Yes. Couple days to write features, then Monza Thursday.
Same timeline. Team wants me in Maranello for simulator work, then straight to the circuit.
See you there?
Wouldn’t miss it. Final race of the European swing, should be interesting.
Monday Afternoon - Separate Paths
The taxi to Amsterdam Schiphol felt like a decompression chamber after the weekend’s chaos. Gray sky, flat fields, nothing like the noise of Zandvoort’s dunes. My credential lanyard was still around my neck. I hadn’t remembered to take it off.
I saw Meridian’s private jet parked on the far side of the runway as I walked to my gate. I knew without being told he was already onboard. Team debrief in Bologna, simulator work in Milan, engineers waiting with data printouts. Different directions, even though we’d finally promised not to live like ghosts in parallel hallways anymore.
My phone buzzed.
Jonathan:Boarded. Don’t vanish.
I typedI won’t.
Deleted it.
TypedSafe flight.
Sent.
For a moment I considered waiting there. Just to see the plane lift off. Just to wave. I didn’t.
Instead, I shuffled forward with my boarding pass in hand, in the crush of the rest of the economy passengers, and tried not tothink about how strange it felt. To be with someone completely, and know they had left on a different plane, for a different destination.
Monza would be the end of the European season.
Not the end of pressure. Just the end of predictability as I’d known it.
We weren’t hiding anymore. That part was decided. But for the first time, I could see a version of my life that wasn’t entirely dictated by Jonathan’s schedule. After Monza, Apex might send me to Formula E in Marrakesh, karting in Italy, endurance testing in Bahrain. Jonathan wouldn’t automatically be the center of every assignment I took.
For now, though, the structure was the same. He’d always been the one steering us — his races, his flights, his credit card paying for that villa in Mykonos. I had fit my life around his because that was the shape of things, and until the contract was signed, it still was. Even if Apex came through, my work would move alongside the calendar he lived inside, orbiting race weekends and the narrow windows between them.
What had changed wasn’t the structure yet, but my sense of myself inside it. We weren’t hiding anymore. That part was settled. The question now wasn’t how to disappear, but how to exist in the open. How to do this without losing the parts of myself I’d fought to build.
I didn’t doubt that he loved me. I just didn’t know yet what being honest would ask of either of us.
Two people in motion, still largely in the same direction. For now, that was enough.
And as the plane banked over the English Channel, I found myself wondering,what does commitment look like when the world keeps getting bigger?
42
PRESSURE POINTS
The London officefelt different to me on Tuesday morning, lighter somehow, as if the weekend’s drama at Zandvoort had cleared the air rather than muddying it. By the start of September, the staff had returned from summer vacations and the office buzzed with the sound of phone conversations, fax machines, and curses over spilled coffee.
I spent the afternoon writing features about the Dutch Grand Prix’s technical surprises and Nat’s breakthrough victory, trying to prove that I could cover the sport objectively regardless of personal complications.
As I was working on a broader feature about weather strategy in modern Formula 1, Thea Blackwood appeared at my desk with coffee and a satisfied expression.
“Your Siripanit piece was exactly what we needed,” she said, settling into the chair across from my workstation. “Technical analysis of Alpine’s strategic preparation, human interest that didn’t sacrifice accuracy, proper context about what this victory means for Asian representation in F1.”
I looked up from my laptop. “The story practically wrote itself once I dug into the data.”
