Long Goodbyes

my father's side of the family, my biological father's side, likes to make fun of their Grand Patriarch, my Grampa. among the number of things they tease him for, one of them is his penchant for long goodbyes. anytime he leaves someone's house, anytime someone leaves his, it is an issue. really, it takes at least a good ten minutes to say what needs to be said, give two rounds of hugs, say the i love yous, and then say more of what needs to be said. it tickles me to see this, the formality involved in saying goodbye, making it official: this is exactly how i am. i understand the need for closure when saying goodbye. there is a fear that my heart will flutter away without performing the proper ritual. its hard enough to part with people i love as it is; what's worse is the unrest when i part their company abruptly. you need time to prepare; you need time to come down. you need time to say goodbye. finally i've taken mine, so its time to say goodbye to some people with whom i've parted ways, and make it official.

Bill:
first, let me apologize. i know it was kind of a shit thing to do; all in one swipe, just quitting as your 'oldest friend.' i know the deep love you have for your friends, and i'm sure you're feeling burnt by me. i don't blame you. i miss you. a lot actually. but we both have changed. Nyack changed you quite a bit from the best friend you used to be to me; honestly, i didn't mind that so much. you were more or less the Bill i expected you to be most of the time, but Nyack cultivated some of your faults: your obsession and snobery over New York City; your constant grandstanding about Macs and Mac products; your addiction to cloves. i was willing to join you at least partially in these newfound enfatuations, but i can't follow them deep enough. i don't think anyone can, which is why they've become faults for you and jokes to anyone who knows you. you used to see things, i think. and you've come back from Nyack a little more blind. by what, and to what, i can't put my finger on. i know i'm a little more blind now too.

for a long time i considered you the single person who understood me the way no one else ever would. sometimes it seemed we were inside of each other's heads. sometimes it seemed we were two halves a person. i liked that; i was proud of that. i wish we still had that, but we don't any more. i've changed a lot too. thing is, i think of you sometimes as being so much like me in certain ways that i can't handle it, and here's where we come to my main problem.

you are extremely talented. you have loads and loads of raw talent, you have an angularity of wit, an abundance of intellect and you don't use it. you are allowing it to stagnate. honestly, i understand how it is, i empathize. because its me too. i have talent too, talent that just showed up, and i didn't have to do anything to get it. built in tools to make things, to be creative. maybe you aren't confident enough in your gifts to have the revelation that if you don't use them then you deserve to be robbed of them. i know you have done a lot of work for Mosaic and other christian media, and that you probably feel that what i have to say, what i have been saying, is unfair. i've always been disappointed that you felt called to that; i never thought it was your calling. sure, church should be cool, people should want to go, and it should be beautiful and earthshaking when they do. maybe its because i know my gifts are not called by God for that use that i am frustrated that yours are. i struggled with the meaning of art for awhile, its use, how God could use it, and where my vocation and my duty to God intersect. i discovered that they don't. to be an artist 'for God,' is a cop out. i would be an artist anyway, i can't make it count doubly as my devotion to God as well. God doesn't call everyone into a life of career-service, and even if he did, it would be no way around the devotion that God wants from everyone. it is why the sacrifice of Cain was not accepted.

at any rate, these are conclusions i've come to for myself. i wish they were yours too. i don't know if your call is genuine or not, but either way i'll still be wishing that you were motivated to create, to be an artist, to use your talents to make things. we could have made such beautiful things. we never did. i resent you for that.

Jeff:
you're a fucking asshole. i know its not that you didn't have any time to hang out with your friends this summer, and the couple years or so before that; its just that you didn't have time for the single ones, the ones who haven't started a family yet, the ones whose girlfriends you didn't like because they were too young or shy, the ones who don't go to the church your dad pastors, the ones who actually would make creative demands on you, the ones you think are a little too uncouth, unpolished, unshaven for polite company. though i'm sure if i grew up with perfect grades, a perfect family and a perfect life, few things would be good enough for me too.

i feel a little bad for being so harsh. but at the same time i don't know that any of it is inaccurate or undeserved. i have much to be thankful for from you. you were there for some major milestones in my life, and much of who i am i owe to you and your influence. the bands i like, the movies i've seen, the books i've read: almost all of them have come with your recommendation. there is no doubt you knew what you were talking about.

i think i also want to thank you for being there for me during my crisis of faith, and for inviting me over to your house for those awkward dinners with your folks, and for hanging out with me in general. don't think i didn't know how awkward i was most of the time: i was completely aware. it took me awhile to develop my own personality and actually inhabit it around you and eventually i figured it out. and we've been growing apart ever since. not to mention you did what every married person does once they say "i do." sometimes i wonder how often you venture out of the cocoon of that existence, or whether or not you realize that it is what you are in. chances are you realize completely and are in love with every minute of it. God, that makes me sick.

you must be thinking of having kids now with Janine, now that you've got your house and your grown up job. i was looking forward to being an unofficial uncle to them. i'm not seeing that in my future anymore, and, again, like with Bill, what frustrates me the most about what i see in your future is the absolute fumbling of your talent. i can't imagine being as good at anything as you are at music and not wringing out all i could from it. i can't imagine not taking it and running as far as i could with it, as far away from anything that could ever stop me or get in my way. you could have done it. maybe you still can, but something tells me you made an exchange in there somewhere, and whoever you did the deal with swindled you out of your motivation too. i hope its worth it, because (not that you care) it will always be a disappointment to me.

i know, it sounds funny that i should be so critical of you; me, this awkward, little brother of a kid. you were always a better friend to me than i was to you.......in both senses of the phrase, now that i've come to writing it. but still. you should've called. you could have written.

have a nice life, i guess. and say 'hi' to janine for me.

Sarah:
Goddamn...i don't know how much more saying goodbye i can handle. just when its getting tough, i get to you and you make it tougher. thats kind of what you do anyway though, isn't it? things always have to get difficult with you before you can bring them back to some normal, rational, reasonable level.

ah, i'm going to stop myself here. Jeff deserves all the shots i took at him, but i'm not writing this goodbye to offend you. i'm going to try to lay off the sarcasm as much as possible, and swallow my desire to really let you fucking have it in the interest of clarity, something we never had in our 'friendship,' often by design. i owe at least that much to the formality of goodbyes.

took me six years to fully understand the subtleties of our relationship which ultimately served to undermine it. don't think you got away with it all unobserved...you're terrible at hiding things. the vehement denials usually give it away. and the feigned ignorance. the feigned ignorance thing kind of makes me smile...that was always your bait...pretending not to understand something just to lure me out, and then completely ripping me to shreds with my own words. pretty clever. i wonder if you do that with tom? anyways, now that i think about it, i should try and use it in an argument some time.

at any rate, we're not friends anymore, and after six years of fake friendship and six months of real not talking to each other, i've managed to piece a lot of things together. instinctually, i knew it all along. i just didn't know how to make it make sense.

this was you and me:
i almost want to say i never had a chance with you, romantically. but what that really means is that at some point in time you decided it would never happen. it was a decision you made, and you made it in spite of how i made you feel and how you sort of felt about me. i'm more clear on the "how i made you feel" part, and at the time, i think you were too. maybe you knew it was fake, and you knew you were using me, because the way i looked at you made you feel beautiful, and the way i treated you made you feel wanted. it came so easy, so cheap: you didn't have to do anything, really, except keep me where i was. i was an open valve inflating your self esteem. i am learning this about women, about how they massage their own egos like this. men do it too, by having sex. women do it by not having sex. women do it by not even kissing. i never kissed you. i wanted to. you knew it. it made you feel attractive, and that's why you kept me around. i was kind of your dog. which i think is where we come to why you decided that you and i would never happen: it killed any respect you could have had for me. you still have none for me, even to this day (and fuck you for that). you could never love me because you had no respect for me.

that makes this part, the "how you felt about me" part a bit more clear now, i guess. you were not unattracted to me, because i am an attractive guy. that isn't enough for you though. for some girls it is; it is enough to make them want to bear my children and do unmentionable things with me. you liked me as a person too, somewhat. you ripped on me for being too dorky. but i admit that part of me, and its never gonna go anywhere, and there are some things about me that offset my dorkiness: i can draw, and you loved to have me draw for you. and i was a nice guy, and intelligent, and a good hang, i like to think. that really isn't enough for you either though. that's ok, some girls aren't into that.

what i don't understand is how it was almost enough for you. how it was so close to being enough and never was. you genuinely did return at least a part of what i felt for you. i know you did. tell yourself you didn't, tell whoever you need to that you didn't, but don't tell me that. i know you did. there are too many moments, too many words between us and you cannot deny what they add up to.

i can forgive you with toying around with me. i can forgive you for all of the friendly "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" and every ounce of their intended ambiguity, every particle of their ambiguity burying them in my heart. i can forgive you for the decisions you made in the face of that ambiguity which pried out every last one of those "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" to expose them as a collection of my shame and stupidity. the shame and stupidity were my fault.

i can't forgive you for the amount of real affection, however small, you had for me that you hid away. if you couldn't guess, this is what has always made me resent you. the fact that i know it is there, and you trapped it, choked it.

i am guilty of using you too, though. i'm not a perfect martyr here. i liked that a hot girl wanted to hang out with me. i used you to inflate my ego when i could; sometimes it backfired. sometimes the only way i could get it to work was to just be a good guy that you'd say nice things about. i did a lot of things to get you to feed my ego. flowers when your dad died, showing up at the wake. i wanted to flatter you, but mostly i wanted to know what a good guy i was. that's pretty horrible, huh? how did i ever get this insecure? ah well.

i don't know. i don't know how to end this one.

we tried being friends for awhile, but you were convinced that we couldn't be, that it was all fake. that hurt a lot: i'm not sure if it was because it was true or because it was the latest in a string of rejections from you. you called it out though: we were still using each other, under a facade of best intentions, under the alias of a real friendship. and it wasn't right; and you were married now, and there is no more room for ambiguity.

i tried to tell you that a long time ago; you said: "it will still be the same."

if i got nothing else out of knowing you, i at least get to be right.

but for the record, i don't think our friendship was completely artificial. i liked you as a person. you liked me. there was some undeniable, some unspeakable connection there. we never got the chance to build on it. we could have been friends. we wanted to be better friends than we were. but all we had was all we had, and after i dropped out and you got married there wasn't room for anything else. in fact, there wasn't even room for all we had between us anymore.

sarah, if you ever end up not married for whatever reason some day, look me up. i don't say "God forbid" because i am selfish, and i have visions of being a real friend of yours one day. but for now, i've got to say goodbye, and make it official. awhile ago, in june, i had a dream that you were dead. i told you about it then as an attempt to reestablish contact, but i didn't realize what it meant: that i must consider you as being out of my life for good. and so you are. that said, you will still receive a letter in the event of my death.

goodbye, friends.

love,
phil