We didn’t go. Even as a family of three, there was scarcely enough money to spend on recreation, much less a cross-country jaunt based on the whims of a ten-year-old. My mother asked me why. Why Colorado? Why all of a sudden? And I had no real answer. I knew there was a why, just didn’t know how to put it into words, even in my head. Explaining the why wasn’t as important as the why’s mere existence.
The thought faded eventually, falling into a bin with all the other temporary impulses of adolescence. A distant memory, not totally forgotten, but no longer salient. It was replaced with words from textbooks and after school activities and summer jobs. It was pushed out of my consciousness, through the subconscious all the way to the unconscious, and it rested there for decades, until one morning I heard a song I’d never heard before.
Perhaps it was naïve to expect the Rockies to majestically jut from the earth into the sky, just like they did in that picture, as soon as I crossed the border into Colorado, but nonetheless I felt a tinge of disappointment. Here I was, finally in that foreign land, and there were no mountains. It was just more Kansas. I squinted into the distance, but even on the far horizon there was only flat land meeting a hazy sky.
It was confusing. I got back in my car and kept driving.
Two more hours across bland farmland and mostly flat countryside, the elevation slowly and imperceptibly creeping upward, and finally I was able to make out the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. Through the clear summer sky the image came into view, starting as a wisp, an illusion of sight, and soon coming into focus in grand, far off splendor. I slapped the roof of my car and yelled, and honked the horn three times. Three days of driving across America’s heartland, a lifetime of harboring an unconscious dream of mountain peaks and blue sky and open range, and it was real. Finally, it was. A decade of slaving away in a pewter gray box, a sweatshop in the sky, secretly dreaming of freedom, and it was real. I found it.
The highway led me gently to the edge of civilization. The road became more populated with cars, the highway signs more plentiful. The mountains came into focus, and I could make out specific features; certain peaks separated from one another, small blotches of snow at the highest altitudes.
I saw Denver. Driving through the eastern suburbs, past industrial centers and railroad tracks, I had a good view of downtown. It was small, no more than a dozen skyscrapers, flanked by twice as many smaller buildings, and this made it welcoming. That was the city center, but Denver sprawled for miles.
The highway took me north of downtown and closer to the mountains. The elevation again rose steadily, then dropped, quickly and sharply, and I made the descent into my final destination. Boulder. A town I knew nothing about, other than the little Anthony had told me. But as my car crested the hill and made that drop into the valley below, I slowed down to take in the beauty that lay before me. Lush trees and shrubbery broken up by small, scattered buildings. A town nestled at the base of the foothills, with green mounds rising from the earth just beyond the city, blanketed in pine trees. To the immediate west were gigantic blades of sandstone rock, carved out of the hills and marking the city. The Flatirons. The sun began to set and cast a golden glow through the valley, falling gracefully and directly on the town itself. An oasis.
My car glided down Highway 36 and through town, past the Tuscan architecture of the University of Colorado. I turned on Broadway and followed it north across Pearl Street, then took a left on Mapleton and climbed another hill. I parallel parked the car under an oak tree on a divided street, looked at the address I’d written on a piece of paper, and found the house. It was a small, ranch-style home with Victorian styling and overgrown shrubbery in the front. It was beautiful, but everything was.
4
“You just left?”
“I did,” I said.
He looked at me a while longer, waiting for some further explanation, but I just shrugged my shoulders.
Anthony squinted his eyes and shook his head. “So…Megan’s okay with this?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Are you getting a divorce?”
“Hmm,” I said and rubbed my chin. “Hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t gotten that far. But probably, I guess. Yeah, that would make sense.”
“You’re being flippant.”
“I’m not.” I wasn’t.
He squinted his eyes further and shook his head more vigorously. “I don’t get it.”
“Honestly, still trying to figure it out myself,” I said. I looked around his home. Small, two bedroom, decorated by some tasteful hippie. Hemp rugs and abstract paintings, low ceilings and wood floors. “I appreciate you letting me crash here.”
The comment rolled off him. “When’s the last time I’ve seen you? Five years?”
“Seven. You guys came back for the family picnic.”
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head. “Seven years.”
“Yeah. Seven years. Sorry about the lack of notice.”
“I appreciate you letting me know this morning.”
“Least I can do,” I said, a thin attempt at humor. “Anthony, I know this is weird. But you’re the only one I know in Colorado. I would’ve just gotten a hotel, but those were getting old.”
He got up and started pacing the room, mumbling sporadically to himself. This was something he’d done as a kid, and it made me smile that he’d carried the trait. Seven years. He was the older cousin—four years my senior—but our houses were five miles apart and our parents got together often. He was the epitome of cool back then –always seeming so old, sophisticated, advanced. I didn’t know what to think now. It’d been seven years since any contact, and far longer than that since contact on a regular basis.
Anthony stopped near the window and looked back at me. “Why Colorado?”
“Why not?”
He moved closer and shook his head for the last time. His voice was quieter. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to figure that out still. But I had to get out.”
“So you’re just, ‘getting out?’”
“Yes. And for right now, that’s all I’m doing. I’ll decide the rest later.”
He sighed, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes. Then he smiled, a pensive, defeated smile, and walked to a sliding glass door on the other side of the room.
“Well,” he said, “welcome to Boulder.”
5
I slept on Anthony’s couch that night. His wife came home an hour after I arrived and greeted me like an old friend. There were no mentions of how many years it had been, or what the hell I was doing. Nothing said about how she and I had only met a handful of times, and now I was setting up shop on their couch for reasons she probably didn’t understand. Julia. She was a kind soul.
Julia made us dinner, and afterward we sat on the back porch and drank pale ales. She asked about me a lot, never poking or prodding, but nibbling around the edges of who I was and what I was doing there. I told her as much as I could. The sun set and extinguished the soft glow of summer twilight, and we were left in darkness.
Anthony and Julia had married eleven years prior, in Massachusetts. I was not at the wedding. Shortly after, they moved west so Anthony could take a position helping start a technology company in Boulder. The company flourished and they bought a house.
A half hour passed and they moved inside; there was work in the morning. I stayed on the porch for another beer, sipping it slowly and looking out into the darkness. Through a hole in the trees I could see the moon reflecting off the foothills, casting its silver glow on the rock and pine. I thought about money. Three days ago I left a generous salary and prestigious title without a word to anyone at the company, and now I had no prospects for future employment, and no real plan on what to do. Since leaving Wilson Keen, I’d traveled one thousand, eight hundred miles and received sixteen voicemail messages and countless emails, all wondering where I was. The messages started Friday morning and continued through the weekend, growing more agitated. On one level this was amusing; shouldn’t these people be doing something else with their weekends than worrying about a single employee that didn’t show up on Friday? But it wasn’t just that. I didn’t show up Saturday, either, and I didn’t swing by or at least check in and answer emails on Sunday. There were no weekends as a senior analyst. So yes, I had been MIA for a full three days, and while none of the correspondences had explicitly mentioned termination, I was fairly sure the decision had been made. I planned on calling tomorrow to explain my situation, which would not do much good. They probably already knew. They had Megan’s number.