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{the long letting-go} cassie schoon My sister and I had always been like rivers running along the same path. Our turns were nuanced, our lessons were learned in different ways, but we always carved out the same course. That is, until, we hit the divide. I was 24 when she left for Lesotho, for a Peace Corps engagement that would take her away from us for 26 months. The day she left was overcast. The clouds hung low and heavy that day, and it felt a little like being smothered when I went outside. This was the last day I would see her, the goodbye day, the last time we'd hold each other for two years. The past few weeks had been sun-soaked, warm and bright. The Colorado springtime was getting ahead of itself, as if it wanted her to see what it could do before she left for a place where it would just be slowing into winter. But for her farewell, it slumped, exhausted, under the oppressive clouds. It was as tired as I was. I'd loved her since the day she was born. Since the first moment I held her pink body, impulsive and murmuring, in my arms. We had raised one another as much as our parents had raised us. And, as we were only 18 months apart, we alternated roles of older and younger sibling, teaching each other, learning from each other. From each other's defeats and victories. The day she left, we ate lunch at some airport bistro, and I remember it tasting like nothing. The tears began to win their tug of war battle with my sense of restraint, right as the busboy cleared our mostly unfinished lunch plates. She would be in Africa in a week, after training in Philadelphia and braving a grueling 20 hour flight to Amsterdam, Dakar, Johannesbourg and finally Lesotho for her two-year Peace Corps engagement. She made me a CD and told me to listen to it after she was gone. We said our goodbyes at the gate. I couldn't stop crying- from the moment she checked in to the moment she turned to look at us once more, a touch of fear in her face like a child on the ladder to the diving board. I went home to my apartment in the city, where my parents dropped me off before heading home. I was wrought and tired and needed nothing, honestly, more than a nap. But I instead decided it was time for a walk. I still had a pack of cigs from a recent poetry reading, an evening when I had read one of my pieces for a crowd of hipster kids with creative haircuts and tight pants. I felt like I needed to be a smoker for the night. I was, at that point, not much of a smoker, so the pack was still mostly full. As I closed my apartment's door behind me, I lit up a smoke and put her CD in my player, placing the headphones on over my beloved Fidel Castro hat. Modest Mouse began playing as I walked to Broadway. The sun was still struggling to shine through the low, sickly clouds. It was uncharacteristically humid outside. Every single song is a memory. The Raveonettes evoke sage-scented moments driving my convertible to New Mexico together, stopping at diners and obscure gas stations in dusty mountain towns. Drinking truck stop coffee and talking about sex and drinking and how it sometimes, mysteriously, lead to falling in love. The Shins are long nights talking about nothing, everything, in her attic bedroom. Led Zeppelin and Tom Petty are road trips as little girls, playing games in the backseat as vast states like South Dakota passed by in the windows. The music she gave me was a preface to our parting, the story as of now when we would grow up and inevitibly different, as the paths of our respective rivers pulled ever farther from each other. Headed for different oceans. Different men, different stories, different ways of looking at life, formed from the perspective of different hemispheres of the planet. Would she grow to forget things about me? Would this void of experiences unshared come between us forever, making us irrevocably different? What songs would we learn on our separate little pushpins, half a planet apart? The thought that haunted me as I walked the streets of my city was that we would become too different. I'd stay and remain ever more American, and she would come back with stories that I could never fully understand. It was unimaginably painful to think that we could never fully relate the way we once had. Tears would threaten with each evocation of a moment we had shared. Tears came close to falling, like fish swimming close to the water's edge, coming so dangerously close to breaking the surface tension. But what I noticed was that in a city, nobody cares if you are crying on the street. I had learned this lesson before, actually. We had shared a trip to New York together a few years prior, while she was still in college. It was a week or two after we had found out that she had been date-raped by a fellow student, and while she was being admirably strong about the entire ordeal, and agreed to go on our planned trip anyway. We spent three days in the city, doing what girls in the city do, watching plays, drinking expensive coffees, simply wandering about in awe of what was around us. And when the time came to say goodbye again, this time only for a few months and only to a school a few states from where I lived, we were strong in our farewells. Though I held on perhaps a bit longer when she hugged her goodbye. Just a bit longer before I set her off on a train to Iowa. Because what I had truly wanted to do was hold on to her so hard she could never be hurt like that again. Because I wanted to go with and make things right, wreak vengeance on the boy for what he had done to my little sister. Because the thought of her hurting like that was something I could only pretend to empathize with. And I wanted to hold her so hard that I would somehow take the pain into myself and see her smile again without the small hint of hurt I'd noticed during our entire trip. And when I finally did let go, I was able to keep the tears below the surface until she was out of sight. I walked out into the dull early-morning sunlight filtering through the skyscrapers and I cried as quietly and inobtrusively as I could. Some people would glance my way but nobody seemed particularly upset or even interested in the girl they saw crying as she walked aimlessly down 8th Avenue. I briefly thought this was odd. But then I came to the hard realization that I was no longer a little girl, and while little girls crying alone in a city may illicit the attention of strangers, big girls crying barely mean much at all. There are a number of reasons a big girl walking down 8th Avenue would cry. And anyone who cared enough to notice that I was crying at all had probably been faced with plenty of good reasons to cry, maybe even that day. And those years later, when I walked down the streets of Denver, contemplating the fallout of my sister's absence in its earliest moments, I kept the tears in. And I walked along wondering if the others I noticed were also trying to keep something from making them cry. Maybe others I saw had said a goodbye, had stopped loving someone, had realized that the person they were becoming was a person they never wanted to be. I made it home as the sun was setting and the last song ended. It was an older Moby song where he samples an old black man singing a gospel song. "I'm not worried at all," he sang. I made myself some dinner, alone in my apartment, and felt somehow more alone than I ever had in my place. As I sat down to eat, I tried to imagine where she was. She hadn't even landed in Philadelphia yet for her training period. I wondered if she had spent all day trying not to cry, and wondering what the other passengers on her flight were not crying about. I wondered if she could feel it too, this feeling of a connection being pulled too taut by distance and threatening to break, its threads snapping and unraveling as the plane took her ever farther away from me. |
