Frequent Flyer Mileage

Sometimes I wonder.

The account summary states out of the first 6 and a half months of the year, I've spent one and a half months somewhere else.

One full third of the year. 8 hours of a day in specific ratios. Almost 3 days a week out of each week.

Those are not the travel days. Rather, those are the nights spent abroad.

I sometimes wonder what is the toll that it has taken. What have I missed.

I can remember clearly the nights (early mornings, for what their worth but it was dark out and it was eerily quiet so I prefer to think of it as nighttime) when I stood on the edge of the driveway. Listening to the sounds of nothingness. No cars. No airplanes. Complete and utter silence. A few scary times when a deer would come crashing through the trees and leaves surrounding the house and stand staring at me in the middle of the lawn. Other than that, it was black hole silence.

And then beams of headlights would splice the black and I knew my car had arrived, to take me silently away.

It's not a bad job. In fact, on paper, on a resume, it freaking rocks. The numbers look pretty good, the responsibilities look even better. It is a wonderful and sought-after opportunity.

I embraced it early on, and tore into it in a fairly fiendish fashion. Long hours, far away commutes, my life controlled by the blinking red of a Blackberry in communications.

Yet in 24 months, while I still put the blinking redness into the gaze of every hour that I am awake, the Sunday night packing has worn thin.

The balance of 5s...five socks, five pairs of underwear, five shirts, five ties. It is a week measured on a hand. It is complete efficiency when I can choose one belt and one pair of shoes.

It represents a full quarter of a month, bundled in a black suitcase and left on the bathroom floor so that I can retrieve it in the still-darkness of an early morning.

I will rise with a simple and familiar rhythm. I am a morning person by nature, and I am awake and alert at 3am or 4am...whatever. I need only 4 hours of sleep. I need only to see the blinking redness of a message waiting to know that I am about to start my day. With a decision.

I leave the quiet and warming confines of a bed. I hear the rain from our bedside noisemaker, and I hear the stir of dogs as they notice my movement.

I dress in faint light. I leave knots fairly untied, to be dealt with on a train.

I hear the squeak of woodboards as I step across the floor, the slight jar of a door. I try to depart in silence, but usually I cause a stir.

I am leaving, as I have done now for over two years. And for many years before, but in a much more predictable fashion.

I leave them sleeping, and warm and comfortable. I set off hoping that in the end, perhaps on a Friday, that I can return, albeit briefly, and try to make up for the time away.

Increasingly I cannot. The time away has caused an erosion. A dulling. A hardening.

It has become too hard. It is becoming increasingly difficult.

It is simply becoming too old. Too old to warrant the pittance of rewards based on the efforts of sacrifice. The middle is starting to wear through, and the seams are becoming undone.

I leave in the familiar, and sometimes come home to the unfamiliar.

I am leaving again.

And while the choice is ours to remain, it is really the only option we currently possess. And so we do.

And I depart, quietly, in a morning of Summer when time and hours really don't matter. When school does not interrupt and schedules are wide open.

Except for the moments and minutes that tick away until I return. I like to think those are counted with clarity. And carefully.