Farewell As A Funeral
On being twenty-three and getting used to saying goodbye with your whole chest.
It was a Friday. I woke up with a greasy face and rotten breath in Dwight’s Lincoln Park bedroom. Eliot paced around the living room outside, his footsteps grunting louder and quieter as he organized the last of his belongings two hours before his plane was to leave for San Francisco. “An acting career in San Francisco?” I thought. It seemed so foreign to me, but I accepted my ignorance with grace as someone who — prior to moving to Chicago — didn’t know actors moved anywhere but LA. I sat up and looked over at Dwight, studying how his bicep shielded his eyes from the 11 A.M. light.
Eliot knocked on the door, “Dwight, I’m leaving.” To which Dwight responded with a grunt. In the sticky musk of the 80 degree morning, I hunted through the piles of our clothes for the water gallon we left on the floor. I let myself choke on a chug to snap me out of the hungover daze.
Then I frantically scratched at my naked thighs, hopped into a pair of boxers and some borrowed shorts, and rushed the door to find Eliot leaving his keys on the dining room table. He turned to me and we stood awkward for a moment.
“I uh, didn’t want to say goodbye through the door. I’ll miss you man.”
Shirtless, sweaty, and mournful I hugged him as affectionately as I possibly could while maintaining an awkward distance between waists. I hug everyone this way. We didn’t make eye contact.
“Aw, I love you Ty.”
His words stirred something deep in my chest and startled, I had to force my response,
“I love you too.”
And we let each other let go.
Eliot*1 and I had only really known one another in a handful of conversations scattered across June, but they were meaningful enough for our “Goodbye” to feel like an obituary headline.
I’d met enough people in bars, parties, and summertime fervors that his departure shouldn’t have phased me, yet it was in the small chatter we had before he walked out the door that I realized I was grieving the potential of a friendship that could’ve lasted years. In the brief time we spent together I wondered why I developed such a strong liking towards the guy. The core of it always eluded me: I wasn’t obsessed enough with him for it to be infatuation and my interest in him wasn’t intense enough to fuel a codependent friendship; but, he was handsome, funny, smart, a bit edgy, and I couldn’t really find anything I disliked about him.
“I’ll text you when I visit the Bay, maybe we could hang,” I said, knowing that San Francisco was too rainy and unsexy of a city for me to do anything in but drive through.
“That would be nice. I’d like that.”
Dwight shouted his goodbye wrapped in bed through a closed door and I noted how — due to his certainty that they would see one another again — he could say the word with ease to Eliot, a man he’d lived with for nearly five years.
That was the difference between our goodbyes that really drove the nail in the coffin for me: the uncertainty. There was a possibility that Eliot and I would never exist in the same city again and despite any of our commonalities that could serve as fuel for long-standing affections, we could disappear into one another’s memories as nameless mustaches who met briefly one summer. What was worse was that I knew it wouldn’t be the last farewell of the season. Soon, Dwight would start his Master’s at Yale and I would fade from his present to his past, and many of my other friends — new and old — would follow suit.
It’s an easy thing to say goodbye without crying when you walk away before the word is finished, or avert eyes, or add some line like “oh maybe I’ll come visit you.” Apathy toward the narrowness of time between casual hellos and uncertain goodbyes was an art form I envied all the practitioners of. I, however, have always found myself to be quite pathetic in the face of farewells that might last forever.
There’re many ages I think that serve as major turning points in one’s young adult life:
When you’re 18 you’re taught to expect change. You’re taught to expect new: “move out, start college, etc.”
When you’re 21 you’re finally looked at as an adult (by bouncers at the very least) and can delude yourself into thinking you’re a grown-up.
Then you’re 30 and you’ve finally escaped the chaos of your first decade as an individual.
But twenty-three? It daunts like a reaper looming over every relationship you have. Overlooked in our culture’s discussion of milestone ages — twenty-three is the age of farewells. Where you graduate college and look around to realize that everyone’s moving: to a new city; or back in with their parents; or straight into a grad program; or into a career; or, god-forbid, in with their partners.
It’s terrifying. You look around and realize that if you aren’t saying goodbye then you’re just standing still, and that eventually you’re gonna have to move too. So the farewells feel like funerals. Whether they’re to people you’ve known for years, months, or weeks. They’re funerals for the moments you’ve had together, or, as was the case with Eliot, the moments you might never get to have.
While I had many friends fluent in the art of farewells, Ian Fugett’s*2 familiarity with it was the most foreign to me. Ian was a writer with a pension for looking at things in “the big picture.” He swayed through interpersonal relationships with a philosophy that lay somewhere between Kerouac and Curious George. His fondness for life gleamed out of him with a smile straight out of a children’s book. And when he spoke, his words weighed with an intimacy that made every conversation feel like it was being held on a back patio table in the hours between midnight and 3 AM. Yet, unlike me, he was never terrified of watching intimacy die.
Everytime Ian rang me up he was always in a different city: Paris this week, Amsterdam the next, then Chicago, then L.A. His tales about the couches he crashed on and the people who offered them were always admirably stingy; he was sparse with his details in a way that I suspected helped preserve the preciousness of his interactions with people.
I never could really wrap my head around Ian's comfort with casual intimacy — his ability to bounce from friend to friend, city to city, couch to couch. For a while I found that the only way I could live like him was if friends ranked in some hierarchy of importance. That, as long as I had a count-em-on-my-fingers ratpack of close friends who never said “Goodbye,” the rest of the world didn’t matter and I could survive a farewell from anyone at the drop of a hat. It was an unsustainable and slightly codependent survival tactic I’ll admit, but it worked well enough until twenty-three.
Ian didn’t need a life raft. He recognized that each moment he spent with someone was just as important as the last. The uncertainty of whether or not he’d see someone again after a hug and a goodbye didn’t seem to frighten him. Maybe his gratitude for the memories he formed with people was enough to reduce “Goodbye” to a superficial tag on what actually mattered; maybe he’d seen enough faces waving in his rearview mirror that “Goodbye” just didn’t hurt anymore; or maybe he was never uncertain, and his goodbyes secretly harbored a knowledge of whether or not he was determined to say hello to someone again. All I knew was that his goodbyes — after nearly a year of sporadic hellos — were never too painful for me.
When I first adopted my dog Mimosa*3 she’d cry each time I walked out the front door. She was afraid I might never come back. In order to get her to stop crying when I was gone, I conditioned her by walking out the door and then walking back in after a minute. Then out again, but I waited five minutes before coming back. Then I waited ten. Then I waited thirty. And eventually, Mimosa realized that my goodbyes aren't forever. Now instead of whimpering when the door shuts she simply awaits with excitement for my return. With each of my reunitings with Ian, I was trained — like a newly adopted dog who cries when its owner walks out the front door; each of his returns conditioned me to realize that his goodbyes weren’t forever.
My desire for certainty in farewells is perhaps no more evident than in the one I remember the most clearly. When I was 20 I had a friend named Day. They were an erotic poet who used they/them pronouns and were referred to as whatever day of the week it was: on Wednesdays they were Wednesday, on Thursdays they were Thursday, on Fridays they were Friday, etc. Day’s hair was a fried blonde and they exclusively wore silk lingerie and cowgirl boots that sheathed a handy two-foot long wrench for self defense.
One night as we slow-danced on the rooftop of an abandoned warehouse somewhere near Pilsen, I was overtaken by the same grief of goodbyes that would haunt me years later when I hugged Eliot in that Lincoln Square apartment.
“We should say goodbye now, just in case we never properly get the chance,” I whispered, “in case we ever fall out or just lose touch we should say it now.”
So we did. In the spotlight of the moon under the starless Chicago sky we whispered preemptive farewells. Armed with confidence, I looked them in the eye and consciously accepted the certainty of us never seeing one another again. Then we hugged without a gap between our waists.
We lost touch not long after that and they grew to become a person I knew exclusively through word of mouth. Last I heard, they go by a new name and she/her pronouns, engaged to an airforce pilot and living a life without lingerie, rooftops, or wrenches. Wherever she is I hope she’s happy, and I’m glad I got to say goodbye. Grateful for the funeral we held for the versions of ourselves we used to know.
When you think too hard about goodbyes, you realize that you’ll say them to most people eventually. I wish I didn’t need the certainty of whether or not I’ll see someone again to cope, but it’s just the way I am. If I had the power to kill the uncertainty that laces every farewell, maybe twenty-three wouldn’t be so devastating. But I guess if eventually everyone gets a farewell that lasts forever then every goodbye is morbidly certain and we should hug each other as hard as we can each time we say it. Fuck. I guess I’ve got to visit San Francisco*4, if just so that I can look Eliot in the eye next time I say “Goodbye.”
The lad himself.
A pic of Ian I took during one of his more recent stints in Chicago before he bounced off somewhere.
This is some pixelart I made of my dog Mimosa. I couldn’t find any pics on my laptop. I adopted her about two years ago to cope with living in Chicago and experiencing winter for the first time
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I don’t hate SF really. It just seems so rainy-dirty-sticky-gray and expensive. Why not just go to SoCal y’know?
I know what you mean, and you gain perspective as you get older I guess, but a loss is still a loss, and that never really changes.
I remember I took a course in Shakespeare my senior year of college, and I was so distressed at all the fare-welling that was going on at the end of classes that I barely studied for the final exam. I did memorize MacBeth's soliloquy in Act V, Scene 5, though. When I saw the final exam I was stymied for any answer, and for lack of any other idea I just wrote the soliloquy as my answer. My whole grade rode on this one test, and I wrote:
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
I don't remember the question, and I don't remember whether I wrote anything else, probably not; I fully expected to fail the exam. But I got an A, so I went to see him to see if there had been a mistake, but he assured me that no, no mistake.
We spoke a little further and he revealed that he was grieving - grieving the loss of the students in his class, which he told me he did every year for his whole career, and somehow MacBeth's soliloquy had hit just the right button and moved him just so deeply that he'd had to give me the A. I was mystified that an *adult* could feel that way. Yes, I was feeling it, but he was *old*!
I think it comforted me, and so I offer it to you along with this reminder: you can stay in touch. And if you fall out of touch, you can get back in touch without all that much trouble. Maybe you should.
23 and in chicago as well, thankfully no one in my life is leaving the city yet but I definitely dread the inevitable day when someone does…it’s hard enough making plans to see people who live in the same place as me given how separately busy our lives got once undergrad was over. Plus covid took away a good year and a half of my undergrad social life. I really relate to your need/desire for certainty. Love this piece!