why can’t I stop, or the eternal writing of this memoir

When we all went home in 2020, I started working on a memoir.

To get started, I dug through old journals and realized I’d documented much of my teen years, in great detail. The confusion of puberty, my longings for the future, worries about God and page after page of swooning over hot guys I no longer remember.

Five years and a full-on draft and a dozen rejections later, I’m embarking on a huge edit.

It’s necessary I think but I also think I’m somehow reluctant to be done.

To leave this space.

There’s something about staying in here in this time when my sisters and I were teenagers. When we were close, when all we had was each other. We went really hard things together. Poverty, deprivation and abuse and hilarity, a father’s rages and a mother’s near-fatal illness. It’s like I think I can change the outcome somehow if I stay.

I know I can’t. That would be silly. Unrealistic.

But if I stay, if I continue to be patient, I can figure some things out, maybe.

Maybe.

to from

From a recent trip.

>>to Seattle

 

>>from Seattle

 

don't ever change

Visiting a place where I lived for thirty years feels strange, now.

Coming from the humid Gulf South, Seattle seems so clean, bursting with greenery and efficiency.

Gas is five dollars a gallon.

You don’t have to talk to anyone to do most things like order coffee or buy a $7.99 dress at the thrift store. Even so I talk to clerks and security guards and homeless people and feel gaudy and garrulous and slow.

Don’t ever change, a co-worker crows. You’ve always been just yourself.

You’re such an eccentric, a Southern friend comments, looking at my caftan-y dress and sneakers.

*

My sisters planned a week’s worth of events but I only made it to one-point-five-ish.

After rising at four a.m., flying for 4.5 hours, jumping a dead car battery and sitting in hot traffic for hours, we sat on a porch politely catching up and swatting flies off chunks of juicy watermelon.

We had an enjoyable but subdued Fourth, playing bocce with a restless eight year old, eating veggie dogs and s’mores, and lighting $150 worth of fireworks amid Gen Z diffidence (“that one was mid”).

Then a chaotic brunch, glorious hours on a houseboat and wistful goodbyes.

*

Relief and regret.

How I mostly feel these days.