M&Q, our son and daughter, went back to their final year of college on the same day but in their own way. Q spent a week packing, piling her clothes in the center of her room and then going piece by piece to decide, fold, and neatly assign to dresser or closet or suitcase. At the end of seven days, her room that she had lived in all summer looked almost hotel ready for the next traveler.

M is studying abroad in Berlin this fall, and his approach to leaving favored spending as much time saying goodbye to as many people and attempting to finish as many projects as possible. (He’s a performing musician and music producer who always has around one million songs somewhere in process with many other musicians and producers.) M’s packing ended up unfurling on a single furious Saturday, the one right before his Sunday flight, and he left his room in a state best described as Level In a Survival Horror Video Game.

To be fair, I haven’t had to organize life for months away in a long time, especially an away that’s far enough to where you can’t easily get more of your stuff. M said that Berlin begins warm in September but slides into a hard gray cold that, as a friend of his who went the year before described it, chilled bone and soul. He also had less room for clothes than he might otherwise: He brought a guitar, an audio interface, and some speakers better at making songs sound how they will for other ears. We’re still not sure what he took or how it got any of it to fit, but he’s old enough to live with his choices.

M&Q leaving on the same day meant my wife and I split up. She helped M get to the airport and into security with a bag of pork buns for the plane. I drove Q up to her college town.

We loaded the car with Q’s stuff, and her mother hugged her for a good long while. We find it easier to let them go now, of course, but they continue to make our lives richer in new ways as we all age. And we still like the old tools of love from their youngest years — the hug, the favorite meal, the long-running bit sharpened by years.

During the three-hour drive, Q and I talked about our shared love of sad-girl music, books we’ve enjoyed recently and a few we hope to enjoy soon, bookstores that our best books have come from, what we needed to pick up at Target and Trader Joe’s to get the semester shoved off right. All this conversation about the past and present provided a way of stepping lightly around the future, which we knew was coming for us both.

We loaded up on snacks and shampoo and cold brew, and headed for lunch at a coffee shop downtown that we often go to. The light rain that beaded the windows on the road gave way to open sky, and we ate outside in the warming, bluing day. Q studied abroad in Spain last spring, and she hadn’t been to this town, this place, for almost eight months. She said it seemed a little strange, small, or maybe that she felt larger, still far away. We ate our sandwiches and gave each other sips of our drinks. “It’s so beautiful here,” Q said, looking around, and she meant it. And it was — the trees glossy and as green as they could be, flowers brilliant enough to pick themselves if they could, us sharing a bright-red table in the time before either of us had to stay or leave.

The car was less full than in other goings back, and unloading took little time. Q, like always, had firm ideas about how her room should look, and she enjoys the decorating. Which means I just brought in the boxes and bags, helped her push the heavy pieces of furniture into their proper places, then left her to invoke her imagination. We hugged for a long, long time.

The drive home, with the sad-girl playlist Q made for me restarted from the beginning, left me alone with my head. I’ve got a pile of gorgeous blank notebooks within reach, many of them gifts from M&Q, but I haven’t been able to write much for months though much has happened. Over the summer we lost a close family member to age and what comes with it, and I passed through a birthday that weighed on me more than usual. I put a class in personal-essay writing in a shopping cart but never checked out. So many things seem to have ended before they properly got going; so many things feel broken or in the middle of breaking, the fixes and solutions more obvious but longer shots.

By the time I walked into the apartment now home for just my wife and me, I think I understood why M&Q went back the way they did. M can deal with almost anything if he can reach his guitar from where he’s sitting and can get at least some of the music out of his head. The car back to college held less this year because Q has come to know what she needs.

What do I need to come back? To borrow from C.D. Wright, what I want is less clear to me now than it was then. Still, I try not to forget myself or to disappear into the dark. Instead, I try to be good, to think a little about goodness, to do laundry and the dishes, to read something every now and then that makes me want to read it again, to make my wife’s path through the world a little lighter, to help make some room for my kids to make art, to pull something from a high shelf that someone else can’t reach, to make folks laugh. And I still, even after all this time, want to figure out how to talk to myself.