Here, at the Edge

Pivotal points, seen and unseen

A year ago today, I was on an AirFrance jet across the Atlantic from Boston to Seville to begin the trip that would usher in my 30th year of life. The next two weeks would be spent exploring southern Europe, northern Africa, and what it meant to me to close the chapter of one decade - my turbulent, roller-coaster twenties - and enter into a new one.

Sometimes in this weird little life, you get to be absolutely aware of the moments when you are standing on the cusp of something enormous and new.

Most of the time, you do not.

While I drank in the sangria-scented awareness that my twenties were ending, I remained completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be proposed to, and that I would fly back across the ocean with a ring on my finger, bound for marriage.

Here’s another thing I couldn’t see coming: that the next few weeks and months, as joyful as they should have been, would bring about a series of life-altering incidents that would change the way I saw my past and present forever; that would bring parts of my life out of their artificial darkness so forcefully that I could never again put them back; that would throw me into the depths of an emotional untangling process that would leave my hands calloused and bloody, but ultimately fill my mind with painful and true knowings, deep clarity, and deeper gratitude for the life I have now.

On May 26th, 2023, I had no idea any of this would happen. I simply scanned my boarding pass and hopped on the ride.

Most of the largest precipices of my life have been ones I stepped into unknowingly: in high school, when I signed up for a poetry class as an easy way to fill a hole in my senior schedule and walked obliviously into the great work of my life.

In college, when I returned home from an internship with a stomachache and crawled into bed, not knowing that the next year and a half of my life would be stolen from me by a mystery illness that would take years to fully understand.

In my early twenties, when, sitting drunk on my friend Cory’s floor after a day of long-term substitute teaching, I decided not to laugh it off when he suggested I “go get a Master’s in Teaching and just do the damn thing.”

The next week, when in a fit of existential misery I sat on my bed with my laptop open, picked Seattle on a map, and started the first pieces of a plan.

And all of the magnificently unexpected flaps of a butterfly’s wings, great and terrible and everything in between, that have led me to where and who I am today.

In the early hours of May 26th, 2024, I am sitting at a small table in a backyard in Massachusetts. A chorus of birds is echoing out across the valley in every direction. This small fragment of the world is gorgeously still: leaves ripen in the run, peonies stretch open into the day. I am a year from my engagement in one direction, a month from my wedding in the other. I find myself, once again, on one of those rare cusps that I get to be aware of in real time.

And I can’t help but wonder about the ones I’m not aware of, the wheels turning right now whose tracks I will only see in hindsight, the tectonic shifts I am moved by but cannot feel. What they will teach me. Who they will make me. Until then, I’ll be here. In the becoming.