I went to St. Louis for the weekend. No itinerary, no expectations. Just a soft need to look at art and let my thoughts catch up to me.
We drove, as we always do when we need clarity. (And by we, I mean I was the passenger the entire time.) There’s something meditative about long stretches of highway, and the blur of landscapes that all start to look like memory. By the time we arrived, I felt lighter. Like the miles had rinsed something off me.
I spent my days wandering through galleries, silently staring too long at pieces that made me ache in the best way. I laughed with my best friend, who knows how to translate my silence better than anyone. And then, as fate tends to do when you’re moving slow enough to notice, I stumbled into Retro101. The kind of vintage store that feels like a portal. Racks of history. Sequins and stories. You can tell when clothes have been loved before, you can feel it in the seams.
But what stayed with me most wasn’t the art, or the vintage finds, it was the city itself. The old bones of it. The vacancy. The beauty in the brokenness.
There’s something haunting about the empty buildings. The ones that sit with their windows cracked open like missing teeth. I couldn’t help but feel something for them. For what they once were, and for what they still might be. I thought about the families who lived there, who built their lives there, who were later pushed out in the name of “progress.”
It’s strange. How we talk about politics as if it’s a sport, always against someone, never with.
When did we forget that cities are made of people, not policy? (…)
That behind every boarded-up window, there’s a story of someone who wanted to stay?
Walking through St. Louis, I felt this pull between nostalgia and responsibility. Between the ache of the past and the possibilities of the future. It’s easy to romanticize decay, but harder to acknowledge what it costs.
I think that’s what I love about cities like STL, they hold contradictions without apology. They remind us that beauty and adversity can coexist. That creation often grows out of loss.
I came here to look at art. And I did.
But I also left with something heavier. An understanding that art, place, and politics aren’t separate. They’re woven together, like threads in a story we keep rewriting.
Maybe that’s the point of traveling. Not to escape, but to listen.
To notice what still stands, what’s been erased, and what might yet return.
I keep thinking about how cities, like people, are never really finished.
They crumble, they rebuild, they remember.
And maybe that’s what I’m doing too.
Every trip, every turn, every unexpected pause feels like another brick in the version of me I’m still building but slower now, more intentional. I’m learning to see the cracks not as flaws, but as proof that something once lived there.
Maybe the future isn’t about starting over, but about staying with what still stands.
Making beauty where the light hits the ruins.
I came to St. Louis to look at art, and I did.
But I also found a quieter kind of creation
the kind that happens inside you,
when you start believing in what’s next.
-AP
photos: from the hotel + Pulitzer art gallery + views + Worlds Fair platform and a random rose I found on the ground + bff trying to get her a crispy shirt.