Whatever Held

The drive was an hour each way, three or four times a week, for the better part of a year. Central Valley flat, the same stretch of cotton fields going by every single time, white and low and endless in a way that stopped registering as scenery after the first few weeks and just became the road. I don’t remember the exact mile markers anymore. I remember the cotton.

My parents stayed with us three days a week that year, which is its own kind of thing to say plainly and let sit. My parents, in their own later years, driving up to take care of a daughter who couldn’t take care of herself for a while. My dad drove a lot of those trips. I’d sit in the passenger seat, eighty pounds, hair broken off in patches from the treatment, not really looking or sounding like myself in any way I recognized, and we’d
just drive. Two hours round trip, most of it quiet, watching the same fields pass on repeat like a loop that never resolved into anything new.

There was one day he stopped the car. I don’t remember what prompted it. Maybe the light was doing something, maybe he just wanted the photo regardless of the light. He wanted a picture of me in front of the cotton. And the strange part, the part I still turn over now, is that I let him. I had a moment of caring that day, a small flicker of wanting to be looked at and photographed even though I looked the way I looked, thin, wrecked,
nothing like the version of me that existed before all this started. Something in me still wanted to stop and be seen standing in a field, the way you’d want to be seen standing anywhere beautiful, even if beautiful that day just meant white rows and a father with a camera.

Those drives were their own strange gift, looking back. They were some of the only real stretches of connection my dad and I had that year, not doctor talk, not treatment talk, just two people in a car with cotton going by, present with each other in a way that didn’t require either of us to perform wellness. I’d feel almost normal on the way there, sometimes even good, like the drive itself was a kind of pause between the parts of my
life that were falling apart. But it never lasted. By the time we got home, the sickness would catch up with me again, and I’d need to go straight to bed, spent from a day that most people would call nothing at all, a drive, an appointment, a drive back.

I think about that photo sometimes, the one version of that year where I look almost present, standing in front of all that cotton with my dad behind the camera. I don’t know if I still have it. I don’t think it matters much whether I do. What I remember is the wanting, that for one stretch of road, in the middle of losing so much of myself, I still wanted to be seen standing somewhere. That the two of us, worn down in our own
separate ways, found each other again for the length of a drive, again and again, until the year finally ended and the fields just went back to being fields and the realization settled that we couldn’t go back to being ourselves.