Re-release: In praise of a place apart

A love letter to Occoquan, VA

Jun 02, 2025

Written October 2023

In October 2020, I searched Airbnb for a full apartment, contactless check-in, and thorough cleaning. I think I may have brought disinfectant on my first trip, along with enough food to last the whole time.

I hadn’t seen my family in months. My new family, my L’Arche family, still overwhelmed me sometimes. I was getting paid every two weeks and spending almost nothing—buying books, or occasional takeout, online.

The first trip’s impetus was an online conference, one I had attended in-person previously. I want space and quiet to participate. I also want to get the hell out of Dodge, but there were limited options, on what felt at the time like an isolated L’Arche island in a sea of Covid-19.

The place was exactly what I only sort-of knew I needed.

A comfy couch under a window overlooking the river, which was pronounced Awk-Oh-Kwon, not, Oh-Kah-Kwon, as I had called it because I’d only read it. A back porch overhanging said river, with a tree whose leaves were only just turning yellow in the October coolness. A comfy bed.

The occoquan river at sunset. Cars are parked on the pavement on one side of the river, the other is trees. A white motorboat is docked. — The view from said window

I learn, there, about what my body craves when it’s alone. Stillness. Books. No one to need anything from me.

I love it.

I visit another two, maybe three times, in the coming year. I recall leaving from L’Arche at 11 pm, or leaving the Airbnb at 6 am, to fit it around my work schedule. I recall cooking in the little kitchen and the smoke alarm blaring over Maggie Rogers’ voice. I recall joining zooms and writing. Mostly, I recall sitting. Resting. Being.

On that couch, in that bed, on that porch hanging over the river, I read Olive Kitteridge, then Olive, Again, The Burgess Boys, My Name is Lucy Barton. Laziness Does Not Exist. Why Fish Don’t Exist. Saving Time. Some cookbooks. A book about restorative yoga poses. A book about container gardening.

Find these books on Bookshop*

I watch 20th Century Women, Lady Bird, Little Women, Women Talking. So many women! But on brand, since I love women and women directors and movies and sitting alone in a dark room and paying attention to them.

Out the open window on an early visit, I see a toddler with a head shaped just like my little brother’s was when he was tiny, all oblong and round, with blond-brown hair, and I feel a sudden homesickness. He is a teenager now, but I can remember running my hand through his hair when he was that small.

As I’m judging literally from on high, trying to figure out if they’ll even put masks on before they go indoors to eat somewhere, I hear a stranger’s laugh, one of the adults with the kid, and I realize I hadn’t heard real-life laughter from someone who doesn’t live with me. Not for months.

I’ve booked the same place in October 2023, despite having had my own apartment for almost two years. Why? I sort of want to say goodbye; I’ll be moving in three months.

I also sort of want to go somewhere where I don’t have memories of watching my friend die slowly, or of helping my other friends and colleagues through watching their friend die slowly. I want to go somewhere safe, and distant.

The people I work most closely with, also, had all but directed me to take some time off.

We’d buried Charles the week before.

On this, my grief vacation, it takes a day and a half for me to let go of the clench in my jaw. My teeth backed right up into one another, the ache of it radiating down my neck. I take part of an edible, but it doesn’t do much.

This time around, I actually enter stores. No mask. Most are empty. Everyone I encounter either politely ignores me entirely or speaks as if answering a series of increasingly specific interview questions.

The witchy crystal shop: “Every year around this time, I start to get the feeling of thankfulness and forgiveness. Like, even before I moved here and Thanksgiving was a thing, I could always feel it. We didn’t have much growing up, but Christmas was special because we made it so…”

The artisan tea shop: “White teas are less often in stock that black teas, for sure. I’m actually not sure what the difference in caffeine level is. I know we have a decaf black tea somewhere around here…”

The empty gelato shop: “The flavor of chocolate is actually significantly more complex than that of wine, you have more flavor receptors for it. And any single-origin dark chocolate you buy is going to taste completely different depending on the region. Vanilla too!”

It’s the best gelato I’ve ever had. I tell the gelato guy this as I come in for more the next day. More, the day after that. I tell him I’m visiting from out of town with no agenda but to sit around and eat gelato.

I imagine telling him what it is I’m thinking. “Uh, my friend died, and he, uh. He liked ice cream.”

I don’t say it.

I also don’t say that I have been here before but never entered a building, except for the Airbnb across the street in which I have stayed on each visit.

The Airbnb where, earlier that day, in my spot on the couch reading Sarah Polley’s stunning memoir, Run Toward the Danger, I heard the couple above me arguing loudly. It’s an old building; I had been aware of other humans in it before. Anytime someone in the adjoining apartment, or the one above me, walks: the apartment shakes. Same with strong winds, with storms. And when I say the couple, here, what I really mean is someone who to me sounded like a man. I couldn’t even hear the other person; whether they were a child or a grown-up. I only heard increasingly agitated swearing and loud clattering.

I pictured, for a moment, walking up the winding back stairs and tapping on their porch door. “I heard loud noises, is everything okay?” I also pictured calling the police and probably hours later, watching them do it for me. I quickly nixed that idea for all the reasons why that idea should be nixed, but doing nothing felt like…doing nothing. Which is what I was learning how to be okay with, here, without people to take care of, other than me.

But I also think about someone I once knew, not showing up to work, no notice. Telling me the next day about her boyfriend putting his hands on her. Taking her phone, destroying her apartment. Things calming down. Then, again: no word. Four days later, a text: she’s okay. He took her phone and her car this time. No, she doesn’t need anything. Thank you.

I briefly consider what Charles’s response would be, if I’d asked him what to do.

“Tell ‘em, ‘You’re too loud!’” he’d yell, extremely loudly.

I stand right under the sound, right in front of the door, for minutes and minutes, just listening. It stops after a while. A few hours later when I go for my now-daily gelato, eating it on the porch, in the middle of the tree that was losing big, fat leaves daily, I hear them out on the porch above me. Smell cigarette smoke. It sounds like an apology. I am ready to watch the stairs until one of them comes down. But no one does.

That night, I take myself out to dinner next door. All the servers are women my age. I order baked ratatouille that tastes like a recipe I’d cook myself. I read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and sip my wine. Someone who I think is an owner or manager comes over, convinces me about dessert. I want her to ask me about why I’m here. I want her to comp my brownie. The people next to me are speaking French. Top 40 from about the last three years is playing: Noah Kahan, Ariana Grande, Miley Cirus. I like listening to the sounds. I finish my wine and order my dessert to go.

I walk around the park in the dark. Pass by two young guys, the hood of their car open, phone flashlights on. “You guys okay? Do you need any help?”

“No, that’s okay, ‘Preciate you asking, though.”

Re-release: In praise of a place apart

A love letter to Occoquan, VA

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