All Of Rozzi’s Figs

The other side of the bed in Los Angeles was cold. I used to love sleeping alone but then again, that was before I learned the inevitable: to love someone is to lose a bit of yourself. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe for others, letting a person in does not require that kind of sacrifice. But when I’m in love, next to isn’t enough. I want to crawl under their skin, become one with them. Become the new me. The me that has them.

It’s a scary feeling that change. One that is exacerbated by the possibility of an even bigger one. On a walk with a friend, a few months after we had ended previous relationships, we discussed the mutual and persistent sensation we felt: those men were not the fathers of our children. On a cellular level we knew, to choose a person may mean never being able to extricate from them. It may mean a baby.

Despite being miles from motherhood, it was always floating above our heads, pulsing and ringing like our ears after a loud concert. The birth of one life, the death of a million others. I’d heard people say their “clock was ticking” but it seemed to me more like the countdown on a bomb. To choose a life is to delete the rest.

I never understood myself better than when I read the famous passage about the fig tree in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar:

I saw my life branching out before like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

The book was paperback but this page was made of lead. It was a closed fist ramming into my gut. I felt overwhelmed by the endless options stretching out around me, and the incredible limitations that came from choosing just one. Despite the beauty of my life — a new, healthy relationship, supportive friendships, and a career I adored — my stress lingered.

Like most great art, this book came into my life when I needed it. I had been contemplating my future while freezing my eggs, a process that was magically easy and impossibly hard at the same time. After shooting my stomach with hormones for weeks, I arrived at the hospital bloated and anxious. “I know you from Twitter,” the anesthesiologist said, his face upside down above me. “No way,” I responded, before falling into a deep and medicated sleep. When I woke up, I was told my eggs were on ice.

What a gift it was to have this procedure. And yet emotionally, I was wrecked. The crash from the hormones was no joke. This was compounded by the fact that my actor boyfriend was on set in Europe, deeply (and annoyingly) in character.

The difference between our realities was stark: he had a production assistant who brought him tea and cigarettes upon request. I had a plastic tub from the hospital that was slowly filling up with needles. He had a beautiful costar who he was contractually obligated to make out with. I had Friends reruns to watch while I avoided getting sick before surgery. While he quite literally stepped into someone else’s shoes to play out a different life, I was spending thousands of dollars in a desperate attempt to delay the day when I might no longer feel like the protagonist of mine.

We were not ourselves, but for very different reasons, and despite his greatest efforts, I was filled with bitterness. When I went to stay with him on location, a crew member named Iris helped me with the laundry. “It’s funny how it’s always the women” she said in a thick Greek accent as we hung socks with clothes pins. I felt unmoored, disconnected, and resentful.

Walking on the island one day, I found a real life fig tree. Just beginning to ripen in late May, its arms curled like fallopian tubes, each branch a bend in the road. The way I saw it, one fig was me as a writer, a novel tucked up my sleeve. Another fig was a contralto, realizing my great grandmother’s dream in an opera house somewhere. Another fig was a cozy home, married to someone who was always on time, who did something predictable like medicine or finance. And another fig was Rosalind the single mother, no one to pollute parenthood, no one to resent for doing less than their half. And yet another fig was deep commitment between two artists, who loved each other just slightly less than the crafts they were devoted to.

Instead of answers, the tree inspired questions. Can I be a mother someday and still be myself? If loving a man once altered my insides, can I withstand the tectonic shift that loving a child promises to be? How do I maintain togetherness with someone thousands of miles away? How do I maintain individuality while so intertwined with another person? Is it indulgent to mourn the loss of potential lives while living a uniquely beautiful one?

Philosopher LA Paul argues that we cannot predict who we will be after a transformative experience such as having a child. “We all consist of multiple selves who cannot be counted on to agree with one another across time,” she told the New Yorker last year. With that in mind, can I carry both the joy and the grief that comes from knowing that the love of my life is the loss of another?

Months later, back in Los Angeles, after the hormones and my tan had faded, I recorded my third album, Fig Tree. I made no major decisions in my life other than reharmonizing track eight. I was different than I had been the year before. And who I had been before was different than who I was the year before that. Maybe in that way we get more than one fig. With my eggs somewhere in Redondo Beach, I keep on becoming.

LA based singer/songwriter Rozzi is redefining what it means to be a modern soul-pop artist— melding emotional depth, bold storytelling, and cultural consciousness into every facet of her work. A recipient of a Sounds Right award for her poignant track with NATURE, “Orange Skies (Chapter 2),” Rozzi has collaborated with icons like Nile Rodgers, PJ Morton, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, John Taylor (Duran Duran), Sheryl Crow, and Jacob Collier. She’s toured with acts including Maroon 5, Kelly Clarkson, and Joss Stone and has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Talk, The Today Show, Apple's The Morning Show, and even played herself on Hulu's original series Dollface. Her original music “Best Friend Song" was the title track for Netflix's Me Time. This fall, songs from Rozzi’s forthcoming album Fig Tree will be the focus of an art exhibition at NYC’s Ki Smith Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side, marking a multi-sensory extension of her creative vision.