I don’t have an address right now. But I did have halfhearted mole enchiladas delivered a few hours ago.
I’m back in the United States. I don’t want to be here—reentry felt like whiplash. Immediately after crossing the border into upstate New York, a rented delivery van rode my ass for over 50 miles. Frustrated and starving, I stopped at a gas station and bought a chicken salad sandwich that tasted like tuna and a carrot cake cupcake with cream cheese frosting that defined its own state of matter.
After a few days avoiding Appalachian spirits I ended up here, close but not too close to the nation’s capital, in a quiet condo in a pleasant neighborhood with two dogs that I didn’t know that my soul was aching for. Something in me is finally not running.
Everything I own fits in my car again. I was like this before I got married; when I came back east after getting my English degree it all fit in a 1992 Saturn. Back then I couldn’t stop the spiral: I drank until I didn’t know how much I’d consumed, ended up dead on a table, coughing up the dead parts of my lungs, and somehow ended up creating two people at the same time. When I slammed into the bottom of the spiral, stunned, I built my way back to being human by cleaving to what other people said was true. I followed the rules. I anticipated the results.
And I lost myself.
Now my things fill a larger, newer car, and I’m pretty sure that everyone I know is deeply worried. The past is looping through the present like static under my skin; everything feels familiar and fragile, like it might break the same way twice. When I talk to people, there are weird silences that I try to fill by trying to explain a perspective on my own life that cannot possibly make sense to anyone who has not lived it.
I’m not trying to create my own originality. I’m not trying to consciously create a distance between myself and the people that I love–and I hope love me in return. I’m just no longer trying to twist myself into something legible. I’m trying to remember how to be honest. I’m trying to understand my own life. I’m trying to create space around the stories that have already been told, to try and remember what was there before the narrative went wildly off the tracks.
The PTA secretary and Girl Scout leader can go in this Sterilite tub over here. The annoyed middle-aged college student can slide into this hanging file. The desperate sci-fi novelist who typed out 38,000 words when she wasn’t copyediting the church newsletter or figuring out if she’s supposed to be a priest can finally take a nap between the pages of that pile of journals stacked next to the bed. The second career teacher trying to both rescue kids destined to be forgotten and change the system so that it never happens again can close her laptop and listen to the birds on the porch.
I can’t remember who I was. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be her again. But I do want to carry the parts that kept glowing, even when everything else burned down.
I promise that someday I’ll have an address again. I’ll set up an altar with a Roth IRA and a lease contract. But right now I have a Toyota RAV4 and a walking appointment with a couple of borrowed senior dogs named Basil and Siena.
And for the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid of the quiet. If you need me, I’ll be learning the language of the birds.