Where She Lived

I took a short drive today, trying to find the street where Asha moved, sometime in March or April, 2006; she had a room in what the media described as a "cozy house."  I realized tonight that I went down the wrong section of the street, which is divided in half by trees.  It is the only street in that section not mapped by Google Map's Street view, though I can see a little ways down it from Glen Arbor Road, which is mapped.  Her home is in a neighborhood that, during all the turbulent times I went through many years ago, I wished I could have lived in.  It seems a very safe, family-oriented area, on a bus line, easy for getting around, something I did not have in Lompico, when I often did not have a functional car for long periods of time.  When I have a bit of time on Friday, I am going to take a walk there.  It may be very emotional for me.  That house was her safe place, I think.  I'm in some ways glad it was not on Google Maps, as I might have sat behind my computer instead of taking a drive down that road.

What is happening for me now is that I am beginning to see more into Asha's life, to some degree.  She spent nearly the entirety of her pregnancy in that neighborhood.  One of my friends from Cabrillo College had a daycare place in that neighborhood; my daughter's best friend lived a couple of blocks away.  I have many ties to that general neighborhood.

My therapist (whom I really appreciate right now as a way to have an outlet for all the emotions coming up from this) said that one of the deeper reasons for this book is not only to honor Asha and her daughter, and try to assure they are not forgotten, but to return to the young woman I was, the just-grown-to-adulthood woman with a little child, who wanted to get away, to go anywhere with her child than where she was, to get away from the people whose lives she had fallen into, who did not want her around...that this book springs partially from that deeper well and all its attendancies.  So it is with writing: even nonfiction is definitely a two-way mirror.