On Endings

A Story by nc

A non-fiction essay about leaving, goodbyes, home, and what it means to be an exile (Andre Aciman's word, not mine).

1. I wrote to my friend Charlie asking him about nostalgia, a subject we’d discussed often over the course of the last two years. “The hardships of the present and the uncertainty of the future are overwhelmed by the tranquil certainty and distilled beauty of the past, and I find myself trying to mold what I can change into the image of what's gone. My next girlfriend is going to look like the last, and we're going to do everything exactly as I did with her, and my new friends will have the same interests as those gone, and they'll laugh at all the jokes I've already made. It robs me of any lust for adventure because I'm imbued with this sense that anything that will ever be great in my life has already happened.”

2. When I look at photographs I am always swept up in undiluted longing. The aesthetic qualities of the picture do matter (I’ve found it more difficult to be nostalgic for an unattractive moment than an attractive one), but unless the picture is unbearably unpleasant, nostalgia finds a way to kick the door in, making no attempt at subtlety or gentleness.

3. It’s the summer of last year, and I’m standing in the doorway of the room I grew up in. My backpack is on and my suitcase has already been taken downstairs. The clutter that crowded my desk for the last two weeks has been organized-- papers have been disposed of, pens and pencils are back in their holders, the notes that I’d written to myself two years ago have been pinned up again. My favorite one is back in its place, a list I wrote in the frantic rush of the days directly preceding the move, trying to squeeze in my last goodbyes the best way I knew how:

1. Badminton with Vir

2. Dinner with Joe and Alex

3. Sunday with Arnav

4. This isn’t my first visit back to India, it’s my third, but I am more completely overcome by sadness now than when I left this room for good. The questions come: why am I feeling this now? Why hasn’t the pain gone away? Where has it been hiding all this time?

5. Paula Cole said, “music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface,” and I cannot disagree, but she continues, “getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.” This, I have not yet found true.

6. There have been five major endings in my life, each one the year after the next, each one with its own character, each one with its own brand of pain. I’m writing this essay because these endings profoundly reshaped my view of life, because I think about them more than anything else, because in a lot of ways we have yet to come to terms.

7. Occasionally I feel as if I am in the midst of a desperate search for something"a concept I haven’t yet met. What, then, am I seeking? To be honest, sometimes I’m not sure if there is anything there at all-- can I define my life by those transitory moments of yearning? Can you be searching for something that has already happened? “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, and maybe the tired are the ones that have recognized the futility of their searches, maybe the tired are the wise. I’ve been tired before.

8. The first ending was a switch of schools-- it was the easiest, few connections were severed. If my life were a circuit, then this was an oddly painful rewiring. I was taught here about the anticipated ending. If, by some logistical happening, an ending is contemplated before its occurrence, it becomes an ‘anticipated ending’; these come with their own baggage. I knew I was moving schools for months before I told my friends, and from the moment of that knowledge on, every interaction became an ending. Every handshake, every hug, every conversation, every look--everything, becomes a ‘last.’ A last visit to the old stomping ground, a last walk through the market, a last look at my best friends before things are different. Time can be spent with people, but no matter what, from the moment impending change becomes reality, you are always leaving. There is a quiet awareness of the ending, tucked away behind your eyes. The same way a suitcase is packed and room is fundamentally changed, you are too.

9. In experiencing these lasts alone is a kind of solitary pride. There is some nobility in knowing you are bearing pain and keeping others from it, even if it’s just the pain of knowing. But when you tell a friend, then they have lasts too, then they can share your pain.

10. After enough endings there arises a fear of lasts. I’m dreading the twelfth of December this year because it will be the last time the date is the same two-digit number in my lifetime (12/12/12). I’m haunted by the permanence of this phenomenon.

11. I remember moving to America on August 19^th, 2009. Three years, one month, and nineteen days ago. Or one thousand one hundred and forty six days ago. I remember that first night, sitting on my bed in a morosely empty house, the house I was born in but never lived in, wondering how I’d ended up back here. The aptly titled ‘Far From Home’ played in my ears:

I've got a bad  taste in me/ It's like I've been robbed/ of something I once was/ in my childhood memories

I wrote that night for the first time. In an online journal, in a stupid, tearful frenzy, in young, naïve prose, trying to find (create?) some dignity, I wrote, “I have finally arrived 'home', if you can call it that. Delhi is still my home, and it hurts deeply when i think about it, yet i cannot stop thinking about it. i cannot stop thinking about my friends either, and i keep wondering what they're doing, i feel like i have stepped out of their lives for good.” Each lower case I annoys me now, like a pin prick. The song continued:

All I have is words/ to which I’m a slave/ I scribble them down/ hoping they’ll save/ me but I’m lost/ I’m so lost.

12. At a conference in government and politics at UC Berkeley, my team leader told the crowd he had a good quote from a bad movie for us: “You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.” It’s been four hundred and sixty one days since then. I told my roommate at boarding school the quote on our second last day of senior year; he mentioned it the next morning at Quaker meeting. It hurts that for the rest of my life I will know these memories less and less.

13. There is trauma, and then there are the little things that cause sadness, pain, longing. I call them ‘everyday traumas,’ even though they aren’t truly every day. Moving out of a room is one-- putting things in boxes, changing furniture around, or maybe taking it out altogether"it’s all change. Every room has memories that come with it, events that happened in it, lives that were somehow shaped by it-- every room is mortal. It is awareness of these everyday traumas that makes the past seem so charming and the future so bleak.

14. Almost exactly one year ago, on September 29^th (the night before my birthday), while reminiscing about the year before that, I worriedly wrote in my journal “I remember this night one year ago…this anticipation happens only once a year. I will experience this less than one hundred times over the course of my life.” I still sometimes feel a jolt of fear when confronted by any sort of rarity.

15. One hundred and fifty nine days ago my Theory of Knowledge teacher began his class with “Seniors, today is the last first day of the month you’ll have here at GS.” He smiled kindly after he said that. That night I frantically wrote his words down in my journal, desperate to preserve my ‘last first day.’ Later that month I began an entry with “Tomorrow is the first day of my last week of high school.”

16. This summer in India I spoke to a girl I’d fallen out with almost three years ago. At a party, late, I found her sitting next to me. In a telling moment of awkwardness, each one of us unable to begin the conversation, we pulled out our own cigarettes (I was holding some for a friend, but couldn’t see another way out of the discomfort). She got to the lighter on the floor before I did, so I leaned forward for her to light me; she said, “that’s usually the guy’s move,” and I replied, “you know me better than that.” An hour into our reconciliation I realized I had to leave, and I stood up to say goodbye. She said quietly, “that’s your thing isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Leaving.”

17. The most often repeated sentiment in my journal is one of disbelief at the passing of time: “I can’t believe this day has come,” or “my life is flying by.” It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to live in oblivion.

18. “To those who asked, I said I went back to touch and breathe the past again, to walk in shoes I hadn’t worn in years….the walk down Memory Lane, the visit to the old house…the visit to the old temple…the old school, the old haunts….And then, of course, the tears, the final reckoning, the big themes: the return of the native, the romance of the past, the redemption of time.” Wrote André Aciman in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. This is not a rare occurrence-- the compulsion to revisit, to relive, has troubled humanity since its beginnings. Nostalgia makes for difficult and reckless moments. Aciman continues “All of it followed by predictable letdowns: the streets always much narrower than before, buildings grown smaller with time…the city dirty, in ruins.”

19. Endings, then, are a dangerous proposition; “nostalgia is a seductive liar,” as the diplomat George Ball put it. “And so I'm overwhelmed by a nostalgia for a time that never existed” wrote Charlie.

20. “There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks…” wrote David Benioff. I remember standing on the porch of my dorm, on a breezy Sunday evening towards the end of senior year, with one of my best friends"arms crossed on the railing, looking out on the most central part of campus, Red Square. A group of people was playing foursquare on the left edge of the bricks, chattering and exclaiming in whispers, uncharacteristically quiet; the breeze floated music toward me from the other side of the Red Square where people sat on the ground and in chairs, listening to students sing and play instruments in front of them. I’d had a storybook Sunday with my friends, the weather had been unbearably good, and the day was winding down. In the moment, chatting with Charlie, I struggled to comprehend what I was experiencing. I was overwhelmed by a calm I’d never felt before"peace, happiness, sadness, satisfaction. We discussed the day, the scene, our ineffable feeling. Somehow my school, life, had attained the unattainable. I had gone in with an ideal, but it had been a romantic standard, a “delusional standard” as Charlie said, one that wasn’t reachable, that wasn’t supposed to be reachable. But that evening it was reached and surpassed, and in those moments I was wholly aware, intensely happy, oddly nostalgic, and genuinely thankful. Life surprised me. Benioff continues, “Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.”

21. Ernest Hemingway said “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

22. I learnt to bleed on May 5^th, 2010, eight hundred and seventy two days ago, when I decided to keep a journal. Unwittingly, I quieted my greatest fear-- forgetting. I put into words the people and places and events that mattered to me, I marked the days that were somehow significant; it has not changed the endings, and it has not changed my sense of endings, but there is peace in it. Endings can be put into writing, and left there, revisited whenever they need to be. They are more beautiful now than ever.

23. Like ‘Far from Home,’ the song ‘Audience of One’ is bound tightly to my first year living here, to my most difficult moments and fatigued feelings; We raced the sunset and we almost won, sings Tim McIllrath. The sunset, like few other occurrences, is symbolic of both beginnings and endings, of permanence and transience"its beauty only lasts so long, but it has been there since the beginning, and it will be there tomorrow, the day after that, and for the rest of the our lives. There is a game on the iPhone, Tiny Wings, in which you play an endearingly rotund little bird attempting to venture as far as possible from its nest before the sun sets. If you falter, and fall behind the sunset, and cannot make up for lost ground quickly enough, the game ends. But if you can beat the sunset, the only limit on your score is your ability to navigate the changing landscapes of the game. Clarity can be found in surprising places, desolation is universal, and everyone spends some time in their lives racing the sunset.

24. Someone told me once that a short story I wrote “felt like an ending,” and it was the best compliment I have ever received. Fitzgerald might agree with my aging theory that the ones that end up tired are the ones that gave up early, those that saw an ending coming. But maybe not, because I recognize endings now, and I’m not tired anymore. Every ending has its own shape, its own texture, its own contours to explore. And an anticipated ending might even promise the end of some small suffering; today while walking back from class I watched the sky; the wisp of a cloud that had stood against the breeze so long was on a languorous move, casting lingering shadows along warm lawns and low hedges, disappearing lazily moment by moment.