“So what did you mean exactly?” I ask, finally, now that we are paddling. The air is hot, heavy. The clouds are huge with expectation. The breeze and the cool water on my hands and arms are a much-needed reprieve.

We are moving against the current. It feels good to work our muscles hard against the approaching rapids, wondering how far we can go. Good to take a break from the retreat. There’s only so much yoga, body painting, and self-realization a guy can handle.

With unspoken agreement, we drove in heavy silence to the launch site and waited until we were on the water to discuss what David unwittingly let out of its not-so-deep hiding place. It seeped out during the “Let It Flow” workshop at the upstate retreat center we go to every now and then. Not as a couple, not exactly.

Separated for five years now, we keep holding onto each other, scrounging around for better, not finding it, not really talking about it for fear of breaking what’s barely intact. Living half-lives, knowing that something’s missing, something’s off. Partway in, partway out, we came together for the long weekend of activities with sixty other men, mostly doing our own thing, but lazily aware of each other—or the other’s absence.

It was a surprise when we found ourselves in the same session. Even more of one when we were asked to move about the room and read other men’s pieces of masking tape, on which we all had written several things we wanted to let go of in our lives, then stuck them to the floor.

As fate would have it, I stumbled onto one that read: Stop keeping Gregg in my back pocket. I heard a familiar gasp from the back of the room, and the truth hit me like a slap. It reddened me.

It turns out that the number one thing David wants to let go of is me.