Wendy and I sat at a round banquette in a nondescript hotel dining room designed to seat two hundred, but empty save for us and two men in white dress shirts many tables away. We’d picked a location just off the 405 in Orange County, halfway between where she stayed while in town, and westside LA where I lived. A few years ago, we might have ventured to South Coast Plaza to relive some of the shopping expeditions of our youth, but neither of us had the will or the stamina.

Since Wendy had moved out of California, we saw each other once a year, but with Covid, it had been several.

She looked older and frailer, though she still had the blonde bob with bangs she’d had since the day we met in fourth grade. She’d just come through a life-threatening illness, and I was relieved to see her enjoy a meal.

We finished our rice bowls, dishes cleared, check waiting, no dessert on the horizon. Wendy had shared the harrowing details of her surgery and recovery. We’d caught up on spouses, family members, reminisced about childhood. So much of our relationship hinged on those reminiscences. Still, we lingered at the table. Who knew when, or if, we’d see each other again?

Wendy started to cry. Her face collapsed before her words registered.

“I want you to be in heaven with me,” she said.

I took her hand, which felt cold and thin, and my own eyes filled. When Wendy cried, I cried. Wendy wanted to save me, again, just as she had when I was a lonely kid in elementary school and she became my first best friend.

In 1975, I look straight at the camera for a school photo for the last time: asymmetrical and exuberant in a red turtleneck and ruffled corduroy jumper, still unconscious about the cleft lip scar, mine from infancy, my hair still silky and wavy, not yet kinked by puberty. I liked school, that place of safety. Its Roman pillars upheld my belief in a just universe and in my uniqueness.

In middle school, things would be different. The low-slung halls of concrete block would thrum with subterranean class warfare, jocks versus potheads. I did not play sports, but was a known exotic, suspect. I would get braces and operations, quixotic attempts at repair. A beautiful boy named Vaughn, destined for a coverall with his name embroidered in a blue oval, found me easy prey. His turquoise eyes held mine as I made up a test after school.

Man on top, woman in the kitchen—Italians love to dominate. Food was a religion in my husband Gar’s family, like the one they pretended to practice on Sundays. But this one was for real.

Gar’s family was everything my family was not. Big, loud, colorful, smoking like troopers, and talking with their hands and laughing and eating with abandon. Food was the epicenter of their lives, an expression of love, a big hug wrapped in marinara and tied with a Chianti bow. Simple food, well prepared, with utmost respect for the ingredients. Tomatoes, basil, garlic, pasta. They lived it, breathed it, savored it. What did I know? I came from a place of stringy pot roast and tuna noodle casseroles.

Affection, generosity, amore, all rolled into one. A little red sauce for the soul. When a regular American girl marries a nice Sicilian boy, as I did many years ago, she’d better learn how to cook.

In a dusty guitar case in the corner of my closet, among boxes of thirty-year-old photographs, rests my most sacred possession. I first found it a quarter-century ago, in 1999, in an arts and crafts room while sifting through magazines with soft-tipped scissors, searching for clips for a collage during hospitalization for suicidal depression. Among wrinkled copies of Time Magazine and Vogue emerged an anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, and there, squeezed between pages 76 and 77, was the foldout black-and-white poster of Artist of the Decade, Kurt Cobain.

On that long ago afternoon, the expression on his face grabbed hold of me. Unusually well-shaven with combed but still unwashed shoulder-length hair, blonde like mine, Cobain was contemplative, not smiling but not pouting. Piercing eyes that stared out from a long-dead past, like La Gioconda, stole my breath. I turned to see if anyone had noticed my discovery, then fled to the corner of the room and began to weep, clutching the old poster to my chest. I had been living at the hospital for two weeks—it was not uncommon for patients to be overcome with emotion.

Kurt Cobain had been dead for five years, but his music was one of the few things keeping me alive, immunizing me to a world where I felt that I didn’t belong.

Now, more than twenty-five years later, the deafening roar of his guitar and the cathartic rasp of his yells continue to pulse through my veins.

My compass once pointed to dogs, but it has spun out. I’m undone.

How does a lifelong dog person, middle-aged and set in her ways, fall in love with her cat? Can I even call myself a dog person anymore? This has amounted to no less than a watershed change to my self-identity.

The cat I fell for is not even a new cat. We’ve had her for twelve years. Nor is she the first cat I’ve lived with—the seventh. Nor again is she a cat we sought out as a pet. Not at all. She came into our lives as a ratscaring device. Years ago, I read of Kolkata’s Karni Mata Temple, where rats are considered sacred. Priest and congregant alike will pamper them, and their numbers have metastasized. The intersection outside the temple, said to be overrun with scrabbling businessmen and rats, has gently simmered in my imagination.

A decade ago, a park near my home hid a subterranean palace for vermin. A warren of tunnels and perhaps furnished suites formed a complex, interconnected community under the park’s entire city block. When bulldozers came to redevelop the park, the rats fled.

A month after our firstborn died, Shakil and I were struggling to get into wet suits on the shores of Palm Jumeirah beach. The doctor suggested it would be good for us to move on. So, like typical South Asian expats living in Saudi Arabia, we vacationed to the glitzy artificial islands shaped like a palm tree to forget about our grief. Maybe the garish over-the-top glamor of Dubai would put a Band-Aid over our gashing wound.

Shakil fit into a medium, but my post-pregnancy body was unforgiving. I opted for a larger size hoping it would be a modest fit, but the garment clung to every curve, highlighting my deflated balloon of a belly. When I tucked my hair into my hijab, I shuddered at the contrast of my fitted wet suit and modestly covered head. Why was I doing this again? I didn’t know how to swim and never had any interest in scuba diving. Normally, I’d be scared of drowning, a shark attack, stinging of stingrays, inking of octopus, sticking of jellyfish, and pulmonary embolism. Since the passing of our daughter Mehak, death and other lesser inconveniences had lost their edge.