Blogging to Nobody

This blog is such an odd thing. I keep imagining it has all kinds of potential, but of course I have done nothing about that potential, and so I would never dream of imagining it would have any sort of readership, and without an audience, what can it be? It is public, so it can't be a diary. I wouldn't want that, anyway. Maybe one day it will simply coalesce into something worth reading.

We're about to move to Arizona. Saying goodbye to Chris was one of the hardest things about moving. We've had to scrape together money, eat whatever we could mooch off people, move heavy furniture, find a place to live and convince someone to let us live there. But saying goodbye is never easy. This is the biggest move we've made yet. We're going where we know no one and the people we do know are days away. And we're going where we can't look back. Once our paths sunder, I know it will be hard to ever bring them back together again.

Sitting on the grass in his front yard, looking up at the stars, it felt like a scene from a movie. Inside the house, we had cheerfully noticed it was getting late, we were all getting tired, and it was time to go. Stepping out the door and crossing the wet lawn to the car was like crossing from ignorance into denial. The moonlight and starlight that made me feel like I should be part of some epic coming-of-age story simultaneously reminded me that this night would soon give way to the morning. Tomorrow would come and deprive us, without comment, of a friend.

We stopped at the car. One of us said, "See you never." It was a phrase we had started saying when Jon and Ashley left for New York. We said it all the time when one of us would leave town. Saying it like that, flippant, like it was something you were supposed to say all the time, made the reality of it easier to ignore. We had already gone through this sort of goodbye before--the uncertainty when we would see our friends again. In the short walk from the house, the three of us had realized that this wasn't just goodbye for the night. This felt like goodbye forever.

Once we leave the Pacific Northwest, we won't be home anymore. And we probably won't be coming back. We have to go wherever the jobs are. And then we'll want to settle down and have a family. And then we'll tell our children about our friends from college, the ones we visited when they were little, too little to remember. Their kids are just a little younger than you, we'll say. They sent a picture with their last Christmas card.

So it really wasn't like a movie at all. We sat in silence under the stars, occasionally moving to scratch an itch or adjust for comfort, listening to Chris's dog whining from inside the house. "I'm cold," said Chris, shivering a little. We sat a little longer. "I'm getting pretty tired. We have to go eventually," I said, sounding heartless in my own ears. We all stood up. I opened the car door. The inside of the car, suddenly illuminated by the dome light, seemed like a prop that had been accidentally left on the stage of our little drama. We stood there, unable to see one another's expressions in the dim light of the early morning. Andrew moved around to the driver's side, opened that door, too. I looked between them, unable to read their expressions. I sniffled. I needed a Kleenex. At last, I sat down in the car, leaving the door open. "Goodnight," I said. Not goodbye. "Bye," said Andrew. Nobody moved. Then he just got in the car, and we just left, while Chris waved and his dog whined in the background. It wasn't poetic at all. It was just like leaving every other time, only this time felt worse. This time, we wouldn't be coming back.