BICEPS
Yeah.
They wait under the tree for a while. The tree is large, and its branches curve all the way to the ground on one side. Nature’s perfect umbrella. The sky is bright in some spots and dark in others. Unpredictable.
Andrea looks expectantly at Biceps. Biceps smiles but looks away. They stand still and quiet and watch.
The rain lightens.
BICEPS
Oh, good. I think it’s clear enough to head back now.
Biceps mounts his bike and starts down a trail beside the river.
ANDREA
(whispers) Oh, good.
* * *
* Derek Webb, “On Failure, Liturgy, and New Years,” Facebook, January 1, 2016, www.facebook.com/derekwebb/posts/10156423125900512 (also republished on Relevant, January 4, 2016, www.relevantmagazine.com/life/derek-webb-failure-liturgy-and-new-years).
13
Good-Byes at Kazbar
A friend of my sister’s once told her you must grieve everything. Any time you have to say good-bye to something, someone, or some place, grieve it. But how does one grieve? How does one set out, voluntarily, on an honest path of loss? The absolute last path anyone ever wants to set out upon. I’m not sure about the entire journey, but I am certain of the first step. Say the good-bye. Actually say the word, and then the words that need to be said before it and after it. Articulate it. Make it real, for yourself and, if the good-bye is to someone else, for the other person too. If words need to be said, say them. If they need to be written, write them. Whatever you need to do. Imagine that person in five years, and think about what you want him to remember about you and your relationship, and set a time and place for you to tell that person those things.
If you don’t, if you don’t say a real good-bye, you’ll live in denial, refusing to acknowledge that this part of your life or this person in your life is no longer there. This denial suspends her—the person, place, or thing—in your mind. The person is gone, but she’s not gone, for how can someone really be gone if you’ve never admitted she is? And thus you create an unnecessary ghost.
I wish I had said good-bye, really said good-bye, to all the important people in my life who are no longer a part of it for one reason or another. I have said it a handful of times, and I’m so glad I did. Like with my grandmother, not too long ago. I sat by her bed, knowing it would probably be the last time I saw her. She couldn’t talk back, but I told her I loved her. I told her she had been a good grandmother, and then I told her that she made really good pies. I’m not sure why I went there, why I started talking about pie, but I did. I told her that her classic southern “all-good” pie was the best there was and I had always loved it. I felt a little foolish talking to her about pie in the last minutes that we were together, but in the moment pie was what I felt I needed to discuss and thank her for. It was a simple way of telling my grandmother that she had taken care of us well, that she had cooked for us so many times in a way that only a loving grandmother can, and that I would always remember her for her love and for her care. I wasn’t able to say all of that sitting beside her bed that day. For some reason, that felt too hard. But I’m glad I at least talked to her about her pie. I think if she was able to hear what I was saying, she understood. I think she got it.
I haven’t always taken the time to do the proper good-bye though. To sit down with someone and look at him. I wish I had. I wish I had said good-bye to Jisu. Really said good-bye.
I’m better at saying good-bye to things than to actual people. I’m sure we all are. Maybe this is why I orchestrated an Epic Good-Bye Walk around Oxford before I moved to Nashville. I planned it all out. A list of places I wanted to visit or look at one last time. It would be a long walk. It would take all day, and I would go alone. Going on good-bye walks alone is a completely normal thing to do.
The walk began at my little white house on Donnington Bridge. It was fall again. September. The month I had arrived one year before. My route was long and crooked, not efficient in any way, taking me to the pretty, hidden, and memorable parts of the city. The first part of my walk took me up Headington Hill on Divinity Road to the Brookes campus. A couple of days earlier, I had ridden my bike up the same street to submit my thesis.
Finishing my thesis was a feat I was only 10 percent sure I would be able to complete when I began graduate school. I remember during my first Shakespeare class, the professor warned us, “If you have not completed the required reading for this class at least twice by now, you are already behind.”
I stared at the list in front of me. Ten plays. I had read three of them in undergrad, maybe, and only once. I called my mom after class and asked if I could fly home. Fortunately, she knew one class, and my tendency to overreact, was not reason enough to abandon graduate school altogether. She talked me into staying for at least another week or two.
I don’t know if I had ever been as proud of myself as when I handed in that fifty-page paper on “The Role of Sacrifice in Postcolonial Literature.” I printed it, dropped it in the appropriate box, and walked back to my bike weighing four hundred pounds less than when I arrived on campus that morning. It was finished. My master’s done, forever. I never had to take another class or test or fake my way through a presentation on a literary topic I didn’t actually understand. I would never, ever have to cite another source in the proper format. The thesis, the looming, how-will-I-ever-finish-it thesis, had been written.
I rode my bike down Headington Hill and can still remember exactly how the wind felt. Cold was returning to Oxford, though it had never really left. I could feel it on my scalp as the breeze cut through. My knuckles stiffened against the wind, but my face, usually held down to avoid full exposure, was lifted up this time. I was so thankful for all of it. The cold wind, the breeze, the hill. I rode it fast, and for a moment I saw me on the side of the road walking up the hill exactly one year before, headed to orientation.
Because this “past” me had left too early and given herself too much time to get there, she walked slowly, not wanting to be the first to arrive. Her slow pace gave her more time to take it in, to learn her route, the landmarks, to stare at the people walking past her, more sure of their footing than she was. She had left her parents waving at the bottom of the hill. The climb was steep, and she was worried she would be sweaty by the time she arrived to meet her teachers and her classmates. She was twenty-two years old, but felt eleven.
This September day, the day she would turn in her thesis, was far from her thoughts a year earlier. She didn’t think it would actually come. As far as she was concerned in that moment, she would never survive this foreign country or all the papers she had to write. She didn’t know she would get a job at the end of this all the way in Nashville or that she would make friends with unlikely people who taught her things she didn’t know she needed to learn.
I rode down the hill faster and faster, and the image of me walking up faded. It was a small thing—to achieve a master’s degree in England—but it was the absolute biggest thing then.
On my Epic Good-Bye Walk, I carried a camera and took pictures of the leaves in the trees on Divinity Road. It felt nice to walk without purpose, not rushing to get to class or get to the library before it closed. I watched students with their bags pass by me quickly on foot and on their bicycles. Once I got to the top of the hill, I looked at the building where my English classes were held. I looked at it for a minute, took a breath, and then took a sharp left toward South Park. The ever-grassy, beautiful South Park with the best view of the city below. I took a picture of the distant buildings and a moss-covered bench nearby and kept walking at my leisurely pace along Mesopotamia Walk, a footpath that takes you over the River Cherwell and through what looks and feels like a forest until, suddenly, you are in University Parks. The park where I jumped in the river years before.
From there it was more paths, crooked, then straight, crooked, then straight. A street, small at first, that opened onto Banbury Road,
the road that led me into the city center of Oxford. I walked on Cornmarket Street in the middle of a mass of dark coats, tall boots, and scarves. I didn’t know anyone walking near me, but I told them little good-byes in my head. “I’ll never see you again, man in the brown fleece, girl with the bangs. You don’t know this, but this may be the last time I walk down Cornmarket Street for a very, very long time.” I could smell the Cornish pasties baking at the shop on the corner. I wanted to see and notice everything. A crack in the pavement, a weathered restaurant sign, the hurried feel of getting swept up into pedestrian rush-hour traffic as night set in and people buttoned their coats all the way up.
I cared about the details because when you go somewhere for the first time and you learn so many things there for the first time, you leave, and forever that place, that city, holds so many of your “lessons” that you can’t let it go. It’s just with you forever, and other people will go to the same city on vacation or a weekend, but they will come back, and the city hasn’t grown into a part of them. Plenty of people have gone to Oxford and don’t return having grown an imaginary Oxford limb, but so many of us go and do. The place is attached by accident.
The real thing, I guess, is the period of time and what happens in it. Maybe for you it was your first year in high school, or that summer at camp, or the year you had your first job. It’s a part of you in a weird, can’t-shake-it kind of way, and whatever it is, where we experience the new, deep, and hard things matters and will always matter to us. That’s why I paid so much attention to the ground and the streets and the people in Oxford. That’s why I went on a walk to say good-bye to a place. Something that could not say good-bye back. Maybe I can’t remember your name two minutes after you introduce yourself to me, but Oxford? I remember what it smelled like. I remember how it looked after it rained. Where the homeless people slept. Where the rich people ate and lived. How the buses sounded as they raced past, and how the seats inside them felt after a long day of walking. The pavement’s echo under my feet. How the water from the faucet tasted. What my neighbors looked like when they picked up the morning paper.
In the gritty, unique, odd details are the sights, sounds, and smells that changed us. We were someone before we knew and experienced them. We were someone else after.
The sun had not shown itself much that day, and it was dusk now. I had been walking for miles in shoes that weren’t made for walking for miles. I stopped at Magdalen Bridge and peered over its edge at the River Cherwell. That part of the river, I knew, would soon meet the Thames. My river. All the roads and paths in Oxford that I wore out and frequented that year seemed to end up at the Thames. It would be the most crooked and winding way, and I would think I was lost, and then there it was, the river, every time. Like the city was a funnel and the Thames its magnetic center.
I clicked through my photographs of the day when I got home. The library, the trees, park benches, bicycles clumped together, their chains tangled in an unsolvable mess. I didn’t know I was saying good-bye to more than objects and locations. What wasn’t visible to my camera were the parts of me I had left behind, the parts of me I had said good-bye to little by little, layer by layer. The me I had envisioned walking up Headington Hill on Divinity Road for the first time. That me knew things about the world. That me spoke English, knew about God, who God was and how he worked. That me enjoyed shades of black and white, what was right and wrong. That me knew who was wise and who was not. That me had lived inside the church walls, unaware of all these islands off the coasts of nowhere, near the edge of the universe that had so much to offer me. As the day had progressed and I walked all over the city, the north part, the east part, the middle part, I said good-bye to the me I was when I first arrived in Oxford.
Sooner or later we have to say good-bye to that someone we were before. To the parts of us that no longer fit. This is okay, I think. If we continued on in life with every version of us that we have ever been, we would all be very large and heavy people having difficulty walking down the street. Life is about shedding layers, offering up the old skins, like the cricket nymphs do on their brief and painful journeys to adulthood. It is a sacrificial ritual to the earth, this offering of skins.
“Here, earth, are my old skins. They are yours now as I walk forward wearing skin that is a little newer, a little more knowledgeable, or perhaps less knowledgeable, but something more grown up and understanding with wider eyes. Something that is, I hope, more humble and maybe less pretty and taut, but at least more honest.”
The night I submitted my thesis, I said good-bye to Jisu for good.
I invited him and some friends, including my new friend Biceps, to celebrate with me at a bar in east Oxford called Kazbar on Cowley Road.
After my river conversation with Jisu, there had been another conversation, at an ice-cream shop. I don’t remember the exact words we said, but I remember my ice cream tasted bad in my mouth. At the end, Jisu asked what would be helpful for me going forward, how we should act, and just like that we slid into acquaintance mode. We didn’t speak for a while. A superficial text or e-mail here and there, but the tone of us had changed and spending time together no longer made sense.
When Jisu walked into Kazbar, I knew the real reason he had come was not to celebrate my thesis but to say good-bye. He would be leaving for a trip the next day, and I would be off to America before he returned. This was it, our final hour.
He sat on one side of me, and Biceps sat on the other. It was an uncomfortable emotional situation. Feeling joy and relief at finishing my degree while also feeling something deep and sad at the idea of saying good-bye to this person who meant so many things to me.
Jisu leaned over to me. “I have a gift for you,” he said in a volume above the noise of the room. He pointed to his bag.
“You do? You didn’t have to do that. What is it?”
“I’ll give it to you later,” he smiled.
Jisu saw someone he knew at a different table and went over to say hi. Biceps sat on my right talking to people, and I was quiet, watching. I told myself I wasn’t sad. I tried to match my environment and be happy and celebratory. I didn’t want my good-bye with Jisu to be in front of Biceps and everybody, but I didn’t want to do it alone either. I didn’t want to have more serious conversations and say serious stuff. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I didn’t want to apologize. I didn’t want him to apologize to me. I wanted to have no feelings about any of it. I wanted a robotic good-bye. A fake semi-good-bye for post-river conversation, post-ice-cream conversation us.
After a while someone finally suggested going somewhere else.
“Yes! Where should we go next?” Biceps asked me.
“Next? Um, I don’t know.”
Everyone was pulling on coats and moving outside. I stood up with them, and Jisu came along beside me.
“I have to go,” he said. “I need to pack for tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah, your trip. You can’t do one more drink?”
Jisu shook his head and reached into his bag to pull out the gift. It was a book. I read the title, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. It was one of those gift books that illustrates how to survive a stampede of giraffes or how to open a coconut should you find yourself one day on a desert island. I flipped it over and read the back: “Because anything can go wrong, anywhere, at any time.”
I smiled and laughed quietly. “Well, I could certainly use this,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
It was just me and Jisu looking at the book and not at each other for a moment, then everyone was around us, chatting about the weather and who needed to go home and who was staying out. Outside Kazbar with all the people, I couldn’t study the book for as long as I wanted to. Jisu and I both knew we didn’t have much time. There was no place to talk. He lightly hugged me. We exchanged few words and said less than what was needed.
I think we spend a good portion of our lives saying good-bye. To friends who move and you kno
w, deep down, you will never see again. To men you kissed or never kissed. To cities that are still holding on to a part of your heart. To something you worked toward, dreamed about, told your friends about, and hoped and hoped and hoped for, until hoping no longer brought you joy but pain, and one day you put down the pen with which you wrote that dream and you never return to the page.
There will be many nights when your soul says a reluctant, sad, angry, misunderstood, or baffled good-bye.
And saying good-bye is not a skill you get better at with age. Just watch your mom crying at your grandmother’s bedside. Good-byes do not work this way. But for as many dark or sad nights in which you say good-bye, you have the other kind of nights too. Nights when you said hello for the first time to someone who would become a good friend or a central figure in your life. Nights on balconies with wine and the words said over the wine, or maybe because of the wine, that remind you why people say, “Life is rich.” You will taste the richness; in that moment, you will taste it and chew on it. The seat beneath you, the glass in front of you, the balcony railing, and the view of the setting sun squeezing between the bars. The clouds above you will spell out promises or possibilities you never thought possible. The people beside you, the grapey aftertaste in your mouth. Your awareness of these things will convince you that what the clouds have spelled out for you is indeed true.
Interspersed with the good-byes, you will have nights of laughter too. Many of those in the backyard with friends you never thought you would meet in a place you never expected to meet them. There will be nights with these friends and new people when the wind feels good and the cold has thawed. Gratitude will slide into your heart and take over, and it will make you laugh even harder.
English Lessons Page 16