itinerant

We pay for sunset.

I want to be honest about that

That thing that’s perfectly free from the deck out back

But we look at brochures

Or websites pretending to be brochures

And we see the photograph of two people at a railing

Or a candlelit dinner

Or a cliffside

Or the beach

Or a snowed in mountainside cabin

And the light doing what light does

When it’s trying to sell you something

And we say “yes…

That…

We’ll take that”

And hand over whatever currency we’ve accrued for trading our time

Ourselves

To give us a chance to do this

*****

I notice somewhere around day three

We’ve stopped negotiating

Not fighting; we aren’t really the fighting kind

We’re more the

“Talking-around-the-outside-of-the-thing

Until-the- thing -dies- of- loneliness-kind”

But somewhere in the moments

life makes its case for infinity in every direction

and we just stop

I sit at the edge of the bed

You’ll nap

the same thing we’d be doing at home but

We’re on vacation from ourselves

While being the best version of just that

Reconnecting and remembering who we are

Without opinion

Without judgement

Without keeping score:

It turns out this is just what we need,

We just couldn’t figure out how to build it at home between

The routine

And the calendar

And the obligations

And the particular sound a house makes when it’s full of

Everything we haven’t dealt with yet

So we will buy it

5 days away

Plan on leaving at 3 but not get out the door

Until 4:30

All expenses paid.

*****

But this is the part I find hard to explain

Without it sounding like an accusation—

We needed to pay someone to move us to a location

With an endless horizon

And enough disruption of routine

Before we could look at each other long enough

To see everything that was there

Which is…

Still this

Still the thing we built

Before we got busy building everything else.

We paid cash money to discover we were not lost.

I’ve had worse investments, certainly.

*****

On the last afternoon

We’ll look out into that endless horizon and see

The shape of our day to day coming back into view

The return of specificity,

The world reassembling itself into the streets we know

And obligations

And the particular shape of our shared existence

Waiting at the curb…

And I’ll watch your face

While you watch the passing hillside

That look of someone calculating what she is willing to carry back

And what she is deciding to leave in another county

Where neither of us has jurisdiction…

And I think

we should do this more often

not all the tourist trap nonsense

but this

the paying to be moved

the part where we run out of distraction

and discover we still like what’s underneath

that part

Whatever it costs.