A[n Uncomfortably] Personal Goodbye

[editor’s note: I typed a long, lyrical thing that died horribly in battle with a Firefox browser. So, here goes another attempt.]
Note: I wrote part of this in a coffee shop, alone, so that makes it slightly less weird. But I never claimed I was normal.

I’m alone. I haven’t been alone in months. Not really alone. It’s a warm feeling, but I have to fidget to get comfortable in it. It necessitates sinking into it. I’m still fidgetting. Texting. Dastardly avoiding isolation. I haven’t been alone in months. Because even though I’ve always been really good at being alone, I know that before I know it I will be forced to be alone, and I’m so afraid of being lonely, it’s unhealthy. I’m leaving for college and I - the only child, driven and mature and content, want something to cling to. Because I’m afraid of drowning, and washing up ashore later, unidentifiable. I used to be a really good swimmer. But I’m not sure I still remember with the same ease and grace I had.
I’m having a “going away” party, for which I’m rather excited, and not sad to have. I’m excited for the physicality of travel that comes with starting one place with a red suitcase and ending at another three hours later with hundreds of people doing the exact same thing at the same approximate time in an airport. I’m excited for the college, the growing, and the pain. But I’m nervous for the departure. I’m ready for it, in a sense. But losing permanence is a threat against humanity, especially that of the modern American soul, manufactured on self-importance and merit, and ethereality is a ghost story I’m wholly afraid of (I know, mixing metaphors. But this whole thing is about lack of permanence, right? It’s a poorly done mimesis, then.) I’m no Keats or Dickinson or Auden. I’m still learning to come to terms with the temporal nature of my flesh, of my imprint.
On one hand, I’m afraid of leaving and everything except me changing. I cannot stay the same. But the idea that things will change here—the people to whom I attach my identity, and the identity of this place, the attributes that make it “home,” are not permanent either. I don’t know, beyond obvious assumptions, how I’ll change. But I cannot fathom how this place will change. I’m even more afraid of everything staying the same: the feeling of being more alienated and uncomfortable here than I’ve ever felt. (Not to say I dislike it here, but everyone has moments where they just want to leave.) Of losing friends in ways that I’ve not experienced—and finding myself, now alone, in the process.
And I realize that it is very melodramatic to think this way, and that under all likely and normal circumstances, these changes will not happen inversely, but in tandem. I am swimming off into uncharted waters, and know that what I’ll find there will be sustaining. But swimming home—surviving that journey is a concern.
I’ve haven’t experienced many changes like this in my life. I’ve lived in the same house all of my life. I’m moving towards the middle of a spectrum beginning with “BIRTH” and ending in “DEATH,” and I’ve never, obviously, dealt with anything I’m now dealing with. I’m not losing everything I have here, but I’m attempting to actually make my future in a place I think I have the best luck of, to continue the metaphor, find an island in the shape of my face with a mansion on it. (I don’t want either of those things, it’s for the sake of the metaphor.) I’m going to be alone. And I know I won’t really be alone I’ll never be alone. But it’s thoughts of this home, in the permanence it’ll stay in in my mind, that will sustain me. That will hold the lonely at bay when I make my departure.
Well I would walk five hundred miles / and I would walk five hundred more / just to be the man who’d fall down at your door…When I lonely, well I know I’m gonna’ be the man who’s lonely without you.. I’m gonna’ be the man who’s comin’ home to you. “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers

Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah

 Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah doesn’t have, persay, anything to do with “departure.” But I feel like the sway of the words, the uttering of “Hallelujah,” I feel like those do. This song is a world of its own. Doesn’t this song feel like leaving?

"Hello," and "I love you."

I have two sides to my family: my mother’s, my father’s. My father’s side lives in one country in Europe; my mother’s in another. I’ve always loved everyone in my family, when I see them (which, at this point, has been four years ago). But the distance creates a feeling of acquaintance. I don’t know them as well as I’d like to. It creates both a stream-lined relationship, and a sense of guilt. I love my family. But I hardly know them. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s life, living 9 hours away via plane. And it’s always wanting to visit, but the dollar’s too low, the tickets are too expensive, the timing isn’t right.
Two weeks ago, on July 20th, my grandmother (on my mother’s side) passed away. She was 89, I think. She’d been sick for a long time, she hadn’t been getting better, and it was stressful for my mother to live so far away and be able to do so little; her sister took most of the care of her, even when she and her sister differed on opinions of how to do that. My mom was supposed to go visit her in September. Right after I left for college. We were so close to seeing her. My mom left, that Friday, for the funeral. I cried. I still cry, when I think about it. I never knew my grandmother well. She was a painter, a good one; much like my mom. She was kind, and had a sweet, soft voice like sugary dough covered in flour. I would tell her, “hello,” and “I love you,” in the foreign tongue when we visited; it was all I knew how to say. I was a child the last time, really. I wish I could’ve been more than that. I wish. I wish. I wish. I wish. Every time a relative passes away, along with sadness, I feel this guilt, this pain, this remorse over how I was, even if “how I was,” was only a nine-year-old girl, unsure of the language and the relations and scared and shy and imaginitive and I’m sure Grandma Vera understood that, just as Grandma Bacher understood, just as my step-grandmother Latchka did. I just wish I knew for sure. I wish. I wish. I wish.
They read an Emily Dickinson poem, in the foreign language, at her funeral. I don’t know which one, but I put this up on the day of her passing, so I’ll put it here again.

“As at thy portals also death, / Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds, / To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, / maternity, / To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me, / … I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these / songs, / And set a tombstone here.” - “As a Thy Portals also Death,” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Pick and Choose

This was meant to be Sunday’s post. It’s on last week’s theme, “Affinity.”
Family is an interesting concept. We have a natural affinity for those who share our blood, our genetics, our biology. We cannot choose them—more specifically, we don’t choose the multitudes of relationships we become involved in when born into certain families, and not others.
I have several friends who have large, complex families. Let’s call these friends D, J, O and A. D can’t tell his mother or father about romantic relationships. D has an alcoholic aunt who no one talks to. I met her, once, the aunt. She got in D’s car and we took her to a liquor store. A’s family can’t accept that he’s gay, or at the very least not heterosexual. I, who’ve hung around A for years, am decidedly the token signifcant other, though there must be tinges of knowledge otherwise. I’m the only girl he’s ever brought around. It must be obvious. O’s parents, divorced, force him to pick sides and fight over him. O’s parents both want to go to the same event, but can’t stand to be around each other. He has to pick a side; he’ll lose the one he doesn’t choose. J’s parents are unreal. She and her mother call each other things, jokingly, like “bitch.” Her mother once told me, “I’m not ready to let her go.” Their relationship is horrible, and so this attachment amazes me. J hides romance from her, they don’t talk. This fighting, wolvish, clannish attitudes between families amazes me. It’s hard for me to grasp, perhaps because I’ve never had a family like that.
The relationship between my family is different than most. My parents and I are extremely close, and perhaps that’s why they understand my wanting to get away. We talk about everything. We’ve talked about things that most families would never dare speak of. I once had a therapist tell me, “You’re lucky to have parents like that.” and when a therapist tells you that, you know it’s true.
But asides from my immediate family, the distance between my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents keeps me close to friends. And, based off my last post of affinity, you’d think that most of my friends are very much like me. But with most of my friends, we perform the “opposites attract, differences are minimized” game. And while I love my friends, for their differences and their similarities, I am excited to find people who are completely like and unlike me in the coming weeks. While I find that my approach to affinity last week was rather harsh and rather true, I think that the idea of discussing differences and coming to accept them, or at least honestly discuss them, is the only way to really evolve as a person and to try and widen my viewpoint. I don’t think that, then, the world is as like a mirror as many construct it to be. Differences give me hope for that sort of thing, and are easier to mold and learn from through honest friendship. With family, the bonds are more precious, both sturdier and more fragile. Some people think that because of this, family is the most important thing in the world. I think relationships are, but the kinds are variable.

“When I was little, my dad used to tell me, ‘Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.’…” - John Green and David Levithan, Chapter One of Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Do you think that learning from differences in friendships and beliefs can happen effectively, or that it all ends up minimizing contrasts?

My First Excuse

So, I don’t have a second post for this week. I’m sorry, for anyone expecting anything; it’s the third week and I broke. I’m a little all-over the place, having 10 days before I move across the entire country for the next four months. It was a busy day. But my personal life is not the point of this blog, nor is it interesting, so I’m apologizing now. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll go ahead and say the next two weeks might only have one blog a piece, or smaller posts because I do take some time to formulate my (amateurish philosophical) ideas and opinions.
I do, however, want the theme for next week to be “Departure.” It’s decided. So, forgive me or pretend to care that I missed a post. I’ll make it up.

People Like People Who [Are] Like Them

  So, I’ll cut straight through the chase; no fox-hunting today, just the gun and the hounds and the horn. But while my horse canters away at the fox (I don’t condone fox hunting, nor do I like hunting to start with, but this is metaphor) it leads me to a den full of other foxes, so similar to itself. And the people I’m hunting with are probably similar to myself. Because people like people who are like themselves. Affinity, in the greatest sense of the word.
   Affinity, at first, seems common sense for happiness. And while it is common sense for happiness, it’s not only common sense; it’s essential. Surrounding oneself with various fun-house mirror images of one’s own reflection creates stability. I think, “A.” All of my other friends think, “A.” too. Some with a “+” or “-” involved, but an “A” nonetheless. We are all similar, we are all right, we are all good. Thus, I am similar to the norm, I am the norm, I am right, I am good, I have a role here, I belong here.
   Essentially, this affinity is a motion against change. If I fit in, I am appropriate. I need no altering. None of my friends need altering, there is no conflict. The life I lead is a still, as cold, and as distilled as an old, algae-covered pond. We aren’t looking for people to have fun with, who are interesting; we are looking for images of ourselves varied enough to fulfill the belief that we are normal, that we are unique and yet not. We create our own reality in relationships, and the reality is such an absurd bundle of egocentrism we never see it.
Even the idea that “opposites attract,” is a lie. Romantically, the mechanic might be hot for the PhD candidate. But they’ll share enough beliefs, traits, and thoughts to reinforce each other. If they don’t, they won’t have enough spark. If the mechanic is Catholic and the PhD candidate’s agnostic, they will fit to each other’s contrasts so that that contrast is minimized, or discuss it until it’s no longer abnormal in itself. It’s understood. There is no stigma, there is no conflict. It is normal. He/she is normal. He/she is good.
   I have friends with whom I don’t agree on certain things: politics, homosexuality, religion, etc. But we never discuss these things. We don’t want to grow outwards. We want to reinforce the Ozone of our lives; nothing outside the livable atmosphere can come inside. It’s natural: biologically, psychologically; it’s essential. Even people who pretend to “be something they’re not” end up disillusioned and bored and feeling like they can’t survive. Affinity for oneself, then, is the only affinity that really exists. Until you or I widen in viewpoint, or you or I retract it. Nothing else can be seen; it’s outside the lens of our rose-colored glasses.

Sunshine Song

Jason Mraz - Sunshine Song

I picked this rendition of Jason Mraz performing “Sunshine Song,” because, despite the fact that there are better recorded versions, I was actually at this concert (though I didn’t record this). (He’s better live than recorded, even recorded live; his voice is too thick and feathery and warm and welcoming.)
This, also, has to do with “affinity.” And I have a serious affinity for Jason Mraz.