I graduate from Regent in May and I have less than three months left in Vancouver. Despite the fact that the past year has crept along at an agonizingly slow pace for so many of us, three months doesn’t seem like much time. And as I expressed here a few weeks ago, I am very ready to be back in the States. But part of that, if I’m being honest, is because leave-taking is hard. I’d like to skip this part, and just move on to the future already.

Leaving Vancouver and Regent right now, in their semi-hibernated-covid states, feels like having to say goodbye to someone you love very much while they sleep. 

There are upsides to this, of course. I’m an emotional person, but not a demonstratively sentimental one, so I’ve never been big on sloppy, drawn-out goodbyes. It’s sounded appealing recently to just detach from community and place here, to stop paying attention to how beautiful the mountains are and how the bus hums, even to pull back from my close friendships in preparation for slipping out the back door of this place at the beginning of the summer. I could latch it quietly, I’m sure, and no-one would be the wiser. In my more socially awkward moments I’ve certainly polished my own version of the unannounced exit. 

And yet to sever ties like that, to pull myself in and bundle myself away so as not to deal with the ungainly mess of an ill-timed farewell doesn’t do justice to what this place and people and experience has meant to me. 

Also, despite my self-protective dreams of timely emotional detachment, I haven’t really been handling things so neatly. For the past few weeks I’ve gotten up and written in my journal and worked library shifts and had meetings and read books and interviewed folks for my guided study and gone for walks and made stew and small talk and advised friends on life decisions. And yet, I’ve still found myself for at least a couple hours a day sitting and watching the sleeping giant of my time here, contemplating what has come and gone in and around and through me.

If things were more wakeful and normal, I wouldn’t be doing so much of this contemplation. There would be overwhelming busy-ness and distractions and parties and occasions, and they’d all be punctuated with occasional short, nostalgic conversations about time and how it flies, sometimes with close friends and sometimes with acquaintances. And I would blink and it would be over and we’d all hug and I’d move away and write a blog entry about it that wouldn’t be bogged down by questionable existential metaphors about sleep.

But that doesn’t happen to be the way of things now, here, for me. Existential metaphor is my lot at the moment. Trying to say goodbye in this way, on my own, means I have time and space to think of everything that’s happened. I think of regrets and embarrassments and disappointments and the occasional frustration. And sometimes, if I am very brave and allow myself to dive down deep, I think of the good things too. I think of a lot of laughter and a lot of conversations and a lot of pictures of my feet that I took at bus-stops in my first month here. I think of sidewalks I’ve walked down and beaches I’ve stood on and bowls of soup I’ve eaten and ferries I’ve taken and a whole lot of people who’ve sat down beside me–so many of those. I think of hands and flowers and washing dishes. All these things are a bit sharp and painful in my chest, and that reminds me that they’re worth writing a story about some time. For me, they’ve already been one.

But more than that, the place itself will wake all the way up one day, probably not long after I go. It’ll rise and shine and then we’ll all come back and have a party–not a good-bye party, but a hello one. (That’s the dream, at least.)