What a strange thing it would have been to know how we would all turn out. If I had known how smart we would all be, how expert in our fields, our arcane our knowledge, how much we had to learn. If I had known what it would feel like to have a broken heart and then to actually feel my heart break. If I had known what it would feel like to fall in love and then to settle down into it for good, to feel safe enough to be the bitch I was anyway, to fall deeper and float in it and seethe in it and roll around in it on weekend mornings. If I had known how long-lasting the love was. If I had known how long a grudge can last, and with it, love.

By the time the Tuckahoe roommates moved in, I had filled the place with new Ikea furniture and summoned the cold, functioning part of myself long enough to unpack the boxes of things that had belonged to my mom, things my grandmother had packed even when I waved my hands at her and told her I didn’t need them. I already had a set of measuring cups, a hand mixer, a frying pan. She listened, she nodded, but she packed these things anyway. The kitchen was full even before the roommates arrived with their own contributions. I had to rearrange, store things in the bottom of the pantry so that each time I went in for food, I saw random bits of my childhood on the floor – the 70’s pitcher with the bright orange lid, the avocado green mixing bowls. The familiarity was almost bodily felt, the pit of my stomach contracting with the feeling of using these items, of seeing them in her cupboards, as dependable as Arizona August, monsoon season, and my mother smoking a cigarette with the front door open, her face Zen-like calm at the sight of lightning slicing desert sky.