Fifteen years ago, I was doing lines of cocaine in a port-a-potty at a Metallica concert back when you could get tickets for cheap and drugs for even cheaper. I backpacked through Europe with nothing but twenty dollars and a used guidebook and dyed my hair every spectrum of the rainbow. And now here I was, shopping in a Whole Foods in North Carolina with my husband of five years and a daughter at home.
When I was younger, I had promised myself I would never end up like my parents, trapped in some suburb with a minivan, carbon copies of who they had been. Smoking cigarettes in an empty parking lot, I told my friends I was moving to New York and never looking back. In an ironic twist, my worst nightmare had come true and here I was, living in a house with a fenced-in lawn and a patio and I had never been happier.
“Do you want to buy any sushi?” my husband, Chris, asks.
I nod and he vanishes into the aisles of the grocery store, his sleeves of tattoos highlighted by the yellow fluorescent lights. We had met at a party I never planned on attending and we were both a little clueless and very drunk. We slow danced to Nirvana before making out in a bathroom stall where I scribbled my number on his arm. Now he’s seven years sober and I drink coffee instead of vodka.
  Everything is slower now but it’s the kind of slow that comes in shades of Sunday mornings and childhood sunsets. We have a dog named Beowulf and a daughter named Kate and everything is smothered in the words “I love you”, even the walls where family photos now hang instead of music records.
We take part in small rebellions. Kate’s room is black instead of pink and we drive an old Corvette instead of a minivan. We drive with our windows rolled down and the radio blaring, screaming to heavy metal at the top of our lungs. Sometimes I think I miss aspects of my old life but then Kate will show me something she drew in school or Chris will smile at me from across a grocery aisle and all my nostalgia disappears.
Chris asks me if there’s anything else we need to buy and I tell him we have everything on our list. We check out and head home where our daughter greets us with a bear hug and the dog licks our toes and everything is warm and slow and perfect.