None of Those Roads

Tayo's a little blue bus. Korean cartoon, the kind where everyone's cranked three notches past human — the bus is thrilled to go to work, the traffic light's thrilled to turn green. Raven and Xander vanish into it. So I do the voices. Not well. Loud, and a little stupid, and the joke isn't the voice, it's that a grown man is saying it instead of the cartoon they just got swallowed by. They lose it every time.

Today they were both tucked into me on the couch, bottles going, while I ran my Tayo bits and rubbed their bellies. Raven asked me about a dozen times if I love her — she does that — and told me how much she loves me in between. Xander nodded along like he was confirming it for the record.

And I noticed I was full. Not the good-mood kind. The kind that catches in your throat — too much love going both directions at once, and your eyes sting and it isn't happiness, it's closer to awe.

Then the other thing showed up, the way it always does. I started running the tape. The woman years ago who looked at me like I hung the moon, who I got bored of for no reason I could defend today. The roommate who took his career seriously while I screwed around, and who now runs a company. The money I didn't save, the business I didn't start, every fork where I took the dumb road. And here's the strange part: even if I could go back and drive every smarter road, and keep everything good that would've come after — I wouldn't. None of those roads end on this couch.

There's a thing Stallone keeps doing in the late Rocky movies, and again in the Creed ones. He's old, he's got the belts, and he's haunted — by the son he didn't father right, the people he loved and didn't tend. He keeps circling it. I used to think that was an actor with one note. Now I think it's the most honest note he's got.

Because I've got a first set of kids, mostly grown now. By most measures my oldest is crushing it — better than I had any right to expect. And I was there for it. But I always feel like I could have given more. More time, more patience, more of whatever my best self had and didn't always hand over. It was probably enough. It still wasn't everything I had.

So here's what I'm actually afraid of with these two. Not a disaster. The slow version — looking up in fifteen years, fuller than ever, and realizing it went by while I had more to give than I gave.

And the job now is to hold all of it together — the money, the month, the what-if-it-all-breaks — without letting the strain of holding it become the reason I'm not all the way here. I can grind through the logistics. The danger is the grind becoming the place I hide.

Raven asked again if I love her. I said yes. She said she loves me more. I told her that's not how it works and hit her with the Tayo voice, and she lost it, and we were back.