call it what it is

on simplicity and believing our own perceptions

How are you holding up? Like all of us, I can only think about the election. Even when I’m not thinking about it, it’s swirling around in the back of my mind or the pit of my stomach, places beyond conscious thought. 

One coping mechanism I’ve tried lately is getting lost in audiobooks to distract myself from political anxiety, and I finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House last week. It was published in 2019, so I’m a little late to the praise of this novel, but I really loved it. Tom Hanks reads the audio, and it was such a welcome escape. As it neared the closing hour, I didn’t want it to end– even though I desperately wanted to know how these characters ended up, like friends I’d become invested in over the two weeks I spent with them. It’s a book about two siblings, Danny and Maeve, who grow up and move on and somehow have to make sense of the convoluted mess they were given as children and the ways the adults in their lives failed them. It reveals how dramatically a step-parent can alter a family dynamic and the human desire to look back at our pasts with a certain obsession and determination to recapture something that was probably never even there to begin with. 

There are countless scenes of the brother-sister pair sitting in their parked car outside of their childhood home which no longer belongs to them. This is their ritual as they grow up and move on with their own lives, and each time we look in on these conversations, it feels like both a perfectly believable moment and a perfect metaphor. Two siblings, orphans clinging to each other as the only family they have, sitting in a stalled car and staring through windows, trapped in a moment that doesn’t exist anymore but with that hovering perspective of the years between now and then. They pine for something they can’t find words to say, chain smoking cigarettes when they’re young adults, and then outgrowing the urge to chain smoke but still sitting and still staring.  They look at the windows and the hedges and the lamplight glowing through the drapes and wonder what actually happened in that house, questioning the validity of what they remember. The house itself becomes a symbol of something– both what was and what could have been. 

Photo by Zachary Keimig on Unsplash

Maybe one reason I loved this book so much is because I know that feeling, whether I’m in a stalled car or not. I struggle with the tension of what was real and what I’m imposing on my past. It’s easy for family systems or old relationships to become hazy with the fog of unintentional gaslighting. For every person a different perspective. No, you’re wrong, that's not how it was for me. I remember it like this.