Between the Cracks

used to say “good enough” and mean it.

Like, I didn’t overthink the plan…I just moved. Did the thing. Built the system. Bolted the route. Took the client. Broke up with the girl. Took off in the van. I ran my life like a climbing topo. Sketchy in parts, but still got you to the anchor.

During Covid, I got it in my head I’d swap Subaru engines so I could finally fix my Vanagon. Because of course I did. Because I believed that if you just put in the time and turned the wrench, you’d get there. But by the end of it, I had to sell the Subaru just to make a mortgage payment. The van never ran. It still doesn’t.

I used to date a woman who broke me open. Not in the bad way. Not even in the romantic way. Just in that blunt force truth way that wakes something up.

After the breakup, I somehow learned emotional intelligence and network security in the same year. She had a stolen gun on her property. I got kicked out of her garage. She taught me more than she knows, probably. She’d probably hate that I wrote that.

Covid year, I drove the Vanagon from California to Key West on borrowed time and tools. Somewhere in Naples, I met my biological grandmother for the first time. She doesn’t talk to us anymore.

My mother broke up with her mother over email. Just like we’ve broken things, all of us, again and again, because we don’t know how to fight clean. My mom won’t talk to her. She helped raise me. Now she’s a ghost in a story none of us have the courage to rewrite.

And all of this…these women, these vehicles, these almost homes they swirl around a version of me that used to just say “good enough” and get back to building.

But now I don’t know what’s good enough anymore. Not in work. Not in love. Not in forgiveness. I’m not sure what counts as “done” or “worth it” or “fixed.”

The van isn’t fixed. The relationships aren’t fixed. The family tree is a shredded PDF. And my skills are half packed in a digital glovebox I can’t always access.

But I’m still here. In a body that remembers how to build, even when the brain forgets.

Good enough.

Maybe.

Perhaps…