I’m trying not to vomit. It’s not easy. I look over at Meredith. She’s also trying not to vomit. This makes it even harder for me not to. Someone should tell this cabby that driving like a toddler playing with a toy fire engine won’t get us to the airport any sooner. Not in stop and go traffic.
Look, a Maserati. Wonder what that guy does.
We’re on our way to JFK after a quick holiday in the city for our friend’s wedding. (The band at the reception killed it! Like when Michael Jackson said bad but really meant good.) Manhattan is over my left shoulder now. I don’t know why but for some reason I’m thinking about when we bought our first home.
It’s the morning of our closing. I miss a call from what turns out to be our attorney telling us how much to bring to closing. It’s A LOT more than I was told by our mortgage broker. Miscalculation gets the blame. Poor guy. My moment of panic subsides as I try to figure out what to do. We’ve got the money. But not a lot more. This is going to wipe us out. Not a good conclusion when you’re buying a home. Something’s bound to break or worse and how we will handle that?
Meredith isn’t with me at the moment. I pick her up from work and we head out to the closing. I’ve got to tell her. I hope she doesn’t take it badly.
I tell her.
I’ve had enough time to rationalize it and make it seem like it’s no big deal. She takes it okay. She trusts me. I tell her “It’s going to be fine.” At the same time I’m hoping I’m right. Did we overstep our ability? It feels too late to turn back. We arrive at the closing table. Everyone’s there who’s supposed to be. The biggest pile of paper we’ve ever seen begins to form on the table as we sign almost every page. I turn to Meredith and I can see that the profundity of it all is taking it’s toll. I lean over and whisper.
“You can cry as much as you want when we get in the car. Just please don’t cry right now, okay?”
I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do but that’s what I just did. She holds it together and we finish up. Everyone gets up and we leave to find the house that belongs to the keys they just handed us.
I return and begin looking out the window, trying to focus on a cloud. Maybe that will settle my stomach. I suggest Meredith does the same. I’m checking the map on my phone to see how much longer we need to hold the lunch we had at that street-side cafe on the west side. 5 minutes. Thank goodness.
I don’t know where memories come from or where they go when we aren’t thinking about them. I’ve heard some science behind this but I’m not even a novice on the topic. It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad we have them. Even the ones that are uncomfortable to make. I find it true that the way you feel in the moment is hardly the way you feel when you remember the moment. We tend to look romantically upon times that were anything but in the making. But that’s one thing people mean when they talk about “being human.” In spite of all of the darkness and gravity of life we want to rise, to recalibrate and walk forward with hope.
There’s a lot of reasons to be sad. You have the right. Just remember that there’s another side to this. You may just be smiling someday when you remember what it was like to be you today.
