Elsewhere
The other night we hosted a small dinner to celebrate the new job of a dear friend. I made an heirloom tomato salad with loads of fresh herbs, fried capers and goat cheese. Two bunches of easter egg radishes, roasted, stems and all, in miso butter and grilled steak with chimichurri. Our friends brought a homemade zucchini galette. We drank sparkling wine and listened to records. Remi played while we cooked. In the kitchen my bare feet moved swiftly across the terracotta tiled floors as I measured cups of olive oil, lime juice and a plethora of spices. I wore a white dress with embroidered flowers. Pearl earrings. Pink lipstick. I took out the blue and gold encrusted Noritake China inherited from my Grandma Ruthie – a way to commune with her on special occasions.
It was the first time since Remi being born I felt like I could be fully present and engaged in conversation while multitasking. I’ve been so consumed with raising our daughter that I’ve hardly noticed my absence of self. It’s been a beautiful kind of absence though, a divine elsewhere. And now it seems I am beginning to emerge from under yards of tangled silken sheets – my mind still cloudy, my hair messy, my eyelashes anchored in starlight. I’ve been away and yet somehow more here than ever. More in my body, more myself. I’ve been away, it seems, on a dig. An excavation that began with infertility, wound its way through the darkened earth and delivered me to the other side where I now stand on misty shores, my former self waving to me from a little boat that dances in the distance on a sea of twinkling emerald waters.