overwhelmed

Sarah knows things. You were just uncurling your talons to take hold of the first centimeter of the earth and exhale and then fuckity fuck, there goes the rug.

My entire life has been a slow-motion disaster film. We've always been moving forward toward the next destination. My mother grew up on Guam, lived on a boat her father built and sailed to Japan, Yap, and Hawaii. My grandfather earned his doctorate in Bloomington, and my teenage mother met my father at the Chinese restaurant where she worked as a waitress. A year later she was hospitalized for 3 months in Newfoundland, waiting for me to be born while her kidneys shut down. She worked through college, became a teacher, and the two of us moved to Arizona. We lived on the Navajo reservation in a small trailer. Then in a bigger one. We saw the small dramatic scenes of a rural community -  murder and gunshots and natural disaster. When the white folk at the nearby trading post town began getting shot, it was time to go. My aunt lived in Honolulu, and so we crossed the Pacific. We lived in a cramped city apartment, then a condo on Molokai, then a glass house in the clouds. We saw the redwoods at my youngest aunt's wedding, and Vancouver at my grandmother's bedside in the cancer ward. I flew off to Florida for art school, and moved from dorm to apartment to smaller apartment, driving north to swim in Lake George and fall in love and get a lot of speeding tickets in the Monte Carlo. Then back to Hawaii - rapid-fire years of birth, marriage, grad school, first job, divorce, heartbreak. I fled to the redwoods, walked through Seattle and San Francisco, had a short love affair, a reluctant reconciliation, an unexpected miscarriage, and a second pregnancy with my stupid lovable ex-husband. Fuck it all, I thought, and moved back to Hawaii with my son and huge belly and apologetic man. I found a corner and sat myself down and thought, finally, this is where I'm staying. Right here. I'll let the road take me, or a landslide, and I'll finally be home when it comes for me. 3 years have gone by. This last year was probably the best I've had since I was small enough to be carried to bed by my mom.


More overwhelming than the shock of the layoff has been the community response. People I've known for only months and years are pulling around me with tears, tight hugs, phone calls, moving arrangements, construction plans. This is where you belong, they tell me. This is your home, and we're keeping you and seeing your children graduate and growing old with you.

And so I am digging in my talons. This centimeter of earth is mine. For as long as I can keep hold.