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An aspect of Amber's neurodivergence is that she hyper-fixates. She cannot detach or slow down until she has consumed as much as possible. It is why she has a consistent 4.0 in her college classes, rattles off calculus, and can discuss the glycosylation of proteins in mocha mice. It is her copious genius.

While walking to pick up her car from the charger, I say, "At 7 pm, you have to stop talking about Cornell, or I won't be able to sleep tonight."

She looks around. It is raining and has been since we left on our half-mile trip. It is not enough that it would stop us from walking, but it suffices to obscure light. "What time is it now?"

"6:38."

"That's okay. I don't have anything else to say about it."

She then launches back into detailing what she knows about Cornell.

"I might not get in, though," she says, referencing the 9% acceptance rate. I do not know if this is for the college or the program.

"Then what would you do?"

"Keep applying until they accept me."

I am not thrilled this has become a topic. I do not want to send my anxiety down the path of what Amber getting into Cornell will mean for us, so I have given her this time limit.

Still, I look askance. How could Amber imagine Cornell wouldn't want her getting her master's there?

"No, it would be my doctorate. I would skip past my master's. I would beat you."

"I don't want my doctorate."

"Do they have that for education?"

"Unfortunately. I would need to become an administrator then. I don't want to be in a classroom where I am not getting paid," I say. "I'll teach myself anything I want to know."

Amber is the opposite. She hopes to be in school for the rest of her life. She says Cornell will give her a stipend if she gets into the doctoral program. Beyond a point, academia operates by fairy rules. I would have to pay for another graduate degree, but I am a liberal arts teacher. We are gullible and easily fleeced, or we would have chosen a better discipline. She is a scientist, thus worthy of reward.

I could not fully explain what she hopes to study further. I tell people it is microbiology, but that's not it. There are more words, but they are slippery and large.

She jokes about how she will make us immortal and had better get started. I mention something about synthetic restorative stem cells, a pseudoscience from a show we were watching.

"Pretty much," she assures me. "You can stay here. I'll live in my car and see you on weekends." She hums over how one would do this, settling on insulation and leaving her car plugged in with the heater on.

I would not stay here. Amber will not live in her car. There are two juvenile detention facilities within fifteen miles of Cornell. If they need a teacher, they must accept me. I will have over twelve years of seniority by then.

She was flattered I would have done even this level of research, but I wanted to make this impossible rather than eerily simple.

I say the weather is worse than here. Amber skims her phone and says it is better. The average temperature is only a few degrees lower, with less rain and snow than in the Hudson Valley.

The housing prices are not more affordable, but she is optimistic. "Maybe we could get a house. And a dog!" she says, adding to herself, "What kind of a dog?"

Moving will not make me any less allergic, though maybe her research will sort that out. She talks about beagles being the preferred dogs on which to experiment, wondering if there is a cat breed equivalent.

"I could just take street cats for my research then," she says. "You can buy the beagles after you are done experimenting with them. You have to pay extra for the ones that don't have seizures."

"I would pay extra for that."

She isn't sure. Epileptic beagles seem cute to her. She would find it fun to cure them.

"My head meds are anti-epileptics," I say.

"Are they?"

"Well, you haven't seen me have a seizure, right?"

Someone out of their mind completed the doctoral program in two years. An outlier whom we find adorable took fourteen years, set so far to the right on the bar graph. Amber would skew toward the lower end.

When I thought she only sought a master's degree, I could see this as temporary. A few years, then we could return to the Hudson Valley, where we belong. With a doctoral degree in... some union of human and veterinary medicine(?) via proteins, she would find a new tether.

"What's weird about applying to a grad program is that you aren't applying to a school as much as a job." If she gets into this, Cornell won't let her go. Or, if she does escape Cornell, she will not escape universities. I am unsure if she sees a throughline between a doctoral degree and a career.

When ***Daniel ***left, Amber and I were among the few things keeping him in the area. We don't want to be so far from our families, though we would see them on major holidays. Cornell is four hours away. We could stay with her mother for Christmas and Easter. I could pop down for Memorial Day or my father's birthday. If the niblings visited, we would want to see them.

Amber mentions late nights in her original college, how the art building was open at all hours. "I once saw a guy at 2 am, then again at 8 am in class. I didn't mind it then but wouldn't do it now." She immediately diverts into explaining how she would do this in graduate school, and it might be okay. "I do need to get a solid block of sleep. Maybe 1 am to 10 am."

If I made Amber stay up until 1 am, she might murder me.

I can think of a few more significant leaps than following her to Cornell.

"That is unless you want me to go to Berkley. That's in--"

"California. I am aware."

"Tufts is only in Massachusetts."

Rensselaer Polytechnic is an hour from us -- not a drive I would want her to make every day, but it would not require us to move much. They have a program that might meet her requirements but not her preferences.

Do I have a psychological block on knowing what precise hue of science she would be doing?

"Rensselaer has a program for Biomedicine and Biophysics."

"So you could double major," I joke.

"No, that's one major."

"Seems redundant."

She muses over different majors, flitting between them. I look at the overlaps but only come away with "science; biological; not too much math."

Cornell may not happen, but Amber's tenacity is notorious. She will not be satisfied with a Bachelor of Science in... I'm going with Biochemistry. I can explain the research I have heard her present to her computer while I am writing in my nook. I have corrected the grammar of papers on LAMP-1 proteins, but I could not tell you what they do. I am not proud of my ignorance of her work, but it is several floors above my scientific knowledge. She takes the elevator.

When I later tell this to Daniel, he asks for my worst-case scenario. "It's something I do, imagining the worst. I don't know if that's helpful."

"It's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; it's helpful. My worst-case scenario is that I move to Ithaca with Amber and am desperately lonely while she spends all her time in the lab. I dated a woman who had me ***move in with her and immediately said she would start training much more at her gym, so I would hardly see her. It incensed me she would have me take this step with her -- and I didn't want to -- and then pull that. I told her, and she saw what I was saying. I don't think I stood up for myself much in that relationship, so this surprised her."

"So, not divorce?" he asks. This is not joking or goading.

"Of course not. I will move with Amber. I want to be around her and support her success. I would rather be miserable and alone with her than surrounded by people and not have her. I can't do long distance with her, even if I thought that was affordable."

He is relieved to hear this, though still surprised by my vehemence.

"Kest and I have a state of the union every once in a while, checking to see if this relationship is still something we want."

This would drive me crazy. Every morning, I want Amber. We kiss before leaving home and recite our little goodbye *(be awesome, be safe, be loved, be beautiful)*. When she skipped it once, assuming I would rather sleep in on a Saturday, I spent until our lunch texts with growing anxiety. (She informed me she had still said it from the doorway so she would not wake me.) We have infrequent friction -- a status to which her fascination with Cornell has not risen -- but I do not doubt she is the person with whom I want to spend my life and every day. I cannot imagine anyone who loved me so completely and without reservation.

"Amber's and my neurodivergences are at odds here," I say. "Her autism fixates her on the intricacies of this possibility. My anxiety fixates on the doom of this change."

"I haven't even applied to grad school," Amber notes when I summarize my conversation with Daniel. "I haven't even graduated. I suppose I could stay as a vet tech."

"That's not what I want. There is no reason you should limit yourself. If I thought I had held you back, I couldn't live with myself."

It would not be the end of the world, but it would not be a pleasant transition, giving up all I have built in the Hudson Valley to be a potential science widow. It is not as though Amber will get there and decide she doesn't want to do this. She wants to do what she is doing in most circumstances. When she worked for a garden center, she wanted to do that. Most of the time at her animal hospital, she wants to be there. I will do things because they provide an end I enjoy, mostly money to do the things I actually want (writing). Amber, though, finds purpose in what she is doing, and the financial reward is never primary in her mind.

This is not to dismiss her as likely being happy in any situation, as though she could substitute Cornell for another goal. There is a world of difference between assisting with neutering and doing biomedical research at a prestigious college. Ithaca might not be her home either -- I don't think she would contradict this -- but Cornell could be.

"Would you have a lab?"

"I would share a lab," she says. "Maybe eventually I would have a lab."

As far as she tells me, Ithaca is a city surrounded by farms and nothing. Cornell is its anchor, and everything depends on it to thrive.

Red Hook has been my home more than anywhere I have chosen to live. Ithaca would not be home. Amber is my home, though. Without her, Red Hook is only a place.

Perhaps I would enjoy Ithaca. I adapt well and have learned to discount my first days and weeks of whining until my brain recalibrates to the paradigm. I would miss my people here endlessly. There are permutations of friendships I have not fully explored. I quake to leave the comforts of familiarity behind for a clean slate elsewhere.

It is not as though we are going to another country. We can have lunch with our friends if we start driving after breakfast.

There is a sprig of excitement at the idea of so new a start. New people to meet, new things to discover. My job is the bedrock on which our lives are built. We do not want to leave our parents, but there is the fairy dust possibility Amber traces with decreasing idleness.

last watched: The French Dispatch
reading: Bluebeard