I was twenty-nine, already middle-aged in my mind, and had made my decision. By the time I bought the plane ticket I knew there was no turning back; I was leaving my wife and toddler son.
I suppose a lot of men think about leaving their families. I know I thought about it for a long time. It wasn’t an easy decision, even if getting up one morning, taping a note to the fridge, and taxiing out to JFK sounds like a cliché.
When I got on the plane, I thought about my son mostly. The relationship I had with my wife was a lost cause. It had been going south before our son came along, and though we should have split up earlier, I don’t regret staying together—because my son came out of it.
I flew to Orlando, but wrote in the note to my wife that I was going to Rio de Janeiro. I wanted her to think I was a true asshole—running off to get with exotic women or something—because playing the role of asshole was the only way I knew she could deal with my leaving.
I could tell you a long story about how things worked out for the best, and how my son will graduate from Boston College next year and is applying to med schools. But what I really want to talk about is that flight to Orlando.
I walked on the plane, sat down in coach, an anonymous nobody, and felt great relief and great sadness. I knew I was failing my son, but I also knew he wasn’t old enough yet to know that I was failing him. If I left when he got to be four or five, he’d hate me for the rest of his life. That didn’t happen. Even his mother doesn’t hate me now. I’m not saying I wasn’t an asshole—feeling a burden lifted from me as I drank a couple of beers at the back of the plane…it was more pitiful than asshole-ish.
At one point I literally cried into the plastic cup of my beer. A flight attendant saw and thought, I suppose, that I was afraid of flying—we were in rough turbulence. I was praying of course that the plane would crash, that I would somehow be punished. No such luck.
When we landed in Florida’s false paradise, I got in a cab and spent a week in a fleabag motel. I thought about flying to Rio, for real. Or Southeast Asia. Or Russia—the Berlin Wall had recently fallen and there were possibilities there. But I didn’t have the energy for that—I didn’t have the energy even to back get to New Jersey.
Because that’s what I wanted to do after that week of take-out and booze. I tried and just couldn’t do it. That’s the thing about the cliché of hopping a plane to escape your life—it’s easy to buy the one-way ticket out, but it’s impossible to buy the one-way ticket back in. No matter how right it sounds, two one-ways are not the same as one roundtrip.
Bobby Smithe is a real estate attorney in Houston.