ADVANCE PRAISE
“These essays travel far—from New Zealand to Chicago to India—charting, all the way, tangled origins, colonial legacies, the intricate shadings of truth and mythology. With warmth, curiosity, and lyrical intelligence, Toni Nealie keenly parses out the very human reverberations of dispersal, rupture, unraveling, and arrival.”
—PEGGY SHINNER,
AUTHOR OF YOU FEEL SO MORTAL
“[Toni Nealie] takes her reader through lush landscapes, gives us glimpses into life in New Zealand, and brings us directly into her home, into her garden. Her writing is evocative and meditative, asking the reader to question the world she lives in, we live in, right alongside her as she questions it.”
—MARGINALIA
“Nealie is both profound and poetic; a brilliant thinker. Reflecting on her own experience stepping from one country to another, one life to another, she writes: “Books can’t really tell you how to chart your emotional terrain, how to circumnavigate the currents of loss and longing.” For me, The Miles Between Me did just that. It challenges us to examine our very own heart.”
—MEGAN STIELSTRA,
AUTHOR OF ONCE I WAS COOL
“These lovely essays of exile and home explore the inner life—what the author calls “our internal night music.” Each piece unfolds slowly and moves to unexpected terrain, like life itself often does. This is a moving meditation on womanhood, motherhood, sisterhood, and how the self and “the other” depend on who is looking, and from which direction.”
—AVIYA KUSHNER,
AUTHOR OF THE GRAMMAR OF GOD
CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2016.
First Edition
Copyright © 2016 by Toni Nealie
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948129
ISBN 978-1940430812
Cover images © Toni Nealie
Author photo © Bruce Sheridan
Design by Alban Fischer
Edited by Naomi Huffman and Catherine Eves
FOR MY FAMILY
CONTENTS
UNRAVELING
Trailing
On the Rights and Privileges of Being an Alien
The Dark-Skinned Dispenser of Remedies
Meditations on Brownness
On Autoimmunity
Unraveling
BEQUEATHED
Rupturing
Blooming for Deserving Eyes
On Theft
A Regret
Rodents
Dreamtime
The Displeasure of the Table
Bequeathed
THE MILES BETWEEN ME
The Sediment of Fear
The Roar of Distance
Moth Trap
Dispersal
The Miles Between Me
“We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I’”
—SIMONE WEIL
I LIKE TO fly. Space and time dissipate with the vapor trail. Bubble-wrapped solitude, headphones, and a book. Deliciously detached. One weekend I flew from Chicago to London to celebrate a family wedding. Eight hours without commitment. The weightlessness of traveling in silvery air, floating without my mother-wife carapace.
The pilot announced our flight path “across” to London. I’ve always thought of going “up” to London, after flying so many times there from my native land, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Why do we still call the South Pacific down and Europe up? On a globe, a mapmaker positions north and south, but Earth’s spin renders arbitrary these irrefutable points. Ancients knew better than to settle into the simplicity of up and down: the Roman goddess Fortuna, “she who revolves around the year,” rattled mortals on her wheel of providence. Knowing that today’s luck could be tomorrow’s fall kept humans aware of life’s mutability.
My own life flipped topsy-turvy when I moved from the Southern Hemisphere to America in 2001. My personal coordinates seemed knocked off-kilter, the solid self I thought I possessed became unformed. For a while I cleaved to London as kind of a nest. My eldest sister and her family lived there, my only family in this hemisphere. I’d spent three years living there in my twenties and had visited many times since. London’s muted pigeon-gray light, its drizzle, and pink brick became familiar beauty. So it became “across,” a half-way house, until slowly, imperceptibly, incrementally, Chicago became “home,” and I transferred my allegiance to wide pavements, big blue skies, yellow and red brick.
On the plane, as it creaked and swayed up through the cumuli, a loud voice sliced through my thoughts. “Hey, I’m Lisa.” A willowy woman in yoga pants folded herself into an improbable lotus position on the seat next to me. She thrust out a hand. “Are you on business or pleasure?” Taking her hand, I removed my headphones. Lisa’s husband had a job in London and wanted to explore Europe for a few years. She was joining him for a two-week reconnoiter of the city. Should she move there? The blue skies of Colorado versus grey clouds. Giving up her jobs: child psychologist and yoga teacher. All those years of education—for what? Uncertainty, an unfamiliar culture. What should she do?
It posed a dilemma for her, as it
