Abby Rosmarin's Blog, page 3

Reintroduce

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“We write stories in such different ways,” a fellow writer friend remarks. “I prefer one-off stories about characters before moving onto different worlds, and you like to return to characters and give them additional stories.”

“And both are completely valid,” I reply.

And it’s true. I love to interweave stories, to hide Easter eggs in one novel to show everything is happening in the same universe, that it’s all connected. All these characters as they stumble across their lives are doing so under the same sky.

My friend had been reading a draft of my short story collection: a collection I had just received the rejection letter for, from a publishing company that had been considering it since November, right as the pandemic started to find its footing.

A collection where characters introduce and reintroduce themselves throughout it. A side character from a finished, but unpublished manuscript, makes an appearance as the protagonist in her own tragic story. One of the most prominent characters in the collection is a main player in a novel I’ve been slowly putting together for the last year or so.

(But that connection feels like cheating: all her short stories were ways for me to learn about her, to put her in the various concepts that I had for her and see how she’d respond. The perilous recognition that I don’t make the characters so much as they reveal themselves to me. The story is not mine so much as I’m the vessel it comes through.)

A collection I’ve decided to publish myself during the quarantine. One of the projects I have dove into to keep my head on straight, to not look at the state of my career, the state of the world, and completely despair.

It feels good, to be reintroduced to these characters again. To remember their worlds — their one, singular world — and feel that richness, like hearing a grandmother remark on her full life.

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“The pandemic is not without its small blessings,” I remark to another friend. And that’s true, too. I wouldn’t have voluntarily made such a trade, but I can still find value in what was exchanged to me.

There are things that are born out of pure, hysterical necessity, but that doesn’t mean those things are not born beautiful. I’ve been reintroduced to so many thing I let gather dust. I’ve literally wiped the dust off of my old slackline — a summer staple back in 2016, but since then ignored — and now practice on warm, windless days. I’ve returned to house projects — working on the basement, yard work, clearing out areas that weeds and thorny vines had invaded. I’ve returned to the woods behind my house. I cleaned up my old beach comber bike — a bike that also was a staple back in the summer of 2016, before being ignored — and began circling my neighborhood.

I’ve even been reintroduced to my PlayStation 2 and my Dance Dance Revolution games — and learned I had a completely unopened, unused game for it.

And I’ve been reintroduced to the world of writing. The world of fiction, and crafting stories and polishing the words and putting them out there on my own because god damn the gatekeepers who have been mostly ignoring me for the last decade, even though I keep vying for their attention. Writing outside of personal journals and public blogs — writing I had kept telling myself I’d return to, in between classes, hunkered down at a Barnes & Noble, a local café, like the bohemian stereotype I can be sometimes.

I’m trying my hand at gardening again, at growing vegetables and fruit. I’ve even put in an order for egg-laying hens — a staple of this house that has been missing for the last two years. I’m returning to the positive parts of a past life.

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I’ve also been reintroduced to the darker corners. Reintroduced to old demons, to old emotional responses, old coping strategies that I’ve spent the last 5 years distancing myself from. Grittier aspects of my CPSTD knocked on my door the second it learned I’d be staying there for a while. Old demons, old insecurities, made use of this upheaval, became the looters who smash windows and grab flat screen TVs after a hurricane.

I’ve been reintroduced to problems I thought I had moved past, but learned quickly that moving past and processing fully are two separate entities. Reintroduced to every time I didn’t speak up for myself, every imbalanced or toxic situation, every injustice that was never set right so much as shrugged at and said, “Well, that’s how the world is sometimes.”

But I’ll take it. Show me the areas I’ve been avoiding like an unpleasant person at a party. Force me to be reintroduced and make me stare them down. Denial does nothing more than make them permanent houseguests, the kind that secretly raid your fridge and take money from your piggy bank. In this forced stillness and silence, I can sit down across from them, one forearm on the table as I lean forward, and go, “You’re not as powerful as you think you are.”

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In some ways, I’ve been reintroduced to my own interweaving stories, as the situation in this world continues. The returning characters and themes, plot devices and poetry. The lovely and the draining. The beautiful and the repugnant. And in this time of upheaval, I can sort through and edit, reread and decide what will be embellished and what will be deleted. Appreciate each character for what they’ve added to the story, decide to the best of my ability what the next chapters will look like, but knowing I’m simply a vessel for the greater story to unfold through.

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Superposition

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My beachcomber bike isn’t meant for the hilly roads of New Hampshire, but here we are.

There’s a perverseness to this tableau. Here I am, seated upright on my dainty, turquoise bicycle, saying hello to twice as many neighbors on that ride around the block than I would in an entire month. Someone in one of the backyards is grilling. Another has started a campfire. Skies are blue; sun filtering in through the trees.

But all of this is happening in the midst of — and because of — a pandemic. You can see it in how we give each other ample breathing room by going into the middle of the road to avoid each other. Riding alongside us is the absolute dread, uncertainty, stress, tedium, frustration, and fear that has been our constant companions for almost a month.

There’s something simultaneously Rockwellian and Orwellian about it.

It’s cliched, in a way. If a horror movie opened like this, the audience would roll their eyes. It’s too on the nose. All that is missing is “It’s a Wonderful World” overlaying a montage of ER nurses breaking down, bodies being loaded into big rig trucks in NYC, army convoys transporting the dead in Italy. The polar extremes of everyday, modern life.

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Beachcombers are not equipped for this trek. But mine comes with a feature few have: gears. Only five, but it’s enough to get me up the moderate slopes, and with enough elbow grease I can make it up the hills without stopping.

I’ve been in a constant state of grief. The first few weeks, a hazy, surreal anxiety — the kind where I’d drive home and have no idea how I got there. A combination of such paralyzing grief and such bullheaded determination. And now, in the midst of the fourth week, determination has shifted to determinism — what will be is already destined to be, and I’m just along for the ride now.

Everything seems to be in a state of superposition. This is Schrodinger’s pandemic. Life is simultaneously quiet and loud, normal and not. There is so much that needs to get done and yet a vast openness of nothing on the to-do list. I’ve had plenty of time and yet not enough of it. Every unfair, lopsided, toxic situation, every bit of injustice, that simultaneously seem like tiny fish now and yet exactly worth rehashing. We only have the present moment, but also the past and the future blinding us with floodlights.

And we won’t know whether it’s Rockwellian or Orwellian until the lid is lifted.

But that’s the thing about Schrodinger’s Cat: the cat is already dead. The thought experiment was to poke fun at quantum mechanics. Another tale of irony that slipped through the cracks.

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I’ve been here before.

I tell myself that. In truth, none of us have. There is no one alive who would’ve been old enough to remember the Flu of 1918. The closest we can do is create Venn Diagrams. Use analogies. Social distancing is to the blackout orders of WW2 as… well, all the analogies seem to go back to WW2, don’t they?

But I have. I make my own Venn Diagrams. That surreal, hazy anxiety, just like five years ago, when your father’s health spiraled out; when he died and so did your step-mother and so did your brother-in-law and you nearly lost your brother to a motorcycle accident. When a predator put your life on pause and every aspect of your life was upended and you stopped knowing who you were or what you even wanted anymore. That feeling of superposition — to look out at a calm landscape and feel the tremors of dread below your feet. To feel days as both individually eternal and blurring together.

My career is in temporary tatters. Online options have been the aloe vera lotion to a third degree burn. I’ve grieved this, grieved the hard work over the last six-plus years, to build things up, only to watch it disintegrate in front of me — but I’ve been here before. That feeling of having to start over, from seven years ago, when I burned out and had to face the truth that I wasn’t cut out for the job I had returned to school for, build up my credentials for, lost sleep and gained tears and stress stomach aches for. Of suddenly waking up without a job to go to, with any real income coming in, and wondering, “Well…what now?”

I’ve simultaneously in uncharted and charted waters. I have well drawn maps to territories I’ve never been to before.

I’m not equipped for terrain like this. But I can shift gears, however few I may have. And maybe with enough elbow grease, I’ll make it up this hill, too.

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Discern

My car hit 195,000 miles today.

It will most likely hit 200,000 before the summer. I don’t do the long, delirious drives like before — back when life was an unrelenting attack until I had no choice but to become better — but I log at least 1,500 miles a month for work. Hiking season alone can put on an additional 15,000 miles on it.

The car is only 6 years old.

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It’s been a quiet year, so far, for my car. It’s a needed change from last year.

Last year was like a set of dominoes, each spaced just far enough apart that I assumed the current individual piece would be the last one to fall over. I sunk in thousands of dollars over the span of 10 months — each time, something new popping up, sometimes while at the shop for something else. They didn’t know the brakes needed replacing until they fixed the faulty cap. Only in replacing the brakes did they realize the wheel bearings were on their last legs. And so on, and so forth.

In between all this, my A/C breaks and my transmission valve goes. I get an unfixable crack in my bumper. A sensor corrodes and I can’t get my key out of the ignition.

All this, spaced out just far enough apart that I couldn’t make an educated financial decision — not until I had already invested too much to back out. I probably got ripped off, at some point. Something got tacked on that didn’t need to be there. In the chaos of me just wanting my car to run right, I agreed to more than I needed to.

I thought about this, while getting a slow leak checked out in December. An unrepairable slow leak, one that required all 4 tires to replaced, since I have all-wheel drive.

One last financial punch as the year wound down.

Had I known everything my car was going to cost me, would I have invested as much as I did? Would I have cut my losses, asked simply, “What is the trade in value?” and moved on?

Because at what point are you throwing good money after bad? At what point are you draining your savings, your energy, your soul, because you are certain this will be the last problem to be addressed — fix this one last thing, and everything else will be good. At what point do you realize the folly in your statement?

I had stuck it out, primarily because I knew I would finish payments in the following November — and the idea of owning my car, free and clear, felt worth the thousands of extra dollars to get there. I did foolhardy math — if those repairs give me even an extra year, multiply that by my current monthly payment…

But beyond math, I was driven to keep my car — the car my brother-in-law sold me, before he sold his company, before he lost his battle with cancer. It’s a rare sight now, to see another Subaru on the streets with the Singer sticker on the back, especially as the years wear on. It makes me smile something sad. A little nod the other driver knows nothing about.

But even then, I knew I had to be careful. I can’t let sentimentality cloud my judgment. That’s how you guarantee investing more than is intelligent. That’s how you guarantee getting ripped off, feeling taken advantage of, realizing too late you had been agreeing to more things than you ever originally would’ve.

Or should’ve.

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It’s been a good year, so far, for me as well. In some ways, a quiet year. No, not quiet. Just that the sound has shifted. The symphony plays at whisper levels and the cacophony around me has settled enough so now I can hear it.

I can feel the new decade. I’ve untangled myself where I needed to untangle. Closed chapters that been dogeared against my better judgment. Stepped back where I needed to step back, even when stepping back felt like getting walked out on. The act hasn’t been without its tears, but it’s the pangs of growth instead of injury.

My career is picking up. I’m still getting used to the new workload. I’m using the extra revenue to build up the savings I had to wipe out to keep my car running. I’m down to single digits in terms of remaining car payments; I’m already imagining what I can do with that extra money, if my car can hold out, if the promise of a few extra years follows through.

I’m using this time to build up what I spent in 2019 within my own soul, too. Perhaps the same kind of foolhardy investments, in the chaos of me just wanting everything to be all right. Sometimes it takes everything you have — or everything you had given away — to recognize that life is unfair and it’s not worth begging for a spot at a table that you’re not fully welcome at. Or worth being sore that there was never truly a spot for you in the first place.

What would I have done, had I known ahead of time what the total cost would’ve been. That’s a question I’ve routinely asked myself. And it’s, in some ways, a moot point. We can only predict and look ahead so much. A lot is taken as it comes. It always feels like a sound investment in the moment, like this problem will most definitely be the last one. It’s easy to deny that this is just one more domino piece in a predictable and unrelenting row. All you can do is have faith the cost was for a reason — or, at least, it didn’t happen for naught. That something was learned, something strengthened, something cultivated. Perhaps it honed your ability to recognize patterns and cycles, and strengthened your resolve to break them. Maybe even break them sooner.

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I hear myself say something I’ve said a thousand times over in my classes.

“We’re looking to discern the difference between the discomfort of challenge and the warning signals of pain.”

My own statement hits me in a new way and I lose my wording for a moment. How often I try to tell my students to recognize the difference between breathing through challenge and ignoring pain. That there’s a difference between the things you tough it out for and the things you have to back away from. A difference between worthwhile investments and throwing good money after bad. Between acceptance and acquiescence. Between optimism and foolhardiness. Between progressing forward and being part of a toxic cycle. Between something that is simply difficult and warning signals. And that — across the board — that’s a discernment you only start honing with time.

Frozen

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The temperature has dropped to single digits for the first time this season.

My garage door protests opening. My car takes an extra moment to start. The world around me is frozen. The snow that built up from the week has a layer of ice to it and, against the winter morning sun, it is luminescent.

I’m driving down familiar roads to a routine appointment. Car needs new tires after a slow leak sprung on the side of one of them. It’s the final sour note on my car as the year winds down, a year spent with systematically repairing and replacing everything in the car, incrementally investing more and more money until I had no choice but to see it through to the end. Investments that, had all the problems been presented at once, I might’ve opted to abandon the car entirely.

There’s a metaphor there. I know there is. Perhaps one I’ll return to.

I can’t describe exactly how I feel as I’m driving. I try to focus on my audiobook before abandoning it entirely and leaning into this vague emotion. These are familiar roads, roads I once drove down in delirious anxiety and dread, and they’ll potentially always have a tinge of the past on them, the way streets wear the tire burns when cars peel out on them.

Time is a buffer, but sometimes the scratches are too deep to completely polish them away. Like an old injury that just has to be hit at in the right way in order to remind you it’s still there.

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For a fitness professional, I sure spend a lot of them researching trauma.

A simplified idea behind post-traumatic stress is that, when the traumatic event happens, something gets frozen. In the mind, in the body, in the spirit. It’s actually why I try to specialize in trauma-sensitive yoga; I don’t know how to help the mind in any effective way, but at least I can help the body, maybe the spirit.

My career is starting to reflect that. In the new year, I’ll have two new teaching gigs, bare minimum three classes a week, that will focus squarely on trauma-sensitive yoga. Between the addition of new classes and saying good-bye to old ones, my schedule is looking nothing like it did in the beginning, or when my career started to gain traction.

It’s something I’ve given some thought to. There is a class I’ve had for almost five years, and two for almost four, but everything else has changed since then. Studios closed down. Some I had no choice but to walk away from. Others, I more amicably discontinued when the numbers dwindled to nothing. None of the classes from the start of my career continue on today, at least not with me as the teacher.

I already dove into this. How the trauma that started five years ago was so enveloping, the anxiety so palpable, that it got absorbed by my teaching schedule. That it froze against the studio walls the same way it had frozen against the road. And there was relief when I left those places behind, perhaps as a subtly symbolic gesture that life had moved on.

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This time of year always gets retrospective for me. Perhaps a byproduct of it being such a heavy time of the year. Perhaps it’s because it was this time in 2014 that my father’s health went from a steady decline to a tailspin — and I got hint of what the next 10 months were going to bring. It was when my vulnerability was at its peak and my distress beacon looked a little too much like a dinner bell for the vultures. When the tremors of the cataclysmic unearthing that was to come had started to rumble under my feet.

Something froze during that time. Something got stuck, and now sometimes life is measured by the distance from that ground zero, the time that has passed, what has changed.

There’s a lot that has been resolved since then. Perhaps “resolved” is too strong of a term. Many of the storylines have found their conclusions. The endings weren’t the ones I was looking for but they were the ones I got. Funny, how I can write stories with unsatisfying endings because that is how real life works, and yet I had expected differently for my own life.

But regardless, the final lines for the chapter have been written, a few final lessons cemented in place as the decade winds down. A poignant way, bare minimum, to close out these past years, even if it’s not the most satisfying.

(No, that’s not accurate. The individual chapters have ended in anticlimactic ways, but  – oh! – the storylines that branched off from it! Perhaps it’s all for the best that this book closes with the decade; I find I prefer its sequel tremendously more.)

There’s a lot I could’ve done differently. Different ways to navigate situations, my family, my life, my problems. A lot I did sub-par and a lot I did just outright wrong. I could’ve been better, more self-aware, more assertive. But it was in the cataclysm that I emerged with more of those traits, albeit with soot on my shoulders and debris by my feet. I am who I am today because of it, and I’ve fallen in love with that evolving soul I’ve become. The type of person who now has the wherewithal to recognize better ways of handling things in the first place. The type of person who has already demonstrated that she can, when parallel situations present themselves.

Perhaps that’s what needs to be focused on. Put all your energy not in wishing you navigated the past better, more intelligently, more assertively, but to make sure you’re a better person at the end of it and because of it. That whole “mistakes are only mistakes if you don’t learn from them.”

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It’s a beautiful day, despite it being frozen outside. I originally plan on taking the same roads back — plan on leaning into the feeling and playing music that I had enveloped myself in, five years ago. Music that had also been frozen in time, in feeling. The tire marks on the chorus, the bridge. I had planned to lean into it, because sometimes that’s all you can do. Stare down the shadow until the light inevitably comes.

But the wheels take twice as long to install as they were supposed to. Without even remembering my original plans, I take the most direct route onto the highway, to get to my first class in time. I play the audiobook and listen along and it’s not until I’m at the first set of tolls do I even remember what I was originally going to do.

I have to smirk. Sometimes you have to lean into a feeling, a retrospective. But sometimes you have to go full speed ahead in the present moment. And I’ve got a lot planned for such a frozen day.

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Tangled

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I’m attempting to decorate the house and it’s leaving me frustrated.

Not just frustrated, but to the brim. Every little extra thing is spilling me over the edge. Stubbing my toe. Knocking something over. A Christmas light catching on something and pulling it with it.

But I know that my baseline has been temporarily raised. A stubbed toe isn’t really just a stubbed toe right now.

The Christmas lights. That’s where I’m getting the most frustrated. Even the ones that were neatly put away are a tangle when I try to get them out. The delicate ones fold and knot. The bigger ones catch on each other. Half of them, I have to throw out anyway — the lights are out and I can’t pinpoint which bulbs ruined it for the rest of them.

And they catch and snag when I try to hang them across the house. I slam my shin on the back of a chair and the noise I make is something primal.

“Why do I even bother?” I find myself thinking again and again. Because the lights are so beautiful, I find myself answering. Because you’ve decided the pain and frustration of all these entanglements are worth the beauty it can create.

I smirk. Maureen from Rent enters my mind again. Idina Menzel staring wide eyed at the stage lights and shouting, “It’s a metaphor!”

It is.

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Christmas has a heaviness to it. The holiday season doubles the weight in our baggage somehow. It’s why every song about December is morose and melancholy. It’s just a more heightened time, while we simultaneously get dragged down.

I’ve returned to recovery meetings. The ones meant for the family of those addicted. This time I’m focusing on the meetings for adult children of alcoholics. It’s fitting: it was around this time, four years ago, I started going to the broader ones. Walking in and sobbing during the meeting, sobbing afterwards, grateful beyond measure that my career hadn’t really taken off, that I had the time to drive around and cry and process.

I know I need them. Specifically for the meetings for children who grew up in it. I’m a textbook case. I know I am. All I have to do is pay attention when they read from the Laundry List in the very beginning of the meeting. If this were a high school test, they’d be putting me in the honors classes.

We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process. We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We overcommit and get angry at those who don’t do the same.

Yup. Yup. Yup.

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There’s a panel in the Watchmen graphic novel. Dr. Manhattan looks up at the sky and says, “I’m tired of earth, these people. I’m tired of being in the caught of the tangle of their lives.” I read that novel years and years ago, and I keep coming back to that one panel.

I’ve cried too much this year because of how tangled up I was in other people’s lives. So tangled up that it was inevitable that the cords would eventually wrap around my neck. I’ve taken off what I can. Cut what I had to. Taken steps back and put up boundaries and reminded myself that, “healthy people have boundaries; sick people feel guilty for even thinking about having them.” Decided, perhaps foolishly, that some tangles are okay — that the beauty of those lights are worth it.

I’ve learned a lot. Learned that if someone takes a step back, you don’t take a step forward. Learned that you can pour your heart out and still be left to clean it up alone. Learned that trying to untangle someone else’s mess just leaves you with lacerations on your skin. I’m doing my best to practice better boundaries and better self advocacy — but the fact remains, the more invested I am, the likely it is I’m going to slam my shins and stub my toe.

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I keep coming back to one night this year, when two of my friends got uproariously drunk. They were gliding across the house and making wild plans and statements. The owner of the house turned to me, the quiet, mostly sober one, and said, “thank you.”

Thank you for being the responsible one. Thank you for being small when the others are taking up space. Lest anyone forget that the reinforcement for this behavior comes from all angles.

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There’s a line from a TV show, about Christmas. About how we put up all these lights to safeguard against the darkest time of year. That we put up with all its tangles because otherwise the blackness fills the space instead. The funniest thing is, the line was barely a sentence long. So short and so obscure that you can’t find it anywhere online, even if you search the episode’s name. Just like the Watchmen panel, it’s something small that made something big within my soul.

I’d be amiss to say that I’m still getting used to some of the cuts I’ve made this year. The air is cold in the distance I created. There’s a phantom ache across my skin where those tangled cords once threatened to cut off circulation. Perhaps I’m afraid that stepping away from the tangles means that the lights have abandoned me too, that the darkness will close in. Perhaps suffocating entanglement at least meant things were shiny and bright.

Perhaps I just have to have faith that I’m making the right decisions, win, lose, or draw. That the ones I signed on to keep will straighten themselves out, that I’ll be rewarded with beauty in linear fashion, and not a mess that will leave me with indents in my skin and bruises on my shins and a primal sound of suffering escaping my mouth.

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Winter

I feel its first introduction when I step out of the store.

That rawness, the air sharp, even as the skies are softened with gray. There are garlands already wrapped around on the posts outside the store. It’s hard to tell if it’s misting or lightly snowing.

I breathe it in, making me think about the factoid about the smell after rain. That humans are more sensitive to the smell, to the bacteria that make it, than sharks are to blood in the water. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there, or quaint symbolism if I think about it for long enough.

But it’s hard for me to dive in deep. My skin has its own rawness to it, its own sharpness. I’m getting sick. Once again.

I have to wonder if I have to welcome every changing season with sickness. I remember the cold that lay me out when summer turned to fall this year. The flu (despite getting the yearly shot) once spring stepped forward, forcing me out of a race I spent all winter trying to train for.

It’s like I have to react violently and viscerally to change. That my whole body has to throw itself into tumult.

The time change has just happened as well, and I feel like I’m an hour delayed on everything.

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For years I wrote about the holidays. For four years in a row, I laid out my own rawness about Christmastime.

And, in some ways, it makes sense. Even without the catalyst events, the life thrown into tumult and then built back up again, the holidays bring their own edge.

I’m intrigued by this edge. I still don’t know how the holidays are able to make the darkest time of year a little brighter and a little heavier, simultaneously. I don’t know how Christmas lights can shine sweetly and yet sting. Tens of thousands of words later, and I still can’t get to the bottom of it.

But last year, I had stopped. Last year I didn’t even feel the ping to wax philosophical on Christmas. Perhaps it’s because sometimes things are better left felt and not analyzed.

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This is the time of year I have to think about vitamin D supplements. Broad spectrum UV lights. Alarm clocks that mimic sunrise. Anything to counteract the disappearing light.

(And perhaps that’s really the culprit, and the poor Jingle Bell Rock has been the scapegoat for a deficiency in vitamin D and an off-kilter internal clock.)

I’ve been talking up a yoga instructor I know, whose classes I used to take regularly when we were at the same studio. About how she embraces this dark period, as tough as it can be. She holds classes on the winter solstice, reads poetry about the darkness. Expounds that the dark times are part of the ebb and flow, and chasing the light constantly means we’re denying half of the scope of human condition.

It’s funny to think about. After such a rollercoaster year, it is as the days have been getting shorter that things have been feeling a little lighter. A bit more hopeful. Ironically, the darkest parts were confronted during the sunniest days, and I spent them disappearing into the mountains to try to build my soul back up. The days that had the most edge were the ones when the sun was highest in the sky.

Perhaps a nice reminder that the natural world doesn’t bend to your bidding.

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I am definitely sick. There is no other way around it.

Whatever cold someone had, I have it now. I muddle through classes, I mainline cough syrup and ibuprofen. I cancel whatever it superfluous. I rest.

“Getting sick is sometimes my body’s only way of getting me to slow down,” I tell a friend, when I explain I won’t be around this weekend, when they remark that I keep getting walloped with disease.

Slowing down. If fall applies easy brakes, winter slams on them — and the whiplash is sometimes pretty severe. Softened perhaps only by the lights, the jingles, that gentle rawness in the air that’s like blood to sharks in the water.

Today, the snow is unambiguously falling. It gathers and dances in the air and makes whirlpools against the ground. But nothing sticks. It’s a trickster of an introduction. Something slick and flighty, something sharply beautiful against the cherished remaining sun.

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The Whole Image

My husband got me into a new game. A puzzle where you have to figure out the image based on nothing but number clues along the top and side of a blank square. Empty rows & columns, and you only get three mistakes before you have to restart (four if you’re willing to watch a commercial).

It’s a game of patience, of looking at the numbers and seeing what they can tell you. Slowly chipping away, even if it means agonizing over the numbers only to fill in exactly one block.

I avoided it at first. Numbers get jumbled in my head. Math made me cry in frustration until I abandoned the subject entirely. But like so many other things that make me want to run, I stepped forward into it, if only to say I can.

I’m not great at it. The numbers still get jumbled and I’ll make a move assuming I saw one number when it was something else. And sometimes I stare at the tiles, unsure what my next move is going to be.

“This puzzle is giving me nothing,” I’ve said a few times to my husband, more times than I should.

“Well, tell me about that row,” is all he’ll say, and point to a spot on my screen. He knows the answer and isn’t giving it to me. He wants me to find it on my own. Teach a man to fish instead of giving it to him, in a sense.

And it’s a quick lesson with the fishing line. I figure something out on that row, and then another, and then another. And suddenly the entire puzzle is figured out. Suddenly a bunch of white tiles is now a mosaic. A flower, a sunrise, the pyramids. Chaos and confusion evolved into beauty.

—

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—

“It was a calculated risk, but man I’m bad at math.”

“No it wasn’t,” my husband corrects. “It was a calculated risk, but you did the math right. You knew exactly each way the situation could’ve gone. You’re not bad at math just because a negative result happened.”

We’re driving through the Midwest after a soul-draining week — yet another tumult in the soul, another moment I had to stand toe to toe with a few demons I wished were quieter housemates. Another chapter in this overhaul from the last few months.

All this inner growth is goddamn exhausting.

I sigh out the uncertainty. I’ve been here before. In fact, exactly the year before, give or take a week. It’s almost like the fall is has become a type of clearing out ever since my father passed. A wildfire that sweeps through forests like kindling.

I’m focusing on the positive. I’m finding my voice. I’ve let toxic or unfair situations fester before. It’s what got me into such a confrontation last year, anyway. Because I couldn’t just stand my ground, even though I knew it would’ve meant walking away. Little did I understand, then, the power in deciding when you make those steps.

It comes on the heels of a more innocuous, albeit just as clearing out situation — the same way that, last year, a more innocuous, albeit just as clearing situation came just before the confrontation. And just like last year, it leaves an unsettling feeling.

“But it’s okay,” I say on the drive, my eyes on the road in front of me. “I’m at peace with it.”

But back home in the northeast, I sigh heavily again. So much is in limbo. Things happening in 2020 that I can only wait for in 2019. The moving parts are making me dizzy. There are more things in the air and it’s all can do not to snatch them out and call them mine, albeit it prematurely. After getting comfortably complacent for years, so much is unknown.

Only, no. There has been no real complacency. This time last year I was staring down the barrel of uncertainty, like the fall before, like the fall before, and the fall before that, and the one before that. There’s a reason I feel fall always feels like a clearing out. A clearing out that feels like loss at first. But it always proved to be the right decision. It always worked out.

And that’s what I focus on. Everything will work out. It always does. I learned a long time ago that it will feel like life is shoving you to the ground when in fact you were dodging a bullet.

__

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—

I like the numbers game because you never know when a chip here and there will cause the entire sheet of ice to break.

I like the satisfaction of things falling into place, after staring at the great unknown, telling the powers that be, “You’re giving me nothing.” — when, in reality, they have given me plenty. It’s just a matter of looking at the signs and asking yourself, “Tell me about what you see.”

When I started, I assumed I’d be stuck on easy mode forever. I graduated to intermediate, and then swore I’d only do the hard mode puzzles with my husband to guide me through.

And, for the first few, he does: a few evenings on the couch, my iPad between us, him asking me to tell him about this row, that column, when to change orientation and what to look out for. He’s not really guiding me through so much as he’s teaching me how to think so I can guide myself.

Soon enough, I’m doing the hard puzzles on my own. Asking myself the same questions. Messing up, mixing up numbers in my head, but eventually getting the puzzle, even if I have to watch a commercial to get that extra chance.

It’s a lesson in patience. A lesson in sitting with the unknown and recognizing you don’t have the whole picture yet. In just thinking aloud, “what are you trying to tell me?” and deduce from there. In recognizing that you don’t have to solve the whole thing just yet — just chip away, tile by tile, step by step, until eventually the ice breaks and everything falls into place.

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Fall

It’s an album I haven’t listened to in ages, and their recent concert had inspired me to dig it back up.

The intro does something to my soul. There’s a stirring, a recollection of the past, that I can’t put my finger on. As the boyband singers croon, I’m transported — but I don’t know where.

It becomes the most fascinating walk down memory lane. I play the intro over, and over again. It’s nighttime. That much I know. There’s a rumble underneath me and I eventually deduce that I’m in a car. And I’m the one driving. And I feel peace, like I’m about to embark on something. But where am I? Where am I going? Why is this song placing me in this unknown car? I’m here by sight and by feel and nothing else to connect me.

I slowly piece it back together. It’s 2008. I’m learning stick shift, albeit it by myself. It’s my mom’s car, but my father had given me a quick lesson before leaving me to it. I’m leaving my parents’ house to drive around the neighborhood, to get comfortable with manual transmission.

It’s 2008 and the album just came out and I bought it on CD and I have it in the CD player. It’s my soundtrack as I shift from first, to second, to third, my left foot clumsily at the clutch. I remember clear skies and quiet nights and the Backstreet Boys slowly singing out, “Last night I saw the fireworks, the kind of pain that never hurts...”

How peculiar, how unnerving, how amazing, to have such a deep memory encapsulated in a song — and to not fully remember the moment, to have it only stored as the night air and an engine’s rumble and a serene sense of calm as the night unfolds before you.

—

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—

Fall has making its quiet introduction through the breeze in the trees. I can feel it. The same way I can feel its preamble in the mornings, when the air has enough chill that I need my sweatshirt and the porch feels cold beneath my bare feet and the coffee cup feels just a little warmer in my palms.

Fall is my gentle lullaby to soothe the overtired soul before rest. Fall applies easy brakes without jerking the vehicle into stopping. Fall reminds me that life doesn’t have to go a million miles per hour, that sometimes living your best life is a life with moments in the slow lane.

It’s been a fast summer, one spent feverishly finishing my hiking challenge — spent feverishly letting life unfold in whatever ways the fates deemed fit. I’ve stayed up late only to wake up early. I’ve released poetry, released the past, released tears, realized a little more about myself. The kind of summer where I can spread the calendar out over it and points out all the events, the adventures, the plans. The peaks and the valleys, the highs and the lows. Where it dipped and where it soared.

Summer’s swan song always has the same refrain. “Where did the summer go?” and I can righteously point all of it out and say, “Right here.”

It’s why I do what I do. Sodden the day with memories and perhaps it will slow a few of the days down in the rear view.

Because this life is so tragically short and the years zip by, one faster than the other. Because there seems to be fewer and fewer verses in between that refrain. It’s why I’ll exhaust my body and my mind and my heart and risk shattering all three without hesitation. I’ll bleed myself dry before letting the days just bleed together.

And it’s why I document, I journal, I maniacally take pictures. I want to oversaturate, and yet find a way to hold all of it.

—

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—

One crisp morning, I’m greeted by a hummingbird. The distinct hum jerks my head to the right, to the flower bed that I didn’t dig up during yardwork (reclaiming the backyard: another hallmark of this busy summer). She flutters around, her squeak just a little louder than her hum, and just as involuntary. It’s like she’s compelled to sing a song to the lavender pedals before landing on them.

She darts. She darts in a way that makes me believe she’s safe even from the neighborhood cats and their viciously destructive ways. She eventually rests on one of the flowers, her wings uncharacteristically by her side, unmoving for a rare, beautiful moment.

But she still stirs. Her body thrums, her torso wiggles and gyrates, her head darts around. Even when she’s not moving, her soul is still rapid. Rest is not actually rest.

I feel that in my own soul.

—

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—

The week after my hiking season finishes — when I stopped waking up at 3 in the morning every week, sometimes twice a week — I become permanently tired.

There is not enough sleep for me. I nap for hours and wake up unrested. My knees are stiff and aching in ways that won’t go away.

It goes on for two weeks. It’s as if my body had accumulated all the exhaustion over the summer and waited until I had a moment to breathe. This is certainly not the first time this has happened. Like the original marathon runner collapsing after finally reaching Athens.

“You do too much,” my husband warns, as I’m nursing ibuprofen.

I learn later that a major bug has swept through the area. People are absent from classes. Kids are taking sick days on their first week of school. I can’t help but build a defense for myself out of it. Maybe instead of running myself into the ground, I actually had fortified myself, and what knocked them out for days simply compromised my hummingbird ways.

And therein lies the problem: I haven’t found proof this relentless pace is a negative thing. That I’m not burning out so much as I’ve built the flames to ward off the unwelcomed.

—

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—

There’s a dead butterfly on my porch a month after the hummingbird visit.

It lays on its side by the door, like it had crawled to our home for sanctuary and we refused to let it in.

I’m heartbroken. It had been a hard weekend and I woke up that Monday with hives across my skin. Waking up to find this lifeless, delicate thing only serves to further things. It’s the symbolic cousin of the wasp who used our porch as its final resting place as my brother in law lost his battle with cancer.

“I’m frustrated I’m this upset,” I tell my husband. I’m referencing the weekend. The past week. Not the butterfly. I’ll let myself shed tears over the butterfly.

“Why?” he asks. “What does that serve? How is being frustrated over your feelings going to help?”

“It’s not but…” I’m swallowing back tears. I’m in a loop these days. Talking about being upset gets me upset.

“You are having a pure experience. Don’t fight it. This is what it means to be human.”

It’s something he reminded me of last winter, when the rug had been pulled and I just wanted to stop hurting already, when I had gambled heart and soul and lost to the house. It’s sorrow, but it’s pure sorrow. These are emotions that ping the edges of the spectrum and remind us of the breadth of the human experience.

And isn’t this why I do what I do? Perhaps it’s not even to weigh down the days so they stop flitting by like a hummingbird getting the last bits of nectar before winter. It’s to fill the soul with pure experience.

Pure emotion. To have it paint the soul so readily that sometimes a memory will come back as pure visceral experiences – the hum of the car, the feel of the night air, the sense of expansion and adventure – before the details can even fall into place.

—

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—

I bury the butterfly in the garden.

The garden — filled with flower bushes I had painstakingly moved when reclaiming the back yard. I can’t stand the thought of the butterfly getting snatched up by a bird, or getting stepped on. I’m identifying and personifying it. I’m lending it pure sorrow.

Even in my hands, I have a hard time believing it’s dead. But nothing moves. The wind rustles the wings but they won’t open, won’t reveal the beauty of its markings.

This little symbolic gesture. Maybe a nod to the wasp who disappeared after finding out Aaron was gone, who did get snatched up or stepped on.

They say fall is a reminder that there’s beauty in death. Soon this ground will be frozen, the flower beds under inches of snow. And I will be hibernating in my own way. My heart and my soul and my body and my mind will still be on the line. Because that’s what I do. I know no other way to wear my heart but on its sleeve, no other place to put my spirit except in places where it can get crushed. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That Monday morning, I sit on the stone edge of my garden, my feet on either side of the hole I dug. One of the butterfly’s front legs sticks to my thumb as I place it in the dirt, like it’s clinging to me. My heart breaks just a little more. It eventually rests in the hole I dug out with the trough and I slowly cover it up. The day is warm and a reminder that summer is still a guest at this event, and its goodbyes are jovial and drown out.

In a week the weather will soar back up, the mornings with that hazy preamble that the tropical regions know so well. Perhaps this is a reminder that life is not linear, that so many things will bid its good-byes only to reappear, that the valleys will plateau and shoot back up before you ever reach sea level.

Either way, it’s a reminder it’s not time to rest, just yet.

Like the sun was in my eyes, and now I’m running blind / And I can’t explain / Last night I saw the fireworks / The kind of pain that never hurts / …Another unsuspecting Sunday afternoon

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Forty-Eight, Again

(For Part One.)

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An old classmate gave this advice: mourn the first anniversary, but stop keeping track after that.

Granted, he went back on his own advice a year or so later, but I still gave it weight. And I tried it myself. And, just like him, I faltered by the second anniversary. It’s just too big of a mile marker. It’s the notch you count the rings of the tree against.

When you lose your father, no matter what the relationship was, there is a distinct line drawn. A before and an after. And one can’t help but measure the distance between them and that line.

—

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My parents met through the Appalachian Mountain Club.

They met because they were both avid hikers, despite being perennial Bostonians. They met back in the early 80s, back before it was popular to hike all of New Hampshire’s 4,000 footers. They met because my father had a car and was offering to be a ride for a group hike.

It’s actually a beautiful story. Leave out a few details, and you have something out of a fairytale. Two hikers who fall in love and decide to conquer all 48 together, sleeping overnight in huts, campsites, and retracing some of their steps so the other can conquer what they already did.

Leave out the details, stop the story at the wedding, and they live happily ever after.

Because there’s a reason why movies based on true stories bend certain truths and omit others. A nuanced story is too heavy for the average audience to carry.

At my father’s memorial, my mom reads her eulogy on lined notebook paper. Written in pencil, and double spaced, as if she’s back in grade school. My heart breaks on that detail alone. She meticulously describes how they met, how they hiked all 4,000-footers, how they joined the enviable club years and years and years ago.

And she leaves it at that. That is the body, the crux of her eulogy. No mention of life after hiking. Perhaps she’s a lot like me: it’s best to focus on the pure memories, when things were good, when you could dip into the well and know the water hadn’t been poisoned.

—

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The summer before my father died, my friend’s boyfriend took us on a long hike through the Pemi Wilderness to 13 Falls.

It would be my first hike in the Whites since I was a child — and to a swimming hole, no less.

The summer before my father died still has a haze around it. It was my lowest point — and I hope to always be my lowest point — of my adult life. Everything was wrong and the dread constantly rumbled under my feet. It was all I could do not to drop everything and run; assume a new identity, call mulligan, and try again.

I still remember seeing Franconia Notch peak out from the bend in the highway. The mountains don’t make my problems seem small, but they make my soul feel large, I scribbled in my notebook. I remember that hike, that gentle slope to a pristine set of waterfalls and freezing pools of water — something to cool the anxiety that radiated under my skin. And I remember that long walk back down a former logging road, my fingers swollen from dehydration and pooling blood, and, for the first time since possibly November, I felt peace. I still had no idea what the outcome of anything was going to be, but for once I’m not clinging to what I desperately hope for. For a split moment, I face the future without carrying my attachments to the outcome.

I’ve used my hikes for a lot of things over the years. To escape, to dwell, to think out all the things I wanted to say to people, especially after my father died. To radiate anger at every person who wronged or manipulated me, who made a hard time just that much harder. Those who used me, either as a scapegoat or a stopgap (or both) when I was at my most vulnerable. To emit everything and beg the forest to take it in. But the main use of my hikes have shifted, and it shifted to that feeling on the Lincoln Woods trail, coming back from 13 Falls after logging over 13 miles before hitting the logging road trail.

Hike not for catharsis, but for serenity. Hike to hear the hum of the bigger machine at play and be at peace with whatever it’s going to bring you.

—

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—

When I hit 30, I decide I want to follow the trail I took as a child to summit.

All those pure memories of the past, and that trail is the nucleus for them. Hiking along the river to the major waterfall. The smell of the water passing over the rocks, of our old canvas packs, our plastic water canteens.

I’m turning 30 and I’m full of symbolism. Life has just started to piece itself back together. I’m just starting to hold my own, to let go, to break from people who aren’t concerned with my well-being, to reconnect with those who do, to patch up what had been ripped. And I want to return to the very trail that heralds an unadulterated time, but now follow it all the way to the top. I feel the poetry in it, and I chase forward.

The only thing is, I can’t remember the trail’s name. I call my mom, ready to handle the string of non sequiturs I’ll get instead of an answer. Ready to have my question met the same way questions were met during my father’s health spiral, when I just wanted to know what the doctors said. Ready to be frustrated and upset and ready to throw my phone against the wall because of it.

But she answers with ease.

“That’s the Falling Waters trail,” she says, and talks a little bit about the hike. She’s lucid and linear and my heart shatters over it, over the person she must’ve once been, over the million ways our relationship will never be.

The day before my 30th, I climb the Falling Waters trail with my husband to its summit, then follow the ridgeline over two other mountains. The summits are all socked in and you can barely see the trail ahead of you. But the memories are precious and the poetry is still sound.

—

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—

Two years later, when my hikes are no longer about escape and release, when I feel confident in my time alone in the forest, I decide I want to follow in their footsteps. I want to hike all 48 qualifying 4,000 footers.

Perhaps it’s because it’s the only way I want to follow in their footsteps. Because my adult life has been defined by the ways I went in the opposite direction, and such deviation can chip away at your soul without counterbalance.

I expect the hikes to become a rumination on my parents, my childhood, my father and his life and his death. And, for the first official one, it is. The same way anything that makes the ground tremble will bring rocks to the surface.

But after that, the hikes are my own. I think about all sorts of things, get songs stuck in my head, worry about time, focus squarely on the trail. But I’m not left in the past. In fact, the technicalities and difficulties of the trail have me focused squarely on the present. The moments I don’t, I slip, wipe out, get bruised and banged.

And even with the scrapes, I see the poetry in that. Poetry isn’t always pretty and light.

—

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—

I mostly go alone and the hikes force my soul into transformation. Some things smooth out, while others reveal their grit — but the right grit, the kind that you need.

I learn the hard way about a lot of things: reading topography, checking the map, packing enough water, understanding your limits.

But then again, that’s always been me. If I don’t learn the hard way, it doesn’t stick. I need to be literally crawling up the rocks, so tired I want to cry but too tired to actually cry, before it leaves an indelible mark. And that’s something that undeniably extends beyond hiking, and why 28 was as hard as it was.

—

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—

The hikes make me stronger, and stronger than I realize.

Even the hikes when I’m literally crawling up rocks — pep-talking to myself while simultaneously and only semi-facetiously thinking, “this is literally the hill I’m going to die on,” — I’m passing hikers left and right.

I’m hitting mountains in record speeds, destroying book times and averages. A few ask if I’m a trail runner. My concept of what’s an easy hike and a hard one shifts dramatically.

And it’s why I can’t hate any of the trails, even if I was cursing them out when I was on them. They’re the reason I’m stronger, that I have this much fight in me. Their relentless and unforgiving cruelty is why my soul has both grit and smoothed out edges.

In the same way, it’s why I don’t hate any of the people I once had anger for. I forgive them like I forgive the trails. They helped make me who I am today.

—

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—

I can’t help but think of my parents as my hikes wind down.

Call it one more sifting of the ground. A reminder of the start line as you see the finish.

“They tried their best.” It’s not exactly a new revelation, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of it. They went down a path blindly and with demons nipping at their feet. The fact that they both got so lost in the woods is a reason to feel sorry, not resentment. There were good moments, and unlike the good intentions they don’t have to pave a road to perdition.

I hit my last summit with a run and a smack of my hand against the cairn. I’m overwhelmed with emotion and grateful I’m the only person on the summit.

And I stay. Stay until the sun is kissing my skin, soaking in more than just the UV rays. Forty-eight. I now qualify for the same club my parents joined long before I was born. And I think of how I recently explained to some friends (partly) why I’m doing it, and how they told me how sweet it was to follow in my parents’ footsteps.

Because stories are light when the heavy details are removed.

I meet up with a group of men that I passed on my way to the summit. We chat in the way hikers tend to do, the ease of knowing you’re around kin, people cut at least in some way from the same cloth as you.

“Are you local?” one asks.

“A bit,” I say. “It’s just an hour or two drive for me. How about you guys?”

They’re from Massachusetts. Two from the South Shore. One from the town over from my hometown, and one from my actual hometown.

Of course he’s from Weymouth. Of course. Of course he’s from where I grew up. And of course his friend is from the town I would escape to as a teenager.

And I exit down that former logging road one more time. The very one that had brought me to 13 Falls. And my fingers are swollen in the same way, and I’m also at peace — but a different kind of peace, different than when I was 28 and hysterical and desperate and insecure. I’m a different kind of person than that girl at 28. I stride down this pathway in a different way than she did. And I relish in the parallels as I round out my time on the Lincoln Woods trail, coming out a completely different person than when I first went in four years ago.

Life is poetry in ways that remind you that something bigger is at play.

—

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—

The next day, I steel myself to call my mom, to tell her the good news.

My phone calls are like a social worker checking in on a client. A nurse checking in on her invalid. Deviate from that dynamic and it can shatter me, leave me in tears on the couch. To call with any other intention is to play with fire.

And I quickly abandon telling her about my hike, as she immediately dives into a rambling set of non sequiturs, repeating certain talking points over and over again. She tells me about her upcoming back surgery, and I piece together that the doctors have finally advised her against driving in light of her deteriorating mental state.

She quickly segues into talking about the hikes she used to do. This is pretty common these days, to talk about the Whites from 30 years ago. And I use it, these days, as best as I can, to connect. We can’t meet in the present moment, but perhaps we can meet in the past, back when things were good and stories had happy endings.

“I don’t know if you do any hiking, but…” and my heart sinks. She doesn’t remember the calls I made, the letters I wrote, telling her about my adventures. She doesn’t even remember I hike.

Eventually I wedge the information in, wedge myself between my mom and her ramblings. That I also summited all of the mountains she once did.

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” she says, before immediately changing topics, before returning again and telling me how wonderful it is that I summited all 48, before veering away once more.

I know, somewhere in her mind, where grey matter still remains, she is so proud of me, so happy for me. In those little pockets of lucidity, there’s a mother and daughter on two opposite sides of the spectrum, and yet somehow still cut from the same cloth.

Life is poetry if you’re willing to handle a little free verse.

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Slow is a Good Look

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Fort Lauderdale, in some ways, feels like homecoming.

It’s only my fourth time here, but perhaps it’s in the same way just a few trips to the midwest can create a homebase. Sometimes your soul just knows what and where (or who) home is, where it can rest its head in the tumult of the world.

But it’s also my fourth time here, and that would usually get me antsy. I’ve already been here. Let’s see what a new town is like, new state, new country. There’s too vast of a world to tread the same soil multiple times. It’s an insatiable wanderlust that I’ve been trying to reckon with, try to balance out, try to calm down and smooth over. 

Yes, it’s a vast world, but what parts of it will really soak in if your eyes are constantly on the horizon, the next bend in the road.

I was the one to suggest it. Come down to Florida for our annual vacation in June. Come to the very spot that introduced Florida to me in the first place, introduced me to a version of the Atlantic that wasn’t always cold, beaches that weren’t filled with rocks. It was partly pragmatic, partly a tradeoff (how many vacations of ours have been adventure packed, even the so-called low-key ones?), but largely a practice in slowing down. I don’t have to constantly be darting all over the map. It’s still a foreign concept to me, but sometimes homecomings can feed the soul, too.

—

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—

I keep collecting seashells while I’m at the beach.

A part of me rebels against it. You have enough shells at home. They fill jars and glass containers throughout your house. Artwork you made with them still hasn’t been hung up. You. Have. Enough.

But sea shells are a lot like good memories and adventures. Whatever quota you think there might be, there isn’t. And just like good experiences, when one is within reach, you grab for it, make it yours.

This time around, I’m drawn to two types of shells: the ugly and the smooth.

I pick up ones shaped by harden barnacles, that look more like misshapen pumice stones than anything else. And I pick up the ones shaped by the waves and the sand, that look more like opaque sea glass than anything else.

There’s a metaphor there. I know it. Isn’t that what writers are notorious for? You can find the metaphor in everything. To maddening levels, noticing the metaphor in everything.

And the immediate is there: beauty in the unconventional, the character that lays in the imperfections, etc, etc, etc. But I also think of sea glass, of the piece my best friend wrote for me in my time of hysterical and dire need. A piece that reminded me of the creation of sea glass — that, if you find yourself shattered upon the rocks, let the ocean do what it needs to do. Let it churn you over time and time again, bring you to the shore only to pull you back out, until you’re what you were destined to become.

The blog that had the piece has long since been taken down, but it’s by far one of the most memorable posts I’ve ever read, and one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received. 

I took the metaphor a step further a year or two later, comparing sea glass to the pieces that are still new in their brokenness. That, if you find yourself shattered on the rocks, allow the ocean to do what it needs to do, and don’t try to escape it early. Pull yourself from the tumult too soon and you’ll still have your jagged, cutting edges, and you’ll make whoever tries to pick you up bleed.

I’m not sure, exactly, what the metaphor is this time around. Perhaps that the tumult can soften and transform you, but it also can take away your texture if you don’t know when to extricate yourself. Or to find that fine line between the sea glassed shells and the barnacled ones. Or that the same force that can soften your edges could add more on. Who knows.

But then again, I’m not picking up these shells for their metaphors. I just think they’re pretty.

—

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—

Three days into Fort Lauderdale, and my husband gazes quietly at me in the elevator.

“Florida is a good look on you,” he says.

“Is it because I’m all sunkissed now?” I ask.

“You’re Irish. Standing under a 100-watt bulb gets you sunkissed,” he jibes. He adds: “No, it’s more than that. You look relaxed. You look at ease.”

I think of the few other times I look at ease. After a few drinks, when the muscles in my face relax. In the middle of a hike, when I apparently (and unconsiously) smile. It’s nice to see a middle ground, between moderate annihilation and physical exertion. There are other ways to drop what you’ve been carrying, if only temporarily.

—

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2019 has been about release. Releasing things that have been held for a few months, a few years, an entire lifetime in some instances. And in that release, I’ve also been trying to let go of that need for speed. To allow life to be slow. Let a Sunday be a lazy Sunday. Lay in bed when you can. Go on vacation and go to the beach and sit in exquisite indulgence as you read an entire book in three sittings (it’s been months since I devoured a book this quickly). Wade into the water and gently swim alongside the school of little, shining fish. Stand in the waves and let the fish nibble at your ankles. Sit out on the balcony and listen to the waves and feel the warm breeze.

Perhaps the slower approach is okay to wade into from time to time. Let timelines be the timelines they’re going to be. Enjoy the music without wondering when it’s going to end, or what the next song will be. Don’t crane my neck to see what’s beyond the bend, even when I feel desperate for what the horizon has in store. Be with the scenery of now. Look around and appreciate everything within arm’s reach.

Maybe the slow approach can sunkiss my skin like a Florida afternoon.

Maybe I can find homecoming in the present moment. No matter what that present moment is.

—

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Five days into our vacation, and we find our lone piece of seaglass on the shoreline. It’s long and rectangular and looks almost like a crystal. We find plenty of barnacled shells and smooth shells and the conventionally pretty ones, but no other pieces of sea glass.

“I don’t know if I should be shocked we didn’t find any more,” says my husband, “or shocked that we found one in the first place.”

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