Where we live.

I am sitting in a coffee shop in Bangkok, wearing two masks. There are many things in this city that I would like to do but cannot because of the state of things, the pandemic. I would like to wander through every market and touch every single thing. I would like to hold hands with the babies and kiss them on the cheeks. I would like to time travel to when I was first here and see Chinua and I and our young children walking these streets without a flicker of awareness of our proximity to others.

What a world it was. 

But I am treasure hunting for beautiful moments, and they are everywhere. The canal beside me at breakfast. A little gecko friend. The taxi driver who told me that back when they had their big pandemic wave in Bangkok, many of his friends had gotten sick. One friend died. I told him I was very sorry to hear it. He pointed at an empty massage place with a “for rent” sign in the window and told me, “You should come here and open a beer bar for people who come through the airport.”

As tempting as that was, I told him I must decline.

There hasn’t been terrible news from home. Leafy texted me today to ask if I could send him the pickle recipe I gave him the other day. He made refrigerator pickles with cucumbers and dill from our garden and now he wants to make them all the time. I don’t blame him. Pickles are delicious. 

Solomon once wrote a song about pickles, or maybe a pickle, singular, called Pickle on the Fritz.

(That’s just a bit of trivia for you.)

Chinua has been away, as you know, helping Kai get settled and visiting family. It’s been eight weeks, and tomorrow (tomorrow!) I’m going to join him in Phuket. This is the most clever way to be together that we have ever come up with. Over twenty years ago, on the Andaman islands, Chinua proposed while we sat on the sand under a moon with a halo around it. We dreamed of coming back to the beaches by ourselves one day, since we were with about 40 other people at a Rainbow Gathering. Then we sort of missed our honeymoon and since then, have never been away together for more than two nights. So we have been talking and wondering about this honeymoon for twenty years.

And now! Chinua has to do a seven-day sandbox quarantine to get back into the country and since he has to be there anyway, I have decided to join him. It’s like a mandated honeymoon. It’s brilliant and wonderful and slightly terrifying (my personality doesn’t often allow for simple, outright joy without a few extra emotions thrown in). I’m over the moon, to be honest. Ro and Neil are staying with our kids to make it possible. I texted our dentist that my friend was going to drive the kids in (three hours from our home) for their appointment instead of me and she responded with “She is a very good friend.”

I agree. One thousand percent, though my eighth-grade math teacher would scoff at that. It’s not possible to have over a hundred percent, he would say. But he doesn’t know Rowan.

In other news, the time that Chinua was away was a cluster of many things. It was beautiful in some ways. The kids and I snugged in and made it beautiful and warm. (Warm is a figurative word, temperature-wise it was actually very hot.) And then I had times where my mood plummeted and anxiety rose. I tried to ride through it all, writing and talking when I needed to. We helped to facilitate a memorial for a friend who died by suicide. We lost another friend swiftly to sickness, the father of a good friend of ours. The virus came to our town. Things were beautiful. Things were hard. And I wasn’t getting much thinking time.

But I was thinking about the swift, transient nature of the job of raising children. And feeling a lot of loss over the goodbyes of the last years. No surprise there, my oldest son has moved away and I have three other teenagers making their way through this decade, so it is my season, now, as surprising as that is to me. (You remember, right? Five minutes ago they were six and under and we were traveling on trains in India?) At the worst times, having these thoughts, I get into a sort of morbid tunnel vision where the sides of the tunnel are plastered with my mistakes and things I wish I had done differently. Or maybe they are plastered with the good times and we are moving too swiftly in those orange tunnel lights for me to see the things properly and I feel as though I was never there at all. Did I pay enough attention? Was I grateful enough?

Living in the past is actually kind of impossible. The limitations of our memory make the past full of our own failings or full of glorious moments stretched all out of context. We cannot make our home in the past, we cannot settle into it, we cannot make space in it. It can live in us but we can’t live in it. Both Kenya and I have a proclivity for a kind of tormented nostalgia that can make us cry. It’s okay at moments, but at others, we both need to know that we are allowed to have today. Just today.

I am here and I am here today. I have this generous renewable gift. I get to be here, with my multiple masks on, soy green tea latte in my belly, the age and shape and woman I am exactly today, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. I have the treasures of this day, the way God works today. And I do have all those years behind me. They live inside me and in my kids and my husband and my loved ones. Nothing can take them away, they are like lights and jewels in my heart. They are treasured. But I can’t live there.

I live today, in today’s breath and work and noticing and art. No matter how much I have tried to earn each day, they have never been earned by my hands. God stands before and behind me, outside of time and meeting me within it. Today.

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