How can something feel so right and so wrong at the same time?
Neither of us says a word.
Starting the engine, the bike comes alive, and her hands press in just slightly as the vibration moves through us, just for a second. Then she settles, her palms flat against my sides, and we pull out of the garage and into the Nevada morning.
The road to the canyon runs long and straight through open desert, the sky enormous above it, the mountains patient and distant, and the landscape stretching in every direction without apology.
Her hands stay at my waist for the whole ride, warm through the fabric. I don’t look down at them, keeping my eyes on the road, horizon, the desert opening up ahead, and feeling every mile of her warmth through the fabric regardless.
The Grand Canyon arrives without warning, just suddenly, where there had been nothing, the earth opening up and dropping away into something so vast that the first few seconds are just the brain catching up.
Pulling the bike over at the viewing point, I cut the engine.
Sophia gets off and removes the helmet.
And looks.
Through most of it, I’m watching Sophia rather than the canyon. It’s easier and more honest. Her face in the light is completely open in a way it rarely is during the day, the careful composure she carries everywhere gone, replaced by something younger and entirely unguarded.
Her expression moves through surprise, then awe at the scale of it, then something else entirely, something that opens slowly and fills with tears she doesn’t try to stop or wipe away. She stands there, her hands loose at her sides, and her throat moves once.
Getting off the bike, I walk to the low wall at the edge of the viewing point and sit.
After a moment, she sits beside me. Close, arms almost touching. The canyon stretches out ahead, ancient, enormous, and completely indifferent to two people carrying things that feel very large until sitting here, they remember how small everything is.
Neither of us speaks for a long while.
The wind moves through the canyon below, low and constant, like the earth breathing.
“He would have loved this,” she says eventually.
Quietly. Not broken. Just true.
“Yeah, he would have.”
She looks out at it for another moment.
“He was always talking about places he wanted to take me,” she says. “Places he’d been or heard about or read about somewhere. He had this whole list.” A pause. “He never got to take me anywhere.”
“He took you to New York.”
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh. “That’s true.”
The wind moves, the canyon breathes. A hawk turns slow circles far below.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t turn to look. Just goes very still, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the canyon.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
“I’m going away. In a few days. I don’t know exactly when yet, but soon.” A pause. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
A beat of silence.
“Where?” she asks.
“Mexico.”
