Lily and I ate dinner tonight over Facetime. Turkey burger for me, chicken and waffles bought with the IHOP gift card the cat sent for her. She’s wrapping up her freshman year of college. I miss her.

We talked about the saddest things we ever saw.

All the promises we made, from the cradle to the grave.

The separation of an orca mommy and her baby. The day we went to the zoo and saw the utter devastation of a once jubilant monkey couple, then found out later their baby had drowned six months before. The monkeys acted like no time had passed at all since that day.

Lily read me a poem about a two-headed calf. Twice as many stars.

We weren’t sad to begin with. Weren’t seeking to be sad. More discussing the concept of being bone-breaking sad. The capacity for sadness, which requires self-awareness, I think.

I think.

Today my husband sent Lily and me a link to a list of things verified to give you the chills.

Last night I dreamed a high school friend asked me if I was aware of how much weight I have gained.

So you become a monster, so the monster will not break you.

I’m sitting now in my library, listening to Songs of Surrender , staring at my books, my marbles, Lily’s paintings and baby shoes. Pictures of me and my girls from college. A photo of my cousins and me taken the weekend of my grandfather’s funeral in front of a tree in the yard that is now my sister’s.

Every once in a while, I sit with the future sadness that I know will come as my people are growing older, and I try to feel a little bit of it now, as if doing that will siphon off some of the orca sadness that I know is coming my way in the future. I push on it to see if I can handle it. If I will make that sound no human has ever heard before.

Lily leaving for college introduced me to a side of me I haven’t seen since my grandparents died. An unbelievable capacity for pain. I had no idea I had this talent until I tapped a vein of emotion I’m pretty sure most people avoid like cancer.

You got stuck in a moment, and you can’t get out of it.

You float through your days, you know? You drive to work, you listen to some asshole bitch about some stupid thing, and you get upset about it, but it’s nothing. Somewhere out there an orca is making noises no human has ever heard before. We worry about parking spots because deep down we don’t want to admit we are all terminal, and every single one of us will lose someone we love. We will lose them, and we will survive it, and if love wins, we’re more compassionate for it. And some of us will actually feel that pain, will let ourselves touch the stars and be humbled by what sentient beings are able to feel, what all those folds in our enormous brains bring us, both a blessing and a curse.

If I could, you know I would. If I could, I would let it go. Surrender. This is a song of surrender.

Every once in a while, I think back on the wise observations of Ani Difranco:

In a coffee shop in a city
Which is every coffee shop in every city
On a day which is every day
I picked up a magazine
Which is every magazine
Read a story, and then forgot it right away

They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time

What else is a surprise?

Normal people with one child can’t afford college.

Retirement is probably a myth now, but that’s not a bad thing.

In their heads, old people are ~35 years old.

Nobody on this planet knows absolutely what they are doing.

We are all terminal. This means more approaching 50.

It’s that time when I finally notice the moments the light lingers longer in the late afternoon. It’s been doing that, I know, every afternoon since the solstice. But like so many things, I don’t notice until it’s been accumulating for quite some time.

---

What has also been accumulating: My resentment for allowing my environment to rob me of access to my creative self.

I’m mad at my job.

I’m mad at household chores.

But mostly, I’m mad at me.

Last night, I stood with hordes of people in T-Mobile Center swaying awkwardly to the E Street Band. As often happens when I allow myself to fully immerse in music, I started thinking about the things I’ve written and the things I want to write. I felt a tendril of bittersweet fondness rapidly followed by the hot scorch of shame.

There I stood, watching a seventy-three-year-old man unabashedly wave his agency about, gripping it like the neck of a guitar, wallowing in four decades of access. My heart ached to feel that way.

---

A few minutes ago, I watched my daughter drive down the street on her way back to college. We packed advice about filling the hours and becoming herself in the way you do between the ages of eighteen and thirty along with leftover ribs and $7 Panera mac & cheese. As I waved at her disappearing taillights, I thought about how I passed the hours in college, often in a dive bar drinking terrible coffee and writing poetry on the back of napkins. That time in my life when I never went anywhere without paper and pen. When writing was so clearly a part of my identity I didn’t tell people that I did it. I didn’t know anything else about myself, but I knew that.

Since she drove away, I’ve been sitting in a south-facing carrel in the public library, where I came to do some research and work on my taxes and do proper adult things. Instead, I put on my headphones, heard Bruce Springsteen, and felt tears prick a bit painfully, like when milk lets down — productive and right and useful, but uncomfortable as glands swell before the necessary release.

And I logged into Squarespace. To write.

---

Goals:

• Learn to type with thumbs.

• Get out of bed without cursing on the regular.

• Finish CHOMP.

• Not embarrass daughter in front of roommate.

• Be in better contact.

• Stop having nightmares about where I will live in college. I am 48.

• Not dwell on fact I am 48.

My girl was set to come home last Friday.

It rained all day.

I was worried.

I was worried, but I put it away, because that is what you are supposed to do. How you are supposed to suddenly be only interested in passing at the comings and goings of your child after decades of details down to lunch vouchers and snot.

‘Cause, really. Let’s be honest.

Parenting is fucking granular.

So, I was already worried when the phone rang.

Her voice was unsteady but steady.

Rattled but recovered.

She hydroplaned in the rain across two, maybe three lanes and a very dippy median. She could’ve flipped the car, collided with oncoming traffic. All manner of terrible, awful, very bad things. Evil, vile-smelling places my mind has gone more than once since it happened.

But this is what happened, instead.

She made the leap, accidentally.

She got her car to a safe place.

She called us.

We went and met her and drove with her home, a three-hour tour.

Between the deer on the way to Destin and this, I feel we are running short on both vehicles and adrenaline.

However, being faced with losing 100% of our family to accidents in two weeks has me on the ropes with you, Fate.

I kinda think I owe ya.

We think we are in charge.

We think we have it.

I see that deer, rolling, rolling, and therefore, by God’s grace, go I.

This summer, my husband and I had a spirited debate as to whether or not our relationship could survive a road trip. Because, you know, the airlines are a mess. We needed to get away after our daughter came home for fall break, before I started crying my eyes out again. I’ve spent most of the autumn crying, I miss her so. We decided to go to Destin.

We’ve never been to Destin.

——————————————————————————

We were four hours deep into the drive after a full day of work when a deer leaped from the trees on the side of the road near West Plains, Missouri. We both saw it. We cursed, and we watched it leap … land … and leap again … straight into the grill of my husband’s new pick-up truck, the one he’d wanted his whole life and didn’t let himself buy until after his 47th birthday. Neither of us had ever hit a deer before.

We hit the deer with the grill of the truck. The deer destroyed the grill and the engine, and I’m fairly certain the truck destroyed the the same in the deer.

This is the worst part: The deer rolled horizontally, like a child down a hill, three times. I can still see that roll, hooves akimbo, the shock of its young and too-short life meeting metal and rubber on the road where it grew up. Nature, red in tooth and claw.

It met my eyes for a moment through the windshield, just as shocked as we were, and hauled itself up, hobbling on three legs into the woods. I didn’t see it after that - I was too fixated on my husband, who was trying to beach the hull of the destroyed Ford Maverick on the shore of the highway.

“Oh, shit. I don’t have a gun.”

That’s the first thing he said. Because we grew up rural, you must understand, and if you hit a deer, you must shoot it so it doesn’t suffer. I’ve often wished this rule of thumb could apply to any living being, including humans. But also, we don’t carry guns. We’ve separated from the places we came from in geography and politics.

The deer is on its own, as are my reproductive rights.

The deer ran off, and we limped the truck to the side of the road and called the police. The officer who arrived couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He told us about the other folks who had hit a deer recently, and one family who hit a bear. And an elk. You never know, apparently, what will haul its ass out of the Missouri woods these days.

The next morning, we worked the process. One thing at a time. Police report, tow truck, rental car. What can you rent in West Plains, Missouri, on a random Thursday morning? It’s a minivan. A minivan that smells distinctly of cat piss. Yes, friends. And we took it, because beggars cannot be choosers. We took that minivan, and we watched the Maverick get loaded onto a tow truck, and we drove to Destin, where hundreds of poisonous Pink Meanie jellyfish rode the waves like cowgirls and haunted my dreams like a Skeleton Crew short story.

While I sat on that pristine sugar sand beach sipping my drink and staring out at the hundreds of jellyfish cresting the clear waves, I thought how this is the first vacation we’ve taken without my girl in nine years. How alike it felt to the vacations my husband and I took … before. How, now, my life is … after. I thought on how I can make after not separate. How I can find a place for my daughter and I to be both adults but not apart.

I never understood older people who refused to drive after dark. Now that I’ve seen that deer do the triple somersault … now I do.

Do you love?

Lily went back to college this morning. My husband flew off to a conference. And so I find myself here in my backyard, listening to a very similar playlist to when I was last alone, in 1998.

I’ve cried. A lot. I’ve missed my daughter. I’ve missed the weight of her head on my shoulder that in truth hasn’t been there regularly in years.

It might be I’m missing a memory.

Or an identity?

Or an idea.

Because my life now is wonderful. My daughter has grown into a breathtaking young woman, all strength and intelligence and talent. I miss her, but she is not gone from my heart or my life. She is becoming her own reality.

My marriage is strong and something I marvel at daily, having witnessed the many, many tries we have all taken and how few of them have stuck, despite all our best efforts. There is no talent to relationships.

I’m now in another transition, trying to figure out who I am now. I’m the rocket ship, not the launchpad.

What if maybe what I thought was the main part was just the thruster all along?

What if that were true?

Leaving my daughter at college the first time was like being hit solidly in the back by a breaking wave. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know how or when to dive.

I hugged her goodbye in her room about two hours ago. I always try to let her end the hug first, but this time I couldn’t.

At the midpoint of the hug, it came against my will: the time to dive.

I gave her an extra squeeze. I counted aloud the days until I would hug her again. We turned around and walked out the door.

I dove.

We are driving. I’m typing with my thumbs into a little Squarespace app with tears pouring down my cheeks. It’s mile marker 191 and I just broke the surface of my defenses, gasping for air.

She graduated.

That was what was supposed to happen.

And I’m glad.

She’s amazing, and I want her to launch.

It is good and right that our children launch.

And, also?

Driving away from the dorm registers like grief.

It came from somewhere down deep, and it tore me open, unexpectedly.

I think, in a strange way, it is a good sign.

We had a good time.

I wish we could live both lives - the one where she stays with me and the one where she makes her own way.

Life is not like that. We must choose.

She chose right.

And it hurts.