#life reflections

Unexpected Realizations

Sometimes, the biggest realizations come in the most unexpected ways.

So… story time.

When my husband and I got married, we agreed on three children. Three, max.

After our first two boys, though, he started hoping for a girl.

I remember telling him, “You never really get to choose what you’re given.”

So I gave him an ultimatum.

Considering I’d had two C-sections and a few pregnancy complications, we would only try until I turned 36.

That was it.

For our first two boys, I got pregnant on the first try.

This time was different.

Month after month, nothing happened.

Eventually, we stopped counting.

We simply decided that if it happened, it happened. If it didn’t, we’d be okay—we already had two wonderful boys.

Then one morning, I woke up unusually early.

It was around seven.

Somehow, I realized I was four days late.

There was one pregnancy test left in the drawer.

Just one.

I took it without expecting much.

Two lines.

Positive.

Today, I’m seven months pregnant.

And if all goes according to plan, I’ll be giving birth just a few days before my 36th birthday.

Funny how life has its own sense of timing.

Sometimes we spend so much energy trying to plan our lives.

Setting timelines.

Making backup plans.

Believing we’re the ones in control.

But every now and then, life gently reminds us that some things arrive only when they’re ready.

Not when we ask.

Not when we expect.

Just when they’re meant to.

Head in the clouds,

This studio is perfectly akin to a prison cell, although it only feels that way because I’m here so often. Confined to 400-something square feet of solitude, I spend my days staring at the ceiling from my bed, keeping the shades drawn, and washing my dishes religiously after every meal like my mother is still shouting in my ear. Sometimes, if I listen closely, I can still hear her. She floats in the heavens like she has already passed away. Every time I mention her (“My mom liked this, she used to say that, blah blah blah”) I cringe a little, thinking of how distant we are and it feels like she really is dead. Sometimes I get a ping from the heavens, maybe once every few months, a timid check-in that usually ends in 10 messages or so. I imagine her tucking into bed, Ginger fast asleep, an old-lady-dog version of my mom in some respects and in other ways, reminiscent of a child with her sparkly big eyes.

I am hit with a wave of loneliness and what I can only describe to be suppressed sadness, even though it feels like I don’t really have anything to be sad about. I am free to do whatever I want. No time constraints, which quickly becomes its own prison if I don’t remind myself to do things. I might be depressed but I might not be. It’s a sense of floating above the world, above the minions who shuffle to work every day and feed their families and long for more in the stagnant fog of it all – I used to be one of those worker-bees who cared what everyone thought and lunged for approval wherever I went. It’s starting to feel like Walden up here, and I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing.

I can sense it in Lauryn Hill’s songs. She floats above others with a sense of superiority, and while it borders on patronizing at times, I know she means well. I look out for all of you, whether you know it or not. She was so bright as a twenty-something, and it really strikes me in a personal way – how she regards the world, and most especially her own race, as poor animals – stretching, shrinking, scraping by. Full of potential yet almost as dumb as a doorknob. We didn’t start off that way. But we sure as hell have to reverse it before it does us in.

Most people will never know what the hell I’m talking about, but all that matters is I know what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe Alzheimer’s will come for me, but I doubt it would since my brain is so active all the time about things important and trivial. I mention Alzheimer’s because the album Everywhere at the End of Time popped into my mind a month ago after watching The Backrooms, which had a track of that album slipped in. I didn’t listen to the entire album and yet I knew that song in some deep, primordial vein of my mind, or perhaps my soul. Reading The Goldfinch really was good for me. It helped bring back my stream-of-consciousness type of writing that hones in on too many details. I love that style of writing. Perhaps I can send a prayer to Donna Tartt, wherever she may be now, and thank her for gifting me a skill.

And now I wonder who she received that skill from. God? Allah? Her mother? I think we’re compilations of all the things we go through in life, all the things we consume, and to a lesser extent, the people around us. We waver each others’ static waves with interference when we get closer. Sometimes the connection is so strong, it wavers even when the other person is miles away. Miles away in Texas. Miles away in Mississippi. Even in Japan, where the woman’s heart got broken and she swept herself up in work – just like her ex-lover – who toils away and staggers on in the heat of Hawaii, a few miles from me.

Writing this makes me feel a little less lonely. Whenever I write, there is a little gnome-like creature listening, usually on a chair, in a room that eerily resembles a therapist’s office (although I’ve never been to one in real life). I suppose it’s sliced together from images and clips in all kinds of movies, serious and humorous (Good Will Hunting) and I think to myself how grateful I’d be for someone like Robin Williams’s character to be my shrink. How he would expand my mind, but in a better, healthier way. I’m under the impression that we don’t need to shrink the mind. We need only to expand the parts that matter, and let the rest fall away in particles of dust. The sooner the better. There is too much life left to live.

Saturday, July 11, 2026