I didn’t sleep well that night, for reasons that require no explanation.

When the sun finally filtered through the hotel curtains the next morning, the warmth in my chest was gone. The spell had burned off. In its place was a clearer, quieter reality: Scott breathing beside me, Emaline curled up and turned away in her bed, the ordinary world assembling itself again like it hadn’t just watched me come apart.

In that light, the truth I’d been carrying—the one that had felt enormous, electric, undeniable only hours before—suddenly looked ridiculous in context. Not false. Just far too large for the room I was occupying. A truth with nowhere to land. A truth no one around me could possibly understand, and one I barely believed myself. And because I hadn’t planned this leg of the trip before England—before his gaze detonated the neat little map I thought I was following—I found myself trapped inside an itinerary I never would’ve chosen after.

Scott and I took cover in the Pacifica before the sun was fully up, the kind of cold that seeps through the seats and makes everything feel harsher. It was the only private place we could talk without the kids hearing—two adults in a minivan at dawn, trying to make sense of a situation neither of us had any language for.

I was buzzing, overwhelmed, confused, everything in me turned up to eleven. Scott looked like someone had unplugged him in the night. He kept saying maybe we should cancel the rest of the trip, head home, reset. I could already see him mentally dialing his father—the critical care doctor—because that’s what you do when you’re scared out of your depth: you escalate. As if I needed an ICU bed, Haldol, restraints, and someone in a white coat to declare me officially “not okay.”

It was surreal, sitting there as a physician myself, knowing exactly how this would read from the outside. But I also knew, with the kind of clarity that isn’t up for debate, that what was happening wasn’t delusion. Some things arrive in your life with a certainty that bypasses consensus reality altogether. You just know. And I knew that going home, submitting myself to medical scrutiny, was the last thing I needed.

So I had to convince him—gently, rationally, while my insides were doing somersaults—that continuing the trip was the best medicine for me. Even though we both understood that “medicine” had nothing to do with it. It was something else entirely. Something he couldn’t yet see and I couldn’t yet explain.

We sat there in that cold van, two doctors with no protocol for this, trying to decide what to do next. And all I could think was: This is happening, whether anyone believes it or not.

We eventually went back inside, but the mood didn’t lift. There was still a family waiting for someone to act like an adult, and Scott was too stunned to pretend. Which meant the job fell to me. So even though I’d just spent the morning trying not to get involuntarily admitted by my own husband, I still had to walk out of that hotel room and come up with a plan—as if spiritual implosion didn’t exempt you from being the trip coordinator.

Everyone looked at me, waiting for direction, and all I could muster was a pitiful detour to the Animas Museum. I’d recently fallen back into Jung—reactivated by the twin flame chaos—so for a split second I thought, Ah, Animas… maybe the unconscious is throwing me a bone.

It wasn’t.

It was a lovingly preserved historic schoolhouse turned local history museum from 1904 that held the emotional atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room.

We shuffled through the exhibits in stiff, hostage-level politeness, the only visitors in the building. The kids tried to look interested in mining tools. Scott stood there in quiet shock. I hovered on the edge of tears beside a chalkboard listing the rules for female teachers from 1915—no marrying, no loitering, no “unguarded expressions of emotion.” Reading it after the night I'd just had, felt almost comically anachronistic. Whatever archetypal insight I thought might “perk me up” never arrived. Even the docent looked bored.

Afterward, we ended up in the hotel lobby. Brett made me a cup of tea—his version of crisis management—and said he wanted to talk more, to process, to understand what was happening. He meant well, but there were no words in the English language that were going to satisfy him. Not without making things worse. Anything I said would either terrify him or sound unhinged, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to perform normalcy for his comfort.

So I bailed.

I took the Pacifica up to Silverton, and parked on a half-empty main street, staring at a closed storefront for nearly an hour. I tried walking, made it maybe five minutes before the overwhelm caught up with me, and realized even the air felt too loud.

I retreated back to the van, shut the door, and let the smallness of the space hold what the rest of the world absolutely could not.

We left Durango the next morning.

The sky had that flat, metallic look it gets right before weather moves in, and by the time we loaded the bags and wrestled everyone into the Pacifica, it had started to snow. Thin at first, then steadier—an almost comedic twist of timing, considering we were supposed to be heading south into New Mexico. Leaving Colorado for the desert and somehow driving straight into winter.

It felt fitting, though. Appropriate. As if the trip had stopped pretending to be anything else. I knew we were headed toward cold—externally, internally, symbolically, whatever axis you want to use. The warmth of that gaze, the shockwave of recognition, the fever of certainty—those were gone. Now we were in the aftermath, the season that comes after revelation: the part that strips everything down.

So we drove toward New Mexico in the snow, the final leg of a trip I hadn’t planned for the life I was suddenly living, the last stretch before everything broke open in a different way.

Not long after we crossed the border, Yacht Rock Radio served up Boz Scaggs—a song I’d sung along to but never actually listened to. Just something I would have played to keep the mood light. I was no longer living in a place where anything was light. I honed in on the lyrics and for the first time it became clear just how devastating they were.

My throat tightened, my skin buzzed, and suddenly it felt like something old and wordless was trying to surface—something I didn’t have a memory for, only the physiological aftershock.

By late morning, I knew I couldn’t keep white-knuckling through it. That tightness in my throat wouldn’t go away. It was new to me. I told Brett we needed to stop for lunch, and because I was trying—always trying—to thread my father back into my children’s lives, I chose Blake’s Lotaburger. Everyone else went inside. I stayed in the van, shaking, chewing my nails, the air too sharp to swallow.

A few minutes later Brett came back out, sat beside me, and asked what was happening.

And it just came out.

“I think something happened…”
“…when I was young. Something…”
“...and I only have pieces.”

The silence that followed wasn’t confusion. It was recognition—the kind that settles when two people understand exactly what’s being named, even if neither can say the actual word.

I wasn’t making a claim. I wasn’t inventing a story. It was simply the only language I had for a sensation that felt older than I was—somatic truth without a narrative.

Brett froze, unsure whether touching me would help or make things worse. We sat there in the van, outside Blake’s Lotaburger, holding a truth that refused to clarify itself.

I think that was the first moment I realized I didn’t need answers.
I just needed the world to stop expecting me to explain everything.