we always write about the first times and meet cutes; but we never know when the goodbye is coming
this is the last time i ever saw you: exit row, boston bus, holiday market, R train, tower elevator, fifth floor, brattle st., unknown
plane, exit row
Planes are the perfect place to meet people if you never want to see them again. Not before security: that’s where you go to say goodbye. Or near baggage claim, where you go to say hello again. When you’re on a plane, this hunk of industrialized society suspended in the stratosphere, you expect to fully disconnect from all the humanity that awaits you below. You and whatever you’re doing in the microscopic world of your middle seat.
You don’t expect to have the stranger next to you peer over your shoulder and ask what you’re up to on your computer. And you don’t expect to spend the next three hours talking to this stranger: comparing notes and life philosophies; dissecting the state of the world. I felt bad for the other person on my right, a second stranger to our little giggling airplane bubble. I don’t remember your name, but I remember glimpsing it at the flash of your laptop screensaver and trying to commit the letters to memory.
When deplaning, the swell of urgency to get off the plane disrupted any zen from being up in the air. I remember walking into the arrivals terminal, carry-on in hand, and you were standing at the bend of restaurants. You had turned back, lingered, and then wished me well. It was really nice to meet you.
bus, boston-bound
I’d taken this route so many times between two cities, I regarded it with the routine mundanity of a necessary commute. Wait in this pre-boarding line; stow luggage here; claim a row of seats there.
The surprise is the best part: to find yourself sitting next to an old friend, who had long since left the premises—and is doing just fine, thanks for asking—but you’d never wondered how they were or what they were up to. To have some miracle around the Thanksgiving holiday where both of you decided to depart on the same day at the same time to the same place. To invite someone into the regimen of a journey, and have it take on a different shape in unexpected company.
All your laugh lines were in the same place as before. There was that thing you did, where you’d always talk in the past tense. This memory and that anecdote—you were full of them, filled to the brim with tales that weren’t always your own. I think I laughed the entire time. Every pause was a transition to the next beat in the story.
holiday market, union square
You were very, very high on the list of people I never thought I would see again. This is the dangerous thing about being in New York. People frequent the same places, walk the same roads: small town, big city.
Here’s the scene: perusing festive shops at the holiday market, studying the menu at Wafels & Dinges (the stand right at the corner of the park), looking up once—and that partial moment of recognition occurred. You turned to your friends and I turned to my friends, and it was like nothing ever happened. Nobody saw anything. It never happened.
But I felt thrown into another timeline.
subway platform, R
It was the morning after my parents had mentioned you at the dinner table. They told me how you were doing (very well), asked if we had spoken recently (definitely no).
It was barely seven a.m., the last hours before the crush of rush hour. I was standing at the edge of the platform and you approached me from the left; or maybe you were standing and I entered your left periphery and you turned. I don’t remember, but I do remember being completely surprised at how nice the greeting was. As if we hadn’t been ships passing in the night all these years, nearby and never-acknowledging.
The thing that scared me was how normal it all sounded. We’d stood like that, waiting side-by-side for the train to pull in for so long; only now, to depart in opposite directions. Years of enmity can collapse if you discuss the same things you always did, as if no time had elapsed at all. We still watch the same shows; know the same people; want the same things. Every around us still talks, but we don’t. We were waiting at the same place we always did.
elevator, the tower
Doomsday loomed ahead, knowing we had to vacate the premises in the next few days. This was before we all developed a devastatingly rational fear of existing in small, cramped spaces with one another. Elevators would soon be a thing of the past.
For now, I was coming up the elevator from the concrete basement from dinner, on my way back to my dorm room. I was prepared to pack up the bits of my life I had left and compress it into cardboard boxes. At least, that’s what I told myself I still had left to do once I overcame the turbulent inertia of it all.
We made polite conversation in the elevator, as all acquaintances do in a collegiate setting through repeated exposure. Yet this, knowingly, could be the very last time we talked at all.
fifth floor, market building
I don’t know how many people were gathered there by the close of the day, but it was a small representative sliver of whoever was left with a doomed ticket. As if the colleagues remaining on the floors above were the orchestra playing on the deck of the Titanic. As if all the colleagues left in the lodge were destined for the frigid Atlantic sea, soon to be set adrift.
This, unlike all the ones before it, came with a half-certainty. Pre-apocalyptic inevitability. One day, it was free throws and sour patch kids; the next day, it would become the fall of a new Rome. The only certainty I still have is that this would be the last time I would see most-if not all-of these people as I had known them.
bar, brattle st.
We were sitting in a high-top table near the entrance. Everyone we knew was there that night. We were all everywhere, anywhere. At some point, you walked through the front door and past the table. You greeted someone else and then greeted me, then goodbye.
My friends turned to me and looked surprised; that we knew each other, that we’d even known each other for that long. I was sitting there, between annoyed and peevish, at their line of questioning. What did that say about me; about them? It taught me how little they knew about me, in reality. How they didn’t pay attention; or how I didn’t let them in to know enough.
unknowable, parking lot probably
I don’t remember this one. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I swear—(I swear it; nobody told me. I swear it on soft serve vanilla cones with sprinkles and gummy bears on the side. Pinky promise on the banana-flavored popsicles you always had in the freezer and every time I think of you in the grocery store aisles)—it wasn’t until years later when the truth was delivered to me as a correction. I said your name in passing, in present tense. And that was wrong.
You knew me best of anyone, but I didn’t know much about you at all; at least, not enough. Do all forms of doting inspire reverence, even in hindsight? I remember everything else, the trailing behind you in small sandaled steps, the getting what I pleaded for, the waiting for you in between absences. I wish I could remember this, but I didn’t know it was the last time, even when I never expected a next time.