A Flashback to Christmas Night

 July 9, 2024

I'm talking to my kids about visiting my father, whether we should fly or drive. It's about the same travel time, door to door, unless you hit delays, like when I visited on Christmas night and there were no rental—

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—oh, shit, yeah. That's when I was texting M, when I was on the shuttle to the car rental place at BWI, and I told him that when he just vanished, it really hurt and I was sick of it. And he apologized, and maybe I declared something or was just being really open and honest about it, and I was crying, because this was the third? fourth? time he'd just been there and then been GONE, unresponsive, over the past few years and dammit, I hated it.

As recent as Christmas. 

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I pulled myself together and walked up to the car rental desk; I'd reserved a car. It was Christmas night, and I'd handed my kids over to their father earlier, after a rushed Christmas morning, and driven to the airport; my lover and his family would be dropping off their son later that day and he (my lover, tall and sweet) was going to drive my car home for me. 

It was 8 p.m., and I was on my way to visit my father, who in some ways died years ago, and I was dreading it but also feeling guilty for dreading it—you know how it is with aging parents, the guilt/love/obligation/dread one big tangled ball rolling around your feet threatening to trip you at every step, and I still had a 2-hour drive once I picked up the car. 

The man at the rental booth—older, Black, with a neutral but not unkind face—told me they were out of cars and wouldn't have any available for at least 4 hours, and as I had not actually entirely pulled myself together from the text exchange with M, I could feel myself coming undone. 

"It's not you—I need a minute," I gasped out, and he nodded, and I stepped away as I started sobbing, or I started sobbing as I stepped away, but in any case Mr. Car Rental Desk was exposed to my outsize reaction to his statement. 

I went around the corner, cried and cried and cried, washed my face in the bathroom, and got back in line. 

"Sorry, that wasn't about this. So, I had a car reserved, and you're telling me there are none available?"

It doesn't matter how that resolved—I did, eventually, end up with a sweet Tacoma pickup truck with all the modern features, and I visited my father, and I got home again, with my lover picking me up at the airport—but what I was thinking of now, with my children already moved on from the trip-planning, was that text exchange with M. 

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What had I said? When had I started feeling empowered enough to tell him he caused me pain? 

The kids returned to their video games and I went for a walk, scrolling through my texts with M— so very many texts, so mundane but necessary—to find that Christmas exchange. 

So much scrolling, only to find that our texts began in March. I'd deleted the previous ones, as I'd often done in the past out of frustration with him, with us, with the us that would never be but I so wanted. Not in my deleted texts, either. Just gone. 

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Curious this morning, I find the texts on my laptop, after much scrolling, and I also see the absence of texts, the excuses about missed meetups to run, the confessions of relapses. I'm feeling sick now. 

He was so different as recent as 6 months ago. I never thought I would save him, but I didn't think I'd be too close to see the changes. 

Oh, M.