postcards from Switzerland

I am, first and foremost, my mother’s daughter, a woman whose insanity sometimes rivals mine though her wisdom and experience ensure she outranks me in the representational hierarchy that I’m sure she sometimes wishes I still obeyed. Yet I am also my father’s daughter, a reality that often invokes an internal struggle when I consider the events and realizations of recent years — so I don’t. (Consider them, that is.)

Instead I think about how I am a reflection of every friend I’ve ever had, every stranger who was particularly harsh or especially kind, every man I have ever found myself kissing even if I never loved them. I think about how I started reading the Harry Potter series when I was six because my elementary school best friend did, I think about how I discovered my favorite place in Massachusetts because a boy I worked with for two summers mentioned it in passing, and I think about how I love eggs benedict because a man I briefly dated at twenty-one woke up early to cook them for me whenever I slept over. He beat his own hollandaise sauce, something even my can-build-and-cook-literally-anything cousin-in-law was impressed by. The man’s poached eggs were perfect and I have yet to find someone who can make eggs benedict better.

When I was in seventh grade, my English and history teacher told me that I couldn’t highlight nearly every word in every reading we were ever assigned. I was only supposed to highlight the important parts. This is where our opinions differed: I was highlighting everything that I thought was important, because I often thought everything was. Her second piece of advice to me was perhaps the single greatest instruction I have ever received: don’t write how you speak. It wasn’t an insult, and the words are still burned into my brain a decade later.

I’m easy to know, through the books I read and the words I write, the colors of my highlighters matched to the covers of my books and every essay or poem or story a direct reflection of the mechanisms in my mind. Every book I own has my name embossed somewhere in the first few pages. When I lend someone a book, I expect it to be returned, because each volume is an extension of every thought found inside my head. I will only give books I have read to people I love, people who I want to know who I am.

I’ve read a lot of memoirs in recent years, and there’s an intimacy involved in reading each of my copies, the author’s secrets and dreams becoming my own with every marking. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read, and truer words have never been spoken and it pains me to know that I have never lived in a world where James Baldwin was breathing too. Because regardless of the genre, reading is deeply personal by nature, a direct indication of the stories that move a person, the plots that captivate them, the characters that have an individual cursing or cheering or both.

I’m easy to dislike, I know this. I tell white lies, I manipulate situations to my advantage, I’ve been told that I’m a girl who always knows exactly what she wants and isn’t scared to strive for it. I’m not. I live by my own moral code, an honesty within my actions that only I am truly aware of.

But I still love easily, and deeply, love burning through every centiliter of my blood, and sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever found me easy to love. I wonder if anyone has ever loved me because, rather than despite, because all I’ve ever wanted is to be loved to the same extent I love, and every time I wonder this I remember my mother exists, and my closest friends, and my mother’s dog, and though the yearning remains I know that is more than enough.

I was in my spring semester of my freshman year of college when I had a writing professor assign the novel Random Family. I was twenty and two years had passed when I leant it to a man I was sleeping with, Random Family his choice out of the three I presented to him. He also borrowed When McKinsey Comes To Town; Poverty, by America; Evicted; The Splendid and the Vile; and Empire of Pain, and even after I told him I could no longer be friends with him I still ordered, read, and mailed him Killers of the Flower Moon simply because he had mentioned he wanted to read it. I finished the book in three days. I also embossed one of the first few inside pages with my name and highlighted my favorite parts, and it’s the one book I’ve ever lent with the knowledge that it will never be returned. He wouldn’t even know where to send it anymore.

I knew I trusted him when I realized that I would’ve given him any book he asked for, and I knew I loved him when I realized there were books on my shelf that I wanted him to read. I knew he understood me, understood who I am, when his excitement to give me Educated mirrored mine. Those are the conversations that I miss the most, the ones that almost convince me the aftermath was worth it.

People talk about love languages, and this is mine, quality time and words written on pages — whether they’re mine or someone else’s. I know you and I love you are two phrases that each have three words and eight letters and he was the person who showed me that to be known is to be loved.

Like all others, I have been built by the people I have known, the experiences I have lived, and the media I have consumed, so I left America to meet new people and find new experiences and read new media. I know who I am, but I don’t know who I want to become, and I found it too difficult to figure that out with more than two decades of history haunting my every thought. In more explicit terms: I ran away. It is a privilege I do not take for granted. A product of timing, I am writing this in Switzerland. Even if there isn’t a train that can deliver me to an answer, I am here, I am loving, and I am finally starting to realize that maybe this can be enough.