“Did you graduaaattteee today?”
I was washing my hands in the tall sink when she said it so sweetly, emphasis on “graduate.” An older woman, styled white hair, gold cross, nice clothes. I said “Graduate?” She followed up with “Oh the whole restaurant seems full of grads, so I just assumed.” I said “…I’m 31.” Her face looked kind of surprised and it made me feel good to say something so impactful. “You have such a baby face! I hope you’re not offended…you really do have such a young face…”

This was the assortment of words we exchanged, in mostly the right order. I left the women’s restroom feeling so high. Sometimes 31-years-old feels like so much. So much time spent alive, but I feel like I’ve only been living for a short time of it. If the world sees me as younger then maybe I don’t have to feel like chunks of my life so far have gone unlived. It makes sense in my head.

Eugene took me to get oysters. Eugene is the part of my life that makes me feel the most alive so far. Every year I feel like more of a person. Eugene has always been a person. Even when he was little he was a person. He seems to remember all of his life as something he has been a part of and not something he was just there for.

Maybe oysters and hard cheese and Irish coffee and tuna tartare are not all foods that go together. Because it is 3 am and my tummy hurts.

Move to Seattle. It’s still the 1970’s in Seattle. Not everywhere. Nowhere shiny and Amazon and condos with skinny grey doors. If you can fit yourself into people’s lives you’ll find the 70’s. They drink tea made with tea balls in teapots. Light incense that coats the walls with sticky smokey sex. There is an altar in the hallway full of tiny hard plastic animals and seashells, they are praying to a God we don’t know. No one has to shave or wear ironed clothes. The neighbors next door are having a drum circle. Withering long plants in the livingroom are wearing macrame funeral clothes and the cacti are in cracked painted pots. The co-op has the spirit of the 1970’s, but the sprouts are overpriced.

My grandmother has always been the person who was simultaneously the most gentle, and the most firm with me. Much like my mother she has always been what you could call…a difficult person. The both of them are difficult in different ways though. Before the dementia, Nana was the stabilizing force in my family. Things were always to be done her way, and if they weren’t, they usually ended up done her way anyway. She wasn’t relenting, and she wasn’t one to give someone what they wanted over what they needed. My family is a motley crew of entirely well-meaning individuals that all happen to believe they are the center of the universe. Nana’s energy was sorely needed for that bunch.

A scene from my very early childhood plays on the television screen in my head fairly often. Even before my mother, brother, and I moved in with my grandparents, they never lived more than 10 minutes away. They came over almost every night of the week. One night I became distraught as my grandparents left our apartment to go back to their house. I remember pressing myself against our living room window, howling for my grandmother as she got in the car with my grandfather to leave. I can’t recall if my cries were what brought her back upstairs to me, or if one of my parents went down and fetched her. There are nights I just want to scream and press myself against a window until nana comes and comforts me. I miss my grandmother. I miss her from before the dementia. I miss her from when the dementia was a minor hindrance. I miss her as she is now, even though the dementia has so far removed her from the woman I knew as a child. I know scenes like the one I just described happened fairly often in my childhood, I wouldn’t be surprised if my mind has compressed many of them into this one scene.

I binge watched the first season of Shameless tonight. Say what you will about the show, it did an excellent job of portraying the different kinds of mothers you can have. This train of thought brought me to writing this post. In one scene, Sheila screams at Eddie for humiliating their daughter Karen at a “Purity Ball.” Sheila yells, “She’s a human being! She deserves love, not hate!” I don’t know, I fucking lost it watching that. It brought up a lot of feelings about my teenaged years, and my relationships with my mother and grandmother. Now I’m sitting down at my computer, hurting my own feelings at 2:53 am.

My brain on quarantine is a lot like my brain not on quarantine. I just have more time than I usually do to think about my life and cry.

Everything feels different, and at the same time, everything feels the same.

Years ago, I remember crouching down on my floor attempting to start yet another diary. This was back when we had just moved in with my grandparents, before the dementia, before my mother had to take care of everything in a way she wasn’t really prepared to and still really isn’t. I had the window open, and spring was unraveling itself. That smell of damp fertile earth crawling through the window on the back of a frosty breeze. I have cried stupid hollow tears over so many diaries. Self-pitying tears. I can’t say they weren’t warranted considering how sad and stupid my life has been at times. Spring has always been a sort of delayed New Year’s for me. Springs feels like the season in which the year actually wakes up. January has always sort of felt like the year is hitting the snooze button and we are insisting on dragging it out of bed anyway.

I vividly remember this moment, even though I can’t precisely tell you what year it was, or how old I was, or what I was attempting to write. I just remember the smell of spring in my room. That this was early enough in our move that I lived in an unruly mess of my childhood belongings. There were three television sets in my room, each one about as old as I was. I lived in a shrine to each home I had before the one I had moved into. Something about sitting in a crumpled heap on the floor of my hoarded bedroom, feeling the change of seasons announce its presence as clearly as it ever had, sticks with me to this day.

I’m 27 years old now. Most days I feel more like myself than I ever have. Some days I still feel like the frightened teenager I was, desperate to crawl out of my skin, even though I didn’t particularly want lodging in any other skin in particular. I’m living the happiest time of my life, so far, in the midst of a pandemic. I don’t know what to make of this time. I know it’ll be something wild to look back at one day.