Soufflé a la Julia Child

and moving backward

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I think I’ve been moving backward.

I was thinking about this a lot as I slowly, angrily, contemplatively walked behind those people doing the “resort shuffle” at our hotel in Hawaii. We were there with my in-laws, and I never got used to that almost aggressively slow pace — each flip and flop accentuated by the smack of the ocean water dripping from the bottoms of people’s feet.

My six month old niece had fewer meltdowns than I did on the island.

I cried more on the flight back from Hawaii than I did on our family flights to Phoenix when I was five.

While we were in Hawaii, we went snorkeling at a place called Shark’s Cove, which my husband assured me had been falsely named in an Iceland-Greenland-like anti-marketing ploy. I spent the morning while my in-laws got ready researching exactly how many sharks had been seen at Shark’s Cove. I made a joke about this to the family as they gathered their snorkel sets. My sister-in-law asked if I get a little bit anxious. I lied, laughing, and said “Yeah.” Because, really, I get a lot a bit anxious. More so now than I have in years. I get anxious now like I did when I was a teenager.

Like many people, my social skills have slipped since March of 2020. When I packed up my apartment and moved home, away from the city, to restart and to find a sense of normalcy during the Pandemic, I must’ve left those and my confidence behind tucked away in some dark and dusty corner of the closet with a few paperclips and some French fry crumbs.