It’s coming up on a year that I’ll have been out of school. Less than that, since I officially graduated late last summer, but this month will mark the year anniversary of the end of my undergraduate career, and I get a little reflective around those kinds of milestones. Well, really, who am I kidding. I’m a writer – I get reflective about anything. But a year seems like a good marker. Progress made, shortcomings discovered, organs removed (I don’t miss you at all, gallbladder).
When I moved, almost a year ago now, I didn’t stop and look back. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, like I hadn’t been able to really fill my lungs for far too long. I forgot to tell my friends that I was leaving – they found out the day before, or sometime after. I packed up everything I could hold and dropped the rest; possessions in the trash can, obligations left on my front stoop.
I won’t say I was unhinged, or close to losing it. But I was desperate, and had been for a while.
I blazed out of there like a fire was at my back. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew I couldn’t stay.
Once I moved, I slept for perhaps a month straight. Then I started working, and threw myself into the task of learning to live like a normal human being. Not one with demons in her closet, with monsters breathing down her neck. I needed to live in a place where not everyone knew my story, where the looks people gave me were once of nonchalance rather than pity. I needed, in so many ways, a fresh start.
In some ways, that’s what I got. But the idea is kind of a fallacy. You cannot leave everything behind, much as you might want to. It will all follow you, slowly, obligations and monsters wending their way up the freeway behind you as you blast forward in an attempt to shake them off your back.
****
I lean against the counter of my best friend’s kitchen, yellow walls refracting the setting sun around us as I’m chopping a shallot for the very first time. She’s teaching me how to cook, at my humiliating request. Tonight is homemade pasta sauce from scratch. We settle around the dinner table, blue mason jars filled with water, dog scampering around our feet. It is simplicity and laughter and peaceful and all the things I left looking for.
We pause the movie we’d been half-heartedly watching to talk about death and grief and the kind of sadness that permeates every breath you take. I tell her that I am dreading mother’s day, that I will wake up depressed and lifeless and avoid the greeting card aisles. I say she’ll feel that sadness that encompasses all, come father’s day.
We agree that people think death, or tragedy of any kind, ends when it happens. She lives with her father’s absence every single day; there is never a moment in which I’ve forgotten the peculiar and strange story of my parents and me. But people stop asking, because they think it is over and done. It happened, it stopped happening, you look happy, you must have moved on.
It’s never that simple.
****
I may have moved far, far away from my parents, in body and spirit, but I still see them in myself and hear their echoes in my ears daily. A friend’s husband asks me to compliment her on something, and rather than seeing it as the sweet gesture of caring that it is, I immediately flash back to my father’s control of my mother’s appearance, and it takes me an entire evening to work through the fact that this is different and not something to fear. I wake up from nightmares, and when my youngest brother’s birthday passes again, with me not there, I cannot sleep from the crushing guilt. I have my father’s hands, which is why I keep my nails short to the quick – the longer they get, the more they seem to take on his shape. I see the hands that hit me echoed in my own hands. My laugh, when I’m really laughing, is the exact same as his. We throw our heads back in the air with a cackle and a toss. No one else in this place would know that, because I am an entity devoid of context, an organism independent, not the pastor’s daughter – just Becca, the girl who laughs with abandon.
No one else knows that I have my father’s hands. And as glad as this makes me, because this is the thing I fought for, this fresh start – this independence – sometimes it still makes me sad. Because I loved my father’s hands.
It is a complicated and ever-present grief and it does not come with a guide to help you navigate it. You simply learn to live with it.
****
Last week I went out with friends four nights in a row. This time a year ago, that would’ve been impossible. Not because I didn’t have friends, because I did – and they never stopped inviting me. I just physically couldn’t do it. I did not have the energy, the life, the willpower to keep up in everything. It was all I could do to move forward each day, forget drinks at the end of it.
But here I am now. Conversing over kitchen tables; watching movies and making jokes throughout; drinks and dessert in a crowded bar with coworkers; traipsing across parking lots and sitting above the city with knees bumping, picking out constellations with sticky ice cream on our hands. I have friends, new ones and old ones both, but now I can muster the strength to step outside. It’s an amazing feeling.
I am easing into normal, have been this whole past year. Going on dates, flirting with boys, free dinners and failed expectations. Going to friend’s houses and laughing for hours and hours on end. I go to work every day and most of the time I even like it. I have an appointment this week to take my (very first) car to (my very first) mechanic. My room is gradually and gradually getting cleaner. I brush my teeth and floss every single night. Some days, I even remember to pack a lunch. This time I only kept the library books past two overdue notices, not three. I have a stack of clean work aprons in my closet. I bought new sheets. If I don’t have an appetite these days, it’s due to recent surgery, not a fatigue of heart and spirit. I sometimes even go to the gym.
I no longer wake up sobbing at three am. Tears still come, but these days, they come gently.
This is why I left, for the moment when I realize that I am waking up into a brand new life that I built. I waited so long and fought so hard, and now?
And now, life.
****
I do not know what is next. More late nights and early mornings and laughing til drinks spill from noses. More awkward first dates and set-ups and weird boys from tinder. More friends to hug firmly and more people to love and miss and hope good for. More songs to be sung, more fiction to be dreamt, more things to write and share and give away. More disappointments, more victories. More times to be wrong, more things to learn, more birthdays and Christmases and Fourth of July cookouts. More cooking in the kitchen, more midnight adventures. More surprises, more things I never could’ve seen coming, good or bad or both.
Here, in this last year, I have had my taste of living.
I only want more of it.