Here I am, in my American home. Between the forest and the sea, I am siting in my local coffee shop, as I always have. Listening to Radiohead, holding back tears. Is this heaven or a dream? Certainly it can’t be real. Time is compressing – the eras smashed into the now, through the taste of my iced coffee and the knot in my throat as I feel like I am 20 and 37 and 48 and also like it is 20 years from now, 40 years from now and I am looking back at it all with a sense of wonder and awe. Did it all really happen? Did I go all the way out to the deep dark, tumultuous unknown and really find my way home? Did I really either lose or destroy everything I ever had and rebuild my life into something I wanted? Did I really heal from it all to be happy, content, and hopeful? Did I finally learn how to love? Did I really do something that I was finally fully proud of? Did I really? Yes, I did.

Here I am, now, in the in-between time, once again, in Northern California in my local coffee shop listening to the mid-morning mid-90s mix that’s been made just for people like me. Once again I am here, in what has become somewhat of an annual ritual, alone this time, to be with my sister, my friend, my self. I am able to both look back and look forward from where I am now, to see how far I’ve come and how far I still can go. I am pleased; I am proud of myself; I am content. I am no longer running from my feelings. I still want to, but I fight the flight reaction, or more so, I accept it. I accept it as a part of me that I don’t have to fight anymore. I don’t have to fight anymore, period. I am done fighting, I am only flowing now. Ok, well not really, but I will tell myself this until it is true. The song that’s on now is some instrumental that I remember in my body, a post-rave English song that was at once melancholy and hopeful, slow and steady, and oh so very London. No idea what it is but maybe it will come to me again, later, unexpectedly.

Here I am once again to take stock, to reflect on how far I’ve come, to process more, and to leave more behind while working to create a future that I love, with those that I love. Taking pleasure in the little things, the tiny pleasures of coffee, sunshine, family treasures, country dirt, noise of the morning cocks and crickets, even the smell of the skunks wafting through the late sunset air, as they take to the streets and reclaim their territory from the domesticated animals of the daytime. I am so grateful for it all as together it makes up the story of my life, of my family, and of my future. Even the fucked up bathroom in the house holds reason to have gratitude, as it represents one real, one big project to be done that can bring the house into the luxury of finished-ness, of modernity. It represents a new future, not of making do but of enjoyment, of feeling worthy of nice things, of ease, of completeness. A pretty little bathroom with a pretty new door and a pretty everything – a little oasis that shows what the house is, a tiny little treasure box in a tiny country town on the north coast of the best state in the United States. It is small and shiny and weird and wonderful. It is our home.