The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

There’s a lot of wonderful and kind, and ultimately right people, who say it will be fine. And it will. But that reassurance for my move does come with a lot of “WOW! Big change!” And sometimes, I give into the awestruck, anxious feeling that comes from pulling up your own roots and throwing yourself into the wind.

Thing about fear is that it thrives in the moment. The Fibonacci sequence of What Ifs, beautifully spiraling out in terror-soaked electrical impulses after witnessing something only your reptilian brain can know. Something it can only whisper up the soup-can telephones of your limbic system to your waking mind. The human body can only hold on to a panic state for so long. Maybe 20 minutes.

I am not afraid of moving overseas. Not really. I have a soft place to land in York and strong connections to buoy me. I have an interest and excitement in the culture. I have love and mystery and curiosity. But it’s a fact that things are irrevocably changing. As a person who has twisted her life around the presence of anxiety, the choice to disrupt the routine is…worth noting. In some ways, it’s almost impossible to believe. I have to wonder what my father would think. How worried he would be. But there’s no longer a solid way to know.

Thing about grief is that it’s like a newly invented color. You can’t help but live your life blind to it. Like Tyrian purple. You might hear about this costly shade, a color for royalty, and know it’s outside of your reach. In the wake of loss, you realize the color was always there, you just now have eyes to see it.

It’s Father’s Day and for the first time, my father’s gone and I see the purple everywhere. But the purple is beautiful, complicated and I’m learning how to wear it alongside my jeans and crooked glasses.

Give it all time and sunlight and a rum and coke, and things settle. At least some of the time.

We’d have talked about politics. We’d have talked about being careful. He’d repeat that I could always come home. But he’d be a little impressed. He was the one who left his family home in rural Minnesota for a dream out in Colorado. There’s, buried deep down somewhere, a willingness to push past anxiety in my blood. In this moment, I’m grateful for that. I wasn’t sure I was so lucky.

For many a year, many a decade, I would have described myself as frozen atop the high-dive of life. Not jumping, not climbing down. Just waiting for a sign. Paralyzed in place while everyone else was flying headlong into the open air, legs akimbo.

Cliche but true that grief and love and even fear…are insanely powerful motivators to bypass all sorts of self-assumptions. Losing my parents shifted every goal post. I don’t know how to explain it beyond the fact that it’s just stopped being not possible.

But there have been emotional duck legs furiously paddling along underneath the still water all the way along. I remember graduating from college a semester early in December. I was living alone, I didn’t want to walk in the ceremony and get my diploma. Instead, I was excited about seeing the 2nd Lord of the Rings and wanted to move home. Life was throttling in a way I’d never known before. But somehow, my parents, chose this moment to surprise me with a gift trip to fly to Beijing.

And with that trip, those flights, the whole world opened up. Walls were erased in an instant. A freedom ran through my whole life and I started traveling on my own.

Of course, it wasn’t all roses. There were many more years of panic and anxiety to come. But when I think of my father’s legacy to me, my relationship with him now nearly a year since he passed, I feel the result of his desire to see us all happy. And I know he’d support this decision to move to England. That helps.

I have grown up. From this, through this, loss. I’ve fought against my shyness and anxieties. There was a specific decision to get curious about the times I felt curious. To be more of a leader when I knew where to go. To speak my mind when I thought my thoughts were worth thinking. To ask for more even if I wasn’t ever sure I deserved it.

I am wondering if the old patterns will return. If I’ll get overwhelmed. New phrases to learn, new food, new grocery store, new TV channels. New Saturday nights always happening a little bit before the old Saturday nights. No sisters turning up to help. It’s all subtle, but in aggregate, why wouldn’t some part of myself start to panic?

But if my father were here, my father who always showed up every single time I asked, he would tell me a story of when he was brave. Being a rodeo clown (was this ever true?), at the top of the St. Louis Arch, shoo-ing bats out of the house with a broom. And I’d remember panic can’t last and bravery’s in the blood and I’d be alright.

And now, we dive. We fall. We fly.