All The Goodbyes That Await You

The days are going by and it’s light in the mornings now when you yawn and stumble to the bus stop, and according to the tuis outside your window it’s starting to be spring, and the long strange dull winter is almost over now, even if it isn’t quite sundress and jandal time. Time stops and starts, jerks and shudders: the interminable hours in front of the computer in ill-fitting work pants as you feel what’s left of your youth drain away are followed by the brief bright flashes of dinners out with friends and walks along the beach and the kinds of conversations that make you love being alive in the world with all the people you’re in the world with. It’s day and night and day again and there’s not enough time, never enough time to do everything you want to do and be with everyone you want to be with.

That old Led Zeppelin song All Of My Love comes on on a drive along SH1 to Kapiti Coast for a friend’s last Wellington day. All of my love, all of my love, all of my love for you, you sing, and you tell the girls in the car about how you and your best friend in high school would sing that coming home over the bridge, except you thought it was Olive My Love, Olive My Love, and that made perfect sense to you at the time because hey, you really like olives. You think of your high school best friend in the early nineties, trying and failing to be grunge in Miami where it’s too hot for flannel, singing along to the classic rock that you, like adolescent girls all over the world, suddenly liked a whole lot. Seventeen, driving around in the car, the summit of the bridge suspending you over the smooth green water and the huddled mangroves, the narrow windsailing beach and the old marina. Olive my love, olive my love, and now she’s married to someone awesome and has two kids in North Carolina, and you haven’t seen her for almost five years. You’re still singing that song with the slightly wrong words, and maybe she does too, sometimes in the car, and when will you see her again?

It’s just part of it, you think, later, in the evening’s chill when the farewell gift has been given and the hugs have been hugged, the tears have been shed. It’s just part of living here: you went to your first leaving do about three weeks after arriving in Wellington and you will continue to say goodbye for as long as you live here: if it’s not the international people going home it’s the Kiwis jetting off for five years in London or Vancouver or wherever isn’t the last stop before you hit Antarctica. You’re used to it by now, kind of, sort of. Probably you would be saying goodbye no matter where you lived: people move away, everywhere in the world. And even the people who are in the same physical location as you grow and change, sometimes towards you, sometimes not: they get married and have kids or just start working a lot, and what are you supposed to do, mourn the past forever? Insist that people don’t do what’s right for them to do, just because you happen to like them and want to hang out more often?

Because it’s not like you haven’t done the same thing: back in 1993 when you moved across the country to go to college and so on and so forth. You’ve been the one getting on the plane too, the one who’s promised to stay in touch. Think of everyone there wasn’t time to see when you were in the Bay Area last year, everyone you didn’t have enough time with in Seattle. Think of your mother and sister. Think of the Key Girls in Boston and London and Miami, think of everyone you met your first weeks in Wellington. Think of all the times you’ve had to tear yourself away and sit with burning eyes in a middle seat in coach class, think of all the times you’ve hoped to see their names in your inbox. Think about heaven, and how if it exists, it’s the chance for everyone to finally, finally be all together.

You’ve used to think that saying goodbye would get easier, over time, the more you did it, and you know, Skype and Facebook. It does, sort of, and it is, kind of, but there’s always a little grief. There’s always a wish to hit the pause button, to stretch the hours, to lengthen the sweet sunny days on the beach or by the fire or in the café that always plays your favorite kind of music even though you don’t really have a favorite kind of music.

You don’t, though, you can’t. You keep falling asleep and waking up, trying to be right where you are with the people you’ve found, for the time being, trying to love as much as you can for as long as possible. You finish your dinner, upload the beach pictures, think about the what you’ll wear to work tomorrow, make your lunch for the next day. Think of the next weeks, the next years, all the goodbyes that await you. Where will you stay, and where will you go, and who will be with you at the end of your story?