by Lucy S.
My good friend Amir is moving away. I'll see him tonight when he reads his poetry and I'll see him tomorrow when we go see a movie and eat a meal together afterward. Then we'll say goodbye until who knows when, and he'll fly away early Tuesday morning.
I can write that I hate these endings of times that will never come back - the definitive, more noticeable cut-offs that make us see what we otherwise miss when our days seem to go on as if all is staying the same when in reality, everything is always in flux - something always ending, something always beginning. But I don't know if "hate" is the right word. I wish he could go and have all the new adventures that he will have and we could still somehow meet at least a couple times a month for our relaxed hangouts that have no purpose beyond the joy of talking and being there together.
I can say I don't hate endings because endings bring people into our lives who we'd never know otherwise. Moving here was an ending to the life Amir had before. Going back to finish my bachelor's degree - which placed me in the class where I met Amir - was an end to the life I'd had before, even if that ending was not as stark and obvious as geographical moves are. Still, something gets lost even as something new is gained.
I've tried to understand the truth about these endings. Marcuse wrote that "there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time" (47). And: "Actually it is not a question of the happy end; what is decisive is the work as a whole. It preserves the remembrance of things past" (48). This is the best I can figure out right now. In whatever ways are possible, I try to make the endings not be total - make them and what comes after them be part of "the work as a whole" - this laboring creation - this story - that is a relationship and a whole life and a whole humanity.
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
