“I don’t have anyone left to help put me back together if it goes sideways. Another loss will leave me devastated.” “But haven’t you been doing that all this time?” she asked. “What?” “Putting yourself back together.” 

All I know is that when we enter this physical realm, we begin to believe this is all that exists. Our pain and suffering can narrow our understanding so significantly that we cannot see beyond what is in front of us. We become trapped here in this plane of existence, blind to the knowledge that flesh, bones and bank accounts are all so humanly temporary. The spirit version of us knew of our mortality before choosing to come back and settling into the skin that separated us from the unseen.

As I drove, I held Asu’s hand in mine, just like I held my mama’s hand, my auntie’s hand, or my best friend’s hand. I am grateful that I have so many women in my life to love and hold hands with. I drove on a straight stretch with one hand on the wheel. I wondered who would hold my hand and take me on endless drives when I am old.

“My girl, I love you very much. You can do anything. You know I am always here, praying for you,” she would say. Her eyes saw me. She saw me every time. She saw me when I couldn’t see myself. She didn’t see the addict or the woman with shaking hands. She saw me. I was the little girl she gave back scratches to until she fell asleep—the girl who she would surprise with bowls full of hand-picked wild strawberries. I was the child full of possibility with the world stretched out in front of her.

“Leaving your country is like losing your first love,” the taxi driver said. “You are always searching for things that remind you of her. You go to places where you can feel her beside you. You eat foods that remind you of her. You listen to music that brings back memories. You are always wanting ways to feel close.”

No one told me that such a big part of being an adult was learning how to lose and figuring out how to make yourself whole again in the face of those losses.

The women were the keepers of burdens. The women were the shores the waves first crashed upon. The women were the buffers between the elements of the world and the men they loved and cared for. The women in my family are medicine. They are backbones and ribcages and hearts. They are the whispers in men’s ears. They are the guardians that keep us whole. The women in my family cry alone behind closed doors. They are islands that keep their mysterious secrets to themselves but offer the best they have to those who inhabit them.

What else have I made my responsibility that no one asked me to take on? In answering that question, I found permission to take care of myself.

"All this time, you have been trying to become something predetermined, baby. You have been trying to become some idealized version of your mama and some form of your grandma. You have been focused on fitting into a role instead of allowing yourself to let go and become who the hell you’re supposed to be.”

I learned that day that I was my own sense of safety, and I was stronger than I imagined.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. —Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum