There’s a part of me, that people pleaser me, that almost feels like I should apologize for the rage that I poured out onto these pages last week. I have to stop and remind myself that I am practicing the allowance of all feelings good and bad. Contrary to what some may think, I don’t walk around breathing fire like a dragon or punching walls all the time. My rage stays contained inside this body until I can furiously type it all out. A friend of mine referred to it as “Beautiful rage” and I love that so much, I’ve been thinking about where to have those words tattooed onto my body. But I don’t want this space to just be a rage against the machine page.

Saturday morning, I sat down in my usual space at Heirloom and opened up my Fortune Cookie Journal (so few pages are left…I don’t know what happens when I fill them all). The music playing that morning were all the 90s bands that made up the soundtrack of the end of my HS years and into my college years. Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Cake. I knew the words to every song that played through those speakers and I was pulled back in time to a place of great happiness and naivety. Those years smelled like burnt coffee, used bookstores, cigarettes and incense mixed together. These were the years of learning the importance of finding meaning in words and oh how we dissected lyrics and movies and scripts. I was a biology major, living alongside english majors absorbing their coolness while memorizing biochemical compound structures. We were carefree even though we had no reason to be so.

I watched Past Lives over the weekend and I have been pondering those moments that feel like past lives for me now, much like the one described above. It took me longer to get around to seeing the film than I had intended. I knew that it would be beautiful in a way that feels prickly and it was. It was full of the what if questions, the kind of game I have often played on my own. There are the choices we make and there are the choices made by others that have a ripple effect on the trajectory of lives and all of these lead to questions of what if I had chosen this way instead of that. If everything in life is a choice, half of those choices are how we have decided to react to the choices made by others.

Perhaps I was a bird and you were the branch I rested on. - Nora, Past Lives

I joke that in a past life I was a devout Catholic, possibly even a nun. Guilt was often my motivator and I would constantly stress over doing the “right” thing. I’ve never really thought much about who (or what) else I might have been in other lives. I’ve never really thought about the what if I’d gone to a different college, accepted that full music scholarship to OU or at the very least sent my MCAT scores in and applied for medical school. I don’t really think about it because I know how unhappy I would have been with those choices. I knew at the time of decision that choosing those paths would not lead me to a life of joy. I never started playing the What If game until after Chris died. Then I questioned all the choices I had made and what life would be like if I had made different ones. Except, I haven’t played this game with myself in quite some time. I didn’t choose those other lives; I chose this one. Has it led me to a life of joy? I heard someone say once that we can’t have all joy all the time. This is true for me, but I do have joy.

This is my life and I am living it with you. -Nora

Next week, I’m dragging Michael back to New Orleans, a place where if past lives are truly a thing, one of mine was lived here. The last time we went was the first time I’d been back since before Hurricane Katrina and I thought that so much had probably changed since then that I wouldn’t feel at home there anymore. What happened during our last trip was I became so overwhelmed by memories of previous trips, that I froze. I didn’t make tentative itineraries or search out restaurants. We just sort wandered aimlessly and hoped to stumble onto good food. The wandering aimlessly was good, the food finds were not. Reservations are needed in this post-Covid landscape. This time around, we’ve made better plans and we’re even doing an activity that I have never done before any all the many times I have been to New Orleans. We’ve booked a swamp tour in hopes of seeing alligators in their natural habit.

We’re not leaving until next week, but I feel like taking a break from this space. Maybe I’ll spend some time updating some photos and thinking about what’s next. I need to spend more time with paper and ink. This is how I conjure up the experiences I want for myself and I’m a planner at heart. Don’t worry though. I’ll be back.

In this life I am still a blogger.