I’ve been thinking about the cliff walk specifically. The four miles of it, the headland view, the descent to the shingle beach. I have been thinking about what it will feel like to be in that landscape with Nathan, ten years and a hard autumn behind us, and what we might talk about or might not need to talk about.
I have a tendency to want to know in advance how things will feel. It is one of the aspects of my personality that I have the most complicated relationship with: the desire to have already done the hard work of living through something and arrived at the part where it’s known. This is not possible, and I know it’s not possible, and I continue wanting it anyway.
The trail will be what it is. The weather will be whatever April decides. Nathan and I will arrive with everything we are bringing to that moment — the ten years, the fall, the counseling sessions, the small caught moments and the small missed ones, the photograph of the empty headland path, the grief for what we’d planned and the cautious attention we’re paying to what we’re building.
We’ll walk the four miles. We’ll look at the ocean. We’ll be, in the most literal and specific sense, present for it.
That is what I’m planning for. It is, I think, enough.
More than enough. It is the thing I wanted, and the thing that is coming, and the evidence that we are, however slowly and imperfectly, still moving toward something.