So here we are.

At goodbye.

A road has ended and I am standing on the very edge of it, trying to remember the feeling of the gravel as it crumbles under my feet.

There are certain events in your life that you feel instantaneously changed by. You simply feel a way that you have not quite felt before. Something has happened. Something has ended and something has begun. You have ended and begun, all over again.

This is one of those moments.

SAYING GOODBYE

The last day of college.

I get to campus early. I pull into the parking lot and walk up those lethal stairs for the very last time. I feel as if I am moving through water, fighting to keep my feet on the ground, unsure of where the hell gravity went on the one day that I need it to anchor me the most. Nothing is keeping me here anymore, I can feel my body pulling away, moving beyond this place as I try to hold on for one more hour.

I watch the world of college spin around me one last time. Students are walking in every direction in one grand sweep of stress and motion that is so perfect in this moment that I stop. I stand still in the middle of it as it all turns to a blur. I take mental note of the chaos. It won’t be here tomorrow. I won’t be here tomorrow.

Everything is art in this moment.

THE GHOST OF YOU

I walk around, from one end to the other, waving goodbye to all of the selves that I have been. Like a reptile, I have shed shells of myself all over this place. It is littered with who I have been, and what it has all meant. When I look around I see the scenes of my life playing out before me like a graveyard film. The ghost of my college self brushes against me as she runs to class. I can see her, but she can barely just make me out in the distance. I want to reach out and touch her. I want to say,

I’m going to go now, but you stay here. You stay here so that someone remembers. Someone needs to remember all of this. Will I remember all of this? Will you do it for me?

Stay right there. Don’t move. You were perfect in this moment.

You’re sitting in that corner of the library writing countless papers as the sun falls out of the sky and the parties begin and you are still just right there, glued to your seat. You’re buying coffee from the crappy cart with bad service, sitting down on a warm bench underneath all of those god forsaken palm trees with a stack of books as skateboarding frat boys fly by.

I can still hear the wheels on the gravel, can still smell the hangover.

You’re running all over this place with a bag full of notes and novels slung over your shoulder and the watery remnants of a coffee in hand. You’re discussing Dickens and Zadie Smith at two and checking your hair at three before sneaking off to a coffee date that will turn into dinner that will turn into the next four months of your life. You’re falling off your skateboard. You’re laughing because the ground feels kind of nice and because you just found out the guy you like talking to so much in class is thirty-three and has four children. You’re crying in lectures because you never knew that Gothic literature was that beautiful. You’re crying because you never knew that anything could be that beautiful.

I want to say stay. Stay right here. I will go for you. I will go see what’s out there.

CAN YOU HEAR IT STILL?

It’s funny.

You spend your whole life sitting in classrooms, watching the clock. The hands never move fast enough and you think you might die.

How ironic that on the very last day, they move so fast that you also think you might die. I grew dizzy just watching the cruelly relentless motion of the whole thing, lost in the haze of trying to stop time for one second when the buzzer sounded and everyone was up. Everyone was gone. I was in the hallway hugging people goodbye but a part of me was still stuck in that chair. The part that sat in classrooms and took notes and felt her spine grind against the plastic of the backrest for hours on end, not yet knowing what it was all adding up to. Not yet knowing that it was a thing going away.

So this is it. This is walking out the door. This is grief holding one hand and joy holding the other as I savor the linoleum floor for the first and last time, pressing my palms to the cold metal bar and leaving one place for the sake of another.

IT WAS SO HUMAN

The last place I go is the first place I ever went. I sit at the same table and write the end of the story I began right here, years ago, in a journal that has long since been filled.

I take careful note.

I write that the sun is falling, drenching me in golden light. I write about the sound of the trolley and the distant white noise of the freeway. About the lack of noise from students that accompanies the last week of the semester. Car keys are jangling in someone’s hands in the parking garage to my right. A plane flying over my head and the trolley passing through once more. New students are touring the place with their parents, their eyes lit up just like mine were. Just like they still are, but not for this. Not anymore. I put my pen down. I look up. I hear, for one moment, the sound of my professor lecturing in the classroom that is just behind me. That was two years ago but I swear I can hear it still. I can hear so many things still.

Is that enough? Will this be enough to hold onto? Can I take all of this with me?

It has occurred to me now that I don’t have a choice in this. There will always be fractured dimensions of this world latent in every world that I will ever know. My vision, my perception, will always contain the colors of these years. Like rings in the trunk of a tree, they will remain, etched into me, telling the story of the place that I once knew. The place that once knew me.

I close my journal. I stand up. It’s time to go. They say to not ever look back, but she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human, Vonnegut wrote.

It was so human.

TIME TO GO

What came next I cannot tell you for sure.

I know that I drove home to find banners, balloons, and roses. I know that I felt changed, older somehow, and utterly untethered, in the best way, from the life that I have been residing within for these years. When I left that campus, when I turned my car onto the road and watched it grow smaller and smaller in the distance, I knew with certainty that it was a world gone away. Like a portal, it closed and I let it.

And the odd thing was, in that moment, all at once, I felt severed and indifferent to it, immediately overwhelmed with the excitement and joy of moving on. My excitement, now that it’s over, surprisingly transcends all bounds. I am not sad. I am not aching. I’m just ready.

Like when the show ends and the curtain falls and thoughts of what’s next flicker across the audience with the lights as the drama concludes. No more tears, no more suspense, just time to go.

But wow, it has been so much.

And wow, it has been so beautiful.

Love, m.

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