It was odd being back. Ann Arbor was home for four years and then it wasn’t. My mom texted me a picture of my box-dyed red hair hanging mid-chest in a coat covered in flowers. Smiling. The picture was ten years old to the day.
But now it was April 2024, not April 2014. And as I walked the streets of Ann Arbor, I felt like I was a big-grown-up on a little kids playground. It used to feel so far and treacherous to cross town on foot, but now it felt like just a few strides. Am I a giant?
I visited town for 36 hours to attend a board meeting at the public policy school I attended. But for three hours before the welcome dinner I zigged and zagged through the city noting what was new and what was exactly the same. Making a long list in my mind, I couldn’t forget. I had to let everyone else know what had become of the coffee shops we studied in. The place we ate falafel.
The dinner was in the restaurant I went to for a date night soon after I finally turned 21. It was where I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea for the first (and last) time just to see what that was all about. But now I ordered a mocktail and told my fellow Board Members what I did for work, where I lived, all the lives I’ve lived up until this point.
Sobriety stretches and changes space and time. As they asked me whether I’d returned to all my old haunts, I carefully avoided answering in full honesty… yes, I’d returned, but it was safest for me to just look on from the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to step inside establishment after establishment that had been the study hall for my relationship with alcohol.
The next day after the meeting I sat on a panel to share what I had done with my public policy degree and what tools my time at the public policy school put in my pocket. I talked about how it taught me the importance of being in challenging dialogue in collaborative and coalition spaces. The raucous ride of working in groups of different-valued thinkers and doers. The ability to build bridges between intentionally confusing policy language and its impact on real people in real communities. I didn’t talk about how my time at the public policy school was also defined by severe mental health challenges, my first experience with getting a substance placed in my drink without my knowledge or consent, with bullying because of how I’d cut my hair to feel more aligned with my queerness.
Time heals. Or makes cool scars, at least. As I wrapped the panel I slowly walked over to Dominick’s, a strange green house whose rooms and yard have been turned into a Sangria-pouring-sunny day kind of bar wedged in between the law school, the business school, and the policy school. The day was a supremely authentic Ann Arbor kind of day. Piercing and clear cold with some oddly timed spring flurries. With a new queer friend from the Board at my side, it was nice to go to the counter, order the one NA beer they had shoved in the back of the fridge, and make new kinds of memories in a place that once felt so consequential and now, looking back, was one rock that I leaped across to, forging the rushing, winding, bubbling life-river.
“I wish I could tell college student-me that it will all work out. That it will be harder and more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.”
Days later, I was many states south in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. My partner and I packed up our dog and met a group of our friends at a cabin to watch the solar eclipse. Being in the path of totality was its own kind of time travel; not backwards, but through the universal plane of the relationship with the Earth and everything beyond us. As the morning rolled on, I grew more and more nervous. Scared, even. My relationship with space is one of utter awe and I was increasingly aware of the fact that something deeply outside the norm was about to happen.
To feel comfortable with the ever-unpredictable change of being alive, there are certain guardrails I hold onto. The sun rising in the morning and the moon rising in the evening are two constants I hold soft on my chest to keep my beat aligned. And a solar eclipse challenged that loop.
The woods alongside the house we rented were teeming with birds. Bugs. Totality, or when the moon found its way directly in front of the sun blocking its light from reaching earth, was going to happen from 1:45-1:49 PM central time. For four minutes, the day would become night.
Around 1:30, the shadows grew long, much like it does at dusk. And, like dusk, it brought evening bugs. New clouds of gnats and mosquitos who had been tricked into thinking it was time to come out and feed.
And then, at 1:45, as the moon tucked in the last sliver of sun, it shifted into darkness. The sky grew so deep blue black we could no longer see to the creek in the woods. We could see stars and it was only lunch time. Nothing that we’d known before felt like it could hold true, now. Nothing where a day brought two nights.
The birds quieted. The cicadas sang. And we stood with our mouths agape to the way the sun tried its best to push through, its bright white ring a mane around the mouth of the impenetrable, strong, slow moon.
As fast as it began, it was over again. It ends up the sun is so powerful that it only requires the tiniest hair of her shine to bring daylight through. And the summer it brought was soft, sweaty, and the kind of rebirth that brings about play and rough and tumble fun. We waded through the creek to kiss giant thistles, played games, drank cold drinks, lathered on sunscreen, ate sandwiches, and laughed and laughed and laughed. We needed to remind ourselves, on a day like that day, that life will be harder and more beautiful than we could ever imagine.
On the drive home, I sat in content and soft silence, slipping in and out of dreams as Iman drove. Singing to songs by artists I loved when I loved other people, years ago. It’s all slippery, this soft time. It’s all malleable. And the more we sit in its lack of rigidity and plunge into its liquidity, time feels friendlier than ever. I will sit in you, in more of you. I will run my fingers along the grey hair you’ve grown. I will sing songs to the small child still in you (and you. and me. and you).
We don’t know what it will look like when the state of Arizona tries to enact its 160 year old abortion ban. What we do know is that community organizers like the folks over at Abortion Fund of Arizona are going to need all the help we can give.
Did you have a memorable experience during the eclipse on Monday? Did it make you think about how close we are to space, how you relate to light or to time? Did your timelapse video also make it look like you got raptured? I’d love to hear about it.