All of Me

zero • prologue

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❝ every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end ❞

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s e m i s o n i c

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THREE MONTHS BEFORE

I have never been so far from home. I guess I've never been so close either, because home as I know it isn't home anymore. The nineteen years I lived in that cramped - no, cozy - third-floor apartment in Queens was just leading to this moment: the moment I left.

I always thought leaving home would mean moving to college, that I would pack up half my life to cram it into a dorm room and my parents would drive me to my new life on a campus somewhere in-state. We'd have an emotional goodbye and then it'd be up to me to find my way. That future was hard enough to envisage.

I never thought it would be like this. I never pictured such a permanent farewell, reducing my life to a few boxes to drag halfway across the country with Mom asleep in the passenger seat next to me. Never did I entertain the thought that at some point, the last time I said goodbye would really be the last time, or that I wouldn't even remember it.

It always used to be so black and white in my head: you say goodbye when you leave. Mom and I said goodbye to the apartment when we shut the door; we said goodbye to New York when we crossed the river.

But I can't recall the last time Dad said goodbye. He hated the word. He said it was too final, so he always said see you later! or I love you or some variant on the sentiment, as though every farewell was a colon, the first half of a sentence waiting for the next clause. He saw life for the ongoing narrative it is, each day a new paragraph, but he left the world hanging halfway through a sentence.

Now Mom and I are the ones leaving. A planned relocation rather than an unsolved disappearance, but it still hurts so much that I had to pull over on the New Jersey turnpike when I was sure the searing pain in my chest had to be a heart attack. Mom said it was probably just heartbreak, and she turned away when she cried.

This morning, I had barely left my neighborhood, let alone my state. I had never crossed the Hudson or even made it to the end of Long Island, but now I've driven across New Jersey and through Pennsylvania and into Ohio. Today alone, I've seen more of my country than ever before but it's all wrong. It doesn't feel like an adventure.

All I can think is that with every mile that passes, I'm further than ever from Dad, and I never got to say goodbye.

•••

The road's beginning to blur. The sea of headlights bleed together through the rain slashing the windscreen and the wipers on Mom's old sedan are struggling to keep up with the onslaught. The weather was ok until we hit Pittsburgh but since then it's been storm city.

Worse than the rain is the exhaustion. I've had my license for three years but there weren't many chances to drive when we lived in Queens with everything in walking distance or just a few subway stops away. Last year, Mom and I went to Poughkeepsie but that was only a two-hour drive. It's already been twice as long since I last stopped, and thirteen hours since we got in the car.

There's a rest stop up ahead, the bright light like a beacon calling me home. Five Oaks, our new home, is only fifty miles away. It's nothing in comparison to the five hundred I've already driven but I feel like someone has replaced my brain with molasses and there's a watercolor filter over my eyes.