No one has it as good as I have had it. I knew this would happen. This leaving. This departure. The inevitable longing for things to remain as they are, but remain they cannot. Love is not fleeting, some of the time, though its expression is the earth’s shifting tectonic plates accelerated, evaporating any sense of steadiness or safety. This airplane has reached cruising altitude. I’m always thinking about love on airplanes. My friends call me the poet laureate of love, an honor and a burden. My love is not the fireworks, but the match. This poem is cliché and I don’t care. The Alaska Airlines app tells me there are 43 minutes left in this flight and that is not enough to find the right words. As much as I don’t want to say goodbye, I know I have to. I want to say the thing about how this isn’t goodbye but the honest truth is that in some way it is. I want to tell you how big the canyon will be in my heart after this. You are a familiar presence, a door I’m never afraid to knock on. I’m about to cry on this airplane thinking about how I won’t be able to sit in your office anymore. Someday, everyone must leave everyone. I’m not going to the moon, I say, laughing. It feels like a lie and the moon has never been so far away. The therapist says that the laughter is the protector inside me trying to shield me, and that I need to let the protector take a step back so that I might be seen. What I don’t want to tell anyone is that I love them, but I need to be witnessed. What I’m going to have to tell everyone, and you, eventually, is that I love them, and you. No one has it as good as I have had it. You picked the poet laureate of love for a friend and so I present to you my favorite, terrifying kind of gift: the friendship poem. I won’t call it a goodbye poem. Not even a gratitude poem. (Though it may be both of those things.) A departure means an arrival. Here’s the hope. I knew I’d find it. In poetry, this is called the turn. The part of the poem where the sadness doesn’t end but is transformed. I mean this is not the end, even if it is a kind of goodbye. I believe in the future. I believe in us. I believe, most of all, in love. The airplane has landed and so it is time to pick up the baggage, take only the essentials with us, and carry on into the future. I am sure it will be just as beautiful as what we know now.
Longing– December 2023
This month’s theme is inspired by the yearning to memories, humans and places which we experience emotionally and struggle perhaps expression them.
