The Volvo is Gone

The buyers came on a Saturday.

The 2021 XC90 T8. White. Plug-in hybrid. The first truly beautiful, truly nice car we had ever owned together — a car that felt like an achievement, like evidence of something we had built. Kelly loved it in the specific way that a person who has spent years doing unglamorous work loves the beautiful thing he worked his way toward. Not with attachment exactly. With appreciation. With the quiet pride of someone who knows what it cost and is grateful for it every single time he gets behind the wheel.

He knew, when we listed it, that it was the right thing to do. We both knew. The car was never coming to Europe. That math was never going to work. Every dollar from the sale is runway in England, or a tank of gas driving south through France, or a week of groceries in a country where we are starting from zero. We accepted this. We made peace with it.

But making peace with something and watching it drive away are two different things.

The buyers were nice people. That helped and also somehow made it harder. They shook our hands. They admired it in the way that people admire something they are about to own, with a kind of forward-leaning enthusiasm that has no room in it for what is being left behind. That was okay. We were happy for them and happy and sad for us at the same time, and all of those things were allowed to be true.

And then they drove it away.

Kelly stood in the driveway for a moment after. Just a moment. He is not a man who lingers in his feelings in public, not even with me standing right there. But I saw it — the particular stillness of someone watching something go that they are not going to get back, letting themselves feel exactly what that costs, and then squaring their shoulders and coming back into the present tense.

There have been a few moments in this process that hit like a ton of bricks. This was one of them. One of the largest tangible steps we have taken toward actually leaving — scary and exhilarating and all too real, all at once.

This is what we signed up for. The whole project of this move has been a long and deliberate process of releasing — things, comforts, certainties, the beautiful accumulated evidence of a life we built here. The furniture. The tools. The things. The car. We have been practicing letting go for two years, and we have gotten good at it, and it still lands every time.

Here is what I want to hold onto, even when the letting go is hard.

The car was never the point. The car was a milestone on a road we were always going to keep walking. And the road goes somewhere now — somewhere real, somewhere with a date attached, somewhere with a Vicuna Air confirmation number and two dogs and a plan held together with research and faith and fifteen years of choosing each other every single day.

There is still uncertainty about how exactly we are going to land and how we are going to live. We are building the plane while flying it, as they say. But we have each other, which has always been the only thing we have ever really needed to figure out what comes next.

The Volvo is gone.

There is no going back now.

There was never going to be.

74 days.