Building My Life Novels & Stories

Those are the simple facts of it and they are also the whole of it and everything in between them is what a life looks like when you decide, very deliberately, to build it correctly from the ground up. I am fifty-four years old and I have two lives behind me, one short and wrong and one long and exactly mine. I have a husband who chose me every day for twenty-five years with the specific intention of someone who understood what choosing was. I have a daughter who is going to rebuild how we think about the spaces we build for people.

"What do you believe instead?" I thought about Lyanna's face on her birthday, examining Juniper's hair with complete dedication. I thought about Owen's expression when he said 100 years and meant every syllable. I thought about my mother humming in the kitchen in the morning, a low continuous sound she had picked up from a husband she had loved and lost too young, and that I had apparently inherited without knowing it. "I believe," I said slowly, "that the life you build around the work matters as much as the work itself. That the people you come home to are not secondary to the purpose. They are the purpose."

It hadn't simply happened to her the way weather happens to a city. I'd built it. Deliberately, carefully, more carefully than anything else I'd ever made, more carefully than the brand or the legal cases that had once threatened to swallow my whole life or the collection with my own name stitched into every seam. This was the thing I'd built most carefully of all. The thing that meant my daughter never had to wonder, not for a single morning of her short life, whether the ground under her feet was actually solid.

I could imagine the scene, Roman Ashford, a man who could buy entire countries, struggling with a pot of boiling water and a bag of flour. *Why do you need a witness for terrible pasta?* I asked. *Because he's convinced he's improved,* she replied. *Has he?* * Moderately * *I'll be there,* I sent it. I put the phone down and looked around my apartment. The sun was finally starting to bleed over the edge of the buildings, catching the chrome of the kitchen and the worn leather of my notebook. This was my life. I had spent so long building it as a fortress, a place to retreat to when the world got too loud. But looking at the text on the screen, I realized it was more than that. I had built th

I watched him do it and felt something tender and slightly frightening move through me. Then he spoke. "I have been a man who built things," he said. "I built a company and I built a family and I thought for most of my life that the building was the point." He looked at Eloise. "She tried to tell me otherwise for forty years and I was not always good at listening." A small sound from the table. "I am listening now. What I have learned is that the building was never the point. The people who filled the thing you built were always the point."

Kade made a note in the margin of the quarterly review with the small, precise gesture he always made when he'd found something worth recording. And I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee and my notebook and the beginning of whatever came next, in the particular, warm, ordinary, entirely sufficient quality of a Saturday morning in a life that had been built honestly, one choice at a time, over sixteen years, and was still being built, and would continue to be built, for all the years that followed. This. Exactly, completely, without remainder, this. The daily choosing. The honest building. The love that showed up in the details and the details that added up to a life. And the life that wa

"We broke up four times." "Four times. And now look at us." I look around. Photos everywhere. The girls in various stages of growth. Our wedding photo. Clara and Marcus's wedding. Family photos. "We built this," I say. "Actually built it." "What did we build exactly?" "A life. A family. A home. Everything we didn't think we could have." "Because we were too damaged?" "Because we didn't know how. But we learned." "We're still learning." "Always learning. That's the point."

But I had decided to give myself the opportunity to find out. For the first time, I was making plans that had nothing to do with leaving someone else’s house. I was beginning to think about what I could build in my own life, and the thought no longer felt impossible.

A man who respects a locked door is a man I can work with. "If you ever build something real," he said, standing, tucking the folder under his arm, "of your own, I'd follow you." He left. I sat at my folding table in a room that smelled like fabric softener and thought about the word build, and how it sounded different now than it used to. Smaller. Truer. Like a brick instead of a speech. That night, with the city going quiet outside and my body doing the heavy, strange work of growing four people, I opened a cheap notebook I'd bought at the drugstore for ninety-nine cents.

I stand on the pavement in Paris with the printout in my bag and three futures assembling themselves somewhere inside me and I start laughing, the real kind, the helpless kind, and my mother starts laughing too, and we stand there, her in San Diego and me on a pavement in the eleventh arrondissement, laughing at the absolute enormity of my life. I go home, open my laptop, and start a new document titled, simply, Bellamy Inc. If I am building something, I am building it all for three.