Mile Marker

# Mile Markers

Once upon a Time couldn't come fast enough, I thought as the big gray four door pickup with my entire bedroom strapped into a Uhaul trailer backed out of my childhood driveway and entered the streets of adulthood. I silently counted my blessings as each mile marker passed as we furthered away from the 710 freeway onto open road tree divided patches of land as we trailed up Pacific Coast Highway.

Dad kept his eyes fixed on the road, but I caught him glancing at me in the rearview mirror every few minutes. His knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and I wondered if he was gripping it so tight to keep his hands steady or to keep from turning the truck around.

"You sure about this college thing?" he asked for the third time since we'd left Bellflower. His voice carried that particular note of doubt that had been creeping into our conversations ever since I'd gotten my acceptance letter.

"I'm sure, Dad." I watched the urban sprawl give way to coastal bluffs, the Pacific stretching endlessly to our left. The salty air through the cracked window tasted like possibility. "Besides, it's only four hours away."

"Four hours might as well be four hundred when you're the first in the family to do something like this."

I'd heard this refrain before. Mom had said it when I'd announced my major—Environmental Science—like I'd declared I was becoming an astronaut. My little sister Maria had said it when she'd helped me pack, though hers came wrapped in admiration rather than worry.

The trailer behind us rattled over a pothole, and I imagined my carefully packed life shifting and settling into new arrangements. My grandmother's quilt, the desk lamp I'd used for late-night studying, the cork board covered in photos of friends who were scattering to their own new beginnings—all of it bouncing toward an uncertain future.

"Remember when you used to say you wanted to be a mechanic like me?" Dad's voice softened with the memory. "You'd sit in the garage for hours, handing me tools, asking a million questions about engines."

"I still ask a million questions. Just different ones now."

He laughed despite himself. "Environmental science. Still can't believe my daughter's going to study how to save the world."

"Someone has to."

The coastline opened up before us, and I felt something shift in my chest—not the homesickness I'd been bracing for, but a fierce kind of joy. Each mile marker we passed wasn't taking me away from home; it was leading me toward who I was supposed to become.

When we pulled into the university parking lot two hours later, Dad sat for a moment with the engine running, staring at the red-brick dormitories and the students walking with purpose across manicured lawns.

"You know," he said quietly, "your mom made me promise to tell you something if I got too choked up to say it myself."

I waited.

"She said to remember that roots don't disappear just because you grow new branches."

I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes as I reached over and squeezed his hand. Through the windshield, I could see other families unloading trucks and trailers, other young people standing at the edge of their own new chapters.

"Come on," I said, opening the truck door. "Let's go build me a new room."

As we worked together to carry my childhood into my future, I realized that Once upon a Time hadn't been something I was waiting for—it had been happening all along, in every choice that led me here, in every mile marker that had brought me home to myself.