2022, Halfway Through (II)

A first crack at an epilogue at the end of the great American (Brazilian jiu-jitsu) road trip

As I write this, I’m on a rented couch in a terrace-level apartment in Marietta, Georgia. The apartment breaks out into the view of a tranquil pond, where you’ll find flocks of geese, Muscovy ducks, and — if you’re lucky — a mythically-sized pelican in the early break of dawn, before the humidity settles in and before the human noise perturbs the serenity on the water.

Aside from the rented furniture, the apartment holds the contents formerly packed into the Subaru. Everything in the one bedroom somehow made the trip from the previous year spent on the road — jiu-jitsu gis, a Wal-mart folding table serving as a moveable desk, notebooks that came onto the trip empty, but now have filled themselves with months of words and observations across the country. These things, along with many others, have expanded to fill the surfaces of the one bedroom, our last truly temporary home.

In the coming weeks, the time in the apartment will reach its end, soon to be replaced by a year-long lease in a proper house. With that house (a rented one, not an owned one in this economy — alas), the cross-country journey comes to an end, too.

A year ago this weekend, I left my job. At the time, it was the most important decision of my life — and the most difficult decision of my life, second only to the decision to go on the trip at all. It was an…