lie no. 24 | 08.19.19
By the time Florence cut her swath through the flood plains of eastern North Carolina, I’d been thinking a lot about my sense of place, or, rather, my utter lack of one.
Ever want to make me uncomfortable? Ask me where I’m from at a cocktail party. The answer isn’t complicated. It’s fairly straightforward, at least geographically speaking: Atlanta and Charlotte. And yet, for most of my life, I’m learning, I’ve focused so hard on the future—the present merely the vehicle to get me there—to the point of losing my sense of the past. So when I’m asked about the past, even the most basic of pleasantries around where it took place, I panic. It’s like taking a pop quiz and being unable shake the fear of failing, of getting it wrong, despite holding the answer key.
Can a person know who they are if they don’t acknowledge where they’ve been, where they’re from? The storm forced me to face this from the time it formed as a tropical wave off the western coast of Africa to well after it made landfall on the eastern coast of North America. My problem wasn’t a lack of connection to the physical places of my childhood, at least not directly. My problem was a lack of connection to the past, to the repositories of memories I’d left behind with each place.
I started questioning myself on the drive to North Carolina about what suddenly felt like an incredibly impulsive and poorly thought-through decision. This wasn’t my hometown. Who did I think I was? Did anyone even want my help? No one had asked for it. What was I trying to prove? I could count on one hand, with fingers to spare, the people I knew on the island. I didn’t know the first thing about post-disaster relief efforts. I certainly didn’t expect how hard it would be, how much work would go into even finding ways to help.
By the time I got to the house and unloaded the car my lack of a plan became even more glaring. I’d been running on adrenaline to that point and really needed some rest, but I had to keep moving. I was so afraid to get comfortable, to sit down and turn on the TV, when I got to the empty beach house that day. It reminded me of the first few months of working for myself, doubting every step, desperate to prove someone or thing wrong. To sit on the couch and turn on the television felt like absolute failure. It’s funny the extents we go to avoid failures perceived by no one but ourselves.
Instead, I hopped on a bike and went to survey damage at friends’ homes around the island. That felt useful—until I ran out of homes and dunes and people who cared, with no choice but to pedal back to the house as the sun set.
That night, still refusing to surrender to any semblance of stillness, I wandered around the house, from room to room, as though I was visiting a museum for the first time.
This place was never my home, yet it felt like all I had left—a bridge between what was and what is—for reasons I hadn’t yet begun to understand. Its rooms filled with furnishings from homes past, its halls haunted by memories that used to hang from the empty nails now left behind. I ran my fingers across picture frames and tried to remember what memory used to reside there before this one replaced it.
Upstairs, the chaise lounge on which my grandmother used to sit for hours and read. Outside, the worker’s bench my unfinished doll house sat beside for years, never completed.
The kitchen, an entire standalone gallery in and of itself, housing a vast collection of archival cooking wares, c. 1980-present. The semi-permanent collection, albeit a traveling one, of plates from childhood homes states away from one another. Each pattern telling a different story, each eliciting tastes and smells of different places and faces.
The tour ended in a room just off the kitchen, a room I rarely stepped foot into. I looked around and finally sat down, caving to exhaustion. That’s when I realized it: This was my childhood bed. Had I noticed this, or any of these things, before? I must’ve, right? I let myself lay down, my adrenaline finally hitting empty, as I wrapped my arms around my knees. I ran my fingers along the bed’s frame, my hand instinctively lifting the loose brass tops off the hollow bedposts as I tried to remember which one I used to hide my secrets in as a little girl. I wondered if any of those scraps of paper were still in there. I wondered what they said. Is it possible to stash secrets so well even you forget they ever existed?
I laid there as it got darker outside, the night sky taking with it the last of the light illuminating the room. Five more minutes, I kept telling myself, then I’ll go to my room and get ready for bed.
I woke with a start hours later, not immediately sure where I was or how long I’d been sleeping, as the room’s light flickered on and off. After a couple flicks of indecision, the light stayed on.
I glanced at the clock as I got up to turn the light off. It was early, but not enough to justify going back to bed. I flipped the switch but nothing happened so I did it again. Still on. I tried pulling the cords hanging from the ceiling fan, but still nothing, so I gave up. I chalked it up to the storm, went to get coffee and forgot about it.
I didn’t think about it again until my first morning in San Miguel de Allende, four months later.
At seven on the dot, a light in my hotel room turned on, rendering the blackout shades completely useless. As I got up to turn it off I noticed a piece of paper under the door, a letter from hotel management apologizing for construction noise. Awesome, I thought, just like my hotel in Hong Kong the month before. I kept bragging about finding these amazing deals for really nice hotels (which, of course, is actually to say it’s how I justified my travels to others, always afraid people would think I was frivolous or irresponsible). Apparently my knack wasn’t for finding great rates, it was for finding hotels under construction.
I tried every switch in sight but couldn’t get the light to turn off. I got back in bed anyway. Not a minute later music started playing from the speaker on the nightstand. I’d docked my phone on it to charge overnight. I love me some Stevie Nicks but I did not need ‘Edge of Seventeen’ at full blast at that hour and I was sure my neighbors didn’t either. I scrambled to turn it off as quickly as possible—fully expecting an angry knock on the wall at any moment—a slight challenge considering I wasn’t sure where the song was even coming from. I didn’t have it on my phone and wasn’t sure I’d ever played it on Spotify before, which, it turned out, is where it was coming from.
“OK! I’m up!” I said to no one.
I threw on some clothes and went out in search of the town’s famous lavender latte. I stumbled on the place right away, a line out its door. One of the joys of traveling alone is rarely having to wait to be seated so I gave it a shot. The couple in front of me was told the wait would be more than an hour. I was seated immediately, inexplicably at a four top in a cozy corner on the stone patio, next to a fireplace. I reiterated it was just me, feeling guilty at the idea of taking up an entire table with so many people waiting. The woman smiled and whispered, “esta el mejor lugar en la casa,” as she placed the single menu in her hand on the table. I’ll just eat fast, I decided as I half scanned the menu and half tried to get the waiter’s attention.
“¿Desea ordenar?” the man asked as he filled my water glass. Everyone in San Miguel seemed to speak English, or is an ex-pat, so I appreciated the opportunity to practice my Spanish.
“Pienso que tomaré....” I started to say as I looked down at the menu for a split second to find what I wanted so I could point to it as I said it, apparently not confident he’d understand the words coming out of my mouth. When I looked up he was gone.
This was not my morning. What was his problem? Was I the problem? I shouldn’t have come here—the restaurant or San Miguel. What kind of person sits outside by a fire sipping a lavender latte while a man strums a guitar nearby on a Monday morning?! Who did I think I was? Why couldn’t I be content with the first eight incredible nights I’d already spent in Mexico? What kind of person thinks they deserve more? Probably the kind of person who is so worried about mucking up a simple order in a foreign language, so afraid of making a single mistake and saying something stupid, she uses the menu as a crutch to get something right she hasn’t yet had a chance to get wrong. Just as I got up to leave, the granola bar I should’ve been eating while I worked from my hotel room on my mind, the waiter reappeared.
“Are you ready now?” he asked with a smile, his English perfect, as if nothing about his disappearing act was the slightest bit odd.
“Yes,” I said as I handed him the menu to avoid making the same mistake twice. “I think I’ll have,” I started to say again, exactly as I had before, except this time in English, when his laugh cut me off.
He sat down next to me along the fireplace, not noticing or caring about the AirPods in my ears, the universal sign for leave me alone. Apparently he maxed out at bilingual. He didn’t look much older than me, I noticed all the sudden. The place was still packed, the line out the door only growing the longer I sat there.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” he said, his grin almost winking at me as if we were both in on some inside joke. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this uncomfortable.
“Americans do this all the time,” he said, not noticing, or perhaps caring about, my visible discomfort. “Too much thinking with your head. I thought you needed more time because you didn’t know what you wanted to order yet.”
“Got it,” I said, even though I didn’t. I just wanted some caffeine, food and for this lecture to be over before people started looking. He didn’t move.
“Pensar is something you think with your brain,” he said as he tapped his finger on the temple of my head, my internal rage roaring.
“Creer, on the other hand, is something you think in here,” he said as he, fortunately for his sake, tapped the center of his own chest. “When you believe, you know. When you believe, you’re ready.”
And with that he got up and took my order as quickly as he’d sat down and made himself comfortable, the entire encounter lasting only mere minutes. His words replaying in my head repeatedly after he’d left.
When he returned a few minutes later with my latte, breakfast and check, he asked where I was from.
“Washington, D.C.,” I told him, my earlier discomfort dissipated.
“Cree en ti, D.C.!” he said with a hearty laugh as he walked off. “Te creo!”
I dropped my fork when he said that, suddenly remembering the man on the phone the day before. The voice was different, the message the same.
I left cash on the table along with my untouched breakfast, so glad I’d ordered the latte in a to-go cup. As I walked out of the restaurant, I nearly tripped over myself as the guitarist started to strum a strange yet familiar tune: an acoustic version of ‘Edge of Seventeen.’ This time I hightailed it back to my hotel.