“You need to go,” she said.

Her telling my I needed to go hit me pretty hard. Not because she was wrong, or because she spoke the words in a malicious or hurtful way. Her words hit me hard because I’d been feeling the exact same way for longer than I wanted to admit.

It would be easy to blame the breakdown of my second marriage on living in the fish bowl. It would be convenient, even, to blame it on her job, or my intransigence. People that need simple answers to complex questions and are unwilling to accept any shared bit of responsibility might find such explanations useful.

But I knew better. I’d known for a year or better that something was wrong. Relationships ebb and flow, have ups and downs. I knew I was difficult to live with; but I also knew I wasn’t the only one. Somewhere along the way, we stopped considering one another. Not all of a sudden; it happened bit by bit. Melissa told me later she thought it all started to go south for us living in Arizona; I didn’t notice until a year or so into living in Mount Carroll. My reaction, rather than to talk to her about it, was to say nothing. I had determined early in the relationship that part of my job as a husband was to protect her. And that included protecting her from those parts of me that always seemed to work against having what I had thought was a normal life:

my chronic itchy foot.

It plagued me for as long as I could remember. From the moment I was set loose from the house and learned to ride a bicycle, I was gone. When I wasn’t gone, I was usually off in a world of my own anyway… existing as much in my imagination as I did in the world I shared with everyone else. When the marriage to my daughter’s mother crumbled, for every good reason in the world, I took to wandering. Then I had a car, and bounce between my Mom’s condo and friend’s couches. I wrote. I worked when I had to. Even when I had my own place, the longest I stayed at any job was two months. I wrote. I read. I fed the itch in whatever way seemed to work that would keep me in some geographic proximity to my daughter. Movement and geography crept into my writing. I moved to New Orleans, following my daughter. I moved back to Kentucky — the state that while it is not the state of my birth, certainly has been, over the years, a kind of spiritual home for me. I went back to school. I ran into Melissa again.

It all seemed pre-ordained. Meant to be. And back when I was approaching 30 — an age, I thought at the time, when it was time to settle down. My own father fixed his itchy foot with a military career and was able to settle down after falling in love with my mother. The story made sense.

But I had trouble quelling my itchy foot. We lived in Knoxville, and couldn’t find work teaching — which was, at that point, what I decided I wanted to do to earn money. I asked the universe for some kind of relief. We moved to Cincinnati because I landed a part-time teaching gig at Northern Kentucky University. Cincinnati wore on us both, though, and her in particular. I asked the universe for respite, and a full-time job at Arizona State University fell into my lap. Arizona was eating us alive, and we were both miserable in our work. Again, I asked the universe for help and Melissa was offered what seemed to be her dream job as Managing Director at Timber Lake Playhouse in northwestern Illinois.

The universe, regardless of how kind or cognizant I have been, has always given me enough. As I stewed over the gradual decay of my second marriage, the itch and the idea rolled around and around in my mind — an idea I had once mentioned over drinks with friends of ours in Arizona:

to travel the United States, never settling down any longer than it would take to earn enough money to keep on traveling.

There were all sorts of reasons, also rolling around in my head, for why I couldn’t, or why I shouldn’t. My lousy feet, that hurt more often than they don’t. My lousy physical condition. My age, as I was approaching 40. It seemed the sort of thing that as younger, more foolish man might do. But the more I thought it about it, the more the itch bothered me more than any of the excuses I could think of. My daughter had grown distant since the Arizona move and since she got old enough to start putting something together for her own life, and the distance between seemed to matter less as she marched towards all her preconceived notions of adulthood. There was only one deterrent that really mattered. My marriage.

I’d tried talking her into hitting the road with me while we were living in Arizona. She was drawn to the romantic nature of the undertaking but couldn’t get past the fundamental lack of planning involved. Or to be more accurate, she was not able to embrace the lack of stability. From my perspective, we’d never really been stable in a financial sense; we had the same sort of illusion of stability most people achieve living paycheck to paycheck. Why not throw off the vestige? Why not embrace a life more certain and with less certainty? It seemed that the universe never gave us less than we needed; but it never gave us more, either. I was certain there was some lesson we hadn’t learned yet.
I was certain we could learn it Out There. As it turned out, I would be heading to Out There alone.