Since moving to Florida, we instituted the tradition of road trips to the Smoky Mountains each fall. A week or two in the mountains gives my soul the autumn weather it craves, unavailable in always-sunny Florida. It’s a 14-hour drive, which we usually break up into two chunks on the way there, and do in one, long-ass, straight shot on the way back.
This year, it rained for the first leg of our trip. I’m not a fan of driving on the highway while it rains– is anyone?– and I white knuckled a good chunk of the drive, clenching the steering wheel as I tried to make out the lines that marked the road.
As tradition dictates, I drive until it starts to get dark, then we find a Cracker Barrel, spend $50 on bribe toys for good behavior, eat approximately 3,000 calories, use the bathroom twice, and waddle back to the car, where Chad will take over for the night.
And God bless him, because the rainy conditions were treacherous. By the time we pulled into our hotel two hours later, we were exhausted. It was dark, and we were grateful to be out of the confines of the car, packed to the brim with toys and snacks, and hiking boots somewhere in the depths of the trunk. The next morning, we awoke to a clear sky, a hilly landscape devoid of palm trees, and fall colors.
As we drove away from the hotel, I was gut-punched by a lightbulb moment. “It’s wild,” I said to Chad, “That we drive into this town, and it’s dark. We can’t see anything, it’s raining, and visibility is shit. We’re praying we get through without getting into a massive wreck.” He nods.
“The last time we saw our surroundings, there were palm trees, and green, and the roads were as flat as they come. And now, we wake up in the mountains.” Chad shakes his head. “We aren’t in the mountains yet,” he says, clearly unaware that I’m going for the kind of metaphor that makes my writer heart glow.
I get a little pissed. “Fine,” I say, “I wasn’t going to tell you this anyway, so I’ll just stop.”
He gets the deer in the headlights look, the, oh-dang, you’re going for an analogy, and here I am being all actuarial, ruining this narrative your brain is weaving together. Or maybe, more likely, he just knows that it’s best not to argue with me while I’m driving.
“Tell me,” he says, “I want to hear what you were going to say.”
“It’s like,” I say, tears welling in the corners of my eyes, “You drive through awful conditions, and you can’t see anything, semi-trucks are drenching you in their backwash, and you’re so scared you’re not going to make it. The only reason you’re alive is because of the white and yellow lines painting the road, that you can only see a few feet ahead of you.”
“And then you wake up the next morning,” my voice breaks, “And you realize you’re in this new place. One you couldn’t see the night before. There are colors, and hills (not mountains, actuarial Chad), and it’s beautiful. It is so fucking beautiful. And you realize, it was beautiful all along. The conditions just got a little shitty.”
He gently squeezed my leg. And he, more than anyone else, knew this story was about a lot more than driving in the rain.
This past year, I started therapy for PTSD. Each week, I am guided by a knowledgeable, compassionate, therapist, into parts of my soul I tried so hard to forget. And each week, after an hour of unearthing and processing hellish memories and emotions, I return home to Chad.
There’s been a lot of white knuckling, and the road has been nearly impossible to see. Instead of rain, it is tears. And instead of a windshield that desperately needed to be defrosted, my view is often limited by a trauma-induced fog.
But sometimes I forget that I’m driving through a weather system– it’s not that my world will always be like this. And underlying the storm is beauty. I catch glimpses of it more and more. The coziness of the fire I’m sitting next to, the way Alice’s eyes sparkle when she laughs, the unexpected bear sighting yesterday, Avery’s goofy 8-year-old personality, and crisp fall weather. The way I am so comfortable around Chad– the way that he grounds me in experiences that would otherwise be unbearable (like driving up a dirt road on a mountain with steep drop offs).
We celebrated our 9th anniversary last week. They say that people don’t change. But each year, as November 15th rounds the corner, it seems glaring to me that we do change. I’d argue, we are constantly changing.
Sometimes these changes aren’t visible to the outside world. Sometimes we aren’t ready for people to see what we’ve unearthed, or the direction our soul is shifting. That has definitely been the case in my writing: though I’ve alluded to the pain, or my mental health struggles, most of my story has resided beneath the surface. But Chad has served as a witness to my journey through the pain– through hell.
I think there’s great vulnerability in allowing someone to view you in your raw and exposed state. But I think to be the viewer is equally vulnerable. To sit with someone in their pain– without flinching, or trying to fix, distract, or coordinate an all-out helicopter rescue from the wilderness– it’s equally gutsy.
And I have the deepest gratitude for him, being my witness and accepting me as I am.
