the long road that has no turning

and after that we drove in one day, waking up before the sun rose, to memphis, tennessee. we checked into the heartbreak hotel at 2 am, woke up a few hours later to see graceland, and then drove back to atlanta, a new set of people.

i've been back in new york now for about as long as we were on the road, and like they say, everything is different but nothing has changed. looking at the thousands of pictures and thinking about our journey feels to me like what the astronauts who landed on the moon must have felt like when they returned to earth and saw the footage. you knew you were on another planet, your footprints are left there and will be there forever, and yet your world and that other world continue to go on, in their separate universes, pretty much just as they were before you set sail.

there are so many things i used to say i would never do, or things i promised i would. i said, just a few years ago, that no matter who she was, if a woman ran ever for president i would vote for her, i would do everything in my power to help her get elected. most of the declarations i made are of this nature- they belie the essence of who i am, but they inevitably get shifted around with experience. i consider being a feminist essential to who i am, but in this election, i believed there was a stronger candidate than the woman who ran, and i am now doing everything in my power to see that it is he who gets elected.

one of the few declarations i can remember making about getting married was that i was sure i would live with the person before we got engaged. just as a few years ago i never would have imagined that there would be a candidate running against hillary clinton who could inspire me more, i never would have dreamt that in order to simply live in the same country with the man i love, i would have to marry him. it is a catch 22 unlike anything i have ever heard of, and yet, it turned out to be the greatest blessing of my life and will forever remain the happiest moment i have ever known.

i am sensing the realm and reach of my universe expand so quickly that i can almost feel it physically- growing pains, in a way- and it as once terrifying and comfortable, funny and sacred. i am scared of missing chris so much that i can't get up in the morning, but day by day our glorious adventure continues, and i know that next year he will be living here with me and we will enter into the next territory of our lives together. i am so worried that somehow, by some cruel twist or some evil plot, barack obama will lose the election, and yet everyday i spend in that office and every time he responds to fear mongering and lies with dignity and intellect, i am so full of hope that its staggering. i drove across america and what i saw was familiar and foreign, and there is no way to summarize it and there is no category of emotions it could even fit into. contradictions are not new for me necessarily, but what feels different now is an ability in myself to let them all marinate together, to not untangle them right away, to rest with them and let them be.

my mom has a saying that i never really understood, though i asked her to explain it many times. when something surprising happens to someone, usually its something unfortunate, my mom will say "its a long road that has no turning." what caught me up as a child, and even until very recently, was that i wasn't seeing the irony, i wasn't putting the inflection on the right word. the expression doesn't mean that only the long roads have no turning, it means exactly the opposite- there is no road, no matter how long, that does not at some point turn. there is no road without bends, without intersections, without eventual dead ends, and whatever road the road you are on now will take you to, that one, too, will eventually turn.