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If It Wasn’t Hard To Leave, It Wouldn’t Be Worth Staying
The delicate art of goodbye
Everything becomes beautiful when you’re about to leave
Every person and place and thing takes on new layers of meaning and beauty like varnish on an old chair. The minute you say goodbye, you lose sight of the reasons why. You remember only the good things, and the steel jaws lock like a wrench around your heart to twist it out of joint.
Even the ugly things. A lesson life teaches us again and again is that absence can boil filth into ecstasy.
“We’re over here!”
“No, we’re over here!”
A drunken battle raging between a group looking for their car. A woman the far side of forty stumbling down the sidewalk in bare feet, uncomfortable shoes tucked under her arms, made loud and sloppy by $12 beer from plastic cups.
Elderly Chinese women standing on street corners waving signs for hours on end, offering their driveways as parking spots for patrons of the nearby amusement park. And the park itself, the low glow in the low clouds like the stylish red bottom of a wildly overpriced shoe.
My best friend lives just across the street from Vancouver’s amusement park. For a long time, I lived…
