The Language of Good-Bye
Note: This is a combination book review and journal entry, tweaked a bit from something I'd originally written for a private online diary over the summer. Nacwolin (http://nacwolin.vox.com) had mentioned that I should submit it a review of this book to Associated Content, and that got me digging through my archives and thinking about this piece.
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My friend Mike and I had off one Friday last summer, so we decided to meet Lee, a man I’d recently begun dating, downtown for happy hour. This was something Mike and I used to do often, take days off together and haunt Fell’s Point. Or maybe we were ghost-hunting rather than actually doing the haunting ourselves, since we were seeking out glimpses of our early 20’s in the taverns and waterfront walkways.
It was too hot for the yard work I’d planned, so I got downtown before either of them and treated myself to some me time in the bookstore. I wasn’t there ten minutes before I saw it sitting on the shelf.
The Language of Goodbye.
I didn’t buy it because of the title, or the synopsis on the jacket, or because someone had recommended it to me. I don’t usually buy books in hardback these days – I wait for paperback or borrow them from someone else. But I had to have this one, because the author had been one of my favorite college writing instructors.
Maribeth Fischer taught an essay writing class I took in my senior year. I was 22. There was a 30-something guy in the class, a writer with hair that looked like a pompadour and who was just getting started with a band. Back then, smoking wasn’t as taboo as it is now, and after class we could often be found puffing on Marlboro Lights and trying to look thoughtful and literary.
Maribeth often caught up with us after class. She didn’t smoke, but she’d stand there and talk to us while we did. She was young for a professor, much younger than I am now. We’d talk about writing and creativity in general, and I was young enough that I believed my whole life would be made up of words woven together to build stories and dreams.
Ten years had passed since that class. Shortly before browsing through the bookstore and coming across Maribeth’s book, I’d happened to be having a few beers with a friend one evening in a Fell’s Point Irish pub when a band had taken the stage. Even as I’d lost myself in the music, I’d been struck by the fact that the tall, lanky singer seemed somehow familiar to me. It took another show or two for me to figure out that he was the guy from that creative writing class, with a cowboy hat resting where the Elvis do had once been.
And now, sitting with Maribeth’s book in my hand at a time when my whole world was changing, it seemed like forces were somehow realigning to kick me in the ass for being the only one NOT to do something with my dreams.
My marriage of ten years had ended. I was dissatisfied with the daily drudge that was my day job, learning to live alone, and questioning just about every assumption I’d made about myself so far in my thirtysomething years. There could have been no book more telling for me then than “Language.”
The book is amazing, and I know this is partly because it speaks so eloquently and truthfully to what I am and how I feel and the way I approach life now. There is something both gripping and haunting about it, a beautiful kick in the gut that leaves me almost sick to my stomach.
I’m not sure I would have fully appreciated this book a year ago. I would have enjoyed it for the story and for the fact that it was written by someone who had influenced my own writing, but the reality within the pages would have escaped me. I would have been more caught up in the fact that the main characters, while real and raw, make mistakes and skate moral edges that chafe when your experiences with love have been more selfish and lasting.
It talks about how once you have felt loss – real loss - you approach every new relationship in your life with one part of you already out the door; already mourning the loss of that new relationship even if there is no reason to suspect it will ever end. You question not just the feelings and intentions of others, but also yourself. It is as if your heart thinks that if it bleeds a little at a time, it will somehow hurt less than the crushing final blow you’ve already been through. Instead, you just end up stretching out the pain, and perhaps for something that won’t even happen. But we humans are too guarded once our walls have been cracked to listen to that rationality.
I had approached my evolving relationship with Lee that way. We had grown, in spite of ourselves, into something more than two people who liked spending time together. We had admitted that we were “together” in that way that excludes seeing others. We had comforted each other and laughed at each other’s childhood stories long into the night. We had hit that stage where we talked during the day and realized that we didn’t want to hang up because we missed each other, living on opposite work schedules as we did.
I had recently gone to a family cookout with him. We ate steamed crabs at his cousin’s little waterfront house and his aunt and four cousins, all women my age, chattered at me as my own family would, and we cursed and laughed and told stories and talked about hillbillies and rednecks and there were moments I felt like I was on my own mother’s porch. I met his daughter, who was shy with me at first, but when all the other kids were clamoring over me and giving me hugs and insisting that I watch them mess up their faces with a birthday cake, she said “I want to hug her too, Daddy,” and he got the biggest grin on his face and said “Well go ahead then, sweetheart.”
And when I watched him with her, I wanted to run away as fast as I could and be alone by the water and weep. The tenderness in his blue eyes was so amazing, the invisible thread between him and this tiny mirror image of him breathtaking. I had glimpsed fleeting, timid moments of that tenderness in our interactions, and seeing it soar unrestrained in a more guaranteed and interwoven relationship, one where the ties that bind are made of love and family and blood and history, made me both marvel at its beauty and tremble at the tenuousness of all that is new and growing.
I knew then that it would hurt to lose him. He had become precious to me, and for some reason just sitting with his family and having all of them make me feel so at home and watching him with his little girl had made that fact clearer than a punch in the gut. We were letting each other into the most precious parts of our worlds, the family, friends and daydreams we guarded carefully from passing acquaintances and casual dates.
When you start to let someone in, and to get let in yourself, you are standing on a threshold. What if you like it there, and you get shoved away? What if your own space becomes harder to breathe in when you let someone curl up beside you? What if, like closing time in a bar, you’re heading towards “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here?” What if you are doing nothing more than guaranteeing that you’ll have to learn to live without again?
I had no reason to think of this. I never would have tried to breathe in potential endings when everything seemed like the perfect beginning in a new relationship before.
Like the characters in the book, I have learned to speak the Language of Good-Bye. It is a language that permeates everything you do and say once you have learned to speak it. It is a phantom that lives in your soul and haunts each and every one of your actions, sabotaging all your attempts to avoid having to confront it again. It goads to you prepare for it, to accept it, and maybe even to force it to appear. And while it taunts and tears as the fabric that guards your heart, it also opens your eyes to the shimmering beauty of each and every thread woven into that fabric. You appreciate each soft brush against your skin and your soul in a way you could never have done before.
I had read almost half the book before Lee and Mike arrived that night, and was already lost in its beauty. I held it at my side like a talisman as I enjoyed a wonderful evening of drink, conversation and music with one of my closest friends and a man with whom I was even then falling in love.
Our evening stretched into the night. We ended up back at my father’s bar, and I was still clutching that book as if it were a lifeline.
Once we’d settled in at the bar, a few of my beloved drunken regulars grabbed the book and were flipping through it. The philosopher among them summed up their thoughts on it by shaking his head at me and saying “Language of Good-Bye? What the hell, girl? You need a whole book for that? The Language of Good-Bye goes like this – Screw You. Get Out.The End."
I knew right then and there why I always run back to dad’s bar, the safe place where I take refuge from the world and my normal place in it. I wish some days that life was a simple as the world views held therein. But it isn’t, and it never will be, and since that’s the case I’m glad there are others who speak the Language of Good-Bye, and who write about it as eloquently as Maribeth Fischer.
