It is a little known fact that a totally hardcore thing to do is to get home from your trip to the East Coast at three-thirty in the morning, go to work late, leave work early, go to two grocery stores because heaven forbid you go a week without your organic sweet potatoes and your FAGE Total 0%, get home in the pitch black dark because it’s a quarter to five, lug your vegetables inside, cook them up, eat them while reading a book about penises, and still go to bellydance, for the first hour if not the second. If I think of some semi-good things to tell you and type really really fast and manage to find my pantaloons and brave the impending snowstorm, that will be me: Totally Hardcore. Two words I just know spring to mind when you think of your friend Chiara.
So, today: multiple sweaters and gray darkness. Yesterday: sandals and palm trees waving overhead. The cognitive dissonance you need to sustain a Miami-Seattle travel day is breathtaking. I didn’t have to leave for the airport until three so in the morning I took a bike ride with my mom to the beach and the Quiet Gardens and then met up with Ashley and Marah for lunch…for which we ended up getting takeout and going to the gardens again. I love it there so much. I love it there alone, with friends, with my mom, with anyone. I told Marah and Ashley my theory about what heaven is like, and I amended that theory to include the Quiet Gardens, maybe somewhere out back. We sat on a bench and watched the huge orange iguanas threaten and pose, and listened to the sandhill cranes honk loudly as they did their tai chi exercises. We looked at some of the trees that went down in the various storms and talked about grapetree vs. banyan: which is more beautiful, more graceful, more evocative of home? We talked about why turkeys don’t have feathers on their heads. The three of us took our junior year yearbook photos there, in the old zoo cages, and I thought about us then and now as we strolled along and talked about babies and pregnancy and Tums and why we wore such hugely oversized clothes when we were in middle school.
Then it was time to go home, and I dropped Marah and Ash at Ash’s mom’s house…and we realized that if the Not Secret Plans, version 2.5940580820382 happen, as I am hopeful they will, and soon, too…we won’t see each other for two years. We usually see each other only for Christmas, and if all goes well I will be elsewhere next Christmas. The babies that are currently residing inside them will be something like a year and a half old, and little Landon and Jacob and Luke (who is so brand-new he doesn’t even have his own entry yet) will be five and four and two, respectively, and I won’t have seen any of them for a long time. That is a very big thought. That is a thought that is, in fact, too big for me to think very long…at least it was in front of Ashley’s house, the motor running and my needing to get back and pack up and get ready to go. We hugged and kissed and it felt so ridiculous to just say goodbye, to just drive away, as if it was 1992 and we were going to see each other the next day at school and at youth group and at play practice, in our hugely oversized polo shirts and penny loafers. That’s the thing about having old friends, I guess…saying goodbye seems ridiculous on some level. We all accept, I guess, that we just see each other once a year, because we’ve all ended up far away from one another and that’s just the way it is. I know we won’t come back to the island forever…but there in front of Ashley’s house I got the sense that forever is starting, um, now. Maybe. If I am brave enough and smart enough and cool enough to revision the Plans and make them even better and more awesome, then I won’t see any of my friends for at least a year…but I certainly won’t see those friends for much longer, due to the emotional treachery of geography.
I haven’t cried about any of this yet, by the way, but I know I will one day. It’s just sort of sitting there, not even as localized as a lump in my throat, as I type furiously, as I consider where I may have left my pantaloons, as the discomforts of a night spent in coach class catch up with me slowly and surely and I begin to cast lascivicious glances towards my flannel sheets because I am just so tired. Those tears that I haven’t cried yet are spread out evenly, maybe one in each of my blood cells, in each of my bones, waiting for the time when they can gather and gush out my eyes as I try to answer the question: why can’t I be with everyone I love all the time? Why do I have to choose between lives? Why do I have to wait until I get to heaven to walk in the quiet gardens, to see the fogged mountains, with everyone who is and has been dear?