My whole life, I’ve fixated on being remembered. Perhaps it was because I secretly believed so many had already forgotten me. As an adoptee, I was not haunted by the idea of being abandoned on the street, clinging to the edge of life. I feared how easily a seven-thousand-mile journey from China to America could erase my existence from an entire family, country, and culture. If some higher deity simply snapped their fingers, I would disappear from the dinner table, the classroom desk, the window seat of a bus.

Growing up, my mother always marveled at my impeccable memory. To her, I had a talent, a gift. To me, it was a means of survival. While playing under the dining room table, I concentrated on images, sounds, and senses with a subtle desperation—the type of shoes the women wore, the sound of men slapping the table as they laughed, the coolness of the tiled floor that I dragged my toys across. Each detail was a lifeline. Perhaps I was trying to make up for the memories I left behind in China. The two most important, forgotten years of my life. I sometimes believed that recalling them could answer all my questions.

Forgetfulness was an ever-present existential wound throughout my childhood. When my mother couldn’t remember a conversation from last week or the name of one of my friends, I was convinced this was the onset of her forgetting me entirely. I believed our souls were built from memories, as we stacked each day on top of the other. Forgetfulness poked holes in our foundation. Without our memories, we could lose ourselves. Without other people to remember us, it could be as if we never existed. I set out to prove my existence. Early on, I promised myself: You are going to be someone special. You are going to be someone worth remembering.

Stories were my first love; they were easiest to remember. At dinner, I recited scenes from my favorite movies, copying the pauses in dialogue, the sound effects, and the musical score, just how I’d seen it on screen. Even half-asleep, I knew when my mother had skipped pages of The Sneetches, hoping to go to bed earlier. Stories gave memories flair and vitality. If memories were ships docked in the subconscious, stories propelled them into the future, where they set sail to become legacy. Stories could travel for centuries, riding tailwinds across communities and continents, changing shape but never essence. My desire to be remembered transformed into a desire to write a story that would ripple through people’s collective memory.

When I went to college, I discovered that I love people by remembering them. I could recall the first time I met a friend or a lover down to what they were wearing and the first words we shared. I would recite it back to them years later, listing all the details, the time of day, the color of their shirt, as my way of saying: I love you. I won’t forget you. I listened to the beliefs, hobbies, and especially stories of the people I loved and tucked them into my way of life.

But college also showed me the self-destructive side of my obsession with memory. Sometimes it didn’t matter how I was remembered, as long as I was. Sometimes I looked back and was horrified by the relationships I’d destroyed and people I’d hurt for the sake of not being forgotten. I’d interacted with friends and lovers as if they already had one foot out the door. Each conversation, each impression I made, could be the last. Without security and trust to tether them, these relationships decayed.

Anticipatory grief. That was what my therapist called it. An adoptee herself, she explained that it is the body’s way of bracing itself for another loss. It humbled me to learn that there was a psychological term that could so clearly encapsulate my way of life. Perhaps I wasn’t unique, but I wasn’t alone either. Still, the label felt more fitting for the terminally ill and their caretakers.

In the months following my graduation, my therapist kept digging:

What happens if your story never gets published?

What happens if you are forgotten in the end?

What could happen if you stopped trying to be remembered?

As the months stretched out, I began to feel the side effects of living the first twenty-two years of my life as if I would die the next day. That kind of living erodes the soul and makes the body sag like a walking corpse. The muscles in my jaw, the tendons in my back felt the strain of always looking from the outside inward, always perceiving through a lens of contemplation.

Still, I scanned Wikipedia biographies of famous authors with a new kind of desperation. How old were they when they had their big break? How many years do I have left? It made writing agony—the dread of being forgotten poisoned my words. Will this sentence remain in the reader’s mind after they put down the book? Does this paragraph capture this memory accurately?

One day, during a conversation with my best friend, I was once again lamenting how writing—this labor of love—was becoming like wading through slough. This time, she interrupted me: You are chasing something unattainable, everyone is forgotten eventually. She said this with a levity I couldn’t comprehend.

Secretly, I knew her words held some truth. I no longer wanted to write as if my sentences would be etched on my tombstone. I did not want to speak to friends wondering which conversations would be quoted back to me in my eulogy. I did not want to grieve myself while I was still alive.

How do I make peace with being forgotten? I asked my therapist in our next meeting. As the words left my mouth, I already knew she couldn’t give me a concrete answer. That kind of peace wasn’t a stage of self-actualization you could progress towards.

However, as the days rolled on, I caught glimpses of something that looked like peace. It was weightless, so ephemeral it could’ve been a trick of the light. It hid between discoveries I made by myself, small victories that only I deemed were so, poetry and prose that I loved but never tried to publish, and natural beauty that only I was around to witness. I recognized it in the brief moment between the end of a monologue and the beginning of the applause. I felt it during a magnetic first impression that grows into a lifelong connection. I heard it in the sound of my father walking up the stairs after turning off the kitchen light.

Weeks can go by where that sense of peace feels so distant I question whether I experienced it at all. I may never understand its coming and going. I may never be able to harness it, cup it in my palm. Still, these days I try to fall asleep by leafing through the memories of the day and letting some go in order to make space for new ones tomorrow. I practice trusting in my existence without other people confirming it.

When I was applying to college, I was confronted by an eerily personal prompt: What does legacy mean to you? What legacy do you hope to leave behind?

At the time, I responded with an essay about my school newspaper articles—how I hung each page up on my bedroom wall, and how the words remained while the sun bleached paper faded. Now, I recognize that legacy takes many shapes: a community impact that ripples throughout generations, advice given to a friend that they take with them through all the curves and bumps of life, learning a new family recipe, taking the scenic route, late night drives. There is legacy in sleeping, eating, and breathing—in being.

I still want to be a great writer. However, these days, I try to focus on the feeling of the pencil carving along the page. I try to gently nurture my first drafts with the hope they may flourish final copies. I realize a human lifetime can never be fully encapsulated in the pages of a book. There are things a memoir can never tell you about a person: the scent of their kitchen soap, the cadence of their laugh, the look in their eye right before they tell you a secret. The sacred unwritten moments. People, places, and lessons that don’t make it into the final draft. I may forget them over time, but all that matters is that they existed once.

One day I will be forgotten too. One day I will be gone and so will every person I met throughout my life. Our stories will be disassembled, repurposed, or scattered into unrecognizable fragments. Perhaps all that matters is that we were here.

We’ve stayed twice in the Hotel Paradox in Santa Cruz, mostly because of the name, not because the accommodations are in any way remarkable—a cramped boutique hotel in a not great neighborhood with a Jack in the Box across the street. I’ve wondered whether many guests make enigmatic pronouncements containing the word “paradox,” or whether most guests just take it in stride, finding the name no more surprising than Motel Six or any other hotel. (Six what? The guest’s sixth choice?) Maybe only writers spend time wondering about things like that. And about where the name Jack in the Box came from, for that matter. I always found jack-in-the-boxes scary as a kid. You wouldn’t expect to find your dinner in one.

In the 16th century, “paradox” denoted an opinion running counter to accepted opinion (from Greek paradoxon, “contrary [opinion]”), which isn’t exactly what it means now—something that seems contradictory but actually isn’t.

Right now I’m at home, not in a hotel. I’m sitting in a new wicker chair in my overgrown backyard in northern California, reading about all the hotels and places Geoff Dyer stumbled in and out of twenty years ago, mostly on mushrooms or grass or skunk, wrapping my head around passages like: “It’s about places where things happened or didn’t happen, places where I stayed and things that have stayed with me, places I’d wanted to see or places I passed through or just ended up.” I’m thinking about that, and about places where I just ended up, especially hotels. I lived abroad for four years in my twenties and traveled a lot more than I do now.

I remember the interiors of some hotels without remembering where they were or when I visited. A lot of places have stayed with me.

I read Roz Chast’s graphic nonfiction book on dreams recently, and she includes getting lost in a hotel in the section on her recurrent dreams. I’ve never been lost in a hotel, but I can picture it easily, as if it happened to me and I’ve forgotten it. I used to teach in a large circular building, not often enough to know the building well. I’m not good at remembering numbers and I always worried when I left my classroom during break to go to the restroom that I wouldn’t find the classroom again. I’d end up racing down the infinite corridor, popping my head into classes in progress, apologizing as I looked for mine. That’s one of my recurrent dreams, along with running up and down cement stairs searching for a classroom and finding only locked exit doors at each level. I don’t have any happy recurrent dreams. Maybe no one does.

The circular building where English classes sometimes met housed Anthropology along with other social sciences. The larger classrooms were cavernous and dark with dim lighting and no windows. One had glass display cases of browning skulls. Which feels like a surreal detail from a dream but in fact is real.

In my nonfiction, I frequently include dreams, as well as speculation, and alternate scenarios. Sometimes I call my creative nonfiction “hybrid,” but the term is pretty vague, at least open to multiple meanings. You could call Dyer’s writing hybrid, if you wanted to. In Yoga for Those Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he says: “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too.”

I suppose a lot of things didn’t happen to me. In the past or future. Here or there. Now I write.

This is the second book by Geoff Dyer I’ve read in two weeks. Out of Sheer Rage was even better. He’s maddened by everything, it seems, and so funny I was laughing out loud. He can’t seem to write his novel, or his book about D.H. Lawrence, and spends an inordinate amount of time searching for the perfect place to write, losing books as he travels, looking for specific books in used bookstores for years.

Speaking of searches, six geese just passed overhead, in a perfect V formation, honking. I was about to say honking happily but I don’t really know how they felt, because aren’t formations supposed to be much larger than six? In that case, are these renegade geese honking triumphantly because they’ve broken off from the others, or are these lost geese who’ve fallen behind or gone astray? Honking forlornly as they search for their companions?

Okay, I looked it up on my phone. Geese usually travel in flocks of thirty to one hundred. They can travel 1,500 miles a day. A flock can start as a group of five or six. The geese honk to attract more geese to their formation. So their honking is not forlorn, or triumphant, or happy. It’s a sort of invitation.

I should probably bring this train of thought back to paradox, something seemingly absurd that actually makes sense. A circular structure in an essay creates a satisfying sense of closure. The writer’s thoughts travel in a circle because the writer is about to pull them together, and the circle returns us to some important insight implicit in the opening. Of course, sometimes our thoughts travel in circles because we’re befuddled. And sometimes our thoughts break off and travel in a different direction, and we have no idea, really, where they’re headed.

I looked up “paradox” and discovered many more permutations than I expected. For example, there’s something called “vicious circularity” or “infinite regress” that can be applied to the “liar paradox.” If you say “This statement is false,” the statement can’t be both true and false. According to Wikipedia, “if the statement is true, then the statement is false, thereby making the statement true, thereby making the statement false, and so on.” Nothing I’ve written here is false, by the way.

“All around the mulberry bush / The monkey chased the weasel / the monkey thought it was all in fun / Pop! Goes the weasel.” My childhood jack-in-the-box, battered tin with pictures of clown faces on the sides, played that tune without the words. I think all jack-in-the-boxes play that tune, with the grinning clown head popping up at “Pop!” In Cockney slang in the 1800s, “weasel and stoat” meant coat, and “pop shops” were pawnbrokers, so some scholars think the nursery rhyme had to do with pawning your coat. That’s just one of many possibilities. Monkeys were also drinking jugs in pubs. I savored the nonsensical and inexplicable as a child. I think most children do. Essayists must also. I expect many of us enjoy research rabbit holes. We’re more interested in questions than definitive answers.

I keep thinking of Dyer in Amsterdam, a scene where he struggles to put on a new pair of trousers in a tiny bathroom not unlike the one in the Hotel Paradox. The room in the Hotel Paradox was barely large enough for a queen bed. You couldn’t exit the small bathroom if the sliding closet door was open. Dyer’s on mushrooms. The trousers end up inside-out. He is staying, by the way, at a hotel he calls Hotel Oblivion. Since his girlfriend is called Dazed, and they do a lot of drugs, it appears that names have been changed, along with a lot of other things, in this only apparently nonfictional book. Back to hybrid writing again. What would an essay look like that was turned inside-out?

Geese are monogamous. Some are migratory, some stay put if the conditions are right. My husband and I have been married for more than thirty years, living in this house for more than twenty years. We really should fix up the back yard, but I enjoy the disorder: the aging lemon and pomegranate trees that sometimes produce a lot of fruit and sometimes don’t, the hummingbirds and butterflies, the sprawl of weeds and flowering plants that spring up each year of their own accord. I still don’t know the names of most of them.

Our son was reading aloud at breakfast one day from a book by Bill Bryson called A Short History of Nearly Everything and my imagination was captured by a doomed eighteenth-century expedition to Ecuador and Peru, where French and Spanish scientists planned to measure the world. It took ten years, and everything went wrong. They’re stoned by the locals. One of the scientists runs off with a thirteen-year-old girl. Their doctor is murdered “in a misunderstanding over a woman.” One of my favorite moments concerned the European botanist who “became deranged”—I’m guessing because there was so much fantastical flora he had to name. Imagine an environment where everything was unfamiliar and nothing had a name! How long would you last? Our son lives in Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo now and does research in the rainforest, so I guess he wasn’t daunted. He sends us photographs of unimaginably colorful insects and fungi, very occasionally of a snake dangling from a branch or a belligerent orangutan in a tree voicing his objections to humans trespassing on his territory. At least I suppose that’s what’s on the orangutan’s mind. But I was wrong about the geese.

We have a new neighbor with two bloodhounds. Right now one of them is baying (not barking, baying, which I find impressive). Was it disturbed by the geese? Possibly. I have no idea what the bloodhound is thinking either. Or what direction it would pursue if our new neighbor liberated it from the back yard. They’re trackers, right? They follow a scent? Not unlike the essayist, always ready for a wild goose chase.

What am I pursuing here? The meaning of paradox? A definition of literary hybridity? The hidden thoughts of geese and orangutans and dogs? The importance of naming plants? Or maybe I’m just pursuing my own thoughts, not knowing where they’ll take me, or you. There might be a paradox there: reflections that are ostensibly mine have become yours just by dint of reading them. The word “reflection” suggests mirroring as well as rumination (something that cows do as well as people, but don’t get me started). The point of a wild goose chase is that you can’t catch the goose. If you do, it’s not wild anymore.

The first thing I remember from when I woke up—the first real, clear, thing—was your text: I’m here! Do they know I’m here? I don’t understand why they won’t let me in already! I squinted at the empty recovery room around me. Something was inflating and deflating around my calves, like gentle, repeated hugs. The nurse asked if I wanted cookies or _____? Juice or _____? I chose cookies and juice—the other options, I cannot remember—and when she brought them my mouth was so dry that I could not swallow. I was trying to clean the crumbs off my face when you texted: They’re finally letting me in!

“Joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh,” Anne Carson writes. Your body formed next to mine, and when we were born, those bodies were the same, if not genetically then essentially: tiny, soft things, all cartilage and skin, a dusting of hair, fingernails shorter than the wick of a candle. Then we changed, always together but not always the same way: you were taller than me but with smaller feet. Your hair straighter than mine, your voice higher. Our noses turned out completely different.

You were already pregnant when you picked me up from surgery, both of our bodies comets shooting in distinct directions: mine towards a chest I could finally love, yours, growing a human. He will not be born of my body, but he will be born of a body that I met at the same time I met my own. Someday I will tell him: you were there when I woke up. Someday I will show him my scars, the two lines that arc across my chest, and tell him how you took me to the bathroom to pee before I was released. You held my drains while I sat on the toilet so they wouldn’t get tangled. Our bodies are more different than ever; they will never again be as aligned as they were the day we were lifted from our first home. And yet: there we were, laughing in the bathroom like we have in so many bathrooms before. Here you are, carrying around a person who I lean down and say hi to whenever I see you and your big belly these days. Someday I will tell him: no one else could have picked me up from the recovery room. Who else to bear witness as I reentered the world, as my new body first saw the light? You are two minutes older than me. You have always been just outside the door. I’m here, you said, and I knew it was safe to come out.

[I say, fuck the bees, kill them all]

(But where would you keep her, / with all those huge strange thoughts in you / going and coming and sometimes staying the night?) I say, fuck the bees, kill them all. What I mean is I am afraid. Bees, for me, are the only frightening insect, their flight and sound so painful. I use the word painful so often because language escapes me and I cannot find it. When I try to enter and reenter language, it retreats, so fickle. Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic / orders? I want to run far away when I hear wing movement, thorax muscles, an alarm of buzz headed towards me. I am leaned up against the kitchen sink wiping my hands with a dish towel, and I say, god I hate bees so much, and you immediately anger.

and at first, I am confused. I repeat myself, lost in a circle of language, an ouroboros of tongue and tail, that makes you even angrier. This is what I do these days, get lost in language and cannot find my way out, so I repeat and repeat until you crack. For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure. I try to recenter and allow language to seep back in slowly, which it does at times when I am unprepared and ill-equipped such as this moment. I say, I don’t give a shit about bees. There are 199 synonyms and antonyms in the English language for the word pain, but all I can access is one word. Short circuit. I wish I could say something, anything else. Every angel is terrifying.

and it is the first time I try to read poetry aloud to you, and you are so pissed off about the bees, but really you are pissed off at my retrieval of language, at my circular repetition, at my inability to articulate my thoughts or to communicate clearly. I am afraid of you, X, for no good reason. I am afraid of the pain being inflicted because of a perceived threat of my own making. I am afraid of being a threat to myself and to others. I am afraid of hearing anything before I see it. I am afraid of colonies. I am afraid of the queen. I am afraid of the sting, the welt, the tears. I am afraid of even the idea of despair, of woe. This current exchange between us, filled to the brim with agony, the impending doom of trauma before it comes. The unpredictability. What am I afraid of more than myself? Alas, whom can we turn to / in our need?

and I want to say all of this to you. I want to apologize, even though I don’t know what I am apologizing for. I want to ask, do you like being stung? Can I sting you in all your tender places? The heart in your chest and the heart tattooed on the inside of your arm? What of the welt it will leave, the tears surely on the brink? Even the word, sting, rolls out of my mouth like a song. What is the remedy for heartbreak? An EpiPen? A mud pack, cool and grit? Baking soda? I want to ask, do you still love me? The answer to the last question is what I am afraid of the most. How painful. I say, instead, fuck them bees. Your face gets red. I say, are you mad? Really? and I laugh. Your eyes never leave the TV. I sit next to you on the couch and open The Duino Elegies. I begin to read. I say, listen to these lines, O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace / gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there, / desired, gently disappointing, a hard rendezvous / for each toiling heart. You shake your head, pause the video game, and say, stop, I don’t want to hear it. Stop it. You go back to playing. A golden Sony PS4 controller in your hand, a jewel. You say that is probably the most unintelligent thing you have ever said. I halt mid-line. You clarify: About the bees. I finish: Is it easier for lovers?

and later in the deep evening, a crack and dust of snow silences the world outside. I am cradled in a blanket like a tomb, everything simultaneously cold and inviting. I will drink alone on the floor of our bathroom when you go out with your friends, X. Everyone in town and wanting to see you. This is the first time I drink alone in our apartment, but not the last. I wait until you abandon the video game, until you shout through the door you are leaving now, be back later. December and all along our silent street twinkling lights of every color lit every window except ours. The clawfoot tub is unenclosed, and I hit the top of my shoulders on the lips of the curved porcelain-enameled cast iron every time I lean back. I invite the pain. A momentary holiday in the air, I am drinking Christmas and the way pine scent is never actually pine scent, how juniper lies. I’m reading Rilke by myself: I’m reading about terror. I’m reading about yearning. About ghosts. About love. Strange, to not go on wishing one’s wishes.

and I’m lying on the bathroom floor, tipping the bottle back into my mouth. I text a friend: There is something happening inside of me I find fascinating, feels like worms in my belly, a vast evening of insects inside of me. They text back: Sounds more like a snake, the longest of the world. Remember how the snake eats itself, less predictable than insects. I leave the empty pint of gin in the front pocket of my hoodie, tucked next to our bed, the most audacious secret. Many a star was waiting / for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you / out of the past, / or a violin surrendered itself / as you walked by an open window. All that was mission. / But were you up to it?

Notes: Lines quoted from “The First Elegy,” Rainer Maria Rilke. (Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Translated by Edward Snow. North Point Press, 2000.)

The day I danced with Jordan, I first baptized my hand in honey.

That morning, my boyfriend and I toured our first apartment together. Looking through a tiny phone screen, I watched him walk around the one-bedroom as the broker chirped about the gym and garage. We both ended the call exhausted and unsure. We each had our own excuses: the gym seemed sparse (him); the square footage felt small (me). I wondered if these things really mattered if it meant living together after four long years of distance. I wondered, less openly, what we were really making excuses for.

I was twenty-five then. I lived in Wilmington as a graduate student and had a long-distance boyfriend I didn’t know how to love. And then there was Jordan. I didn’t have the words for her yet. At twenty-five I could barely say queer, let alone feel ownership of it. I was set to move to Philadelphia with my boyfriend after graduation, so I told myself none of it mattered anyway.

And maybe I would have gone through with it all—the move to Philadelphia, the role of supportive partner, the family and kids he wanted—had it not been for Jordan. When I met her, she stopped me: hair that fell forever, eyes that could cool you even in summer’s wet mouth. It’s the same story women I later dated would tell back to me: we were friends with an asterisk, drawn together by something intangible.

But I didn’t have time to sit and ruminate. I had to prepare for a basketball watch party that Jordan and I were co-hosting for our friends that night. I started by making the honey-sriracha brussel sprouts. I halved the green leafy orbs and tossed them in the air fryer. Then I set the honey in the microwave to soften it before adding the sriracha. But I left the honey in the microwave too long. My mind was scattered on the apartment I had just toured, on the blue punch I still needed to make, on Jordan who had suggested the party. I loved her spirit, her overzealous charisma, the way she always talked at max volume. A piece of me was always on her. When the microwave beeped, I reached for the ceramic bowl, but it burned so hot to the touch that I threw it up in the air. The honey flew from it and landed in a crescent moon around my right thumb. It bubbled over my soft skin, nearly making a perfect circle. At the sink, I tried to gently wash the honey away, but it clung to me. The wound glowed red and glistened. It shone like a chrysalis.

At the watch party, a friend lathered my wound with Vaseline and wrapped it with bandages from her car. “It’s my honey-baked hand!” I announced to the watch party. Jordan stood over us, laughing at my clumsiness. I devoured her attention and kept her close all night. We drank buzz balls and blue punch and made bets on whose team would win. When I lost, she put an oversized pope’s hat on my head and placed a crown on hers. Together, we led the party to the strip of beach bars by my house.

Despite my boiled and blistered wound, Jordan still grabbed my hand and pulled me to the dance floor. All night she focused on me, waving off other people. As she spun me, my hand beat raw and pink like a heart. She spun me until the lights and her eyes blurred into one bright pulse, and I wondered if I would die from the silence between us. We spun like tops, like marionettes in some bigger play, like women caught in the dancing plague. When she released me, I ran out of the bar, afraid I would kiss her if I stayed. Instead, I called my boyfriend and with the naked honesty sometimes only alcohol brings, I confessed my crush. It was late, and I had woken him up, but still I could hear the hurt in his voice when he said we could talk about this tomorrow. I called my mom afterward, desperate to hear another familiar voice, and in a drunken haze, I came out to her. “I’m not fully straight,” I said.

“But you’re dating a man,” she said. “What about children?”

In the morning, I surveyed the damage. I unraveled the gauze around my palm to expose swollen blisters. I rinsed my wound under cool water. I made a doctor’s appointment. I called back my mother and my boyfriend, assessing the canyons I’d carved between us in the night.

For the next few weeks, I followed my doctor’s regimen of covering my hand with a thick salve of Vaseline each night before bandaging it. The burnt skin slowly molted in dark strips that fell like feathers. As it shed, I shed my four-year relationship, the plans I had made for us, and the person I thought I was. I no longer had a city picked out or a five-year plan. I had a lease up at the end of July, no job prospects, and a crush on a girl who was afraid to label herself, too.

After I broke up with my boyfriend, Jordan and I began texting every day. We made lists of movies we should see together: Luca, Sleepover, Jennifer’s Body. Sometimes we watched a movie on the list, and sometimes we just watched Is it Cake? But beside each other on my couch, I realized a new truth. I had imagined we would fall into each other easily, but we were both timid. This girl who had so boldly spun me around her now buried herself into the couch corner. I sat beside her still as stone. I watched her hands folded against her chest or balanced on her thighs, wondering if I should reach for them.

Jordan's hands were strong and tan; her fingers were stocky and her fingernails short. She wore delicate golden rings and a light blue nail polish that chipped easily, exposing her smooth nail beds. In sapphic culture, it's easy to see our hands as firstly sexual. We press them together comparing hand sizes to flirt and clip our nails as foreplay. But when I looked at Jordan's hands, I felt thirteen and chaste. All I wanted to do was hold them. But our timidness in the face of this new world became clearer the longer we spent time together. Instead of addressing our feelings, we nervously laughed at the queer undertones in Luca and asked each other: Is it cake?

Some days, we communicated in gifts: a pint of my favorite ice cream left with a note in my freezer, a box of Double Stuf Oreos perched on her porch. Some days, she ignored me completely. Some days, emboldened by White Claws, she put her hand on my knee before backtracking: I’m just not ready yet. Maybe later in the summer. I took it personally, feeling the need to convince her otherwise. I didn’t realize that she needed more time to come into her own identity. Instead, I wanted her to affirm mine.

I found peace in the sound of the Intracoastal Waterway. I was lucky enough to live in an apartment overlooking this sliver of water and even had access to a muddy beach where I could wade in. On many mornings just after sunrise, Jordan and I swam from this hidden beach to Palm Tree Island, which was really a sandbar with a fake palm tree poking out of it. Only on the island did we ever seem to loosen enough to confide in each other. I loved those mornings when we sat in the murky water, our toes buried in the muck, our fingers filtering the silt like sieves. Within me flickered a hope that, despite our literal sandy foundation, we were building something solid. I imagined doing something to bridge us more concretely, like reaching for her hand.

We could talk for hours about the plants she was growing on her porch. We could play ping pong with our texts, shooting them back and forth until we were breathless. We could dedicate songs to each other over karaoke. We could make earnest plans to go backpacking or fly across the country together. We could lie next to each other on our own private island swapping secrets and confessions. We could share intimacy and dreams and plans, but our hands stayed against our sides, confirming our distance.

At the end of May, I visited New York for two reasons. First, I wanted to see if I would like to live there. My friend had a yellow room she needed to fill in Brooklyn, and we joked that I should journey to the queer mecca to live with her. I also felt desperate to understand if I was really queer. Despite their intensity, my feelings for Jordan felt unreliable. Our relationship was purely theoretical, and I wanted to be sure I liked kissing girls to know if I really wanted to kiss her. Selfishly, too, I craved confidence and competence. If I could kiss another girl, perhaps I could close the expanse between Jordan and me.

I sought my answers in a dimly lit bar in the East Village where I sipped my drink slowly and waited for a girl matching the photo on my phone. She walked in tall, in all black and leather like she owned the whole city, and—if I wanted—me. Two drinks in, she slid her hand on my knee, and I thought of Jordan’s hand: those chipped Carolina-blue nails. But my date demanded my attention. Her hands quickly crossed the boundary of stranger to almost-lover, making circles up my thigh as she asked about my passions, my work, my goals. I kept reminding myself that this was real, that I was here on a date with a woman. I was terrified to look at her lips, but then she took my chin in her fingers and kissed me. I’d built it up to be something large and foreign, but the kiss was just a kiss. Soft, sweet, easy to fall into. I imagined a world where Jordan and I could kiss like this. I couldn’t imagine it in Wilmington, where even alone together, even our hands could not cross the threshold.

That night, I held hands—really held hands—with a woman for the first time. Drunk and giggly, she led me back to her apartment. We pushed each other into walls and street signs as we went. Her lips were the softest I’d ever kissed. Her hair fell in ringlets. She interlaced our fingers so that we could not separate, and I loved the wall of our bodies against the world. I had never kissed so publicly with anyone, so, when a man walked by us and yelled, “Are you homosexuals?” I didn’t think to take offense. My date screamed back, “Fuck you!” but I glowed. Yes, we are, I thought. Thank you for noticing.

In the morning, we read each other poetry. I read her Ross Gay, and she read me Mary Oliver. I liked how she folded over me as I read, so there was no space between us. I liked how she thumbed my still-red wound. It had not been the kissing or sex I had craved so much as this small tender moment in the sliver of morning light through her window. I wanted the kind of love I imagined she could have with someone. Easy laughter, morning breath, holding each other in the liminal space just before waking. On the surface, the woman and I were just two drowsy queer bodies tangled in perfect knots around one another, and for a second I could pretend that we looked like a new beginning.

But I felt the gurgling guilt of what I had withheld on my end. I hadn’t told her I had never slept with a woman before and didn’t ask her, like I later asked my friends, if what we had done counted as sex. And when she asked me the story of how I came out, I talked about the burn and Jordan as if the pain of them both existed in the past. I left her apartment confused and ashamed.

What I thought I wanted from the woman was a ticket to an identity I already had, just by virtue of being. But what I really wanted, I realized too late, was to be close to someone, to be held. I had hoped for Jordan and me to find an ease with each other, a rhythm and closeness all our own. Over the course of ten hours, the woman and I had created a kind of emotional and physical comfort that Jordan and I had never reached. Neither Jordan nor I could trust ourselves to fully lay down our defenses to let the other in. I suspected then, with new clarity, that we likely never would.

When I returned from New York, Jordan picked me up from the airport with a sign welcoming me home and a box of Double Stuf Oreos. For a few days, she orbited me, and I wondered if we would finally be together. But I’d unlocked a different kind of hurt in her for sleeping with another woman. I’d done all the things we had talked about, thought about, considered quietly alone in our beds—with someone else. Whatever intimacy we had, I’d ended it.

Instead of the therapy I desperately needed, I baptized myself in new ways. I wrapped up my hands and spent hours punching a body-sized punching bag, sweating out my frustration. I woke up before sunrise and paddled out into the break on my lime green foamie I had named Shrek. I took long dips in the Intracoastal Waterway, swimming against the current before letting it carry me back to shore. I swam to the island I had once thought of as mine and Jordan’s place and sat alone in the sand. I ran through our summer as if I could turn back time. I did not realize it then, but I had wanted Jordan to be the cornerstone for my queerness, putting too much pressure on her to be the person I needed to be for myself.

By summer’s end, I was small, shaking, fetal. But I also felt clean. I was left with a new self, a woman who seemed to understand as much about the world as a small girl. But still, I knelt at her knees and listened.

I stopped bandaging my hand before I was supposed to. The wound still held a darkened tint like a sunburn, but I no longer wanted to cover it. I attributed this decision to laziness, but it was also something else. Even then, part of me wanted a memento from the night I set my world on fire. I wanted to remember it all, even after I’d moved to New York and let Jordan go for good. When the next woman asked about how I came out, I wanted to trace the crescent along my thumb as if it retained it all: strobe lights, buzz balls, a pop song I knew all the words to, and a beautiful woman pulling me in to dance.

When my grandmother gave herself abortions, they were meant to look like accidents: tumbles down riverbanks, food poisoning, or a brisk jolt while riding bareback. Nothing, back then, was much of a stretch. Living in the woods outside of Austin, any number of dangers might have befallen her: a freak lightning storm, a midnight intruder, a bolting horse. During the Great Depression, women like her did whatever was necessary. For food, she pulled fish from rivers and gathered roots and weeds. Sometimes, when a man took notice of her, she’d get a free ride to town, and a meal. Sometimes, he wanted favors in return—sometimes, he took them whether or not she’d agreed.

Fortunately for her, abortions at that time weren’t legal, though neither were they widely condemned—not even in Texas. As the nation spun into economic despair, who, after all, could afford another mouth to feed? Certainly not a girl like my grandmother: orphaned at fifteen and already raising her three younger siblings. So, when pregnancies came along, as inevitably they did, she’d followed the advice of female friends who’d suggested how best to end them. Hungry and alone, she’d done what she must, because in survival, there are no accidents.

Whenever she told me these stories, my grandmother never complained. How many men had taken advantage of her? How many lovers disappointed her? Each time, she’d sought the aid of female friends: just as women always had, working as midwives, delivering babies, or herbs to end a pregnancy. And people, for the most part, ignored it.

Though there are still other ways of punishing women—even for doing the same as everyone around them. Decades later, I was shocked to learn, at a family reunion when my grandmother was in her eighties, that relatives still whispered about her beneath their breath—the local hussy. Even after generations, this is how our shared lore remembers her: as a woman who’d made the wrong choices. But how could she have done anything else? From the letters and journals she’d left behind after dying in her nineties, I know she was assaulted many times; and I know that, each time, she’d survived on her own grit, along with female friendship. This tenacity is what I’ve most admired in her; but that’s not what history highlights. History claims, instead, the parts that it can most easily judge—and I cannot help but wonder how much of this may not be accidental? What is remembered, after all, is what was seen—a girl alone in the woods, nearly as independent as a man—though not the underlying reasons.

All these years later, my own life could not look more different than hers. Unlike my grandmother, I’d had the luxury of caution, sleeping only with those men I wanted to, choosing, each time, someone I’d imagined I’d marry—someone who, each time, had happened to leave me in favor of his own interests, his own career, instead of mine. So, while my grandmother had had to wait until her sixties to earn a GED, I had a PhD in hand at half that age. But I did not have what she’d had. More than anything, I wanted to be pregnant—even though, like her, I was alone.

Still, I believed I had a choice: the ability to have a child, even without a mate. Born a handful of years after Roe vs. Wade, I’d been raised on the ideal: reminded that generations of women before me had sacrificed and suffered, and now that I had a choice, I should use it wisely. And I’d believed them: believed it was that simple.

Though it wasn’t. Becoming pregnant without a man, I quickly learned, cost much more than I could imagine. Nothing, after all, was descriptively wrong with me—no diagnosis, which meant no medical insurance coverage. I was simply alone—with the process, as much as the costs: a year’s salary, in this case, for IVF. All that math spun through my mind: What loans could I get? How many new credit cards? Despite all its pro-life rhetoric, the Catholic university where I work as a tenured professor offers me no financial assistance toward becoming pregnant. Choice, I’ve learned quickly, is necessary, though not entirely sufficient.

You’re so brave, people have told me nonetheless, to be doing this alone.

Though I didn’t feel that way. This was not, after all, the life I had wanted, even if people often assumed I did. Just as they’d once assumed that my grandmother, known as the girl in the woods who occasionally found herself in trouble, was a loose woman, now I, as a single woman—bold enough to try having a child on my own—am presumed to be empowered.

But making this decision at forty doesn’t feel empowering; and I’ve struggled to understand why. Perhaps it was that same response I’d had to give, over and over again, each time I’d check in for a medical appointment, explaining that I didn’t have a husband. Or, perhaps it was the constant tracking of prices for the various steps in IVF, and my extra jobs to pay for them. Or the dormitory room I’d moved into at my university, giving up my home, to pay those bills. Living in a one-room studio, reading Instagram posts about how to transform closets into nurseries, I found myself wondering aloud: Who would choose this?

But at least, people have reminded me, too, you’re not alone.

And this is true. Like my grandmother, I have also sought the help of other women: women like me, going it alone. Though their name, “Choice Moms,” troubled me: that desire to set ourselves apart, to suggest that our lives as single mothers had been planned. Our solitude, that name insisted, had been no accident.

But what about all those other women—the majority of the eleven million single mothers in this country—who hadn’t gotten to choose? Women like my grandmother, with her myriad secret abortions? Or my stepmother, pregnant at seventeen, and dropping out of school because she could not access one? Or my own mother, her lesbian sexuality closeted for thirty years, until she’d finally left the marriage she’d never wanted, once her children were finally grown? Or her mother, who’d never escaped her marriage to an abusive husband—not until he’d died unexpectedly of a stroke at forty-two, leaving her alone to raise their two daughters? None of the women in my family had had much choice about their conditions; and if this was the case for so many of them, how could their circumstances be accidental? Instead, it was my own life that seemed the exception.

But even these omissions were not accidents. That name, “Choice Moms,” was meant to offer women like me status and respect—though at the cost of leaving out all those other women I’d come from.

At least, friends have reminded me, you can choose the child’s father. They’ve pointed out sperm donor profiles: athletic and educated, musically talented and perfectly built. Beautiful men, all of them—perfect fathers, though whom my child would never meet.

“But that’s not what I want.”

What I’ve wanted, truly, was to feel less alone. I wanted my future child to be known and loved by as many people as possible. I wanted my son or daughter to have some chance to know where they came from. So finally, when I did choose a donor, he did not come from a catalogue, but, rather, was a close friend: a gay man, a man who happened not to be white. He would act, I told my doctor, if not as the child’s father, then as an uncle: someone else to love this child, to witness their life. Someone else to rely on.

Are you sure? The clinic had asked. That path, they’d warned, would be much harder.

Though I could not guess why. I could not guess, for instance, that gay men still cannot become anonymous sperm donors anywhere in this country, and that even known donors are vetted beyond reason.

“But is there a risk?” I’d wanted to know—for me, for the baby?

My doctor had shaken her head. It made no sense—to her, or to me—though I understood. Born in the late 1970’s, I’d grown up as much with the empowerment of the Roe vs. Wade decision as the raging fear of AIDS a decade later. My youngest years were reminders both of the promise of choice and the fear of what using it might lead to. Years later, gay men’s bodies remain suspect, not unlike the bodies of single women.

He will have to pass through a lot of tests, I’d been warned. It will take time—a lot of time—if it works at all.

And how could I not consider this? Already forty, how much longer could I wait to meet my child? How much time could I afford? Though how, too, could I begin to measure the worth of such time—or the worth of a man who would know and love my child?

The sperm bank, they’d insisted, would be much easier.

And though no one was telling me explicitly to have a white baby, or one with two straight parents, that was just the point. No one around me named what our systems—whether medical, cultural, or political—convey: how some bodies are safer, more desirable than others.

So how was I, alone, to contend with such questions: ones I’d never imagined I’d face. How to choose the right father, the right body to create?

History, of course, has its answers—because the truth is, these kinds of questions are not new. So, I learned how choice is stripped from us for the convenience of others: How the first nation-wide ban on abortion was motivated first by male physicians working to eliminate midwives from their field, in order to increase their own salaries. And how that momentum was followed next by politicians’ efforts to sustain white birth rates to offset rising numbers of other bodies—foreign bodies—arriving at Ellis Island.

So, I’d learn that history bends to male intentions.

So, I’d learn that history bends women away from our own bodies—our needs, our hopes—and from each other.

And I’d learn, too, that there are reasons why, confronting questions of reproductive rights, I feel so isolated. Making abortions—or their opposite—harder to access, after all, is about many things, including sustaining that isolation: It is about keeping women siloed, disempowered, alone.

In my grandmother’s case, the only abortion she’d ever regretted had come later: the one she’d had after she was finally married, when her new husband had enlisted just after Pearl Harbor and handed her a wadded seventy-five dollars and an address to an old brownstone where a man would end it for her, so she’d have one less mouth to feed during the war. This was the only one she ever told me about explicitly; the only one she’d remained angry about. “He told me to do it,” her voice had hung grim, “even though I didn’t want to.”

He was her husband, so what else could she do? She hadn’t had any kind of choice.

Decades later, when I’m finally permitted to become pregnant with the child whom I hope to name for her—Maxine—more than a year has gone by since I’d begun trying: another long stretch of months that I wouldn’t get to spend with my child, another invisible loss. In that time, my friend’s sperm was analyzed and quarantined, evaluated, frozen, and all but denied. For months we’d fought for my right to use it; and finally, after all those months of waiting, after all that pain and uncertainty, we had eventually prevailed.

Now, holding that baby within me, alone in my tiny apartment, I finally feel fulfilled. Perhaps not empowered, but relieved, happy, whole. It must, I think, have all been worth it: these staggering credit card bills, this loneliness, these invisible layers of pain. Because finally, my child lies within me; and, whether male or female, I decide that yes, I will name this child for her, my grandmother: the strongest woman I know.

A few weeks later, though, when I lose that baby, no one can tell me why. Some things, the medical staff says, are beyond answers. Beyond control. Beyond choice. So they can’t tell me if there had been some unfortunate medical error, or if my body lacks some crucial spark. Nor can they tell me the answers to all these questions that I cannot ignore.

Had that loss been due to all the added stress and strain? Or that implicit message that I, or my baby, wasn’t worthy? What if the world had wanted this child? What if it had shown me that? Would this baby, finally, have arrived?

I can never know, of course, as my grandmother will never know what would have become of her life, her marriage, had she been permitted to keep that first child during the war. What I do know is that her loneliness, like mine, is not unusual; it is not happenstance. And I know, further, that if I feel like a failure, neither is that accidental. I don’t fit the norm, and neither did my grandmother.

So, if I am frightened now by the closeness between her experience and mine—between the ways that women’s bodies are so closely managed, whether they aim to plan or end a pregnancy—it is no accident.

If I feel negated, as the daughter of a gay woman, trying to create a child with a gay man, neither is it accidental.

Or if I feel burdened by this system, what it wants from me—safe bodies, white bodies, obedient bodies—it is no accident.

And if I am angry, finally, seeing more clearly into this history, and all its enduring effects, my own rage is also real. It was, and still remains, no accident.

That morning, before it’d ever occurred to me to worry about the sky that burned and blackened over my head some days, I was just a big sister with a little sister at a breakfast table pouring spoonsful of sugar into my cereal when our mother wasn’t looking. The sugarcane fields not far from our home were a fact of our little life, the way that the grocery store in the other direction where our mother bought our sugar was also a fact of our life. That the cane fields were set ablaze each year in preparation for sugar harvesting was another fact, but an abstract one—like the fact of our neighbor’s collection of exotic birds in cages that we could sometimes hear squawking from inside their closed garage but had never been permitted to see. This was back before I learned to read maps, or to read history. To trace one ripple in the water to the next with a finger: sugar to labor, labor to burning, burning to profit, profit to death.

On that morning, there was just the wedding-china sugar bowl and the plastic spoons my sister and I used. Our mother didn’t have to chide us about wasting our breakfast because we slurped every last drop of our cereal milk, a grainy sugar sediment settling at the bottom. Back then, I didn’t yet know about run-off or waste. I was still years from thinking about the way the sugar factories dump phosphorus into canal waters, or the way the phosphorus explodes the water with oxygen, or the way the oxygen over-blooms algae, or the way the algae chokes everything else.

Before I’d ever heard the word phosphorus, before I knew of the journalists who’d investigated the burning fields at the sugar factories—the failing hearts, the failing pregnancies, the failing lungs—my mother was realizing the time and rushing us out of our chairs at the kitchen table. She pushed our backpacks into our hands, pushed us out the door, told us to be good for our teachers and each other. To our west, the sugarcane burned and billowed into a cloud of smoke particularly huge and angry that morning. An apocalyptic sight, maybe, to anyone from anywhere else. But my sister and I walked the length of our street to our bus stop and recited our usual funnier reasons for why the air in our neighborhood was hazed with smoke. God is having a barbecue, we said. The angels are practicing a fire drill, we laughed. This was more than a decade before I’d spend hours and days of my life gliding over Everglades waters, running my fingers over its dark surface the way some people run their fingers over rosaries. I hadn’t yet seen the sugarcane ash hit the water’s surface and dissolve.

When my sister and I reached the bus stop at the end of our street, the wind picked up. It changed direction and blew right at us. My sister’s hair snapped across her face. In the years to come, we would learn how mean the wind could be, how it could pull down our favorite trees. There’d be a stupid stunt in high school when I’d strap myself to a stranger’s body and jump with him from a plane, and the wind with its fury would pull our parachute so far off course that we’d find ourselves hanging in the air over the sugarcane fields, and the man I’d be strapped to would make such sounds—animal sounds that I’d hear even over the wind—as he’d try to maneuver us away from the sharp and burning fields below.

But on that morning, when the wind shifted on my sister and I at the bus stop, it brought with it a shower of fresh ash. Thick flakes of gray sugarcane burn-off from the fields nearby. I remember laughing. I remember grabbing my sister’s arm and shouting Snow! I remember my sister twirling in it, arms outstretched. Florida snow! I remember ash on my sister’s face, leaving smudges on her nose and cheeks that I’d later use spit and my thumb to rub off. When the school bus turned onto our road, its windshield wipers brushing the ashy debris from the glass, my sister and I had the same idea at the same time. We’d seen it in movies and shows set in places with real snow. Just like the children in those places, we looked into the sky and stuck out our tongues. We chased the falling ash with mouths wide open, bragging when we’d caught some. I don’t remember what the ash tasted like because in our snow game, the truth of its taste didn’t matter yet. How were we to know on that morning that what we breathed—what we swallowed—could stay with us, could erupt later as tumor or murmur or rasp? We didn’t even see the bus’s open doors until the driver was yelling for us to hurry on board, to get out of the smoke. We had our faces lifted upward, away, swallowing as much as we could with our eyes closed.

You are returning home to Fresno, California, after accompanying your daughter on her move to Boston, a year and a half into the pandemic. A new era has dawned for her after her virtual graduation from college, in your old stomping grounds—the place for which you left an older stomping ground, Pakistan, over thirty years ago, which itself came after England. And all these moves are woven of intergenerational threads, red as the blood shed in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India, the largest migration in human history, some 15 million people displaced in a three-year span, they say. Boston is the place you called home for most of your American life, and where your daughter now lives, a stone’s throw from all the apartments you rented with other students, near the Davis Square subway stop on the red line, the connection to worlds that await. She has moved across the continent, and you feel the amputation in your body. Less the loss of a limb than it is a hollowing of the heart—the unbearable lightness of it different from Kundera’s imaginings because the weight of the emptying drops your heart to your stomach. You will grow accustomed to it sitting there as an ache, and time will dull the sharp edges of that ache as a river smooths a rock, as you remind yourself that you were once that daughter and, oceans away, your parents knew that hollowing.

Staring out the airplane window, you watch the night deepen even as you fly westward. It seems counterintuitive, this darkening trajectory. But you love being aloft in the clouds. It is an exquisite displacement, unlike all the others, to be suspended above the earth, between homes and faces you love, nowhere and everywhere at once. On the connecting flight you’re struck by the plane’s wing aglow in its own light above Denver and you pull out your cellphone to take a photograph. It is eight-thirty p.m. Pacific time.

What you don’t know is that in this moment your home in Fresno is aflame.

In his 1976 memoir, The Names, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday describes a moment in his life when he found himself “within an eyelash of eternity.” Since the fire, I think often of his assertion: “I should never again see the world as I saw it on the other side of that moment.”

Momaday gives time a physical dimension. But his statement elides a verb for how we get from one side of a salient moment to another. To say that we “cross,” “migrate,” or even “move” is much too intentional. Rather, we find ourselves there without volition or warning, an apparition in a physical space—powerless, and permanently displaced from all the moments on the other side.

Landing at Fresno airport and switching my cellphone out of airplane mode was that kind of moment. The screen exploded with texts and voicemails from the neighbor with whom I shared a wall and roof and attic in our two-unit structure. There’s a fire, get out if you’re in there! By the time I deplaned, made my way to long-term parking, drove out of it in my minivan, and pulled into my cul-de-sac, it was almost eleven-thirty at night. The fire was under control, only a couple of fire trucks still parked in the street, and the neighbors had disappeared into the safety of their homes. None of the other two-unit structures in our complex were affected.

I had been spared the sight of flames, but the wreckage remained. Dark, except for a light cast by the fire trucks, and in that lurid light I could see my neighbor’s charred unit and their garage, already boarded up. The tenants who called it home had left for shelter with family in the area. I had no family in Fresno.

At some point the owner of the next-door unit pulled up, got out of her car, and walked toward me. We mirrored each other’s composure. I have no memory of any words between us.

My own garage was agape, a big hole punched in the ceiling leading to the attic, my Prius covered in debris. The plastic tubs we called Memory Boxes, some of them still labeled in my ex’s hand, lay overturned, their insides spilling out on the ground: plush toys, cards, handmade ornaments. Somewhere in the garage, salvageable or not, was every letter ever written to me since I was twelve years old, sorted by year into plastic bags and lugged across continents—assurance that those people and places, those past lives, and my own bygone selves really inhabited time and space once. A couple of workers from the fire department who were still in there told me that the fire had entered my unit through the attic and leapt into the garage and the kitchen before they could subdue it.

Then a man and a woman pounced on me with forms affixed to clipboards, insisting on my signature. Who were they if they weren’t my insurance company or the HOA or the fire or police departments? What was a mitigation company? Was I liable for this $700 if I signed? Why were these people hammering away, boarding up my kitchen without sweeping the shattered glass out of the way? And where were my cats?

I pulled my Prius out of the garage. I’d have to assess the damage to it in the morning when I could see. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would take it through the car wash and call my auto insurance company. Tomorrow, I thought, though tomorrow sounded hypothetical, a mere abstraction. There was only today.

Stay out, they tell you. You shouldn’t be here. There’s no power, no water, and the air is toxic.

But you need to find Winnie, your indoor cat. Snickers, who comes in only to eat, knows how to be safe outdoors. But Winnie’s a homebody; you recall how he refused to come out of his cardboard box when you first moved into the condo. He’s not likely to have fled.

Besides, it’s midnight, a pandemic still raging, and you’ve just gotten off a plane. Where are you going to go?

You walk down the pathway and enter your unit through the side entrance, your small roller suitcase trailing behind you. Step into your living room, now full of a smoky darkness—where are the moon and stars tonight? There’s no power or running water, and no sign of Winnie. Muscle memory leads you to the kitchen, where you keep your flashlight. With the glass slider boarded up, the kitchen is pitch black. You can’t see but you can smell, and here the smoke is overpowering and triggers an instant headache, so you are glad for your mask.

When the hammering outside stops and the chaos recedes into the night, the silence falls thick and opaque around you. And sure enough, a few minutes later, Winnie emerges from under your daughter’s empty bed. You try to keep him out in the temperate September night—it would be safer for him, you think—but he keeps walking on broken glass like some desperate Jesus, howling to be allowed back in. So you give up and let him stay with you in the dark and smoky stillness.

When, as a young man, Momaday hears that his beloved day school in Jemez, New Mexico, has been gutted by fire, he returns to the site of the wreckage. This was the place where his mother had taught a generation of children, and where he himself had sat writing his first poem one night when he was home from college. “What a strange and solemn experience it was for me, one that I can neither express nor understand,” says Momaday. “I had the sense that I was looking for myself there among the ashes.”

I am still looking for myself among the ashes.

I thought I knew something about displacement. My parents had jostled me back and forth between Karachi and London as a child, a postcolonial couple trying to make it, now in their young nation and now in the seat of former empire. Once settled in Karachi, I grew up on my grandmother’s stories of the home she was torn away from in India: Patna, a provincial town by many accounts, but for Amma, and so for me, it was a lost Eden, a vision of home that her subsequent generations would try to approximate from continent to continent. Amma was a lifelong invalid. Now gout, now jaundice, now some mysterious illness for which there was no adequate explanation. All these decades later, I know: her heart had hollowed. She tried to fill it with her writing—every day, longhand in Urdu, moving from right to left, this woman whose education consisted mostly of Arabic and Farsi lessons from tutors who came to her home, filled the pages of tall, lined exercise books resembling the attendance registers that teachers carried in their classrooms. Every day for twenty years, she would read out a page or two to anyone who cared to listen. After her death, when her manuscript was finally gathered, it became a two-volume family memoir that is also, in the words of the writer and journalist Zaheda Hina, a social history of Patna, written in a dialect of Urdu that remains specific to that place and time.

When we cast our hollowings onto the page, we re-embody them. We give them shape and form. We re-member ourselves. In French, as in other Romance languages, it’s a reflexive verb: “Je me souviens,” I remember myself. We speak of the body of an essay and body paragraphs, literally externalizing our thoughts and feelings. We visualize the page with headers and footers; we give it headings and footnotes. It is as though we seek to exchange one host body for another on the page. Something to contain the dispossessions, the amputations.

But unlike Amma’s outpouring of words, mine dammed up when the fire displaced me. In the year and a half following the fire, I wrote only one brief piece, tellingly titled “Ash Tree Elegy,” its form not so much a body as an urn for the ashes. To lose your home from under you is one thing; for your body to be hollowed out of the words you thought you had is another, staggering loss.

Did the smoke smother the words in my throat? Or did I simply exchange the writerly re-embodiment for lessons I would never have otherwise learned? Who am I afterfire if not those lessons, learned bodily? I am even now looking to fill the hollow, if not with words, with lessons—something, anything, to make meaning afterfire.

I wasn’t refugeed by war or rendered permanently homeless. But I did learn what it was like to have nowhere to go. That first morning after the fire I stood at the glass door of my neighborhood Starbucks before opening time—seven a.m. in those days of restricted pandemic hours—not just for coffee, but to wash up, use the bathroom, and recharge my phone so I could call my home insurance company and figure out where to go, what to do next.

Afterfire, I learned to hunger for small acts of kindness. With a single exception, none of the neighbors who stood outside to watch my home ablaze knocked on my door the next day to ask if I needed anything. In time I learned to think of it as pandemic fatigue, relieved by one or two friendships that were actually forged by the fire. Three years after the fire in my home, I watched in horror as my TV screen displayed the ravagings of the Los Angeles fires a mere two hundred miles south of me. My one experience multiplied and magnified, entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes. I felt I knew a little of what many would go through in subsequent days. How time would stretch in a bewildering haze, no definition but that of uncertainty; how the normalcy in other people’s lives would become something to marvel at—aspirational, but utterly unreal. Yet the news coverage also included scenes of Angelenos showing up for one another with food and toiletries in public parking lots, and in this I sought hope for them. Did the displaced carry their burdens a tad easier because they were shared by the community, at least in the immediate aftermath of the fire? I wanted that for them. But I also felt an absurd twinge of envy because I would have liked that for me, too.

Not that the world wished me ill; it was simply and astoundingly indifferent. And it went on expecting things of me. Surely I was going to not only teach my own virtual classes but observe my colleagues’, attend meetings, review tenure and promotion files, continue to chair a hiring committee for American literature. Surely it was my problem to figure out where to find all the books to which I had suddenly lost access, and whether or not I could live out of the small carry-on suitcase I’d had with me on the flight back from Boston, and which now contained the sum total of my possessions. And of course I would continue to pay property tax for a home I was barely allowed to enter, a home now inhabited only by the hauntings of memory. The world—not an alien or abstract one, but the world I knew and mostly liked—expected me to remain me while I stumbled around, a blind Tiresias sans power of prophecy, seeking myself among the ashes.

The pet-friendly hotel my home insurance had found for me was located at the busy intersection of Herndon and Fresno Avenues, an area close to two major hospitals and peppered with extended-stay hotel options. I enlisted the help of my friend Ann—whom I didn’t know as well then, but who had a reputation for being both a kind Midwesterner and a cat whisperer—to coax Winnie out of the condo and into the hotel suite.

In that southeast quadrant of Herndon and Fresno there is very little to look at: a giant CVS Pharmacy and Spring Hill Suites, separated by a big, barren plot of land. I followed the paved road past Spring Hill Suites, and then I saw it: “Homewood Suites,” three stories in three shades of tan, situated in a vast parking lot. But with “home” in the name, something more than a mirage: an approximation, an aspiration, a yearning. Every time I made that right turn off Fresno Ave and into the parking lot, I focused on the power of the word to anchor me.

My son, Cyrus, who was away at college, flew in from Houston that first weekend after the fire—to settle Winnie, he said, and run errands for me. Also at this new address, my friend Mayra dropped off a big care package with paper plates and utensils, insulated paper cups for coffee, a ceramic bowl and plate, crackers and hot chocolate, toiletries, Advil, and Band-Aid. A black mug with gold lettering that quipped: At least I don’t have ugly children. And, infinitely precious to my eyes, a single plastic placemat with a cream background, at the center of which a cherry-red vase tossed petalled flowers toward me, and the words: Today is FULL of possibilities.

I didn’t linger in the pool or patio at Homewood Suites, and, given the pandemic, I darted in and out of the breakfast buffet with my mask on. But I liked the sound of people in those passing minutes, especially children splashing in the water, knowing how to be at home in the moment. That’s something I had yet to learn.

I wonder now how many of us converged at Homewood Suites in the three weeks that Winnie and I stayed there before we found an affordable rental—converged, not because we were vacationing in Yosemite, or King’s Canyon, or Sequoia National Park, but because we had been torn from our lives. How many prayers, in how many languages, went up from those suites? How long before they were heard?

Three miles south of my condo, the intersection of Olive and Weber is one that I had only zoomed through, and that when my children were in high school in southwest Fresno and I had occasion to drive there. Even the proximity of Roeding Park never tempted me off-course. At times when a traffic light required that I stop, I might have glanced to my left and wondered fleetingly if anybody lived in that direction. But the thought lasted only as long as the red light did, and I never, in the course of six years, made that left turn off Weber.

What I would come to know intimately is that Esther Way lies on the other side of Weber, a community of small homes built in the 1950s, with outsized backyards, many of them hospitable to dogs and cats and children. The rental home on Esther Way was a gift that fell into my lap through a network of conscientious women. Fresno’s rental market is known to be brutally skewed; it made national headlines during the pandemic. Even with my middle-class resources, I could find nothing affordable to rent that would also welcome Winnie. Desperate to get out of the hotel suite that was burning through my insurance’s Loss of Use limit, I posted my plight on Facebook. A Women’s Studies colleague saw it, mentioned it to another, well-connected Women’s Studies colleague, who happened to know someone who was thinking about renting her place. I didn’t know it then, but I would spend six months in her home before hitting my Loss of Use limit and leaving Fresno with Winnie to be near family in San Diego.

Esther Way runs north-south and parallel to Weber, which itself runs alongside the train tracks. A single row of homes on the south side of the street stood between my rental and the many trains that blared their way through the neighborhood. One night I counted four trains between one and three in the morning, laying on the horn while the little house trembled from the sheer proximity of the rumble. In time my ears got so attuned to the sound that it hardly registered, though I’d straighten out the many pictures and knickknacks that were displaced, sometimes with a violent thud, by the trains’ passage.

The home I rented was about one thousand square feet of living space, though the lot size was some seven times that. Remarkably, the backyard was all dirt. Mayra took one look, smiled brightly, and said, “This view reminds me of when I was twenty-one and crossing the border.” It was a furnished home, owned by a young woman who had invested much of herself in this space. Not much older than some of my students at Fresno State, she was a Latina whose parents, she told me proudly, still worked in the fields. The first in her family to go to college, her trajectory had taken her from Stanford to Yale Law School, and she now advocated for the employment rights of agricultural workers in the state of California. She had decorated this home on Esther Way with folk art from her travels in Latin America that reminded me of Oaxaca, where my goddaughter lives: calaveras in bright, saturated colors, a portrait of Frida Kahlo, and carved wooden animals, the whimsical alebrijes my children loved in Oaxaca’s zócalo. This part of Fresno may have been unfamiliar, but the decor of the house was an embrace, its artifacts emblems of continuity and connection to who I was before the fire. One day, in this space, standing alone by the kitchen counter with cellphone to my ear, ceramic vases by the window sill, and inspirational quotes penned by the young lawyer up on the kitchen walls, I received a diagnosis of breast cancer. In the following weeks, Esther Way sheltered me as I went through radiation, healing in body before the long haul of healing in heart.

If Esther Way was defined by the roar of the trains, its most joyful sound was the melody of an ice cream truck. It was an unusual tune—not the commonly heard “Turkey in the Straw” of minstrel ancestry, but a sweet and simple melody that evoked a longing for which I had no explanation. The memory of summer days in England, perhaps, when few things elated us children as much as the sound of the approaching ice cream van (as it’s called in England). Most days we knew we couldn’t run out and buy that vanilla soft-serve on a cone with half a Cadbury’s chocolate Flake stuck in it, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the ice cream van came around reliably, full of possibility. Esther Way’s ice cream truck looked more worn and much less glamorous, and I seldom saw children lined up around it. But it made the rounds twice a day, through the fall, winter, and spring while I lived there. I waited for its music every day, and as it approached, I stopped whatever I was doing to listen. When the time came to leave Esther Way for the proximity of family, I tried to reciprocate in the only way I could. With cash withdrawn for the purpose, I ran out of the house and up to the ice cream truck, not to ask for a soft-serve but to say thank you. The man looked baffled through his smile; he said something in an Arabic accent, and I knew that this inadequate transaction would have to be enough. Even if we had language between us, there was no way to say that his tireless immigrant labor had been a consistent thing of beauty at a time of great flux in my life. That what was no doubt a tedious routine for him, driving the truck around all day, perhaps without making any money, had been a small, essential ritual for me, a pocket of joy in every day.

“The events of one’s life take place, take place,” says Momaday. “Events do indeed take place; they have meaning in relation to things around them.” One more place would be home for three weeks of my life, an interlude during my six months on Esther Way. It was the Airbnb on Bond Ave, at Barstow and Third, which my brother and sister-in-law rented for the family for three weeks in December, following my breast cancer surgery. Amir and Linda live in San Francisco, the rest of my family mostly in San Diego. Their idea was to rent a bigger home while family members took turns coming to Fresno to take care of me as I convalesced. Since my sentinel lymph nodes were removed along with the cancer in my left breast—to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread, and, fortunately, it hadn’t—I had limited mobility in my left arm and side.

My cousin Sheba flew in from San Diego to help me prep for the surgery. Maya, my daughter, took advantage of her ability to work virtually and flew in from Boston. She and my sister, Sadia, moved me to Bond Ave on the eve of my appointment. It was a pretty, unpretentious, three-bedroom house with a yard and pool. A Christmas tree welcomed us by the fireplace. In this space, the women in my family—sister, sister-in-law, cousin, and daughter—nursed me back to health. They showered and dressed me, tended to my incisions, kept track of my medications, and cooked foods that would make me strong and whole again.

The cancer diagnosis came two months after the fire, and, in a way, it saved me. In contrast to the complete lack of clarity and direction after the fire, Kaiser Permanente’s octopus arms were there to enfold and guide me through what was next. And unlike fire, everyone knew how to respond to cancer, including me. My colleagues in the department offered their support, relieving me of my role on the hiring committee, and urged me to apply for medical leave the following semester.

In the days when my doctor hoped but couldn’t tell me for sure that the cancer was at an early stage, I had to face the distinct possibility that I might have arrived at the end of the line. I found myself largely at peace with that. Maya and Cyrus had the staunch support of extended family, and I’d had a good run, though I would have liked more time. My only regret was that I hadn’t given my creative writing enough attention to see how far it could go. Yes, I had published essays in various literary magazines, but I had done so without formal training, without giving my writing—and me—the best of my resources: time.

In the Airbnb on Bond Ave, I made the decision to enroll in Fresno State’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. Twenty-five years after my doctorate, this degree would have no bearing on my professional life. But it would mean centering my art. It would be a new relationship to the department and to Fresno State. And decades after my purchase of a yellow-and-gray paperback titled Teach Yourself Creative Writing from London Book House in Karachi, I would no longer have to wonder about the path not taken.

Also in this space on Bond Ave, I reached for the sounds of the Italian language. It had no utility in my life, but it was beautiful to my ears. I signed up for virtual lessons with a tutor in Salerno and had my first lesson with Stefania before the year was out. For the next fifteen months, this was most of the reading, and the only writing, I did.

Why, given the multigenerational displacements that have shaped me, was the fire so devastating? Why, given that I knew this displacement, unlike the others, would be temporary, and that I’d be back in my home someday? Above all, why did the fire freeze the words out of me?

I may never know the answers to these questions or have the words in which to couch them. To borrow from Momaday, who, as a Kiowa Indian, knew ancestral displacement in his bones: “I wanted to say that this was a pyre of matters and moments that were peculiarly mine. But of course I did not say these things at last. At last there was nothing to say.”

My home was restored enough for me to move back into it in the final days of 2022, fifteen months after the fire. Maya and Cyrus flew to San Diego from Boston and Houston to help with the return to Fresno.

Maya, who has my father’s gift of compression, packed all my afterfire belongings along with her own and Cyrus’s luggage into the Prius, using every inch of space without blocking my view from the driver’s seat. And so, with Winnie in his carrier, the three of us said goodbye to my mother, my sister and her family, my aunt, and my two cousins, who had made my nine months among them a time of tenderness, a beauty to hold on to in the parched stretches of absence ahead.

It was a longer drive than usual, seven hours north on Interstate 5, through the Tejon Pass over Grapevine Canyon that connects Southern California with the Central Valley, the unquestioning love of family at one end and the life I have built at the other. A long stretch of Highway 99 to Fresno, and finally we turned into our cul-de-sac. There it stood, our condo, looking cleaner and fresher than the others, while our next-door neighbor’s unit was still being restored. We took in the new light fixtures on either side of the garage door, the gleaming unit number, freshly painted white on black, that located us in space. Only the three azalea bushes carried the memory of fire. They had survived, but with a gaping hole in the middle, as though from an impact that had hollowed them.

We pulled into the garage, noting how gracefully and quietly the new door opened. And inside, it had been restored and painted, looking cheerier and more spacious than it ever did. The reconstruction of the shared roof and wall was now up to code, with a true fire wall between my unit and next door, which would buy us more time if a fire broke out in either one of our units again. Walking into the kitchen, we were greeted with new appliances, a new slider, and no trace of broken glass where the pet-door used to be. When I stepped through it, my heart gave a little leap at the sight of the brand-new door that had been installed between the garage and courtyard. It was a rich chocolate brown, matching the trim, and they had built a short path to it over the soil that used to be there, but where nothing thrived for long. They had done it beautifully, placing my large lapis-blue flower pot against the cream stucco wall, my cape honeysuckle vine resplendent with orange blooms on this December day. And best of all, they remembered my ask: at the bottom of the chocolate door, behold a white-edged cat-door, just Snickers’ size. Snickers would have a place of her own, safe from the cold and rain, and unbothered by Winnie, in the new, brightly lit garage.

Your children leave for their lives again, as children do. The ache from your daughter’s move to Boston fifteen months ago is tempered by her frequent visits home, and home for both your children is wherever you are. In the days following your return to Fresno, they unpack and collapse dozens of storage boxes, going through them to separate what’s still relevant from what they have outgrown, taking some to Woodward Park Library and others to Assistance League and Goodwill. Many remain, and you’ll take the time you need to sift through them, make an inventory of what’s not salvageable for your insurance claim.

Winnie has survived the trauma of the fire as only he experienced it, and the multiple moves. And Snickers, who remained in the cul-de-sac, cared for by your neighbor, Barbara, while you lived in San Diego, has forgiven you your wrenching year apart.

A new semester begins, your first in-person teaching in almost three years. And your first semester as a graduate student in the MFA program in creative nonfiction.

A five-minute walk from your condo, the defunct North Central Fire Station 59 has been resurrected. This would be reassuring if you could get past the irony.

Only you still smell the stankness when doors and windows are shut. Trust that in time, like the trains on Esther Way, you’ll cease to notice it.

Memory will prove less tractable. As Momaday has said, “If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.”

You will learn again, because you must, how to live with the emptiness of distances, far from the wellspring of love that is your family.

Slowly, fitfully, it will come: a thawing of the words frozen by fire. You’ll re-embody and re-member yourself on the page, as your grandmother did before you. No, you’re not there yet, but this page is a melting.

Today is full of possibilities.

Still, confess that you now have trouble leaving home. That you shorten your time at conferences and visits to family. You don’t want Winnie and Snickers to suffer any more turmoil than they have. But more than the leaving, it’s the return that terrifies. What awaits you this time when you land at Fresno airport and switch your phone out of airplane mode? Wild texts and missed calls urging you to get out, there’s a FIRE, your garage is invisible from the smoke, and where are your cats? There’s no home to go back to; it’s boarded up, a heap of shattered glass where the firefighters smashed the kitchen slider to get to the flames that had found their way there before you. Your eyes sting, throat constricts, breath shallows, and blood quickens, even as the heart drops to the stomach. Your body remembers the hollowing.

For a long time, I never thought about getting old. I remember with fondness the feeling of immortality that came from what I now understand as my rather miraculous capacity to believe I would live forever. That feeling fueled my life well into my thirties. It isn’t that no one in my circle of family and friends had died; I just didn’t make myself hospitable to thoughts of my own death, my own mortality, my own finite time. But then, like fog creeping in on cat paws, fear of becoming old began to intrude. As I continued to age, consciousness of my waning fertility was accompanied by a rising consciousness of my mortality, such as when I sat in a hospital room with Ramberg, a close friend my age, as he died from brain cancer. Until I reached that threshold, my imagining of the future conjured my youthful current-self into perpetuity. I never imagined dying, growing old, looking in the mirror and seeing a seventy-six-year-old Barbara.

Years later in my mid-fifties, after spending a weekend with a much younger couple who seemed to have so much of life ahead of them, I confessed to Bob, the man I would soon marry, that I suddenly felt old. He heard what I was feeling and, instead of laughing, promised, “If you ever become old, I’ll grow old with you,” and held out his hand as if to vanquish the passing dark cloud. With this simple yet significant gesture, I felt as if I could suddenly look forward to becoming old, as part of a white-haired couple holding hands and strolling the streets of  Chicago. There was a special sparkle to that image because of our complicated journey to falling in love.

We met thirty years before falling in love and marrying, having managed five previous marriages between the two of us. Bob was sixty-two, and I was fifty-four, determined that this marriage would be our last. As we launched the adventure of our marriage, I found myself inspired by Maya Angelou’s admonition, “Trust love one more time and always one more time.” He was as sexy and interesting as the day we first met: this gregarious, adventure-loving, Colorado-dirt-bike-riding, Roatan-scuba/snorkeling, travel-the-world-companion who valued taking care of me, pleasing me, delighting me, and holding my hand. So I trusted.

But five years after we married, Bob received a diagnosis of Huntington’s disease, an incurable degenerative neurological illness.He died when I was in my mid-sixties, leaving me to eventually become old on my own. I found myself adrift in understanding how to negotiate this new territory I was entering. Where would I even live? I know some women are comforted by staying in the home that houses memories created with their partners, but I needed to escape the kitchen where Bob sat at the island, pleased to pour our wine while I prepared meals. His mother so hated cooking that he thought my making something as simple as oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins was as endearing as a Julia Child feast. I fled the bedroom where he used to light candles and his melodic voice called me to bed with my middle name “Yvonne.”

***

In retrospect, I recognize my ageism. I never imagined myself being seventy-six years old. And though I’d always considered myself a feminist, I bought into the “anti-aging” campaign with a vengeance as the years advanced. Each passing year challenged my sense of self; I increasingly struggled against what seemed to be my dark, inevitable future—unless I died early. And just like that, my fantasies of youthful eternity slowly morphed into gnawing fear of growing old: a three-letter word carrying the weight of loss, illness, invisibility, loneliness, and uselessness.

***

After Bob’s death, I can remember four distinct moments in my life that pivotally underscored my growing anxiety and dread.

The first moment occurred while vacationing with my old girlfriends from high school. Beginning at age thirty-five we began taking annual vacations together, and this time we were exploring Paris, Rome, and Venice. I remember how the air took on a certain stillness when Carol referred to herself as an “old woman.” Granted, we were all in our sixties by then, but I drifted to sleep with determined resistance that night thinking, She may be an “old woman,” but I’m not. Still, I began to wonder then when I would truly feel it.

A year later, I boarded a Chicago bus when three young women hopped up to offer their seats. I turned to assist the elderly person to whom their thoughtfulness was directed, but there was no one behind me. I sat down wondering if my silver fox hair was responsible for giving others the wrong impression. But I can’t lie, of course it made me feel some kinda way, so much so that I cut it off the next week as if to destroy the evidence of my age. Am I becoming old?

A few months later, I was reveling in the experience of undertaking a solo road trip along the same route I once drove to college when I stopped for lunch. The young woman who took my order at Interstate BBQ leaned over as I read the menu and said, “Now, I’m not saying anything, but you might want to look at these,” as she pointed to the Seniors Lunch Specials section. Seniors: that prissy word for old. My breath caught in my chest. It took all I had in me to express appreciation for her thoughtfulness. I nodded agreeably, chose something from that section, and just stared at the heading as she walked away with my order.

The fourth major incident occurred when I was seventy-four and interviewing the young mechanic my friend recommended to help care for my car. Appreciating the prospect of having someone keep my seasonal car in working condition, I chatted with the mechanic on the couch of my summer home, listening to his lilting Jamaican voice as he shared his work experience and a bit about his children. He seemed trustworthy and good-hearted. And he said ever so nicely and with the respect of his culture, “I really like old ladies.” The impact of those words hit me like a slap. I consciously fixed my face as I realized, He thinks I’m old, and asked if he’d like another cookie. After he left, I sat down on the deck and confessed to myself that being seventy-four did, indeed, mean that I was old. A shot of bourbon was a welcomed accompaniment to the acknowledgment.

***

Now closer to eighty than seventy, my 109-year-old friend Dorothy is prompting me to interrogate my aversion to the word “old.” There we were on her cottage porch: “The Old and The Ancient.” She has been a social justice activist since the 1930s. Beginning in Brooklyn then moving with her husband to the headquarters of the Southern Negro Youth Congress in the 1940s before returning to New York to continue her activism, Dorothy was a biologist by profession and now the matriarch of a family that now includes great-great-grandchildren. I can still recall her virtual 105th birthday celebration when someone tapped on a glass and called for quiet so Dorothy could say a few words. This diminutive, fragile-looking woman rose to her full height of maybe five feet and in a voice rich with determination issued her memorable proclamation, “Keep fighting!”

Even from the other side of a screen, she didn’t look like loss, illness, invisibility, loneliness, or uselessness, though I know she has tasted from that menu before. While porch-sitting at her summer cottage as we often did, she would talk about her long life, and her stories and reflections would create beautiful collages of meaning out of the fragments of her life, similar in kind to the collages she began making in her seventies that now fill the walls of art galleries and the homes of friends and family. Holding my glass of prosecco to toast her image on the screen, I saw her art as accepting and making meaning of all of it: all the fragments that make a life. I put down my celebratory flute, looked at the collage birthday card she had made for Bob’s seventieth birthday, and a phrase I hadn’t thought of for a long time emerged: “in the fullness of time.”

***

That phrase “fullness of time” echoes back through the years to my childhood. As a child, I didn’t know quite what the phrase meant, but I had a feeling it promised the understanding from which the grown folk in my life made meaning of their lives.

I remember sitting next to my grandmother Mama Russell on a hard pew in a little brick church in small-town Virginia listening to a preacher’s voice fill my ears with the sounds of Black Baptist preaching. His rhythms were backed up by claps and murmurs from the congregation. His black suit and immaculate, white starched shirt only affirmed his authority. His skin stretched taut over his thin frame, almost as black as his suit. Close-cut salt-and-pepper hair completed Reverend Johnson. Always somewhere on a random syllable in the middle of his sermons, his words would be carried out by a rumble inside him, and you could feel them winding up for an explosion that would elicit shouts and “Amens” from the congregation.

In Mama Russell’s church, Reverend Johnson offered a menu of food for the soul. He spoke with the voice of prophecy as if given to him personally by God Himself earlier that morning. It seemed that every Sunday, some part of his sermon reassured the congregation that their lives held meaning that might not be apparent in the moment. He promised that “in the fullness of time” the grace of God could be counted upon to reveal the meaning of living through the hardships, humiliations, arbitrariness of broken dreams, the sorrows, the joys and blessings: what appeared to be disparate fragments of time. I could feel that certainty in the soul-filled air that touched my skin.

On Sunday evenings after supper concluded, I’d listen to the old folks as they sat on the big front porch and shared their stories: some were old family stories, while others were about what had transpired in their lives as recently as last Sunday. I realize now that they were making meaning of their lives. I longed to experience that understanding as a child when the world seemed so mysterious. Then, when I became a young adult, I was always too busy living my life from moment to moment, experience to experience, with the exuberance of immortality fueling me. I gave little thought to the meaning of it all. But, that longing to understand finally returned to me more acutely than ever when I grew older, even as I still dreaded growing old.

***

Dorothy’s example, along with the encouragement of an artist friend, prompted me, after Bob’s death, to begin creating collages. I noticed and collected all sorts of things, including magazine pictures, images and designs, cards, photos, paints, fabric, lace, and beads. And then I began seeing this seemingly random collection as a metaphor for my choices in life, and the resulting collages came to represent my understanding of how these pieces fit together. I began reflecting upon the choices I’d made during my life —and their consequences—in the same way.

Today, at seventy-six years old, I understand what Reverend Johnson was preaching about, what those old folks were accomplishing on their porches, and what my friend Dorothy was doing with her stories and collages. The fullness of time comes as grace when we pause and open ourselves to understand the meaning of moments we’ve accumulated through living, when we pause to make meaning of the whole of our lives by understanding how our fragments all fit together. As we live it, we go from moment to moment—some moments are fleeting, some moments stretch over time—without being able to recognize the significance. It took growing old and the companionship of reflection to be ready for grace to create this fullness of time: to appreciate the beauty of the whole and to see the meaning of my life.

My long-held fears of becoming old have been replaced by the unexpected rewards of reflection and understanding: the very things Reverend Johnson spoke about. As I move deeper into this fullness of time, the moments of sorrow, pain, regret, and shame for my own failings find their place among my treasured moments of joy and pleasure in creating the collage of my life, revealing meaning of my life and the portrait of the woman I am still becoming. Age itself does not deliver the fullness of time, I realized, but when accompanied by reflection and grace, the fragments of my life continue to unfold with meaning, and I feel acutely my connection with all of humanity, not just in the abstract sense, but within the human being in front of me. I am rewarded by once again experiencing moments of being fully present,  similarly to my youth, but with a single profound difference. Now, I can be present in my life with the consciousness that past, present, and glimpses of the future come together. This is what it is to be old.

So many of us are made through the memories and desires of others.
This is particularly true for those who immigrate at a young age.
Everything I remember is just what they remember.

I was born during the Iran-Iraq war, in a hospital filled with injured Iranian soldiers.²

My parents were communists, members of the Tudeh Party. I know this because they told me. Later, in the U.S., they took me to communist gatherings with other diasporic Iranians, where often I was the only child in the room.

I have no memories from the first two-and-a-half years of my life.
Which means I have no memories of Iran.
Which means I have no memories of the war.
And yet.

Consider the simultaneous. Inheritance
a cluster of stunned ghosts

trailing from vow to vow.
Confused detectives.

Wet edamame pinched out
from skin pocket
clutching survivors
how rubble clenches the neckskin

of collateral damage.
Motherhungry

and bewildered
at the breach.³

When I was two and a half years old—my dad thirty-two, my mom twenty-two—we left Iran.

Why did we move away from where my parents grew up, where all their family remained? Why did they leave their friends, their language, their mutual understanding of culture?

One way to answer this involves the U.S. and Britain’s profit-driven interventions in other countries.⁴ In 1953, a year after my father was born, and nine years before my mother was born, the Prime Minister of Iran nationalized the Iranian oil industry. In response, the U.S. and Britain facilitated a coup to overthrow him. Full power was placed back in the monarchy, and Iran’s king obediently re-granted the West access to Iran’s oil.

Then, in 1979, many Iranians, tired of foreign exploitation of Iran’s natural resources, tired of the forced marginalization of Islam in the country, tired of the surveillance and torture by the king’s secret police,⁵ and enraged by the royal family’s opulent displays of wealth in the midst of poverty for so many, eventually banded together and overthrew the king. This led to the violent theocracy that Iran has now. Immediately afterward, Iran and Iraq went to war. The same bombs that exploded our neighbor’s house had been given to Iraq by the United States. In the midst of all this, many Iranians—like my parents, who had been communists and targeted by both the king’s government and the Islamic regime—were being arrested, tortured, killed.

Decades later, in the U.S., I call my parents and ask them why we left.

We arrived in Lubbock, Texas, in 1985.

All my memories begin in Texas.

Sometimes the identities immigrants cling to when they leave become static, like old photographs. They're contained in symbols and rules that determine how one is supposed to behave in a desperate attempt against loss. So much of my Iranian-ness was birthed through the labor of my parents pitting their idea of their own culture against their idea of American culture. I get it. It's an act of cultural survival.

As an immigrant child, I asserted myself through small, subversive acts to establish my identity.⁶ Looking back, I see that I was emulating my parents’ battle to preserve the parts of me that started slipping away when we left. In elementary school, I deliberately placed my left hand—instead of my right—over my heart during the pledge of allegiance. Or I sang the Iranian national anthem (what I knew of it) when the stars and stripes were blasting. I felt proud of my lone resistance.

But apart from these covert rebellions, I was a good girl. I was a teacher’s pet. I didn’t stir anything up. I was obedient.

I often made myself small, and I was praised for it, for being such a mature kid, for being excellent at following the rules, for being so polite, for being the best, young Iranian in the room. This process of comparison, of tuning myself to the reaction of others, became my norm. I would seek it out. I would play dumb or play wise. I was good at it, because I have a gift for reading the room, for discerning people’s energy even when they think they’re hiding it. I was always perceiving the environment and aligning my frequency for the highest praise, or the least disturbance. Sometimes this meant knowing all the answers in class, and often this meant restricting my Light so that others didn’t feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable.

But things got muddled. In the blur of what I thought it meant to be Iranian (good, and based on my parents’ idealized narratives) and what it meant to be American (rude, selfish and based on my parents’ fears), somehow the expression of wilderness, of play, of freedom, of divinity, was all restrained inside me. And the fear of triggering others the wrong way—fueled by a fear of causing harm or disruption—led me to continually read the room, not to uplift it and infuse it with my magic, but to control the energy, to not upset anyone.

For so long, I dimmed my Light to match the dimmed light of others. For decades I did this. As a mode of survival, as a habit of seeking praise. As a misguided form of empathy for others’ pain.

I mistake enormous for annihilating.

Even now, I have to remind myself to not re-create the same dynamics with my son. That he can be expansive (which he is), that he can be loud and joyous (which he is), that he can be brave (which he is), without me panicking that others will in turn feel their own sense of smallness by witnessing his freedom, and will then resent him, and that somehow this will make him unsafe. Every single day, I battle with myself to allow my son to be and show his true, divine self, without my panicked interventions. And while, overall, I’m winning, I fail almost every day. I know that light is always stronger than dark. But darkness is still darkness. And the world has so much of it, so much violence that is normalized and woven into everything.

My parents were Soviet-inspired atheist communists. And in Iran, they endured a violent theocracy that, using a narrative anchored in God and religion, continues to kill, torture and repress the entire country.

My parents’ belief system did not leave much room for explicitly exploring spirituality, and in fact cultivated in me a sharply judgmental disdain for anything related not only to religion, but also to God, to ghosts, to magic. My own aggressive condemnation of any reference to the spirit world left me out of touch with much of my own power. On the other hand, the portal—poetry—through which I accessed my powers was also offered to me through my parents. Their love of literature, art, and music was central to my upbringing.

Asterisk water dancer pulling stitches free.

In many ways, poetry was the midwife that helped me birth myself. It took me years of pioneering through the rich, painful, and informative darkness to remember how incredibly luminous I am. And that my Light doesn’t harm others, and it doesn’t make me a target. That my expansiveness speaks to the vast, luminous Source energy in all of us. That my spirit wants me to be seen.

Am I a god? I am.

I was born in Iran. I was born in the U.S. I was born in the stars. I am ancient. I am the future. I have been here thousands of times. I am mammoth love. And I know that everything I do impacts everyone across space and time.

I know my freedom is interwoven with everyone else’s. And this freedom doesn’t mean what the U.S. says it means. Because American narratives are rife with violence, exploitation, and manipulative mythology.

As I reconcile the individual with the collective,⁷ as I discern the best ways to use my gifts, I repeat this refrain: everyone is trying their best. It’s the closest I’ve come to unconditional love. And still, I am negotiating wanting to hold people accountable for injustice and harm, while also operating from a place of compassion and forgiveness, one that recognizes on a galactic level, we are all one.

Flood the stage with a trill of red bougainvilleas.

What stories does your mind tell about you?⁸ And what stories does your heart tell?

The heart is a clarifier. Love wrings the world clean of static, borns us through our static. You are perfect, she says, holding all we have ever exalted or concealed. Do you understand? Love is the inexhaustible ear to whom we sound like music.

May you feel the freedom to tell all your stories, to sit and speak with your shadows, and to thank them before you release them to the light. May you listen to the stories of others with radical openness, with a defiance of hierarchies and totalitarianism. May you be tender with yourself as you grow. May you be tender with yourself.

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1 As stated by Daniel Ortega, cited by Alice Walker. https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2008/12/the-victory-belongs-to-love

2 What if I don’t remember this? I don’t, not in my mind. How much is the mind a receptacle for memory? Our entire body an archive and a portal.

3 When someone is killed suddenly, sometimes there is a delay in processing. A panic or disbelief on the part of the spirit of the one who’s passed. They may latch onto the living for a while. Anyone nearby. Something to hold onto.

4 I’ve noticed something. Western art institutions love to talk about women. life. freedom. They love to foreground Iranian women’s critique of the Islamic State as long as it only critiques the Islamic iterations of their suffering. In other words, museums love when we talk about the veil, but not U.S. intervention. Not western empire. Because museums and universities and many “philanthropic” organizations are invested in weapons and war and profit from state and global violence. So diversity in a gallery is great as long as no one at the gallery is implicated and as long as we don’t get too transparent about what the politics of the donors to these institutions are.

As a poet, much of my work examines poetry and poetics as a means of resistance against coerced, totalizing Western narratives produced by militarism and state violence. This violence is tied to empire’s veneer of civility and its corresponding mythology of objectivity, and how these forces work to condemn and criminalize those who draw attention to the culpability of art and academic institutions. These western institutions often reward the exposition of human rights abuses against women in Southwest Asia and North Africa, as long as there is no stated culpability of the West or Western ideals, which impacts arts funding and exhibition opportunities. SWANA artists are glorified when they speak about the misogyny and violence of Islamic theocratic governance, whereas those who speak of the role of ongoing U.S. and European military intervention in their home countries are typically marginalized and less frequently provided institutional support.

This is part of a larger relationship between military capitalism and the western art world. There is a lot to say about the horrific legal violence, manipulation, censorship and abuse in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And there is a lot to say about the horrific legal violence, manipulation, censorship and abuse in the United States of America.

5 My father was kicked out of his university as a student during the Shah’s government for being a communist who criticized the government. After the revolution, he was kicked out of his job during the Islamic Republic for being a communist who criticized the government.

6 In the first draft of this essay, I wrote this sentence as: “So I did stupid shit.” Why was it stupid though? Why do I belittle it now? I was trying my best to weave a whole self from the stories I was crafted from. I suppose it was the blind Iranian nationalism that feels silly to me now. I was trying so hard to prove I was not American, that I was aligning myself with Iran as a nation-state. But I was beautiful then in the ways that I was trying to form myself, trying to protect myself with what I had been taught.

7 What do I mean by this? No matter how much I align myself with Love and Light, there is still overwhelming violence here. Systems and laws built through brutality and harm and ruthlessness that wreak havoc on people’s lives all the time.

I am Iranian and I am American. Racism, capitalism, patriarchy and all state violence are foundational to the formation and reinforcement of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America.

These forces are integral to every institution in which I participate as an American; this is my inheritance and therefore my personal responsibility.

How can I continually recognize the interrelated nature of our histories? How can I honor our incalculable responsibility toward one another? How can I navigate and subvert visceral and legally-codified violence across the globe, while also allowing my heart to lead? How do I hold individuals—including myself—accountable for harm, while also practicing unconditional love?

8 The thinking mind, though well-intentioned and trying to protect us, uses fear, doubt, and restriction. It loves taxonomies and categories; it separates and breaks things apart to study and better understand them; and then, the mind tries to convince us that these things are actually separate in their nature, that they’ve been separate all along. Here's the thing though—everything is connected, all the time. Even the most mundane thing with the most horrific thing with the most luminous thing, everything is one thing.