Goodbye Overload

Further Feelings From the Farewell Files

I had a different reason for procrastinating on final grades this semester than I have before: I wasn’t ready to let go. My Freshman Comp students have done extraordinary work and I’ll miss them, and reading through their reflections on how our Deviance-themed composition class has challenged their thinking or improved their writing made me unexpectedly sad not to be able to see them around campus next year. But the grades are in. A few of their reflections brought tears to my eyes, and so I didn’t feel unambiguously free when I was done. A month ago, I’d have told you that the end of the semester would be a weight off my shoulders. But the weight, instead, has shifted.

Desperate for catharsis, I ended up blasting a song I didn’t think I would use for my Ending Theme: the first time I heard it, Ian and I had just arrived in Milledgeville, and after being on the road for a full week or more, Blackbird Coffee felt like home. We didn’t yet have a place to put our own couch, which was waiting to be transported from a storage facility in Oakland, so the couch at Blackbird felt as welcoming as anything. I couldn’t pin down my feelings, relief mixed with grief mixed with hope-and-expectation mixed with something else I didn’t have words for. I didn’t expect to find words over coffee, but suddenly, the speakers offered lyrics I had never heard:

I miss you, I’m going back home to the West Coast

I wish you would’ve put yourself in my suitcase

I love you, standing all alone in a black coat

I miss you, I’m going back home to the West Coast

I was never at home on the West Coast, and I wasn’t going back, I was leaving, but the bittersweet uncertainty of the vocals made this feel like my song anyway. Maybe I could sense, in that weird way we can sense things, that the longer I stayed away from the West Coast the more theoretically at home I would feel there, at least in my head. But I didn’t hear this song as being about going home to the West Coast. For me it’s about missing someone. Someone you love, maybe someone you love whose black coats are integral to their aesthetic and—

Well. I used to shatter every time I listened to it. I don’t anymore. But the love and the missing still surges up dramatically when I’m not expecting it. At the time that I first heard this song, I had to stop myself from leaping off the couch, grabbing the barista by the collar, and demanding, “WHO IS THIS?!” But I realized this was most likely a playlist and that I could do a lyric search myself, so I did: “Standing all alone in your black coat lyrics” (now I would add “-ai”). The song is “West Coast” by Coconut Records.

The singer observes, “It rains a lot this time of year,” which makes it feel more immediate, because the view from my home office window is especially lush and green right now; the rain has been pouring with impressive stamina. Still, why did I need this song, our arrival song, right now?

Because leaving is leaving is leaving is leaving, just the way a recent death can blindside us with grief built up from deaths that came before. All goodbyes are emotional, but not all of them are complicated. No goodbye in the rural South is complicated for me. But the goodbye that defined my departure from California has so many thorns and layers and silk threads and sharp edges that it’s become a Platonic departure, the one by which they’re all shaped, chronology be damned.

Part of the reason is that I don’t feel like I ever got that goodbye right. I wrote a raw novella-length letter by hand, I sent it, I wrote several wild-eyed emails, I sent them, and anything that didn’t make it into that lucky recipient’s mailbox I wrote in hardcover journals, Word documents, my Notes app, and (personal growth) a series of cathartic emails in my Drafts folder with no name in the To: box. There shouldn’t be anything left to say and yet nothing feels complete. I’m a fucking connoisseur of goodbyes, but nothing in my history prepared me for that one.

The last time I saw my father was in May of 2006. I had no idea that my first post-Katrina trip back to New Orleans was going to be a goodbye. There were moments between us I can only call sacred, when I told him things about my life and that crazy summer that I’d thought I would never tell him, and I saw in his eyes that he saw and accepted me even more wholly than he already had. I told him how much I loved him for that. I had no way of knowing he would die two months later. I still get angry and unfathomably sad that there are no more real-time conversations with him in the flesh, but I knew we had no lose ends. In fact, many of us, his countless friends, marveled when we gathered for his funeral that the last time we had seen him was the best time we had seen him. You could say I never got to say goodbye to my dad, but you could also say I never had to.

The strangest farewell experience I’ve ever had took place with my dad, as it happens. We were leaving Albuquerque for Santa Fe, and as we drove away from it for the last time I was convinced I saw what I couldn’t possibly have seen. I almost didn’t want to say it out loud, but I had to. My final glimpse at the salmon-pink stucco Presidio Apartments looked, and this I told my father, tenatatively, “like the building was smiling at us.”

My dad shocked me by saying, in that almost-whisper we often use when we confirm transpossible truths, “I thought that too.”

We both saw it, so of course it happened. No apartment or house I’ve ever left has smiled at me since. Given how much that 9th-floor apartment in San Francisco with the floor-to-ceiling living room windows and cinematic view knows about me, I think I should’ve gotten some kind of acknowledgement, even if it was a raised architectual eyebrow. But just as people in New Mexico tend to openly express emotion and people in California tend to value carefully-chosen filters on what feelings they decide to show, I should probably expect buildings to behave according to the same established cultural norms that people put in place.

I have a fluctuating relationship with reasonable expectations.