In Greek they have a word for the feeling one gets when
realizing something one once had is lost and can never be had again: saudade
(sow-da-jee). I could never put my finger on how hard it was for me to let go
until I discovered this word. It is not just a fear of change or a lack of
fearlessness when approaching the future that makes me hold so tightly to
things, even those that I have chosen voluntarily chosen to release. I can
identify when a friendship has gone badly and I need to get out. I do not
hesitate to leave a city when the time has come and I see the white space at
the end of the page that signifies this chapter's end. I have chosen to let go
of things when I knew that it was the right thing to do or that I needed to if
I was ever going to be happy. I have chosen to let go but when the feeling hits
and I realize the permanence of what I have done I am in panic. It is the
finality of letting go that terrifies me. I want to hold on to the details
about this person, or this city, or this thing that made me so happy and I
realize that I am making a decision I can't take back. I often forget that by
the time I try to let go, it is because there are only traces and memories of
what made me happy left. I sometimes mistake the feeling of saudade with doubts
about letting something go. I don’t want to let go of something without
recognizing that I have already lost it and all I am holding on to is the
ghost. There is no English equivalent to saudade.
I have always thought of letting go as losing something.
Losing a place, a part of yourself, or worse, a person. I have never lost a
person whose absence burned a whole through all the pages of my life. I have
never had to wake up every morning and realize all over again that a person I
loved is gone. My hardest loss was an uncle two summers ago but when I came
home it was easy to forget him, to not notice his disappearance in a place
where he had hardly been present. When other people I knew died I cried
sympathetically, the way you do when you are watching a sad movie about a war
that happened before you were born. I have been lucky enough to live a life
free of tragedy. I do not know how to say a goodbye to someone that I have
loved and consequently I do not know how to say goodbye at all. When there are
no mountains to climb up, every hill feels twice as steep.
I do not know what it feels like to say goodbye to someone
you love but I can imagine. I have watched enough soap operas, read enough
Shakespeare, and heard enough love songs and break up stories to be afraid. It
was luck that kept me from losing someone I loved to the ground but often it
was choice that kept me from loving at all. I knew I wasn't built for
heartbreak. I cried when the stray cat we used to feed left us for good; how
would I ever stop crying if I fell in love and he left me? So I didn't. I
wouldn't admit to crushes and danced around labels like "girlfriend."
I spent all of high school and most of college single and saved my emotional
attachment for other things. I became inordinately emotional about friendships
and interior decorating but never about men. When I finally fell in love I
wouldn't even say the words out loud to myself for six months. He was a boy I
had known for years and could never let go of. We have been officially together
for a year now.
When I was little I asked my mother what heaven would look
like and she told me that heaven would be whatever I needed to be happy. I told
her that heaven would be lots of big houses all on one street but they would be
connected to each other by hallways and all of my friends and all of our
relatives would live in these houses together. We would eat ice cream and watch
movies and be together always without having to fly on airplanes to see each
other.
I still want this. I've
tried to fashion my life after this childhood idea of heaven but instead it
looks more like an attic in need of cleaning. I collect people. I add them to
my life the way people add Facebook friends. When I am emotionally bored I stalk
them. I click through memories finished with the filter of nostalgia and I let
myself feel the pain of knowing that I can never go back.
I never let go of anything and while a temper tantrum in my
teens resulted in the loss of all the cards and material items I had saved to
the dumpster, the memories remain. If I didn't hold on to it because I'm
sentimental, I did because I'm bitter. Courtney and Kate making up a song about
me ripping a hole in my shorts at recess in the fourth grade. Not over it. My little
sister Shannon getting a Tara Lipinski Barbie for her 6th birthday when she
didn't even like Tara Lipinski and I was obsessed. Not over it. Getting
"door privileges" taken away and having to sleep with it open for two
weeks. Still bitter. The emotional weight I attribute to material objects is
nearly as bad as that which I feel for the people who share their memories. I
miss my favorite black leotard the way I miss the barre
under my fingers and the feeling of being perfectly grounded with only my toes
touching the floor. I miss my favorite shoes the summer after junior year of
high school the way I miss the people I ran around in them with.
Lately
I have felt like I am carrying around a huge weight and my shoulders hurt the
way they used to in middle school when I had a backpack full of books that I
wore low on my hips because that was the style. I catch my shoulders inching up
towards my ears and the ballerina in me is ashamed. One more thing I have lost.
I am heavy with the usual senior burdens: trying to find a job, an apartment,
an idea of what life I want after I graduate. People keep giving me the same
advice, to be excited about all that lies ahead and all the possibilities I now
have. I keep hearing that great things are coming but they are too far away to
see and instead all I see is a blank page. The things that are not too far
away, not just blurry possibilities are the people and things that I am losing.
It is hard to let go of things you love for little more than a promise that you
will find something to fill their absence. I am sad to say goodbye to the
people especially. I am sad to see them go most because I have still not let go
of the last set of friends that were supposed to be forever, the set that the
college friends were supposed to replace. I find proof of the friendships I had
in high school every day in memories and the emptiness of their dissolution in
the silence between us. "We will all stay friends," my college
friends say. No we won't. I think. I am bitter and jaded by finally having to
admit that I am not friends with any of the people that I loved so much four
years ago, at least not in the same way. Most of us don't even speak to each
other. I cannot believe it will be any different four years from now. I will
remember this month and these friends with the same fondness I always held but
I will ache with the pains of loss.
I don't understand how you can stop caring about someone who meant so
much to you once. This does not happen if somebody dies. You never stop caring
about them or feel guilty about never talking to them or have to decide whether
to invite them to your wedding when you used to talk about them being in it.
You are sad but what you had with them can never be destroyed. Your
relationship is preserved exactly like it was, safe under the bell jar that
comes from a forced permanent separation. This is not how it is with the
living. Relationships change and fade away slowly. I don't know how to let go
of someone without letting go of all of them, the good times and the laughter
and all the things they taught me about myself. How do I keep all these things
I was with you when you are not around? I don't know how to stop worrying and
wondering and asking about you. If you don't care about me anymore, did you
ever?
I know that there must be a way to hold on to memories and
not the people in them, to be content that these experiences were mine even if
the people no longer are. I know that I should believe in the truth of past
relationships even if they have changed. I know that I will still feel the
fingerprints of the people I have known when they leave. I am graduating from
college in exactly three weeks and there has never been a better time to learn
to let go. I have no choice but to face that people are going to leave me.
Whether I can find a way to or not
the people I love are going to let go of this place, this life, and me and move
on to something new. But I am afraid. I am afraid to lose mission beach and the
boardwalk, the mission, Lestats all of my favorite places and spaces in the
city that has been my home for four years. I am afraid of losing the faces I
see everyday and their laughter, advice, inside jokes. I am afraid of losing
the view from my rooftop deck or the perpetually sandy floors of my kitchen. I
do not want to let go of these things. Every moment of happiness and
celebration is colored with loss. I am happy to have known these people but I
can’t stop being sad to lose them. I am lucky to have experienced this life but
I am not ready to let it go. The part of it I will carry with me is such a
small piece of the whole. I am sore from trying to hold on to everything as it
runs away from me like a puppy on a lease but as of right now I have yet to let
go of anything.
