my new year

I observed yesterday my own personal holiday, the one year anniversary of my arrival back in Michigan. One year ago yesterday I arrived in the Detroit Metro Airport at 5:45am, in the old terminal, the dingeiness of which always brought about a sense of nostalgia and a feeling for the beautiful imperfection of home, a feeling I always dismissed, brushing it away for fear that it was the dreaded “Midwestern complacency” in disguise, settling on my shoulders, burdening me with family ties and guilt and responsibility and adulthood.

(Lonesome wanderers, you may as well assume, are not fans of such.)

“I’ll only be here for a little while,” I assured myself. My preparations had assumed as much. I had a few changes of clothes randomly thrown into a suitcase, two pairs of shoes (my favorite boots and my running shoes) and a book for the plane (presciently, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion). I paused in the terminal even though Dad waited for me in the baggage claim, unknowingly savoring this fantasy that my time in Michigan would be short-lived. I ate a muffin from Starbucks. I wandered into the bathroom, rearranged my hair, applied cosmetics, made sure I didn’t appear too bedraggled. Therein lies the magic of airport terminals – forever they provide the rare ability to pause. They create a middle ground betwixt the teary or expectant or rattled departures from and before the grim or hopeful or nerve-wracking reunions with reality.

But eventually it must be met, sometimes in the form of one’s cheerfully affected father, in his orange down coat, hands in pockets, with a “hey, kid, long time no see” look on his tired face. It was 5:45am and he had to go to work in a few hours and I had called him the day before indecipherably sobbing something about “how could he do this to me?” and then later at the San Francisco airport, completely calm, explaining that I would be back that morning before the sun rose. What could he be thinking about me right now? was all I wanted to know, was all I ever, in my previous incarnation, wanted to know about anyone. Is Dad disappointed in me?

“We’ll be fine,” I explained to Dad as we drove home in relative silence save for his relaying to me some rote, chatty neighborhood gossip. ”We just need to work out some issues.”

“You want to get breakfast?”

“Alright.”

After omelettes we came home and the sun was just rising, making the fog only  grayer and denser in its incipient lumination. I wanted a cigarette. I had wanted a cigarette for a month, since I first arrived in San Francisco, even after a whole summer of not smoking at my ex’s behest. I had been fantasizing about that cigarette for days and days. The night that the ex and I enacted the whole breakdown, blowout fight I had been sitting in the back seat of the Land Rover, regarding some poor fool outside the 5am Club smoking, and I wished so hard to not be inside that Armor-all upholstery scented vehicle with its soundtrack of deep-rooted familial bickering in a family that wasn’t even my own and never would be, and instead outside on the sidewalk in the Bay Area mist smoking an American Spirit. With my mother.

Mom was up early now and we joined together in our ritual on the back porch (the ritual we have, in the course of a year, retired for want of need). I can’t remember what I said to her. I’m sure it was stupid. I can’t remember what she said to me. I’m sure it was wise.

A year ago I couldn’t see a thing on that back porch, not through my own and my mother’s curls of smoke and the comfortable fog and the thick wood beyond the marshy back yard and the opaque cloud matter settling in for its winter smothering.

Yesterday we had the strangest weather — inky clouds bashing together and spilling their contents imperiously, followed by intense, winter-clear cold sunlight and spring-like whooshes of wind. I witnessed this from inside the store, remembering for a moment that I had been back for a year, one of those thoughts that comes and goes in the course of a day when most of one’s attention lies focused upon produce codes, cheerful greetings, did you find everything okay, do you need help out with that, old ladies picking through change with wrinkled digits and bright fingernails, babies googling pressing the credit card machine buttons with doughy little fingers, making sure the chicken is wrapped in plastic, the bulk flaxseed is double-bagged, the receipt is signed, change is given and the till is counted down to the last penny.

A year has gone by and I recently stopped thinking of leaving Michigan anytime soon. I thought for all those years that eventually, if I starved myself enough and lived in a beautiful enough place and had the most perfect boyfriend or husband and the best house that I could work my way into the happiness that eluded me.  

A year later, I am curvy and single and I live with my parents. The old me would have died of humiliation, but I wish for her to know : I have never been happier.

It’s been a very good year.