Dispatch from the Wild Middle: The Campground Loop
Her divorce is final. My life is moving. We are teaching teenagers to drive and laughing like nothing is guaranteed.
The thing I want most right now is to laugh so hard I cannot breathe.
This weekend we went camping.
Dirt. Smoke. Folding chairs.
That low hum that comes back when you’ve been outside long enough to remember you have a body.
L decided the camp loop was the perfect place to teach the girls how to drive.
Of course she did.
Gravel. A few trees. No traffic. Just enough room for things to go wrong.
Sophie got behind the wheel.
Within seconds, it became clear.
We laugh too much. Not occasionally. Too much.
The wrong kind of laughter. The kind that makes everything worse. The kind that turns instructions into static.
L is calm.
Clear. Direct. Actually useful.
Before they even start moving, she steps out and positions herself just off the side of the car. Right where the mirror loses you. “See? I’m gone.”
A full demonstration.
She turns her own body into a blind spot like this is a completely reasonable teaching method.
No hesitation.
Just standing there proving the point with her whole self.
I lose it.
Sophie is laughing. Delaney is laughing.
We have not even started driving yet.
L resets. Back to instruction. Like this is a classroom.
Eventually the car inches backward.
Careful. Slow. Trying to follow directions that are now competing with laughter.
I cannot catch my breath.
The kind of laughter that hurts. The kind that shakes something loose in your chest.
And in the middle of it, it lands.
Oh.
I am happy.
Not later.
Not when things settle.
Now.
In a campground loop with a teenager behind the wheel and my best friend using her own body to explain peripheral vision.
There is a moment when something stops.
Not loudly or all at once. Just a shift you can feel in your body.
Her divorce is final.
Before that, there was waiting. Forms. Delays. Conversations that loop. A life paused but not over. Its own kind of freezing.
Now there is paper. Ink. Dates. Signatures.
A whole life reduced to something you can file away. And somehow, that is what lets hers thaw.
There is paper for mine too.
A death certificate. Official. Final. Filed away.
But it does not hold the ending.
It comes in seasons.
Freezing. Thawing.
And then, sometimes, something loosens.
There are parts of it I am not explaining yet. Not hidden. Just not ready to be handled by other people. There is movement. There is something opening.
Because there is still that look from people, well intentioned people. The softened voice. The careful tone. Pity. Like they are talking to a version of me that only exists in memory.
They are behind.
I am not there.
I am here.
Bent over laughing while Sophie tries to drive straight and Lisa keeps teaching like this is completely normal.
Grief did not hollow me out.
It sharpened everything that stayed.
This laughter.
This moment.
How loud it is. How alive it feels. How quickly it could be gone.
So I stay in it.
I do not edit it down to something more comfortable.
I do not make it smaller so other people can recognize me.
I am still called things that are true and not enough.
Names that make the story easier to hold.
But I am not just what I survived.
I am this too.
A woman laughing so hard she cannot breathe.
A life still moving.
Something still unfolding.
That is what I am learning to trust.
Not the future.
Not the outcome.
This.
My ability to recognize joy when it shows up. To not flinch or apologize. To just stay.
If you saw me this weekend, you would not see someone fragile.
You would see someone alive.
I am still here.
I am laughing.
We Build Anyway
jess