Dear Coco: Homeward Bound

Monday 6/15/20—Quarantine Day 93

Dear Coco,

Mercury is heading retrograde. I wonder: how will Coronavirus fare when she’s turned back around on herself?

Even as cases of COVID-19 continue to rise in California, the Golden State insists on lifting restrictions. Facts have been so muddled with fiction that I don’t have an opinion anymore. I don’t feel inclined to think about it at all, actually.

Pandemic fatigue.

Whether it is safe or dangerous to leave the house, go shopping, hug a friend, or enter a public space without a mask is still unclear. Regardless, California is reopening it’s businesses and begging all citizens to start spending all their money again. I am still currently unemployed, as are at least 3.9 million of my fellow Californians, so I will not be venturing to the mall any time soon.

Instead, I’m taking the opportunity to go home. Since the earliest days of the shelter-in-place order, I’ve known that the first place I’d go when I could travel again was home. The first people I’d see when it felt responsible to start expanding my circle again were my family.

Home has been calling to me like a morning bed, inviting me back into the folds of sheets still warm from my soft, sleepy body. The word, home home home, has been pulsing in my heart like a beat, a mantra, or a sacred chant.

Home has been reaching out her arms for me in dreams, sleeping and waking. Memories vivid with taste, fragrance, tangibility. A whiff of summer jasmine in Grandma’s backyard. The stain from fresh-cut grass on the playground lawn of my elementary school. Erin’s husky giggle, irreverent and innocent. Mom’s sweet angel voice singing along to Linda Ronstadt in the car. The hard clay of Central Valley farm land, heavy, solid, true, in my hand. Dad’s quick footsteps, rebounding off the land he governs, with a light and athletic tap tap tap as he runs back to the pickup to grab another snack.

My life was beautiful. I was loved sweetly, whole-heartedly. I got to ride horses and dance in tutus. I was encouraged to dream, and sing, and tell stories.

I was also paralyzed by fear, and haunted by trauma, both inherited and my own. This made it difficult for me to experience my blessings in their purity. Every luminous gift resided under the shade of my anxiety.

The sweetest dreams, all mixed up with the messier memories of childhood and adolescent anxiety, loneliness, fear.

I’ve spent the last three months in near solitude, aside from Nathan. I’ve sorted all my old photos and thrown away those it didn’t feel good to see. I’ve learned to cook, and enjoy it. I feel comfortable and confident in my kitchen now. I’ve battled my co-dependence, struggled with the fear of missing out, and practiced standing my ground and staying home, even as friends broke the mandate. I’ve begun a new online business venture, building a platform to provide my services and products to a quickly changing and uncertain market.

I am growing.

I’m learning, processing, taking care of myself, saving money, and planning for a future I can look forward to.

Still, I’m being called back.

Home sings its siren song, and I am entranced, following its voice over the mountains and into the valley. Down old roads that still lead to nowhere, but can take you anywhere.

This is the paradox of the small town. Small towns are known for their limits, but rarely celebrated for their possibilities.

I’ve spent my entire adult life working through my anxiety in the hopes of creating a happier future for myself. Only time will tell whether that happens.

What’s happened for certain, though, is that I’ve created a better past for myself. Now that I’ve processed my trauma, I can see myself apart from it, not a part of it. The same goes for my past. I understand that my childhood wasn’t inherently bad. It was only burdened by the heaviness of my fear. Healing has felt like drawing the shade back, and letting the light shine down on my childhood memories, so I can recognize their sweetness, and experience them as blessings.

Perhaps this is why, just in time for Mercury Retrograde, home is calling me back. Is it time, at last, to return, not in sadness or regret, but with joy? Can I stand firmly and joyfully on ground I once crumbled upon? Can I rewrite my history, to reveal how the light turned out to be greater than the darkness? And if the beginning can be transformed into a happy story, can the same be chosen for what’s yet to come? Is this what I’ve actually been doing all these years? Pealing back the layers, from the palimpsest that is my life, until I get to the pure truth?

My life has always been beautiful. My life has always been blessed. I have always been on the right road. For so long, I worried it would lead to nowhere. Now I see: it can lead to anywhere.