writing again

I have never been too fond of goodbyes. The act of a door shutting, whether physically or symbolically, has always sent a wave of chills through my body. My stomach begins to tighten up; my eyes begin to swell. I should be ok with it by now.

Since I was eight, every summer my family would come and visit from Hawaii. For me, it was the highlight of the season. It was like a vacation for me, although I never left my own inhabitance of Kansas City, Their visit has always been synonomous with carelessness for me. There was never a worry when they came into town. Day after day was spent running around the town, making it our own. This was a departure from the daily suburban life I was surrounded with every other week throughout the year. Their visit became something to look forward to. They would shower my siblings and I with gifts from the island. Their visit was filled with trips out shopping and lunches at The Cheesecake Factory (which was quite the change from mom’s hamburger helper.) But inevitably as they came, they always had to go. And it was the annual repitition of their departure that formed into the person I am today; a person who can’t watch someone leave.

Although I knew every Summer the length of their trip, every year as we pulled into the airport, it felt more and more like a betrayal. I wondered at the age of ten why these fascinating people that I called family were able to just pack up and leave the desolate place that I was forced to call home. I learned at a young age that nothing felt worse than the inevitable return to boredom that always hit me each year as I watched my dad hand the parking stub to the teller in the booth and we made a sharp right back into reality.

For weeks afterward, I would be in a complete slump, only picturing the plane living, as my grandma forced us to do every year. That engrained image would come to symbolize my efforts to escape from my hometown, and subsequently my own childhood.

I should have known better when I watched him walk out the door that night. I should have just let him go, and fall back into the same rabbit hole of despair I had created for myself 10 years ago. I should have just cut my losses and moved on.; but I didn’t. Maybe it was the year after year of coming and going to the airport that made me strong. It could have been the fact that I had four years ago been able to finally experience the more exciting side of airport security; the side that lead to the airplane.

Whatever the reason, that night, I wasn’t scared of him leaving. Instead of sulking in the backseat of the car like I used to, I wanted to spring out of the bed and grab him by the forearm. As the door shut behind him, my only thoughts were to stop him. But similarly to my childhood, I felt helpless in my attempts. My newfound courage was overshadowed by my fear of what stopping him in his tracks would accomplish. Would he comply? Would he push me away? Would he remind me that we had just met only days before, and that he had no allegiance to my demands? Would he jump back into bed? Would we talk for two hours more? Would he slam the door and indefinitely shut me out of his life?

After contemplating these thoughts, it was far too late to act upon anything I was thinking of doing minutes before. The door was shut, and the room returned to a state of darkness that now matched my jumbling feelings.

The complete 360 of my emotions in a total of 20 minutes had thrown my heart into complete shock, leaving me nothing else to do but give into the excessive amounts of Pabst Blue Ribbon I had thrown back in an attempt to drown out my nervousness to meet him, and pass out.

And unlike waking up as a child with the reassurance that a year later I would again see my family, waking up this time I had no certainty that I would ever see him again.