Please Keep Your Patience

I texted my dad that we were not going through with the house and explained why.

He replied, "I am sorry it didn't work out. Please keep your patience."

Forgive me, but that last sentence has been a pebble in my shoe ever since I read it.

Please keep your patience.

I read it once.

Then again.

Then one more time, trying to figure out what exactly he thought was about to happen.

Because I vaguely remember hearing that phrase from him when I was a teenager. And like most fifteen-year-olds, I had enough hormones pumping through my bloodstream, poking every brain cell, that yeah—I was on the verge of flying off the handle over the smallest inconvenience.

But I'm almost forty now.

I've been married for nine years. I go to bed by nine. I make balanced meals that we actually sit down and eat at the table. I do the laundry every week. Fresh sheets, too. I refill prescriptions before they run out. I compare insurance deductibles. I know exactly how much cat food is left before I need to buy more.

I really can't put into words how stable my life is compared to my childhood, when clothes might sit in the washing machine, wet for days—rank, stank, and mildewing—or dinner was canned green beans because there simply wasn't anything else in the kitchen.

So I kept coming back to that sentence.

Please keep your patience.

And the more I read it, the more it felt fearful. Maybe that's colored by all that pesky past stuff again, but it felt like he was bracing for my inevitable meltdown. Like he thought I might lose my temper. Freak out. Lash out like an animal.

But then I wondered if that was fair.

Maybe he meant exactly what he wrote. Maybe it's just something he says to people when life gets stressful. Everyone at the community center has heard him say it.

I honestly don't know.

What I do know is how strange it feels to realize that, at least a little, I'm still frozen in time for him.

Maybe that's what parents do.

They update your age, but not always your identity.

You can become a homeowner. Build a quiet marriage. Learn how to regulate your emotions. Spend years building a life that is so wonderfully, almost boringly stable that you forget stability was ever something you had to learn.

And yet somewhere inside your parents' minds, you're still fifteen years old, slamming a bedroom door and screaming.

The funny thing is, maybe he hasn't actually missed who I've become.

Maybe he just hasn't had the chance to see it.

Change is so slow from the inside. There wasn't one day I woke up and suddenly became patient. There wasn't a ceremony where someone handed me a certificate declaring I was now emotionally regulated.

It happened one ordinary Tuesday after another.

Unless you were there for all those Tuesdays, maybe you wouldn't know.

I can't really tell if I'm reading too much into one sentence.

But I also don't think it matters.

Call it reflection, healing old wounds, making amends, or whatever the fuck you want, but I feel called to call him today. If he doesn't answer, I'll leave a message. Not to convince him of anything. Just to let him hear, through my words and my tone, who I am now.

Maybe the phone call isn't really for him.

Maybe it's for the version of me that still wonders if she's one bad day away from becoming that fifteen-year-old again.

Or maybe it's simply because I'd like my dad to know that I turned out okay.

The strange thing about growing up is that you don't just outgrow old versions of yourself.

Sometimes you have to outgrow other people's memories of you, too.

I can fall in love with anyone in love with me.

I'm going to live life not let life live me.

The Algorithm Thinks I Need a Hug

Phones have this really funny thing they do now that they didn't used to. I really can't pinpoint when the change occurred, but change it did. Everything is connected in these strange little strings that link the most random things.

Search Google for a mover, and suddenly you get ads on Instagram for movers. Click on one obscure post, and suddenly there's an influx of similar-ish posts. It's not a coincidence. It's really, really shady and voyeuristic marketing. They know what you're looking for.

Well, it happened to me this week.

I'll tell you the facts, and then I'll tell you what I think happened.

Today.

Reddit.

Recommended.

A post.

From the

"Professional Cuddlers" subreddit.

You read that right.

And did I click?

My God, of course! It's like Jerry Springer—you have to look.

But here's how I think we got to this point.

First, I've been following the Rover subreddit for intel. You have posts from both sitters and customers, and they're freely sharing their rates, how they care for animals, expectations, pet peeves (pun intended), and so on. We needed a pet sitter. What a great way to research what I'd need to know—straight from the source, the boots on the ground, not the polished and marketable corporate branding.

Then I recently clicked on a ranty post about someone who had just found out their best friend was dating an AI companion.

Because I'm a nosy bitch.

And then the algorithm said,

"Oh, hiring people to do things in your home via an app? And..." checks notes "...AI companions? Yeah. Give her the professional cuddlers. Hire someone to hold you tonight."

And it's not that the arithmetic daddy-god energy matching up what to give me next was wrong, per se.

Because I am a little into the weird, and of course I wanted to read about what the heck this was and who was hiring them.

But I'm not someone who would hire a professional cuddler.

Then again...

I feel like I'd probably be a professional cuddler's favorite client.

I'm a good hugger. I don't fidget. I'd be so respectful of boundaries and considerate. Ask if this is something they do full-time or if they're also in grad school. Have really nice snacks. Always tip. And we'd have a lovely conversation.

Then again...

Isn't that probably exactly what all the clients think?

Maybe that's the algorithm's real talent.

Not knowing what I want.

Just knowing which strange little corners of me are curious enough to click.

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.