I had slipped away from the apartment my client had provided for the month and crawled into bed beside my little old man, drawing the green velvet curtains around us before turning out the lights. I was determined to spend the night in Meridian.
I had already become homesick for her.

Darkness was more accommodating than daylight had been. The clutter of the travel configuration disappeared into the shadows. The refrigerator, whose absence had once been so conspicuous, now contained the previous night’s potato salad, and the roomlette became, for a little while, a place in which I could lie down without immediately discovering something else that required doing.

The machinery beneath the bed continued its employment. I had arranged for the essential things to proceed without my supervision, and was now attempting the rather less familiar business of leaving them to it.

There was an obvious explanation for Meridian by then. Losing the house was no longer simply something that was happening, but something that had happened. I had needed somewhere to live. I had built somewhere to live upon wheels.

This explanation had the considerable advantage of being true. It also allowed the most recent circumstances to take credit for an intention which had existed before they became so urgent.

Before departure became a problem to be solved by a particular date, I had been considering what portion of my life I wished to remain available for general use.

I had been useful for a very long time, and had generally enjoyed it. There was satisfaction in understanding a difficult thing, in arriving where something had gone wrong and helping to put it right, in being trusted with work whose consequences justified the attention it required. I had known the pleasure of discovering, at the end of an exhausting day, that the exhaustion had purchased something worth having.

I would not have wished to exchange all those days for easier ones.

But usefulness develops expectations, some of them so gradually that no occasion presents itself upon which one might reasonably object. A person who has answered the telephone before will presumably answer it again. A woman who knows how to solve a problem may be expected to take an interest in its solution. Having taken an interest, she will naturally wish to see it through. By the time the matter has acquired several additional complications, her departure would inconvenience people who have quite reasonably begun to rely upon her.

Considered separately, many of these expectations are innocent. The difficulty lies in their acquaintance with one another. Each arrives believing itself to be a modest request, and none has been informed that the others have already occupied the afternoon.

I had assisted this process considerably.

It would be gratifying to attribute the whole arrangement to the selfishness of other people, but I had too often volunteered before anyone thought to ask. I could see what needed doing. I knew how to do it. Leaving it undone seemed wasteful, and watching somebody do it badly could be worse. My own competence supplied an argument against my refusal which I was especially well equipped to find convincing.

Then there was the matter of my word.

I had always attached considerable importance to it. Once I had undertaken something, the discovery that it would cost more than expected did not appear to release me from the undertaking. I had made the promise under one set of assumptions; when the assumptions proved optimistic, I generally retained the promise and dismissed the assumptions.

This was an expensive method of preserving one’s principles, although the expense did not always arrive in money.

My principles nevertheless remained mine. I could see no reason to surrender them merely because somebody else found them convenient. What required examination was the ease with which I allowed another commitment to become a test of whether I possessed them at all.

There ought to have been some interval between recognizing a need and appointing myself to meet it. I had allowed this interval to become very short.

The larger world offered little assistance in extending it.

I had come to dislike the direction in which ordinary life appeared to be proceeding. More and more of a person’s time seemed to have acquired an owner before she had decided what to do with it. Work extended its reach. Institutions multiplied the small duties by which one remained in good standing with them. Every service required attention, every difficulty an account, every account maintenance, and every failure of the arrangement appeared eventually to become the responsibility of the person attempting to use it.

Even convenience had become something one was obliged to administer.

I had watched organizations expect a devotion they did not feel obliged to return; the language of shared purpose seemed to survive longest in requests for somebody else’s sacrifice. I was tired of being invited to call this realism while my own attempts to preserve something of myself required a moral defense.

There were good people within these arrangements. I had worked beside them. Some were attempting to make the machinery kinder while being consumed by it themselves, and it would have been a poor return for their efforts to imagine that everyone behind a desk had chosen the rules by which the desk was governed. But the presence of good people did not make the total demand reasonable. An entire life could be occupied by things which, taken one at a time, appeared to ask very little.

I had begun to want some of that life back while there was still time to decide what to do with it.

This desire had no particularly impressive destination. I had not received a vision of a certain mountain, nor discovered that all my difficulties would be resolved at a specified distance from Sacramento. The desert and the mountains appealed to me, but I was sufficiently acquainted with practical matters to know that scenery would not undertake my responsibilities. There would still be work. There would be repairs, provisions, weather, and the ordinary consequences of having taken myself along.

What I wanted was more choice in the arrangement of these things.

I wanted to remain somewhere because I liked being there, and to leave when remaining had ceased to be agreeable. I wanted to accept useful work with a clear understanding of where the work ended. I wanted to enjoy somebody’s company without every acquaintance becoming another appointment to maintain. There were people to whom I would gladly give my time; I wanted to arrive with enough of myself remaining to make the gift worth receiving.

And there were hours I wished to keep.

An afternoon might contain a view, a little reading, the company of the dog, or nothing I could afterward explain to the satisfaction of a productive person. I wanted to discover what interested me when interest was permitted to develop at its own pace, without first establishing whether it could be made useful. Perhaps I would learn something. Perhaps I would spend an unreasonable amount of time staring at a hillside.

I called this “optionality”. It included the possibility of staying still. A road was valuable even when I did not take it, provided the decision remained available; knowing I could leave might allow me to stay with considerably better grace.

Filthy lucre still played a considerable part in making such choices possible, and I had no intention of pretending otherwise. I hoped to earn more of it. But I had begun to question the habit of treating every improvement in one’s circumstances as an invitation to acquire a more expensive set of obligations. If work went well again, I wanted some of the benefit to remain in the form of time I could dispose of, rather than disappear into arrangements which required the work to continue indefinitely.

There was also no serious possibility of becoming independent of humanity. The trailer itself furnished a fairly comprehensive objection to the idea. Other people had made the steel, the tires, the batteries, the tools. Other people maintained the roads. I had depended upon knowledge I had not discovered, labor I had not performed, and kindness which no ingenuity of mine could have manufactured.

Don’s work, for example, was still beneath the bed.

Any accounting of my pursuit of independence that omitted these things would have been a considerable work of fiction.

I wished to keep the connections I valued and to participate in arrangements I could respect. I expected to pay for things, to work, to help where I could, and to (mostly) remain subject to the inconvenient fact that other people had needs as real as my own. But my own needed to enter the discussion somewhat earlier than they had been accustomed to doing.

The prior January I had first arrived at the expression “me first.”

I found it less comfortable to practice than to pronounce; and the latter was certainly difficult enough. It sounded, to an ear trained by many years of putting something else first, like an announcement of deficiencies in one’s upbringing. Yet the alternative had begun to require a degree of self-neglect which I would have considered unreasonable if recommended to anybody else.

I was to be included among the people for whom I was responsible. This ought to have been an elementary conclusion. I had required some decades to reach it.

Nor did reaching it make refusal easy. I could still anticipate the inconvenience my absence would cause, still imagine the disappointed face, still hear the persuasive little argument that this particular thing would not take very long. Some of those arguments would be correct. I expected that I should continue to help, and that I should sometimes agree to more than I ought.

Meridian would not improve my character merely by transporting it.

She might, however, give me a place from which to consider a request before answering it, and a means of departing from an arrangement whose demands had become unacceptable. These were practical advantages. I had spent far too many years trusting myself to endure circumstances which I might have done better to change. I wanted another course available before endurance became the only one left.

Yang’s place in this calculation was settled. He would eat, take his medication, sniff new places (and subsequently urinate upon them), be comfortable, and have his person. There were commitments I would carry willingly wherever we went, and his was among the reasons to want a life with a little more room in it. I should like, occasionally, to be available to the dog without first finishing something for everybody else.

The rest would require judgment. I had no expectation of becoming good at it all at once.

Lying in the dark, I could imagine the small enclosure standing somewhere else. Its contents would remain familiar. The bed would still be difficult to make, while being almost unreasonably inviting. The same machinery would continue beneath it, and the day’s work might still involve a problem which refused to be solved by any of the methods it ought reasonably to have accepted.

But beyond the door there could be a place in which I had deliberately chosen to spend another day.

That was what I had been looking for when this undertaking still possessed the leisure to be an intention. A life in which there was room to consider an invitation before it became a duty, to offer help without silently promising the rest of myself, and to discover what I might do with an hour which nobody had yet claimed.

In the morning the practical difficulties would resume their claims upon my attention, with every prospect of being heard.

In that moment, the machinery beneath me continued its quiet magic of turning the previous day’s stored sunlight into the comforts of this evening.

With Yang beside me and the velvet drawn, I allowed Final Meridian to hold the lingering promises, longing, doubts and regrets at a merciful distance until morning.