Empty Nest

After we drop you off, we will be heartbroken, empty. After we drop you off, we will be ebullient, free. We will clean out your room, flinging open the windows to air out the poorly-cared-for iguana smell. We will redecorate: spare bedroom or office. We will sit on the end of the bed and hear you spilling boxes of Legos out onto the floor, raking through them to find just the right shape and color.

After we drop you off, we will high five. We will hold each other and miss you terribly. After we drop you off, we will relish the quiet. We will miss the near-constant racket, will wander the halls, ears searching for the sound of you.

After we drop you off, we will stop cooking dinner per se. Will return to our grad school menu of salad and cereal eaten alone, nose in a book. After we drop you off, we will miss meals where you both fought over whose legs, long and growing, had extended into whose under-the-table real estate.

After we drop you off, the house will seem far too large, rooms left empty for weeks. After we drop you off, we will remember years when the house felt strained to bursting, someone in every room, music from the kitchen, dog trotting from person to person, doorbell ringing, basketball on asphalt, wet swim trunks moldering on carpeted floors, piles of dirty laundry in the bathroom growing taller and taller, ice cream dripped on counters, watermelon juice speckling the floor, candy wrappers littering your rooms, library books splayed open on the couch, mountains of sneakers and flip flops and slides blocking the door from the garage into the house, the garage door left open all night by accident, dings on the doors of the car, potato chips crushed onto the porch, dirty handprints 6 feet up on the walls, then 8 feet, then 10, cereal bowls gone crusty left out on the table, refrigerator bursting with gallons and gallons of milk.