Places I Stopped on the Way Home: A Memoir of Chaos and Grace

by Meg Fee

We sit across from one another, and I tell her I am blue and low and bruised, and she looks me right in the eye and says, Meg, we all have those moments. We all live through stretches of time in which we think we’re not doing so well. And as I listen to her I suddenly feel a distance between us that is unbridgeable. I am aware that we are using similar words to describe two very different experiences. That’s not what this is, I want to say. We’re not talking about the same thing. But instead I sip my coffee and smile and nod because, much as we don’t always want them to be, some battles are private ones.

And you cannot get close to, or be intimate with, or fall in love with a person who is so mired in their own shit that they’ll do anything they can to pretend there’s not a stink about it. You can only wish them well and walk away.

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

And what must it feel like when a person you love carries your heaviness, if only for a moment?

I have let go of expectations and, without meaning to, of hope, too.

That in fact, my biggest issue is the division of food into only two categories: bad and good. Healthy and not. Acceptable and off-limits.

Long gone is the allure of the bad boy—our mistaken confusion of unkindness for complexity. A man can be many things, but let him be kind, first.

But this is what I know to be true, that in the worst moments of our lives, good things happen. That, in fact, the good and bad rush in together, one somersaulting over the other. And you must be alert enough to look for both.

But just as it is not my job to convince a man to love me, it cannot be my job to convince a man that he is worthy of the love that I have to offer.

I have wrongly assumed that in making myself small, in settling for a job I hate, other things will be easier.

When you seek out stability for fear of failure, you have already lost.

And suddenly home is not a place, but the inhalation and exhalation of your breath as you sleep in bed beside me.

When you have been alone longer than most, there are certain things you learn. Chief among them is this: there is no one person for you. The world is wide and vast, and sometimes you meet the right person at the wrong time.

People have told me that there is almost no way to prepare for how beautiful a place becomes just before you go, made sweet by its impermanence.