We are in a 20ft moving truck driving along the Florida coast. I have never seen this state before and it is much prettier than I had imagined. The April heat has brought on clouds that seem to pull the green straight from the porous skin of everything growing along the highway. I cannot relate to the lyrics. I am somewhere else. I am watching as my boyfriend's hand drum the steering wheel and then adjust the bass and treble again, in case I don't hear yet what he hears when he bobs his head. He glances a question to me and I hope my smile is enough of an answer. A lot rides on this for me. I came to Florida to drive home in this truck together. To try to understand whether or not I am meant to have something I am so capable of taking for granted. He rolls the window up and the humid wind is smothered by the the vibrating dashboard and piano. I hear his refusal to accept the quiet decision a man and his son made before he was old enough to play monkey-in-the-middle. How you can know a story by heart and still not understand it. His father's calm, spare words; he does not know if they have ever wondered about their grandchildren. His belief that blood is not an optional bond. That you cannot stop needing family just because you feel betrayed by it. That there is a kind of love that is nothing like a feeling to distract yourself from and forget over time. A kind that you always keep coming back to and must decide a hundred times to either ignore or risk acknowledging, embrace. He feels something he hopes his grandfather feels when the letter arrives. When it turns up again the next time they move. The feeling he hopes might stop them from getting rid of it although they can find no use in it now. And somehow it is comfort enough to know that someone is trying not to think of you, if that is the best that you can get. Maybe, at least, there will be more chances if you can't get it right this time.
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