sum of deez dings

Some of these things—these dreams—I dreamt when I was practically a child. High school, college, you know?

These things I’ve been carrying around on my back, from town to town, job to job, each new face I meet. I haven’t really examined them since I first dreamt them.

I haven’t really dug under the surface and asked: Why? Why this? Why this for me?

It’s not a bad goal. Not a bad aspiration. But does it feel good on me still, decades later?

God, I’m almost forty and still doodling ideas I made when I pierced my own nose over the course of three hours—not even straight—in the middle of the night with a sewing needle and a post earring from Claire’s.

And maybe that is what I’ve been mistaking for destiny all these years: a girl alone at night, trying to make herself into someone.

So now I feel it’s time to take inventory, really tally it up, and ask: What do I want?

Not the “I” I swore I was forever and a day ago, but the “I” I am now. The one who lived all that life.

What does that woman—the almost-forty woman, in her second marriage, name on the mortgage, fucking paid-off car—want?

What does she want?

It’s peace. It’s freedom. It’s peace.

It’s not being tied forever to who I was for a minute.

gotta live yo life at sum point

Safe and Secure.

Last night, under a full moon in Capricorn, I kept waking up with fear.

Nothing was happening.

That was the stupid part.

I was in bed. I was under a roof. My husband was asleep beside me. The dogs were somewhere in the house, breathing their hot little dog breath into the dark. The moon was doing whatever moons do over women who are trying, God help us, to sleep.

And still, my brain was dragging furniture to the doors.

The kind of fear where I start thinking through all possible outcomes of my life. I start making contingency plans: if X happens, I will do Y. Worst case, best case. Mentally drafting Facebook Marketplace posts in the event I have to sell everything I own just to eat.

Not because that’s realistic. Because it is a fear I have, and my brain wants to solve it before it happens, like fear is a bill I could pay early.

Not that it probably even would happen.

But try telling that to the moon.

Recently, I listened to a podcast, and the researcher being interviewed said, “Safety and security are the two things women want most.”

It was an episode on the psychology of men’s and women’s drives and desires and needs. Fine. Okay. I’m listening.

But then the researcher continued, “Safety and security are relative, subjective, so the best advice for any woman is to choose to feel safe and secure.”

Excuse me, ma’am.

Mrs. Doctor Lady on a podcast.

What?

What do you mean just choose to feel safe and secure?

Like it’s a throw pillow? Like it’s an essential oil? Like I can just stand in my kitchen, snap my fingers twice, and announce to the cabinets, “Well, boys, we’ve done it. The nervous system is chill now.”

And I’m too lazy to quote quote quote quote some smart bitch, but it actually did make sense, which honestly pissed me off more.

Obviously, do your best to be safe, to be secure. Basic safety stuff like being alert in parking lots and sharing your location and not dating abusers. Basic security stuff like saving money and budgeting and whatnot.

But safety and security are relative.

Recently, my husband and I passed on a house because the neighbor had some aggressive dogs. We said no, no, no, this house is UNSAFE.

And I still think that was a fair thing to consider. I do. I am not trying to girlboss my way into a dog attack.

But I also think there are plenty of people who would be absolutely elated, relieved even, that just two dogs behind a fence were the biggest threat. At some point, someone should be shaking me and saying, “There are people dying, Caroline. There are bombs exploding in some neighborhoods.”

You’re right.

And still, my nervous system lives in its own country with its own war and it's own economy.

And security? My God. It’s not even that long ago that my current savings, bank account, assets, what have you, would have been unheard of in my own life. I remember a time when I received a $2,000 tax refund and felt fucking RICH.

And not in some flippant, hyperbolic way. I mean I really felt rich. So rich I went to the bars and bought drinks for everyone. Me. A benevolent queen in Forever 21 earrings, blessing the village with well vodka.

Me today, of course, thinks $2K would nice but doesn’t go THAT far—plus inflation will only get worse—all the more reason it should be saved. Saved, saved, saved, because I need to feel secure as a lil baby wrapped and swaddled in my dollar-bill blanky.

Which is funny until it isn’t.

Because that girl at the bar with her tax refund thought she had made it. And the woman in bed with more money than that still wakes up rehearsing disaster.

Yeah, I guess safety and security are subjective, and the best thing to do is just CHOOSE to be safe and secure. Like snap, snap, I’m now safe and secure, bitches. I don’t need to wake up worried or planning or thinking about what-ifs.

And what a cruel joke, that what women value most—safety, security—we honestly never REALLY get, because it’s subjective. Because there is no number in a bank account that can promise nothing bad will happen. No neighborhood so quiet. No husband sleeping so close. No moon so full it can fill the hole.

But don’t worry your pretty little head too much, because the guys have it rough too. They most crave productivity. Not just present productivity, but past and future productivity too. So theirs isn’t just subjective; it’s got a whole stupid time-contingency thing too.

God bless us, every one. The men are haunted by to-do lists. The women are haunted by the locked door.

So fine.

I choose it.

I choose safety. I choose security. I choose the roof over my head, the money in the bank, the dogs behind their fence, the husband asleep beside me, the moon hanging over the house like a silver coin nobody can spend.

I choose it.

And still, somewhere around 3 a.m., my brain opens Facebook Marketplace and starts pricing the furniture. 

I think I could get $409 for this bed if I got good photos.

A body with some miles on it.

 "The old pleasures were gone. They were but memories. Never could we recapture the great moments of the past. There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it. There was always one more attempt—and one more failure."

—Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

I haven’t been inspired to write as of late. I wanted to, but nothing comes out. And there are these things that seem like they could weave into something coherent.

Like, for six days I’ve felt on the edge of my period: breasts ache, body bloated, acne, moody-bitchy-no-good-foul-mood, yet... nothing.

And I am flipping through my notes. Yes, because if I don’t write it down, I might forget it. Yes, I can live it, feel it in my body, it can hijack my life for almost half a month, but as the moon spins, I am stupid again. So, to the notes!

Maybe it’s diet, medication, stress. Or even just an off month, schedules off, summer heat. God knows it might even be my brain. You know what I’m talking about, like when your brain makes you sick by thinking about being sick.

But it could be menopause.

And I really need to take a step back and tell you vital context. I have never really feared growing old or “the change,” as women older and obviously less progressive than I called it when I was young.

At most, there was a brief time when I felt the need to decide if I was or was not going to have kids.

And in 2016, when I was 28, I went almost mad and actually was thinking I might. It lasted two months.

But I had so many other things to take care of and do, and it was on the back burner until finally I didn’t. I probably did not want kids.

After all, I put everything else in front of it.

A decade later, I decided I had feelings about it, complex feelings, but ultimately love my life as is.

So the idea of menopause and aging and not having kids doesn’t scare me.

I’m not even sure if scared is the right word. When I was 10, I used to put socks balled up under my shirt and pretend they were boobs. By 12, I had some and was excited, but then at 14, they were too big, too floppy, too cumbersome, and the outfits I could comfortably wear in public dwindled.

Repeat this with everything puberty. Period, excited, then it’s too much. Armpit hair, excited, then it is too much.

Till it more or less evened out and my body morphed slowly. Like erosion, like hair growing, so stealth and soft and quiet in the background, like gaining five pounds. It just happens.

It’s been gradual. I am a fish still in the bag, my temperature adjusting.

And now, what if it’s all wonky again? I will have to learn how to live and feel best in a new body again. Like an alien, I wake up—yet again in my short life—to find all the physical rules of my existence different. We were playing Uno, but now it’s poker—go fish!

And a woman I’ve never met in my life and probably won’t commented five years ago about over-the-counter progesterone cream, and now, six days into the sneaky little menses-who-cried-wolf no-show, I’m rubbing this hormone cream on my tits.

I guess this is what happens to women when all the crones are just shit-posting AI fake news on Facebook. If I had a daughter, I hope I would let her into everything I’m feeling and thinking right now.

She shouldn’t be flying into it blind.

Yes, all those women in my life, older women, elderly women, all those women, and I heard plenty of fear about menopause and so little of what it was actually like.

P.S. Tonight I microwaved nacho cheese in a “29 and holding” mug I thought was so funny and ironic when Mom gave it to me when I was 25.

URGENT!

What do they say? When it rains, it pours?

Pours out the ass?

I suppose you could say I have a lot going on right now. Earlier, I was squirting diarrhea into the toilet, but thanks to the miracles technology has bestowed upon us, that didn't stop me from still being that work-from-home diva, muted on the call, of course, hearing all about the end of fiscal year.

Let's have a meeting about how busy we are. Then let's schedule a follow-up meeting about that meeting.

And while I could mute myself for the call, I couldn't mute my ass. Or the stench. Or the rest of the chaos unfolding around me.

Like the Guatemalan man who had cut a two-foot-by-two-foot square in the ceiling of my guest room.

See, impeccable timing.

It rained hard last night, and there was water on the guest room bed: A leak.

Which is great because, you know, our house is on the market, and we were less than twenty-four hours away from a showing.

So we panicked.

We ran around.

We called numbers.

I say we, but I really just mean my husband.

Hence, the Guatemalan men in my attic, cutting holes in my ceiling and probably wondering what the fuck is wrong with the little white girl who disappears into the bathroom every thirty minutes while someone on speakerphone keeps shouting, "END OF FISCAL YEAR."

As if, between the drywall and insulation, they also worry about fiscal years.

Alas, the stupid leak might be fixed.

At least fixed enough for the showing.

So there I was, chewing an anti-diarrheal while inviting in a snooty-looking blonde, a decade younger than me, and her realtor, who spent a grand total of five minutes in my house—not even bothering to look at the bedroom we'd rushed to save—before deciding it wasn't for her and walking right back out.

Fiscal year. Leak. House showing.

Every little emergency arrived on the same day.

And somehow...

it all got done...As if none of it was urgent after all.

But my ass soup?

That Hershey squirt?

That's eternal.

Summer Solstice 2026

Awaken, child, for I know thee. I know your heart and the fears it harbors and the hopes it dares not name.

Summer Solstice was yesterday, and with so little night, so little dark, my subconscious wreaked havoc. Dreams on dreams, layers of dreams. Not fun dreams, surreal and whimsical adventures in which the boundaries and physics of life are drawn out to their elastic limit. Not even nightmares. It was as if my mind handed me all my fears on a silver platter. One night only. Tonight's chef's special.

While, now, hours after waking, I cannot recall every little bit, I will disclose the few I do remember, for they weigh heavy on me, like a recovered repressed memory that really would have been better to stay put in the trenches.

Like I am in the audience of a comedy show with some guy. Who is he? Random dream guy. As often is the case, a placeholder for any guy. For whatever reason, I am lying on my belly, and someone points out that I am bleeding through my pants. There is blood on my ass. So, of course, I go to the bathroom, which has a steeply sloped floor and weird automatic soap dispensers that are broken. Of course they are broken, and plastic tubes, like life support, are spurting slick soap onto the floor—heavily fragranced, chemical-sludged, colored goo. And I struggle to get to the bottom of the slope where the toilet resides. I struggle to get back to the top of the sloped floor, back to the door.

Sweet child, you have hidden from your own blood as though I had not woven it into you.

I return to my seat, which has now appeared (good and gracious Lord, thank you. I no longer lie on the floor on my belly; I sit in a chair!). But every male in the audience is in some state of undress. Some fully naked, tiny little micro dicks, shaved and on display, big fat guts hanging over swollen, red, angry testicles. Some are in boxers or briefs or undershirts. My male companion—the Any Guy U.S.A.—is in a wife-beater and boxers, just like my husband wears to bed.

I ask him what is up. And the only response was that the comedian on stage said it would be funny for all the guys to get naked, and it wouldn't be weird if they all did.

Beloved, how strange that you should stand clothed among the naked and still believe yourself exposed.

Next dream: I am standing in a pool that only comes to my waist, yet everyone else is under the water, swimming beneath the surface, close to me. Close to my legs, as if they are sneaking a peek. I think they are all men, but I'm unsure. At least all the bodies I can see swimming under the water are male and buff. Like bodybuilder buff, swimming so close to me. And all I can think about is my pubic hair probably peeking out the edge of my swimsuit, and that they are probably only under the water to gawk at the shame of what had naturally grown out of my body. The cursedness of womanhood that sprouted when I quit being just a little girl.

Daughter, you have mistaken becoming visible for becoming unsafe.

For some reason, my husband (not indescript Any Guy, my actual current husband) and I are staying with my friend Kim. And for some reason, he needs to get up before me, so he has requested that Kim wake him up, even though I am sleeping next to him. So she tiptoes into the room and wakes him up, and I just lie there, silent and still, but also awake and aware. And jealous and outraged and hurt. He has picked her over me. They tiptoe out of the room, and I spend much of the dream searching for them. I find her, and she says it's nothing, he just needed to be woken up. But I could have done it! Why, oh why, did he ask her?

Precious, every door you feared would close behind you has always opened toward me.

Naturally, with dream logic, we leap to the next scene, in which I am moving in for a year with a couple because this has led to my husband and me taking a year-long break from living together (this is what happens when you have someone other than your wife or your alarm clock wake you up). Naturally, my husband is helping me move in. Did I mention the woman of the couple is pregnant? Not a little pregnant—hugely pregnant, might pop out a kid any moment.

My husband and her husband are trying to unpack my stuff, but she and I are trying to stop them. You can't just throw my stuff in with theirs! We need a system. We need organization. She and I plead with the men. Get some decorum! For we both know I will move out in a year, so even as we are moving in, we are planning the moving out. We need to have a system in place to distinguish whose stuff is whose, to make it easier when, in 365 days, everything we are doing right now falls apart.

Rest now, little soul. I have watched you bleed, hide, compare, divide your home, and prepare your leaving before your arriving. Sleep.
 Even morning arrives without rehearsing itself.

Unfinished Business

Last night, my husband, lying in bed, turned to me and said,

 "God is keeping us here in Alabama a little longer for a reason.

 I just don't know what it is yet."

See, this is one of the things that first attracted me to him:

his spirituality,

his faith in the universe,

his belief in magic.

Not metaphorical magic.

Actual magic.

In our first month of dating,

we each slept with a crystal we'd chosen,

then gifted it to the other.

It was his idea.

The clear quartz point he gave me

still sits on my altar.

The raw amethyst chunk I gave him

still rests on his smoke stand.

So when my husband, lying in bed, turned to me and said,

 "God is keeping us here in Alabama a little longer for a reason.

I just don't know what it is yet."

I took it seriously.

I pictured psychic chains

tethering a ghost to a place

until it resolved

the unresolved business of its life.

And today I looked around

this place with renewed eyes,

searching for the soul contract

we made with this land—

the land we are so desperate to leave.

Do we need

to unite our home,

to end the feline civil war

that demands we keep one cat away from another?

Should we harvest and can

the tomatoes this summer,

so they'll sustain us

through the Hoosier winter?

Perhaps it's the neighbor

who waves goodbye each morning.

I gave him zucchini from the garden

and cookies I'd baked.

We still harbor resentment.

Or perhaps it's the leaky bathroom faucet

we still haven't fixed,

though the replacement parts sit,

silent and accusing,

on the floor.

Or maybe it's nothing.

Maybe we're falling into

the oldest human trap:

constructing

the illusion of control,

like OCD—

believing that locking

and unlocking the door

three times

can save you.

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.

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.