I am usually good at answers. Or at least at finding them quickly, which feels close enough.
On the way home from a father-child bonding event, my son asked me a riddle — which month has the letter X in it? — and I didn't know. I reached, instinctively, for my phone. I couldn't use it. We were moving. I was driving. So the question stayed in the car with us, unanswered, and I had to just sit there with him in the not-knowing.
That same night, driving my daughter somewhere, it happened again. A question. No answer. No phone. Just the two of us, and the dark outside, and the thing neither of us could resolve.
I don't think it's the questions themselves that stayed with me. It's the feeling of being temporarily stripped of the reflex — that automatic reach for certainty — and finding something quieter underneath. Not knowing, and being with my child anyway. Not performing competence. Just present, and slightly at a loss, and somehow more there for it.
X is the symbol we give to what we don't yet know. But it's also a crossing — two lines meeting. And I think that's what those moments in the car actually were: crossings. My children and I are travelling along different lines, at different speeds, from different places in time. They are moving into years I have already passed through. I am watching from somewhere further on. We don't always inhabit the same moment. But sometimes, briefly, our lines cross — and in those crossings there's something that doesn't need a name, or an answer. Just the fact of it. Just: there.
That's what this poem is trying to hold. Not the unknown as problem, but the unknown as place — the place where two people who love each other sometimes find themselves, together, without a map.