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[Jun. 30th, 2019|02:46 pm] |
I should start at the beginning. Audra Michaels. Nice to meet you. The quick easy personal ad version goes something like this: SWF, 34 with large rambunctious puppy. Likes cooking, food, laughing. One brother. Many friends. Clumsy as sin. Working on life.
I say working on life, because it's been a strange few years. Everything I thought I knew in the world, or at least in my corner of the world, had changed.
School was over, really over. After what felt like forever, because it took for-freaking-ever, I'm finally finished with the MFA in Creative Writing. That combined with my mighty Culinary Arts degree, means it’s all really done.
And then there's the whole Alex thing.
Alex was the one. From the day I met him, I knew he was the one. We started dating early in college, everything was set, and then he went and asked me to marry him. We got married in his parents' back yard in Florida, surrounded by our friends and family. I carried white and yellow tulips, because roses were overrated. When the minister said I could, I kissed the man I loved with all my heart and took his hand as we jumped into the whateverness of life. We settled back in Chicago, in the house I grew up in, and tried to get into a normal life. I was 24, the whole world was ahead of me when we got married. Everything was wonderful; we had our little life, the dogs, the house and us.
And then the accident happened.
It was a warm day in late September, warmer than usual for Upstate New York. It was a Friday- I was home with baking a cake for a client when Alex called. He was going to run an errand or two, stop and drop something at Kevin's house. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Just the regular Friday stuff - to the gym, the grocery store and his best friend's house, the same way Fridays had been for as long as I can remember.
The police showed up at the house around eight o' clock. I just figured that he and Kevin got carried away- that they were playing cards or talking shit- the usual Friday afternoon stuff. When I realized that these were cops, somber in their blue uniforms, I knew something was wrong.
The cops said the truck that hit the car was going 95 in a 45. It swerved into Alex's lane as he rounded the blind embankment. The impact pushed the small car into the wall. He was dead on arrival at the hospital.
I don't really remember much more after that. I know that Officers O'Donnovan and Jackson had to pick me up off the floor. They called Eric and told him there had been an accident. I don't remember making the phone call to Alex's mom and telling her that her oldest son was gone.
I do remember picking out his grey suit - it's the same grey suit he'd worn the day we got married. I remembered his pale yellow tie. I remembered a pack of Camel Lights, a bottle of Jack Daniels and some money to tip the Heavenly cabbie. And most of all I remember what he smelled like, what his laugh sounds like how he smiled first thing in the morning when the puppies climbed into the bed. I remember the small scar on his chin from collegiate lacrosse and the way his kisses tasted like cigarettes and Doublemint gum.
I remember all of it. Just like it happened yesterday.
That was almost four years ago. I'm still trying to work through things. I still haven't quite adjusted to life without him. I don't know if I've really had the chance. I still talk to Alex often, even if talking to him really means just talking to our wedding picture, which still hangs on the wall. He is the first man I ever really loved, and somewhere in my heart I'll always love him. Always.
I talk to my college friends often. My brother laughs, because he calls me the pit bull- I'm fierce, and for whatever reason, he thinks I can't let go. Once school was done my friends scattered across the country, in some cases the world - but we're all still tied together somehow, doing their own things. Getting married, starting families, living life by their rules.
After the accident, when I realized that now that Alex and my grandparents were gone and Eric and Elizabeth lived in Costa Rica, there was nothing solid holding me to Chicago anymore- I did some traveling. I visited Daniella and her brother in Boston. I went to Los Angeles to visit Kisha and her husband Anton, and to finally meet my favorite niece Amia in person. I went up to Vancouver to visit Sandra and Michael, who were taking care of an island off the coast for the summer. I went to Costa Rica to visit my brother Eric and his wife Elizabeth, and ended up staying for a little over a year. I went to Japan to visit Tasha, who was teaching English there. I tried to learn something everywhere. To do something. To find something. Maybe to find peace. Probably to find out what that something I was missing was.
It was Eric who convinced me to try the states again. Leave it to my brother to remind me that I could always just go home.
But where was home?
I mean, I'm Chicago born and raised. I still shared ownership of the house I was raised in with Eric and Elizabeth.
So I went back to New York, and tried it out. I put the city on like a familiar pair of shoes- but it wasn't a fit. It just wasn't right anymore. The city that never slept- the city I finished my degree in and found love in and actually started life in- was it.
It wasn't. New York, like it had been toward the end of my life there was an exercise in frustration, and honestly, I was over it. And I wasn't willing to do it to myself again.
That's why I'm here.
My visit was supposed to be temporary. I was passing through on the way to visit Jeremy and his husband in Iowa City. I stopped back at the house I grew up in, and it... well it felt like home. Which it hadn't in as long as I could remember.
And it felt like home.
We (me and the dog) rented a place while I had the rooms repainted, and the first weekend of June, moved into our house. My house, really. A place of my own, just as Virginia Woolf prescribed. That was a little over three years ago.
Edibles started as a small catering business out of my kitchen at home. I did small parties- mostly weddings and showers, until one of my customers suggested that I do small meals. That’s when things started to take off- making meals for busy moms and dads so that family time can be just that. I have a small store front where I have food for pick up as well as fresh baked goods available every morning. For the first time, I decided to follow my heart- and not worry so much about what everyone said. I had all I needed- my friends, and life by my own rules.
They say you can't go home again. I was only passing through. But Grandma always said "Audra Diane, you know that things never happen exactly when you expect them. Not when, not where, and sure as hell not how. It's all a big ol' game of chance."
What was lost, was found by chance.
But it was home.
And it makes me feel whole.
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