59,000 Miles

I don't know if I'll ever write a book based on all of these ramblings, but if I do, I have decided on one of two titles. Over the weekend the famed race car driver Dan Wheldon was tragically killed in a 15-car pileup during a race. At the news conference announcing his death, Mr. Wheldon was said to have perished from "unsurvivable injuries." If/when I do write my tome, I will either call it "Survivable Injuries" or "Unsurvivable Injuries". The exact title will, of course, depend on what happens between now and then.

To bring everything up to date, I voyaged to Maine for a long weekend with my kids over Columbus Day which was tough, as it was the first time since leaving town for good that it had been just me, just them, and a hotel room. Every visit since January had either involved me traveling to Maine with my wife and stepdaughter or me picking them up and taking them to another, better place.

This is not to say I didn't have a great time. The weather was an Inconvenient Truth-ly 80+ degrees (October! Maine! 80 degrees! Call Al Gore!) and we had many memorable moments. Maybe someday I will pen the whole narrative of this weekend, but, in journaling about the trip during the plane ride back "home," it seemed like a more cathartic exercise to spill out random thoughts from the weekend gone by:

The last day of Indian Summer
Where I come from and how that place is gone
Feeling rootless, like I'm living in quicksand
Watching my children struggle and being unable to help them
My daughter's scary fascination with TV commercials
Playing superheroes at the school playground
Watching my son go up (and down) the Hi-Jacker ride at the Fryeburg Fair
Seeing my daughter get on the swing and go by herself
The street sign on the way to the fair that read "Pig Street"
Playing "bedbugs" in the hotel room
Swimming at the YMCA
Sitting on a bench at Deering Oaks Park watching the squirrels together
Riding the Tornado ride at the fair all together
Room 112 at the Extended Stay America
Can being 500 miles away be better than 1,100 miles away?
Who would talk to me for an hour anymore?
Teaching my son about football
My daughter blowing raspberries at me then singing "I'm a Little Scarecrow"
My son leaping from one bed to the other in the hotel room
My kids talking about their "step-family" as if were their own
Needing to feel useful and pining for a better job

Reading this list a week later I feel it does a better job of summing up my feelings than would any contrived narrative. My feelings were (and are) scattered, and the time I spend with my kids is best summarized in this manner. There is no arc to the story. There is no recurring theme. There is just a series of highs and lows. Elation in one moment melts into fear and despair. My fragile heart soars 80 feet up to the top of the Hi-Jacker, then shatters upon impact.

I'll see my kids again in a month or so, again alone in a hotel somewhere near Portland, although I can almost guarantee that it won't be 80 degrees any sunny this time (and if it is, I'm really going to give Mr. Gore a call!) Until then I'm left to stew in my own juices about the life I'm living. I'm sitting here at work, having all the time in the world to write this entry as, after more than three months, I still have virtually nothing to do all day long. Meanwhile, I've been offered a job in the Washington DC area, and have only a few days to decide about it. The job could be great, but I've been keeping myself up nights worrying about whether or not that's really close enough to my kids and being if neither here (Maine) or there (Atlanta) is going to allow my marriage to work. But I don't feel like I have any other options, as there are no better opportunities on the horizon anywhere else.

By the time I write my next post I will have decided whether or not to take the job, in the process probably causing more stress than I can handle. My body has, technically, survived the injuries suffered due to my first marriage and its disastrous end, but I'm having a hard time seeing how my spirit will carry on. No matter where I live (Atlanta, DC, Boston, Maine), I will feel like I'm giving up too much and that my life will always fall short of what I wanted it to be. In that regard I suppose I haven't survived my injuries at all. I'm not living the same life that I was living before the crash, but instead feel like a ghost who is inhabiting the same body but somehow unable to feel the same way. But that's the definitation of survival, isn't it? I've been bloodied and battered, but my body still lives and breathes. I guess I've got my title.