Nick's time in Kenya wrapped up as I headed off to Argentina for an international summit on climate change, followed by a lengthy research expedition across Greenland. We joked that the closest we'd come to seeing each other would be when our flights crossed over the Atlantic when he left Africa for Boston and I left Iceland for South America. It was our dark,reality was a real bitchhumor, but that was when the velocity of our distance hit me the hardest. I wanted to see him more than anything, but the summit was a big deal for me, and this—along with a couple other symposia and conferences in coming months—would set the course for my postdoctoral work. I knew that Nick wanted to see me too, but it wasn't as if we could continue having circular conversations about life after Oxford. I had to do this, and I had to start making sense of my options.
This was the first juncture when anyone else had ever figured into my decision-making. Before Nick, I'd allowed whimsy to set the sails. Hawaii, the Mediterranean, Iceland…none of that was planned. It all happened organically, and I trusted that I'd find the places and pursuits that were right for me without strategy.
And all of that was great, but my whimsy wasn't in charge anymore.
Although he'd suggested otherwise, Nick wanted me to move back to Boston. He liked it there, and he liked my siblings, too. He'd found a family with them, and that was really fucking ironic considering my sentiments were quite the opposite. It all sounded charming in amade for TV and not even close to my actual lifekind of way, but the next steps weren't clear to me. Maybe it was the packed calendar of research, position papers, and presentations ahead of me that tunneled my sights, or maybe I needed a metaphorical kick in the ass.
Or…maybe I wasn't designed for this. Maybe the best I could give Nick was a stolen weekend every other month. There'd been a time when I didn't believe I was capable of caring for another person, and love had been an entirely separate, even more unlikely syndrome. I knew better now, and I knew that I could both care for and love Nick.
But I still doubted that I could do enough of either.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nick
Livingand practicing medicine in a Kenyan refugee camp for two months changed a guy, but not in the ways I'd expected. When I got back to Boston, I knew I'd be even more pissed off about the state of managed care in the United States. I knew I'd also experience the same frustration with the systemic inequities in access that I'd felt when helping my grandmother treat ranch hands and migrants. I didn't anticipate getting a whole helluva lot better at diagnosing without the aid of imaging studies and blood work panels, or performing surgery with the fewest instruments possible. But most of all, I didn't expect to resent the distance between me and Erin quite as much as I did now.
It wasn't what I'd been hoping for, and it was possible that made me the world's biggest asshole. The truth was, I thought I'd spend some time in Africa and come to understand her preference for the untethered life. Sure, I caught a bit of the traveling bug and I was looking forward to my next Doctors Without Borders stint in Honduras this summer, but coming face-to-face with the suffering and death there only served as a reminder that life was fragile and fleeting.
We thought we had time, that the minutes and months stretched on into our future without end, but that was the fallacy of youth, wasn't it? Believing that life went on, until faced with the cold truth that it didn't. It ended—weallended—and surrendering a single moment was an affront to the death and disease I worked to prevent every day. I'd believed Erin when she said that time wasn't to be wasted, but now it was a mission statement. The need to make our relationship work whipped at me in hurried, impatient lashes. I didn't care whether I had to push her past her comfort zone, and I didn't care what I had to give up.
Returning to Boston was an otherworldly experience. Erin was right, everything did seem louder, faster, and bigger, and with that strange new perspective came a sudden comprehension of her disdain for texting. It canceled out some of the separation forced by distance, but that rapid-fire form of communication never allowed thoughts and emotions to develop or digest. It took longer, and we didn't get any instant gratification out of waiting hours and days for a response. Whether she knew it or not, Erin's preference for email forced us to say more, and say it with greater precision.
My hospital-issued pager, the one I'd been overjoyed to receive at the start of my intern years, now earned my most hostile glares. My colleagues were pleasantly vindictive in that they happily picked up my patients and assorted duties while I was overseas, and then happily dumped all of theirs on me during the two months between my sabbaticals. My schedule was loaded with surgeries, on-calls, and ER coverage, and I was basically living at the hospital. Free moments were spent showering, power-napping, or eating lukewarm cafeteria oatmeal. There were invitations to dinners and housewarmings and happy hours, but my nonstop routine didn't allow for much of that. I missed spending time with Matt and Lauren, Andy and Patrick, Sam and Tiel, and Riley.
That I was willing to do all of this again when I got back from Honduras was a mark of my obvious psychosis. I'd lost my damn mind, and I was almost certain that Erin Walsh was to blame.
It was a gift that she was pawing around Greenland's glaciers and then tied up with lab work and intensive sessions at Oxford. We exchanged middle of the night calls and stray emails, but it was chaotic and we never fell into a rhythm. The fault belonged to no one as this was the state of our lives right now. But I still resented the fuck out of that distance. If she was here, in Boston, at least we'd sleep together. Or if I was in Iceland, or wherever her research took her.
During the one week where I wasn't jogging between operating rooms all day and night, we'd made plans to video chat, but she picked up a nasty cold and slept through our scheduled time. Later that week, I had to watch her coughing and wheezing from thousands of miles away. It was then that I truly understood why doctors couldn't treat family members. I'd grown up caring for the extended ranch family, and I'd assumed I possessed enough objectivity to remain clinical. I didn't, at least not as it pertained to my wife. I almost hopped on a flight right then, and flew all the way to England, even if only to comfort her.
We tried (and tried and tried) and failed to find a few days when we could get away, but it was a losing endeavor. The two months between Kenya and Honduras were watertight, and presented hardly any opportunities. On top of wrapping up major elements of her research, Erin was also attending several gatherings on climate change, and presenting her preliminary findings at a few. She couldn't miss those events, and I didn't want to ask her to do that either. It was the delicate balance between needing to spend time with her and respecting her work, and I didn't want to be the kind of guy who dismissed her career because I wanted her in my bed.
During our most recent calendar-scouring conversation, Erin had closed her notebook with a frustrated slam and said, "It's just a bad time for us."
Itwasa bad time for us, but I struggled to identify a time that hadn't been some shade of bad. We'd spent two years chasing moments, and we were no closer to anything more than moments. Our lives were separate and distinct, only sliding together at heavily orchestrated junctures, and my ability to continue this experiment was crumbling at the base. I was finished with separate and distinct.
I wanted our circumstances to be different, and it didn't matter what we had to do to make that happen. It only mattered that we were both willing to do it.
As these tumultuous weeks continued on and I prepared for my time in Honduras, I was ready to set aside my phone and pager again. I didn't think I'd find the answers to any of this in Central America, but unplugging had a way of narrowing my focus to the things that mattered most.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Erin
To: Nick Acevedo
From: Erin Walsh
Date: July 6
Subject: It's true what they say about Iceland/Greenland
I can now say, with absolute certainty, that Iceland is nice and Greenland is full of ice.
Not as much ice as it used to have, but still mainly icy. That's a good thing.
I've discovered that Greenland's terrain is not designed to sustain agricultural efforts. There's a historic erosion issue, although before all that, there wasgreen land. About 2.5 million years ago, it was quite green, almost like the Alaskan tundra. I've been playing around with the meteoric beryllium-9 and beryllium-10 from soil samples. That is, the soil underneath the ice sheet.
