It was springtime in Oxford and the cherry blossoms were blooming and there was something not quite right. This was supposed to be the buoyant time of year, but I kept waking up in the hot blue depths of the pre-dawn with no breath, my heart beating too fast. I remembered feeling like this once or twice before, or maybe it was more than that: I remembered feeling like this for weeks at a time, but I thought I had put all that behind me. So now I thought: am I dying? Well, maybe. But also maybe I have felt this way before and asked myself the same question, needlessly, and been okay, so maybe I will also be okay this time too. But then I thought: well, perhaps this time is different. I thought that perhaps in the morning, if I was not dead, I should make an appointment with the doctor. All those vertiginous nights and I had learned nothing! But in the end I never made an appointment with the doctor, not about that, anyway, and I kept waking up, which was, I eventually decided, a good sign.

When I began to examine my situation, I realised that at the heart of it was this: I could not decide anything, but I was running out of time. I was both very young and very old simultaneously: maybe the tightness in my chest was simply the weight, the vice-grip of missed opportunity. But also I looked around and everyone was older than me. My friends were all older than me. My boyfriend was older than me. We kept talking abstractly but also very seriously about babies, each of us trying to impart some sense of urgency to the other whilst also, at the same time, trying to make light of the situation, to stop the progress in case we had misunderstood each other. He was five years older than me: that was a lifetime, it was nothing. I was still young, to have children, but he was old, even though he was young too. I kept thinking about it this way: as if age somehow mattered.

Only of course it did matter. Age had always mattered. I had always been younger; I had been propelled forward, skipped a grade, left to flounder with my patchy understanding of long division and joined-up writing, encouraged to consider myself intellectually precocious even while I struggled with basic social interactions. But now I was reading articles in the newspaper about how fragile fertility really was, which did not help things, because I was already worried, again needlessly, again powerfully, about fertility. I wanted to go to the doctor and ask, but I did not know how to, and I did not want to have a conversation about how young I was, how much time I had left, because I was not young! I had so little time left!

***

His grandfather kept asking why we were not yet married. It had been four years and I suppose it was not an unreasonable question. We asked ourselves the same thing, too, and I could never find a satisfactory answer except that we weren’t. It was very simple, really. We had lived together from the start and there had never been any doubt about the seriousness of our situation, of our strange devotion, and yet even when we did talk about getting married we talked about it as very young people are apt to do: as a thing for the future. And yet here we were four years later, the future was upon us! So we simply hadn’t caught up with ourselves. But it was hard to say this to a 90-year old man who wanted to see his first grandson married. You see? Age did matter after all.

***

But the real issue was that I could not decide anything. For instance I could not decide if I wanted to commit to children. I mean, I did, really. I thought about my own parents, who had not the benefit, as we ourselves had, of all this time and youth. My mother was 36 when she had me, but this was not, I had begun to realize, really the conscious decision I had always imagined it to be: it was not necessarily about feminism, or about putting a career first, or even about indecision. It was on the other hand at least partly to do with the fact that she simply had not met my father sooner, and so had not the same luxury of time that we, theoretically, had.

But then again I thought about how little I had done so far and how much I did not want to feel useless. I thought about how unprepared we really were. Neither of us had any money to speak of or any prospect of earning very much money ever. We did not own a house and although we had a very understanding landlord in Ireland who did not charge us very much to live in a beautiful terraced house with a big garden in East Oxford down the road from our favourite pub we had very little stability, because while this arrangement might last forever, or at least for a long time, it might also not, and if it did not, I couldn’t see what we’d do. We’d been utterly ruined by living in this beautiful house and I did not know where else in Oxford we could go and be happy as we were happy in this place, at home as we were at home here at home.

But then perhaps it would not matter: we had always said, for instance, how we wanted to move to the US at some point. I couldn’t even decide about this, now: I was so happy in Oxford (even when I was desperately unhappy), I had such a sense of community (even when I felt lonely), I rode my bicycle through the city centre every single day and every single day I was overcome with this sensation that I belonged here: or at least, that I wanted to belong here. The beauty had not gotten old and familiarity had not ruined the novelty of finding myself here, of all places. So where else would we go, and why would we go there? But at the same time we liked the idea of being the sort of people who could get up and go, who could raise children in two countries, or three. And he was deliberately setting up a portable life: a career that allowed for flexibility.

***

This was another problem: careers. I had none. I did have a job, where I spent eight or nine hours every day, with people I liked very much, performing tasks I mostly had no passion for. But anyway a job is not a career, and the real problem is that I could not do the things I really wanted to do. I could not write, much, because I had no time and no energy and then whenever I did write it came out all jumbled and depressed, or else I worked on a novel that I could not decide what I felt about. In some ways I thought it was very good but there were also ways I suspected it was very bad, and I was afraid of finding out which bits were which, in case I had to confront the fact that I would have to do something very seriously different with it to make it readable. And of course I knew that even if it was readable, it wouldn’t necessarily be what I wanted it to be, and even if it was what I wanted it to be, it wouldn’t necessarily be published, let alone read. So it seemed a bit of a dead-end, or at least, not the best way to spend what precious time I had to myself.

***

With the rest of my hours I slept and swam. And I thought about how I wanted not to have to swim every evening with the rest of the weary workers: all of us slogging through our days, slapping our arms against the water, mouths moving open like fish lips as we rolled our heads to the side to receive air. I wanted to swim at midday, maybe. Or midmorning. Or mid-anything. Just anytime that was the time I chose and not the time that had been given to me.

So then I thought that if I felt that way about my time, perhaps children were not right, because the thing I knew, one of the very few things I knew, about children was that when you had them you had no control anymore over your time. You would be awoken again and again in the night and then for twenty years you would give yourself to something else. But then I thought that this was just what I needed: a real reason to not be selfish, not a fake reason, not a salary or a fear.

***

There were certain things I did know. I knew that I was in a holding pattern, I knew that something would have to give or be given, and soon. I knew, too, that in the end we would be alright, that it did not matter if we did not have a house or even if we were not married, and that since we did after all love each other there was no real reason to think that we would not find a way to support a family if we wanted to. I knew also that I did not want to raise a family on unhappiness, and the situation I had got myself into was an unhappy one, because it was not one in which I was doing something I wanted to do. I knew that I had to write something. I knew that I had to keep swimming, because it was the first thing I had found in a long time that gave me the peace of mind they say exercise is supposed to give you. I used run, but the problem with running was the impact: I got a bad knee from it (this was why I had started swimming in the first place), my side often hurt and I would have to cut the run short (later the doctor told me that this was because of my hip and too many years of running on hard surfaces). I had liked running, and I still liked it, but not in the same way. It left me tired, which is a good feeling to have but not always as good as feeling simply buoyant. I guess perhaps it was just that the act of floating seemed a small miracle. My own mother could not swim, and yet I had been given the ability to, I had had lessons and an upbringing by the beach. And my grandmother, now in her 80s, had been swimming practically her whole life and still did it regularly.

I even knew that all my obsessive worry was irrational, and that I was waking up in the middle of the night for nothing, and that I was very lucky in very many ways, and that I was thinking too hard about too many things that were too far in the future for me to have any control over. But even so I kept worrying and I kept waking up.

***

My thinking was very circular. I would think for a time – any time, in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, halfway through a meeting, staring at a slide being projected onto the wall or at my desk looking out at the tennis courts and watching a pair of white-haired men send the ball back and forth on the grass courts. And then I would reach the place I had started: a question, a series of questions. I would find myself unable to understand if I knew what I wanted or only knew what I thought I wanted (or were these the same thing?), if I was able to move forward or not. So I would keep staring out the window. And meanwhile, all the while, time was passing me by, or I was moving with it, or anyway I was getting older, if imperceptibly.

Perhaps this is what they mean by growing up: the awareness not of mortality – nothing so grand – but simply of each moment. The ability to literally feel the length of a second or an hour, and to place that second or that hour in context, to know how much it means. But in any case I did not really want to be grown up: I only wanted to sleep through the night, I only wanted to find it not such an effort to smile at people or even at myself in the mirror. I wanted to cut my hair short, even though I worried I never would, in the same way I wanted to say, ‘I want to start a family now, because why not?’ even though I knew I would not say that, yet. I worried what would happen but also wanted to know what would happen if I did do these sorts of things.

I told myself that in a way, once before, I had done something like this: I had simply moved to Oxford, which went against logic, which was not the easy or even necessarily possible thing to do, and yet I had done it and it had been easy and we had made it possible. And it was the best thing I had done, it was one of the only things I could not convince myself, if I tried, to regret: no amount of convincing would make even my wretched anxious self think that that had been at all a bad idea, even if it had not always been good, even if I had not always been smart about it, even if we had struggled.

So I thought I should be comforted by that.

❧

I’m having a patchwork summer. Mostly I work, and then occasionally something else happens, and the months are like this weirdly pieced-together quilt of something elses. In a way I like looking at my life like that. Don’t you ever think how funny your life is? But really it’s only funny because you’re looking at the funny bits.

So I had this idea, to put together a story (a story? well, a string of stories, I guess) made up entirely of those funny moments, you know, when you think, isn’t my life funny? Isn’t it weird? I think if you put them all together, with nothing else in between, no matter who you are, you’d have something like a Wes Anderson film, one of those films where you sit there thinking, this is so cool and hip and everything but really, whose life is like this? Not that it matters – it’s a film, it isn’t promising to accurately reflect the way people’s lives really are, that’s the whole point – but you think, it’s just so quirky, it’s too quirky to even have a basis in reality.

But actually, if you stuck all those moments of your own life together and pretended that they happened very close together, and left out all the mundanity in between, you might be left with something that looked as quirky as Rushmore. I guess I don’t really mean mundanity; often these weird moments are very mundane. I guess I mean it’s all about how you frame things. I guess I mean I’m having a funny summer; I’m feeling very old, very young, I’m having visceral dreams about having children, I’m talking about buying a dog or buying a house, but I haven’t come very far from where I was not that long ago when I couldn’t even talk about buying a bag of groceries without bursting into tears. Or at least, maybe financially I’ve come far, but time-wise I haven’t. I’m still young. I keep thinking I’ll always feel young, and at the same time I think I feel so old compared to how I felt when I moved here.

***

One hot night we sit outside at Freud’s. I haven’t been here in years. That’s a lie, I was here two weeks ago with my parents, we sat outside in the daytime because I’d taken the day off work and it was sunny. I had a latté and sweated in my metal chair. But before that I hadn’t been here for a long time. The first time I came here was with Xander; we sat inside (it was summer, it was probably raining), we had just met, we were getting to know each other and he was telling me about how he’d used to work here and I was too busy staring up at the ceilings to care, and a drunk man fell over our feet and asked if we’d just met, had we, in fact, met here, tonight, and laughed. No, we said, we hadn’t just met, not tonight, acting as if we’d known each other forever (we’d known each other a week, I guess it felt a bit like forever, we’d hardly slept and I was jetlagged and confused about what it was I was meant to be doing with myself) because it was embarrassing, I guess, that someone who couldn’t even walk straight could see that we’d only just met. We were at that awkward stage of intimacy where it’s uncomfortable to reflect on how quickly someone can come to mean something but equally uncomfortable to try to pretend that it hasn’t happened. And anyway I do feel a little like someone pressed the fast forward button on our relationship and we went from not knowing each other to living together in about a fortnight (probably because we actually went from not knowing each other to living together in about a fortnight).

But anyway, this year, this summer, hot and not raining, we sit outside at Freud’s and a parade of drunks go past, falling up and down the big stone steps. Later, after the bar shuts, we call an ambulance for the man who’s fallen over near the Co-Op into a pool of his own sick. He’s a doctor, we eventually find out; he’s getting married in two weeks. He keeps telling us this as if it will help him find his way home, or help him understand how he came to be precisely here, in precisely this way, on precisely this evening in June. But no one wants to claim him and we don’t know what else to do except to involve someone else, some higher authority, someone with badges and access to lifesaving apparatuses.

The ambulance arrives and he doesn’t move, except to compliment our friend’s sneakers and then be sick on them. Then the police arrive and he lurches upright and goes a few steps down the street and falls into someone’s walkway, and there he lies. The policemen – there are two of them – just stand there. I lean against the wall. I listen to the policemen talk to the ambulance driver. “Waste of time”, seems to be the consensus, but then, here they are anyway, wasting time at one in the morning. After awhile the man is still lying on someone’s walkway and the younger policeman discovers a discarded sausage on the pavement. So he puts the sausage into the drunk man’s back pocket. “Ha!” he says. “He’s got a sausage in his pocket.” He nudges his partner in the ribs. He looks straight at me: this is our joke, apparently. “He’s got a sausage!” he says. “In! His! Pocket!”

After awhile the policemen give up and go home, or back to the station, or wherever they go when they’re done wasting time in one place and want to waste it in another, and the drunk man gets up and remembers where he lives and we call him a cab and he calmly removes the sausage from his pocket and leaves it on the street and tells me again he’s getting married in two weeks.

***

Before that, we’re in Wales. We get back from a party and have a glass of red wine and some cheese before bed and everything is happy until we get int a fight because I find him standing in the bathroom finally reading an A.A. Gill essay about fatherhood. I think I actually say that – “finally!” – even though I only told him to read it earlier that day, and I only told him to read it because it made me cry, which is, if we’re honest, not always the best recommendation (“oh hey, this book made me bawl my eyes out and doubt everything, wanna read it?”). The argument starts with me saying “why are you reading it here?” and then I suppose becomes about something else, something quite different and bigger and not at all to do with reading A.A. Gill whilst standing in someone else’s bathroom in Wales but really, in the end, it’s just about that. And somewhere between that moment and the morning, quite unconsciously, we make up and wake up snuggled quite close, or as close as you can be snuggled while sleeping on two twin beds which have been pushed together to form a faux-grownup-sized bed, and the A.A. Gill book is still in the bathroom and he still hasn’t read the whole fucking essay.

Later in the week he reads the whole essay and agrees, it was very good. But the fact remains that we had a fight because I found him reading a book in someone else’s bathroom. And I promise you this: when I moved here, when I graduated from college or high school or 8th fucking grade, I did not imagine that I would have a boyfriend who read A.A. Gill standing up in the low-ceilinged bathroom of a Welsh cottage or that I would listen to a policeman laugh because he’d put a sausage in a drunk man’s pocket.

❧

It’s Doctor Who season again. I don’t even know why I like Doctor Who. I never know why I like television shows. My taste is arbitrary and often deliberately contrary: I say I like both The Wire and Gossip Girl but I’m never sure if what I really like is simply the juxtaposition, if what I really want to do is simply confuse people into thinking I’m more interesting than I am (if you look closely, this post is really all about me trying to appear a certain way).

Mostly I try to avoid TV. One summer in Boston I sublet a little studio apartment near Fenway Park and one of its most prominent features was this giant flatscreen TV. I didn’t have very many friends who were also in the city that summer and my boyfriend was living with his parents in the suburbs and I had a retail job that made my feet and my back ache, and most evenings I would just come home and watch TV. I mean, this object took up a lot of space, I felt I had to use it, I felt the apartment demanded that I be the sort of person who would use it. To be honest, I sort of felt like the whole city demanded I be the sort of person who would use a flatscreen TV. You know, after a long day at the office and a run along the river (training for the marathon, obviously), you would come home and cook dinner and sit in front of the TV. I don’t know why I have this overwhelming impression of Boston, of what my life there could have been, especially since later, when I moved off campus for the first time, I didn’t have a TV at all, but that summer I watched a lot of TV.

I watched cooking shows. I never cooked myself (I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, heated up frozen vegetables from Trader Joe’s to have with rice and soy sauce, occasionally very loosely wrapped some beans and cheese in a tortilla, swaddled it in salsa, and called it a burrito, but I never cooked, if you see what I mean, I ate, but I never paid very much attention to what I was eating), but I spent hours watching the Barefoot Contessa put things into ovens and Rachael Ray make lots of meals in 30 minutes. I watched these things in a very abstract way. I think when you watch cooking shows you’re supposed to imagine yourself actually making these meals, actually serving them to people and eating them yourself, but I could never really do that, I couldn’t imagine myself pre-heating the oven and making breaded chicken breasts in 30 minutes in my own home. I never really even tried to imagine this: the cooking shows were an escape, so completely and utterly separate from my own reality that they were as exciting to watch as something like Indiana Jones.

I also tried watching some of the reality shows on MTV, but I could never really keep up; every few minutes I would have to ask myself: Who are they? Have they slept together yet? This was not so foreign to me – at college, everything is really ultimately about who wants to sleep with whom, and that’s what all these shows were, I think, also about. And so I suppose it was not really very interesting to watch these small dramas being played out on screen when I could simply watch them being played out in common rooms after midnight or at the back of lecture halls or in cafés between classes.

And I watched sitcoms – mostly reruns of Friends, which I was ashamed to admit, because I had always thought Friends must be one of the most insipid shows ever created. It turned out I liked Friends. I think what I liked was the idea of everything existing so neatly: people who were emotionally close to each other (brothers, sisters, best friends) living in close physical proximity, their lives continually and elegantly overlapping, everything progressing more or less as you imagine it should – better jobs, deeper love affairs as time wore on.

But mostly I watched Gilmore Girls. Again, its wholesomeness felt very foreign; it was nice to watch a family interact when I had spent the previous year sharing a room with two other girls, waiting for showers and toilets to become available at night, drinking cheap vodka straight from the bottle even though we were not allowed alcohol in the dorms and chasing it with diet ginger ale from Whole Foods. Watching Gilmore Girls was a bit like holding on to a security blanket; I felt warmer watching these imaginary people in an imaginary town in Connecticut (which itself may as well have been imaginary: although I lived in New England now I had not yet been to Connecticut, and it was deliciously unlike anything else I knew very well). I wanted to go to a diner every morning where the owner knew my name; I wanted to live in a house with a porch, with different rooms allocated to different activities (it felt like so long since I had lived in an actual house, where the kitchen was separate from the living room which was separate from the bedroom!).

***

Now of course I do live in a house, with different rooms, where the kitchen is separate from the living room which is separate from the bedroom. And we don’t have a TV. In fact I often wonder if we don’t have a TV just for the novelty of not having one, just for the way it makes us sound (and therefore feel) smug and self-righteous.

But, really, where would we put a television? We have a whole house at our disposal and the thought of ruining any of the rooms with a gleaming screen is actually painful. We’re happy to litter the place with laptops and iPhones and you can see the glow of gadgets here late into the night, yet I can’t bear to make a commitment to this other kind of screen, this non-interactive screen that feeds but needs not be fed, that requires nothing of us other than our incomplete, fevered attention. We use BBC iPlayer, of course, we rent films on iTunes, the truth is we are as good at watching as anyone else, and yet I suppose I can’t physically admit this, I can’t stand the thought of not feeling smug. And so, consequently, we watch less. This is one of those examples I guess of where wanting to be a certain way can actually make you that way; I know I’m as inclined as the average American to watch more than four hours of television a day, but here I am, not watching four hours of television a day.

***

But then I find that I get this weird enjoyment from things like Doctor Who, and the enjoyment becomes interactive. I think I started watching Doctor Who because I liked watching David Tennant, the elasticity of whose face always seems to me a minor miracle, every expression a strange and fleeting work of art. And so to begin with, what was actually happening around him was irrelevant, it was just background noise. But then, in the way that these things happened, the background noise got louder and louder. And now I go on watching it, compulsively; I am invested somehow in the outcome of each episode.

But if I really think about it, it seems possible that I like Doctor Who because it’s interesting to see time as something malleable instead of something dogged (“like an ever rolling stream” etc). My days, these days, are very much about time; everything divisible by hours and minutes, centred around the clock. I am very aware of time; obsessed by it, in fact. I am fascinated by the way my body adjusts without complaint, even while my mind wants to linger longer on one moment, say, than on the next. I write things like “I have a new bicycle”. But then I think that this term, “new”, is relative; I have had my bicycle for a month, so maybe it is not so new anymore – it has a few scratches, now, it has been outside in a rainstorm and I have ceased to notice how different my posture must be to accommodate the lower handlebars. I find the phrase “time lord” very appealing for the way it implies control, which is of course the one thing we don’t have, we never have. Again this is about watching something which thrills, it’s the ultimate form of tourism: I am thrilled by the exoticism of it, by the way time can be manipulated on screen, by the way my brain, meeting this strange new idea, wants to both recoil and to investigate simultaneously.

And if the thing about television is that it’s a waste of time, which I suppose it is, in the way that anything can be construed, if you really thing about it, as a waste of time, then maybe this is exactly what to watch: something that subverts our conception of time, something that makes you feel – for a short hour, a shorter hour than usual – that things are neither linear nor predictable.

❧

It started with a journey – first across the Donnington Bridge by bicycle, then to Africa. People write of that first view, of the descent at dawn into Kenya; but I was fast asleep. We thawed out on an island under the auspices of mosquito nets and equatorial heat. Later we drove north out of Nairobi and stayed for a week on the shores of a lake that turned purple in the evening and heaved with hippos.

Back in England the cold had become less sharp; it had settled in for the season, become comfortable, while I had become lazy and rather weary. At a certain point it occurred to me that it was no longer emotionally or financially sustainable to stay how I was but nothing much happened about it. I got older and more desperate and still nothing much happened for awhile, until I was denied a visa, granted a visa, and offered freelance work in a short span of time. My parents came to visit and suddenly it was warmer and a volcano erupted and I graduated in a flowing black gown and blue-and-cream hood.

After more than two years, I handed in my notice at the Admin Job, and the freelance work turned into a Proper Job, and the Man and I celebrated three years together and we went to Hay on Wye with friends and didn’t buy quite as many books as usual but had a nice time drinking coffee and going to lectures about philosophy. My bank, worried that I had been spending rather more money than usual in Wales, cancelled my debit card.

The spring turned into a giddy summer. We attended a christening and then, later that day, sat backstage at a Blondie gig drinking beers. We listened to a lot of music and watched World Cup games outside at our local pub, crouched near the barbecue. Just as it was getting really, properly English-hot, we fled to Fez, where it was even hotter, where we stayed with friends and squeezed fresh oranges for juice and sat on the rooftop late at night watching the moon shine on minarets.

We went to a festival and sat in the grass getting drunk on sunshine and had to sprint for our train. Then we stayed in the countryside for awhile, feeding pigs and walking dogs. The Man’s grandmother passed away. We went to Toronto, where it was summer-sticky and seductively live-able. We came home to the cooling down of September; I started to run seriously again, and then sustained my first proper running injury and took up swimming instead and fell in love with the sensation. I started ranting on my blog, instead of just privately to the Man after every Saturday afternoon spent in the pub with the papers. My mother visited us on her way back from Turkey. My uncle passed away after a short battle with cancer and I felt the distance between California and Oxford.

I wrote 50,000 words in a month and danced all night and went to the Isle of Wight and then discovered, one morning, that it was winter again, although I had not really given it permission to be winter again yet. We went to dinners and Christmas parties and house gigs and then found ourselves in New York. Then we flew to California for the first time in two-and-a-half-years and it rained a bit but we still went for a walk on the beach for Christmas Eve. I saw family and friends and we celebrated on the ranch with steak, red wine, cheese, and a bottle of champagne and here we are, arrived in the New Year.

❧

On the 29th September, my Uncle John died. It was both unexpected and expected; a few weeks previous, he’d been diagnosed with advanced colon cancer, and suddenly we had to adjust to the idea that he was ill, seriously ill. In a way I still haven’t adjusted to that, but things happen regardless of whether or not we’ve adjusted.

And it’s a difficult one. I miss my family in some way or other every day, you see, but I have a family of sorts here, too, and mostly I find that I can happily exist thousands of miles away from where I grew up. It’s sometimes strange, but it’s a fact of life. I mean, toenails are strange too, but we get used to them. We don’t think every morning as we wake up: gee, those nubby bits on the ends of my feet are a bit funny. And I don’t think every morning as I wake up: golly, it’s weird that my childhood home is eight time zones away.

But this is maybe the first time in over three years of living abroad that I can see the implications of my choice in a different light. Because it’s great that the internet means I can communicate with my parents every day via video chat. And it’s great that I’m happier than I’ve ever been anywhere else on earth, and that I’m still not tired and never will be tired of standing in that particular spot in Queen’s Lane on a cold, hazy night and seeing the spires of All Souls shimmer in the mist. But you know what I can’t do? I can’t just pop over to my parents’ house for an evening to be with my family.

And the thing is, my family is pretty amazing. We’re not a very needy family; my dad and his siblings all live in the same state but see each other only a few times a year. I didn’t start hugging my grandparents until I went away to college and suddenly their existence seemed miraculous to me, who was living in student housing in Boston, watching the snow fall and the streetlights shine all night. But I love these people I’m related to.

I know it sounds really obvious – yes, I live a million miles away from where I grew up (you see? I’m not even sure how to refer to it – is it “home”? But then this, also, this place that I’m in right now, is “home”), so yes, obviously I’ve given up some privileges. And gained some in return. But you don’t really think about that when you apply for your visa and decide to live somewhere else. You just kind of think, abstractly, that something – a feeling, a technology – will erase the distance, change the geography. And mostly it works exactly this way, mostly everything is fine. And then something like this happens and you say to yourself, oh, okay. So it is never going to be easy, and I have chosen for it not to ever be easy.

The thing is that it’s never as simple as choosing between one love (your parents, your blood relatives, your roots) and another (your partner in life, your adopted homeland, your whole life). You are always and will always be someplace in between, a slave to the map, a subject of the cruel time zone and the unrelenting transatlantic journey.

And my uncle? He raised three beautiful and scarily intelligent children. He was such an integral figure in the community – a teacher, a coach, a mentor. He was 55, which is too young.

I remember sunny California days on the beach, all of us, cousins, aunts, uncles, family – laughing, playing, eating. Swimming. The water is always a focal point in these memories. We were products of our upbringing; the way we behaved, the way we felt, was directly related to the place we had been born. There is a photograph of us – my father’s three siblings, each of the cousins, the grandparents – from ten or fifteen years ago. As far as I know it is the only such photograph. And yet I keep thinking that we were always together all along, even if there was physical distance between us, and we always will be, even if for awhile I’m over here and they’re over there.

❧