The folder on my desktop is named Essays. Two decades of a blog, poured into one container and set in front of me to be judged.
I opened it sometime last month with the intention of finding a book. What I found instead was a woman I had mostly forgotten: twenty-five, new to Pennsylvania, writing in the dark on a blog nobody was reading yet. Writing, the way you talk to yourself when you can’t talk to anyone else.
The collation took longer than I expected. Not because there was too little, but because there was too much, and not all of it deserved the permanence of a book. I had to learn to be unsentimental about my own work. A post I had loved because of what it cost to write it is not the same as an essay that does something on the page. I kept confusing the two.
The ones that survived are the ones that move. Not emotionally, though some of them do that too. I mean structurally: they go somewhere. They arrive at a question they couldn’t have asked at the beginning.
I also had to decide what the book was not going to be. It was not going to be a tribute collection. It was not going to be a record of difficult years I had endured. I have written about infertility and adoption reunion and a father who died before I knew what questions to ask him, but none of those essays made the cut because they were hard to write. They made the cut because they were honest in ways I couldn’t have been earlier, couldn’t have been without the distance.
The Smudged Hyphen is organized around seven loose territories: marriage, the wanting years, adoption, raising daughters who look nothing like me, the writing life itself, what we are made of, and womanhood as an ongoing project. None of these are sealed rooms. Grief walks through all of them. Identity doesn’t stay in its section. That is the actual shape of my life, and I stopped trying to correct it.
The last essay I added was one I almost didn’t include. I kept thinking it wasn’t finished. Then I reread it and understood that its not-being-finished was the point. You don’t arrive at belonging the way you arrive at a destination.
You keep asking Idam enge? You ask it at twenty-five with a suitcase. You ask it at fifty with a book.