Sometimes love just isn’t enough. After 8 years together, 5 of them married, my wife and I split up. In fact, we split up while I was in the middle of writing this book.

Our love for each other did not go away. Our relationship just didn’t work out. It was always off-kilter. We spent years trying to figure it out, years trying to solve it, but trying to solve it was like trying to punch our way out of a gigantic paper bag. We made a lot of noise and we exhausted ourselves trying to escape from the bag, but the bag just flexed one direction when we punched it one way, and then it flexed in another direction when we punched it in another. It never tore open. We never saw a sign that said, “This is the way out of the paper bag.”

Perhaps we put too much strain on the relationship too soon after meeting. Perhaps it was too much to expect we could uproot ourselves and move to a new country and embark on new careers and learn new languages and do all the other things we had to do in order to make it in Turkey, and build a healthy relationship too.

There are many things I don’t understand, but what I know for sure is that when I write about how she is as graceful as a gazelle, or about how much I loved watching her explore Amsterdam, or about how I called her “my little fish,” none of that is diminished by the fact that we are not together anymore. Our splitting up does not negate the memories I carry with me. What is done is done though. Some balls of string are just too tangled to unravel. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

I originally went to Turkey for her, but even though my relationship with her is over, my relationship with Turkey is not. Turkey is a timeless land where I see stories layered upon stories layered upon stories. It is a land filled with surprises, a place where I can turn a corner and see something completely not what I was expecting. And perhaps best of all, it is a land that showed me that just about anything can happen and I will be fine. There is nothing more freeing than knowing that.

In 2010 I moved back to the US. I spent some time with my family and with Milk Dud, the black lab whose unruliness led me to board that particular flight to Hong Kong back in 2003. Milk Dud, by the way, is my dad’s dog now. My parents took him in when I decided to go to Turkey, and he has been with them ever since.

Shortly after returning to the US I found a job in Seattle and moved back to the city I had left almost eight years before. For the first time in eight years I was back in an office, answering emails, sitting in meetings, shifting widgets. It didn’t feel right. I had done that already, and I had left it. I had left it to explore the world.

Taking that job was me aborting that exploration so I could jump back onto Track A, the default track in life that goes something like this: “Get a job, then get a bigger one. Get a car, then get a bigger one. Get a house, then get a bigger one.” Trying to jump back onto Track A had me feeling like I was wearing shoes that were too small. I couldn’t bear sitting in meetings, shifting widgets, trying to pretend I cared.

So less than a year after taking that job, I left it. I’m not sure what’s going to come next, but it’s going to be more Track B, the alternative track, the track I started going down when I left Seattle the first time. Track B is the path we blaze when we realize Track A isn’t going to work for us anymore.

For me, Track B is probably going to involve living in Turkey, at least for a while. I like it there. It’s not easy living there, but it doesn’t need to be.

When I tell people I plan to go back to Turkey, they quite understandably ask me what I’m going to do there. And I don’t know what to tell them. If I could say I’m going to go back to Turkey to sit at a desk and answer emails and shift widgets, perhaps people wouldn’t look at me as if they wanted more of an answer. But at this point the only honest answer I can give them is, “I am going back to Turkey because I still have work to do there.” That answer is cryptic, and it is evasive, but it is cryptic and evasive because even I don’t know what that work is yet. I would rather find out than not, though. I am not done with Track B.

[This is an excerpt from the conclusion to A Tight Wide-open Space.]