Where This Could Take Us

Prologue

December 2018

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I think you should go, Mark says to me over the phone. I’ve got my feet kicked up beside the steering wheel, my chair pushed back while the car is in park. The streetlight is glaring overhead, stark against the night sky.

What’s the worst that can happen. He says it in a way that isn’t a question. I take a breath and consider what he’s saying. Something about the way Mark speaks when he’s sure of something makes your ears perk up and listen. Right now, I believe him. In a whirl of impetus and feeling, I thank him, hang up the phone, and slam the car door, hurrying up the steps to my apartment.

Inside I find my partner Daniel at his post in the kitchen, his favorite place. He’s chopping an onion and stirring up something delicious on the stove. I slump into a dining room chair beside him and sigh. He is oblivious as to what I’m about to say. After all, we just decided a few days ago it was too risky.

This is going to sound crazy, I begin, and he looks at me. I think we should go. I know we don’t have a plan. I know we are both afraid of how we will make money, and I know we just decided against going. But I just got off the phone with your brother and he told me he thinks we should, and I agree with him.

Daniel drops the chunks of onion onto a skillet and they begin to sizzle in the hot oil. He’s looking at me with all the seriousness in the world. I take a deep breath and watch him formulate his thoughts. Making a life-changing decision on the whim of someone else’s encouragement is irrational, isn’t it?

I think you’re right, he says, surprising me. He pauses before adding, Are you sure?

I hear hope in his voice.

Yes, I swoon, jumping to my feet. I just want us to decide, and then be done deciding. I don’t want to be able to change our minds again. No take-backsies.

He nods, and I hold out my hand

Can we, I don’t know, shake on this? I say, So we know it’s real? I know this is what we want. Dammit, we can't keep waffling. It's this year or never. I think we should move to Alaska.

Daniel takes my hand in his and gives it a firm squeeze.

Part I: Before

ONE ◆ Whispering

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December 2015

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My neck cranes hard into the third-row window as I try to get a better look at the mountains. They’re so tall I can hardly see the tops of them, even across the waterway between us. I press my forehead to the windowpane and it is icy cold against my skin. Turning the volume louder on my earbuds, I tune out the familiar noise in the two front rows of the SUV where my Dad and grandparents chat as though we are not witnessing the most beautiful place on Earth. Where is their reverence? I am in awe as we drive along the Turnagain Arm, a wide and shallow body of water that expands for miles with gorgeous craggy peaks on either side as far as the eye can see. There is snow and ice everywhere. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, where it snowed one day a year, if we were lucky. School was canceled even when the half-inch of accumulation melted by noon. Our winters are the mockery of every Northerner who shovels feet of snow off their driveway before breakfast. This kind of winter in Alaska is unfamiliar to me, and I am in love.

A deep voice croons against a haunting melody in my earbuds as The Sound of Silence, covered by Disturbed, comes up on shuffle. My mind wanders to an old friend from college who always spoke about his love of winter—the quiet stillness in a frozen forest. I think he would like this version of the old familiar song, along with the wintry backdrop surrounding me. Where is that guy now? I wonder. 

I allow my mind to meander, untethered from work and the stressful life I have built for myself back in Atlanta: a new marriage that doesn’t fit quite right; finishing my undergraduate degree; hours of commuting to a start-up rumored to be bought out soon, leaving me unemployed. My husband Chase and I have been in marriage counseling for almost a year, and my heart is exhausted both from trying to make it work, and figuring out what making it work even looks like.

My heartstrings pull at their roots, and my lust for new horizons entangles with heaping armfuls of guilt inside me, like seaweed. I feel weighed down. I pulse with a familiar longing to be unmoored. The mountains and water and snow swallow me whole. What would it be like to live here? I dream, though it is only a dream.

TWO ◆ Wildling

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We’re in Alaska for my brother’s wedding.

Jacob is my only sibling, and we grew up close, two homeschooled weirdos with plenty of inside jokes and too much time on our hands. Our parents divorced when I was six and Jacob was eight. We collected our share of childhood traumas like most people, but we had each other, which meant something to us. In our teens, we took music lessons on the same afternoon. He learned guitar and drums, and I played the piano. We led worship together for Sunday school classes, and I was even one of his band members when he was a worship leader for our church youth group and occasional services at the International House of Prayer. At home, Jacob would keep me awake for hours, sitting on my bed as he strummed and plucked on his guitar. I quit piano lessons long before, satisfied with my knowledge of basic chords. When Jacob got his driver’s license, he’d drive us around while we split a bag of Jalapeño Cheddar Cheetos, sipped on gas station slushies, blasted The Killer’s first album, and sang along at the top of our lungs.

Things were good between us, but getting worse at home. My relationship with my mother was becoming more strained and I was running out of options for resolution. We were homeschooled, and the older I got, the less equipped I felt for adulthood from our haphazard education. At fifteen, I moved in with my dad, so I could go to public school. The night I told Jacob I was moving out of our mom’s place, he begged me not to go. My stomach was in knots. This decision was something I’d been discussing with our father for almost two years, and I knew it was time. Jacob insisted things would get better but I’d already made up my mind. That was one of the hardest nights of my life, and the fallout of my decision tore great divides in our already fractured family. After that night, Jacob stopped talking to me. I lost my best friend in what felt like the blink of an eye.

Over the next few years, I attended and graduated public high school and enrolled in college. I dug deep into therapy and healing modalities after becoming diagnosed with depression soon after moving out of my mom’s house. My brother finished with homeschooling and, in a surprise move to us all, set off for Alaska with some friends. Jacob and I had not spoken much over the years—a few calls here and there, and the occasional text message throughout the year. When I learned about his move, it was like a dagger of arctic ice plunged through my heart. Alaska? I’ll never see him again, I thought.

While Jacob lived in Alaska, he would post on YouTube every few months, strumming his guitar in that artful way he would while sitting on my bed late at night, his voice now a grownup version of the one I used to know. He was like a stranger to me now. I would sit in front of my computer and play his videos on repeat, tears streaming down my face, and my boyfriend would come to stand behind me, his hand on my shoulder.

You’ll see him again. It will get better, he’d say.

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When I was twenty-two, I received the sudden announcement of Jacob’s return from Alaska—as sudden as his departure. Our dad picked up Jacob from the airport on a broiling summer afternoon and the three of us met for lunch at Chili’s. It was one of the places we used to go as a trio when we were kids. I was a nervous wreck on the way to meet them; my dad had set it up over text, and I had no idea if Jacob even wanted to see me. We exchanged forced smiles and hugs in the parking lot, and our initial conversation felt stilted but not terrible. After we sat down, Jacob reached into a bag, pulled out a bundle, and held it out toward me. I accepted it, hesitating. For me? I held a zip-up hoodie in my hands, and Jacob explained that he had brought it back from Alaska—yes, for me.

The pale gray hoodie had patches of hideous neon pink and screaming yellow, with a faded AK Starfish Co logo. I found this odd, since I had only ever associated starfish with the steamy Southeast shore. At the time I was a snobby minimalist, with a capsule wardrobe consisting of only black and neutral tones. I wouldn’t be caught dead in this as a junior in college, but in the back of my mind, I knew it was something I would have loved when I was twelve. I wondered if he bought it remembering me as that young girl with the hot pink zebra-print backpack. Despite my fashion sense, I welcomed his gift.

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Later that summer, Jacob and I met for ice cream at Bruster’s, another haunt from our unspoken childhood. When I was barely as tall as the order window, I would have gotten the cotton candy flavor with Pop Rocks mixed in and they would add teensy candy eyes to my cone. Older now, I opted for my new favorite, Graham Central Station. Jacob and I sat in the car and talked between bites, trying to keep up with the melting drips that are inevitable for Georgia in July. For some reason, that day, the walls came down for both of us, and we talked about life in a way we never had before. I garnered a sense of closure from our child and teen years’ drama, and a new kindred energy was fostered between my brother and I. 

We found a rhythm to our newfound friendship over the next few years. Jacob would pet-sit for me when I traveled, and I invited him over for holiday dinners. He and his new girlfriend Chelsea serenaded the first dance at my wedding. When Jacob surprised her with a proposal at the end of one of their shows, I was beaming, phone in hand, capturing the whole thing. As adults, living our own full and separate lives, we managed to define a new connection, one that felt like something we could stand on.

THREE ◆ Hitching

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Jacob’s now-fiancé, Chelsea, is from Alaska. That’s how they met. They are getting married here in Alaska a week before Christmas. Unfortunately, their nuptials cut into the annual trip I make with Chase to see his family over the holidays. Somewhat amicably, Chase and I decided I would go solo, so he could spend more time with his family. I feel like I have space to breathe all the way out here. It’s like another planet to me, the unfamiliar sights and biting cold a welcome shock to my system.

Everywhere in Anchorage, I can’t shake the question of what it might be like to live here. I’ve never lived further than an hour from the hospital where I was born. Hell, right now the brick house where Chase and I live is only two and a half miles away from it, just down the road from the House of Prayer, where Jacob and I were indoctrinated into evangelicalism as kids, a place that haunts me with a hundred memories. When I drive around the sprawling metropolis of Atlanta, I see layers of myself everywhere. The restaurant where I used to eat with my mom as a kid, across from the park where I had my first kiss, is now the same plaza where I bring my step-daughters for scoops of Italian ice. Something about it makes me feel claustrophobic, like I’ll always be a small-town girl but without the charm of the single stop-light and country accent. I’m lost in Atlanta, aching in two, sometimes three hours of traffic commuting along I-285 and I-85, each overpass a memory of a different chapter of my twenty years—tangled like Spaghetti Junction.

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I recognize this familiar daydream, the one where I simply don’t go home. Earlier this year, I went to Phoenix, Arizona, on a work trip. Long days were filled with touring supply-chain facilities and luncheons, putting faces to the names of all the reps I’ve corresponded with for years over email. Rather than spend the evenings in my hotel room watching TV, I took off in the rental car, chasing the horizon. The red earth called to me. I drove so far into the desert that the snaking switchbacks left behind all buildings and cell service. Even the radio faded to a fuzzy static.

I meandered with windows down, my hand swooping in the mild warmth of Arizona in February. The desert stretched out for miles—Mars-like terrain and cacti three times my height as far as I could see. Time lost meaning to me, and I drove until the road ended along a river. There, I found a small general store, where I bought rainbow-colored popcorn before turning the rental car around. As I followed the same winding track back toward the city, stars prickled through the darkened sky. I felt a sad, quiet yearning, reflecting on the life waiting for me in Atlanta. I mourned the love I’d promised away at my wedding—not even a year before—not for regret, but for all the ways I was beginning to understand how that particular love was not my home.

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We grab chairs for the wedding ceremony from the basement of a building I’m told is a church, but looks more like a warehouse from the outside. All the buildings in Anchorage have this sense of bleakness to them, gray and hulking structures beside tired storefronts that look like they haven’t been renovated since the seventies. The sun arcs overhead for only a handful of hours, but it is just enough time for me to fall in love with the mountain view that encircles the majority of this town. Despite the snow-crusted city’s drab appearance, Anchorage is captivating for its natural beauty— sharp and white peaks cracking into the soft blue of midday. One afternoon, our family piles into the SUV and heads up through Anchorage’s suburbs to Flattop Mountain in Chugach State Park. The view is staggering, limitless; the mountains and inlet and city all stretch out below me. I stand on a boulder and throw my arms out wide. My dad grabs a shot of me—and what dad-picture would be complete without his glove-covered thumb in one corner? 

The days before the wedding are a blur of preparation. We meet Chelsea’s family, and attend dinners and wedding showers. When the bridal party gets their nails done, I talk Chelsea into getting a gel manicure, my treat, which feels sisterly.

The wedding is simple and sweet. It is held in an unpretentious greenhouse that we all worked together to decorate with twinkly lights and flowers hung behind the altar. Like most weddings, the day is over in a flash. I squeeze my brother and his new wife after the reception, and my dad drops me off at the airport, where I have a red-eye flight back to the Lower 48. The airport is quiet. I sit in an empty terminal with fake greenery and red bows all around. I’ll Be Home for Christmas plays tinny on the radio.

As the plane takes off, I look down at the dark clouds covering the expansive mountain range below me. I mourn the lost final glimpse of the mountain view, longing for just one more look.

FOUR ◆ Lurching

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February 2016

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I am bored at the office when an email finally pops into my inbox. It’s from my old college buddy, Daniel—the same one that crossed my mind while listening to Sound of Silence back in Alaska. Now, out of the blue, he’s sent me a song that made him think of me: a lilting number called Shadows by violinist Lindsey Stirling, and a simple message wishing me well.

I Google his name to see if he has any social media presence, curious where in the world he’s found himself, and cannot believe what I see. On my screen is an image of him standing on a mountain vista, one I could recognize anywhere: Flattop Mountain. I shake my head in disbelief and look at the date—it was posted only a few weeks ago.

I met Daniel when I was a freshman at the University of Georgia. We spent a whole summer like best buds, with benefits. He attended Georgia Southern, and spent holiday and summer breaks in his hometown of Macon, just a two-hour drive from my dorm in Athens. When he came to see me, we splashed in the Oconee River and watched Inception in my friend’s dorm; got tangled up in the sheets under my rainbow string lights stretched across the room, and he kissed the soft skin behind my ankle.

When I visited him, we would party with his friends, and he would show me all the films I missed growing up homeschooled. When Daniel told stories, they sucked me right in. His face would light up with a smile from a lousy pun—eyes twinkling when I got the joke too, met with a laugh instead of a groan. We talked for hours on the phone, exchanged novels of emails, and blushed at one another’s dirty texts. Near the end of fall semester Sophomore year, however, our passionate-but-casual relationship sputtered out when I decided I was looking for The Real Thing. A month later, I met Chase.

Seeing Daniel standing on Flattop Mountain feels like a cruel joke from the universe. Though, perhaps coincidence is a miracle gone unnoticed. I listen to Shadows and stare at the picture, in awe that I stood on that mountain only weeks before, and think of us passing like two ships in the night.

FIVE ◆ Shattering

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"Ten years from now,

make sure you can say that you chose your life,

that you didn’t settle for it."

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Mandy Hale

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Summer 2016

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I was judgmental of divorced people my entire life. My parents threw in the towel when I was five years old, and the next five birthday wishes were spent on the hope of a reconciliation that would never come. After growing up with divorced parents, I swore I would never give up on marriage so easily. 

And yet, on one uneventful Thursday night in May, I make the painful, irreversible decision to walk away from my marriage.

I leave not because anything was too heavy to bear, but because I cannot loosen this thought in my mind: when is it okay to end something that is good but not great? Marriage dies a death by a thousand cuts. Despite all the wreckage in my heart, I know this is what I need to do. My marriage was not working. The heart is an unwieldy thing. 

The most unfortunate aftermath of my decision is losing my stepdaughters. The girls were more than Chase’s kids; they became mine, too. From our first date, I knew Chase had two children. I went into our relationship with eyes wide open—excited at the prospect and responsibility of step motherhood. I waited six months to meet them, and after I did, I fell in love. I devoted myself to them as a parent, a friend, and a mentor. We played together when they were still young enough to want to play, talked about their friends and crushes in middle school, and went to concerts together. Driving them to school, taking them to doctor’s appointments, learning the art of disciplining, teaching them to cook—these were the moments of motherhood that came to define so much about my early twenties. I gave those girls permanent residence in my heart. Loving them nourished me—guided me into a more profound knowing of myself. At first glance, I knew I would love them always.

They were never meant to be caught in our crossfire. During the months before leaving, Chase and I talked a lot in therapy about the future of my relationship with them. Best laid plans meant that even if he and I did not stay together, I would remain a part of the girls’ lives. Unfortunately, after I left, Chase and the girls’ mother decided that would not be the case after all. 

It is a lurching, exhausting pain whenever a memory of them blooms unbidden in my thoughts. Each night, as sleep hovers in the distance, I remember it all. See their smiling faces, and their sad ones, too. Think of the time the younger one told me I was saved in her phone as Mom 2. Picture the hours spent cross-legged on their floor, admiring every attempt at violin, art projects, trending dance moves, whirling whispers of young love. Tears choke my ability to think coherently. I don’t know when—or if—I will ever see them again. 

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In the horrid liminal space of being separated but not yet divorced, I live in Airbnbs, a new place every few nights. Eventually, I rent a spare bedroom from a friend of a friend, living with a stranger and his eight-year-old son. My only comforts look like stuffing bags of popcorn in my face at midnight and calling that dinner, and watching Game of Thrones on my phone. I feel too present in each moment, unable to wrap my head around any concept of future.

I rekindle my friendship with Daniel. Our friendship gives me something to look forward to—an excuse to get out of town and sort out my feelings on the mini road trip from Atlanta to Nashville, where he now lives with his parents. After the rooms I’ve been renting, all the space in their house is a welcome reprieve where I can stretch out and think. I call out of work on Monday at least three separate visits, taking advantage of unplanned long weekends just to steal more time away with Daniel. When I’m with him, I don’t have to think about finding my next stay last minute or what I’m going to eat; every meal a plate is set before me filled with so much care I can taste it. More than once, Daniel and his mama, Cathy, gift me huge bags of groceries from their own pantry, despite my staunch refusal. Sometimes they carry the food to my car and place it in my trunk when I’m too stubborn. On more than one occasion, as we’re hugging goodbye, Cathy tucks a few twenty-dollar bills in my palm and says, Hush. 

I set aside my need to be understood, and ignore the hot judgmental glare from my family wondering if I left Chase for Daniel. I allow my heart to move around in all the unpredictable directions it must to heal. On the hardest nights, my sorrow intermingles with great anxiety, fear, and regret. My terror swells into an all-consuming storm that I cannot move through alone. One night, my throat parched from wailing into a pillow, I glance at the clock: 2:00 am. Daniel is working the night shift at the hospital, but he assured me I could call him any time. I think of my Airbnb hosts, who must be uncomfortable listening to me sob every night. I know these walls are thin. I try to hold in my tears but it only makes things worse. I can’t do this alone. I thumb Daniel’s number into my phone and press it to my face, breathless with hope that his voice will come through on the other end. He answers on the second ring. I bawl into the phone, ignoring the resistance of my higher self.

Although I have admitted to myself that I love Daniel, I am still grieving. I mourn every beautiful and pleasant thing I ever felt for Chase and the life I once believed lay before me; pulling the thread back from the fabric of our lives, unstitching every good and hopeful dream we ever shared. As I grieve, I can’t shake the inner dialogue that every self-help book, therapist, and concerned friend would tell me: that growing closer to Daniel right now is not healthy. I am wrecking any shot I have at being with Daniel one day. Each time he walks me back from the ledge of despair, I toss aside my hope that we will ever be more than friends one day. That doesn’t matter. I can’t think on that level right now anyway. I have only to survive—to exist in this space until time moves forward and all of the freshness of this split becomes less severe. I have to put on my own oxygen mask and get back on the ground before I can think about how terrifying it was to be falling from the sky.

SIX ◆ Mooring

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The company I had been working for ended up getting sold, leaving me out of work. While I had taken a summer internship with meager pay to cover the monthly payments on my maxed-out credit cards, at the height of summer the internship ends. Now, the only thing tying me down to Atlanta are a handful of friends who are busy with their own lives, my loving-but-emotionally-distant family, and the room I’ve been renting. I’ve had a desire to live somewhere other than Georgia my whole life, and now there’s almost nothing stopping me. I feel like the chains that once tethered me to this place have been falling off one heavy clunk at a time, until there’s so little holding me back, I could float away.

I pack everything I can fit into my car, donate everything else, and move to North Carolina. My dear friend Kelsey has just moved into a new place and has a month left on her old lease, so I unofficially sublet for a steal. During that time, I live on so little it’s like I’m a wild animal, free and unbound to anything other than what I want to do and feel that day. I go for long swims in the hot August evening and take meandering walks Uptown. Sometimes I do a drop-in yoga class with my friend Tasha, who I met in Charlotte a few years ago while visiting Kelsey. When I walk into the library, I’m astonished they trust me with a card, and carry out each rented book with newfound amazement and appreciation. 

I tempt Daniel with images from the rooftop patio of my friend’s apartment building, nudging him to consider moving to Charlotte. He could get his own place; we could see where things might go. I call him one afternoon and announce I’ve bought him a plane ticket to come see me. He’s flabbergasted, and makes obligatory comments about financial responsibility. Then, we get excited.

When I pick him up from the airport, I carry a bright green sign, his favorite color, with the words WELCOME HOME, DANIEL scrawled across in marker. I hold it high overhead, and when he turns the corner in the airport and sees me, a massive grin beams out of his blonde beard. He pulls me into a big hug and I say, Do you get it, do you get it? He laughs and says yes, he got the hint, and adds something cliché and sweet about ‘home’ being when he’s with me. 

The Charlotte visit is the spark that lights the match. I surprise him with a picnic by the lake. We film one another tasting Rocky Mountain Oysters at a trendy upstairs restaurant. Daniel picks out a serving of octopus to prepare for dinner one night, and wears nothing but boxers and my favorite apron. My bed might be on the floor, but we make good use of its comfort. Every day together lasts a week, each moment like a promise of possibility. Whatever kindling Daniel and I had been preparing over the summer ignites. It’s a small fire, but it burns hot with promise and a zillion what-ifs. 

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While Atlanta is just under four hours from Nashville, Charlotte is almost twice the distance. I make one attempt, but realize I can’t drive seven hours each way for a quick, two-night visit. Daniel and I have had talks about exploring an official relationship together, and we explore the topic on a walk in his neighborhood on this visit. There’s a different energy in the air tonight, the pinky haze of early Autumn sunset spilling over suburbia. We discuss our feelings for each other, and it surprises me when Daniel says pragmatically,

I think we should start dating.

I contemplate my feelings against what I know to be true of Daniel. Long-distance dating was one of the barriers that kept us apart before I met Chase, a firm boundary of Daniel’s. Hearing him say this, in some ways, is a dream come true. It scares me to say no. But I do, with a calm assurance that now is not the right time. Long-distance isn’t a good fit for us. Decision made, we continue walking and discuss where we might want to live if we moved somewhere together one day. 

Last winter, it turned out that not only had Daniel and I missed each other by just a few weeks during our visits to Anchorage, but there were a handful of other serendipitous coincidences that left us both scratching our heads. We were both in Alaska visiting our respective brothers. We both heard a song while riding around town that made us think of the other, though we hadn’t spoken in months. As he stood on Flattop, he too gazed at the mountains of snow and ice and dreamed, what would it be like to live here?

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A few months go by in Charlotte. I drive Lyft at night