That's the One

"In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and trust shall be your strength." Isaiah 30:15

I lit a votive in a glass holder I bought off Etsy for my ancestors. I don't normally do ancestor stuff, but it was a weird moment when I was three dollars away from free shipping, and it was cheaper to add it than not. Enlightenment via capitalism strikes again!

So when it came, it burned down in half the estimated time, and the paper on the outside melted halfway off. Me, oh my. I didn't know y'all was hungry like that. Don't worry, babies. There's more where that came from. Your loyal child will provide.

Have you ever been floating in the middle of a pool, and it feels so nice you close your eyes? With your ears under the water, all you hear is your breath, so you breathe deeper and deeper. Time passes. Maybe a minute, maybe thirty, but your head lightly bonks the pool wall and you wake, having drifted to the edge without noticing.

Well, it's like for years I've been in the center of a pool—breaststroke, butterfly, doggy paddle, treading water. My heart's been beating hard. I've been out of breath. I've been afraid of drowning. And a few weeks ago, I just rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and bonk, bonk, bonk—my sweet little head. I've almost arrived where I was frantically trying to get to in the first place.

What is that?

I light another candle. It's not special...not charged with whatever the Etsy witch puts in that shit. Heck, it's just from Dollar Tree. I think my ancestors might appreciate a frugal moment.

Because I like not struggling.

I like getting what I want when I want it.

Yesterday, I overheard my husband say on the phone, "All I want is for Caroline to be set for life. Fuck everything else."

Me too, dude. Me too.

And I put on a good act. But you know I've been ate up with regrets. I've poked my finger in every fucking hole in the marriage I could find. I wiggled that pinkie into every crevice and tested its limits. Examined all the lacks. All the things I'm MISSING OUT ON!

Bruh, I've been on Reddit. I've scoured Instagram. I've listened to enough podcasts to imagine a thousand different lives.

Only to come, time and time again, to the inevitable truth:

I love being loved like this.

And it's not low-self-esteem bullshit to say, "No one could love me like this," because it's true. There's only one of him. Someone else could love me. Love me well. Love me greatly. Love me better, perhaps.

But it wouldn't be like this.

Nothing is.

So anyway, before me was my mother. And my grandmother. And my great-grandmother. And so on and so forth. That's why I have a basket of ancestors to plead to.

One of y'all has to be looking down at me thinking, That's the one.

And I put an orange on the altar too. I don't know what y'all like, but a little variety beyond candles felt right.

You know, a few days ago my husband brought up getting a dog. Another dog. I've fought him on it. I've pleaded with him to wait. For years. But maybe it's because he's buying me a house and handling all the logistics, and I feel like one of those women who just does yoga and hydrates and listens to music and dances and cooks and cleans and picks flowers. Whatever girls skipping through wildflower meadows in Instagram be doing.

Whatever the reason, I was all on board.

And for weeks now, it's felt like my giving and receiving are calibrating. Like every time I hand something over, something else quietly arrives before I notice the empty space. I don't really understand it or know where it ends.

Maybe I didn't need to swim harder.

Maybe I just needed to trust that I was already floating in the right direction.

Bonk, bonk, bonk.

I've almost drifted to where I was trying to get all along.

What No One Wants.

Ever since I can remember, there was a hole in my bedroom wall.

I never knew how it got there. A doorknob. An angry foot. Some accident that happened before I was old enough to ask.

The cause didn't matter.

It was mine.

My child fingers, without the dexterity and assuredness of adulthood, grasped and picked around the powdery edges as little pieces, bits, and flecks pried off. Chips of wall that I could place in my mouth, cough into my hand, and drop into the hole, which, to me, in that moment, was an infinite abyss.

What some would view as immature destruction, curiosity, the stupidity of youth, became something else entirely.

The hole was a refuge for all those parts of me that couldn't fit in the room, or the house, or this world anymore.

The Matchbox car my mother said she would throw away if she stepped on it again fit through the hole with ease. No clank at the bottom, and I was assured it was safe. Toenails I peeled off until my foot bled. Notes written on receipts. Lists of future selves. Wishes folded into tiny squares. For a decade, I fed the endlessly, insatiably hungry hole all those parts of me no one wanted.

And it never said no.

It only asked for more.

Nothing I fed it was too ugly, too embarrassing, too strange. The hole accepted everything.

I was never too much there.

Never unwanted.

Even the nastiest, most disgusting, unrelenting little pieces of me were welcome. Wads of chewed-up gum. Mean thoughts. Petty jealousies. Secret hopes. Each time, I felt the tightness in my chest, the electric burn on my cheeks, lessen ever so slightly, relieved that I had secured these parts of myself in a place no one would find.

In this manner, I was able to live, continue to live, as whole as I had hoped. Everything about me no one wanted was sequestered in the depths of the wall, leaving only the most pristine and acceptable version of myself for the public to see.

I could straddle two worlds: the one in which I could be what everyone wanted, and the one in which all the parts I liked were hidden in the dark of whatever lay within the layers of Sheetrock.

A portal for me and me alone.

Until one day, my parents announced the sale of the house.

Oh, how they suddenly busied themselves with repairs, and the hole in my wall—my hole—became a topic of conversation for the first time in my short life. I accompanied them all the way to the store for the repair kit, stirred the mixture with water, watched as my father laid strips of plaster-soaked mesh over the hole.

The disappointment that I no longer had my safe space, that my hole was closed off, was met with a strange comfort.

It was permanently safe now.

I didn't even cry when we moved or when the house was sold. But I did wonder if the darkest spirit of myself had somehow leached into the home, could be felt in the air, as though the particles of me vibrated through the walls.

Was I haunting them now?

Did they feel me in the wallpaper?

Did they wonder why a room suddenly felt crowded?

Did they lie awake at night with the sense that something unfinished still lived inside the walls?

But as I grew and moved from place to place, home to home, as parents died and that house remained—a monument built upon all I had tried to salvage of my unlovable self—I came to a starker realization.

I saw these things I had tried to hide in the gaping, welcoming hole renewed within myself, as if I had never dropped them into the eternal abyss at all. As if these were simply parts of me, the way weeds are pulled and return again the next day.

And I tried to pry and cut and sever them. Tried to return to the sweet solitude of the hole, to straddle two worlds.

But in the end, all I had was me—all the parts, the disgusting bits and the few acceptable pieces, which seemed dimmer each day. The hole had taken nothing. Even my toenails grew back.

The wall had healed.

I hadn't.

But Then There's Me

So, my husband should be going out of town next week. This will be only the third time in our nine-year relationship that we will have been apart overnight.

The first was in December 2016. I went to Florida solo to visit my mom, grandma, and aunt—all of whom are dead now, in that order.

Which feels impossible when I write it that way. At the time, they were simply people I was going to see.

It was very early in our relationship, before we were married. We had been living together for less than two months. It was easy on both of us.

Then, in October 2024, he went to Indiana to look at a house. It was only a few days, and I had work, which I did from home each day. I cleaned the oven, cleaned the whole house, watched the entire first season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, watched Room and Saltburn, baked cookies, and talked to him on the phone three to five times a day.

In some ways, it was kind of fun.

So, at the prospect of my husband being out of town next week for a few days, I figured it would be the same.

But next week, Juneteenth—a day I have off from work—falls during his trip. I didn't realize this until after all the plans were made: tickets bought, car reserved, hotel booked.

Why does one day—no work, no husband—hold some sort of newness that I'm examining yet can't quite explain?

In my first marriage, to a totally different guy, I was alone a lot. I was on my own a lot. There were months when he didn't step foot into the apartment where we lived, and I saw him only a few days a week. In many regards, it was as if I wasn't married at all.

I was married, but I didn't share my life with him, and he did not share a life with me. We were coexisting in the way coworkers might sometimes see each other in meetings, make small talk, help out on a project, then disappear back into their own tasks completely separate from one another.

What do they even do on a daily basis?

We don't really know.

It's only the overlap we see and feel and know.

But this marriage has been different. From the start, we wove our lives together into one. The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks—it is intrinsically linked. We have time apart, hours here and there. We have separate hobbies, hours here and there. But even apart, there's this line of communication: texts when we get there, when we leave, check-ins, do you need anything, do you want a Coke from the gas station?

Perhaps it's the solitude, quietness, the realization of how noisy my life is.
How full.

Of course, there is the background noise: another person with whom I share my home, moving from room to room, working, taking phone calls with colleagues, watching TV.

But then there's me.

When all that external noise falls away, I fill it with podcasts, TV, YouTube, music, voice messages to friends. I am always filling the void.

I keep picturing ten o'clock on that Friday morning.

No meetings?

No husband in the next room?

No agenda?

Just coffee growing cold somewhere in the house and no particular reason to be anywhere.

Just open-ended moments.

Just who I am when nobody needs anything from me.

Who I am when nobody even wants anything from me.

My mother is gone.

My grandmother is gone.

My aunt is gone.

The first time we spent a night apart, they were all still here.

And, for now, my husband is simply my husband. In the next room. Going on a road trip. Mowing the grass. Stopping at the gas station.

Footsteps echoing from the other side of the house.

But a thirty-six-year age gap has a way of making the future feel less hypothetical.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about next Friday.

Not that he will be gone temporarily.

That someday he will truly be gone forever.

For one quiet Friday, I find myself staring at the smallest possible version of that reality.

No work. No husband. Just me.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about the whole thing.

Not being alone, but remembering I will eventually have to re-learn how.

I only want to be surrounded by women who understand immediately when I say, “my interior world.”

Capricious Patina Excised

Strange how the capricious,
given enough time, reveals its pattern,
and is excised without a blink.

AND THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE ME

When Google Maps detoured us through the middle of nowhere in Tennessee

As we drove from Missouri back to Alabama, I almost said, "If I see one more Trail of Tears sign, I'm going to fucking cry."

But I didn't.

Most would take it as some sort of humorous hyperbole, and I suppose in most ways it kind of is. I mean, look around at this white girl, okay, life. I am tired and stressed, but it's not biblical levels. Every twenty minutes Tennessee itself seems determined to remind me of that.

The signs aren't subtle. TRAIL OF TEARS. Another one. Then another. Little roadside reminders that something happened here bad enough we've nailing explanations to the roadside two hundred years later.

And here I am, irritated at Google Maps.

The soapbox I could try to stand on is barely wide enough for one foot, and it's a little rotten. Not rotten like the floorboards of a shack without insulation, rotten from the weather coming in, but rotten like a child spoiled rotten. Actually spoiled. Horribly spoiled.

That's what I'm standing on.

But nonetheless, just like Stormi Kardashian wiping her brow, flustered, trying to move frappuccinos out the tiny, luxurious drive-thru window of her playhouse Starbucks, I am tired and worn out. I am wrung out.

And so are you. We are lost on back roads, and yet again, we pass another Trail of Tears sign.

Not the same sign, but another marker. Another place where someone thought it important to stop and say: this happened here. Right here. Along these roads and ridges and stretches of Tennessee.

Then Google Maps instructed us to continue for half a mile.

My threshold dwindles into despair as you announce you need to pee. Thank goodness, me too.

Another Trail of Tears sign.

So we stop at "Country Girls Rest Stop," where an Indian woman (from India, not Trail of Tears) sells us mozzarella sticks and chicken sandwiches and a scratch-off ticket (we won nothing) after we have used some of the dirtiest bathrooms I've been in for at least two years. I left a bloody pair of panties in the trash can, and it's okay. It's part of the fun and the journey. I was just hangry. You too.

We eat and split a Reese's Cup and continue on. For the next five miles, you sporadically announce, "It's okay," and I follow with, "Yeah, we're okay."

And eventually, we are led to a main stretch of highway, which we will stay on for forty-three miles and cross the city limits into what we still call home, for now.

A miracle at last: I didn't cry once.

There, Too—

For all my life, and forevermore,

I will be a chickenshit motherfucker—

scared of winning and losing alike,

fearful of change and stagnation,

just scared to death until I die.

And if there's reincarnation

or some sort of afterlife,

I'd be a yellow-bellied coward

there, too.