My friend Todd came over one weekend and helped me pack boxes into a storage unit I'd rented near South Lake Union. We worked mostly in silence, the way you do with a friend who understands you well enough not to fill the air with noise. "You don't have any regrets?" he said at one point. I thought about it genuinely.
"About leaving? No. About the marriage being what it was? Yeah, of course."
"You think she ever crossed a line with him?" "I honestly don't know," I said. "At some point, I stopped being sure and at some other point I stopped being sure it was the most important question." Todd nodded. "What's the most important question?"
"Whether I was willing to spend the next 30 years feeling the way I've felt for the last year. And the answer to that was pretty clear."
Petra had a conversation with her sister Vera, who lived in Bellevue. Vera reached out to me. I've always liked Vera. She's direct the way Petra sometimes wasn't, and she asked if we could talk. We met for coffee at a place near the East Side Rail Station.
"She's devastated," Vera said. "I believe that." "She doesn't understand how you went from zero to Singapore in one week." "It wasn't one week," I said. "It was a year of one week at a time."
Vera looked at her coffee. "She says you never really told her how bad it was." "I told her," I said. "In November, in February, in March. The words came out of my mouth in the kitchen of our house and she pivoted every single time to telling me I was being unreasonable."
Vera didn't argue with that. She just sat with it for a moment. "What do you want her to understand?" she asked.
"I want her to understand that the ultimatum she gave me last Sunday was the most honest communication we'd had in months. She said it as a threat, but it was actually clarity. She was telling me what her priorities were. I just finally believed her."
Vera drove home to Bellevue and I drove back to what was increasingly becoming just an apartment I used to live in. Six days before my flight, Petra came to me with a conversation I hadn't expected. She'd been staying at her sister's some nights, at the townhouse other nights. We'd been navigating the same space with the careful choreography of two people trying not to cause any more damage than had already been done. She sat down across from me at the kitchen table and said, "I ended things with Damon."
I looked at her. "I mean, we were never... It wasn't what you thought," she said quickly. "But I ended the friendship, the whole thing. I blocked him on everything. I told him I couldn't have him in my life anymore because he'd cost me my marriage."
I didn't know what she expected me to do with that.
I'd spent a year watching a pattern that had a clear shape and a clear trajectory. Watching it end six days before my flight didn't change the shape it had taken. "Petra," I said, "I believe you. And I also believe that you didn't understand how serious this was until I did something you couldn't redirect." "What does that mean?"
"It means that every time I tried to tell you this was hurting our marriage, you told me I was the problem. The only language that actually communicated the stakes was me leaving." She was quiet. "That's not a foundation," I said. "That's not how two people are supposed to work."
"People can learn," she said. "They can," I said. "I hope you do. I mean that." She cried again.
I sat with her this time, not saying anything useful, just being present, which was the only honest thing left I could give her.
The night before my flight, I was at Todd's place in Queen Anne. We had a few beers on his roof deck and watched the lights across Elliott Bay going quiet as midnight approached. The Space Needle was lit up to the south, the way it always is. That weird Seattle landmark that somehow never stops being what Seattle looks like when you picture Seattle. "You feel ready?"
Todd asked. "I've never been to Singapore," I said. "I don't know what ready looks like." "I mean, for all of it." I thought about the townhouse in Eastlake that would be sold by the time I came back.
About the mountain view from the upstairs window that I'd probably never see again. About six years of building something with someone and the particular grief of watching it not be what you needed it to be. "Yeah," I said. "I'm ready."
We stayed on the roof until almost 1:00 in the morning. He drove me to a hotel near SeaTac, about 30 minutes south of the city on I-5, and said he'd come visit once I was settled. I told him I'd hold him to that. I was alone in the hotel room by 1:30 in the morning. Flight was at 10:15.
I lay on my back looking at the ceiling in that specific way you do when you're not tired enough to sleep but too tired to do anything useful. And I thought about the 11 years since I'd taken the job at Meridian and how much of a person's life could accumulate in that time without you noticing the accumulation happening. I wasn't sad the way I'd expected to be sad. I was something closer to ready.
The text from Petra came at 9:47 the next morning. "Hey, what does your weekend look like?" I was already through security, already past the gate, already sitting in the boarding area for the Singapore Airlines flight that would take me to Tokyo Narita and then to Changi, that famously efficient airport that every frequent traveler had an opinion about. I opened the camera, took a selfie, clean and clear, with the destination visible in the background: Changi Airport, Singapore.
I sent it without a caption. She called immediately. I sent it to voicemail. She texted, "Are you really on a plane right now?" I texted back, "Boarding in 20 minutes."
A long pause, then, "Eli, please." I put the phone in my bag. They called group two for boarding, and I got in line with everyone else. A businessman in front of me was on his phone in Mandarin. A family behind me was organizing children and carryons with the particular controlled chaos of parents who'd done this before.
The line moved forward. I moved with it.