Some version of that song is always running through the back of my head when I am at the end of something big. Those phases of time that are lived so intensely that they consume you, in which your identity has been first and foremost a member of that specific experience, cannot be fully realized until you've been gone for while.
Significant culture shock can be expected.
When I remember that this is it, it's really over, I feel like parts of me are leaving as people depart. The people who I have learned to live around- and therefore with and even through- may never make an appearance in my life again. In fact, experience has proven that I won't see most of them ever again, and perhaps only ever hear from a few.
Leaving the "We" of doing everything together, and reclaiming the "I" that we were initially hesitant to let go of, each of us must now get to know themselves again as we realize how we've transformed since we were last outside of this experience.
The blackboard has a few scraps of messages left from when we communicated through it, and where the lost and found has been written in the past, Missing are instead names of departed interns. It is like looking at our group's tomb stone, it's identity unraveling, no longer present in this moment. And the empty tincture shelf looks like a ghost of it's former self.
Walking up stairs I realized my ears no longer needed to be perked for certain voices, or chance encounters in the hallway. Most of the rooms are empty now.
Jars are still out in the kitchen, and the drying rack is full, but there are no eggs frying in a cast-iron, nor are dull knives chopping garlic; no hands are washing a dish, nor making tea. Nobody's reading books and nobody's upstairs either. Nobody's frolicking in the grass through a rainstorm, nor sunbathing, nor doing yoga, nor panting from jogging club, and no abdominals are being made phenomenal. Nobody's watching a movie, no Pandora Radio-station to be heard singing on the computer. Our speakers are gone, and work is over.
I wonder how long my calluses will hold.
The house is silent save one conversation in the yoga room and the buzzing of the still-overflowing refrigerator. And though I craved a silent moment just a couple days ago, it's too loud to sit in comfortably right now that it has arrived in absence.
I wonder how I'll reflect on my aloneness, when I'm sitting in the house tomorrow morning, one of the last to go, and then as I roll off to Portland on a Grayhound bus, starting a new reality once again.
The last batch of photos from Herb Pharm: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2146825&id=6901865&l=31325b6bab
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I am so excited to hear all about your experience and to share in the lessons of letting go. Portland is ready for you, and will welcome you with open arms and a bounty of roses!
ReplyDeleteBon voyage, mein Schatz, on that Greyhound bus! Off you go, on to new adventures - while keeping those experiences, those lessons learned and all those new friends firmly in your generous heart! Thanks so much for sharing! mami
ReplyDelete