I have zero parents

I started working at a new company and in one of my coffee connects with a colleague he said something along the lines of “I don’t know about your parents, but mine don’t seem to care that the city is pretty shut down right now, their lives haven’t changed much.” I instantly found myself in the weird gray space that I now occupy, where I am in a new situation with new people who don’t yet know my story. It’s weird to say, “Oh I’m not sure because my mom is dead and I don’t know my dad” to a new coworker. I did what I’ve gotten good at, I deflected and said something general about boomers and scooted the conversation along.

There’s never really a good time to blurt out that you have no parents because it’s not like they come up often in conversation when you’re in your 30s. I’m not asking mom for permission to sleep over at a friend’s house or hoping she makes something good for dinner that night. There isn’t a whole lot of interconnectedness between adult day-to-day life and decisions and parental guidance. Except for when there is. Like when I was buying my first home and I acutely felt the absence of my real estate lawyer mother. It’s in those moments where wisdom she passed along pops into my head, apparently received through osmosis over the years, and encourages me to make sure I don’t buy a place in Chicago without parking. “No parking? In Chicago? Are you smoking crack?!” is what she would say if I had put an offer on that beautiful condo in Hyde Park.

So I carry her with me and not in a lame Hallmark card kind of way. But when it comes to mixed company, and by mixed I mean people who know me well enough to know that I love to paint my nails and can get down with a good gallery wall and my dog is a beautiful monster, but also do not know that I have a dead mom and a gone dad — it’s just plain awkward. It’s not like it’s something that defines me often, but here and there I get sad about not having parents anymore. I mean I only had one to begin with and for her to also be gone when I’m still young, before she would have seen if I accidentally got knocked up or finally learned what escrow is? Feels almost comical to me.

My friend describes walking into a room with people who know you’ve had a big loss and you’re still raw with grief as the grief fishbowl. I haven’t felt it in a long time, I think it might be a fresh grief feeling, but only time will tell. Certainly, I have felt like I sometimes rush out that my mom died at perhaps strange times like when I’m eating Lifesavers candy on a Zoom call and someone comments on it and I say “oh yeah my sister in law got them for me as a part of my Christmas gift because my mom used to give them to us every Christmas and since she died a year and a half ago she wanted to carry on the tradition.” It’s like I needed to say it just to get it out there. It’s such a part of me now, this loss, that it still feels like I’m omitting something important when people don’t know. Note: If you’re ever wondering how to feel sympathy viscerally through a screen, I recommend this approach. Also recommended if you enjoy awkward pauses.

The truth is, sometimes I feel closer to her now that she’s gone. It’s like she’s quite literally a passenger in my life just like all the other women (and men, I guess) that came before her who’s decisions on this planet led to my existence. I came from her, through her, and given how many mediums the woman saw in her time, she is definitely available to be channeled if I so choose. I’m not unique in not having parents, but as far as I can tell it’s also not the norm. At least not among the people I’m around most of the time.

I got so used to not having a dad that I didn’t know how to talk to dads (I still struggle with it). It was like they were these foreign creatures who picked people up from practice and did errands. Almost mythical in nature, dads perplex me because I truly do not understand what it is like to have one. I feel the same way about them as I do about having white skin, being an astronaut, or successfully leaving Target having only purchased laundry detergent — they are things I will never ever know intimately.

The downsides of not having parents — of being raised by a single mother, of her dying suddenly, of growing up sans père — are vast. But this is the life that I was born to live. And yes sometimes I wish I could call someone older and wiser who shares some of my DNA to ask for advice, but I didn’t do that a whole lot when I had a living mother anyway. If anything, the complexity in my spirit is rife with opportunity. I get to grow and learn from every nook and cranny I discover in my grief, in my processing of the abandonment wound, and in each decision I’ve made in my life that can be linked in some way or another to the early choices my parents made. For a person who adores experiences, I need look no further than my own life thus far, and whatever I create in it going forward.

Turning left instead of right

As the pandemic drones on, many people are getting what can only be described as cabin fever on steroids or whatever is stronger than steroids. I find we’re collectively itching in our skin, literally fidgeting during the day with nowhere to put the pent up energy. And the energy that’s trapped is from all directions, we’re grieving, we want to be social, we want to go dancing, we want to travel, and we want to enjoy some goddamned brunch.

I’ve always known that I’m kind of a rebel. I joke that I go rogue at work often and bend the rules to my will in order to get the job done. Never without integrity, I fully own the rogue-ness and if something goes wrong that’s on me. But it doesn’t stop me from doing it. Honestly, I think it’s why I’ve been successful. In other areas of my life, the rebel shows up when I’m asked to do literally anything. If I don’t want to do something, I simply don’t do it. Being in a relationship with me is a real walk in the park, as I often need to be inceptioned in order to complete things even if it’s something I know is good for me. If my boyfriend tells me that I should throw the empty shampoo bottles out that I’ve left in the shower, I think “yeah, I’m not doing that.” I will, eventually. But it has to come from my own volition.

I am also so fiercely independent and need change and adventure so much that it impedes other areas of my life. I once famously spent rent money to book a trip because that seemed like a better idea at the time. I wasn’t evicted, but it was perhaps a bit reckless. What I’m trying to say is that basically sitting at home for nearly a year due to this pandemic has me feeling like a feral cat who is trying to be both bathed and tamed at the same time. Meanwhile I’m scratching at everything in hopes that I can go back to my life of freedom roaming the streets and killing small rodents.

I’m getting the COVID vaccine in a few weeks, and I am, of course, immediately thinking of my next trip. I’ve narrowed it down to every single place on earth. One minute I’m searching for Airbnbs in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the next I’m looking at hotels in Aruba. I’ve take a gander at how many airline miles it will take to get to Senegal, and have priced gas for a road trip from Chicago to Phoenix. All in a morning’s work.

But the truth is, I just bought a house. I want to make it a home. And buying a house in itself feels a little like a trap to me. A friend asked me recently if it felt good that I don’t ever have to move again and I thought about it for a moment and replied, “No, I never feel like I’m not going to move again. I think at any moment I could move to Lisbon.” Being inside my head and my heart is like a constant skipping from one experience to the next, and commitment feels like the craziest thing in the world.

Either way, I have the house. I want to build a life in it and that requires time and money and lots of fun projects that I’m genuinely excited about. It’s like a ton of new experiences all under one tidy roof. What luck! Except I still have that nagging “hey it’s time to hit the road” voice in my head that never really ceases. She’s just a little girl in a flowered dress frolicking through wild flowers and then boarding a flight to Chile without any prior notice. And I have no plans of taming her because let’s face it: she’s a lot of fun.

But she also makes it hard for me to save money and make long term plans. I mean the fact that I financially pulled off buying a house happened in part because I couldn’t travel last year. I do, in fact, have things I want long term that might benefit from some planning. I’d like to own a home in San Sebastian, Spain in the future. I want to launch a coaching business to help women in customer success. I’d like to be a steady partner to my boyfriend. That little girl that’s already on her second glass of airplane wine isn’t thinking about those things.

So, I technically can travel. At the very least I could do an epic cross-country road trip and spend 6 weeks on the road exploring nooks and crannies of America with my handy wifi hotspot keeping me connected for work.

But.

Since I’m also on a quest to question my deeply held beliefs, I can also turn left instead of turning right like I normally do. I can choose to do a small weekend away, save money, and plan for a bigger better trip and experience down the line. I can use the money I would have spent flitting around a still-deeply-in-a-pandemic world and put it into building my business. Each of the previous sentences made my palms sweat. I have very rarely chosen to stay rather than to go. To save rather than to spend. To sit rather than to dance. Go is frequently the best option for me. And my life has turned out pretty well by my measure. I’m genuinely curious what will happen if I don’t break free and run. What if I sit in my discomfort and scratch and claw around my townhouse, painting walls bright colors and building Murphy beds? What if I learn to take care of the African violets in my office? Imagine the shift.

The technicolor version of 2020

There were many days in 2020 that felt like they played in my vision like technicolor. Skies so blue they hurt and clouds so crispy lined you can feel the shape of them. Trees planted and thriving in your field of view with such contrast against their surroundings that you think you might just be able to touch their energy.

I know, I know. It sounds like an acid trip. And while tripping on acid seems like as good a way as any to spend a particularly challenging time, the technicolor I experienced in 2020 was not drug-induced. At least not most of it. There were days that make your heart expand, to the point where you think you might just be able to feel every blood vessel and capillary and other soft bits that make up a heart moving in rhythm. Your heart is filling with light from an unknown source. Those days, which on the surface look unremarkable, are like bucolic ellipses between the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows.

I’d had days like these before. One comes to mind when I was living in London and my brother was visiting and he and I went with our respective partners to the Tate Modern to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibit and before we walked into the Tate, there were people playing with giant bubbles and a man singing and the sky was clear and the sounds of joy and simplicity surrounded us. We all quietly stopped before entering, afraid we might not get another moment like it and not wanting to interrupt it by opening a new door, walking into a new moment. So there we stood, watching the iridescent bubbles and listening to soft guitar strumming along the Thames.

If I’ve had more days like this, I don’t know if I had the presence of mind to stop and notice. Or maybe I’d never allowed myself to really feel it. You know that moment when you feel immense joy and then the split second later where we steal it from ourselves by imagining a horrific car accident taking place on the drive home or missing a train or a plane. We imagine anything that will snap us out of that feeling because even in the experience of it, we need to control it. If we kill it ourselves it can’t be killed by chance. Before we’re able to surrender to whatever beauty that’s striking us, we snatch it away. But in 2020, maybe because everything was already so bad and so hard, I had more moments where I was able to surrender, keep the connection, allow it to have its power over me instead of stripping it away mercilessly.

Perhaps when bad and worse keep happening over and over again on a loop, we realize that allowing ourselves a little bit of joy for a moment is well worth the sacrifice of not imagining ourselves dying in a fiery crash. Perhaps instead of being primed for more bad, our hearts and minds are grasping desperately onto those technicolor moments as salve and a reminder of what’s possible.

When I walked the dog in May, I went out of my way to stop and smell the lilacs across the park from my apartment building. I stopped and savored them every morning while they were in bloom. I closed my eyes and breathed them in. I lingered.

When I went to the lake I did so with no book or phone, my only plan being to stare at the waves for as long as I felt was required.

On a drive home from a socially distant family visit, I looked out at the boring midwestern landscape and realized with the right clouds and the right sun, the rolling yet flat land looked luminous framed through the front windshield of the car.

These moments, for me, were arresting.

Walking through the reflecting pool in Washington D.C. during the March on Washington. I was holding a sign and I was there to lend my voice to the cause of racial justice, but for that moment all I felt was the temperature of the water, the way it felt cool against my skin even though it was not cool water. The slick of the bottom of the pool on my feet was somehow not gross. I was just sensing everything around me. All the parts of things that were touching my body. The bottom of the pool. The water. The paper sign in my hand. The spandex of my biker shorts against my thigh. The mask over my face, covered in sweat and condensation. Even in the oppressive heat for a moment I felt at peace. Everything was technicolor.

There has to be a way to create moments like this in your life. I’ve studied moments actually, and in one book I read they say that in order for a moment to be memorable, it has to include elevation, pride, insight or connection. Maybe in 2020 the reason things felt so vibrant is because of one of those four elements. Or maybe it was because for some reason, I stopped myself from stealing my own joy more often. Or the nice moments had no choice but to stand out when you’re dealing with things like Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying.

Whatever it was, 2020 was technicolor and I can play back those moments so vividly that I have to believe it when people say that the only way to time travel is to be as present as you possibly can because your attention provides the color and the feeling and the pathway. But, looking forward it might also work to try just a little bit of acid or other psychedelic of your choosing.

Ugh. Negative feelings are gross.

I’m an Enneagram type 7 meaning I really enjoy experiences, doing fun things and in general I will do almost anything to avoid feeling pain or negative feelings. I learned during my marriage that I didn’t deal well with negative emotions coming off of my ex husband. If he felt anything other than joy and excitement I panicked. The thing about long term relationships is that if you let them, they’ll show you who you really are like one of those close up mirrors you use to examine your pores or pluck out your eyebrow hair. At the time, I logically knew that the person I lived with had negative feelings like any other human, but internally I was like “I’m happy all of the time! Always! See!”

That, my friends, was an epic lie.

Reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle reminded me that life isn’t actually supposed to be sunshine and roses. And while my life has been anything but those two things, I have managed to keep it together. I genuinely do have a default cheery disposition. I carry myself in a way that suggests I allow things to roll off my back and sometimes I do. But I recently, as in within the past year in action and within the past month in practice, have allowed myself to be openly angry, sad, frustrated, annoyed and downright grumpy. And you know what? It feels really freeing.

Want to cry on the stairs on the way down to the kitchen because you forgot something in the bedroom and because birthdays are weirdly sad days now and your partner is annoying and you were already hanging on by a thread before you realized you forgot your water glass on your bedside table? Go for it. Your body is telling you to cry, so cry. If you don’t, that feeling will creep up somewhere else in a weird and possibly damaging way and bite you very hard in the ass when you least expect it. Like in the middle of a Zoom meeting or maybe you find yourself frustrated for no reason while you’re walking the dog, rushing him to poop faster because you want to get back inside to do more nothing and you’re on a time schedule. Imagine someone watching and rushing you while you tried to find a good spot to have a poo. No one wants that.

Nicole Sachs, the therapist behind “The Cure for Chronic Pain” podcast talks about receiving anxiety by imagining you’re on a very safe raft in the middle of an ocean and you’re watching a huge, intimidating wave come your way. There’s nothing you can do about the wave, it’s coming whether you like it or not. You can however, hold on to your raft breathe deeply and ride the wave from start to finish. It’s funny how we try to wiggle out of it. We get near the crest of the wave and decide we’re done because it’s too hard. Then we try to paddle wildly in any direction to get out of the situation, exhausting ourselves and inevitably failing because waves are waves and are only stopped when they come to their natural conclusion and the ocean settles. The ocean always settles which means you will, too.

Or we numb ourself while we’re on our raft and then we don’t even get to experience the wave, we’re just drunk on a raft eating cake and watching Netflix and are therefore not getting any practice in both experiencing the wave itself, and riding it out with clarity. When the next wave inevitably comes, there we are: unprepared and maybe still drunk or perhaps not drunk but wearing some new lounge clothing that Instagram told us to buy while we were distracting ourselves from the last wave we felt.

So yes, negative feelings are gross. Yucky. Unpleasant. But useful. Oh so useful. Why are you feeling the anxiety in the first place? Did something trigger you? Did you see something on Instagram that made you think you were inadequate? Did you scroll through LinkedIn, the silent killer, and see that your nemesis was just promoted to VP of Something Special and you feel like you’re toiling away on menial labor (when in fact you’re a force of nature in your own right and no one seems to notice!)? Scanning your body helps. Knowing that everything we’re looking at all day is a tiny sliver of the world helps, but in general being able to breathe, hold on, and ride the waves is the only way to get through any of it.

Enjoy a good cry on the stairs. Walk the dog and don’t rush him to poop. You might not be happier for it, but there’s a chance you uncover inner joy slowly slowly.

Who are you around when your belly is soft?

Dogs are magical creatures, most people would agree with that statement (at least in many Western countries). For me, the reason they’re so magical is because they’re an animal and they operate on animal instincts, albeit tamed ones, while living in a cozy home environment. For example, the other night my dog, Stokely, was laying in his bed (which is next to my bed), and looking out the window of the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony off of our bedroom. Suddenly, he barked, jumped high into the air and scrambled away from the window with the fur on his back raised. I immediately followed suit, jumped out from under the covers, and off we ran down the stairs to safety. Huddled in the corner of the family room a floor below, the rational part of my brain kicked in and I realized it might make sense to investigate why the dog freaked out instead of just blindly following his lead.

Or did it make sense? In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when they’re looking for the tomb of the long-dead knight so they can get his shield and therefore the pathway to find the holy grail, a fire begins to burn and the rats that lined the caved began to run instinctively to find their way away from the fire and to safety. I’m not convinced humans allow their bodies to lead them that often, and sometimes wonder if without the rats, Indiana and his lady friend would have watched the fire approaching and just panicked. But the rats were their guide.

Back up the stairs I went, with Stokely in tow (for protection, obviously), and I also recruited my partner who had been asleep on the couch downstairs and had a bit if a rude awakening with a panicking dog and girlfriend huddled in the corner. We (my partner) peered out the window to discover nothing amiss. The dog remained unconvinced and refused to sleep in his bed.

Upon further inspection, I realized what scared Stokely. With the lights on in the bedroom, he could see his own reflection in the glass of the sliding door. And it terrified him. Perhaps dogs are more human than we previously thought.

In order for humans to breathe those deep belly breaths that calm the nervous system immediately following a fight/flight/freeze reaction, we have to allow our bellies to be soft. You can’t take a deep breath in and out if you’re trying to hold in your gut. Dogs that are trusting (and snuggly) will roll over and allow for you to rub their belly. It’s the most vulnerable part of the dog, you can feel how soft they are there. Ingrid Michaelson sings, “Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts? Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.” That’s it. That’s all that protects our hearts. Our belly doesn’t even get the benefit of a cage of rib bones, it’s just soft and exposed all of the time. It’s tender, and it’s supposed to be.

I remember in grammar school, high school, college, and adulthood every time I took a group photo with my girlfriends, each one of us would ever so slight suck in our tummy. Can’t let that gut show in photos, obviously. It’s as if it’s on cue, the camera is raised, pointing at their bodies and the first thing we do is suck it in. We make our bellies rigid. Taut. But you can’t breathe that way. Looking back at the photos now, I can see visible distress in the faces of my friends. They’re smiling, but they’re strained. Their rib cages are puffed out and they look unnatural like they’re in a hostage situation.

I noticed myself sucking in my stomach while I was doing my hair the other day. I was alone in the bathroom and there were no cameras, and yet here I was holding it in and keeping it tight. I consciously softened my belly and felt instant relief. Then I started paying attention. Who am I around when I allow my belly to be soft? If I wasn’t allowing it when I was fully alone in the bathroom looking at my own reflection, (which as we learned from Stokely, can be terrifying) and had no one to impress or convince that my stomach was flat. It was just me and me and my hands moving through my hair. In fact, it could have been a moment of reprieve, allowing the parts of my body that didn’t need to be working to relax and let go.

Like dogs, I think we probably allow ourselves to be soft only when it’s safe, and sometimes it’s not even safe to let ourselves be soft with ourselves. Next time you’re just sitting there by yourself on the couch, or in the bathroom, or doing laundry, or even — gasp — taking a photo, maybe try relaxing your belly. Let it be soft and you’ll breathe easier. I plan to start paying attention to the people I’m around when I feel most relaxed in my body because those are the keepers.

Let grief change you

I’m not going to lament 2020 being a crazy year, because thats a foregone conclusion at this point. I will, however, talk about how everything is relative. Yes, I just said that. What I mean is that while 2020 is the worst year collectively that many of us can recall, it might not be the worst year everyone has personally experienced. The fact that sitting at home with our choices for months on end is one of the most difficult things we’ve ever had to do is telling. (And privileged.)

Now, that is not to say that people’s feelings of strife this year aren’t valid — they are. Uncertainty is an actual minefield for the brain and the fact that we’re all living in a (much more than usual) uncertain time is taxing. But the thing is, at some point we must all move forward. If we don’t, the world will move forward without us leaving us behind to twiddle our thumbs stuck in an endless streaming TV loop waiting for the other shoe to drop.

2019 was actually a tougher year for me, because in 2019 my mom died suddenly and I gotta tell you: the death of your mother has nothing on a pandemic. I was interviewing for a job — my dream job, actually — when my mother died. I was a director-level position at a company that I had truly admired and followed for years and that job was something that I felt I had manifested. The right title. The right role. The right company. It was like the universe specially wrapped a gift and set it into my lap. And then my mom died.

I’ve heard that you’re not supposed to make any big life decisions in the wake of a big loss, and I see why that’s true. My rule at the time was that anything that was already in motion could move forward. I could accept this job because I was excited about it before mom died. I could move back to America because I had decided to do that before mom died. The wheels were in motion and non-grief stricken me had a pretty strong track record with decision making, so I trusted her. Any net new decisions were met with far more scrutiny. Everything from “where am I going to eat tonight?” to, “ will I enjoy it if I join this group of industry experts" was deeply uncertain for me. I questioned everything down to my love of scotch and painting my nails.

Because grief changes you.

And what’s even more critical: you have to let grief change you.

Grief literally alters your brain in a way that scientifically makes it harder to be a normal person, at least if you’ve allowed yourself to feel your feelings and you’re not a robot. It is the final act of love. It makes you feel at times alive with connection and at times completely drained of every ounce of life in you. A person cannot reasonably go through the waves of grief and come out the other side intact with their past-life personhood fully baked. Spoiler alert: there really isn’t another side, you grieve forever with varying levels of intensity.

Under these circumstances, I started my dream job. But the thing about grief, especially the loss of the only parent you ever knew, is that it is a full time job. It demands your time and attention and if you don’t given in it will make you sit down on a bench in your front entryway crying because you can’t find your other workout shoe to go to the gym. It’s a force so strong that the only option is to yield.

As someone who is no stranger to therapy, I know that feeling your feelings is important. I know that bottling, suppressing, forcing a smile, and carrying on can be unhealthy. I used to pride myself on my ability to compartmentalize and I realize now that the only trophy you win in that game is one where you body just stops working altogether until you listen to it and have a big, big cry. It’s one of my most admired traits. I let things roll off my back. And I genuinely do that, and I do it well. But you can’t let grief roll off your back. It’s not like someone cutting you off in traffic. It’s like a lot of storm clouds, full of lightning one moment and thunder the next and playing the game where you count the seconds between each doesn’t give you a clear picture of when the next impact is coming.

And it changes you.

For the past year and a half, I have had the great pleasure of feeling what it’s like to try to carry on when all you want to do is curl up for the first time in my life. My divorce was at least 152% easier to handle than this, and that came with what I thought at the time was an ocean-sized valley of grief.

I’m softer now. I can’t help it. I also have to protect my energy more because it goes much more quickly than I recall, either that or I’m finally being honest with myself about what energizes me and what what doesn’t. A big loss followed by a year where everything you normally did is off the table really shines a bright light on what your heart wants. Some people are clinging to whatever in their life stays steady. It might be work or a relationship or a workout routine. Some are falling deep down a well of loneliness due to the isolation caused by the pandemic. Make no mistake though, this grief will change us all. If we let it.

For me, the change has come slowly but one of the most notable things to fall away was my desire for a director-level title. Turns out, I want to do other things. I value freedom of time. I value adventure. I value learning. My mom dying was a delineating mark in my life, like it is for so many other people who have experienced a close, sudden loss. If I were to fight the change that naturally happens as we sit with our grief, I’d be butting my head against a wall, incapable of seeing that all I had to do to sooth the headache was to let go of who I thought I was supposed to be and embrace the person I’m becoming. Because grief changes you, whether you allow it or not. It’s up to us to determine where to take our fight.

I decided it was time to trust my decisions again and I resigned from my perfect job to accept a different role at a different company. I’m not managing a team. I’m not a director. I’m going back to my roots with a twist. I’m choosing to learn something hard. I’m leaving a stable job in the middle of a pandemic. I’m closing a computer on a Friday and opening a different one on a Monday. It’s the first values-based career decision I’ve made and it doesn’t look like the rest of my career decisions. The discomfort comes from not wanting to let people down, but throughout the process I’ve stood firm in this choice because it honors who I am now, not who I thought I was or who I used to be.

You’re allowed to change your mind. You’re allowed to want something different than what you previously wanted, even in small ways. Change your hair. Change your nails. Try on some new clothes or habits. We’ve all now felt what it’s like to grieve in some form so trust that you may not be the same. This year might have triggered some latent fears in you and it’d be easy to lean into them and play small because let’s face it that’s an easy thing to do. But it won’t set your soul on fire. See how this grief has changed you and lean into it as best you can. Go gently, like you’re approaching a wild animal, because you never know when it will nip and snarl. I promise you can handle it.

Our tenuous connection with place

A lot of people are moving right now. Have been moving for months. Which on its own isn’t that interesting of a statement, except that as we’re living through a global pandemic, I get the overwhelming sense that we humans in fact have a relatively tenuous connection with place. We believe in home in America. Not just the place, but the concept of home. It’s where you lay your head at night and also a place the defines you, that you identify with, and yet I wonder how well any of us really know what it looks like.

When my mother moved away from Chicago in 2017, I had already moved to London. And yet, my first return trip to Chicago after her move back to her “home town” of Rock Island, IL, it felt different. Suddenly and at first inexplicably, Chicago no longer felt like home. I brought my new revelation back to my therapist in London and spent a few sessions annoyingly and arduously unpacking what I even meant when I thought of or felt at home. Turns out, home was where my mom was.

Which brings us to our current conundrum, how do you find home when your mom isn’t on the earth anymore?

I’ve had a long held belief that Chicago, or really any big city, could be home. I love cities. Love the hustle and bustle and the people. I love getting up in the morning and hearing sounds right away. I sleep best with the sound of traffic and distant sirens lighting up the night. The quiet makes me uneasy. Something about silence is unsettling for me, it’s too much of a void and since there is nothing in it — anything could be in it. I’m not comfortable with that kind of mystery lurking beyond my windows at night.

Then, I moved to London and it felt home-ish. Parts of me unfurled there, I got to experience a life that was by and large of my own design and what more home-like life could you ask for than one you made yourself. Except it wasn’t home. Not really, anyway. I adored it in London. It was comfortable. It was a city. I lived on Hackney Road and heard sirens and traffic. I traveled. I walked to coffee shops and got oat flat whites in the morning. The further I get from that place, and the more I’m stuck in my Chicago high rise, the more disorienting the concept of home becomes.

I live in Chicago because my mom moved me and my brother here when we were young. That’s why. That’s how it became home. And if you search yourself, you might find that where you live is home because someone else chose that place for you long ago and you just kind of stuck with it. If you believe in the concept of souls, that our bodies are just vessels for a spirit and that spirit can move on when the body dies, does that same idea apply to home? Can we travel from place to place and eventually find home? If so, what the hell does that look like please help me find it.

Beginning in March of this year, we were asked to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Collectively, the world sat at home. Or rather, sat in their houses and apartments and townhomes and shacks. I don’t want to assume everyone in the world has a true home. Some people never find it. Except that it was specifically called a “Stay at Home Order".” What if an enterprising person pushed back and said, “well, I don’t really consider this 21st floor high rise home so where should I go?”

7 months into this stay at home life, and we’re letting our lease expire. We’re pre-approved to buy a house and we can start shopping as we see fit. When I tell you that I never really imagined myself getting to the point financially, professionally, personally, to buy a house I mean it. I’ve had a long-held belief that I’d live in a very nice apartment in a big city until I died. And now the actual world feels open to me because when you don’t know where home is, buying a house becomes an odd and privileged challenge.

Some days, I search on Zillow in Rogers Park, because that’s where I grew up in Chicago and probably feels the most like home. However, I don’t know if it just feels that way because I’ve lived there before. Or more specifically, because my mom lived there. I live in Uptown now, two blocks from the last place my mom lived in Chicago before she moved. Again, I don’t want to conflate home with familiarity because they are not one in the same. A long long time ago, in my past life as a married woman, I once told my ex-husband that he was my home and so anywhere he was, I would feel at home. I remember those words coming out of my mouth vividly, and at the time I meant it. See? Concepts of home can change.

So here I am, searching far and wide for what home looks like. A little bit like the ugly duckling searching for his true people. And I do think there is a strong case to be made for home being tied to people. But people die.

I can’t seem to feel unblocked enough to narrow down any areas whatsoever, which isn’t a great level of direction to give to our realtor. “We’re looking for a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a big enough yard for a garden and oh by the way anywhere will do.” As I slowly crack open about the home search, I want to be able to think beyond my current limitations, which are, like most people, based only on what I’ve experienced thus far.

Here are all the places I’ve lived: in Rock Island, IL as a child, in three separate homes; in Chicago in Rogers Park and South Shore; in Champaign, IL for college; in Avignon, France, for study abroad; in Chicago again, this time in Edgewater, Lincoln Park, Rogers Park again, and Logan Square; in London; in Chicago again, this time in Uptown. Sounds like a lot of places. Lots of experiences to draw from to determine where home might be. But they’re all cities with the exception of the one college town thrown in there. What if I want to live in the country? And I do.

Perhaps the scariest thing of all, the thing that’s just licking at my insides with a scratchy cat tongue, is that I’m interested in a totally different life than the one I live now. All of the parts that have defined me feel irrelevant, like I’m molting and also trying to hold on to the dead skin casing. What animal do you know sheds their skin and then carries it around looking for a place to store it in its new life? None. Yet humans do it all the time. We do it in the form of old stories we tell ourselves about who we should be and where we should live based mostly on what other people have historically decided for us (since we don’t choose where we’re born or where we live for the first 18 years of our lives at least), and things that we’re not able to quite define in ourselves yet due to lack of experience or fear.

I can absolutely live in another big city. Throw a dart at a map and I’ll go where it lands. But I want a juicy life that I live with intention, and after not having to commute for 7 months the thought of doing it again feels like carrying around a dead skin casing. I often imagine what my perfect day would look like as a way to help me move more toward home. I wake up early, throw on some soft and comfortable clothing, go into my meditation room and breath and meditate for 30 minutes, then I walk to my kitchen and make my coffee and walk through my solarium (I don’t know what a solarium is, but I want one) to my writing room and write, sometimes freely and sometimes with such a fight to get each word out that it makes me want to bang my head against my walls. Then I make breakfast a couple hours later when Aaron wakes up and we talk for a while. I use fresh vegetables from the garden and eggs from my hens. I might have a couple of meetings and then I take a midday nap after eating a large lunch. In the afternoon, I imagine I’d see clients (though I’m not sure what they’re seeing me for).

In the evenings there is a fire, music, and candles and I let my home ease me into the night.

If I back into that life, there are clearly some things I need to have including a house big enough for a meditation and a writing room, a yard with a garden, an a working definition of a solarium. Perhaps this is the criteria I can give to my realtor. But the other parts that are missing are within, and I know I won’t find them in a house. I expect I’ll make my home decision the same way I’ve made all other decisions on where to live. My gut. I see a place and I immediately know. It’s a part of me that I’m banking on and I hope that instinct hasn’t been snuffed out or confused with dead skin. I can make my own noise without the sound of sirens through the night.

A love letter to far away friends: Adam

I’ve recently been struck by the impact of people in my life who I don’t see often, and don’t even speak to often. Even via social media, which is kind of a crazy thing in these days. But really, there are those in my life that have crossed my path that I still consider friends. Soulmates in some instances. Far away friends that have molded me in some way, whether they know it or not.

Everyone has those main friends. If they’re lucky. And then everyone has those friends that they don’t see often but that each time they do see them — even if it’s years apart — it’s as if nothing has changed. These are not the friends to whom I’m referring.

I want to talk about the lost ones. The transitional ones. The made you look at yourself differently after just one night together. The met in a foreign country ones. The met on a boat ones. The ones that you knew in passing in high school, but never stayed in touch there afters. Those friends.

I am lucky enough to have many of these such people in my life. One of those people, is Adam.

I met Adam while studying abroad in France my junior year of college. We were in the south of France, in Avignon, a beautiful medieval city with charm and everything you’d ever want from a French town. Adam and I became fast friends. First, though knowing both me and Adam I don’t think this was deliberate at the time, Adam and I are both Black. So I think there had to be a natural energy between us.

Next, Adam and I seemed to find the same things ridiculous, the same things funny, and the same people annoying. I gotta tell ya — those are ties that bond.

We spent a lot of time together in Avignon, going on walks, making fun of people and each other, drinking cafe, going salsa dancing, dancing at the gay club in town. Once, we were on a train to Aix-en-Provnce to go to a literary festival. I was an English major and Adam was an avid reader so we were excited to get a chance to go. It was a big deal.

We boarded the train to Aix at the main train station in Avignon, and about 35 minutes into the journey we realized we had made a mistake. You see, Aix is about 20 minutes on the TGV from Avignon, so we should have stopped already. We also noticed our seat numbers were weird, but we thought that was just a mistake. We strained our American ears to hear the conductors announcement: the train was heading to Nice. The first stop wouldn’t be for quite some time, and our arrival was about 3 hours from that moment in time.

Ok. So we’re stuck on a train to Nice in the South of France. Life could be worse. We have a little money in our pockets. We’re young. This is an adventure. Except that riding a train in France without a valid ticket gets you kicked off the train and also fined more euros than either of us had. That, and we couldn’t afford the fare difference. Remember, we were planning a 20 minute train journey and had paid something like 12 euros for our tickets.

Each time the ticket guy came through the car, I would strategically go to the bathroom and wait it out until he left, slowly opening the door and peeking out like I was a in a bad spy movie. Adam chose the route of going to the lower level of the train when the ticket guy came to the top level and vice versa. He waited near the doors and then snuck back up or down the stairs as needed. It was the most stressful train journey of my life.

But.

We made it to Nice. And of all the places to accidentally find yourself, Nice ain’t half bad. The pebbly beaches, the cute streets. Amazing. We had about 3 hours until our train home left. We wandered the streets and found ourselves in a Nice sex toy shop which was fascinating and so fun. Adam and I just drank it all in, made our way back to the train station and hooped aboard a much less stressful journey home.

Adam is an adventure buddy, a kindred spirit, a beautiful energy, and a soulmate. In later years, long after we both returned from France, I would visit Adam when I found myself on business trips to San Francisco. Each time we saw each other, it was so loving and connecting. He’s a funny guy. A critical eye for the world with a wry humor that does self deprecating without us actually believing that he hates himself at all. Rather, he loves his own heart and anyone that is lucky enough to be close to him feels the warmth.

I received notes in the mail just because from Adam, no matter where I lived. When I moved to London he sent me cards. And I sent him cards back. He remembers my birthday every year, even without a social media reminder. He’s even met my mother, because she came to visit when we were in France. She loved him.

I don’t know if he knows what he means to me. And sometimes I think he is a better friend to me than I am to him. So, to my dear Adam: I love you. You are a part of my heart. Your spirit is beautiful. The world is better with you in it breathing, thinking, laughing, drinking, making fun of silly things, and being unapologetically you.

When did we become so manicured?

I’m staying in an Airbnb in Michigan and it’s one of those rentals where it is evident that the homeowners very recently called this place their full time home. The biggest indicator, apart from the dog ashes and shrine in the hutch (RIP Maxemus), is the coffee mugs. Growing up, we had one of those homes where the coffee mugs came from all over. There were mugs from my mom’s law school and her other alma maters. There were promotional mugs from random places. There was a mug with a big Santa face on it. I had, and still have, a mug with one of Degas’ paintings of dancers on it. The mug cupboard was gloriously colorful, sometimes chipped, often stained, with a few non-structural cracks here and there.

When I go into many homes now, people have one set of mugs. They’re all the same color and same size. What is this madness? What kind of a monster goes to Target or Home Goods or Crate and Barrel and buys a full set of mugs? Some things in a home must be built gradually.

It’s really a function of the world we live in. I won’t get into a rant about social media and how Instagram in particular has filtered our lives to such a point that we have people going into stores and buying full sets of mugs instead of carefully building a collection over time from conferences and schools and trips and silly bachelorette parties and white elephant gift exchanges and theft. But it’s undeniably true. The home I’m sitting in now in Michigan is not just lived in — it’s lived through. Every part of it is a reflection of the family that lived here. Even the weird dog toys in the corner. We have sanitized homes so much that we don’t have a little of that disorganization that breeds a juicy life.

I’ve stayed in beautiful places all over the world. Airbnbs that are impeccably decorated with curated dishes and artwork and all white bedding. But few places have an obviously handmade quilt on the couch.

I think you misunderstand me

When I first started dating my partner, we had a lot of fun (we still do, pandemic and all). We met at a time when I was feeling more free than I’d ever felt. Everything was on track, I was enjoying a Chicago summer with my friends, there was an ease to life that I’d not felt previously and it electrified me. I was also on the cusp of moving abroad, a long time goal of mine coming to fruition. I was the most tuned into myself that I’d ever been. Then we met. I was like a ball of light entering his world and you know what? He thought I might be ditsy.

Before you judge my partner too harshly for this thought, I laugh a lot, I talk a lot, I smile a lot and all of it just happens, often at the same time, often while I’m bouncing from story to story and idea to idea. Sometimes once the whirlwind is over people are like “Wait, was she talking about how capitalism has taken us away from our human roots or did a spry creature just loudly flounce about the room and leave?”

I think you misunderstand me. The depth of people often comes later. Should come later, in many cases. It wasn’t until he saw me working and on the phone with a client 2 months later that he realized the secret weapon that is my natural personality.

But more than that, there floats around a belief among many that people who are bubbly, open, chatty, carefree, one with spirit, dancing in the grocery store, taking random trips abroad because they just want to shop in Paris. Women who snuggle obsessively with their dogs, sing, tell stories, read books, fold themselves into yoga poses in the middle of the kitchen, laugh like bells reverberating, lick your elbow because it’s funny, play in your hair and their own, and celebrate even the tiniest of things with a flourish. Those women, they’re ditsy, not goal-oriented, unraveled, unorganized, and perhaps a little dangerous.

I reject that my saving intellectual and civilized grace is not specifically that I read a lot of books, but more that I have a good job in a leadership position and I earn a good living. I can fall back on the “but I have a successful career” and where the hell is the fun in that? We lasted a long time on this planet before we all decided to shuffle one by one into office buildings, sit at chairs all day, bang on keyboards, stare at a screen, and have forced conversations in subdued tones.

Being independent is considered a strength. And I agree that it is an overwhelmingly positive attribute to being human. But — and this is a big but — being looked after is a particularly human trait. On some level, we all want to be cared for and about. I joke with my partner that I don’t have to look both ways to cross the street because I know he will and he hates it. He wants us both to “pay attention” at all times. That makes sense! Of course I need to look both ways before I cross the street!

I think you misunderstand me. I can look both ways. I can build the furniture. I can do the laundry. I can cook. I can earn a good salary. I can be alert in crowds, always scanning for the exits. I have navigated or avoided dangerous situations in my life all by myself without someone gently tugging on my hand letting me know the coast is clear. My lady energy has served me well. But I also do a lot of other stuff and so sometimes scanning for exits feels exhausting, especially if there is someone else there to be on the look out on my behalf.

In some of my shadow work, it has come to my attention that growing up with an absent father has had all kinds of fun impacts on my life. Many of which I discovered long ago, but some that are coming to light just now including that while I can take care of myself, there is something really really gratifying about not having to because there is — gasp — a man to help me out. I had brothers who did a phenomenal job as supplemental parents. We looked after each other always, and still do. I expect not to be on high alert for my physical safety in the presence of my brother.

So I’ll say it louder for the ones in the back that might have left because I was being to boisterous — I like being taken care of by my partner. I like being guided through a crowd with a hand on the small of my back. Or being led by the hand with a sureness that I don’t have to exert effort, I only need to follow and trust. It’s like having faith in human form. Something strong and steady that acts as a home base, or rather, an extension of my own home base. Letting go and allowing to be guided, for me, is like coming back to myself.

When I get push back about “not paying attention” it’s hurtful. Because I do. All of the time. And I’m tired. And being cared for lessens that exhaustion. If you’re lucky enough to see the sprite in me, to be around in the kitchen when I start dancing for no reason — good for you, enjoy it. But if you want to really be close in my world there are going to be parts of me that need picking up and tending. Weeds to be uprooted. Dead parts to nip off. I’ll do that work for myself and often for you as well. As long as you keep an eye on the exits.

Drinking wine in the shower

When you died, Deniro, I was very very sad. But I wasn’t fundamentally different. Nothing shifted at my core. I cried, I held your leash in my hand. I briefly thought about how sad it was that you died younger than I thought you should at the tender doggy age of 6 versus 9 or 10 like I’d planned. But when you died, I wasn’t different. Not like this.

I’ve always been a quick shower person, believing in the utility of showers versus the luxury of them. I’m in there to get clean and that’s all. As such, I typically take 2 to 3 minute showers. If I have to wash my hair (once a week if I’m feeling generous) I’ll spend about 9-12 minutes in the shower depending on how tangled my hair has gotten throughout the week (or 9 days) since my last wash. More recently, I’ve even embraced taking a cold shower in the mornings, which is meant to shock you into your body, force you to focus on your breath, and ultimately make you a better, more resilient person.

Tonight, I stood in the shower for an eternity. I did all the things I’m supposed to do in there. I washed my hair, I put the conditioner in my hair and braided the wet, product-soaked tresses into a low, side braid so the conditioner could work its magic while I cleaned the rest of my body. Then I unfurled the braid, easing my fingers between my curls in a way that disconnected them from each other without breaking them. Then I paused and noticed how hopelessly chipped my nail polish was and stared at my fingernails for 6-7 minutes.

Detangling my hair was a breeze. The comb glided through with no trouble as if to say “you need a win today.”

That was it. My work was done. But there I stood, unable to remove myself from the warmth of the shower. My partner opened the bathroom door about 10 minutes later and handed me a glass of wine over the top of the glass enclosure. Apparently, when your girlfriend usually takes no more than a 12 minute shower, and she’s already been in there for 25 minutes, you must bring her wine. I thanked him, took a sip of the wine held precariously in my wet and starting-to-prune hand and let a few tears fall. Crying in the shower is just the best thing ever. Have you tried it? The water rinses away the tears and snot but you still get the release.

I stood there, holding my wine, thinking about how my mom texted the day she died. She didn’t know she was going to die. She thought she was just unwell. She knew it was coming eventually, but not that day. Not July 23rd. The futility of it all is astounding. Not of life, I don’t believe life is futile, I believe too much planning is futile. Straying away from the moment is futile. She was knitting a baby blanket when she died and it’s just sitting there, yarn still on the needles in her knitting bag at my brother’s house. Unfinished business in the literal sense and I think wow we just are gone and the inertia stops.

I look down and see that there’s a fair amount of hair in the shower drain. Still with my wine in hand, I become wholly preoccupied with clearing the hair. The problem is that I have a literal open wound just below my knee from kneeling on a wine glass last week, plus I’m holding wine to sooth the literal open wound between my ribs. I decide the only thing to do is to use my big toe. So I rub my toe along the drain vigorously at first to loosen the hair, and then slowly and strategically to move the hair away from the drain. I spend at least 15 minutes on this endeavor. Stopping only to examine my progress. My posture doesn’t change the entire time. Only my gaze. Hand is steady with the wine. Now even more pruned so I tighten my grip on the glass.

I finish my task and have now made a pile of hair in the corner of the shower, far enough away that the running water won’t nudge the recently freed hairs back into the prison of the drain. But now what? I decide to clip my toenails. I consider for a moment if I can accomplish the task while holding the wine. Sadly, no. I cannot. Not with the literal open wound below my knee preventing me from fully bending my leg. I set the wine on the shower caddy thing, which is an amazingly good wine-holder. Perhaps this is what the designers had in mind when they created it. I clip my toenails and then, disgustingly shove the clippings down the center of the drain figuring I just cleared it of all the hair, what are a few toenail clippings going to hurt?

My wine supply is now dwindling and I’m passing the one-hour mark in the shower. I turn off the water with the hesitancy of disconnecting life support. It’s suddenly cold and quiet in the bathroom. I open the shower door and grab my towel. Back to business.

I have all the Pyrex now

When your mother dies, you inevitably have to do something with her stuff. This is not something people really think about when they’re planning for who gets what while writing their wills. Because what they don’t say is, “I bequeath to Jenny an old box of rusted pin backs.” No, they let you know who gets grandma’s antique dresser set from 1912. Or their gold jewelry. But for the most part, all the shit they have remains unaccounted for in terms of who gets to (has to) take it. Imagine if someone had the foresight to say that all those plastic travel soap dishes were to go to Harold.

My mother was never a mystery about what she wanted when she died. Donate. Cremate. Celebrate. We were to have her cremated after we offered up any remaining and functional organs for donation. Then we were to have a kegger. No burial. Gnarls Barkley over the speakers. Three urns labeled Maybe She’s Crazy. One for each of her children. It was not only told to us over and over, but she actually wrote it down and printed it out on your average printer paper. Your last wishes printed on something that you just printed a shipping label on. A reminder that death is as much a part of life as having to return all the clothes you bought online that don’t fit.

When it came time to actually plan the party that I’d been hearing about for half my life, it was mercifully easy to execute. It helped that two years ago, my mom and I bought her urn in a vintage shop in Ireland. It was a bonding moment, welling with excitement to pick out where her remains would live in my home. It was an excitement that bewildered the poor shopkeeper, who was not a fan of picking out urns with one’s mother.

She was clear about a few other things, too. But that’s it. A few. I got grandma’s bedroom set. My niece got all of her sewing things. My brother and I each had a baby blanket from her. Knitted before she died just in case she kicked it and we ended up having children. A discovery so heart-wrenching you can barely bear it. But that’s it. No more specifics. I know families have trouble when someone dies when everyone wants everything and there are fights over things like antique spoons and coin collections. My brothers and I actually like each other though, and so there was no such fighting. Which kind of made it harder.

No one really cared about the stuff. That’s something no one tells you. Most of the stuff you don’t care at all about. Don’t feel like clinging to because it might hold some of your mother’s essence because it was a candleholder that sat on her shelf. The things you do care about you really care about. Her high school class ring. Her law degrees. Her Pyrex.

Jewelry wasn’t under contention. I was the only girl and therefore mine. The law degree wasn’t up for grabs either because I have a brother that is a newly minted layer. But the Pyrex. It is like gold. My mother had quite the collection and she would sometimes send us home with leftovers in a Pyrex container. We were to bring back the Pyrex or she would not send you home with food again until the Pyrex was returned (or in many cases with me, replaced because I had broken it or lost it). She had big Pyrex. Small Pyrex. Round and square, lids and no lids. And we all wanted a piece of it. This beautiful reminder of your mother, living in your kitchen, wincing when you dropped and broke a Pyrex bowl. Using the Pyrex to store her cannabis butter. Heartwarming.

Having it felt almost like stealing and getting away with it. This otherwise innocuous kitchen item that had become both famous and off limits in the way things do when a parent has a special thing for them. Every family has a Pyrex.

In the end, we compromised. And I have all the Pyrex now.

The art of being motherless

There’s a trend in the wellness, psychology, and self-healing community called re-parenting that’s really caught on recently. It’s the idea that we were all raised by parents who did the best they could, but as adults we can work with ourselves and our traumas and speak more to our inner child when we have reactions, feel scared, feel triggered, or feel lost. It’s an amazing concept, and it puts the power of healing squarely into the hand of the person who needs to be healed. There is agency in it. Power. I really believed in it because right up until July 23rd of this year, I was actively practicing this. Learning to feel safe. Understanding my triggers. Going to therapy to unpack how my relationship with my mother impacted my life. Understanding how the stories that were passed down to me during childhood about love, relationships, money and work all played out on the canvas of adulthood, almost like watching a silent film.

But then my brother called and told me that my mother died.

I always tried to imagine what it would feel like for my mother to die. Don’t freak out, I didn’t want to kill her. But our brains are built to protect us. That is their only job. And one of the ways my brain chose to protect me was to occasionally play out the scenario where my mother was no longer on this earth. I’d think about where I would be when I got the phone call (at home, the call always came late in the night in the witching “no good news coming” hours between midnight and 3:30am). I’d think about who would make the call (never quite landed on a good one here). And the most futile thought of all: I’d think about how it would feel to get that call. I’d imagine the initial shock of grief. The hanging up of the phone, dazed. I’d roll over and tell my partner what happened. He’d already be awakened by the phone ringing, half-awake but deeply concerned about the change in tone of my voice on the phone at the moment the news hit. It would jolt him more awake into that alert but eerily silent state that happens when you wake up and have to use your brain or your heart right away.

Like I said. Futile.

At 4:45am on July 24, 2019 I received a phone call from my brother in Chicago. “Hey. Mom’s gone.”

“What?!” my voice lilting with fear, panic, grief as my body understood what he said before my brain connected it. My brain still wasn’t sure. He replied, and clarified, “Mom’s dead.”

“Are you kidding?” Good ol’ brain. Doing anything it can to understand, to shield. Thinking that maybe my brother thought it’d be fun to call me at 4:45am and play a joke on me that mom died. I spat out, “Oh my god. Oh my god. What happened.” He told me. It was a long story that he somehow conveyed in less than 30 seconds. Procedure. Admitted. Emergency room. Coded.

“Ok. I guess I’ll come home. I’ll come home. I love you.”

I clicked end.

My previous vision that I’d so skillfully put together of the moment I found out my mom died was so far off the mark. I was alone in London. Over 3,000 miles away from any real support system. I had friends in London. Dear friends, actually. People I could call that would certainly have come immediately to be by my side. But when something this deep happens, you need people who have been to the depths of the ocean with you. Time. Years. Something sturdy and bolstered by fights, make ups, crying, sleepovers, joy, laughter, and years of love. Flimsy connections just won’t do. Even meaningful ones. All of mine were not where I was. I called Aaron. I called Alissa. I called Amalia. They all said “come home".” I booked a flight home.

Packing under duress is a strange thing. In my previous vision of getting the news, it didn’t involve having to pack a suitcase. When I imagined my grief, it felt heavy, but this didn’t. It felt like an internal buzzing that got so strong it caused my body to shake. It wasn’t my muscles running the show though, it was my heart, my gut, the spaces between my ribs that were vibrating. All responding like a symphony to my suddenly changed world.

In the fog of grief I made it to the airport. I took a bus and two trains. I sat at the airport bar instead of going to the lounge. The bartender didn’t even blink when I asked for a shot of Jameson at 7am. A few minutes later he looked me in the eyes with kindness and knowing and asked if I wanted another. Yes.

My mom died at 10:26pm on July 23, 2019. She died at 64 years old. She died at the University of Chicago hospital in the emergency room. When my brother called me he was still living in the same day that it happened and I was already in the future in London in the early morning hours of July 24, 2019.

All the re-parenting work I had been doing over the course of the year was rendered useless. The feeling of being unmoored in the world is different than just loving your mother from afar. I learned that shock comes first and nothing my little reptile brain could do would prepare me for the actual physical pain of grief. The shock is what I was able to use to ride home. It helped me book a flight, pack my bag. It propelled me to the airport. It gave me patience when my flight was delayed. It numbed me just enough to act.

The grief came later. And working on re-parenting and understanding your inner child means nothing to a body that’s feeling grief. It demands to be felt. Being motherless at 32 isn’t something I thought would happen. Turns out, preparing doesn’t do shit in this case. And it doesn’t matter how close you are to your mother. Being crushed and watching pieces of yourself float away as your desperately try to hold on to any semblance of normal is about as shitty as it gets. But you let those waves crash over you. You come up for breath when you can. You let yourself be held when you cry. And you learn the art of being motherless.

Letting the room get dark

I’m not sure if dogs experience darkness and light the way humans do. We experience the sun, the brightness of it and the heat of it. Feel it on our skin. I know that you can feel the sun because you would strategically lay where the sun was shining, so you must have some internal intelligence that guides you to the light.

As humans, we like to manipulate nature in any way we can, exerting control in order to make ourselves feel safe and comfortable. Animals don’t do that. When you were home alone on the couch and the sun set and the light coming through the windows slowly faded from bright soft yellow to deeper orange, to steely blue, to gray, to black, you just stayed in your spot (I assume, since you were home alone when this happened I can’t be entirely sure) and let the darkness happen. Sure, you didn’t have thumbs so switching on the lights may have been difficult, but still.

We don’t do that. I’m sitting in my living room on a Sunday evening. It’s 8:43pm and the sun is setting. As soon as the room began to get a little dim, my first instinct was to walk over to my lamp and switch it on. But then I stopped myself. I didn’t move my body to get off the couch. I just stayed still and decided to let the sun go down. To let the room get dark. And it was wildly uncomfortable. It’s still uncomfortable. The sun isn’t down, there is still a soft gray light coming through my windows and I am fighting with every breath not to get up and turn on a light.

Sitting in the dark is hard. Anything could be there with you. Things you might never guess could pop out and scare you and you would have no warning, you’re not able to prepare for it when it’s dark. Our lives are lived in the light — at least artificially so. We don’t want to sit in dark rooms or feel dark feelings. We want to light them up with candles, then gas lamps, then incandescent bulbs. For dark feelings we want to light them up with alcohol, drugs, laughter, more drugs, movies, TV shows, books — anything to escape the darkness.

But what if we just let the room get dark around us. What if we didn’t intervene in the natural order of things. The darkness only lasts for so long before the sunrise interrupts and shifts it down along the earth to the other side of the world. The same is true of our dark feelings. If we let them visit us they will eventually leave. If we put away the distractions and stop turning on the lights, we might just become more whole.

The day I met my dad

Hey Fatty McFatFat -

You don’t know your dad, do you? I assume he’s no longer with us on this earth because if you lived until 6, and he had you when he was like 2 or 3, then he’d be like…10 or 11 now and it seems unlikely that a puppy mill papa would live that long. Condolences.

It’s not weird for animals like dogs and cats not to know their parents. It’s not like they’re being raised by them, right? They’re just born, feed a little at the teat, and then instinct takes over to keep them alive. Human children need so much more than that. I met my dad when I was 17. I suppose I met him when I was born. He did turn up at the hospital after the main event and stare at me in the nursery with such intensity that it prompted a nurse to sprint down the hallway and in her thick Floridian drawl, breathlessly and frantically tell my mother, “Ma’am — there’s a black man looking at your baby.” What can I say? It was the 80s. In Florida. Tallahassee, Florida.

I met my dad when I was 17. My cousin from Nigeria was studying in the States and he wanted to meet me and my brother. We decided to drive to to Pittsburgh to meet him, and because our father lived in Pittsburgh we thought, well why not meet him, too. Arriving at my cousin’s place was just fine, easy even. We had no history other than that of family, we got along and enjoyed ourselves. The next day, our dad picked us up to take us to eat. I can’t remember now if it was for lunch or dinner. I know it was light outside and we went to a Korean barbecue place.

He drove a car — was it gray? Or blue? Either way, he didn’t get out of it when he drove up. So strange. He hadn’t seen me since I was 3 and the man didn’t get out of the car to say hello to his long lost children. Not even lost, just long. He knew exactly where we had been all these years. He just sat placid in the driver’s seat, and let us decide who would draw the short straw and have to sit in the front seat, eerily close to the man that was responsible for our existence on this earth, but to whom we had no connection. I drew the short straw.

I slide into the car and looked at him right in the eye. It was a Toyota Camry? Or was it an Accord? Something small-ish so it felt claustrophobic. Thick and intense with the air of people who had not met and did not want to. There was a pause. And then he leaned over to hug me. I instantly withdrew, scowled and said, “Don’t fucking touch me.” My brother corrected me. Told me to be nice. I might have settled on a handshake but I don’t remember.

He drove and began speaking, I think. I could only stare at his hands. My hands. Then I studied his face. My face. My nose, my eye shape. My fingers gripped the wheel, guiding the car nervously along. Growing up with a white mother in a white family, you forget that people tend to look like their parents. It was the first time I’d seen a family resemblance outside of my brother. It didn’t make me feel normal. Just numb.

At the restaurant they gave us tea. The kind of tea they serve in the tiny cups with no handles. Jasmine, I think. I started ranting. Why had he left? Where had he been? Why didn’t he support us financially? Why was he such a worthless piece of shit? You know, the real, hard hitting questions you might expect from a 17-year old girl. As I spoke my brother wordlessly filled up my tea cup whenever it got low. Our father played with his food. Twirled noodles around on his plate like a 5-year who was avoiding eating his vegetables. I remember thinking he looked so small, so timid, so powerless. And he was. At least I thought he was in that moment.

Lunch or dinner ended. He drove us back to our cousin’s apartment where we went inside. Before we got out of the car, the told us to tell our cousin to “bring me my son.”

When we walked through the front door, a small boy — around 6 or 7 years old — ran past us in a flash and out the door. My brother and I both froze, the wind from the little boy’s acceleration still fussing up the air.

And just like that, all of my power was gone.

We drove 9 hours back home the next morning. I went back to school on Monday. I got good grades. I finished up my junior year. I applied to and got in to college. The thing I didn’t realize is that if someone told me right now that they had just met their father for the first time, I would be like, “Oh my God, are you ok? Take some time for yourself. Maybe go to therapy!” But 32 year old me wasn’t around for 17 year old me. 17 year old me didn’t know about vulnerability and the power of allowing yourself to crumble, just a little even. 17 year old me was a little girl, and the even littler girl inside of her was devastated and unable to process the reality that there was this man in the world who defined nearly every aspect of how she interacted with the world. I didn’t learn that for many years.

I wonder if you met your dad — would you have even known it was him? Would you go on running and playing and humping? Would you tell him not to fucking touch you? I can’t imagine that you would. Just wag your butt and accept him with love because you don’t know any other way. You don’t have the default of hurt to guide you in those moments.

You haven't always felt this way

Humans are notorious for believing that the way they currently feel is always how they will feel — and always how they’ve felt. It’s just not true and the fallacy of it gets us into so many pickles. I’m thinking about this today because I watched an Instagram video of Tracee Ellis Ross talking about beauty and how she does a lot of weird things to wake up her face and feel full, but her self worth and self esteem is driven only in a tiny tiny way by her external beauty. We can all agree that Tracee is magical, but her post had me thinking about how we define ourselves by external factors.

What I’m saying here isn’t new. But I’m not going to talk in generalizations. I’m going to talk about myself. In my late 20s, I felt amazing. I looked amazing. I was in good shape (even though I wasn’t exercising regularly, so what I actually mean by '“in good shape” is that I was eating in such a way that allowed for my body to look fit), I felt sexy. I was newly single. I felt free and open and scared. I had more good hair days than bad and I would walk around looking at the sky periodically thinking, “Wow, I’m so fucking grateful for this life.”

At the time, I remember telling someone that I’ve always felt beautiful. And I believed it. I felt so beautiful, inside and out, that I couldn’t imagine a time when that wasn’t the case. As I was sorting through my life to pack for London, I found my diary from when I was in 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Let me tell you something, if you want to keep your dignity intact: do not read your 7th grade diary. I was, true to 13-year old form, an absolute insecure mess.

I talk about desperately needing a boyfriend. Wanting boobs. People I hated. I literally had a list of people I hated. I’m not kidding. I had a list, that said 1. Fred, 2. Justin, etc. It wasn’t a short list. Then I had a list of people I loved that said 1. Fred, 2. Justin, etc. I was back and forth constantly. Always looking for sure footing and thinking I’d found it right up until the moment one of my girlfriends betrayed me by chatting on AIM with someone else or daring to also like the same boy that I liked.

30-year old me logically knew that I hadn’t always felt confident and beautiful and whole. But 13-year old me was there to hammer home the point in an ineloquent, raw and stunningly candid way. Our past selves are valuable if only because they are the ones that not only provide the roadmap for our future selves, but remind our present selves that we must be grateful for their lessons — and their desire to document all of those cringy lessons in handwritten format in a composition notebook with a bunch of secret agent stickers on the front.

I started taking a little journey back through the phases in my life, scanning for the moment or series of moments when I began to feel beautiful. I refused to believe that this new openness and freedom came only as a result of my marriage ending. What a cliché, right? I left my husband and now I’M FREE, BITCHES. That couldn’t be the only reason.

At the end of 7th grade, we used to play kickball every day. It was our teacher’s way of giving us free time, allowing us to enjoy the early days of Chicago summer, and — I think — to get out of the classroom himself because it starts to feel claustrophobic and unnatural when the sun opens itself up to you and you choose to stay inside instead. One day, toward the very last day of school, I wore my hair down. It changed my life.

I danced when I was young, and had grown accustomed to wearing my hair in a tight bun or braid. Always pulled back, contained, gelled into submission. I only took it out to wash it, condition it, and then punish it back into a bun. It was comfortable for me to simply put it up and not think about it.

I hadn’t discovered the power in my hair yet. I was in the process of trying out new hair products, something that every mixed girl goes through in her life in perpetuity. Seriously, we are loyal to hair products, but always open to trying something new. It’s in our DNA. As soon as the white and black genes mix together, it activates this secret sequence that triggers our brains to stop and look when we’re in the hair care aisle. It’s also the reason every mixed girl follows at least 10 different hair care product Instagram accounts.

I finally found a gel that didn’t dry my hair. This was in the days before leave-in conditioner wasn’t built to also hold your curls in some sort of non-frizzy mess. Gel was the only answer I had. I had a good hair day in the morning, so I decided to leave it out all day. For me, this was a revolution.

When I got to school, I received immediate positive feedback from everyone. I have to caveat this to say that I went to a relatively diverse grammar school. Kids weren’t mean because of your race or hair texture or any of that. They were just mean to be mean because you weren’t cool — frizzy hair or not. Also, can we talk about how unoriginal it is to be a bully because of the way someone looks? Of all the things to pick on, there are so many more creative ways to upset a 13-year old. Seriously, pick literally anything else at all.

The day I wore my hair out ended up being a turning point in my life. But it also was the first taste of true external validation for my looks that I had allowed myself to receive and enjoy. As a child, if someone called me cute, my mom would correct them and tell them to ask me what book I was reading. She refused to have me receive validation for my looks at a young age. As a white mother of mixed children, I recommend this approach for the sake of the kids. Mixed kids are exoticized because we tend to have the “best” (ha!) features from each side. People go nuts and say things like “mixed babies are so cute!” Everyone: stop doing this.

But. I am beautiful. I have soft skin, and nice-shaped light brown eyes that catch the light in a sharp way. I have nice eyelashes and full lips. I’m tall. I’m naturally muscular with long, toned legs and a butt that up until recently has existed without the need for excessive squatting. My hair is big, at times wild, curly, and distinctive. I have a nice face shape and a beaming, bright smile. All of those things are true. None of those things are my choice. I didn’t will myself to have curly hair, I came out like this. But here I was, soaking up validation — more and more over the years as I shed the overly sweaty 7th grader for the fast ass sophomore in high school.

The problem with getting validation externally is vast, the problem with getting validation externally for things that you cannot control, did not choose, and can’t even really take credit for, is disastrous. Because age is real, and youth is finite, yet glorified. Like money. When it’s gone it’s gone and you better have invested well when that day comes.

As I think about how I now define beauty, how I now define myself, I realize it’s less and less about needing external validation. It’s more about understanding the parts of me that I love that were given to me. And understanding the parts of me that I love that I built myself. The ones I built myself, like compassion, empathy, joy, laughing at myself, showing up for my friends and family, painting my nails like a professional — those are things that makes me feel full of life. When people compliment me on those things, I glow. Because someone else is acknowledging what I already know to be true in myself. They’re acknowledging that I’m beautiful on my terms.

Now I forget that I ever felt insecure. I forget that in 7th grade I was beating my hair into submission, hiding my sweaty armpits, and agonizing about if my Skechers were cool enough. With my perfectly manicured nails, and my hair with all the right products, I force myself to flip through the pages of handwritten, beautiful, aching nonsense because 7th grade me was doing the work that got me to 32-year old me. I haven’t always felt this way, which also means I won’t always feel this way. There’s more. That’s why I keep following those hair care product Instagram accounts.

When your ears bleed

Good morning, fatty!

I trust you’re doing well. I’ve been traveling a lot lately, I suppose about as much as I usually do, but it’s been for pleasure and at such a regular monthly cadence that the fact that I don’t have a trip booked for August makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I traveled when you were alive, too. It required more logistical planning because we had to find a place to put you while we were gone, but travel we did. In hindsight, not quite as much as I would have liked to, but alas I’m making up for it now with my monthly holidays.

In 2012, we (me and your dad) had a trip planned to Colombia. The morning we were meant to leave, you were in the kitchen being your normal fatty self, eating breakfast and getting the zoomies, and your ear just started to bleed. Profusely. Your fur was white so the blood instantly covered your entire ear and side of your face and when something that is supposed to be white turns red it’s terrifying. We couldn’t find where the source of the blood was, it was as if someone had just turned on a blood faucet on your ear and we couldn’t find the valve.

You were unfazed. You were looking at us like, “What’s up, guys? Is it time to go to the beach?” So at least we knew you weren’t in pain — but that made it all the more confusing. At the time, we didn’t have a car. I can’t remember why now because I think we had two cars the year previously and we were now down to zero. Our only option was to hire a Zipcar to get you to the emergency vet because we figured bringing you into a cab all bloodied and butt-shakey wasn’t an option.

I immediately ran out of the house. Sprinted. Took the stairs four at a time just trusting that my feet and legs and all those ligaments and tendons and muscles inside of them would respond and catch me. Trusted that I wouldn’t trip because I couldn’t trip right now. You had a blood faucet on your ear.

The closest Zipcar was about three blocks away in a parking garage. I managed to book it on my phone mid-run and was trying to figure out how to get into the garage itself. There was a high wrought iron fence with a gate code attached. I spent a few minutes panicking, trying to figure out where I might find the code before I took a deep breath, reached my hands up to grip the fence and hoisted myself up for an ill-advised climb.

One boost into the climb, I decided to check the app again. My ligaments and tendons and muscles in my feet and legs had been through enough this morning and in that moment I knew I couldn’t trust them to lift me over the pointy tops of that fence. There it was in the pick up notes: the code to open the gate.

I’d retrieved the car in hat felt like 305 minutes but had actually been about 12. Your dad commented on how quickly I’d returned. You were still in good spirits, but the blood was now covering your neck. As cute as you are, you looked like a horror show.

I don’t remember the ride to the vet. What I do remember is that all of this happened at around 6am and we had a 10am flight to Colombia. In those moments, I wasn’t thinking about the flights. I wasn’t thinking about how your dad and I were in a super weird place. Or how I had recently done something that would ultimately jeopardize the marriage we had hastily built in our early 20s. I was only thinking about you and your bleeding ear. You, who were blissfully unaware that something might be really wrong with you. You, who despite our best efforts in the car were trying your very best to get both dog hair and blood on the interior of a rented vehicle.

The emergency vet explained that you must have gotten bitten at doggy daycare while playing, and that it created a blood blister. There was a small cut, but no other big lacerations. The blister simply popped and fauceted blood all over your ear and face and neck. A quick clean up and some antibiotics and you were outta there in an hour.

We didn’t make our flight. But there was another flight to Bogota an hour later that we did make. You were safely at home in the care of a very good friend of mine. With a cone on your head to keep you from messing with the injured area. Colombia was a pretty good trip. I wasn’t feeling strong emotionally at the time. Riddled with guilt and shame. Both of which are reactions that start in your head and work their way into your heart and gut, not the other way around like the true emotions. Once they hit you there, in your heart, it takes so much more effort to calm them, soothe them, remove them. They set up shop in there, turn themselves on like a faucet and don’t stop until you find the tiny laceration that allowed them to exist in the first place.

The search for the root cause is only the beginning though. Unlike your antibiotic treatment, which only last 10 days, my guilt and shame treatment would end up being far longer. Years-long. And would involve unimaginable pain. Pain that starts in the gut and the heart and makes its way to your brain. If only humans could wear cones to keep us from messing with the injured area.

We say our names differently

I met my two younger brothers a few weeks ago. Most people know who their siblings are because they grow up in the same house with them, or at least in the same vicinity. But at 32 years old, I met two new brothers — bringing my grand total of brothers to four.

Our family is like a complicated word problem. There is me and the brother that have the same mom and same dad. There is the oldest one who has the same mom and a different dad. There are the younger ones who have the same dad and a different mom. I’m in the middle.

It’s weird realizing you’re actually the middle child at 32. I was raised as the youngest. And I act like the youngest. I don’t actually know how to be a big sister. I asked for tips from my friends that have younger siblings. Based on my experience, being an older sibling means paying for things, driving people places, and occasionally being mean for no reason and stealing your younger sibling’s food. I don’t know if any of that applies when you become a big sister at 32, though. I did pay for things, but I’m not mean, I don’t typically steal food, and me driving is not recommended even under the best of circumstances.

When I was 17, I found out that I had two younger brothers. I knew very little about them, only their approximate age and that they lived with my dad in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t even really curious at that age, too full of anger still at my father for abandoning me. At that time, I didn’t even have the emotional wherewithal to put together that he didn’t just abandon us, he chose another family entirely. Usually a deadbeat dad is a deadbeat through and through. Not mine. Mine was a selective deadbeat and his behavior in that realm only applied to me and one of my brothers. It only applied to his first-born children.

Looking at it with 15 years of maturity on me, the main thing I feel is deep sadness for my mother. My mother who loved a man, married a man, had children with a man who in the end was never actually all that interested in any kind of life with her. My parents story and my origin story, inextricably linked as they are, remain a relative mystery to me. I think they loved each other. I know my mom loved my dad. I know that my brother and I were a result of the fraught union. I know my dad never lived with my mom and instead lived with his two cousins —one of whom was actually his wife? Fiancé? From Nigeria. She was also my godmother.

Yes. My dad, while legally married to my mom, had his second/additional wife stand up in a church before God, hold me in her arms and witness the washing away of my original sin. My mother stood by watching, not knowing at the time that this woman would later become the mother of his second family. The family he chose.

My brothers, the ones I just met, are lovely people. Curious, smart, interesting. They don’t seem to hold anger toward me or my brother, and overall meeting them was absolutely incredible. I was so nervous. The older one arrived before the younger one and while I waited for him at the train station I felt all loopy. But not mentally, my heart felt loopy. Like someone was washing it on the delicate cycle — not so rough that it hurt, but enough movement that I had to steady myself.

Meeting family is one thing. Meeting someone who shares a parent with you is another. You look at things differently, checking for family resemblance, both physically and behaviorally. The weirdest thing though, was that they had stories about my dad.

They know my dad. They grew up with him. They do not know a life without him. They do not know a life where he wasn’t physically present in their lives. He drove them places. He helped them with their homework. When the younger brother wasn’t sure if he could make the trip to Chicago, he had his dad buy him a last minute flight. I would never, ever ask my father to buy me anything. Have never depended on him for anything.

When I was 8 years old, I was sitting in the middle of the living room floor playing with an Etch-a-Sketch when my dad called. Every once in a while, he’d call. My mom answered and talked to him for a few minutes. Then he asked to speak to me. My mom held her hand out to me, with the phone grasped loosely in her fingers, and I looked up and said, “No, I don’t want to talk to him.” She communicated this message to him, and he replied that she had told me to say that. Which is comical beyond measure. What really happened was that at 8 years old, I realized that he was full of shit. And I was not having it.

The realization I had at 8, I saw playing across my younger brothers’ faces while they were in Chicago. How must it feel to know that the man who raised you, also abandoned two other whole human beings? I can’t imagine the feeling. What I do know is I felt remarkably calm. My story is mine, and it’s kind of incredible. We’re each intertwined with each other in some way. In many ways. We do share mannerisms and behaviors. We look alike. But we were shaped by very different narratives from the same source. Even individually, my relationship with my father and my brother who shares both parents with me is different. Markedly so.

I don’t speak to my father. I didn’t even realize I didn’t speak to him anymore until the younger brother asked me the last time I spoke to our dad and I paused, thought about it, and came up with sometime in 2016, I believe. Three years. I only spoke to him on the phone a couple of times a year prior to that, but when my life started shifting. When I left my husband, when I began learning who I was on my own as an adult, when I moved to London, I didn’t bring him with me. It wasn’t deliberate, it was like a reaction. Like someone hit my knee and it jerked up involuntarily. My life pushed him out for me, on my behalf certainly, but without my knowledge.

My brother is named after my dad. I’m named after my dad’s mother, my grandmother. And all four of us have the same last name. But we say it differently. Long ‘e’ versus short ‘e'. We have the same. last. name. And we don’t even pronounce it the same.

Can I ask you a question?

Hey, buddy. I’ve been thinking and I want to ask you something.

Will you speak at my funeral?

I know, it’s a lot to ask because 1. you’re a dog and you can’t speak and 2. you’re dead. But hear me out.

If we could have our dogs eulogize us, my lord wouldn’t it be great? They would only know how to say truly amazing things. And not just like the way a good friend might do it. It wouldn’t be false, forced, or one of those things that were difficult to put together because all the negative memories were intruding into the mental flow. No one would lean over and whisper to their neighbor during the choked up speech and say, “Yeah, that’s nice and all, but she has to say that. We all know that really Annie was a dickhead.”

It would be pure, loving and full of big, wide smiles. The kind that goes from ear to ear, tongue out panting, butt wagging excitement over your life.

I was in a cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland and there was a grave for a dog there. The dog’s owner died and for the next 14 years, the dog snuck into the cemetery to sleep on his beloved master’s grave. Then one day the dog himself died and was buried in the same cemetery. If that’s not a beautiful eulogy, I don’t know what is.

Although, my love, if you had outlived me I would be very sadly looking down (or up) from the beyond if you waited by my grave for years. Go run on the beach! Destroy a stuffed toy! But I guess as a dog, I would be your sole purpose for living so you would actually really love hanging out by my grave. I don’t think it’s the same for humans.

So, I ask again: will you speak at my funeral? I’d really appreciate it. I think you’d say good things about me. You’d be able to express how wonderful I was. How I snuggled you. How I gave you love without question or expectation. How I was open, caring, and fed you good food. How I held you when you were ill and paid money to have your teeth cleaned. Or — you’d just get the zoomies.

The thing is, giving that kind of love in the moment is never given with the expectation of anything back, so maybe it’s unfair to ask you to eulogize me, but if I had to choose anyone to talk about my life, I’d choose your weird fuzzy face.

Who was I talking to about the pigeons?

Have you ever vividly remembered a conversation, the topic, the ins and outs, the laughs, the pauses, the inflection in the voice, even the hand gestures — but cannot remember who you were talking to when you had that conversation? Of course not, you’re a dog. You only remember where you last peed in the apartment so you can go to it again when no one is looking.

I’m a human, so this has happened to me. It happened today, in fact. I was walking home from the gym in the rainy London evening. Having my hood up on my coat was annoying because my hair was sweaty from the gym and would stick to my neck so I was just leaving my head and hair to fend for themselves against the rain, sans hood.

Walking down Hackney Road, you hear the slick sound of tires on the street rush by you, but you don’t really look at traffic when you’re on the sidewalk. Funny how that goes. You’re technically moving in the same direction as these cars driving mere feet from you, but until you need to cross paths with them, they’re almost invisible to you.

I was about 10 minutes from home when I saw a white and lavender pigeon fly from the pavement in front of me and perch on the awning of an off license. And off license is a store in London kind of like our corner store in Chicago. Well, exactly like out corner store in Chicago. On Lunt and Sheridan. Where the owner would let you come inside with me even though no dogs were allowed.

This pigeon sighting solicited an instant flashback for me. I was sitting outside at a cafe or restaurant, talking about a white and lavender pigeon that was hopping along the sidewalk. It had pigeon friends, but they were all dark gray, or dirty gray. I don’t think pigeons really come in dark gray, only dirty gray. It seemed to be holding court, this lavender pigeon. Whenever it came close to the crumbs, the others would make way for it. When it decided it wanted to hop in a different direction, the others would move.

The pigeon was a boss.

I remember discussing this boss pigeon. How it was actually beautiful, something I would never say about a pigeon, flying rats as they are. It was regal. Elegant. And the others knew it. I had an entire conversation about how there has to be some hierarchy among all things, even pigeons on the street. There are the beautiful ones and the not-so-beautiful-ones. There are the dingy ones. The ones with misshapen feet. But for me, I though they were all pretty gross. Not so of this lavender queen.

I remember observing these birds for some time, discussing them. There was wine on the table. I have a sharp memory, I could smell the smells of the street, and feel the air — it was cool, but not freezing. I was wearing a coat. I recall feeling an intense fascination with these birds, carrying on about their day in the street.

Someone was sitting at the table with me, and adding to this conversation. Equally fascinated. And I could not remember who it was. I couldn’t hear their voice, but I could remember their tone. I could see their gestures and mannerisms, but not see their hands or face. It was wild.

For the remainder of my walk home in the rain, as my hair got increasingly more soaked — counterintuitive, I know, since the reason I didn’t have my hood on was because my hair was wet and sticky on my neck — I wasn’t able to think of who I was with, or even where I was in the world.

I travel a lot, Deniro, and sometimes the world actually melts together in my head. I don’t say that to be one of those snobs. It actually happens. Sometimes just for work, I’m in three countries in one week. No offense to Europe, but the cities all kind of look the same after a while.

The more I tried to remember where I was and who I was with, the further the memory moved away from me. Not just what I couldn’t recall already, but even the details I did remember. Suddenly I couldn’t hear the traffic anymore, I couldn’t feel the weight of that wine glass in my hand. It was like grasping harder for it moved even the things I was sure of out of my mind.

As I entered my apartment building, it hit me. I was with Aaron, my current partner. We were in Paris, sitting at a cafe on a corner in Le Marais. We were drinking red wine and we watched those pigeons for a long, long time.

It felt like that memory would never return to me, even though from the moment it flashed in my mind to the time I actually remembered the details of who and where was about 10 minutes of walking in the London rain. My hair was now beaded with cold rain water, but I remembered. It’s a marvel that all of this happened because that lavender pigeon that flew onto the awning of the off license when I was walking home in the rain.