I knew I would not allow it to happen again. With just the right internal key, something in me had finally Rubik’s-cubed itself into clarity—not loudly, not triumphantly, but with a quiet internal click. A recalibration. The dusted fingerprints show: I no longer abandon myself.
With tightly pressed sound-blocking earmuffs on, I take my pride-and-joy purchase—the most powerful blower on the market—and obliterate acorns off the driveway. I’ve learned from my mother-in-law that this fall season is an overabundant one. As I send those needle-point-tipped assholes rolling, I think.
I think about the protectiveness I feel toward insects and animals, and yesterday’s conversation with a six-year-old visitor about “our house rules” after hearing they’d torn the legs off a daddy long-leg. I never think a child is cruel—just learning.
At the Y in the drive, another memory rises: a strip mall in Virginia, years ago on the road trip, sitting outside the nail salon where my friend worked. A young boy in Velcro sneakers stomped a bug on the blacktop, and the instinctive “No, don’t do that,” flew out of my mouth.
He’d looked up at me—curious, open. I asked how he’d like it if someone crushed him just for existing. He paused—really paused—and said, “I wouldn’t.”
Sometimes I carry a hurricane-sized mass of helplessness.
Another memory plays: my cousin’s friend pulling defenseless, no-feathered, pink-skinned robin babes from their nest—the one tucked safely inside the little 10×10 bus stop my grandfather and dad built for me, my brother, and the neighbor kids. Laughing, he threw them onto our country road, right into the lane closest to us. I stood frozen—scared, shocked—my body small beside their taller, older ones. The hatchlings barely moved, and then the tires came. Tiny bodies bursting into red inkblots.
Every part of me hates that memory. The power we have to harm.
And for all the times I stayed quiet, I no longer am.
When someone killed a spider on our property, I said something. When one of their kids protested that it wasn’t a big deal, I told them it was.
“It is never okay to kill things,” I said. And I meant it. With me, there’s a line.
The heaviness of all I can’t change—and all that has shaped me—hangs thick. The vulnerability of being too young, or uneducated, or believing that respect and being pleasing should be prioritized over one’s values and needs.
Today, I am a fortified castle with a moat, alligators, and guards. And in peace, I sit in my airy, windowed steeple, breathing, contemplating, keeping my kingdom’s balance in order. Some things today are a no.
If you’ve harmed me and you don’t take accountability—no.
If you don’t abide by my values when you’re in my space—no.
You are cast out.
Even now, when I stand in my own kitchen or walk across my quiet driveway, something in my body still remembers. A low, electric hum at the top of my sternum. A slight bracing in my forehead. The faintest tremor of vigilance—an old survival instinct that hasn’t yet learned I’m no longer in danger.
My body is a loyal archivist. It keeps the road trip inside me like sediment: the sleepless nights, the horn blasts, the riverbanks I curled beside, the bars I wandered through feeling too visible and invisible at the same time. The ache of hoping someone would see me. The ache of knowing they couldn’t.
Back then, my body was a live wire, hungry for meaning, scrambling for signs. I remember walking around at times like a woman entering her own autopsy. Every sense heightened. Every nerve exposed. I didn’t have a boundary, a moat, a guard, a single internal no. I had only motion—forward, backward, anywhere but still.
Those moments sit in me like something unfinished. My body speaks a language I no longer ignore.
So now, when the memories rise—when the chest tightens or my lungs feel ribbed with old fear—I know what they’re pointing me toward.
Not back into the chaos.
But back into the story.
Back to the girl I once was, walking the streets with exhaustion clinging to her like a second skin, pretending she wasn’t drowning.
I go back because I have to: There’s a girl still waiting for me in that story, and I’m the only one who can go back for her.
Going On 40 