Traveling through memory for the unhappy place. From a school bus turned home in humid, mosquito and snaked rural Tennessee, to being forced to move into your big girl bed when your baby brother stole your crib, climbing in and kicking until your parents rushed into see why the baby was crying, to hiding from your third grade teacher under the dark, cozy, quiet table with the half-wall behind it, to trapped in the kitchen with your drunk Nana slurring her words, to the loneliness of junior high + high school, loud hallways, screeching lockers, and the overwhelming scent of puberty. 

Feeling trapped. That’s your unhappy place. The 7th grade guidance counselor’s words stuck on repeat: “There are two ways to look at things. Glass half full or glass half empty. You’re a glass half empty person.”

Thanks for the update. How could it be anything else when that unhappy place is in your mind?

Don’t forget your childhood home, trapping you in dependence. Sneaking out the window to nowhere. Skipping school to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes at Classé Café, in complicit Amherst, MA, hanging with college students who exhibited their freedom.

Runaway to Boston one school morning only to call your grandpa to pick you up. Visits during the summer and on weekends. The chlorine smell from Nana + Grandpa’s pool, crisp, burnt grass dry and poking under your footstep, the burn of the hot July sun. A constant, Nana’s cigarettes, smoke filling the air, choking your senses.

The sacrifice of friendships and relationships where you put your needs last, to classes, courses, and jobs, and being bored by the mundane, to looking 14, using a fake ID to get into a 21+ club and not being allowed to go in. You yearned to feel the beat thumping through your body, as you dance the night away, with friends, elbowing some men away, sometimes making a sultry connection.

Those were your formative years. Threads through time: tangled in relationships where you often lost yourself, drawn into patterns you didn’t know how to escape. Longing for elsewhere, always carrying a quiet ache. The overwhelm that creeps in, unannounced.

That unhappy place actually follows you, sorry to say. 

Never satisfied, disappointed, overwhelmed, frustrated. It arrives in a moment as the inviting aroma of brewing coffee turns sour when the half & half separates, your face cringing, knowing the taste will be sour, not sweet from the cream, as it should, filling your taste buds with heaven. 

Unhappy when in those moments of love, lust, and bonding to a misunderstood word turning into a fight through a bed of sweat; loud, angry words piercing your ears, your heart.

Struggling to pay bills, loneliness, never reaching a goal. But you thought you knew your unhappy place— but it all changed when you read in your portal the EMG spurted out a suspicion of a terminal disease.

All of a sudden, all of those unhappy places became memories to hold onto —deep, ingrained memories to reexplore.

How everything changes when the worst thing happens. Now you know your unhappy place lands in your body as it dies away, with the twitches and pulsations on your body, the slow dissolve of muscle memory.