"Eventually they all move on."

Over a two-week period in the sixth grade, three-fourths of the only two pair of identical twins in my small junior high school went away.

Brit and Drew – the girl twins – moved with their parents and older sister to a town in Oklahoma called Broken Arrow and, a week before they left, threw a party around their backyard, in-ground pool where white cupcakes with white frosting were served, each topped with a single colored gumball.

One half of the other set of twins – the boys – left exactly a week later. Sean, of Sean and Dean, died on the floorboard of his family’s minivan when it skidded into oncoming traffic on a rainy drive home from shopping in Wichita.

I remember, about four days after Sean’s funeral, walking into the kitchen where my mother stood rinsing a colander of green grapes in the sink, clutching my arms around her waist and pressing myself to her side. She turned, the faucet still running, and draped her arms over my back, letting them sway gently back and forth like windshield wipers. I was small for my age and we still fit together like mother and child; it would be almost four years before I would sprout breasts and hips and outgrow her. It felt strange then still, to burrow my wet face into a place in her sternum familiar from childhood and sob. I think that I said, “I feel like everyone’s leaving,” or if I didn’t, I remember feeling it. Not sorrow or longing; after all, I hadn’t known Brit, Drew or Sean all that well. It was a small town and so everyone knew everyone, and the girls fell into the wide circle of my slumber party circuit, but I didn’t miss them in any real way, or Sean who had only moved to our town at the beginning of the school year.  Still, I felt abandoned somehow - left out, as if Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and wherever it was that Sean had gone were essentially the same place. Away.

This feeling resurfaced and surprised me yesterday, flipping through the Chicago Reader on the train to work. “This Party’s Over” was the headline under Chicago Antisocial, a weekly column written by Liz Armstrong, a (by all observations) shallow, immature, self-obsessed woman charged with documenting her weekly escapades in the world of Chicago’s hipsters and scenesters. I read the column infrequently, finding even a two-dimensional, black and white recounting of a night in the life of the woman who once proclaimed herself “the party girl of Chicago” to be too exhausting to endure on a weekly basis. Turns out the “Party’s Over” because Ms. Armstrong is moving to Las Vegas. Well, who cares, right? Sayonara? But, no, my heart sank as I read the only paragraph written by Armstrong that’s ever struck within a block of a chord:

“Chicago’s a transient city, which makes it exciting—there’s always something or someone new. But eventually everyone you know leaves. People from small towns come to try out living in a city; people from larger cities come for a break. Eventually they all move on.”

The train stalled over the Chicago River and I thought of my friend Angie, living once five blocks from me in Boystown, living now on the Upper West Side of NYC, and of the two sets of married friends who’d defected to Colorado in the past three years, in search of space and natural beauty. I remembered startling awake from a nap on the couch one bright weekend afternoon in the stark white apartment on Aldine Ave., the words “everyone’s leaving” on my lips, days after learning that my ex-boyfriend was moving to LA with the girl he’d started dating two weeks after we broke up. <

At work I cyber-stalked that ex-boyfriend and found his band’s website and a photo of him, shaved head and a silver band around his left ring finger. I Googled other former flames to no avail, cursing all the common-named men from my past; it’s impossible to sift through all the hits associated with a name like Steve Evans or Frank Lewis. Eventually I MyStalked a guy I’d dated for just three weeks in 2003 and unfortunately slept with in his apartment above Bangkok Restaurant on Halsted just before he got back together with his ex-girlfriend. I found him single, living in New York City and having written a very funny post about school kids with rolling backpacks on his MySpace blog. I wanted to email him and tell him I’d enjoyed the post. I wanted him not to forget his apartment on Halsted Street that smelled of cigarettes and peanut sauce. I wanted him not to forget me.

J mentioned once that if “eventually everything fell apart here,” he’d probably move to Birmingham, since he’d been spending so much time there anyway.

“If everything fell apart?” I’d asked.

“Yeah, with work or whatever,” he’d said.

“Well, what about me?” I’d asked.

“For you, I’d stay.”

I startled awake in bed last night, a tingle of panic in my chest, my jaw sore from clenching, the words “don’t leave” caught in the back of my throat. It took a split second for my conscious mind to catch up and I rolled to his side of the bed, knowing that it was empty because I’d asked him to leave, knowing that my life will not be how I imagined it would be, knowing that J might one day be a Google search and I’ll be thankful for the unusual last name that I once imagined hyphenated behind mine. I gripped the fat pillow he used to sleep on and wanted to stop the rotation of the earth. I wanted to clutch my arms around the sturdiest part of him and feel his hands on my back and his whiskers on my cheek, the two of us fitting together how we used to before I think I outgrew him.

Comments

[EEK]

That's so sad, and so nicely written. My best friend is due to have a baby at the end of this month, and moved to the southside of the city not long ago to buy a larger place. She'll still technically live in the same city, but I know we won't get to see each other or talk nearly as often. Sometimes life's inexorable march forward really sucks.

[TJ]

A lovely, well-crafted post, the last sentence especially. I'd offer some palliative like "these things take time" but you seem smart enough to realize that.

[Alison]

You write so beautifully.

[deezee]

This is just brilliant writing, so real and powerful and everything. I come here often looking for new pieces by you, always wanting more and more...

[deezee]

uh, my word confirmation for the previous comment was "A 8 Z P N S" - imagine that on a personalized license plate. I had to laugh (nothing like breaking the mood of an emotional post.)

[Killer]

As a person who moves for my job every few months, it seems all my friends are temporary and fleeting. I have a group of friends that I keep in touch with that are scattered all over the place. I feel your pain.

[s@bd]

sad and beautiful - thanks for sharing.

[V-Grrrl]

Living as an expat, the connections are very fleeting. I hold my heart in reserve and know that even when I move back to America, nothing will be the same. My friends will have moved on even as they stayed in place.

[citywendy]

Also an infrequent reader of Armstrong's column, I, too, read that final column and was struck by the exact same section.
This is a beautiful post.

[wordgirl]

This is just a wonderful, wonderful post. It's funny how one thing...a word a sentence a picture brings back such poignant times from our past. Everyone eventually leaves. It's one of life's biggest truths.

[Margaret]

sad and beautiful