There’s a moment I can’t stop thinking about.
I am driving through a new burger joint in Charleston, South Carolina. It seems pricey but smells amazing and apparently has a drool-worthy veggie burger.
My hair is salty and damp. Sand falls between my toes each time my knees brush together under the steering wheel. I am just the right amount of sunburnt.
I had stopped at the Circle K to pick up an IPA, something I had been craving since earlier this Saturday morning.
It is dusk now, and the horizon is illuminated by the coastal sunset. We spent the entire day at Isle of Palms, which we were lucky to live only half an hour away from. Maybe even less, given traffic. The ocean is palpable even here; the air always smells of it.
I look around at the palm trees illuminated by the parking lot lights and gaze beyond them to the starry sky. What a strange thing, that I live here now. I don’t think I will ever get over it, as I grew up in the landlocked, midwest state of Missouri.
I inch my car forward in the drive-thru, digging through my cross body, elephant stitched purse to find my debit card. I had never been much of a purse person (lol, purse person), but this one seemed the perfect size, style, length, and perfectly me.
From the backseat, I hear the silence of my five week old sleeping baby. I didn’t see the ocean in real life till I was seventeen, and never with my biological family. Here he was barely a month and had already felt ocean water on his tiny feet several times. Just what I wanted for my child.
I turn up my Spotify “on repeat” playlist, and resting my elbow on my rolled down window sill, I think about how an American Spirit (light blue) might make this moment perfect. But alas, I had recently decided I should probably make sure my lungs keep working.
I am still in my bikini halter top. I glance down at the linea nigra peeking out above my denim shorts. I thank my lucky stars (just as I have every day for five weeks) that I had such a phenomenal out of hospital birth experience, and how proud I am of my body after all it had been through so recently.
My partner was driving home separately with his three daughters. We had all had the best day. I loved them so dearly, and loved the amount of time we all got to spend together today. I knew when we got home he and I would shower together, bubbles enveloping our sun kissed skin, and watch an episode of “Moon Knight” with our takeout while the kiddos slept. We both dip everything in ranch dressing – health fanatics.
If you had been there, you wouldn’t know that he and I had barely slept. You wouldn’t know mine wasn’t the body type he liked. You wouldn’t know that this would be our first and last summer together as a true family.
You wouldn’t know that while my five week old had dipped his toes in the ocean and felt the sand in his hands, he had also witnessed untreated mental health episodes that no child of any age should ever have to experience.
It is so odd how this savory sunset Saturday memory is one etched into my mind. Filed next to it in my brain are countless other unexpectedly lovely moments that came directly after some of the worst moments of my life. Snapshots of times that felt like heaven on earth, right after the ones that were a living hell.
They are paired together like that, the sweet and the rotten. The dreamy and the repulsive.
When I miss this version of me, and this chapter of life, does that mean I miss the high highs, the low lows, or all of it? What is it about toxic relationships and abuse that is so damn addictive? Yes, there is chemistry behind it, scientifically. Spiritually, I believe we are learning karmic lessons. I just wish all of the pain wasn’t so necessary along the way. I try to be grateful for all of it…but that doesn’t make it suck less.
A dear friend and I were recently talking about how when things get calm, that’s when panic seems to arise. After a lifetime of trauma, peace feels ominous. We are both in better, safer places in life, but it sometimes feels we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So we work through the trauma. We acknowledge. We forgive ourselves and others. We process, a bit at a time, as our body deems us able to handle it, and we keep moving forward.
We acknowledge that it’s unfair and all wrong.
Then we learn for the first time what truly feels safe, happy, and healthy. We teach ourselves to stop self-sabotaging. We learn to enjoy the good for just what it is, but not get too attached to anything or anyone.
We learn that happiness and peace come from within, and it’s our human right and our purpose, to find exactly how to create that for ourselves.
I don’t want my child to only remember the high-highs with the low-lows. He will remember anything hard anyway, because he is human and has a human brain (as far as I know), but I truly want the best for him, and for myself. I don’t think that having joyful, pure memories that are not associated with traumatic ones is too much to ask.
All of that being said, I still want to remember these “perfect moments”. The speckles of peace and satisfaction found briefly in the mundane moments. Those blips of quiet nestled in the chaos, wounding, and damage. They are like little reminders that wink at us and say “But there is always this.”
What a strange moment to be seared into my mind forever, but I am so grateful it is.
It’s moments like these that are so completely and utterly human.
Perhaps the goal of life is to find, create, and fight for these glimpses of light as much as we possibly can. Perhaps we must lean into them and soak up every last drop of their essence, until they come to us, by design, frequently and of their own accord.
They are like little scars or tattoos, etched into us, a map of what has made us who we are.
So I must write down these moments, lest I forget.
Because life is beautiful, and always worth it.
Because being human is so very messy.
Because our purpose isn’t always clear, and that is the way it is meant to be.