Leavings & Lasts
Aug 29th, 2007 by heidi
My life is a series of little leavings and lasts.
I won’t claim to have lived a long life just yet. In my family, where women reach 90+ more often than not, 25 is just young. Still, I’ve had more lasts than most people I know.
The last plate of Pad Thai at my favorite restaurant, its steaming perfect blend between sweet and savory, spicy and bland like a little bite of heaven in my mouth. The last slide accessioned, the last get-together with friends.
Ruth Van Reken, in her many articles and books on TCKs, describes how a TCK’s world ends when the airplane door closes. I used to agree, but now I see it differently. That is too quick, the pain too abrupt. My departures are like long, prolonged deaths. The last ride on the Forty Acres UT shuttle. The last chocolate croissant at my usual coffee shop. The former took place today, the latter several months ago. Sometimes I don’t even notice the “last” because I expect that I’ll go back to that coffee shop, to speak to the nice lady who gave me change when I wanted to buy a piece of chocolate and didn’t have enough, but it just doesn’t happen. I don’t go up that direction when the library card expires. There is hope for a return, like a coin dropped wistfully in the Trevi Fountain, but like a second visit to the glories of ancient and Renaissance Rome, that expected final chocolate croissant has failed to materialize.
Other times I am acutely aware of the last and every detail becomes sharper. The cold air conditioning blowing over me while I sit pensively by the window watching the shiny-leaved oak trees shimmering in the waves of heat. Sitting on the wall by the Co-op hoping that the mosquitos that infest the ever-present puddles there will not leave their marks on me this time, unlike many such bites in the past. A giant cicada, green translucent wings out of place against the dark green boards of the pathway, rests in the morning cool as I walk by it on my final trip to work.
In a few days, this apartment will be completely packed and cleaned, with even the most minute everyday detritus of residence, of permanence, vacuumed up and wiped away. The boxes will be gone and the beige walls will enclose an empty space, soon to become someone else’s. Their food will occupy the refrigerator and their lives will occur without any knowledge or memory of me and my presence.
Even if I return, things will never be quite the same. Friends will be gone, I may live in a different apartment, and nothing that says “home” to me right now will mean “home” to me then. Perhaps, more likely, I will never return and the insect song in the humid summer Texan heat will slowly fade from my memory just as the African stars, Californian winter and Massachusetts spring are all vanishing away. This moment will be gone and the one after it and the ones after that.
I am the product of these comings and goings, these leavings and lasts. I am the center of a web of connections moving backwards, forwards, and sideways. Sometimes it meshes with the webs of others, but sometimes the threads simply are cut short, destined to live only in my memory, slowly disappearing, like the last traces of a city’s lights viewed from 33,000 feet.
