Details

I've had a lot of time lately. To think. I spend hours in the sun, laughing at myself for the meager attempt at farming I've managed to scratch out of this wet hot American summer.

And I'm beginning to remember the tiniest of details in my story.

Like the bird's nest in the garden of our house in North London, Turnpike Lane, April. Saturday morning, the sun was out, and Liam and I were doing the Guardian crossword. We had already broken up, but we lived together, like we always did. I remember the baby birds, singing like they never sang before, and I was annoyed, suffocating.

I wanted to stand up and yell at him to make this work, to love me like I was willing to love him. But it was too hard. Always too hard.

Yet here we were. Like nothing had changed. Sipping coffee in the garden, listening to the screeching baby birds. Reading the fucking Guardian.

There are days I feel like I've been sitting on my hands for my entire life, listening to others map out a course that would be perfect for me, lists of things I should do, and biting my tongue.

The little girl me is kind of ticked off. Where did she go? Why did I tell her to get lost? When did depression find me? Huddled inside of myself.

When I did begin to take my walls apart, I found that the clarity, thanks to my own imagination, was superb.

I probably punished Liam for a lot of things for which he was not responsible. It's okay, though, because I punished myself pretty hard with my next boyfriend, and even harder after that for punishing myself so hard with him. I mean, I liked my last boyfriend. We had some magical times, but we hurt each other pretty badly, and I surprised myself at the amount of total bullshit with which I was willing to put up just to feel like I had some semblance of the beginnings of a nuclear family to prove that I was, indeed, capable.

Yes. There was a time I took cute pictures with boys. 

Liam was good to me. Liam courted me. He wrote to me. He listened to me. He came to visit me. He stayed with me, gave as much as I gave. It wasn't perfect, and his list of cons is just as long. But that's the way it will be with everyone.

Plus, I was on the precipice of depression, untreated, and even I wasn't prepared for what was coming.

Every day I have to forgive myself. To remember that I am worth courting, worth chasing. Because I didn't believe it when it first happened to me, and I wasn't able to fully accept it.

The more I open up, however, slow down, breathe, half smile, speak softy to myself, the more I am able to remember those details and mine them for what they mean to me. What they can teach me.

On my last night in London, at the pub with the whole gang, my friend Paul asked me what the real reason behind all of my wandering was, and I don't even think I hesitated when I replied, " For my daughter, so she will wander further, live more fully, and be proud of me."

I may not have a daughter, or a son, but the message is still very clear.

Life continues. People are born and people die. Love is found and lost, and baby birds yell like little boys when they're waiting for breakfast in the back of some house in North London.

None of my experiences stand alone, and even the tiniest details, regardless of the circumstances, combine to comfort me when I feel lost, when I forget who I am and where I'm going.

Nancy Caroline, A Timeline: 2007-2008

I took wellbutrin to get through writing my Master's thesis. I went from scattered and emotional to jittery and ultra focused. I wanted to get out of the states, get back to my man, get back to a country that valued...well, humans. So I dove in while my thesis advisor was facing his own struggle with politics at the university. His notes were always charming. Like a monkey throwing poop at me. Charming. I taught classes at the university during the day and sat in front of a computer at night. Then I defended it, and they passed me with the caveat that I continue the research.

Margaret Fuller challenged every notion of woman. She called it as she saw it, faced off with some of the greatest thinkers of her time, or any time. She travelled, single, with the permission of her family, as an adult, and she left everything to work for a newspaper in New York. She was a literary critic, transcendental disciple, and foreign correspondent. I cried when I wrote the last few paragraphs of the paper, when I wrote about her death. She was full, even then, at too young an age.

My dad drove me to the airport in Atlanta on the day before Thanksgiving. I had two large suitcases and a Klonopin. I bought a huge Captain Morgan's Spice Rum at the duty free...to remind me of home....

Then I cooked Thanksgiving Dinner for my new housemates in Turnpike Lane (North London) and they all remarked how clever it is to have a holiday entirely devoted to eating. The English love food. they eat food at the table. I never ate a meal with people that wasn't at the table in England. At my boyfriend's parents' home, we ate most meals in the kitchen and special meals in the dining room. We had wine with every dinner, and the English use both hands to eat. I love it. I used to practice eating with both hands when no one was home when I first noticed the distinction. It might look really simple, but it is not.

I spent a majority of my social time in England sitting around tables and discussing the legitimacy of homeopathy (home-ee-op-athy), world news, or differences between American English and English English. Once, the core group of friends (my boyfriends' friends), sat around a table and discussed the fact that none of us had done crack and whether or not we should try it. The consensus was no.

There were always pints. The boys drank cider, and when I made fun of them for drinking what we would call a "bitch beer" in the U.S., they retorted that cider was a, "man's drink," due mostly to the high alcohol content of most English Ciders. I always drank Bitter. It was creamy and foamy. I liked that.

You can't buy Fritos in England. There is no equivalent. In fact, most U.S. junk food can be found only at a novelty store in China Town that sells primarily American sweets. Chips and salsa aren't free, and authentic Mexican food is really and truly non-existent. And that's important, access to Mexican food, to comfort food.

I worked as a receptionist for a bank then as a PA for the CFO of a charity organization who was also a "Dame," like Judy Dench. I scheduled luncheons for her with duchesses and the like, and when I asked where she would like to luncheon, she simply replied, as if I should have known, "the palace." I contracted the Norovirus and wept like a baby while I projectile vomited along with the rest of the nation that had recently been instructed by the BBC to stay away from Hospital if you begin to experience symptoms of the virus. Then I finished out my tenure working with baby nurses for the NHS, which, although it has its drawbacks, is quite the organization.

I had a doctor whose office was about a two minute walk from my house. To make an appointment, I simply registered at the office once and never filled out paperwork again. Then, when I needed to see the doctor, I simply called the office and chose, from the myriad of options, when I wanted to come in for an appointment. When I came in from my appointment, I signed in, sat down, and waited for them to call my name in ten minutes. Then, I sat in the Doctor's office, face to face with him, and discussed my issues. He gave me as much information as he could, sent a prescription to the pharmacy next door, and I was done. Then, I left the office and picked up my prescription for 7 pounds ($14). That's all the money I spent. It was HORRIBLE. If I had questions, there were hours during the day that I could call and speak with a nurse, and getting an appointment was never, ever an issue.

What I didn't learn from actually receiving care from the NHS, I learned by working in an NHS facility.

I don't have a ton of pictures from England, so here's a picture of me eating a bus in Rome:

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment. If you want to delve further into my life after moving to England, you can go to the very beginning of my blog and start with this one: Ghost Town.

Nina Simone is an American, and So Am I (Part I)

This woman. 

The first Nina Simone album I ever heard, I procured from an ex-boyfriend’s computer. I just made a little copy (because it’s the future) and saved it to my external hard drive which held five whole gigs and was roughly the size of a hardback book...way back in 2007.

I had never heard of Nina Simone until I met Liam, “my English boyfriend,” so I assumed she was English as well, for a moment. I had been living with him, first in Manchester and later in London over the course of a year with a brief completion and defense of a Master’s thesis thrown in the mix. I’m fancy. At the time I procured his music, we were broken up, but (like good masochists) sharing a space until my visa ran out. Torture.  

I arrived home to a Memphis that I could not remember without him. He, too, had spent some time across the pond with me in my apartment on Linden in Midtown, before it was out of my price range. I finished my Master’s degree while he “secretly” worked at a Sushi place. Thus, when I returned home without him, I was home, but I was constantly in the shadow of our past. It was hard because it was a lovely past.

However, it didn’t take me long to busy myself with teaching and performing, and by the time I turned 29, in 2008, I was quite the lady about town. In my humble opinion.

Ask any woman how much she weighed at any given time in her life, and she will more than likely be able to tell you, without hesitation, her exact weight, size, and shape. At least, I can. I always kind of felt like that was the message the world was trying to tell me, that I had a specific outward standard to meet. Hell, I also assumed there was a specific inward standard of which I consistently fell short.

When I turned 29, I weighed about 120, and wore a size four. The last time I hit those numbers, was in 1992, when I turned 13.

How did I do it? I was “too busy to eat,” but I still managed to go on long, “city” walks with my ipod tucked in my back pocket. I missed walking quickly through the narrow streets of London, climbing the escalators out of the underground two steps at a time, moving with purpose through the veins of one of the biggest cities in the world.

This time, I power walked through the heat of the southern American summer, refusing to drive anywhere that wasn’t absolutely necessary. No one does this in Memphis. Still.

Since I had been in Europe during one of their coldest summers the previous year, I missed the oppression of the heat on the Mississippi Delta, if you can believe that. I walked, sometimes in the morning, but more often at dusk, and I reveled in my own sweat from the slow heat of the late summer. I relished it. It healed me.

I put Liam’s music on the iPod that he bought me for my 27th birthday, and I listened to it on my long walks. There was a lot. Every album from The Smiths. Every Wilco Album. The New Pornographers. The Chemical Brothers. The Knife. The Stone Roses. And Nina Simone. To name a few in a series of non-sentences just to enrage my grammar-nazi friends (Relax. I am one of you. I just like doing things I’m not “supposed to do.” I’m not selling heroin to poor people, so can I just have this one?)

The first time I heard Nina Simone’s voice, I felt a little embarrassed for her, not because I thought it was an ugly voice, but because it struck me as something out of the ordinary. I grew up in a world where the extraordinary were encouraged to embrace the ordinary, lest they fall into temptation and be lost forever. Over the years, I have come to believe that in order to embrace the part of myself that is truly remarkable, I have to be vulnerable, sometimes to an excruciating degree, a bit like Nina Simone's voice.

One summer, I directed a live-action “music video” to the (not) hit song “Flip City” from the soundtrack to Ghostbusters II. I also starred in it. I convinced a bunch of girls to let me choreograph performance art depicting the rise of the ghosts at the hand of Vigo the Carpathian, and we performed it in the talent show at CHURCH CAMP. I should have had “uncomfortably vulnerable” down pat.

The transcendent voice of Nina Simone bled emotion. She did not fit into the status quo, but, as I have observed things, black women rarely do. She was so angry, and she was so sad, and it was all so familiar.

So I listened, and I walked, and I tried a little more to open up and accept life as it came.

Until next time:

And also