These nights mixed in with the nights of sad good-byes make the good-byes livable, better, maybe even okay. We live for the wine, the laughter, the balconies, the hellos, and we live with the good-byes.
A whirlwind of memories spun quickly around me and Jisu as we stood quietly outside Kazbar. I held the book down by my side. Jisu didn’t tell me what I had meant to him that year, and I didn’t tell him. I stood there reluctant to let the good-bye linger, aware of all the others around us and not knowing how to say good-bye to a best friend, an almost kiss. I looked at the book again. I thought about the weather and how cold it was and how much time in the cold Jisu and I had spent together. How many times we had cycled the very street we stood on now. How we had met up at that coffee shop there and he had listened to me practice my entire presentation on contemporary Irish literature and then helped me pick out a new bike. I thought of the times before the question mark, though it had probably always been there.
I thought about all that, standing outside the bar with friends and strangers still hovering too close. All the memories mashed into one quick one, and I said nothing of them. I did not mention the good times or how Jisu had, on more than one occasion, pulled me out of a dark place in Oxford, pointing me in the direction of light. I didn’t tell him how he had been central to my time there, and that I did not want to never see him again. I wanted to say, See you tomorrow, next week, next month, anything, but I couldn’t. Because there was no promise of seeing each other next week, month, year. So I did the one thing I could. I said the only honest thing I could say. I said good-bye. To my dearest friend, I just said good-bye.
He walked away from me, and I turned back to my friends, back to Biceps, who had been standing there unaware of the tension in the moment. Unaware of the question mark that would follow Jisu home, that would follow me home. Unaware of a friendship that had changed, and had changed me.
14
Tumbleweeds
The tumbleweed came to reside in our garage accidentally—and with every purpose in the world. As a metropolis, Abilene—the city of my undergrad years, the city of infinite crickets—does not have much to offer, but if you’ve ever wanted to see a real-life tumbleweed cross the road, Abilene is your town.
My roommate’s little brother discovered an abnormally large tumbleweed one day while driving his truck down I-20. It was about four feet high and the same wide. He understood a tumbleweed of this size could not be left unappreciated or unseen by everyone he knew. Because it would not fit inside his dorm room, he packed it up in the back of his truck and brought it over to our house. That’s how the tumbleweed came to live in our garage.
He was very proud of the tumbleweed, and I grew proud of it as well, though I played no part in discovering it or transporting it. Whenever a visitor came over, I or one of my roommates would inevitably ask, “Wanna see the garage?” And we’d tell the story and enjoy the shocked look on our visitors’ faces.
Eventually the novelty of this huge pile of weeds began to wear off, and after a year or so I stopped caring about the tumbleweed as much. I wondered if animals were living in it. It was the ideal environment for birds and squirrels to nest in. I began avoiding the garage for fear of what I might find.
Our tumbleweed burrowed happily and alone in our garage, undisturbed, for a while. But when we graduated and were packing up and moving out, we knew something had to be done with it. We couldn’t take it with us. It was too cumbersome. The only solution we could think of was to burn it. It felt wrong to set fire to the thing. Although it had collapsed over time and wasn’t the towering figure it once was, our tumbleweed was still a wonder. Killing it would kill its wonder, yet we knew there were no other options.
I wasn’t there for the burning. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I think my roommate’s brother and his friend did it. They rolled it out to our backyard and lit a match. I’m sure it didn’t take much time for our enormous, old, dry pile of weeds, sticks, and twigs to become consumed in flame. What took the West Texas winds who knows how long to build took a match no time at all to destroy. The flames rose and with them, bits of tumbleweed, higher and higher until there was nothing left.
I like to think our tumbleweed lives on. That after we killed it with fire, a few twigs remained, and the wind picked them up and rolled them into each other and into other branches and twigs until they formed an equally huge, new-yet-old tumbleweed that rolls across roads in Abilene today. I like to believe a remnant managed to escape the flames. That we aren’t able to fully kill anything off, not even with fire. That ashes always rise up and form back together again.
On September 14, 2009, I boarded a bus in Oxford at two o’clock in the morning on St. Clement’s Street. The bus would take me to Heathrow so I could board a plane that would fly me back across the Atlantic to where I had come from. I packed my three enormous suitcases and loaded them into a taxi, then out of the taxi and onto the bus. Biceps was there to help me lift them, and Sophie, whose flat was near the bus stop, had woken in the middle of the night to say good-bye.
The three of us stood together in a close triangle in the dead of night, cold, sleepy, and sad. I wondered how I was going to make myself leave them, walk away, and get on a bus. I didn’t know how to make my body do that. After a few minutes, the bus driver grew impatient and leaned his head out the door to tell me it was time to go. Despite how dark it was outside, I could see he had a very large mole on his cheek. Under the pressure of his scowl, I waved good-bye to Sophie and rushed a final kiss to Biceps. Biceps handed me a letter as I stepped on the bus.
I sat in the front row because I wanted to see out all the windows. I wanted to see, as best I could in the night, the city I was leaving. I didn’t know if or when I would be back. I wanted to see it as we drove away.
I held the letter in my hand but didn’t read it, not yet. As the other passengers slept on the bus, I sat up very alert. I tried to understand what was happening. I had spent a year in a foreign place that spoke my language but didn’t. I tried to feel the impact of this and think of memories and replay them as a slide show in my head. I tried to have a very serious and contemplative moment with myself, but I couldn’t. Understanding a year’s worth of change cannot be forced. So instead, I studied my reflection in the window. I looked the same. Maybe all the clothes I had on were European brands and maybe my hair had grown longer, but overall, still me.
This is how change works. It’s stealthy. It delicately changes you and your perspective while you’re in it, and it is not until you are fully out of it that you look in the mirror and notice a difference.
I looked through my reflection and out the window. I was not disoriented. I knew the bus was climbing Headington Hill. I knew Brookes was on my left and soon we would pass the grocery store I never went to on my right and that on a nearby corner was a Starbucks where I sometimes went before class. I was well oriented. I had not only lived here, I had settled here, and now, I had to find a way to unsettle. To loosen my grip and face what was in front of me: the road to London, a flight to Texas, and a few days after, a drive to Nashville.
After looking out the window for a while, I decided to open Biceps’s letter. With sporadic streetlamps as my only lighting, I read it. One. Staccato. Sentence. At a time. He said kind things. He said he was glad he had decided to move back to the States, so we wouldn’t be far from each other. He said that when he thinks back on the last few weeks, his and my final weeks in Oxford, he sees me and us as a picture hanging above his mantel, a figure central to his life at the time.
I thought that was such a lovely description. I still do. We all have people over our mantels, don’t we? The frames and the faces change as we go along, but we remember each of them. They have imprinted us in one way or another. All the people who make up so much of who we are and are becoming. No matter how far from them we go, no matter how disparate our twigs and sticks and leaves are in the end, the people over our mantels have played a part in creating us, and that kee
ps them with us in a way that no fire can burn up. The ashes are not too dry to be brought back to life, and what is created from them is always better than what was before.
A lot changes and scatters in young adulthood. Your surroundings, your circumstances, your friends, your beliefs, and yourself. We are, don’t forget, at our core, like baby cricket nymphs. The creatures that shed skin in order to grow. The small bugs that make sacrifices to the earth as they become older. The layers fall away slowly, one at a time, and we morph into something else, and rarely do things turn out the way we think they will, and rarely do we end up looking the way we think we will look.
After an experience like my intense year in Oxford, you sort of think you’re done. You’ve morphed into what you will be. You know what you believe in and what you don’t. It’s been tested. The worst and the best—it has all happened. You’ve learned what you came to learn in life and the rest of your days will be spent living what you’ve learned and coasting on that knowledge. Nothing will compare. Nothing will be as rich as that, or as full or as hard or as sad. This is what we tell ourselves in order to enter the next phase.
After I left Oxford though, life and learning didn’t stop. Our individual journeys are ongoing. They are not a yearlong trip overseas. More has happened. So many events and things to make me see that the person on the bus on the way to Heathrow actually understood very little. I sit here, nearly twenty-nine years old, and I feel more unraveled than I did at twenty-two, wandering the lonely, old streets of Oxford town. I am not who I will always be. I don’t know much at all. I have seen only a tiny pocket of the world and met only a tiny fraction of God’s people. The things written in this book are from one year. One year. That is not even a gasp of a breath on the scale of knowledge in the kingdom of God.
That’s what this collection of stories is, I guess. Not a few pages about how to live, but a few pages reminding us that youth and its feelings of uncertainty, constant change, and insecurity are the perpetual way of the Christian life. Learning never ends. Change is continuous. The questions never stop. I’m not sure if that sounds hopeful, but it’s meant to. Our faith, how we feel about it and how we feel about God, was never meant to be static. We should never assume we have “arrived.” Because the moment we do, something happens that we didn’t expect or don’t understand, and we are flattened by the reality of our lack of knowledge once again.
I brought it home with me when I left Oxford. That old, muddy trail by the River Thames. It stayed close by. I return to it again and again still. Sometimes just at the last minute, when I don’t know what else to do. When life feels uncomfortably jerked between nights of hellos and nights of good-byes, I stare at my little Thames and say to God with shoulders shrugged, “I am at a loss here.” I look for the ripples over the stones to form some sort of message for me. Some sort of sign that will tell me what to do next. I want a fortune-telling river. But this is not what rivers are for, I’ve learned. They are not here to tell us our fortunes or to answer all our what, when, where, and why questions. Rivers are here to simply be here.
So my hope is changing. As the river ripples by and as I plod along, I hope we have long, rambling, never-ending conversations about all the things I need to talk about and all the things he needs to tell me. A river conversation in which not much of anything is resolved but a relationship of trust and assurance is formed, and I walk the muddy trail until I am very, very old, and the river, it flows and flows and flows.
A few weeks before the bus ride to Heathrow, there was this little moment I remember in a café on the second floor of my favorite bookshop in Oxford. A small moment, a mere second, really, when I sat across from a friend at a table by the window that gave us a view of the ancient school’s library and a cobblestone alley below. My plane ticket home was purchased. I knew I was headed elsewhere. But this day, on an uncharacteristically hot afternoon, I did not think of the future. I was, uncharacteristically, present, and I thought about my location, right then. Even though I had been in Oxford a year, I could not believe I was here. I could not believe I was sitting across from someone I had come to know and who had come to know me, all the way across an ocean in this other country, in this other place. The thought made me feel small and made God feel very big. Like when Lucy is talking to Aslan:
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”*
In the second-story café, at the table in the corner, the sun melted through the window’s glass. It cast part of my arm in shadow and part of it in light, and in the coldest town I have ever known, I felt honestly warm.
* * *
* C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (New York: HarperCollins, 1951), 141.
Acknowledgments
How do I begin here except to say this book would not exist without the people I’m about to address? They are much more than the “acknowledged” or the “thanked.” They are the ones who pushed this along when I wanted to quit, who told me where to turn next when the path had grown dark, and whose mere presence gave me the courage to say what I felt I needed to say. This book is not mine. It’s ours.
To the friends I’ve written about: Thank you for letting me share a part of your story. You’ve taught me more than you know.
To Oxford: Is it strange to thank a city? Oh well. I’m going to anyway. Thank you for giving me space to wander.
To the WaterBrook team: It is a miracle every time a book gets out the door, and you are the miracle workers.
To my editor, John Blase: At this point, these words are just as much yours as they are mine and all I know to say is, thank you.
To Karen Hill: Your suggestions for this book were invaluable. You’ve nudged me toward writing ever since I can remember. I will always be so grateful.
To Steve Green: You are so much more than an agent. You are a dear and trusted friend, and if there was a second dedication page, you would be on it.
To Nashville friends, like Kathie and Erica and so many others: Thank you for cheering me on, even when I was on the floor in tears over this thing. You have no idea how your encouragement has carried me.
To Jenna and Sara: The only reason you didn’t show up more on these pages is because we were an ocean apart when all this stuff happened. To have sisters who are also best friends is no small gift. Trust me, you are on every page.
To my mom and dad: You’ve read this book as many times as I have by now. Your support, love, and care are everything to me. How fitting it is to begin and end this book acknowledging you. I love you.
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