Permanent Change of Station Seventeen Years Old, En Route to Tennessee
Permanent Change of Station
Seventeen Years Old, En Route to Tennessee
A senior-year move is many an Army brat’s worst nightmare.
But not mine.
Leaving Virginia.
Leaving Connor, Bernie, and the twins.
Leaving Rosebell High School.
Our July departure date can’t come fast enough.
Escape, flee, withdraw.
These are the words that loop through my head as I tuck my life into boxes. As we embark on our trip to Tennessee. As I watch summer raindrops race across our Explorer’s windows. As I fill Moleskine pages with meaningless lists and verbose musings and swirling doodles. As I pet Major, our sixty-pound Pointer pup, who’s stretched out on the backseat beside me. As I consume the gas station snacks my parents push into my hands because I’m “not eating enough” and “we’re worried, Lia.”
It’s been one hundred ninety-nine days.
Four thousand seven hundred eighty hours spent navigating a world without Beck.
As Mom and Dad put it: I’m not myself.
How infinitely fucking stupid to suppose I would be.
On the road, my parents fill silences with falsely cheerful chatter. They order peanut butter milkshakes from fast-food drive-throughs. They stretch what should be a ten-hour drive into a three-day trip because “a vacation might make Lia feel better.”
Just east of Knoxville, Mom turns to look at me, eyes doleful. “Oh, lovey. Daddy and I miss him too.”
I hate when she equates her sadness to mine.
“It’s true, Millie,” Dad puts in, his gaze trained on the endless highway. While everyone else in my life shortens my given name, Amelia, to Lia, he likes Millie. “Mom and I loved that kid like our own. It’s bullshit what happened.”
What happened.
No one ever says it like it is: Beck died.
Dad’s still talking. “I wish there was something we could do to help you through this. Make it easier for you somehow.”
“For Bernie and Connor and the twins too,” Mom says.
There’s no fixing death, for it is permanent and perpetual.
Those are the words the reverend used at Beck’s funeral. He was speaking of the community’s love for Beck, but staring at my boyfriend’s mahogany casket, surrounded by a veritable field of flowers, with my teary-eyed parents beside me, Bernie and Connor weeping in the pew in front of us, each holding one of the twins, preschoolers who desperately wanted their brother back, it was hard to think about love.
Loss is permanent and perpetual.
While Mom and Dad and Bernie and Connor cried showers, I’d used up my tears. That past summer, they were a drizzle while I helped Beck pack for college. They became a downpour when he left for Charlottesville—for Commonwealth of Virginia University, his dream school and mine—to begin training with the track and field team. I made a rainy season of that autumn. In November, my tears became sleet, icy and dangerous.
And then, that word again: permanent.
A permanent change of station—military speak for “pack your shit and hit the road.”
We’re off to Fort Campbell, where Dad will serve as Commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.
A fresh start. That’s what he proclaims, swinging open the door to our just-acquired rental in River Hollow, Tennessee.
A new beginning. That’s what Mom preaches, stacking dishes on shelves she covered with fresh liner.
I don’t want either , I tell Beck, retreating to my room-for-now, where boxes stand like mountains in a crowded range.
Dad’s already been in here. He hung my bulletin board over my desk, a collage of my life before: ticket stubs, CVU stickers, photos of friends from Virginia and before that, Colorado Springs. Photos of Beck. Seeing him in full color, smiling, alive , is like opening a scabbed-over wound, again and again and again.
I shut my bedroom door quietly, with restraint.
That’s my grief these days: quiet, restrained.
I, too, am closed off.
Permanently and perpetually, it seems.