I grew up moving around a lot. By the time I graduated high school, I had lived in six different countries on four separate continents and had crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over half a dozen times each.
This type of upbringing was formative in all sorts of ways. For one thing, I learned to say goodbye early and often. When we were getting to leave Austria for southern Africa shortly before my ninth birthday, I took a long walk by myself in the woods near our house, whispering my farewells to particular beech trees. I roll my eyes now at the sentimentality of it, but it’s true. The day we left Burma, I had to reluctantly disentangle myself from our hysterical housekeeper, who had grown fond of my family and was distraught when we announced our departure. The night before we left Indonesia for the U.S., I drank myself into a blubbering stupor at the thought of leaving a friend for whom I’d nurtured an unrequited crush for two years.
The problem with saying goodbye so frequently, beyond the fact that it hurts like hell, is that it leaves a lot of loose ends, and doesn’t really foster relationships that endure over time and distance. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a defense mechanism that keeps one from pining for a person or a place one will most likely never see again, and to this day I’m awful about maintaining long distance friendships. I don’t regret the way I spent my childhood, but as with any sort of upbringing, there were some downsides, the major one being a sense of constant interruption and upheaval, of life being lived in fits and starts.
Saying goodbye got harder as I grew older. In Indonesia I was a teenager, which meant that I was more independent and more intentional about the relationships I formed. High school life there was not without its challenges – I was socially awkward, I got picked on, my grades were lousy – but it was there that I first experienced real acceptance within a community of friends, which became, and still is, immensely important to me. When my family’s tour in Indonesia was cut short with very little warning, leaving that circle of friends was extremely painful.
I was delighted when I found that several of the people I had developed such strong connections with in Indonesia had chosen to attend college in the Washington, D.C. area, where my father had been transferred. The critical mass of ex-Jarkata-ites acted as a lodestone for farther-flung friends, drawing them to D.C. for Thanksgivings and other special occasions. I spent a lot of time in Georgetown during those four years, relishing what I solipsistically chose to interpret as a reprieve of sorts, as some form of compensation for having been wrenched away from people and a place that I had grown so fond of.
But reprieves, by definition, are temporary. Eventually my friends graduated and left, scattering to all parts of the globe like birds. I felt hurt and abandoned. I saw my friends as moving on to bigger and better and more exciting things, in a sense continuing the life that I had shared with them briefly in Indonesia, while I regarded myself as left behind, stuck in the banal wasteland of suburban Maryland. I found myself expending a lot mental energy on “what if” games. What if I never had to come back to the U.S., but had been able to finish high school in Indonesia with my friends? What if I had taken a year off to work in Bali with R__ after graduation? What if I’d had the grades and the means to go to Georgetown? What if I’d gone on that train trip to Bandung with J__ and E__ back in 1989? What if I’d gone with Mike to study in Germany for a couple of years?
Over time, these “what if” exercises ossified into a fictional parallel history of my life, a speculative memoir, if you will. Kristie talks about the power of the stories we construct about ourselves, the stories we piece together to give our lives a sense of cohesion and narrative arc, and I concocted some pretty absurd tales about the “what if” version of myself. This alternate version of me excelled in school, pursued career opportunities with ambitious determination, traveled often, had a lot of money, wore better clothes, and lived in some funky little bohemian corner of a major city. Alternate Me spent summers working for NGO’s in the developing world and regularly returned to Indonesia for reunions with his old friends. Alternate Me was confident, witty, handsome, kind, athletic, and always had fresh, minty breath. Alternate Me contrasted sharply with Actual Me, who got C’s in science courses, waited tables at a ratty little restaurant in the ‘burbs, and spent Friday nights in some guy’s basement doing tequila shots while watching B-movies.
Even when my life began to take on more shape and substance – through love, career, faith, marriage, new friendships, new and healthier ideas of community – the alternate history version of me continued to occupy space in my subconscious. For the most part he remained in the background, unnoticed, but occasionally I’d check in on him to find that he was working for the State Department, or living in Tashkent, or married to the girl I’d wanted to ask to the prom but could never work up the nerve. He seemed to be enjoying life, and was always far better with money and far more deft in his relationships than I.
I came face to face with this alternate version of myself recently during a business trip to Seattle. Some the friends to whom I’d felt closest in high school and college settled in the Pacific Northwest, and I looked forward to the opportunity to see them after so long. I wanted to recapture the sense of affection and belonging that I’d been so keenly missing these past years. I wanted to splice together the threads of my life that were severed when I moved to the United States. I wanted to finally merge the two versions of myself, the actual and the aspirational. Most of all, I wanted to impress my friends with the person I’d become, to have them validate the choices I’d made, to accept me for who I am now, not who I was 20 years ago.
You can probably imagine how things went. My friend met me at the airport. We met up with another friend for drinks and dinner at a trendy downtown restaurant. We visited another friend who had just had her first baby. Over the course of the next couple of days we walked to Pike Place, went to the top of the Space Needle, and rode the Bainbridge Island Ferry. We reminisced about old times and caught each other up on where our lives had taken us over the past 12 years. I visited their gorgeous houses, met their beautiful children, shook hands with their handsome husbands. My old friends were friendly and hospitable. They told me I hadn’t changed a bit, meaning it of course as a compliment, although it was the last thing I wanted to hear. We embraced, and promised to keep in touch, and then we said goodbye.
My friends seemed happy on the whole. I detected the marks of time and sadness in their eyes and in their smiles, and wondered if those same marks showed on my face. At certain points it seemed as if all the years and miles that had separated us rolled back, and I could see us as we had been long ago. But for the most part I was acutely conscious of a gulf between us, wider than the breadth of the continent that separates the east coast from the west. When you’re young it’s easier to overlook such divides, to not let them get in the way of intimacy. As you get older and become more guarded, your armor weighs you down and they're harder to get across. Or perhaps that’s just me.
The evening before I left Seattle I took a long walk along the waterfront in the rain. I thought about the day before, when I had told J__ that one of my few regrets in life was that I had never taken her up on her invitation to go to Bandung with her and E__ that June of 1989. It was a cheap shot: I meant to move her, to remind her of the connection we had shared. Instead she stared at me blankly, frowned, and after a moment’s reflection said that she vaguely recalled that trip, and how weird was it that I even remembered that, because she and E__ hadn’t gotten along for years. And thus my stroll down Memory Lane came to an abrupt dead-end.
My wife the archivist frequently invokes the historian's maxim that “the past is a foreign country.” This applies to one’s personal past as well as the history of a people or a nation. You might love that country, you might spend immense amounts of time studying it, you might visit it as often as possible, but ultimately you remain a tourist and it remains as fundamentally incomprehensible as it ever was. You can’t live there; eventually you have return to your regular life. And there is no closure, not really. No goodbye is ever good enough, no reunion is as satisfying as you would like it to be. In the end it’s not about you, anyway, it’s about how you act toward the people in your life right now.
On the long, dark plane ride back to Baltimore I composed a thank-you note for my friend, the one that picked me up at the airport, the one that I always felt closest to, the one that I’ve missed the most over the years. In it I thanked her for being a generous host and a stellar tour guide to Seattle, for always having been kind to me, and for being the person that she is. When I got home I copied the longhand words into an e-mail and sent it to her. It was, I think, the best goodbye I’ve ever articulated, and it was addressed just as much to that alternate version of myself as it was to her.
I don’t expect a reply from either of them.
