CHAPTERS

On Monday morning we plum ran outta diapers, with less than 24 hours remaining in our family vacation. 

I snuck into Alex's room early that morning and asked to borrow her zippy little Volkswagen. And then, keys in hand and sudden freedom on our horizon, my Huckleberry and I set out for adventure! And intrigue! And the closest Target. For diapers.

There is nothing more defeating than buying an entire pack of diapers knowing full well you'll only use up a tenth of them with no room to spare in your luggage, but there is also nothing better (when you are me) than a car with a car seat carrying a fat gurgly baby, and also the baby is mine, and plus we have free excuse to go to the Targets. Diapers for everybody!

In the car I cranked up the stereo and rolled down the windows, and sang as loudly as I wanted. Huck jammed along in the back seat, blabbing and singing and kicking his legs and making buzzing noises with his lips. And as I glanced in the rear view mirror at his little monkey toes pointing to the sky, I thought to myself, 

"Oh, so this is what it would have been like if I had gotten pregnant sooner, and we hadn't moved to New York, and we had lived another life, and that life included Target."

Sometimes I feel as though my life is like a chapter book. Or possibly a collection of essays, or short stories. One place and one time and one person for a while, before morphing and changing, becoming another place, another time, someone new to discover, new to become, leaving trails and traces and entire lives behind, and always starting fresh. 

My book would go like this.

Chapter One: A confident, half-naked, free-spirited childhood spent in Arizona. 

Chapter Two: An insecure adolescent feels super awkward in Connecticut.

Chapter Three: The angry, contrary years at BYU.

Chapter Four: The newlywed years in Oregon.  

Chapter Five: That one time I moved to Brooklyn and suddenly became myself.

Chapter Six: When New York Natalie became Moscow Natalie, a girl who daydreamed in wheat fields.

Chapter Seven: That awful and blessed summer in San Jose when I was--well, I don't even know who I was then.

Chapter Eight: The end of Moscow and coming face to face with New York Natalie all over again. 

Chapter Nine: We become a mother.

Chapter Ten: Suddenly there is a pay check and it no longer upsets ulcers to go to the grocery store, and I can buy clothes for the baby and nobody panics.

Being a chapter book is tiresomely overrated, I am afraid. It involves the painful shedding and growing of new skins. One more Once Upon A Time, only to eventually leave it behind again, fully and completely. 

Often times I find myself wishing I could have lived a life of continuity instead. Staying in one place from start to finish. Being just one person, from beginning to end, one person I know and understand. One long, meandering paragraph.

As we pulled up to a stop light I read the intersecting street name out loud. It tasted foreign on my tongue though I knew the street well. I glanced back at those toes in the mirror again as the dark Portland clouds in the sky moved overhead. I remembered past trips to Target, I remembered past dreams of baby toes. I remembered when those baby toes were mine in the hot Arizona sun, when suddenly, there I was. All of me there. All of me at once. 

Every version of me I've ever been, every chapter I'd ever lived, violently crashed in on me with a whoosh of familiarity and recognition. Like time had stopped and sped up and rewound and played and I was finally in one piece.

And it was that summer in San Jose: the sun beating down through the windows of the blue Volvo and onto my arms as I drove--anywhere and everywhere--seeking adventure, or more likely, seeking to outrun what felt like perpetual sadness. It was those long years in Idaho spent daydreaming in rearview mirrors, pretending to see outstretched baby toes and imagining the life I longed for. It was the tanned little girl of five years old with no fear and ambition for miles. And it was Oregon, in a place I've never understood but sometimes call home, with my New York drivers license burning a hole in my pocket and my very own baby eating a Cheerio he found somewhere in the car seat. 

It was all so weird and painful and splendid. 

And then the light changed, and it was just me again. 

Fragmented in a borrowed car, running out of diapers we'll never finish.