How do you tell someone that their existence, however infinitesimal it may be to the cosmos, makes this life, this space here on earth, infinitely more worth living?
Two and a half years ago I drove a 16ft U-Haul from Northern Michigan and unloaded it into the very same basement apartment in which I currently reside. My life was starting over. In that year my divorce finally became final and I left a "real" job, my friends, family, a 3000 square foot home with a creek in the back yard, and all the trappings of a middle-class life that I had worked so hard to acquire. I was lonely. Shit I was lonely. And scared.
Within weeks I met four of the most crazily beautiful and scarily intelligent women this planet has ever seen. For real. And without them my life here would have been unbearable. There is something to the rigor and stress of graduate school--from the starting over part I mentioned above to the unlimited work and epistemic ruptures that created a network of friendships at a speed and intensity I've never experienced before. And these past few years, although they certainly haven't been rosy by any stretch of the imagination, have been some of the best in my life due largely to these four people.
But now one of "us" is leaving Stony Brook. And I have no idea how to even begin to articulate a goodbye. How does one say goodbye when there is no goodbye that can be said? How does one even begin to acknowledge the void that will be left?
This isn't the first time I've had to deal with this. Other friends have moved away. I, myself, have been a friend that moved away. I've lost family, I've lost lovers.
But there's something about this time of year that adds sensitivity. I feel the death of my father more acutely, even after all these years, around Christmas. I feel the distance greater from the friends and family I moved away from. And I feel a longing for a stability I'm usually reconciled to never having because of these other feelings. But although the holiday holds no spiritual worth to me-in fact, I loathe the obligation and unthinkingness that comes with the mass consumerism, the guilt, the stress, the imposed normalcy-there is still a small part of me that is reminded of sitting atop my father's shoulders hanging the red glass bell from the garland strung from the rafters in the living room. And it is this small part of me that remembers joy and wonderment. And it is this small part of me that becomes infinitely grateful for everything that I have and everything that I have had and lost.
And so how do I say goodbye? Perhaps by acknowledging that the loss I feel is only such because I am unable to even begin calculating how much better a person I am because of these people, this person. And perhaps that will never be enough and perhaps I will never be able to repay this debt. And this is what I am left with.
Until next time,
Emily.