after Nora Ephron

1. I live in my head. I imagine worst case scenarios, rehearse conversations, replay conversations that didn’t go well, think of the words I’d say if I could do it again. I make little lists all day: things to do, things to look up later, places I want to visit someday. This is where I make up stories, create characters, ask “What if…?” There’ve been a few renovations over the years—things learned and unlearned, epiphanies here and there. Cobwebs hang in corners long unexplored, and so, flashlight in hand, I sweep the beam of light over hidden crevices, trying to find myself. Instead, I hear music all day: showtunes, 80s pop, Motown hits. On a dusty bookshelf, I see faces I can’t place, streets I recognize but can’t name. In another room, a collection of tchotchkes: quotes from Dumb and Dumber, a list of prepositions memorized in eighth grade, the lyrics to “Gangsta’s Paradise.” If I could just tidy up, sit still for a minute, maybe I could find what I’ve been looking for. Maybe I’d come up with the plot for the next great American novel. Maybe I’d hatch an idea that would change the world. Maybe I’d finally remember to move the laundry to the dryer.
   
   
2. I live in a house. It has large windows which provide lots of bright light during the day and very little privacy at night; when it’s dark outside the house is all lit up like a jack-o-lantern, smiling at the neighbors. On those windows there are child-sized handprints, nose prints, forehead prints, and mouth prints. There are also boogers that came out of child-sized noses, cemented onto the walls, waiting to be chiseled off. Tumbleweeds of dog hair roll down the hallway at times, like our living room is a saloon in some frontier town, wild and lawless. And it is wild, I think, to have these walls, these windows, this house, when there are some who sleep under bridges or in tents along the freeway. How glad am I for the dog hair, the boogers, the neighbors who see me in the middle of the darkest night.
   
   
3. I live in someone else’s hometown. It’s only 22 miles from where I grew up, but far enough, most days. Someone else might look around and say, “That’s the elementary school I went to,” or “There’s the restaurant where I had my first job busing tables,” or “There’s the park where I broke my arm.” But none of my ghosts live here.
   
   
4. I live in Michigan, the state shaped like a hand—convenient for carrying a map with you, always. “I live here,” you might say, pointing about two inches below the tip of your pinkie. “But I was born here,” pointing nearer to the base of your thumb. It’s a land of glittering lakes, thick forests of pines and oaks, beaches to rival ocean resort towns. Rivers and roads stretch across the palm like lines waiting to be read by some fortune teller: head line, heart line, fate line, life line, sun line. And how true, the ways this place has shaped my head, my heart, my fate, my life. The way its gravity has pulled me back into orbit like a jealous sun.

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This post was inspired by “Where I Live” in Nora Ephron’s book I Feel Bad About My Neck and shared along with essays by my friends Kim Knowle-Zeller and Jessica Folkema.

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