When Things End

This has been a week of endings for me.  I left a job I was passionate about and I am preparing to see a city I love grow smaller in my rearview mirror.  Transitions reduce me to a trembling wreck.  I don’t even like to come to the last pages of a great book.

It’s so hard for me to let go of something that I can’t see the wonder and beauty of the life that is hurtling toward me.  I can’t enjoy the last sips of sweet lemonade because all I see is the empty glass to come.  Emily Dickenson wrote, “There is no other in the World—Mine was the only one.”  I tend to harbor similar feelings about people, places and things that I have to leave behind. 

This is the part where I am supposed to make the transition in my post and write about how I will be graceful in my grief and concentrate on how I have been fortunate.  I should be grateful that I ever experienced joy in a vocation and to reinvent myself in a new city.  I can’t do it.  I would be pretending.

What I am going to do instead is sit with this pain a little while.  I’m going to give it the space and time it needs.  I’m going to have a good cry and pitch some minor fits.  Some days I wake up so emotionally healthy that I’m all Eleanor Roosevelt and some days I wake up all Lindsey Lohan.  This is not an Eleanor kind of day. 

I’m surrounded by half-packed boxes and the detritus of the life I’ve been collecting these last five years.  What a mess.  I don’t know which this describes more aptly, the state of my house or me. 

This is the best I can say: Goodbye Wichita.  You were so lovely.