![]() ![]() ![]() Roosters pecked at the sandy grass beyond us. Hair still wet from a shower and in an old Hawaiian shirt, he joked about having cleaned up for our date. His brother worked the register inside, but Caleb didn’t know how to introduce this married older woman to him, so he didn’t. The next night, Caleb and I sat on the patio outside the island’s gourmet market. But we decided he’d show me the best places on the island. I can’t remember how long that lasted, who let who go, or who asked for who’s number. Before he got out, we hugged, breathed one another in, exhaled, inhaled again, exhaled. I drove Caleb the short distance home in my rental car. At night, he built bonfires on the beach for tourists, so that when they arrived, things were already toasty, chairs snapped open in a neat circle.īefore I’d left home, Nekos had given me a leather journal embossed with my initials and inscribed with a note encouraging me to “preserve memories of this trip, and all the trips you, I and our kids will have in the future.” ![]() At one point, he described himself disparagingly as “a fucked-up Nicholas Sparks character.” Most days, he worked on a taco truck for a well-loved man named Eduardo. He had let his hair grow long, become disillusioned with work and women. I had nothing to hide I loved them desperately.Ĭaleb had worked all winter for a company on the mainland that took millionaire assholes on damp bear-hunting excursions. He asked about Nekos, my two young daughters, my life back in Nashville. He had lived on the island long enough that he was a stranger to no one. I didn’t need him to, but I was grateful.Ĭaleb was seven years younger than me, almost to the day. When an older man, wildly drunk, leaned over and began to hit on me, another man interceded on my behalf. My second night there, I sat at the bar of one of the hokier, island-themed restaurants and tried to read a book. One grocery, one surf shop, one library, one post office. There is only one of most things on the island. When the ferry finally brought the Ocracoke lighthouse into view, I cried. I knew only the name of a historian I’d arranged to interview and the artist who owned the loft apartment I rented for five days. During the winter, that figure thins to the degree that everyone who remains knows everyone else’s name. That (still very unpublished) book is set on a remote island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Ocracoke. I went to make progress on the novel I’d been tinkering with for a few years and to more fully experience what I’d felt on a few recent business trips - the ecstasy of solitude. I’m 38 now, but I was 35 when I took my first vacation alone. He had just put in his two weeks notice we nearly missed one another. ![]() I was 19 when I started working at a sandwich shop in Knoxville where he also worked. Not at the very beginning, when my now-husband Nekos and I met in college. Now that nonmonogamy has become natural to me, and essential, I’m not constantly processing it. I’ll write about some of the things I’ve learned another time. It’s a blog post, but the sentiment is the same.Īlmost all my energy those first couple years of nonmonogamy went toward howling, sobbing, raging, figuring out the what, when, where, who - but mostly the why - that led to opening our relationship after 16 (mostly happy) years of monogamy and 12 years of marriage. It’s important - to memoirists, if not to anyone else - that we acknowledge a memoir is a made thing, a piece of art, and not merely a howl or a sob or a rage.” I was too busy upending my life.Ĭlaire Dederer, one of my most beloved self-examiners, says, “In good memoir, emotions have been processed, dealt with, swept neatly into the dustpan, well before the writing occurs. The other option - to write around it-didn’t suit me either.Īll good because I didn’t have anything worth a damn to say about it then anyway. I wasn’t ready to write publicly about opening up my marriage. In March 2018, I abruptly stopped writing the blog I’d tended on and off since 2010. ![]()
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