Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

A few nights before I left the city for good, I found myself at my third party of the evening, where investment bankers in upturned collars sat hunched over caterpillar-thick lines of cocaine, sweating as they talked animatedly about their stock portfolios, summer rentals in Montauk, and on and on. It was 5:00 a.m., and this wasn’t my scene. I wanted to go home.

He was the kind of guy who makes you look more generously on the parts of yourself that fill you with self-loathing. He was the kind of guy who, if the circumstances had been different, I would have taken my time getting to know.

A childhood spent on the move had made me weary of goodbyes. On my way out, I left a note on his shoes saying, Thanks for the unexpected fun. Inshallah, our paths will cross again someday.

Determined to spend less time talking about the things I wanted to do and more time actually doing them,

I was taken aback by his thoughtfulness, by the way he was always intent on making everyone in a room feel at ease. Five years my senior, he had a quiet, unassuming wisdom and playfulness of spirit that made him seem both far older and younger than his age.

But the thing about being in love is that you can be anywhere and it feels like an adventure.

I loved the annual ritual of drafting resolutions: I was always filling journals with to-do lists and dreams. The semblance of a plan, no matter how tenuous, balanced out the uncertainty and confusion I felt about the future. Though Will wasn’t much of a planner, he humored me.

“There’s no one quite like you. No one who urges me to live more than you do—who makes me want to be me more than you do. Your appetite for knowing more, and knowing yourself better, makes me want to be better. What we’re building together is big. And soon you’ll be out of here, and we can get back to our life.”

They had the same bohemian values, spending what money they had on good wine, theater tickets, and travel, but they squabbled often, both of them too stubborn and independent for their own good.

It’s a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are now is heightened against the backdrop of old haunts.

As Kahlo wrote, “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

but what I knew, for now, was that I was starting to find my power.

I had spent my twenty-three years on this planet preparing for a life: pulling all-nighters so that I could get the grades to receive a scholarship to a good college and, one day, have a career of my choosing; learning to cook for the dinner parties I told myself I’d throw one day; saving up my paychecks to be able to go on a long trip somewhere; talking about all the writing I wanted to do without ever actually working up the courage to put any of my writing out into the world.

“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were dying.” We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotline.

For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.

but who related to the broader notion of having their life “interrupted.” From the wife of a senator in the Midwest who was struggling with infertility.

We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.

Our loyalty to each other was oceanic.

Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.

It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.

I am not allowed to leave out of fear. In moments when all I want is to flee back to the city, I resolve to stay for an extra night, then two, then three. I decide to trust that what feels unknown and frightening will soon feel familiar and safe. I tell myself that, with enough time, I’ll grow tired of triple-checking the lock or losing sleep over imaginary predators.

travel can hurtle you out of old ways of being and create conditions for new ones to emerge. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I need to leave the familiar, but I don’t want to do it entirely alone—I want to seek out others who can offer perspective into my predicament, who can help guide my passage.

“Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”

Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.

“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.”

When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”

“The death bit doesn’t scare me. It’s the suffering that’s hard.”

“Tomorrow may happen, tomorrow may not.”

Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.

“It’s been delightful to see it all flower so quickly,” he says. “Nothing is missing. But I would much rather have had a slow burn.”

You can’t guarantee that people won’t hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose.

May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

home doesn’t need to be a place or a profession, that I might find it wherever I go.

I want to be released from what won’t let me go. I want uncomplicated joy.

I know all too well that it takes only one bad night or one bad-news bearer to revise the way we remember everything that happens before and after.