I was tossing and turning in bed, half asleep and half awake. Worrying. I want Eric and I to start building the Miami place, I want a real home, that we own, to call our own. I want a permanent place, where I imagine my future, so I can feel safe.

Eric rather wait to start building, he wants to be sure all the final payments from his former employer come-in as expected. He doesn’t see the threats I do – what happens if bird flu breaks-out? If my long covid comes back? If we hit financial distress and need to declare bankruptcy –FL protects homestead assets from creditors. Won’t we be better off with our own home then?

In my semi dream state I am saying to him I want a place that makes us safe. But then I woke more fully and remembered something Mae Neecha had asked me, “when have I ever been safe?”  I just want something that makes me ‘feel safe’. But does something actually make me safe?

Long ago, I got a jury summons and I did everything right responding, sending proof that I was not eligible at that time to serve. I felt in my heart I had followed the rules, sent the right paperwork, I was safe. Only to get a call later that I had been in violation. They said they never got my paperwork, or they lost it. Either way, I was so upset. I felt so vulnerable. I believed I had done everything right to guarantee safety, to avoid violations. But some issue with the mail, some clerical error beyond my control, was all it took put me in danger.

I have an arbitrary criteria, this set of 4 walls – not the ones elsewhere – they will make me safe. Keep me on the side of housed and not homeless. As long as I am there, no one can ‘get me’. It’s like kids playing hide and seek or tag –just designating over ‘this line in the sand ‘safe’. Touching this tree ‘safe’. It is just criteria of my own creation. It is a balm to what worries me, the particular obsession I have at this moment, over this thing or that. None of which are able to actually keep me safe.

I look at all the times I thought my home made me safe and in reality it made me the opposite –it put me at risk. My place in Greenwich was a safe haven from NY, till it poisoned me with the construction across the street. My apartment in SF was meant to be safe from becoming a NYer, but it put me at risk trying to figure out how to move out of it in the middle of covid. I bought the mami place to make me safe –from inflation, from not having a place to stash our wealth, only to now worry we will lose money on it as I bought it at such a market peak.

Where or what is safe in a world where situations and circumstances change all the time? How can I be safe when I don’t have control – not of my body, my home, my fate. I expend so much  work and stress worrying about securing safety , but when have I actually been safe?