Nothing Left to Meet

Morning arrived with a headache, the kind that comes from too little sleep or too little water, though to me they've always felt like the same animal. Bright blue sky, a faint wind not doing its job, every cloud burned off before it had a chance to matter. Hot already, and it wasn't even eight.

The night before, we'd all been around the table. My wife and I, my mom and dad, my oldest sister, my oldest son, and my youngest daughter, the whole reason for the gathering and the one who was leaving. We ate, we talked, we did the thing families do the night before something changes, which is mostly just sit in each other's company a little longer than usual without saying so out loud. When dinner wound down, my parents and my sister headed back to their place. Their goodbye happened right there at the table, hugs in the kitchen, nothing dramatic about it. My son and my daughter stayed the night at our house.

I knew the morning was coming. It hadn't snuck up on anyone. But there's a way you can know a thing is coming and still manage to not really look at it, the way you know death is coming and still spend most of your life declining the invitation to think about it directly. I'd been doing that with this one for months. Light consideration, then away from it, like touching a hot pan and pulling back before it registers as a burn.

My son said his goodbye in the morning, before the two of them left. I don't remember the exact words. I don't think there were many. He's not one for ceremony and neither is she, not with each other. He's the one who thinks the way I think, which isn't always a compliment to hand a kid, chasing a question down every rabbit hole it opens, curious to a fault, unable to leave a system unexamined once he's noticed it's a system. He builds business platforms for a living now, the backend architecture, the parts that have to be right or the whole thing falls over quietly six months later. He's offered to take mine over completely, more than once. I should let him. He doesn't have the hours though, not really, not with a training schedule that eats forty hours a week chasing the next Paralympic cycle. Some offers you just hold onto.

My wife and my daughter left together in her car. I took my own vehicle a few minutes behind them, the two of us headed the same five miles to a gas station off the interstate where we'd meet the rest of them. The drive there took me down the same stretch of road I drive and ruck almost daily, and I noticed different things than usual. Strange, how that works. Some subconscious sense of change kept pulling my eye toward it. Seventy new apartments, mostly finished, some already occupied, two blocks west of me, on ground that for twenty-five years had been a cornfield where I used to watch cranes stop over on their way somewhere else. Turning north, a few blocks further, a smaller set of new apartments or townhouses, also mostly finished. Then, a few blocks after that, a building that had sat almost completely hidden for twenty-five years, now visible with the clearing of hundreds of trees, shrubs, grasses, and a six-foot decrepit wooden fence. The five-acre lot cleared of junk cars and debris, the building gutted, the beginning of a refurb boldly proclaiming its arrival. All of it seemed to be asking to be noticed, reconciled, justified. Change. I'm still not sure why it registered so loudly and fully, but that was the first mile of my five-mile trip to the gas station.

My daughters husband, his mother, and his brother had already been on the road two hours, coming from the east, where they'd said their own goodbye to his step-father earlier that same morning. Truck and trailer, every available inch packed with what made the cut. What didn't fit had been sold or given away over the last month, piece by piece, in the particular way young people thin out a life before they go build a new one somewhere else. There's an emptiness to that kind of packing, not the emptiness of not having enough, but the emptiness of having just finished deciding, item by item, what actually mattered enough to keep.

We pulled in within a few minutes of each other. The lot was already shimmering with heat, that early wobble in the air over asphalt that tells you the day isn't going to ease up. There was a plan worked out ahead of time, hers and her husband's. His mother would ride the rest of the way with my daughter, the two of them in her car for the long middle stretch of highways and interstates. He and his brother would take the truck and trailer. Four people, two vehicles, one very long stretch of road between a gas station in Nebraska and a new life in Montana.

The switch happened fast. A door open, a bag handed across, a mother-in-law climbing into a car that wasn't hers to ride with a daughter-in-law she's known for several years now, the two of them already talking like the trip had started before the trip had started. I stood there in the gravel with the heat pressing in and didn't let myself think about any of it too hard. I knew if I did, I'd end up in that cave I'd been avoiding, and this didn't feel like the place to finally walk into it.

Hugs. The kind that go a beat past what a hug usually calls for, both people aware it's doing more than one job at once. My wife held on a second longer than the hug required. I noticed and didn't say anything.

Then doors closing. An engine turning over. Gravel under tires. Two vehicles pulling out onto the access road, my daughter's face in the window for exactly as long as it takes a car to build speed, and then gone, west first, north later, toward an apartment we haven't seen except in photos and a classroom where she starts teaching in a few weeks.

My wife and I got back in the car and drove the same five miles home. She'd been quiet in a particular way most of the weekend. Not upset, nothing you could point to and name. Just… blue. I noticed it again in the car, the way you notice weather, without needing to explain it or fix it. Some things aren't yours to fix. They're just yours to sit next to and quietly support.

What I imagined at the "see You Later" exchange and what I didn't let myself picture, until the third mile home.

Images made in collaboration with Midjourney and Paintify ai, trained on a mood board of my own paintings and photographs. Not hand-painted.

Here's what I didn't expect. Somewhere around the third mile back toward home, I realized the cave I'd been avoiding for weeks wasn't actually about her leaving. I'd had that part sorted for a while, she was ready, she'd earned this, there was nothing but good ahead of her. The part I hadn't looked at directly was smaller and stranger. It was the five miles themselves. The same five miles that had already tried to tell me something on the way out, cranes and cornfields and a building finally uncovered after twenty-five years, and I'd driven right past it without connecting the dots. The ordinary, unremarkable drive I've made a thousand times to that same stretch of interstate, and how it would just go back to being an ordinary drive again starting tomorrow, with nothing left at the other end of it to meet.

We follow in a week, to help finish the apartment and set up her classroom before school starts. I keep telling myself that helps. It probably does. It just doesn't feel like it this morning.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio