Heidelberg, Germany. Fifth year as a pro hooper.
It's two in the morning and I am curled over my desk, still in my pre game outfit, living in a city where the most human interaction I have is with the Indian restaurant owner down the road. He doesn't speak English but I let him surprise me with different meals most nights. My phone is open on the bed a few steps away. No messages. There's a twelve hour gap between this room and the people I love, which means whatever I want to say arrives at the wrong end of someone's day, and whatever they want to say arrives at the wrong end of mine. So we say less. So we say nothing.
My laptop's cooling fans are screaming at me while I sweat over League of Legends until the sun comes up. My body panics as I hear the morning trucks start their run. I dash to bed and don't wake up until afternoon practice.
This wasn't the first time I had felt the effects of distance. Not kilometres or miles. The way a phone can feel empty.
I left Cabarita Beach at fifteen for basketball. I'm almost thirty now. Most people who love me have only ever known the version of me who's about to get on a plane. I haven't been back much. Some years not at all. The less I go, the more I hate myself for not going. The more I hate myself, the more I push the feelings into a dark void. Fifteen years of that loop, and I've gotten very efficient at it.
Now here I am again, In a new country. I am driving to my favourite acai spot in Puerto Rico on a Monday morning when Beth puts on the new Noah Kahan album. Immediately I was captured by his writing.
Kahan is from Strafford, Vermont. Population around a thousand. He left for music and writes like someone who can still smell his parents backyard trees. I'm driving with my 5month old son in the back seat, wifey next to me and an entire ocean between me and the people who raised me, and a man I've never met is singing about it like he's seen inside my soul.
We get home. I put Oaklynn on my lap. Beth plays the Noah Kahan documentary. I'm watching because I want to know how someone writes like that. Twenty minutes in, "You're Gonna Go Far" plays over a montage of him leaving Vermont.
Pack up your car. Put a hand on your heart.
I put the acai down. I don't want to cry with a bowl of frozen fruit in my hand. I don't want to cry at all, because crying would mean I have to explain what I'm feeling. And I'm not really sure what I feel. I just know Noah Kahan understands it.
That's why I'm writing this. To try to figure out what it is.
The resentment isn't anyone's fault. Nobody banned me from coming home. Nobody asked me to leave. I'm the one who keeps signing contracts in different cities. I'm the one who keeps choosing the flight. Every season is a choice, and the cost of the choice is people. What I want, more than I'd like to admit out loud, is for someone from home to tell me it was okay. That the going was worth it. That I didn't break anything by not being there. That they're not angry.
I've never asked. I've been too scared to. So for fifteen years I've been carrying the weight of an answer I've never heard, writing imaginary versions of that conversation in my head, with voices that aren't real, saying things they may or may not say.
Kahan's song is what that conversation sounds like if it goes the way I want it to.
We ain't angry at you, love. You're the greatest thing we've lost.
For about three minutes, I get to feel what permission would feel like. The going is blessed. The leaving was a kind of love.
Then the song ends, and Oaklynn shifts on my chest, and something in me goes very still.
Because I am holding the answer to a question I never thought to ask. This thing I feel for him. This gravity. This readiness to do anything. This is what my parents feel for me. They have felt it for thirty years. Mostly across an ocean. Mostly through a phone. Mostly without me in the room.
Oaklynn stirs and reaches for my thumb. He always does this. Hooks his whole fist around it like an anchor to help him fall back asleep. My parents have never seen him do this.
The light goes from morning to afternoon. I send texts. I record a couple of voice notes. I do the thing you do when you're trying to close a gap with effort instead of presence. The fear underneath the messages doesn't get smaller. The fear that I'm not enough, because I left. That no number of voice notes adds up to the years I wasn't there. That every message I send is me trying to make up for something that can't be made up for.
I keep his album on for the rest of the day. Oaklynn sleeps. Beth makes lunch. I sit there with my son's fist around my thumb and listen to a stranger from Vermont sing my parents' voices back to me, and I let myself, for a few more minutes, believe them.