Me at 50's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

The Calgary airport smelled like coffee and jet fuel the day I picked him up in 2015. I was fifty. My notebooks were stacked in the passenger footwell because I had been writing the whole drive across the country, one province at a time, motel to motel. We had left Ontario together and I had loved every mile of it. Prairie sky, mountains rising like a promise. I thought we were building something. He walked out through the glass doors with a duffel bag and a look I didn't recognize. He had flown ahead to sort the apartment while I finished the drive. Something about him had shifted in the air between us. He got in the car and asked if I'd stopped at the liquor store. That was the first sentence of the next six years. Calgary itself was good to me. I liked the wide streets and the wind that came down off the Rockies. I went to the Stampede and ate pancakes off a paper plate under a white tent. I watched the chuckwagons and cheered until my throat hurt. I saw the Foo Fighters at the Saddledome and felt my ribs shake. I kept writing. I filled notebooks at the kitchen table while he slept off whatever the night before had been. The drunkenness came first. Then the lies, small ones stacked into bigger ones. Then the other women, and the money missing from the account, and the mornings I sat on the edge of the bed doing math I didn't want to do. I had nowhere to go. My daughter was across the country. My savings were thin. I stayed. I stayed for years. I made the best of it because that is what I know how to do. I went to concerts alone. I walked the river paths. I told myself the woman I used to be, the loud one who took up space, was still in there. She had just gone quiet to get through this. Then one Tuesday in 2021 he came home at four in the morning and lied about where he had been, and I didn't argue. I made coffee. I sat at the table with my notebook and I wrote down a number: two suitcases. That was all I would take. I wrote down a city: Perth. My daughter had a second-floor apartment and an extra room. I booked the flight that afternoon. I didn't tell him. Two weeks later I stood at the departures curb at that same sprawling airport where I had picked him up six years earlier. Same glass, same smell of coffee and fuel. I had two suitcases and the notebooks. He was still asleep in the apartment I was done paying half of. I walked through the doors. The quiet woman inside me opened her mouth for the first time in a long while. She said, good.