This time last year, I was standing outside my apartment building looking in; a woman with few possessions but more hope than she usually musters. As I write this, I can see the artwork I bought in town, the owl cookie jar I bought at a North Carolina antique store, so many plants, the sign in my mom’s handwriting gifted to me by the kindest person I know and the detritus of my existence; a few books, a random charger, sunglasses, junk mail I have yet to throw out. A life.
I recently returned home from a trip back “home”. If you are ever feeling unmoored or unloved or a general unease, I highly recommend moving 7 hours away and then returning to the people who love you most at semi-regular intervals. This is very niche, but it also helps if your uncle owns a house on a creek that you can borrow for a few days. Just a suggestion.
One of the first things I noticed upon my return was that my favorite plant was sad, drooping, unwell, mirroring what I was feeling. She needs water I thought as I sobbed a seemingly unlimited amount of water from my face. I wonder if I can encourage her to thrive using my tears—the way I am trying to do for myself.
-Nature Interlude-
I have a new therapist. Is therapy worth what I pay for it? Absolutely not. Am I going to keep doing it anyway? Yes. My therapist overshares about her own life (but I feel like this is why she gets me?!) I should not know that she has an ex-lover that still comes over and fixes stuff for her even though he has a new girlfriend, and she can tell he still wants to get it. But sometimes she’ll say things like, “you are not someone who wants to be contained” and I’m like bitch all I am is contained! I mostly read and rarely leave my apartment!
Oh. Not like that.
I shouldn’t need to shell out thousands of dollars for someone to hear me and tell me I am great actually and my brain is just lying to me but there is something about a stranger wholly and completely invested in your well-being without any biases. In our first session she told me I was not broken and she was going to be my biggest cheerleader.
Take my money.
One of the first things I did after my move was take a cooking class at the arts council. Chef Laura helped a small group of us make baked cod, spanakopita and a couscous salad. Weeks (months?) later as I explored my new town, I found out Chef Laura does Tapas Tuesday at the wine bar in town. Tapas Tuesday is my favorite day of the week and not just because I love a theme. I also love free dinner and Chef Laura’s food. I go every Tuesday, as early as possible. Chef Laura frequently calls me Queen (I feel certain she calls other people this, but I pretend my Queen is special) and recently told me she read several of my blog posts! This very blog! Y’all know there is no easier way to my heart than appreciating my writing. I could have cried.
Anway, today I text Laura. Your girl is a local with friends!
The chill of Winter has finally lifted around here, and I have done some of my favorite Spring activities in the past two days—brewery reading, sitting on my balcony, letting my thick thighs unabashedly show themselves and feel the warm sun. It feels like such a cliche to talk about warmer weather lifting your spirits but cliches are cliches for a reason.
A year ago, when I was trying to find a place to live it felt like such a compromise that I ended up here. Nowhere near my tiny cottage with a wildflower yard dream but reflecting a year later—whenever I want and in less than ten minutes—I can walk to three breweries, several more bars, a bookstore, a coffee shop, multiple trails and a community that I wasn’t sure would ever feel like home but now feels like mine. What a dream.
On my first visit to Morganton, I cried in what would become my favorite pizza place. I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a post that wrecked fragile trying to start her life over me (I love an overshare but there are some things even I will be cryptic about, “A womans heart is a deep ocean of secrets”— Old Rose in the Titanic movie). I walked out and continued to cry on a bench.
Today, I picked up food from this place I have since been to many times. A young woman with her friends was dancing to Smooth Operator in her chair, her arms raised in delight. The woman who took my order called me darlin’. The bartender from the brewery across the street (where I had just been) said “fancy meeting you here!”. A man held the door for me as I left even though his friends were far ahead at that point, and I was several stairs from the door.
You couldn’t have told Sad She Had To Leave The Pizza Place Alecia that two years later she would feel a gleeful warmth as she observed a community she now claimed as her own.
Seeing past the current moment is not something I am good at. But I was reminded today that places where I have cried do not need to own that emotion forever. Someone will dance in a chair to a song from the eighties. That someone can be a stranger. That someone can be you.
Instructions for Traveling West
A poem by Joy Sullivan
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives
you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road
and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming
apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead,
find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view.
Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going.
Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs.
Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers.
Knight yourself every morning for your newborn
courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey
beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray
to something unnamable. Fall for someone impractical.
Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands.
Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot
a sunning warbler glowing like prism, remind yourself—
joy is not a trick.
The two “biggest” (positive) influences on my life were traveling across the country to Portland, Oregon, and Asheville, NC and I remember my lower-self kicking its feet with both experiences. “This is uncomfortable. This isn’t what you know. Why is there a man resembling white-Jesus tripping on lsd at a public art gallery? This…is…weird. WAIT. I’m weird!” And suddenly, it felt more like home than “home” ever felt. The best advice I ever received in life was to “bring Asheville with you, every where you go…” Every step has become home. And I’m thankful to read that you have absorbed the unknown and turned it into home. So consider this my gift of a “doormat” for you that reads, “Welcome home.”