This life

What better morning to say goodbye than this one, when outside my windows the lake and sky blend together into a uniform greyness, and every leaf and needle drips beneath the slow and constant rain.

Such a melancholy setting calls for sustained hugs and red eyes, unasked unanswerable questions of what might happen between now and the next time we meet – how we might be different, what we might have missed, how much time less there will be in our lives when we come together again.

The summer has been short and long at once, leaving me with irreconcilable feelings of loss and gain that tug at my heartstrings from opposite directions – let go, hold on, let go. A deep and familiar aching for my childhood in this pristine northern wilderness collides with nostalgia and for my adult life of urban excitement, the complexity of grown up relationships, responsibility, all of what was mine now gone.

Now the independence of making and living a life made up of choices mine and mine alone seeps into the need to hold onto this one man. Now we are finding balance, sharing decisions, seeking common ground. Balancing personal integrity with compromise, learning how to love well and live long and well together. Fitting in all the right places and working on the rest of it together – and talking, and talking, and talking it all out until it is right and good. Until it is comfort and home in each other.

Soon each will rely completely on the other. This reality becomes clearer with every goodbye, slowly counting down each piece of stability we had found in our independent lives – the bookends that held it all together. Goodbye house, goodbye family, goodbye friends, goodbye cat. Goodbye to the city and goodbye to the lake. Even goodbye to our cabin tucked far in the woods, with its well-worn path, its chuckling woodstove, the only home we’ve known together, a place that recalls so many of our best memories, our most beautiful moments, our aloneness with each other and with the trees and mountains, with the stars.

Where we are going we will have so little of ourselves to bring with us we will fear becoming lost. We will need each other, in that difficult way that sometimes brings out the worst in us for fear of leaning too much and fearing the fall. We will learn together, travel and experience, taste and see – we will live together, we will really live together and tie ourselves to one another in a serious way that is difficult to undo.

I feel now, where I did not feel it before, that it is time to go. It comes with that kind of sudden urgency when here and now is slipping quickly into what is to come, and the in-between-ness of it becomes unbearable. One more goodbye may finish me. It is not the goodbyes I want now but the gone, the on our way, the we’re finally doing it. The plane lifts off, the ground quickly fades through a tiny oval window, and out there, far away, is all that was, and now it is unquestionable that yes, we are going and yes, everything that was going to change has now changed, and no, there is no going back. So make it good, and make it right, or at least make it exactly what it is going to be and don’t regret, not this choice, not this life, not anything from before or next or after.

The view outside the window tells me this. The melancholy morning. The dreary lake. The move from one season to the next. The finality of it all.

The time passing. This life.