THERE WILL SOON COME A DAY
Summer is ending and everyone is gone, for good this time. Like every year, I’ve been trying to write about leaving. For months it’s been bubbling away to no avail. In May, I made excuses. I’m in the moment still, haven’t left yet. Why would I waste the weeks on grief when I could just hang out? Everyone asks: Have you been writing? No. I’ve been focusing on just hanging out.
I didn’t want to force it. I’d tried that before—once in the middle of the night, the words came out wrong, foreign. Like I hadn’t felt them properly. Smith says It’s not so easy writing about nothing. I couldn’t feel anything. The feeling was in another room.
Without school, the center has disappeared. With every week, the web is detangling, falling apart, falling forever. I’m on the road with no return address. No limit to how far I could go. And yet it hardly feels real. The love so weighty I can sense its hand on my back even now. How to prepare for the moment when I wake and that touch is gone.
Going is never as lonely as you imagine, but it is lonely, to be sure. After a party, texting Harper I wish you could’ve seen it. You would have laughed so hard. Wishing we could always share our lives together like before. Strange silence. I am not who I was, not yet who I’ll become.
I know something is welling up because I’ve started crying in the car a lot. I drive over a big bridge in Vancouver, the expansive kind with the metal struts, trees green behind it all. Metal bars shifting as you move, revealing where you’re going and how fast. This rush of perspective in wide-angle three dimensions like a gush of air or song. It’s clear, so clear. And suddenly I’m crying because everything is so grand and beautiful and it will not be contained.
The night of my brother Elliot’s graduation. Taking photos, thanking teachers, boys slapping each other on the back. Thinking about when I left highschool, the numb grey of it all, my friend’s names stuck clustered together in the concrete. I spent many nights lying in bed imagining what could be next, silhouettes of people who might meet me in this next life. Itching to leave so I could meet them too.
But here’s Elliot crying in my bedroom, saying I graduate in two days. Jumping to comfort him, saying What’s wrong? He says Nothing’s wrong. That’s the problem. Elliot, star of the basketball team, the yearbook’s best dressed, perfect grades, parties in white-marble houses. So happy. Everybody loves him. I know I’ll be happy after I leave. It’s just hard to know that I won’t be happy in this particular way. That things won’t be the way they are now.
Fitzgerald says There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
So much talk about how to be happy. Wondering about where to go and how to act when you get there. Eventually, I hacked it somehow. Moved in with Harper, who was so cool and self-assured that it made everything easier, even failing tests and buying oranges at the grocery store. Together we learned how to drink without throwing up and what to wear to parties and how to walk places without speaking, as if we were encased together in an invisible bubble of comfortable quiet. Going anywhere and feeling that the air between us, calm as if we were side by side on the couch, eating dinner or watching television. Together, we met more friends who filled those shadows I dreamt many months ago. I woke up one day to a full life and a different sort of friendship that wasn’t complacent, but asked me to change for the better.
The thing about being happy is it’s a game of proportions, an exponential curve. The more you have, the more you have to lose. In We Can Dance, Charlie writes There will soon come a day when I will have to pay for all of this. The brand new feeling, that there could be a natural consequence for too much happiness. The universe and its equal but opposite reactions.
Can I admit that I did not want to leave Montreal? That, despite what I said and the ways I explained it away, I would have been happy to come home to you every night for the rest of forever. You know it and I know it. The problem is that knowing doesn’t fix anything.
When everyone came over and ate pasta in the living room from our biggest bowls, and we danced with each other and sang to the stereo, when you asked what it felt like to have a house so full of friends and good food and laughter, what it felt like to be loved that much. Now that it’s over, I can answer your question without shame or self-effacement and admit that it felt good. It was the best feeling I had ever known.
So the problem is not sadness and it's not fighting. The problem is that I love you for your big dreams and the grand possibility of your future, and I know that means you have to leave me. The problem is called fatal attraction, where what draws you together will often break your lives apart. Clare sitting next to me on the night bus, saying You need to think bigger. Don’t just go to law school because you are too afraid to do anything else. Sun breaking over the edge of the mountain. It’s summer and all the fruit is ripe again.
That night at Elliot’s graduation, when the Reverend blessed our dinner and said Remember to look around tonight. This is the last moment before we cross the threshold. And it’s bittersweet because there will be no return. Look around while we’re all still here, in this room. Together. Here we are in the moment before the threshold is crossed. Looking around. Waiting for the shot. Looking around and waiting to pay.
Final night with my roommates, sitting in bed playing games amongst ourselves. Memorizing how the lamplight hits the white walls, how the breeze came through the window and the shapes we made on the covers. I don’t remember when we said goodnight. In my memory, the arrow was pointing at my heart, and I swear the moment was forever. After everyone went to sleep, I lay in the dark, pleading with God like a child. Please, can I have one more night? I am not ready to go. Knowing I have already had so much time, so many perfect nights. Knowing I am greedy to ask for more. And that it’s futile—another night would only postpone the ending by a day. So many moons together, but this one dead on the horizon. Full and beautiful. Ophelia in the river, slowly drowning, singing all the while. McCarthy says Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.
The problem is staying happy once you get there. How to lose and lose without being discouraged. Didion was right when she said We tell ourselves stories in order to live. All year, all night, the ending looming over me, I realized. If I am going to get over this, I will need a really good story.
Most of us assume that circumstances are what make us happy. Apartments and cities, schools and jobs, friendgroups, parties. These things matter greatly, sure. But the notion that our joy is so fragile, so situational, makes each small alteration feel earth-shattering and the big changes insurmountable.
In reality, what often makes the difference between happy and unhappy is how you understand everything that happens to you. When interpreting our lives, we tend to think bad things are our fault and last forever, while the good is a one-off accident that is destined to disappear. But this is a funhouse trick of memory. You can fool yourself out of so much joy by misremembering where it came from and how it came about.
To think that love ends when you leave is not only sad but mistaken. It’s the type of story that feels true when you’re not looking carefully enough, when you forget to take a few steps back.
The way I see it, every great joy in your life foreshadows the next. Each one teaches you where to find it again. You know the sound of one of love’s many voices, how it might look in your living room, how it talks to you on the bus or side by side in bed. If you play your cards right, each time you are better at finding it and more generous with your attention when you do. This process will not be easy and it will require more and different strength than you expect. But, if you have been loved, this is a strength you have already. The only way I know how to cope with an ending is through gratitude. Imagining that there is some way I can pay this luck forward, by using the total freedom of loss to help me move along. Maybe a good ending could sanctify everything that came before.
Leaving often feels like a penance or a robbery, some sort of punishment for being too comfortable, for becoming soft and satisfied. It can make you feel weak and exposed, childlike, a fish out of water gasping for air. I gave myself the summer to mope around and cry in the car. Think about the past and miss it statically. Feel what we call “the pang,” that flash of pain that sticks to your ribs, that comes from a familiar smell or a good memory, that reminds you you are hours and countries away from a home that isn’t yours anymore. But after a while, that feeling will not get you anywhere. Knowing doesn’t fix anything, not in the long run. Neither does staying.
If you stay, your life will become a haunted life, the life of a ghost. If you postpone the final shot, you will be stuck between the East of your youth and the West of your future. The fruit will rot as you watch. You’ll know what went wrong, but it’ll be too late to fix it.
Sometimes, the change has already been made for you. It is not enough to reminisce, to wait and look around. If you are going to be happy again, you have to say goodnight. You must start telling yourself a better story.
Photos by Elliot Mairet.
AMALIA MAIRET: