04/08/2026
Not the leaving. Not the coming home. The part that lives in the middle that strange, disorienting space where he walked back into your life, and then walked right back out again before you even had a chance to exhale.
You had just started to feel it. That shift. The weight redistributing itself across two sets of shoulders instead of one. The quiet relief of hearing another adult voice in the house. The kids running to him. The way the energy of the home changes when he walks through the door fuller somehow, louder, more alive.
And then his phone rings. Or the text comes through. Or he just knows before either of those things happen because fire season has its own language and he’s fluent in it in a way you’ll never quite be.
And just like that, he’s gone again.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from this moment that I’m not sure the English language has a word for. It isn’t just tired. Tired is Tuesday after a long week. This is something older than that. Something that lives in your bones and your chest and the part of you that had already started to let your guard down. You already started to believe that maybe this time you’d have a few weeks to just be a family before the door closed behind him again.
You stand in the kitchen, or the driveway, or wherever it is you said goodbye, and the house settles back into its solo rhythm. The kids are still loud. The laundry is still there. The calendar still has things on it that need to happen whether he’s home or not.
And you put one foot in front of the other because that is what you do. That is what you have always done. But underneath that forward motion is something heavier. A depletion that isn’t quite sadness, isn’t quite loneliness, isn’t quite anger though it carries traces of all three. It is the particular emotional weight of a woman who has been strong for so long that she can’t quite remember what it felt like not to be.
People who haven’t lived this life will tell you it gets easier. And maybe in some ways it does. You get better at the logistics. You find your rhythm. You build a life that functions with or without him in it because it has to.
But I don’t think the feeling ever fully goes away.
The feeling of standing on a shore and watching the tide go back out. Of finally getting your footing only to feel the sand shift beneath you again. Of loving someone whose calling pulls them away from you over and over and choosing every single time to still be here when they come back.
Fire season has a particular kind of sadness that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with drama. It seeps in quietly. Into the evenings when the house is too still. Into the mornings when you wake up and remember before you even open your eyes. Into the moments when your kid says something funny and you reach for your phone to tell him and then remember there may not be service where he is.
It lives in the in-between.
And I’ve stopped trying to find the right word for it. Because I think some feelings are too specific to this life to have been named yet. They belong to a particular kind of woman strong in ways that are invisible, soft in ways she rarely lets anyone see, carrying something most people will never fully understand.
You know who you are.
And somehow, that has to be enough.
