Departures: Dispatches from a new home and a newly pregnant body

K: I'm in a new place, 1,405 miles from where I lived before. 1,405 miles away from you and our friends and sweet, humid Virginia. Two days ago, I was taking a lunchtime walk through my new central Texas neighborhood. There are some things I expect on my walk: a boot store with that new leather smell wafting out of the door and onto the sidewalk, the heat buzz of insects, a taqueria on every block. But some things I do not. I walk down the sidewalk and walk directly into the long branches of a plant, expecting them to softly bend to my body the way small branches do in the Eastern forests I’m used to. Instead, I'm greeted by something hard that scrapes against my arm. The plants here are spiny, and immovable. Agave, nopal, palmetto. No pine trees, huh? B says later that day as we drive on yet another trip to the home improvement store. I haven't noticed them missing from the landscape until he says it, but of course they are.

A: I am returning ‘home’, traveling back to England and the familiar landscape of my parents’ voices and accumulated objects, 3,760 miles from Virginia, the place where I actually live. The pandemic and the lengthy process of applying for US residency have kept me away for a long time, but now, here I am, at this slightly sticky table in Washington Dulles, waiting beneath an artificial tree for my flight to board. My nipple brushes the edge of the table and for a second feels painfully tender. As you begin your new life in Texas, a life is forming in me. My fetus is 9 weeks old and the size of a grape. I threw up on the way here and the diced green peppers in my airport tacos revulsed me so much I wanted to weep. Pregnancy is a departure; this body I have lived in feels volatile, bizarre. It is also an arrival; I am meeting something long-present in me but held at bay for years with condoms and an IUD and packet after packet of little shining pills. Landing in England tomorrow with its paler sky, will also be like this, both affirming and strange.

K: There was the hope that everything would feel so new that I would have to become new. But disappointingly, predictably, I am still myself. B and I go out to dinner on a patio and I drink and eat steak and fried potatoes. Then fitful half-sleep. Waking up from a dream I can hardly remember, my head feels like it is stuffed with cotton. A hangover. Well trod territory. The drinks last night were stiff—bourbon with lemon oil; bourbon and lemongrass and so many mint leaves as garnish that each sip was like sticking your face into the plant itself. The pulse of headache. Then the slick of ice on my arm as I take my cotton head out of the house and put a cooler into the car. And something new: the shock of water as I jump into a cold natural spring. I read a sign that says the spring is also the last remaining habitat for endangered blind salamanders and when I close my eyes to swim underwater, I imagine us blindly facing one another and never knowing it. I imagine the small child growing inside of you. The way these two creatures—small, aquatic, strange—are so alike one another. Then linen sheets and B’s skin, the two of us curled into each other in the afternoon, my legs pulled up against my stomach in the fetal position. Outside the sun heats the air so much it travels in visible waves.

A: On the drive from the airport, we pull over at a field so I can lie down on the grass, my body pulsing with nausea, my parents hovering close and kind. You wrote of lying coiled up next to B, and over my first days back here, my two lives - there and here, present and past - feel nested, intimate. I slide a swab into my nostril, rotate and repeat on the other side: identical gestures performed at Virginia Walgreens 72 hours before. My mum waits while I try on maternity clothes in Marks and Spencer, the store where she bought me grey school tights and white frilled socks as a little girl. In the dressing room I see my belly, subtly curved but almost unchanged and image search ten weeks pregnant to gawp at other women’s stomachs. But within two clicks, I am confronted with gelatinous foetuses cupped in adult palms, pink and alien, images I do not understand. Later, as the evening blooms over Brixton, my brain and legs diverge: I’m convinced I have forgotten the way to the station and yet my body takes me there. Some part of me still fits into these streets, though I can’t imagine myself among the gathering crowds outside the bars. I see the shadow of the Victorian building where I once stayed up all night kissing a stranger. And now I belong to elsewhere. I feel older but it does not feel like loss. True loss, surely, would be life spooling out and out in an unending band of sameness.

K: The lounge chairs in my apartment complex pool are orange. On the fence around the pool there is a sign, worn and ragged, stating Covid rules: no outside visitors, no entrance if you’re sick. The sun is fierce and will burn a red triangle around the shocking white of my breast after I sit outside here for one hour. I see a teenage girl walk out of her apartment with a small bundle and set it in front of the door of the apartment two doors down. She knocks. Nothing. Holds her phone up to her mouth and speaks to text: I left the clothes you let me borrow on your front mat. It makes me think of when we lived together and knew every item in each other’s closets. I knew your black romper and your blue velvet shoes. I borrowed your things sometimes, you borrowed mine, the clothing changing meaning on our bodies—mine tall, yours short. You helped dress me for dates and then knew what clothes I left draped on our living room chairs after them—first a coat, then a sweater, then shoes, socks, finally a robe left hanging on the bathroom hook—the gradual shedding of a night with a stranger. I think of you in the store buying maternity clothes and wish I could be there. I’ll never know your elasticated waists and big sweaters, nursing bras and belly bump bikinis like I would have when we lived across the hall from each other. While we painted our bedroom today, I wore one of B’s old t-shirts. It’s different, wearing a man’s clothes. It feels like a claim on being partnered. It makes me want to try once again to slide your blue velvet shoes on my too big feet and say to you, Anna, but remember when we belonged to each other?

A: You are right: it’s not the same wearing a man’s clothes. I think of the intimacy between women, in many ways so much closer than our intimacy with men or men’s with one another. Walking through the park with my father, I tell him that I think my uterus has begun its journey up, out of my pelvis, into the higher position it needs to be in to expand for the baby. It’s amazing isn’t it? he says. He speaks of the gulf between men and women, these physical changes a thing a man will never understand. I think of trans men who give birth and wonder about that experience, the limits of my own understanding.I tell my parents I am staying with a friend, but skirt over exactly where, not wanting them to judge my extravagance. In Shoreditch, I meet my friend Rachel at a hotel, so that we can carve out the intimacy of a separate space, away from her partner and my parents, where we can lie side by side on white beds in white dressing gowns, talking for hours. I have lived with her, like I have lived with you, Katie, and we borrowed it back for a night - the intimacy of sleeping near each other, continuing the conversation when we woke.

K: Despite my daily shedding of clothes to swim after work, I am not sunburnt yet (not really at least, nothing more than a small outline at the edge of my bikini). I lie out there and wish for a neighbor, a girl to leave clothes outside my door. Here the sun is so strong, so insistent on itself that I remember every day to put sunblock on, repeatingly. Being so vigilant against burn makes me think about flaking skin and the fact that every seven years every cell in our body has renewed itself. Will your body remember what it was like to have held your child inside itself in seven years? Will my body remember the humidity of July in central Virginia in seven years? I cook myself a dinner I learned to make from Aimee, another of our Virginia roommates, to remind myself of who I have been. In the fridge I see the strawberries that I bought at the supermarket and because I think of your child growing in terms of fruits—grape, date, berry—now each one of them seems like a tiny child to me. I cannot bear to eat the rest of them.

A: My husband has arrived, crumpled from his long flight via Reykjavik. He looks at my belly in my parents’ kitchen and says it has grown in the week we were apart. We lie upstairs in the bedroom full of my brother’s books and circus memorabilia and strange ornaments like the glittery crocodile in a tutu that hangs in the window on a dusty string. Each wall is lined with shelves, and the books are stacked double-deep. But naked, with my husband, I can close it all away, and fold into him. Home home home, I say. The kind of chaos I grew up with - represented in this room by Snoopy in various forms of porcelain and plastic - held back by the shield of L’s skin. An ache in my back and sides announces that my ligaments are stretching, a more visible change on its way. The baby is strawberry sized, with brand new eyelids which will remain closed until 27 weeks. You won’t see this belly grow in real time, like most of my friends and all of my family. And it is strange, to be so at home with L, but to feel that he will be my only real witness.

K: B and I drive out to the countryside to a waterpark called Volente Beach. Forty minutes and we’ve arrived at another world of vacation and algae and lake. At the lakeside restaurant I drink something blue and sugary and spiked with rum. I want desperately to go down the slides but B and I can’t figure out where to get the tubes and we can’t figure out which staircase goes to which slide and for a second I feel overwhelmed by the newness of everything. The drive out here, the beach, the slides, but not just those things, also the apartment, the neighborhood, the state. I want something known for just one second. We find our way into line and I realize that the eight year olds in front of me know far more than I do. One, wearing a trucker cap and a bullet on a silver chain and another in a rashguard, tell me what to do. One kid says, I’ve been on each of the slides three times each. The other kid says, Ride the blue one. It’s open and you’ll see the sunset the whole way down. So I do and I see the sunset over Lake Travis and John Mellencamp plays over the loudspeakers and it is just an American summer, same as ever, for a brief moment.

A: Exhaustion sweeps over me, whiting out everything like a sudden blizzard. Then nausea. In the tiny bathroom decorated to its last inch with huge overlapping photographs of animals, I hunch over the toilet, dry heaving. I look up and meet the startled eyes of a lemur. Katie, I want to tell you that these last weeks have been the hardest my body has known. But I have also never felt so at ease. Pregnancy has brought a sense of permission to unbutton my shorts and overspill my bra, a reprieve from the impulse, first felt in childhood, to pull everything in. I feel curious, returning to the mirror often to look at my stomach and swollen breasts, the curving path of a visible vein. Until now, I have questioned my body, but it has simply become too assertive; a flush of nausea will instruct me to eat plain carbohydrates right now, a swell of disgust will make me push away the roasted courgettes on my plate. In some ways, it is a relief.

K: I go to Target in a rainstorm wearing a linen dress that gets soaked through and I worry about the curve of my belly button showing through my dress. I worry about looking fatter than normal after the Texan barbecue and tacos al pastor. I linger over the kids’ section looking at a small eyelet jacket labeled NB for Newborn and marveling at how tiny it is. I wonder if your baby has grown in the past few days, wonder how quickly it grows from strawberry to lemon to grapefruit. I think about the day I’ll get to hold that little one. How strange and wonderful. I look at more of the clothes: ruffled onesies with fruit printed on them, graphic tees with sayings on them, tiny jeans, leather mary janes. I want to buy them all and send them to you. If I can’t be there to hold your baby, I’ll send sweaters, pants, pajamas. Here, I will hold you until she can get here, the clothing will say to your new child and then I will fly over to you in the Spring when the redbuds bloom in Virginia.

A: In my aunt’s garden in Oxfordshire, I introduce L to a table of assorted relatives. I feel conscious of how much I have missed - weddings and Christmases and meeting new children - of having sidestepped so much kinship. In the barn, my aunt places a newborn chick in L’s palm, and I stroke its quivering back. I tell my grandparents I am pregnant and my grandfather’s eyes moisten with tears. My granny tells me of flying to Nairobi with my weeks-old aunt, when the flight from England had many stages and took several days. They are awed by the ultrasound videos on my phone, my baby a grey shape, a paler pulsing grey revealing the beat of its tiny heart. You wrote of the cellular renewal which remakes us every seven years and it has made me think of all the things which survive our upheavals, of genetic material passed through generations, other imprints: you cooking Aimee’s meal in your new apartment, your limbs alive with gestures learnt from her. A process began in me weeks ago of my baby’s DNA entering my body and becoming part of my tissues, forever altering my makeup. It is called Microchimerism, after ‘chimera’: a beast made up of many different creatures.

K: I still believe somehow that with the right things I will become the right person. I go to the grocery store with plans to make an olive oil cake—something sophisticated and Spanish and plain, one small part of the dream of a new self—and walk home with a bag filled with almond flour and blood oranges and raw sugar. I walk by a church that has a large bell tower on top. In front of the church there is a big black hearse, imposing against the grey Texas sky that is threatening rain. Gathered around the hearse are five tall white men dressed identically: jeans, crisp white shirts, cowboy boots and white cowboy hats. Is this how they mourn here? Crisp and pressed, dressed as if they’d just hit a money pit of oil? The first time B and I will travel from our new home will be to a memorial service for my uncle. I think he would have appreciated the men in their cowboy hats. Maybe I can hire them, extra mourners sent to pay their respects. Real Texas cowboys, I imagine myself being able to whisper to my uncle. I go home and make the cake. It is perfect—the best one I’ve ever made. We are not different after I make the cake, but we eat it anyway and take a walk around the block afterwards. A few weeks later, after the memorial, we will put masks on our faces, enter the Cleveland airport, and spend hours in recycled air to get back to Texas. We will open the door to our small apartment and look gratefully at the pool in the courtyard. My body will relax, finally, in the heat of the Southern air.

A: L and I separate at Heathrow, his flight (for convoluted reasons) is hours before mine. My parents and I drop him off. I hug him and say, see you in DC, I’ll bring the baby. My dad takes us to Windsor Great Park to fill the time before my own check in, and I am glad to be alone with my parents, eating cheese and pickle sandwiches on a bench in the summer cold. And then I am leaving them again. They do not cry when they hug me, which strikes me as very British and very kind. I cry just a little as I walk through the door marked departures, and when I turn around briefly, my mum is standing on the other side of the road, her face marked with worry before she waves and smiles. I am alone again, with my baby and a blue antique plate in my hand luggage, protected in a sheath of bubble wrap inside a box. Something about how much my body will transform before I see my parents again marks this leaving as different, makes the time ‘away’ more concrete. But where is ‘away’? In my mind, I talk the baby through what is happening. In the immigration hall I tell it, we are in America, it’s where we live. It is my first time entering the country on my green card and I feel a flush of excitement at joining the line marked ‘citizens and legal permanent residents only’, before realising there is almost no one in ‘visitors’. The country is still closed to much of the world, most of the people I love. I have entered a state of belonging which the family who birthed me are not part of. The immigration officer returns my green card and passport, and says, welcome home.