that keep the house running now that it’s standing. And sometimes i...

From July 7, 2023

His name was Tambi. I’m not sure if that’s the name you had for him in the first few months of his life or if that’s the name the shelter gave him in the scant few hours he was there. But if you recognize his name from the calls of it throughout your house or from the photoless listing on the city website, this letter is addressing you. This is what I want you to know:

You did a hard thing, and I’m glad you did. I’m sure it broke your heart, but I’m merely assuming from t...