Listmaking

Rumor has it that I'm leaving for Afghanistan in less than a month. Supposedly. I'm not sure I can imagine it's real until I actually get on that plane. I remember when I left for Honduras and the Peace Corps. I didn't mentally come to terms with it, even as my Dad honked from the alley when he picked me up to go to the airport. I think it finally sank in then when I was in the hotel in Miami, although now I feel as though I've made so many farewells that they all blend together. It occurs to me that I can divide them all by this century and the last, roughly, since at some point (9/11? before?) they stopped letting people go to the gate without a boarding pass.

Funny how my next stepping stone is connected to that moment.

Anyhow, I think I am better equipped to deal with this latest move at this stage in my life. Of course it helps that I'll have help to pack and ship and store my life (or at least the things part of the equation ... Life = things + people + action). But it's the same in many ways ... I'm saying goodbye to the relationships I've collected and am moving on toward the next phase. On to accumulate more attachments and to limit the loss of those I've left behind.

Sometimes I really feel this way, that my life is compartmentalized into phases, from several in childhood in Chicago (before I went to school, then Bell, and Parker), to Bowling Green, to Centre College (with micro-phases from winter in Ecuador, the summer of '97, London, DC in summer '98, Ecuador again in fall '98 and '99), to Chicago, then Honduras, then back to DC and graduate school, and now my work at Chemonics. This new assignment is my next phase. Rarely have these phases overlapped, except for during college, but they all feel like distinct lives that I have lived, different people that I was.

It's funny, these moments of goodbye have a sort of wistfulness, where you really need to disbelieve that it's a final Goodbye, but deep down you know it could be the last and want to have your words and thoughts be meaningful--just in case. Or perhaps, for me, it's because I know that it will never be the same. Maybe this is why there is also a sort of reckless abandon to the leave-taking, and in a way it's freeing to lose the restraint with which I walk through life on a daily basis.

And now I am trying to busy myself with sorting and listmaking. What do I want to take with me now (pack), what do I want to send to myself (ship), what do I want to put away (store), and what do I want to divest myself of (sell or donate). This distracts me from mourning the loss of Life. So my current occupation is making these lists (and at this point, I use the congnate-ive form of the word as it in Spanish), but I haven't yet written anything down.

Maybe once I do that, my leave-taking will start to become reality.

Whisper

For a whisper in a room
Brings memories of what once was
And will never now become.
Dissolute, now reimagined,
As only the past can be.

In the slanting pale light
Stopping to think is all that there is.
A cigarette burns slowly in the crowded ashtray.
The scent of loss and regret lingers,
Dancing with the illuminated dust
And smoke that floats across the room.

For a whisper in a room
Reminds us only of the screaming silence that follows,
Where the scrape of a chair
And the sigh and squeak of bedsprings
Are incongruous interruptions of a reverie.

Layers of paint peel and chip,
Their edges rough with worrying.
Colors muted by the passing of time and sunlight,
A spreading mandala stains the ceiling,
And the walls click and groan
As they stretch their old joints and taut skin.

For a whisper in a room
Sparks memories of joy,
Squeals of delight, and deep throated laughs,
Playful moments--passionate and dear--
And unending nights
That outshone the stars.