2022-07-18 - Homecomings

Somehow Jules knew, too.

A different look. A kind of knowledge there in the eyes, the solemnity of expression.

"Okay," she says briskly. "So when's the flight?"

Of course she's driving Mikaere to the airport. As if she'd have it any other way.

The times are such that she misses the worst of the traffic , after the morning rush and before the workday ends. Still, I-5 is almost always a mess at some point, especially around Lakewood and Tacoma, with the unceasing construction trying to accommodate more and more traffic as people flood the South Sound region. It keeps Jules alert.

Still, in the quiet of that two hour drive, there's plenty of time to think. To silently wonder how things would change, glancing every so often at the man in the passenger's seat on the way there; to keenly note his absence, on the return. There's a different distance that seems to settle in as Jules returns to Gray Harbor alone. Exactly how well does she know Mikaere, at the end of the day, after a handful of months?

(Her foot hits the brake as tail lights flash red.)

At some point after Olympia, traffic eases and the green landscape turns greener still with the highway now skirting the south side of the Olympic Peninsula, moving away from the Sound's crowded corridor. Returning to this more familiar zone, Jules can't help but start to make comparisons.

For eight years, she lived with someone whose job took him away for months at a time. Of course, those first few goodbyes sucked. And yet, in an unacknowledged corner, Jules was proud of what she fancied it meant. How grown up, at eighteen, to live alone while her man was out at sea. How romantic, that pining away. The long-distance calls and video chats, the texts (and the sexts) -- didn't they prove something? Surely this was what a mature relationship meant. Other women in Taholah did it. She could take part in those commiserating chats, now, about holding down the fort while one's husband or boyfriend or aggravating ex who owed alimony was off making a living. And, good Lord, the sex when Joe came back. How impassioned it all was.

Until it became ordinary.

Until the time apart became a relief.

How is this different, then? Jules pokes at it like a tongue prods a sore tooth.

She's older now. She refuses to let herself be drawn into lovesick fantasies like she indulged in nearly a decade ago. Sooner or later, this absence was always going to come. Jules has been steeling herself for it all along, and now she expects that this is the smaller one that precedes the one that's permanent. Better to acknowledge it now, to let that knowledge sink into her bones, to face it and remain whole. She won't mourn or wish for something that isn't meant to be. She won't fight it. It doesn't matter how present the absence feels, how weighted with emptiness the seat in the car beside her.

Mikaere may think his questions have multiplied. Jules thinks she knows better.

The inevitability of it grows by the time she reaches Gray Harbor. It accompanies her up the walk and into the house. At night, it settles in the chair at her desk, watchful as she readies herself for bed. It snuggles in close when she turns her back on it to face the wall.

This isn't where Mikaere belongs.

She knows this, even if he doesn't.

So when the text comes, right around the time she's finishing breakfast and getting ready for a day on the water (her water, her searingly cold glacial rivers winding down mountains and through the trees), Jules reads it differently.

Mikaere's arrived home.

(TXT to Mikaere) Jules: Good to hear. Take care.