What the Hell is Reentry Anyway?
A writer’s rendevous with the meaning of reentry
What the hell is reentry anyway? Is it when my husband has sex with me for a second time on the same day? Is it when rich men arrange rendezvous with rocket ships into outer space?
What about when I lay for days, weeks in bed sobbing at my helplessness in a world rife with sorrows of war, disease, and famine, unable to bring myself back to my little family who needed my heart-love to hug and hold them? Was it when my family firmly coaxed me from suicide watch into the world of the cooperatively living?
Did I reenter a new and old phase when I picked up the keyboard and started seriously writing after a decade avoiding spilling my guts onto the blank page?
Life ebbs and flows.
To live is to enter, retreat, and reenter. Reentry is about the most unpoetic word I think I’ve ever heard.
I’m going to show you the cards up my sleeve. I wasn’t inspired by the word “reentry” or the guidance relating to it, so I turned to the dictionary, hoping to find a glimmer of something to help me make words dance across the page. I wasn’t disappointed.
Reentry (noun)
1: a retaking possession especially : entry by a lessor on leased premises on the tenant’s failure to perform the conditions of the lease
2: a second or new entry
3: a playing card that will enable a player to regain the lead
4: the action of reentering the earth’s atmosphere after travel in space
- This is a boring and technical definition. When I allow my imagination to roll with it, I see a cop banging on a wooden door and escorting a lessor into a pigsty of a home, cockroaches running up the walls, crack pipes burning holes in raggedy old carpet, bedbugs running over motionless bodies of the down-and-out, depressed, escapists — the brutally hurt and emotionally traumatized sorrows of the world personified. And, the lessor kicks them to the curb to walk homeless into the starry night.
- A more hopeful definition. The word “new” evokes positive beginnings. When I left my children and husband not through divorce, but through hopelessness, a ceding to the heaviness of life and a release of my will to live, I was in utter despair. Ultimately, love is the foundation that allowed my release of fear and reentry into my cherished marriage and family.
- Who knew reentry could remind me of childhood days, sitting with my mom in our living room while the adults played cards — bridge, rummy? Life wasn’t easy for my mom or me. These women provided comic relief. We all laughed as they slapped down cards with glee when they regained the lead. And, with these women in our lives, my mom also regained the lead as director of her own life, metamorphizing from the woman who left her husband to the woman on food stamps and unemployment to the woman with a Master’s degree to the decades-long college advisor. Impressive reentries, if you ask me.
- It seems my idea of reentry for Mr. Bezos is inaccurate. Perhaps he wanted to vacation to outer space so he could facilitate a grand reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. All hail King Bezos of the new mercantile era. School supplies, sofas, books, and more at Mr. Bezos’ general store.
Why am I this resistant to writing about reentry? Perhaps it’s because reentry is what we storytellers live for. We want to coax you into our imagined worlds, presenting you with words on par with a savory soup, decadent dessert, or complex chili. We wish to serve our readers word-entrees delectable enough to warrant re-reads. We want to give our readers sustenance. We want you to chew, slurp, and exclaim. We want you to reenter into conversations about our work when you chat with your friends. We want to be relevant enough to your world that you can’t help but return to the words we artfully arranged on the page.
Writers want to leave relics in our wake. Imagine us at the beach on a clear blue day, virulent purple, turquoise, and aqua waves frothing over our bare legs and receding into themselves. We touch seashells and fossils, feel the once rough edges smoothed by time and tide. We feel cracks and crevices — broken shards — nature has eaten into the relics. We tangle our toes in seaweed and use our storytelling minds to dive to the bottom of the ocean and gaze at mystical creatures out of our human reach.
We grasp for meaning, teaching, connection, and love. We do this every time we reenter the page. In her classic novel, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés shares the profound impact stories have on her:
“Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything — we need only listen.”
Words empower writers to heal and readers to find healing. Engaging in the overlapping circles of being both reader and writer is strong medicine.
As a writer, my life is overlapping reentries, striving to leave behind worthy relics for readers I’ll never meet. Where my mind and heart meet the blank page — that is my reentry.