the little blue house by the sea

 

The last time I was here, the world was burning. 

At least, that’s how I began the poem that I wrote over the weekend, a tangle of words long coming. I’m still in North Carolina, still letting the salt air fill my lungs and the crash of the waves lull me to sleep at night. I love my hometown, and in many ways I’m wildly attached to it, but if I ever were to move, it would be here – the safest place I know. 

I’ve traipsed up and down the North Carolina coast several times over the course of the past year, but the specific spot where we’ve taken up camp over the past week and a half is a particularly special one. The last time that we were here was eighteen months ago, nearly to the day. For two weeks in the late fall, we ran away to a little blue house by the sea. We were battered and bruised, and we needed a refuge. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever written about those two weeks, not really. Maybe because to write about them would mean writing about 2020 and trying to put words to the way that it wrecked me. 

By the time that late October rolled around with her fiery sunsets and falling leaves, I was a shell of myself. Grief had yanked me inside out, and I was all shaky hands and tired heart. I’d pegged everything – and I truly mean everything – on this escape. It was an unreasonable amount of weight to put on two weeks, but I was desperate. It was the only lifeline I had in sight. 

I cried the night we arrived. It was the last way I expected to begin the trip, but it was one of those moments where the tiniest of disasters triggered a flood of the weight of the world. I just remember the exhaustion of it, the hopelessness. It was nothing new and that was the worst part of all. 

Over the next two weeks, the world burned on, but I felt like – for a moment – I was able to pop out from underneath the smoke. The pandemic raged on, and the election had the country in turmoil, and my heart was no less broken. But at the same time, I was in a bubble – spending time with family and listening to Zoom classes while I slathered on sunscreen and taking long walks in the cold November air. And in the tiniest of ways, I found myself feeling like mending wasn’t entirely impossible. 

We rarely stay at the same properties twice – rentals vary from year to year, and you never know how prices and availability will shift. But somehow I find myself writing this letter from the little blue house once more, curled up in the bedroom at the end of the hall. I have the most vivid memory of writing a Tuesday Letter in this very spot, about seashells and breathing and noticing the good. It’s déjà vu in the truest sense.

Being here again has been weird and wild and wonderful. I love this place, love this house, this part of the island. I would be so content to stay here forever. And at the same time, being back is the strangest feeling, laced with bittersweetness.

I don’t always know how to equate the girl I was then to the girl I am now. I still hold so many of the broken pieces of that November, but the edges aren’t as sharp now. They clink around and cause a ruckus every now and then, but they’ve been sanded down; they don’t make me bleed. They’re sea glass, softened by the beating waves. And I wish that I could tell her that, the girl from eighteen months ago. I wish I could tell her that she wouldn’t bleed forever. I don’t think that she would believe me – I can nearly guarantee she wouldn’t. But maybe a bit of it would stick. Just a bit. 

And over the past nine days of being here, that’s been the thought that I haven’t been able to get out of my head – I’m okay in a way that I didn’t know I could be eighteen months ago. In some ways, that I didn’t know I could be eight months ago, or six months ago. 

It felt impossible until it didn’t, and I think that’s the thing that I keep coming back to, the reason that I’m utterly spilling my guts on this page. For so long, it felt so impossible. And there was no pinpoint moment where the world turned around, nothing that I can hold to the light or put on a pedestal to sing the praises of or capture as a mental photograph. This isn’t your survival guide to getting out of the woods, because if I’m being honest, there was no grand system to it for me. That’s not to say there weren’t certain things that helped – there absolutely were, and maybe I’ll write about them one day. But I’m not your poster girl for finding yourself again through cross country moves or ten-step cleanses. My road was rocky and strange and disorganized. But it wasn't a dead end the way that I thought it would be. 

The thing that encouraged me most was when I sat across from someone who said, "Hey. I was there, too. But I made it out. You will too." 

I can't tell you what your road will look like. But I can sit across the table from you at a coffee shop or sit on your bedroom floor, leaned up against the wall, and tell you that I made it out. That you will, too. And that's the reason I wanted to write these words. Not to fill a page with answers, because lord knows I don't have those. But to climb down next to you in the trench and tell you that I get it. To tell you that you can crawl out, bit by bit. To tell you that it might happen before you even realize you've done it. 

And I think I keep looking for something profound to say about it all, when perhaps the most profound thing is simply this: whether you can see it now or not, there will come a day when you're more okay than you thought you could be. 

I can't wait to celebrate that day with you when it comes.