one of my best-friends is moving to Spain. i've known this was going to happen for at least a half a year now, and as the time's ticked down i've been more or less resigned to this inevitability. now, there is no more time; she leaves tomorrow, and while i was going to spend some time with her this evening, she got caught up with packing boston and now won't get home in time for that. instead i have written a poem (a terrible one, actually, but so it goes) about this waiting for emotions to hit that has been an underlying state of mine for at least the past week and especially this afternoon. with an increasing frequency, i have felt this impending loss wash over me in subdued momentary ripples, and the very nature of them being so far from overwhelming has got me thinking about this trope we have in society of the nearly tearful goodbye. the one where instead of crying, we address our non-crying and conspire to draw ourselves back from the brink that is open emotion. there have been a few moments in the past few months when we have enacted that scene - not in any false way, of course, but still, we've consciously, explicitly diverted the conversation from the topic of leaving to abort getting choked up as soon as we begin to.
it's as if, in those moments, we (all of us who do this) hold as simultaneous truths both the sincerity and the ridiculousness of our emotions, and being unable to go further within that paradox retreat instead - but why should the non-tragic be ridiculous. it reminds me of a conversation i was having two weekends ago with another person, who i don't yet know well enough to share my emotions with (that condition is relevant to this; but not enough to go into, so you'll have to explain it to yourselves). that conversation touching upon situations far more heart-wrenching and difficult than any i have experienced, left me with an uncomfortable residual impulse to justify the hurts of my own life as lesser but still real. why do we have these impressions that lesser forms of loss or injury are less valid simply because they are less extreme? why should the loss of a friend's presence be something we are expected both to register and shrug off simply because it is not permanent or complete? why this convention of expressing our reserve instead of expressing what is there?
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