Wild.

A word associated with me from day dot. I was the second born daughter of Teddy & Harper Nomikos. The wild came with my birth certificate. I don't deny I've been a handful for my Moms, nor that I greyed their hairs nor frayed their nerves. I had been a handful, but I also loved my family to my bones. I would set a tonne of property on fire for them. I mean, I won't... I promised Wren I'd stop... but the urge to protect and wreak revenge came too easy for me.

I just can't abide injustice. It's a problem.

My Moms thought it would change when I became grown, but the truth is I've just thrown my wild into healthier outlets. Okay, perhaps the toxic one sided relationships weren't the healthiest outlet for me... but my career though...

They called me the wild child of the WNBA for a whole two years before some other young thing from college came along with her own free spirit and took my moniker. I gladly gave it up.

I was only Wild, in that nobody could predict my next move. The only prediction was that I'd play with my all. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I played on the officiants last nerve most of the time, skirting around the fringe of infringements. Playing with fire. Enjoying the adrenaline that came with a good game, the whistle barely leaving a ref's lips, yet rarely blowing. I can't deny I loved a little eye contact whilst I danced around those boundaries, ball in hand, crowds cheering, opposition jeering, a win imminent.

I may have been a little shorter than most of the team, but what I lacked in height I made up for in spunk and spirit. The Greek girl with the wild curls and crazy sneakers...she went from seeing shoulder shrugs of fans on day one, to fist pumps and jerseys with her name by the end of the seasons end.

"Nomikos" hadn't been chanted in these courts for some time... but back they came fiercer than ever. My Moms legacy was a shadow I had to work hard to move out from, they compared us constantly and they wanted so badly to mould us into one. I wanted my own legacy though, and I fought ball to ball, court to court, team to team, to achieve it. My Moms name was a lot to live up to, but I worked my ass off to make her proud. By my third year I felt I earned the attention I was getting on my own merit.

My Mom managed me, but I made sure she did so mostly remotely. When Teddy Nomikos showed up court side, the crowd went wild. My Mom may have been newly in her fifties, but not a soul would guess it. She didn't look a day over thirty five.

There was a reason I started to straighten my hair on a permanent basis... because the longer and straighter it got, the less I looked like Teddy Nomikos in my Suns Jersey.

Yup, I got my ass sent to the East coast. I'd got a little too starry eyed in LA, and the longer I was there the less I felt like me. I had ended up running in circles that never felt familiar or like home to me. The celebrity that encircled me wasn't so shiny, not when it came to midnight in the VIP area of Club One and the white lines started vanishing from the table top. Drugs were everywhere, and to my credit I only tried it once, and it wasn't even in a club being taunted at for being a pussy. Nope, I dabbled from the curves of a beautiful woman, my tongue running up her back... consuming all in its path. I didn't touch it again, for the sake of my career, but also because I never liked feeling out of control. I really hadn't  much enjoyed waking up to find that the woman in question thought I was in love with her either. High Olympia, confesses love freely and frequently apparently.

Love for me though, it was kept sacred, offered to family and friends ... but never lovers. To think that a one night stand had thought I had loved them...romantically! I patted myself on the back and treated myself to a BBQ chicken pizza the size of my torso that night, for not laughing in her face at the absurdity.

I cared for long term lovers. I did. Why I feel like I have to protest that point, I don't know, but I just want you to know... I'm not a jerk.

I wasn't a monster, despite being birthed on Halloween. I had had many lovers since I was eighteen. Too many. My parents would die if they knew. It had all started at high school of course, far too young to know what I was doing. I thought I loved my first boyfriend, but looking back it was toxic wishful thinking.

I did for a moment, once, feel love blooming at high school...but I shut it down before she became a permanent scar. We would have for sure scarred one another, for high school love rarely lasts. Unless you count my female ancestors and how they loved to prove that statistic wrong at any given opportunity. She was too good for me anyhow. Far too sweet. The only thing we would have made, was one another crazy.

I was already crazy. I didn't need more. My only idea of how love felt for me, was in how I felt about Cameron. I had always felt I was in love with him. I had thought of him constantly as a teenager. I took that into my adult life too, but at some point, perhaps after his wedding, I realised that sometimes what we think is romantic love... is not that at all. I idolised that boy, and I adored him. He was everything that my other relationships with boys were not, and so I think it became a certainty, that I'd fall for him in some way. Cameron was perfect, and he was all that was good in the world. He made me feel safe, like no boy before him, and then as a man he made me feel loved, like no man ever had or did again. He didn't want sex and he didn't want to use me for fame either... he just loved me for me. He knew my favourite candy, and he picked out my favourite movies with ease. He could tell you my favourite colour, pizza topping, book, restaurant, and my worst elementary and high school stories . He knew me. He was a part of my first memories. He just knew me, and the history we had could never be matched.

Cameron was the safest, purest, first crush, and the most ideal first love a girl could have. I felt so lucky that I got to call him mine. Cameron of course made my short list of family and friends that I loved and adored. I would do anything for him, always and forever. I was in love with him, but perhaps in the rarest form, a love that was kept safe and never touched nor tainted. A love that would remain platonic, with both parties acceptance of that fact keeping it innocent and offering us peace to move on.

All was good. And a line never crossed is the answer to a friendship never lost.

Moving on...

Then I hit eighteen, and I fell into something with the woman that would be my on and off again lover for the next seven years. Currently we were off again, because she had a new girlfriend. We didn't call or text when one or the other was in a relationship. Truth be told I didn't ever call or text her first, but she seemed to always know when my bed was empty, and her call was always expected. Like I had a bat signal that lit up the night sky the moment I was alone, she arrived on cue.

Wren disliked this relationship, despite its casual nature. I think she feared my heart would be mauled and spat out by a cougar.
This particular cougar was decades older than me. Wren though, she should have been more concerned with the heart of my lover, for the only co dependency vibes over the years had come from her. I of course wasn't a bad person, and when I felt her attachment becoming overbearing I split and set boundaries. She always came back after my next relationship ended and slipped back between my sheets like a palette cleanser before the next. In our first years she held the power, and she knew I was obsessed with her. I had gone after her at the start, and despite her reservations she had given into my attentions. I would have done anything to get her into bed and have her show me all that she knew. It wasn't love, just infatuation and admiration. She had had a good career in the WNBA, but mostly abroad, and she was now managing after coaching for a couple years. To an eighteen year old she was the absolute GOAT. I wanted to be her, she was sexy and strong, intense and dominant. The power was hers. She took me abroad on vacations on our down time, and splashed her cash without thought. Wren accused me of being a 'Sugar baby'.

I didn't want for anything when I was with her. As years passed though, and I became the woman I had admired her to be, she felt the power shift, we both did. Suddenly I was the wealthy and successful one, and my celebrity and career began to eclipse hers.

She always respected my relationships with others, and I, hers. We were ghosts to one another when in romantic relationships. Not a call or text. Our boundaries well set. She would be colder though than before when we finally hooked up again, and it would always be about sex. If we were ever in the same city at the same time we hooked up. I would say that we certainly became toxic. She pushed me away like she didn't care, and then the next moment she would send me a flurry of texts after a night together asking when we could see each other again and asking how I felt. Again, time would pass and we wouldn't see each other, but her grip on me was ever there. She didn't let me ever get out from under her for long. It felt like a part of me was hers. The last relationship I had was six months long, and had ended quietly, me and my girlfriend at the time, Kassi. We just fizzled out. We had met on the East coast, and vibed from the second we met, but something was missing, something was always missing, and I realised she deserved someone who was sure of her. We ended as friends. Like I say though, it was quiet, and our relationship had mostly been private and away from the paps. We had never been assumed girlfriends, only friends. That worked out for us, as no big statement was required when we split and not a soul was invested in us.

The text came the next day...

B- Shall I bring the wine? 😉

And of course she did. She brought the wine and her fine self, and she devoured me to the point of exhaustion.

Bonnie was an old friend of my Moms. She was a rookie at a similar time to my Mom. She never met me as a kid, thankgod, that would be weird, but she knew of my existence, and as Wren likes to remind me, she attended my parents wedding. Our initial connection was a friendly one since we knew of each other from afar. Bonnie moved abroad and away from the states a couple years after my parents moved to Oregon, but they had bumped into one another from time to time. In recent years she had even been invited to my Moms parties. They had got back in contact after seeing one another at one of my college games in LA. Little did my Mom know that this old friend was seeing her daughter. My Mom would have seen red if she knew. I didn't like to think what would happen. Bonnie and I were very careful when we met up, always making sure we were never seen outside of our hotels or homes together. In Seven years we had managed to keep our relationship a secret, but like all secrets kept hidden ... they eventually all came to the surface... of a gossip magazine. Soon to be realised, far far too late.

Like most good things... they must eventually come to an end. I didn't want to be in Connecticut anymore, and I sure didn't want to continue doing casual and toxic. Bonnie had not long turned up on the East Coast to work closely with a rival team member. I didn't like that. I wanted to finally break our pattern and leave this relationship once and for all. I wanted out. Out of anything that didn't bring me peace and contentment. I wanted to be free again.

I was twenty five next week, my season played well, and my current contract year completed with my team on the East Coast.

Twenty five!! With not even a pet to my name. Wren and Millie had threatened to send a cat once or twice, but they knew it wouldn't survive me. I couldn't keep a plastic plant alive, let alone something with a heartbeat.

Like a beat though of an anxious heart... I was sick for home, and I felt the intense urge to return to Oregon. I hadn't felt the distance growing further as the years rolled by, but now that the twins were four and the family was growing again, I felt like a world was between me and them. I needed to get home. I needed to feel like me again, and the only people who made me feel like Olympia before all this crazy fame, the Olympia of old... was my family.

That and the frequent video calls from Albuquerque and Theodore telling on their Moms, as four year olds do "Awnty O, come back!! Mama won give us candy. Norman scratched my finger awnty O. He chased away my fwends. We saw a Bigforrt saskwaaartch in Great grandmas forest... she's building a Bigforrt spy tower with Mommy. We wan you to come to see it. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease. Don fowget candy"

I was simply a candy pusher to my little sproglets.

Theodore has an adorable little lisp that I can't get enough of. He is sweet and gentle, and his sister Alba... well, she is his first boss. If he can survive Albuquerque's dictatorship, he will survive the world outside.

Nomikos boys just came out sweet. Even Bash as a teenager was still respectful of our Mamas and was never caught without his dimpled smile. He was fifteen, and taller than both my Moms. Mom is aware of the teenage girls who gather around him already... and she ain't about it, let me tell ya. Basketball was his world. That was easy being my Moms boy. Expected perhaps, but never forced on us, we just happened to fall in love with it too. I guess seeing your Moms eyes light up like heaven touched her, every damn time she held a ball would do that to ya. You wanted that too.

Missing them has become an understatement, made worse recently when my grandmothers came to stay with me. My grandparents showered me with so much love for a whole week before they continued their road trip back across the states. So much love, that when they left... I felt lonely. My birthdays approach seemed to trigger in me the need to go back to my roots. I bought the plane ticket and packet my bags, and I called my parents-

"Can I come home?!"

I could hear my Mama smile "I'll make up your bed my little chick"

Home.

Please.