(Part 1/2) I’m currently in my little Quaker hometown of Moorestown, NJ to visit my grandmother. She lives in the UK but is spending this summer with my parents. Her birthday is in a few days and she’s turning somewhere between 95 and 100 (it’s up for debate). She spends much of the day gazing out the window and informing me that my shirt is too short and my heels are too high. I asked her what she was thinking about as she gazed and she said, “I’m turning 100 in 6 days...there are a LOT in my mind I have to think about.” Amen, nani. I admittedly don’t love being here –– “home” is a tender subject and there’s a reason I use convoluted language to not have to refer to it as such. Home is something I’ve made for myself this past decade, and it’s filled with palm trees and sweet community. Still, there’s a sacredness of memories that I can’t simply replace by building something shinier, brighter, and newer 3000 miles away. Often when I’m here and old memories resurface, my mind runs through the “could have beens” of my life. There’s the version that became everything my parents wanted–– working as a doctor and performing 5 daily prayers with them, the version that married my high school sweetheart and had 2 kids by 27, the version that went to a bustling university in New York City and climbed a fancy-pants corporate ladder. I wonder what versions of herself my grandmother is seeing in her own mind; I hope it leans more toward 100 years of gratitudes than regrets. There’s a lot of heaviness that comes with imagining all those other versions of me, but there’s a growing sweetness with each visit. It’s something that looks like peace that I chose a path of joy when many of the easier paths were not. Peace that there’s been enough time and healing that I can still call this home if I choose to. Peace that any version of living that I chose was far better than the version that thought living might not be worth the trouble. (Part 2 continued in comments)