It is once again, the leave-taking time.
I’ve been running thoughts of restarting this blog (haphazardly, none too dedicated) as a space to clear out my mind. No social media sharing, just a blank space where I’m not pressured to think much about line breaks or form or coherence. Sometimes a writer needs a space like that. Someone I don’t know also recently gave me the nicest compliment-she asked when I was going to start writing again, because she really enjoyed this blog. I’m glad (and a bit surprised) someone enjoys my personal musings!
But here we are. So much has changed in the last year. I’m about to graduate from what is often known as “the best four years of my life,” although a professor recently told me she wasn’t sure they were the best years of her life, but perhaps the most fun. The time to do things with abandon, where you can sit on your porch drinking wine at 2 p.m., or jump in the Main Street fountain or stay up late watching Harry Potter with the six other girls you live with. A time when you live with your closest friends in a small bubble called “college.”
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i’m trying to de-clutter. I’m moving to NYC in about a month (O, the terror, the elation, the not-quite-believing!) and know that about three-quarters of this shtuff can’t come with me. Most of it has to go. Preferably not into boxes that I’ll open once in the next five years. It’s hard-I get attached to things. My clothes, my books, the small mementoes people give me and I can’t bring myself to throw away.
This actually led me to tonight’s post. I reached for a medium sized square box that has been sitting on top of my overflowing jewelry box case for a year. I’ve carried this battered thing with me for five years now. I know precisely what it is (the contents were a little more debatable: two magnets, a flash drive, a Panera’s discount card, a mini flashlight, a Birchbox ad, three nose rings, etc.,). The box was given to me by a friend as a going away gift before I left Germany.
I am sad to say I didn’t think much of it at the time. I also was not as kind to this friend as I would have liked. I made him nervous, I think, and his nervousness made me nervous. I think he liked me and that made it ten times worse (at twenty-two, I am still horribly and undeniably awkward around people who I suspect like me in a romantic sense. It is a strange and drunken wonder that I’m currently in a long-term relationship). He was terribly sweet–took me to my first concert in Germany, walked me around school the first week, gave me countless thoughtful little gifts. But I didn’t know how to behave around him and so I tended to shy away from him. I had other things to do, other people to see, and one tall and dashingly handsome boy (think your classic European male) that I was chasing (that one didn’t work out, predictably).
In other words, I thanked him for his gift and didn’t look much at it after that. The gift itself was a medium square box, wrapped in sticky black tape. On the front is pasted a picture of the woods behind my first host family’s house and the caption “Leave the suburbs behind. The Goodbye.”
As I pawed through all the crap I’d tossed in the box over the last four years, I discovered the actual git. A series of Polaroids he had taken and captioned himself. With five years of hindsight, I realized that these were all places we had been together, places that probably held much more special meaning for him than at me.
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There are eighteen photos. They span from the woods in my backyard to the red light district of Hamburg. My host family had put a swing between two large trees in the woods and he took a picture of that titled “Memory.” Another picture: the bunker turned music store that we had visited with another friend, flipping through old records in a mish mash of broken German and fragmented English. This picture is titled “Oasis.” Another, simple in sepia colors: a sign reading Große Freiheit 37–where we went to the Wir Sind Helden concert during one of my first months in Germany. He has titled that one “Punch-Drunk Love.”
I have no idea how long it took him to take these photos, develop them, edit them, and assemble this. It’s a massive effort and one that quite frankly, is heartbreaking to me, five years later, knowing how unkind I was. It comes with the stunning realization that a boy I thought knew me very little actually knew me very well. Knew the songs I loved and places I’d fallen in love with and my need for photographs, for the tangible. I messaged him on Facebook to tell him (five years too late?) how much his gift meant to me. His handwritten note is still in the box as well. He signed it, Yours faithfully V. I wish I could say I had responded in turn.
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The picture he drew on the inside cover of the box is of a girl surrounded by trees, her back to the viewer. She’s staring at the collection of tall buildings in front of her. Country girl to the city. One arm is crooked as if she’s about to start a race or a step forward. She looks vulnerable, brave. More ready than I feel. In bolded turquoise letters under the girl, the words “Take care” are underlined several times.
It is leave-taking time. And this, I think, is a reminder to myself to be kinder, to believe that people know me better than I deserve sometimes, to say thank you to the friends we have.
The Wanderer 