I wanted to see more of it in my daughter, who had appeared from the start a carbon copy of myself. Abbi was the better half of the two of us; she was the rush rapids over my stony, dark rocks. Without her I would be lifeless, I would be barren, I would be unmoving.
"Did you hear me?" Zara whined, sounding more and more like her mother by the second. "You're missing it."
I sat up fully and tried to spy through the windshield, but the reflection of the morning light created a blinding rectangle of liquid gold.
"Missing what?" I asked, trying to push down the cowlick at the back of my head. "Where are we?"
"Just come on," Zara said, grabbing my hand.
I stumbled more than climbed out of the car, and before I was even to my feet, Zara was hurrying me along. I found my footing but lost my breath entirely when I saw what lay before me: we were at the Grand Canyon, and Abbi stood silhouetted against a sky of blooming cactus flowers.
My feet moved one in front of the other after Zara as if in a trance. I wasn't conscious of moving, I wasn't conscious of stepping forward. All I was conscious of was the sky growing higher and higher and higher and chasms growing deeper and deeper and deeper.
Zara and I came to a stop next to Abbi at the railing and we stood in a row of silence as profound as the silence I imagined in space. My breath came in shuddering exhales as I drank in the absolute majesty before me.
Everything I'd done in my life before that very moment was intended to make myself bigger. I earned promotion after promotion so I could walk into a boardroom as a giant among men. I moulded and sculpted a reputation for myself so that I was so tall, so high above everyone else, that people's voices came to me only as hushed, frightened whispers. I puffed up my chest like a goddamn rooster with the confidence of Rolex watches and a Maserati and private yachts. I would be big, bigger, biggest.
And yet, whether or not I was ever really willing to admit it to myself, all of that only made me feel small. My wealth, my career, my office were a balloon I inflated day after day, because the truth was if I didn't, it would fall and shrivel into almost nothing. It was a façade and it was exhausting. It was a lie and it was lonely. It was a hoax and I was the goddamn sucker who had to pay the price.
But something strange struck me as Abbi and Zara and I watched sun rise over the Grand Canyon: I'd never felt smaller. And in being dwarfed, I'd never felt more filled.
The very universe itself seemed to rise and fall before me in shades of vibrant pink and deep lavender. I'd pretended to stand tall amongst steel skyscrapers, but I could not fool myself at the brink of those ancient rocky cliffs. I was small and that was the truth. I was small and insignificant and I would be but the blink of an eye compared to this natural wonder. The reality of this was unavoidable, and for once I didn’t want to avoid it.
I wanted the wildfire in the sky to burn higher and the wishing wells of the canyon to run deeper and I wanted to feel smaller and smaller and smaller still.
Because I was there with Abbi and I was there with Zara and they were enough. They were more than enough.
And with them there, I was enough.
I suddenly saw the last few years of my life not as a titan of the executive world or a modern-day boardroom conqueror, but as a child, a small, naïve child. I'd been dipping my hands into a well and, cupping my hands together, running toward where the silhouette of my father, small and unmoving, stood on a distant hill. But the faster I tried to reach him, the quicker the water sloshed over my thumbs and seeped through my fingers. Again and again my hands were emptied long before I reached the darkened outline of my father on that far-off hill. I would run back to the well and think that the answer was to dip my hands in deeper, holding more. But I never reached him. I never reached him. And I was left with nothing but empty hands held out like a beggar.
But with Abbi and Zara on either side of me and the Grand Canyon before me, I didn't have to reach down into any well. I didn't have to run. My hands, my heart, were filled with more healing waters than I knew what to do with. I did nothing to earn it. I simply received.
I sucked in a ragged breath. Abbi slipped her fingers between mine. I looked over at her and found her eyes sparkling with a faint mist of tears. I frowned. She smiled and laughed and shook her head.
"I'm just tired from driving," she said, waving her other hand to dismiss her wet eyes.
I wondered when she'd started to do that, to hide her emotions, push them away, as if they were dirty clothes to shove under the bed. I remembered when she not only wore her emotions on her sleeve like a badge, but weaved them into the very fibre of her being. I remembered when she practically burst with emotion, bold and unafraid. I remembered when the flames of her passion and anger and joy and love threatened to burn down anything and everything in sight.
I wondered if it was because of me that she laughed it off and blinked her eyes dry. I wondered if it was because
