I want to savor this.
As I stand on the lip of graduating, I’ve made a habit of standing on the lip of Jenks Library too. Evening has fallen and the sky is white and deepens to blue above me. One time my friend Michael came out of the library at one of the moments when I was feeding my nostalgic nature. He said hello and we chatted. And then we just stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder, and then he looked at me and said softly, “You’re really gonna miss this, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded like cotton.
*
My method of coping with stress is making Spotify playlists, because sometimes words fail even a writing major. So, as you can imagine, I have a lot of Spotify playlists. The most recent one I made is called “Gradu-wait”, which doesn’t require a lot of explanation and I thought was very clever. It’s an eclectic mix of songs about moving on while looking back—an ability I’m still cultivating— and of soundtracks in the bittersweet key of D, which reminds me of summertime and sunsets and of things ending in a good way.
I know graduating is a new beginning. I know I’m standing on the threshold of “real life.” But it feels like stepping onto a familiar beach after it’s been ravaged by a nor’easter, and the landscape has changed far beyond what you remember. Some days I’m okay with that change, because it’s still beautiful in its own way. Other days I cling on to every fiber of what I knew before.
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind,” says Jack Lewis in my head, a pipe in his mouth. This is not something that I always want to remember. But you can’t exactly tell C. S. Lewis to shut up, now can you?
*
“Do you think we’ll remember here in Heaven?” Grace asks me. We’re in her kitchen that smells like eucalyptus and tea, in a dorm I’m going to have to say goodbye to. Here means this life, this messy stew of heartbreak and joy and fury and strange spontaneity.
“I hope so,” I say, and I really do. I can see us sitting around a fire on the New Earth, the stars above us and sticky marshmallows in our hands (because, let’s face it, marshmallows clearly will exist on the New Earth). And we’re exchanging stories—stories of struggles, stories of heartbreak, stories of the darkest moments we can fathom—stories that, on the other side of living, will be testaments to the goodness and faithfulness of God. I’m explaining this to her and—oh gosh—my eyes suddenly prickle and I’m crying in the general direction of her microwave. My family and friends, the people I am most afraid of saying goodbye to, are my brothers and sisters; we share the same faith, the same hope of Heaven. If I truly believe that, I have the comfort of rejoicing with them again. I cling to it like a candle in the dark.
There will be other moments like this that I’ll have to make playlists for. There will be a lot of crying and a lot of songs in the bittersweet key of D. But Jack-Lewis-in-my-head is right. The things that are ahead will be unknowable until I face them. Stepping forward into them is scary. But the hope of Heaven is everything I will miss and anticipate all rolled into one, a glorious collage of all the things I love. The memories that I make now, these candles in the dark, enable me to walk forward. They allow me to trust that the people who I hold in my heart will hold me in theirs. That is a glorious thing.
There will be plenty of farewells, but I want to make this a good-bye.
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