I was slick with sweat in the steam room at King Spa when the woman sat down beside me. I was reading a paperback called “Rock Star,” written by romance queen Collins in the 1980s. I was trying to be Very Casual about my nakedness, and my reading of a tawdry 80s romance novel, which I had ordered from Amazon after seeing it on one of David Foster Wallace’s college syllabus for a class of mass-market fiction.

“I’ve never read her before,” I said. “This is an old book, I think.”

“I know, I read it when I was 18!” She laughed. Do I need to mention she was totally naked? It’s a funny thing to have a conversation while nude, because even if you are Very Casual, you can’t help but zero in on the soft mound of the breast, the pale white skin on the belly that never sees the sun. Women’s bodies are fascinating.

“Have you read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?” I asked her, because – I mean, why not?

“I’ve heard it’s amazing,” she said.

I’ve heard it’s terrible, but also kind of amazing.

I returned to the book I was reading, whose pages had become crinkly with steam and sweat, and which contained this line: Her breasts strained to escape the confines of her bra. But he teased some more, playing with her swollen nipples through the material, tracing intricate patterns of intent.

I had come out to King Spa to stop thinking for a while, to tune down the anxious noisemaker in my brain. So far, this book was just the trick.

“Have you read ‘Story of O”?” she asked me.

I had not.

Her eyes grew wide. “A classic. You have to read that.”

“I totally will.”

I spent a lot of my 37 years avoiding romance novels and avoiding situations that required me to be Very Casual about nakedness with another human being, and I understand completely why I did that.

But I’m glad that era is over now.

I found this journal while I was in college, sorting through dusty old keepsakes in my parents’ garage: A story I typed at the age of 7, a horror tale about a mother who gives birth to a devil child and must kill her, which I wrote in the seventh grade, shocking everyone (particularly my mom). I began writing stories as a little girl, partly because it was a language of comfort, and partly because my mother liked them. She never wanted us to buy her presents. “Make me something,” she would say in the days leading up to Christmas and Mother’s Day, and as a result she acquired an endless supply of woven God’s eyes, coupon booklets and questionable poetry.

My mother kept nearly everything I wrote growing up, which is common among parents, who tuck away little scraps of the child’s imagination as it blooms. But to me, this act was big, because it meant that someone out there wanted to listen, even before I had much to say.

Anyway, that journal entry of my mother’s became a joke between my college best friend Julie and me. “A very good baby,” Julie would tease me sometimes, patting my head when I did something clever, like spilling cheese pizza down my shirt. Julie was like my mother in those years, and I mean that in the sense that she looked a bit like my mother – a natural beauty not quite aware of her own radiance – but also that she took care of me. She drove me places. She lent me money when I needed it. It was her sink I threw up in when I was too drunk. I have always been drawn to women with a maternal streak. Teachers. Colleagues. Friends. Maybe it’s because I see my mother in them. Or maybe it’s because I like being mothered. (I am not certain those are different things.)

Sometime around the age of 13, I got in a huge fight with my mother. We did that back then. My rage was atomic, and as a way to exact revenge, I ripped up a binder full of these stories I had written her, and I threw them in the garbage. I take it all back. The look of anguish on her face when she saw those stories in the trash – well, I still think it might have been one of the meanest things I’ve ever done to someone. That night, I stayed up late wiping off coffee grounds and scotch-taping the pages back into place, trying to piece together the brokenness I had revealed in our lives.

Even now when I mention that binder, a shadow crosses my mother’s face. I have never known exactly why it makes her so sad. That I destroyed something so precious to her? Or that in order to get back at her, I would rip up parts of myself?

I can’t remember the last fight I had with my mom. Mostly what we do is talk, and laugh. There are so many details about her I find amusing. Once, when I was in college, I said, “Are you OK right now?” but I speak so fast she thought I said, “Are you a carrot now?” and so when she sees me looking blue, that’s what she asks me: Are you a carrot now?

A few years ago, she learned a handful of Spanish phrases, and ever since then, when she leaves a message for me, she says, “Hello Sarita. This is your mamacita.” I have told her that “mamacita” is how certain dudes refer to hot women. Hey, mamacita. What’s shaking, mamacita.

“I didn’t know that!” she said, but she keeps using it anyway. I laugh every time I hear those voicemails. I make faces like, “Isn’t she adorable?” even though usually, no one is around.

“I think Mother’s Day is hard for people,” my mom said the other day. She was sitting on my bed, and I had just tried on a dress I was wearing to a wedding that weekend. “I think it’s hard for people who don’t get along with their mothers, or who want to be a mother and can’t be.”

My mother is often thinking about other people. I inherited this from her. Sometimes what I feel most about my mother is guilt. Guilt that other people don’t get moms who are as kind and fully available. Guilt that I still have my mother when other people do not. Guilt that I will never live a day in my life wondering if she loved me. On the way to the wedding this weekend, I was reading Emily Nussbaum’s profile of “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, and I underlined a passage in the pages of the old crinkly magazine: “I’ve only recently realized that I have a radically different relationship with my parents than a lot of people,” she says, telling me she related strongly to memoirist Emma Forrest’s description of her mother as “the love of my life.”

I have never written a story about my mother. I don’t think I know how. Where would you start? Where would you end? It’s like writing a story about water, or air. You can’t say anything, because you want to say everything. She is a very good mother. I guess that covers the relevant ground.

Anyway, the experiment was not a failure. People did email me, and I had lovely and unexpected conversations about towns in Colorado and the upper peninsula of Michigan and Alabama and British Columbia and Florida. All these corners of the universe I never would have thought to visit where I now have friends. So first I want to say thank you to those people, for not making me feel like a fool in her party dress waiting for people who never arrive. And then I want to mention that my friend Jennifer recently engaged in her own scary experiment, and it inspired me to write a piece for Salon about how we use cell phones and communicate. You can read it here.

But part of being a good suburban American is that I feel comfortable in malls, especially this one, which is much fancier than most, and part of being 37 is no long worrying (except for a flash) what other people think about what you’re doing. What my New York friends would think is: Man, that’s why I’m never moving to Texas. What my New York friends would think is: Hell yeah. What my New York friends would think is: Who cares? Where did you get that sweet Boston T-shirt?

What a good question. I was wearing an old 70s baseball T hot-ironed with the logo for the band Boston, which I bought at a vintage store during a month when the song “More Than a Feeling” became a kind of fever for me. Growing up, I never liked Boston – theirs was an edgeless guitar rock played on classic radio, impossible to dance to. But in the past year I had become besotted with a certain late 70s aesthetic – latchhook rugs and old beige corduroys handed down from my mother and Dr. Pepper flavored Lipsmacker and aviator glasses. Hair in pigtails. I listened to ELO and “Off the Wall”-era Michael Jackson and Queen and the Bee Gees. Anything you could play in a roller rink – that was my jam.

It was a curious nostalgia. A nostalgia for an age I had just missed. I wasn’t actually remembering these bands so much as I was still discovering them. I grew up wearing more makeup than a Real Housewife. I wanted to paint the world hot pink. I listened to Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Madonna, all the pop stuff that came in reaction to earnest bands like Boston. Music videos featuring a tiger. Everyone in Wet N Wild eyeliner.

Back at the mall, Mary and I had to walk through Macy’s to get to the movie theater, and we were struck by the junior’s department, filled with leopard-print and chintzy Southwestern mesa design and torn neon shirts that really are the kind of crap I wore back in those days. I hated it. I would have happily dive-bombed that store.

“Why would anyone want the 80s to come back?” Mary asked, but of course, none of the girls shopping here would have been alive in the 80s. That is the funny thing about nostalgia – it’s not a direct line. It skips generations, the same ideas recycled for a new audience.

But then other pieces of my past I cling to with an irrational love. We passed by the low-rent spangle of Claire’s (one of the most successful mall ventures of all time, by the way. I have never seen a Claire’s outside of a mall, and I have never seen a mall without a Claire’s. One day, I’ll write about this for the New Yorker.) And I made Mary come with me into the store, because (gasp) she had never been. Never been to Claire’s! My God, there should be a nonprofit for these sorts of lost souls. Her ears aren’t pierced, and in some outrageous miscalculation, she understood that store to be mostly earrings, which it certainly is not.

Here are other items Claire’s sells: Tiaras, Lipsmacker in rainbow flavors, a ring watch, a purple glitter clamshell phone that opens up to reveal a palette of shimmering eye shadows. A Justin Bieber alarm clock. A Justin Bieber pillow. I took a picture of Mary holding that last item. She is a sport, that one.

Claire’s is a candy store for tweens, basically, and in my heart, I suppose I am still one, too. Every time I hang out with my friend’s daughter, who is 5, I am reminded that she and I share the same passion for wigs and bedazzlement. “Oh, I have that,” I think when I see some pink poofery in her room bought at Target. And then I think: Why the hell am I buying the same stuff as a 5-year-old girl?

This resistance to aging feels emblematic of my generation, who grew up marinating in the corporate hatred of Nirvana and the romantic arrested development of movies like “Slacker.” Nobody wanted to grow up. Nobody ever does, but we didn’t have to. “Grups,” Adam Sternbergh called us in a classic New York magazine cover story about a generation of parents who shun the signifiers of mature adulthood. Recently, while visiting Williamsburg, I saw a mid-40s mother wearing black sparkly leggings at 9am, and I thought: Wow, really? And then I thought: Wow, impressive. I mean, if you can do both things at once – be a mom and be a kid, be responsible and be hot — why wouldn’t you?

Recently, Mary heard someone take a swipe at a 40-year-old woman in pigtails. Not any specific woman, but this person used it in a casually derisive way, shorthand for trying too hard, the way I might take a swipe at a dad with an earring. You know: Give it up. And I am aware that my 70s Love’s Baby Soft pigtail aesthetic leaves me open to ridicule. I have the Facebook messages to prove it. But here is the thing: I don’t care. I am just as much a stupid cliché as the guy who is getting his self-esteem from tearing down a 40-year-old woman for the way she wears her hair. None of it matters. What matters, I swear to you, is not giving up. Why do people say things like, “Give it up”? I gave it up for a long time. It was not a trip I would recommend.

The movie Mary and I were seeing that night was “Bully,” a documentary that follows a handful of school-kids living in the vise grip of cruelty and ridicule. Those are brave kids. I had complicated feelings about the film, which I basically thought was good, but what I really felt was: I would not go back for a million dollars. I would not be that person again, the person who flinched all the time and was afraid to speak for fear that whatever came out of her mouth would be wrong. The person craving attention and fleeing from it at once.

People often say we’re a youth-worshiping culture, and it’s true. My friends talk about wrinkles and Botox now. Body parts sag in unfortunate ways. But I would not go back. Not to my 20s, when I was sad and lost and drunk, and certainly not to the age of 13, when relief came in the form of a store like Claire’s, or the fantasy of some soft boy with swooshy hair and Top 40 hits, or the promise of glitter makeup and a freaking ring watch.

But I also thought: I am that person, still, in so many ways. 5 and 13 and 37 all at once. Mary took a picture of me in Claire’s, wearing a “Sweet 16” crown, and I think the title for that picture should be “Count the levels of denial in this picture.” It is a ridiculous photo, an intended satire of sorts. But it’s also me, as I really am. That’s all I can be, I suppose. One day, when I’m 45 and wearing split-crotch panties to the grocery store, I’ll be nostalgic for this moment, too.

“Every time I tell people I’m from Vancouver, I wait for the oohs and aahs that I almost always get. Oh, it’s so beautiful. Yes, yes, yes, I say with pride, as if I’d given birth to it.”

That made me laugh. I totally get that! The pride of other people loving the place you’re from. Such a cheap and easy high. You get hooked on it, and then you move somewhere else and it’s all … blank stare. Nobody knows what to say. It’s awkward. I think people like to oooh and ahhh so much because they just like having something to add to the discussion. My friend Thomas is from Edmonton, Canada, and when he told me that it was like: Uhh, OK. What is an Edmonton?

I think, eventually, you get a weird thrill from people not knowing where you live. From being different than everyone else. A friend who lives in Montana tells me she likes the confusion people express when they discover she has the nerve to build her (highly successful) life outside Los Angeles or New York. Another friend lives in Alpine, Texas, and for years I was all, “WTF are you doing in Alpine?” and then I went to visit and was like, “OHHHH, this is what you’re doing in Alpine.” Because that place was amazing, a little bit like visiting the moon, if it had really great Tex-Mex.

This planet is so big, and there are so places to plant your flag. I plant mine in Dallas these days, and I recently wrote a story about that on The Morning News. But I’d like to engage in a little reader experiment, which I haven’t done in years. Please send me a picture of the place you live, and tell me a little bit about it. You can tell me what you love about it. You can tell me what you hate about it. It can be a place that is two blocks from where I live, or it can be a teensy tiny town in Northern Ireland where I may never visit (but then again, I might!). I’d like to learn more about wherever you have landed. I’d like to learn more about the world, and the people in it, and particularly the ones who are kind enough to stop by these digs on occasion, on their way to someplace else. You can send it to: sarahhepola@gmail.com.

There are only two reasons why my cat gets like this, and I was pretty sure I knew which one was to blame. On Sunday night, I had returned from Austin to discover that not only had my cat vomited but he also sported a ring of blood around his anus. I called Jennifer, who told me it was probably just a stress reaction and prescribed a paste for his tummy, but of course I was going to worry, and of course I was going to spend the next three days sifting through the litter box like I was panning for gold and lifting up his tail to spy underneath, and other invasions of privacy that come with caring for another living creature. I understood vomit and constipation as early warning signs of some medical emergency that usually ended in tears and fluid injections at the vet’s. I wanted to avoid that fate if I could.

So I decided to take action. I pinned him down in the kitchen and administered a baby enema, and it shows you how far I’ve come that I could do so while staying calm and unblinking. “Growing old ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis once said, and while she wasn’t talking about inserting a lubricated tube into the clenching poop hole of your 15-year-old tabby, the aphorism still applies.

But oddly, constipation didn’t seem to be his problem. He ran to the litter box every 10 minutes afterward — glycerine swirling through the rectum will do that — but nothing substantive emerged. Had I read this wrong? Had I been mistaken? After 10 years, I feel utter confidence in my ability to communicate with my cat. He tells me things. And that Tuesday, he was definitely telling me something was wrong.

Like I said before, there are only two reasons why my cat gets like this: When he’s constipated, and when there’s a big storm coming.

Oh, wait a minute. I looked out the window, at the rumbling sky.

Three hours later, a tornado hit.

These are the stories of pet owners who love too much. Bubba had given me the early warning signs of a terrible storm, and I stuck an enema up his ass. He had diarrhea all afternoon. As the sky clashed outside, thunder shaking the home we share, he curled up on my bedroom floor. When I went in to check on him, he stared at me, calm and unblinking. He did not make a sound, but I read his message loud and clear: You suck.

“Umm, I am OK,” I wrote back. “Was this supposed to go to me?”

I assumed it was a slip of predictive text. Perhaps she meant to email some other Sarah in her contact list. But in fact the email was intended for me. This friend had just watched a semi in the Dallas area fly across the highway on CNN. So did several friends, and their emails and text messages and instant messages started popping up within minutes. You OK? You OK? It was nice people thought of me, but it was starting to worry me a smidge.

I mean, I think I’m OK. Is it possible I’m mistaken?

I knew there were tornadoes in the area. I also knew the tornadoes were bad enough that my guitar teacher canceled our lesson today. He told me the weather guys on TV were freaking about the tornado, and we had a brief laugh at the weather guys’ expense. Those poor dudes. They always take the blame.

From where I sat — in a red and unlit kitchen, staring out at a large, leafy backyard with an unused trampoline — everything seemed fine. It was pouring rain. I mean, buckets. But that seemed like a good thing in Texas. Every once in a while thunder struck, and the house trembled a little. The house was built in 1915. Sometimes it shakes when I run too fast.

I checked Facebook, which was a stream of anxiety. One friend was evacuated from her office building. Another heard sirens outside. Several sent out their best wishes to “D/FW folks,” which I guess is me, so I guess I appreciate that. The rain had picked up, along with my worry. The power flickered off, and came on again. I began to hear the moan of emergency vehicles. I can never figure out in these moments — is it good to be connected to people, or bad? The more I talked about it, the more fearful I became. Then again, the less isolated I felt. What a weird world we live in. Where people in New York and Kansas City are the ones give you updates on the tornado a few miles away.

I have lived alone for so long now that I forget how scary it can be. I had roommates through college, but the first night I spent in my own house at the age of 22 — a funky garage apartment in Austin, which I painted in the colors of an Easter egg — I thought all the trees scratching at my window were some guy outside. What a huge mistake, I thought, to ever try to live alone. For the next week, I drank myself to sleep with bottles of white wine, but eventually I came to understand what bristles and whirs were a part of the ecosystem, and which should send shivers across my skin. That was back before cell phones and the ubiquity of the internet, when I’d sleep with one hand on a push-button phone. I can remember how marooned I felt, even when it was just raining. That tiny house was like a little island of one. I didn’t even have Bubba then.

In New York, where people are all around you, the fear of dying in your apartment is legendary. Everyone imagines it. The slip in the bathtub, the cigarette left to smolder after you passed out on the couch. I couldn’t watch “Law & Order” without wondering what the guys at the bodega would say about me. “Oh sure, I know that girl. She was always coming in here for cat food and Sierra Nevada.” One of the minor reliefs of leaving New York is leaving behind the fear of dying in New York.

But I can still be prone to freak out. At 4am the other day, I woke up to a spectacular crack right above my head. I had the sensation of being yanked out of a deep hole, and when I finally sat up and opened my eyes, I found Bubba in a defensive crouch on the floor. My heart was a kick drum. Later I would come to understand that a large limb from one of the giant trees had fallen in the middle of the night, but at the time it made no sense, had no words or shape or origin, it was all fear and waiting. I wish someone had texted me at that moment: “You OK?” I would have felt so much better. Instead, I just lay there staring at the ceiling, twisting in the sheets. It took an hour to go back to sleep.

I guess you could argue it’s an empty phrase. You OK? But I have come to rely on it, and appreciate it, even when it’s not needed. I am OK, thanks for asking. How about you?

But I’m not that person anymore, which is nice, and Thomas and Alan and I spent four hours at Barton Springs on Sunday. Alan was doing crazy back flips and double lutz-fantastics off the diving board and Thomas and I were making our way around the perimeter of the springs, cold and perfect, and talking about the things we talk about when we’re together (work and writing and Jeremy Renner) and I would say, for the most part, I had no complaints about that afternoon. Even the drum circle didn’t bother me.

Around 3pm, I checked my voicemail, and one of the messages was from Mary. She said my cat had thrown up, and it pitched my stomach into turmoil. I didn’t want to bring that minor note into our afternoon together, but I guess I’m the kind of person who does that anyway, even when I don’t mean to, and Alan said, “Something just happened on your phone.”

I waved it away and said, “Oh it’s my cat,” which sounded like code for “it’s something terrible and private that I won’t discuss in public” but in fact it was perfectly accurate: It’s my cat. I don’t really expect anyone to understand.

I drove back to Dallas that night trying not to worry. Usually when I leave town, my brain is on overdrive, imagining terrible things that could befall the cat while I’m away, but I have gotten better. It’s just that throwing up is the worrisome thing he does these days, and it reminds me that his system is winding down, and it reminds me that he is going to slip away from me, and it reminds me that as much as I might love spending a weekend with friends in Austin, he is not really down with it, and it’s an awful split feeling, to want to be in all these places at once.

On Saturday night, at the wedding, I met my college buddy Dave’s wife, who is about as lovely as a woman can be, and she was joking that she never meant to be the kind of person who showed pictures of her son to people she just met. Like, she always thought to herself, “Who cares about your kid?” but now it’s HER kid, and so of course she cares — but the truth is, I cared too, and was glad to see a picture of her son. And partly to be funny, and partly to stay true to form, I showed her a picture of Bubba, curled up beside me on the bed, eyes closed, and she said, with love in her voice, “Look at your baby.”

And I said, “He’s not a baby! He’s 15.” And I got a lump in my throat when I said it, because the force of so many things hit me in that moment: That a cat is not a baby. That my is my baby, and that he is 15. That my friends Lisa and Craig had put their dog down that morning. That I was alone at that wedding. That I had been alone at a whole hell of a lot of weddings. That if being alone at a wedding is the worst fate you must endure, then you’re doing OK. That I was lucky to have been included here, and that when I go to my college friend’s weddings — or when I meet my friends’ partners in general — usually what I am struck by is how good and right these other halves are, how well they chose for themselves. I have the satisfaction of learning the answer to a riddle I have long puzzled over: Ah, yes, of course! That’s it!

Later, as I was leaving, Dave said something to me that was so sweet and true it made tears spring to my eyes and I drove back to Austin under a big clear sky singing along to Radiohead and The Decemberists and Michael Jackson and Queen and Xanadu (always with the Xanadu) not really knowing how my life would turn out, what the answer to the riddle might be, and feeling a little bit sorry for myself over the people I have to let go of and feeling a little bit freed to do anything I want.