Where the Southern oaks grow

In September I traveled “home” to North Carolina for my cousin’s wedding, a quick weekend trip, in on Friday and out on Monday. It was a gamble being on the North Carolina coast at the peak of hurricane season—Helene would hit the western part of the state only a week later—but by God’s grace it was the most beautiful few days, still summer, and in ways I never expected, still home.

It’s odd to sometimes feel memories forming while still in the midst of living in those moments. I felt even at the time that’s what the trip was becoming: settling into the warmth of a lived-in past even as I walked on the beach and laughed with my parents and danced with my cousins. The first night my mom and I walked to the end of the road that our little beach cottage was on and watched the sunset from a gazebo looking out over an orange-lit Roanoke Sound, sitting in golden light with a half dozen strangers who were also all watching silently as the sun dipped into the still water. There was a beautiful tree on our left, a Southern live oak according to my phone’s photo album, its scrubby branches like knotted arms reaching out toward the narrow piers that stretched into the Sound. The air had a sense of stillness I’ve never felt even at the most beautiful New England beaches, that feeling of everything slowing down that people always attribute to the South. I could have stayed in that moment indefinitely. And maybe I have.

Tonight I walked to CVS to find something that would help me get a splinter out of my finger. For a good stretch between my house and the CVS, there was an awful, heavy scent of weed in the air. I used to love this neighborhood, but the past month or so I haven’t liked being there past dark, or even during the day, to be honest (if you’re local and know me, I’m sure you know what I mean). As I walked home, there was a steady stream of honking and people in cars screaming at each other. Welcome to Boston.

I thought, for the hundredth time, “Why do I live here?” Of course I know the answer—I’ve found a community here that I’ve never found anywhere else. And that is worth all the frustrations of city life. But even so, I still often feel as if I’m not a part of this city, as if I’m outside myself, even after three years here. My sister and I lived together those three years, till July, and after she had moved and I was in a new apartment, I remember taking walks and thinking, is this okay? Am I allowed to be here without her? It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but those fears genuinely pressed in on me—it felt like a betrayal, I don’t know of whom, to be here on my own.

I couldn’t tell you where I’m from, not really. I don’t have a hometown. But I say North Carolina, now, when someone asks; it feels the most right. When my parents and I went to the beach that first afternoon of our trip in September, the waves were roiling and crashing onto the hard shore with a ferocity I had no idea how much I’d been longing for. There’s no better sound than that rush and roar, no better feeling than the foam gathering around your ankles. So much of myself is held in that coastline: summers and friendships and my grandparents, hallowed childhood memories as golden as the sunset my mom and I watched later that evening, life played out to the score of an indifferent ocean.

The Outer Banks stretches for miles and miles, Highway 12 following the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and in some places the road is so narrow that hurricanes have washed it away in years past. In Holland Road, Richard mentions that the house he grew up in on one end of the titular road, and the church at the other end, are the starred points on a map of his life; the constellation from which all the other patterns form. That flat highway trailing through the sand dunes, following the ocean, is one of my starred points.

I suppose that the what am I doing here? feelings have snagged me so often recently because, regardless of where I live, it’s not uncommon for me to all of a sudden look up from my life and realize how far away from myself I feel. That sense of far-awayness has to do with God, too, because if I’m far from myself, I am far from him. I know the way back; it’s just a matter of rousing myself and beginning the trek. I’ve read hardly at all this year compared to 2023, which I attribute to so much of my focus being on releasing a novel—and that’s obviously to be expected, but knowing the reason doesn’t take away from the lingering sense of a vital part of me going missing, of my brain atrophying the more time I spend doom-scrolling on Instagram and the less time I spend letting my neural pathways be shaped by fiction, and beauty, and history. The ironic result was that while releasing my novel, I’ve felt less like a writer than I have in years.

Inevitably, and every so often, one of the poetry accounts I follow will post Mary Oliver’s heart-stopping inquiry—Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—and I immediately feel upset that I read those words on social media instead of stumbling upon them in the pages of one of her collections as she and God intended.

I don’t know what comes next; I don’t know why my mind has to jump ahead to the next, whatever is after Boston, instead of appreciating that this is home, now. I wish I could say to you what I’m really trying to say but I don’t know what it is. I’m watching the documentary about Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold, and have had to go back multiple times to pick up something she said because I want to write it down, because she said it so clearly, as if she meant to say it only to me, only now. I watched this for the first time at the beginning of my last semester of college, and didn’t even notice then things that now stand out to me and mean something to me at 28 that I never heard at 21.

Every so often, when I sort of awaken out of the mental, monotonous every-day life equivalent of a drunken stupor and look around to see that I’ve only been plodding through the days, I try to pick myself up—usually unsuccessfully. That is to say that I don’t trust God enough. Every spiritual return is its own prodigal homecoming; every time my prayers are tinged with regret that I’ve lost my way yet again, and how could I be praying this same thing again, and will this one-step forward, two-steps back way of living be the way I function forever?, I have to believe that it’s all stemming from love I can’t even see that I can come home at all. Does He keep a log of how many days I’ve wandered? Or does He throw open the doors to meet me on the road?

Somehow, it always comes back to this—to home, to the prodigal—even when I don’t have any intention of writing about that. Maybe it’s God’s way of reminding me that I’ll never be quite done learning what that story means. Not in this life, at least.

“We went to the movies three or four afternoons a week. And it was there that I first saw John Wayne. I heard him tell a girl in a picture that he would build her a house, at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.” - Joan Didion