LJ Idol 1: I Don't Look Good in Cowboy Hats.

[bewize]

"Do you know one thing that I admire about you? When it's time for you to go, you just go. You don't look back. You don't linger. You don't cry. You just march forward into the future on blind faith, don't you?"

~WizeMother, circa 1998


I wonder if my mother suspected that I'd remember her words a decade after she spoke them?

I remember everything about the moment she said this. I was going (back) to college and I was biding farewell to my family in the gravel driveway of the home WizeMother and WizeStepfather still live in. It was drizzling and I was tired of standing in the rain. Besides that, I had a four hour drive (just over three, really, but we need not discuss my tendency to speed here) ahead of me. A few quick hugs and a pile of crap shoved into the backseat later, I was ready to go. I went to get in the car and my mother caught my arm, bringing me back to her for one more hug.

I know I'm probably biased, but my mother gives the best hugs in the world, so I relaxed for one more second, kissed her cheek, told her I loved her, and tucked away her words along with a slightly flat Coke and the Wallflowers CD to keep me busy on the drive ahead.

She was right. Never tell her that I said that!

I don't look back very often. I never have, really. I'm an old school subscriber to the theory that when you dig in the past, all you get is dirty. Look forward, instead! That's where the action is. Am I the only one getting a mental image of a cowboy riding into the sunset here?

Thinking on it now, I realize that there were a lot of factors that made it easier to do this. We'd moved a few months before I left for school, and while it was home because my family was there, it wasn't really home and it never would be. The house, though lovely, held no memories for me. It was just a building that held my stuff. And it didn't hold much of that either. I had a mattress and a dresser. Mostly, it held my books.

Through circumstances beyond my control (my parents' divorce, the reality of my mother having live-in boyfriends, and moving from the refuge of a townhome into the headache adventures of homeownership about a month before I left for college), I'd been given a clean slate. It drove home the point that my life was mine; it was at my fingertips, for me to grab and wrestle with and force to be what I wanted. Or not, if I couldn't hack it. Failure and success both danced just out of my reach.

Was this blind faith? No, I don't think so. Ha! She wasn't completely right!

Here's the thing. I didn't say goodbye to anything, really. It was more of a "See you later, don't do anything crazy while I'm gone, love you!" This is not to say that I wouldn't miss my family. I did, very much. I just didn't see any point in lingering on sorrowful and tearful goodbyes, when all the long years of possibilities stretched in front of us.

But, Bewize, I hear you say, you don't always have long years to go. How do you say goodbye then?

Well, I imagine I say it the same way everyone does: tears, denial, anger, bargaining, and lots and lots of chocolate ice cream. But, even still, there comes a moment when I realize I don't really need to say goodbye.

I don't need closure from my past. It belongs to me and has carved me into the person I am. I could no more say goodbye to it than I could bid farewell to my skin. Sure, some of it is scraped, and some of it scarred, and some of it burns when it's exposed to excessive sunshine, but I take it with me everywhere I go all the same.

None of this means that it doesn’t hurt. Hell, there are days it hurts so bad I forget how to breathe. I've lost people along the way, people I loved, people that loved me. And I miss them, I do. I really do.

But I haven't said goodbye to them.

I have a freckle on my left wrist. My Aunt Edna taught me to tell my left from my right by pointing out that freckle. She died of cancer when I was 8. Every time I see that stupid freckle, I miss her, but I remember her and I smile. I think that somewhere, she’s smiling with me.

When I was 11, we visited WizeMother's family and they took us to the zoo. My Uncle Mike had colon cancer and he spent the entire day in a wheel chair. I have a scar on my right ankle from where I fell in the Aquatic Center. That night, he and I spent hours looking through an Encyclopedia and finding all the different fish we'd seen earlier that day. He died later that year. I never saw him again after that trip, but every time I see my ankle, I think of fish and my uncle.

Some of the marks I bear aren't visible to the naked eye, but they’re there all the same - the handprints on my back where my great aunts hugged me; the flashes of remembered marker tattoos on my biceps from friends that I once played with; the imprints of kisses that linger on my skin from past lovers never to be seen again.

I don’t know what happens when people die. I want to believe that death is nothing but a temporary separation, sort of like going to college. I remember the day I stopped believing in the traditional heaven. My Sunday school teacher, with the epic patience expected of someone in such a position, answered my rather smart-ass question of how we could be at perfect peace in heaven if not all the people we loved were there. I shall save the topic of religion for another day. Suffice it to say that I had issues with the church I grew up in from a very young age.

She told me that we simply wouldn’t remember the people we lost.

Even as a child, I hated that idea. I cringed away from it, more afraid of heaven than of the alternative. I don’t want to forget where I’ve been or the people that I’ve known. I want to remember them, always. I don’t want closure. I want to believe in endless possibilities in the future, instead. I want to believe that while some people go first, eventually I will follow and we will find each other again. Then, I may cry, but it will be tears of happiness that we finally can laugh and talk together once more. Or maybe it will be like when I visited home from college and WizeMother demanded that I bring all my laundry and she'd do it for me! She would also make my favorite food. Now, that's heaven!

Also, if I happen to go first, don't worry. Pursuant to my plan, I would like to go with a BANG, so I expect it will be sudden and shocking. The people left in my passing are to follow these instructions:

1. I like LOUD music. If it must by hymns, please make them loud. Also, if you could work out some way to include a guitar solo, I'd be grateful.
2. Have a drink. Put it on my tab.
3. And for the love of all that's holy, don't say goodbye.

I'll be waiting for you, undoubtedly impatient and demanding that you hurry the hell up already. Maybe my mom was right after all. Maybe I do march into the future with blind faith that I will eventually see everyone that is important to me again. So, I choose not to say goodbye. Instead, I choose to say:

“See you later, don't do anything crazy while I'm gone, love you!"

Hell. I don’t even own a cowboy hat.


~ Bewize

This entry was written in response to the therealljidol Challenge 1: Saying Goodbye. There will be voting for this week's entries. I will make sure to link to the poll once it is put up and I would appreciate it if you would vote for me if you enjoyed my entry. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Comments

[brownstudies.livejournal.com]

lovely. Really.

[bewize.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I appreciate the comment and the compliment. :)