The last time I went to Barnes & Noble was the day my husband got his second vaccine. We stopped to peruse on our way home. We ended up walking out of there with just one book, Anthony Bourdain’s final memoir/travel book. 

There’s a lot in that paragraph. I’m going to break it down.

The last time I went to Barnes & Noble was the day my husband got his second vaccine. – I keep hearing about how getting vaccinated feels like the first step towards normalcy, in our household it’s so much more than that. I found out I was pregnant in January 2020. I terminated my pregnancy in April 2020. From April 2020 until, well, now-ish, we have marked time by the appearance of my period. Every month that went by was another month in a somewhat locked down state and another month with no baby. My husband and I getting vaccinated was a way to break away from that cruel, cruel cycle (pun 100% intended).

We stopped to peruse on our way home. – I think we have both fantasized about sharing our love for books with our children one day. One of the only things that we and other people bought for our hypothetical children were books. Those books sit on one of our bookshelves now, just waiting to be given to the right child in our lives. No books bought for our future children now. Instead, we have the time to meander. We browse. We do whatever the fuck we want. We may not be sharing our lives with our own little ones, but we are still living our lives in a fulfilling and full way.

We ended up walking out of there with just one book, Anthony Bourdain’s final memoir/travel book. – How fucking great was Anthony Bourdain? He wasn’t perfect. Maybe he wasn’t even the kind of person that we should idolize. I know he would say he wasn’t. But Bourdain did so many of the things I want to do. He saw as much of the world as possible and explored the differences we have as humans and the similarities that unite us. If we had given birth to a boy, his middle name was going to be Anthony. We chose names that represented people that we wanted our children to be like. We won’t have a child who travels widely, loves deeply, and talks openly.

We’ll just have to do it ourselves.