Tonight I drove Finn up to Bellingham to stay for the weekend with Theo at Western. We left Tacoma around 2:30 and I finally got home at 9:40, which is a pretty ridiculous amount of driving for one afternoon, and it was wonderful. There wasn’t anything particularly momentous about the trip itself. It was just a road trip with my son. Driving north, talking, laughing, watching Washington go by in mutual silence. Getting Finn where he needed to go. Seeing these two people who used to be tiny children in my house now having their own lives, their own places to go, their own relationship with each other that doesn’t require me in the middle of it. I don’t mean that sadly. I mean it was really fucking nice. Sometimes being a dad is an enormous complicated thing, and sometimes it’s just: Sure, I’ll drive you to Bellingham.

Then I pointed the Bronco south and turned on Song Why‽, which at this point is less a playlist than an autobiography I have deliberately booby-trapped with music. Every song is there because it connects to something — a person, a place, an era, a joke, a feeling, a version of me, or sometimes just because Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan and that’s enough — so hitting shuffle on Song Why‽ while I’m alone in the car is essentially agreeing to let my own brain take over programming for the next couple of hours. I had no agenda beyond getting home. I wasn’t trying to have an emotional experience. I wasn’t thinking, Tonight I shall process my life through art. I was driving. I was singing. I was having a fucking great time.

I stopped for gas in Burlington, and Care of Cell 44 by The Zombies got me from the gas station back onto I-5. Then Hymn by Pedro the Lion came on, and my body knew what to do before I had even really thought about it: windows down, volume up almost to 11 (because this one goes up to 11), hand out in the airflow flying like a little plane, dancing in my seat, and some completely responsible air drumming that absolutely did not require me to take my hands off the steering wheel because I would never do such a thing in the heat of the moment. It was getting darker but wasn’t dark yet, and the lights were starting to come on in the friscalating dusklight, and it was absolutely delightful.

Hymn has always been a driving song for me. Nothing about that changed tonight. I didn’t discover some new hidden meaning in it. It was just perfectly cinematic, which somehow made all of its old meanings line up at once. I had just left Bellingham, the place I first saw Pedro in 1999, on a trip that redirected a huge part of my musical life. I had just been at Fairhaven, the same part of Western where Theo is now building his own life. Before I left, I had even asked Theo if he could take me to the theater where I saw Pedro back then. He couldn’t tonight, but said we’d do it another time, so I was already primed and ready when Pedro showed up. And the strange thing about those memories is that I don’t experience them as some distant younger Adam and current Adam staring at each other across twenty-seven years. There is no distance between then and now. Time is flat like that. I don’t have all the details in my memories, but I have enough connections to fill the whole duration of the song.

So while Hymn played, there was Elton, who I love the hell out of and wish I could spend more time with even though the outskirts of Boise are a little farther than I want to drive for a casual hang. There was also Amy Grennell, who I had been writing about recently after recovering a giant chunk of our old AOL history, and who I had just managed to find on Facebook after looking for her for years. I sent her a friend request, but her profile barely looks used, so she may never see it. I wasn’t fantasizing about some lost romance or alternate universe. Mostly I was rehearsing a conversation I may never get to have, because I still want to know that she’s alright and that me being an ass didn’t leave lasting damage. That was in there too, while the road kept moving and the song kept moving and the lights came on around me. Not sadness, exactly. Just all these people and places occupying the same four minutes and fifty-two seconds because that’s apparently how my brain works.

And then Hymn ended and Welcome Back by John Sebastian came on, because Song Why‽ has no respect whatsoever for solemnity. So naturally I went from cinematic contemplation of time and memory directly into full-volume dork singing of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme. Nailed the transition. Then Harry Nilsson’s Think About Your Troubles came on, which also sounds more ominous in this telling than it was. That song doesn’t make me sit around thinking about my troubles. It does the opposite. It puts them in context. It reminds me that whatever is happening in my little skull is part of a much bigger cycle and will eventually wash out into everything else. I wasn’t stewing. In fact, when it ended and exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver started, I very consciously thought, I wonder if I’m gonna cry? Nah. I’m not feeling it at all.

And then the line about second, third, and hundredth chances hit me, and, well, fuck.

That line didn’t make me long for my marriage. That’s important. I’m working on another post right now that has me thinking about a lot of stuff with Heidi, so some of this is especially fresh, but what hit me wasn’t I want that life back. It was the much harder acknowledgment that I hurt someone I cared deeply about. Over the course of twenty-two years there were many, many times she had to forgive me for the same shit, and there are parts of that history that belong in a different post because they aren’t appropriate for this one, but the basic truth is simple enough: I caused pain, repeatedly, to someone I loved. The “second, third, and hundredth chances” don’t feel like a list of separate memories to me. They feel like one long repeated memory of the same wound appearing over and over again, and the weight of that was suddenly right there in the car with me.

Then the homeland part of exile hit, and the grief widened. Again, not longing. Mourning. Those are different things. I miss a lot of the life Heidi and I had together in the same way you might miss someone who died too young. Not a grandparent who lived ninety-nine years and completed the expected arc, but someone whose future still seemed to contain all kinds of unwritten possibilities. For twenty-two years there was always a future tense attached to us. Whatever happened, however hard things got, there was still some version of tomorrow that included both of us. Now those possibilities are settled. There is no future for that particular us. I have to build a new one. I have to take all the intimacy I learned how to create over twenty-two years — the shorthand, the rituals, the knowledge of another person, all the little systems two people build without even noticing — and someday find someone who wants to build our own new and hopefully improved version of that with me. That’s exciting and frightening and exhausting and full of possibility, all at once.

Eventually, when you mourn someone, joy starts taking up more room than sadness. You remember what was good and you’re glad it happened. I think divorce can work like that too. But when I start putting all the damage I’ve rendered in my life on one side of a scale and then look at what I lost on the other side, it gets extremely heavy. It feels very much like a death. So I cried. And, because apparently this is a defining feature of me, I sang through the tears. I always sing through tears. I actually enjoy the feeling more when I can stop resisting it and just embrace the whole ridiculous thing, snot-nosed and all. Crying isn’t an interruption of the music. It’s part of the experience.

Then exile ended and Bob Dylan immediately sang “Buckets of rain, buckets of tears,” and I started laughing.

Of course he did. Of fucking course that was the next song. This is exactly why I can’t describe the drive as sad, because the playlist wouldn’t let any one emotion own the night for more than a few minutes. I had just finished crying about the death of a twenty-two-year future, and now Dylan was basically pointing at my face and going, Hey, buckets of tears! Buckets of Rain is on Song Why‽ mostly because Dylan is Dylan. I love what he says, his rhythms, the way he uses words. He’s perfection. So I laughed, kept driving, and went right back to enjoying the hell out of the music.

And then This Is America came on, and I cranked that one too because it is such a fucking good track. I was driving through America at night listening to a song about how dystopic America is, which would already have been enough of a little contextual joke, but then I heard the first few notes of what was sitting as the very next song ahead of it in the shuffle. This Is America is a song about the country we’ve made, all the violence and spectacle and contradiction baked into the place. Dear Theodosia is literally about the birth of a new nation, and about a child who is going to grow up inside it and, the parents hope, change the world. I’ve always thought that about my kids. Not in some weird pressure-filled you must become historically important way, but in the much simpler parental conviction that these people are going to go out there and make the world different because they were in it.

And I had just left Theo at Fairhaven. Not little Theo. Not some memory of him as a kid. The dude who is training to be an RA right now, getting ready to help other kids around campus. He’s not just a student. He deliberately got involved in a way that puts him close to other people’s crises, including the really serious ones, because that’s who he is. He’s always been one of the helpers and caretakers in the lives around him, one of those people who notices other people and makes sure they’re recognized. I know the job may be hard for him sometimes, but I think he can do it, and I think he’ll be really good at it. When we left I hugged him, as I always do, and told him how proud I was of him for taking it on. Then I got in the Bronco and drove away.

Thirty minutes later Regina Spektor and Ben Folds came to wreck me.

The intro to Dear Theodosia started and I knew immediately. Unlike exile, there was no maybe this one won’t get me tonight. I actually said out loud, “Oh, this one will get me,” and started laughing while I cried. I was laughing because it was absurd that this was happening only a few tracks after exile. I was laughing because I know myself extremely well, and I knew exactly why I had put this song on Song Why‽ in the first place, which meant on some level I had built the trap I had now driven directly into. And I was laughing because, even while it was happening, I knew I was going to have to put this whole stupid beautiful sequence together when I got home.

But I didn’t start writing it in my head. I stayed there and enjoyed the song. Every time Spektor sings Theodosia, I hear Theo. Tonight especially. The Hamilton Mixtape version has always hit me harder than the cast recording because Regina Spektor and Ben Folds make it feel intimate in a way that gets underneath me, and Hamilton is already part of our family culture because I introduced it to the kids and then they got hooked on it too. But tonight the name echo wasn’t theoretical. I had just hugged Theo goodbye. I had just told him I was proud of the man he’s becoming. I had just watched him choose a role that makes perfect sense if you’ve known him his whole life. Then this song about looking at your child and believing they are going to grow up and help build a better world starts playing while I’m driving away from him. I didn’t stand a fucking chance.

So I sang through those tears too. All of them. The thing about crying to music is that I don’t really want the crying to stop. I don’t want to get control of myself and return to some emotionally neutral baseline. I like feeling it when I can just let it happen. The snot is inconvenient, sure, but otherwise: why would I want less of that? I was proud of Theo. Completely, uncomplicatedly proud. There was no fear hiding under it, no sadness about him growing up, no wish that he were still little. He’s a strong dude. He’s an amazing human. I think he’ll be good at this. And hearing that song when I did simply gave all of that pride somewhere to go.

And that was it. The emotional ambushes were over. Other songs came on that have made me cry at other times and they didn’t touch me that way tonight, because apparently the playlist had already found the two live wires it needed: regret and mourning on one side, pride and possibility on the other. After Dear Theodosia I went straight back into Sing-A-Long with Mitch mode. Follow the bouncing ball. Somethin’ Stupid came on and I was back to happily singing my way south, and from there it was just great songs, city lights, and the particular pleasure I get from driving at night. I love night driving more than almost anything. I love watching the lights collect as the freeway gets closer to the city, and I love that the Bronco has adaptive cruise control so I can pick a lane, settle in behind the cars ahead of me, and let the miles happen while the music fills the rest of the space.

That’s probably the whole point, if this needs a point at all. I drove Finn to Bellingham. I hugged Theo. I drove home. On the way I blasted Pedro the Lion through little northern Washington towns, thought about people I loved twenty-seven years ago as though no time had passed, belted the Welcome Back, Kotter theme like an idiot, let Harry Nilsson put my problems in context, cried over the pain I caused Heidi and the future we no longer have, laughed because Bob Dylan immediately started singing about buckets of tears, cranked Childish Gambino while thinking about the country my kids are inheriting, got absolutely destroyed with pride by Regina Spektor and Ben Folds, sang through all of it, and then happily followed the bouncing ball through the city lights toward Tacoma. None of those feelings canceled any of the others. The grief didn’t make the drive sad. The laughter didn’t make the grief less real. The pride didn’t erase the regret. It all just got to be there at once, which may be my favorite thing music knows how to do.

And then I got home.

I had to pee so fucking bad.