I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(13)

Repeat experience taught me an important lesson: The second I feel it coming on is the instant to stop whatever I’m doing and move as close to the ground as possible. If I get myself ready to fall, I won’t drop as far or as hard. Preparation is protection.



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If fainting was one recurring experience in my young life, the other was moving. Because my dad was working on his medical specialty, neuro-otology, he had to do a new fellowship every few years. When he did, off we went to another town with a teaching hospital. The legs of our furniture always had orange stickers left on them by various movers. I’d pick at them with my thumbnail. Allied United. Numbers to match the table to the truck.

Fainting and uprooting. I never knew when they’d happen, only that they would. My world could disappear without notice, and there was nothing I could do about it.



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I was born in Nashville when my dad was a resident at Vanderbilt University. My brother was born when we lived in Hagerstown, Maryland, outside Washington, DC. We lived in Nashville again briefly before moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is where I started school. At age three, I went to a progressive preschool in a tree house out in the woods, where we were encouraged to wander in nature and finger paint on easels propped in pine straw. The next year I started kindergarten at a regular school (one with walls, where I first went down) in town.

I don’t remember being told that we had to move from North Carolina, but at some point in the summer after first grade, we ended up at a rental house in the suburbs of Memphis. When second grade started, I enrolled in school and made a best friend named Erica. Over the winter break, we moved from the suburbs into Memphis proper, and I went back to second grade after Christmas at a different school. I never saw Erica again. At my new school, everyone knew each other. Everyone but me.

I made another new best friend—a few of them, actually: one who loved her sticker album as much as I treasured mine and was willing to trade scratch-and-sniffs to fill out our collections, and another who lived down the street and could walk to my house, where we sang along to her mother’s Barry Manilow cassettes on my front porch using sticks as microphones. My family stayed in that house longer than we had stayed anywhere before. As years passed, my friends and I grew from little kids to preteens. We had fights and fell out, then got back together.

When my mother told me we had to move again, I was in seventh grade. I should have seen it coming but I didn’t. I took it hard. We stood in front of the fireplace in our den, and she began, “We’ve always thought we might have one more move . . .” as I nodded, thinking, Unfair, unfair, unfair. I’d thought Memphis was it, our final home, the place we got to stay. I’d thought these were the friends I’d get to keep. Later, I found an index card on which she’d written notes: “Always thought—one more.”

I cried about that move. I resented having to leave Memphis. But I also knew I had no control over the situation. I went to the goodbye parties my friends threw me, and we took Polaroids of each other to keep as mementos, but at no point did I throw a fit or scream, “I’m not going!” Like a fainting spell, it was going to happen whether I fought it or not. Might as well accept it and go peacefully.



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In Memphis, I once fainted while my grandmother was visiting from Alabama. She called it “the vapors.” She’s got the vapors, she said. I didn’t know that was an old-timey term for fainting, so I was confused. I hadn’t smelled anything before I blacked out. What vapors?



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My parents said Augusta, Georgia, the town where my father had grown up, was the right place for him to start his own medical practice at last, but I couldn’t picture living there. I knew it only from visiting my grandparents during the Masters golf tournament once every few years. We had taken road trips there, when my brother and I would splash around in my grandparents’ pool with the children of my father’s five younger siblings. As the oldest of all the cousins, I often got bored hanging out with the little kids, and I’d wander upstairs to find my grandfather’s collection of Stephen King paperbacks.

When we arrived in Augusta that summer, my mother arranged an introduction to two girls my age. She dropped me off at the Augusta Mall, and I soon found myself sitting with two strangers before a slice of greasy pizza too large for its paper plate. After lunch, we cruised the department store perfume counters, spritzing and waving. Should we go to Banana Republic? Oh, definitely. You like belts? I like belts! Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.

Things were fine.



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I fainted in Augusta with some regularity. I once fainted in my room while I was doing homework, smack right onto my algebra. When I woke up, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My face looked like wax, white and shiny.

After making it through high school, I selected Davidson College in North Carolina with all the anywhere-but-here intention of a senior who’s just ready to get out. But once I got there, I imprinted on it like a baby duck. I had attended six different schools growing up—none of which I chose—but this one was mine. This town was mine. These people were mine. The modular bed/desk/wardrobe/loft combo in the dorm room I shared with a soft-spoken anthropology major from South Carolina was mine. I made the best friends of my life, and although we all knew it would be over in four years, at least we all knew. It wasn’t just me who would have to leave. Everyone would be shaken back out into the world at the same time, and until then, we were in this together.