Before You Say Goodbye

chapter one

☀

song for the chapter: Coming Home - Leon Bridges 

☀

There was nothing worse that biting into a chocolate chip cookie and tasting a raisin.

Alas, I was experiencing the bitter taste of disappointment firsthand, immediately distancing myself from the cookie I had gotten from a local dessert stand on the beachfront. I wasn't sure what overcame my desire for a cookie in the middle of the day without even eating breakfast or lunch first, but my nerves were wracking my brain. I couldn't see straight or make very smart decisions, it looked like. I was nervous to my core.

I spotted a trash can on the dock immediately and threw away my cookie with contempt. Not a very great start to my summer living oceanside in North Carolina. Not to mention the humidity that was making my shirt stick to my neck in ways so irritating, I couldn't even fathom the right words.

My suitcase handle in one hand, I rolled it over to a bench facing the ocean and sat down, stretching my legs. I was on a massive concrete pier floating over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for someone. Someone who I had not even met.

I swatted away a thread of hair blocking my vision that was being held like glue to my forehead due to the unfortunate amount of sweat on me. Seagulls cawed above my head as I clawed for my phone in my purse. The ocean roared in front of me, voices of screaming, giddy children playing tag on the sand ringing in the air. I immediately had the picture of my grandmother on my phone in seconds.

It would be so strange meeting my grandmother for the first time in my twenty-seven years of life, but hey, this was the summer of getting out of my comfort zone.

Of course, I had met both sets of my grandparents before. However, I was adopted, so I had only met my adopted sets of grandparents, and I had only one surviving adopted-grandparent currently. I was adopted when I was about two years old, so I had no memory of any of my biological family.

And yet here I was, a suitcase full of a month's worth of outfits, here to spend time with my biological grandmother, with whom I had never met, in the wake of my biological mother's recent death.

Heavy, right?

I was not always planning on meeting my real family this way. In truth, I had always known that they existed — that I was, inherently, plucked from the arms of Other people, before I had gotten to know my mom and dad, the one's who raised me. I had always known of these figurative Other people, but I had never once had enough interest in them. Why should I? I was raised with a decent life, in a brownstone in the Upper West Side, with my children's book publisher of a mother and a defense-attorney father. As an only adopted-child that was my parent's only solution for having a child — in which my mother was unfortunately unable to have, and thus, moi — I had no complaints or ever felt that I was ever starved for attention. To put it simply, my childhood was a textbook, average portrait of a family in Manhattan.

Afterwards, I had no problem being put through Columbia and graduating top of my journalism class. I had dabbled in law, but couldn't stomach the idea of having to defend against such absolutely heinous crimes, so I had instead secured a very comfy position post-grad as a new travel journalist for the New York Daily. I had a life that was good and true.

And then the letter came.

It arrived when I was home visiting from my apartment in Brooklyn. I would often go home every other weekends or so to taste my dad's cooking. He was Russian, but my mother was Italian, so in order to impress his in-laws, he dedicated his life's work to mastering the art of Italian cuisine. And he achieved it, and thus, I never overpaid for any Italian food in Manhattan — instead, I simply went home whenever I craved it.