The Room
Four minutes before the day begins.
This is a story about no one.
It isn't a letter or a message. It’s just a man standing in a kitchen, talking to a room with no one in it. Or maybe he’s talking to everyone who’s ever stood in their own version of that room.
I don’t know him. But I think you might.
There’s a man standing in a kitchen at 5:30 in the morning. The coffee maker hisses and pops through its last few seconds, that familiar gurgle before the pot goes quiet. The yellow glow of the microwave clock is the only light. The house is still in the way houses are still when everyone else is still dreaming. He’s not thinking about anything important. He’s just standing there, bare feet on the wood floor, hands flat on the counter like he’s bracing for something.
He doesn’t know it yet, but this is one of the moments.
Not the kind anyone photographs. And not the kind he’ll tell a story about at dinner. Just a man in a kitchen, scanning the silence out of muscle memory, existing in the last few seconds before the day starts asking things of him. His youngest will wake up soon and call out from her crib. Not crying, but more so just announcing herself to the world the way she does every morning, like she’s surprised to still be here and delighted about it. His oldest is down the hall, fourteen and already becoming someone he doesn’t fully recognize yet. Not in a scary way. But more in the way a song changes key and you realize it’s been building toward something you didn’t hear coming.
He’ll walk into the little one’s room and she’ll reach for him with both arms. That never gets old. It won’t get old for another two years, and then one day she’ll just climb out of the crib herself and wander into the kitchen on her own, and he’ll be proud and a little wrecked by it at the same time.
His oldest will come downstairs eventually, earbuds already in, existing in that teenage frequency where she’s both entirely present and slightly unreachable. He’ll say good morning. She’ll say it back without looking up. And he’ll remember a version of her that used to sprint across the living room in Hawaii and crash into his legs when he walked through the door. He misses those sprints.
There’s a version of this man ten years from now who’s standing in a different kitchen. Maybe it’s in Texas. Maybe somewhere else. His youngest is eleven and has decided she has authority over everything from which animals belong in captivity, to why oat milk is morally superior, and why her father needs to stop trying to use slang he learned from the internet. She’s funny in a way that catches him off guard. She’s sharp, quick, and has the kind of humor that makes him realize she’s been paying attention to things he didn’t know she was watching. His oldest is twenty-four. She calls on Sundays, sometimes. But not always. He doesn’t take it personally, but he also takes it personally. He doesn’t say so.
His wife is somewhere in the house, and the fact that she’s there…still there, after the ups and downs and the long conversations about whether any of this is working…is the thing he’s most proud of and least likely to say out loud. Not necessarily because he doesn’t feel it. But because some things are too big for words and he knows it, so he just makes her coffee too and sets it on her bed side table where she’ll find it.
There’s another version of the man. Further out. He’s sixty-something and the house is quieter than he expected. Not in the good way. In the way that makes him understand why his parents called so often. His youngest is somewhere building a life he can only see the edges of. His oldest has kids of her own, maybe, and he watches her with them and sees every mistake he made and every lesson that landed and he can’t tell which ones are which because they all turned into the same thing eventually…her, becoming herself, in spite of him and because of him in equal measure.
He’s still running. Slower, but still out there. The trails look different when your knees have opinions. The mornings look different when the house is quieter than it used to be. But he’s there. Feet on the ground. Still moving forward.
And he writes. He never stopped writing. That surprised him more than anything. The blog became a journal which became a record which became the thing his kids didn’t care about in their twenties and couldn’t stop reading in their thirties. The thing that made his youngest call one random Tuesday and say, “Dad, I just read the one about the walks we used to take in that little town in North Carolina. I don’t remember any of it. But I feel like I do now.”
That’s the line that breaks him. In the good way.
The coffee maker pops one last time. The yellow light reads 5:34.
There’s a man standing in a kitchen, and he’s been telling all of this to no one. Running through futures he can’t control and pasts he can’t change, narrating a life to an empty room like someone practicing a speech they’ll never give.
And then he realizes something.
The room was never empty. He was talking to the only person who needed to hear it. The one who keeps wondering if he’s doing enough. If he’s present enough. If the mornings and the walks and the writing and the miles will add up to something his daughters can hold onto when he’s not the one making the coffee anymore.
He picks up the mug and takes a sip. The little one calls out from her crib.
He’s not sure he’s getting it right. But he’s in it. And that’s the part he doesn’t want to miss.