I’ve written about not-places, about no-places, about utopias, about Elsewhere with a capital-E. Times and spaces still viscerally palpable though no longer present or tangible. Places that only exist in the heart’s imagination. In the thin stretches between regret and nostalgia. Places we’d give anything to go back to because now we’ve got the perfect comeback. Now, if given the chance, we’d know exactly what to say.
My son was about to be a freshmen and my daughter was in middle school when my marriage to their mother finally gave way. There are Elsewheres like constellations spread across the aftermath of those days. Morning walks to the bus stop I didn’t get to take. School drop offs and pickups I didn’t have a chance to make. Movie nights and board games all together. Cheap pizza and too much ice cream. Maybe if I had been a better husband, maybe if I had been a better father, maybe if I could have been a better human being, maybe I could have Matrix-dodged every bullet better than Keanu Reeves. Maybe it would have only been a flesh wound instead of arterial bleeding.
On good days I know better. That no matter how much we could have changed, things never would have ended differently.
On my run today there was only one Elsewhere on my mind. Only one I was trying to get to. After 4.91 miles I ran out of breath and had to rest before I could make it to its door.
When my daughter was fifteen she spent part of the summer with me. She was going through a breakup and given my track record I should have been better prepared. It wasn’t her first. Just the first I had witnessed directly. She didn’t cry. She didn’t sob. She didn’t scream. At least not when anyone could see. She’s a little girl with big feelings. Brash and beautiful and sweet. She gives too much, takes no shit, and has big brass balls that she wears next to the heart on her sleeve.
We sat on the couch quietly. For how long I can’t say. Time expands and contracts differently when your insides are busy tearing themselves away from the outer world.
My first and longest relationship was with her mother. And though it lasted a not-too-shabby 15 years, it went toxic long before the official date of expiry. It’s not that I haven’t fallen in love since then. It’s not that love has never found me. It’s just that it wasn’t built to stay.
In that wordless space beside my daughter, I thought to myself, if this was a movie this is the part you’d feel the music build toward crescendo. You’d be prepared for a wide open, epic chorus that Josh Groban would belt the absolute fuck out of. I’d reach into the velvet lined dark of a top hat and pull out something magical. With nothing up my sleeve I’d release something with feathers and wings.
But I had nothing.
I could have told her it gets better. Or that there’s someone out there for everyone. The former isn’t true in my experience, and the ladder, well, I’d like to think so but fuck if I know.
When I finally did say something all I could manage was, “everybody comes with shit. The question isn’t whose is better or worse, who has less or more than who. The question is whether you can handle their shit and if they can handle your shit too”.
If I could make it back to that Elsewhere I think I could say it better. I would tell her that’s there’s no such thing as being too much or not enough. You’re only too much or not enough to someone who doesn’t see you. In the right gaze you will be the enough that there’s never enough of and all your muchness will fit perfectly.
I would tell her that, if you have loved rightly, if you have loved deeply, if you have opened yourself up to the miracle of being loved like that in return, when it’s good and when it goes, it will always hurt like it does when you’re fifteen.
In case no one has told you today, I love you with all my everything.
These moments shape us don’t they? Born from regret and raw truth when we’re unprepared. Without them, would our creativity or love run so deep? Your words to your daughter become part of her Elsewhere; that fragile space between past and possibility. It’s there, in that quiet ache, that we grow. And sometimes, that’s all we have left.
“Times and spaces still viscerally palpable though no longer present or tangible. Places that only exist in the heart’s imagination.”
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Your willingness to express your search through images, colors, shapes, and find a name for these places: Elsewhere. canvas for great work, Duane.