During my twenties, I was broke. I remember the payday loans with the outrageous interest. There was so much ramen. Filling the gas tank with like five dollars at a time. Phone getting cut off. No health insurance for years and rare visits to the doctor. I had to get a CAT scan once, I can’t even remember why, and it took me years to pay off. I didn’t go to the dentist for years. This is not a sad story because I am lucky. This is just life, and frankly, I’ve had it easy in terms of material comfort. I am privileged. I always have been. I had a safety net because my parents would never have let me starve or be homeless, but I was on my own, as an adult should be, and I was often very, very broke. I was writing and no one was interested in that writing. I know, now, that I was putting in the work. I still am, of course, but back then I was just beginning to figure out how to use my voice in both fiction and nonfiction. I had a lot to learn and so I wrote and wrote and wrote and read and read and read and I hoped. I was going to school and then working and getting better and better jobs and then more school, and I was becoming a better writer and, very slowly, a better person. I became less broke, and then I was fine, not making that much but making enough money to always be able to handle my business. Twice in the past nine years I have moved and moving is expensive, but I could afford it. The last time I stood in my empty apartment before heading out, I sobbed. That is not something I am prone to doing. I allowed myself to feel everything. I allowed myself to acknowledge how far I have come. This isn’t bragging. This is an atlas.
During my twenties, my personal life was the hottest mess. The hottest. It will never be that messy again because I’ve grown up and I finally give enough of a damn about myself to avoid burning myself in that kind of fire. I’m still a mess, but I’m a different kind of mess now. I can generally identify what the mess is and where it’s coming from. I am learning to ask for help, slowly. I am learning a lot of things.
My eyes are wide open. They are prepared for whatever they might see.
I try to keep all this feeling in a safe place, a neatly contained place, because that is where it will always have to stay. And then there is the intensity of want. Raw urges. Engulfing. Crushing. Tenderness and fierceness, both. Possession. The container is a lie. The container has been shattered. Someone has found the way to my warm. They have taken my atlas into their hands. They trace the wildly arcing lines from beginning to end.