It’s just a grocery store, right? There is nothing sentimental about visiting, or not visiting, a fluorescent-lighted, linoleum-floored, generic chain store with sale signs and cash registers beeping and the same products that can be found anywhere, everywhere.

This morning, I woke with a smooth, gray, heavy stone in the bottom of my heart. It feels like the pain I experience at the nadir of a depression cycle. It’s almost debilitating. My limbs do not want to move. I’m forcing down food and drink that I’d rather spit out. My blood is sludge and my body grinds and I’m fighting drowsiness.

It would make sense that this is the wall I’ve feared I would hit, with all of this cleaning, packing, hauling, dismantling, pushing my body to its limits each day so that my muscles don’t have time to heal and I wake each morning weaker and achier than the day before. Last night, I couldn’t clench my hands into fists because they had held a screwdriver and a sponge past their point of tolerance. Surely there is a wall and I’ve smashed into it. That must be it.

But that isn’t it.

It would make sense that I’ve been losing too many things, sending them away and saying good-bye, one by one, and seemingly taking it in stride. I’ve cried a little, but on the whole, I’ve been eerily okay with it all. Surely there is a tipping point, a straw that makes it all break and crumble. Surely this small thing, a run to the grocery store, could not be responsible for feeling that the gods turned up the gravity.

But it makes sense.

I’ve shopped there for twelve years. James was six and in full manifestation of ADHD. I would move up and down the aisles, trying to envision myself as the nucleus of an atom, with a whizzing electron in my orbit. I would try to shop when there weren’t many other customers who would be bothered by his enjoyment of running and falling and sliding on the floor, his spin-dancing. A nucleus can exert considerable binding force on an electron, and I wasn’t that parent who doesn’t try to control her kid, but usually, contained chaos was all I could manage.

When James was nine and ten, we played the game where we would pass a misplaced item on the shelf and one of us would point it out to the other, and we would laugh at the randomness of the juxtaposition. He was just old enough for me to permit him to leave my side and go put it back without forming, in three seconds, the certainty that he had been abducted and was already in someone’s car, speeding away from me forever. He loved putting things back. He knew where every single item was. He loved the game.

When he was twelve, he told me the things he would like and stayed home, turning back to his video games.

When he was sixteen, he told me he wasn’t allowed to check me out in his lane, because I’m family, but that he could bag my groceries.

Somehow, I became the “cool mom” and the teenagers all want me in their lines. The adults all want to tell me something funny James said or did or a reason they’re proud of him. At home, I point out when his work pants are fraying between the legs and I order him new ones.

Sometimes the goat cheese crumbles are buy-one-get-two-free and we have it in salad with mandarin oranges and chicken and almond slices.

Once, I thought I’d broken the coffee-grinding machine. I spent twenty minutes helping the manager troubleshoot, and we diagnosed the problem. It was the electrical outlet above the top of the shelf. Someone flipped a breaker and I was able to coarse-grind the beans for homemade cold brew. We high-fived.

The Sunday after I’d been released from the psych unit at the hospital, I did the shopping. The disparity was surreal, coming twenty-four hours after I hadn’t even been allowed to have shoelaces, but the asparagus and ice cream and ready-to-microwave mashed potatoes were so mundane and tangible and … normal. They were an anchor that kept me in the real world.

During COVID lockdown, James kept coming home late from work. There were time discrepancies and they concerned me. I looked into it and learned that he was buying fresh produce after his work shift for his best friend’s parents, who couldn’t go out in public places, and dropping it on their doorstep. They’d leave cash out for him. He never wanted to tell us.

The deli subs are pretty good, especially the ones on cheese bread.

Places don’t leave me. I can still close my eyes and wander around the offices of former jobs, see the names on the mailboxes and file folders and smell the hand soap in the bathrooms. I can peruse the border art and posters of former classrooms and turn to the right pages of church hymnals, ready to stand and sing. I can walk in these places as settings in dreams. When the raw edges heal over, I know I will walk the hallways of the schools I just left.

But this place? It’s just a grocery store.