Welcome to the eighth ever edition of Every Other Bee, a weekly digest of poetry designed around a particular theme. This week, I offer you a guide to the goodbye.
Part I: Gone Girl
The final track from Bleachers’ second album Gone Now (2017) is a song called ‘Foreign Girls’. There’s a lot to like. There’s some very good horn section, and the first lyric of the song is the album’s title.
But the highlight is when it concludes in a stirring finale:
Goodbye to the friends I had Goodbye to my upstairs neighbor Goodbye to the dream downstairs and Anybody who lent me a favor Goodbye to the way we talk Goodbye to the things we bought, yeah You should know that I loved you all
It fades into a refrain of that final line which reminds me of the communal, chaotic spirit of the final moments of Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Scott Street’ off her first album Stranger in the Alps. That declaration of love, that manifestation of affection is one of my favourite parts of a good goodbye. It’s like in Anna Maria Hong’s A Fable (2013): ‘“Goodbye, luck, you idiot,” / said the Fox to the Grapes. / “I love you,” replied the Grapes.’
(I’ll digress for a second to note that a goodbye, of course, isn’t always good. The etymology of ‘goodbye’ has nothing to do with ‘good’-ness at all; rather, it's a contraction of the blessing ‘god be with ye’.) sam sax talks about this in So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye (2018):
i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes : meaning go ye with god : meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away. who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where i can visit both my living and my dead.
(End of digression, baby.)
I’ve drowned in fondness over the past few weeks, for, appropriately enough, the friends I’ve had, my upstairs neighbour, and (to a far lesser extent, because genuinely fuck owning things, the things I’ve bought). I’ve hugged so many people for the last time (for now) that my heart feels heavy with all of their love I’m taking with me. I’ve had that moment that you may know well, when you are saying goodbye to someone and you haven’t realised until that precise second that you are in fact saying goodbye, and you both are somehow surprised by the reality of it all even though you were meeting up for the last time.
I’ve been a foreign girl for almost two years now. I left Brisbane on 11 March 2020 and haven’t yet had the opportunity to go back. I’ve lived as an expat, as an immigrant. Even in London, the place of my birth, I am a foreigner, every single syllable of my accent marking me out. I’ve been new for so long that I’m not sure how it’ll feel to be old again.
Part II: Terminal
I’m going to take the time, as a lawyer often does, to defend the indefensible. I know, I know, airports are places of unique hell, but they are also these weird holy little places of intimate farewell.
Nowhere more do you see lovers parting and families reuniting, and I even have a soft spot for the businessmen with their dour faces patiently pacing the lounges on their Bluetooth headsets trying to explain to their wives that their plane was delayed but they will try to be home soon.
Every time I am in an airport, I have the strange feeling of an inchoate déjà-vu, that around the next corner will be someone I know, someone who in no version of our reality would be there but somehow, in the liminal space of an over-air-conditioned airport, feels like a possibility. I frequently cry in airports, usually in the bathroom as a concerned face looks on. I also often eat some of the worst chicken on planet earth. (Tangent: one of my friends recently said that it had been five years since she’d had McDonald’s and another girl in the conversation and I immediately turned to her and said: ‘So all you’re saying is that you haven’t been in an airport.’)
Saying goodbye to someone at the airport is like a weird experiment in object permanence. You say goodbye, tearfully, kissing their face, and then, in an attempt to be brave, you turn around and stride confidently towards the doors. (Tonight’s edition is a paean to the parenthesis so I’ll pause to note that Gerald Stern in his poem Waving Goodbye (1979) says that we have ‘minds to move us through our actions / and tears to help us over our feelings’ but I must say that often my tears just keep me rooted in the same place, with an endless supply of feeling and a headache to remind me of how much it pains me to feel. Back to the airport.)
The second you turn away from the person, you can no longer perceive them, so you panic, turn back and recommence the whole process. When you are finally separating for good (there’s that word good again, and I don’t necessarily agree with it here), you drag your suitcase behind you, your arms useless and limp against the weight of all that you are leaving behind. They stare at you as you disappear through the automatic stairs and up the escalator, evaporating into thin air. My father was chatting to my cousin at Christmas about her four month old baby, and the two were discussing object permanence. He turned to me and asked me, ‘when did you get that?’ as if it would be something I’d remember. (Never, I wanted to respond. I have never been able to be confident of a person’s existence after they leave me.)
I left my current workplace at approximately 5:06 pm today. As I walked my bike out of the gates of the building, my co-worker, who had escorted me out and hugged me (declaring that he was refusing to cry), disappeared behind me. He got smaller and smaller, and it felt like this phase of my life had moved into the rear vision. Moved.
I have been feeling this sudden awareness throughout today that verbs, everywhere, are shifting tense. I had to leave dozens of Signal groups, had to sign out of so many accounts, had to get countless signatures on various forms. I listened to Grimes’ Delete Forever off her album ‘Miss Anthropocene’ (2020) and Dorothy Hewett’s Goodbye Forever (1996) as I did so.
I had my last dinner with my best friends in The Hague last night, three women who are all varying levels of British and Australian (with some Greek and Dutch thrown in for good measure). I made a joke about it being International Women’s Day and us all being international women. (Foreign girls.) We had oysters on the house and then they, too, disappeared into smoke. I think of how it felt to say goodbye to them and it feels strangely nautical, like the metaphor used in Jason Shinder’s The Party (2009):
That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool, drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking, shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water; to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others.
I am now living in the future of my life and if the past is another country, the future is another world, and I have never felt more strange than now.
Part III: The Necessity of Departure
One of my parting gifts from my boss was a copy, with the famous kilometer zero stamp of Paris’ Shakespeare and Company bookshop, of my dearly beloved: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). It is a book almost entirely comprised of perfect lines (letting horses dash hooves at chests, strings somewhere under left ribs, etc, etc), but the lines which have been forwards-most in my mind in recent months are these, uttered by Jane, as she attempts to leave Thornfield and Mr Rochester:
I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:- I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,--momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in,--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.
I know with certainty that I have lived, as Jane did, ‘a full and delightful life’ here. I felt it when I rode my bicycle to work in the mornings, and in recent days, I have taken to filming those rides. I sit atop my bicycle, holding my handlebars with one hand and (mostly steadily and entirely illegally) use my other to guide my phone along, as the bike path, red and gorgeous with the morning sun, unfolds itself in front of me. (Digression: The first eight editions of this newsletter were largely inspired by The Hague, and the themes to which they were devoted were my parting gift to the city where I fell in love with my bike. Palimpsest. Enjambment. Disease. Afternoon. Length. Impossibility. Neologism. Goodbye. P E D A L I N G.)
I have lived in an apartment with high ceilings and stained glass and a little pink armchair where I spent many a happy evening, both by myself and in the company of others. I saw more sunsets than I can remember in my life to date. I took holidays when I was here, a thing that is probably unthinkable to most people who have lived through this pandemic. I saw the Alps for the first time last summer.
It was a profound experience. When the little train took its turn around the mountains and the ranges finally revealed themselves to me, I suddenly felt very Australian, very small, very alien. I’m a stranger, I thought. I’m a stranger in the Alps.
But I’ll pull back for a second to remind you and myself that my strangeness wasn’t absolute. I assimilated fairly well: I started using Tikkie, I talked about things being gezellig, I made jokes about Mark Rutte.
I pack up my apartment and I think of how much I adjusted to Dutch-ness, how much I feel like the creature at the heart of Tim Reynolds’ Catfish Goodbye (1967): ‘Outrage first when you / find yourself / a fish, it seems / unfair’. Now, adjusted to my fish-ness, my river-ness, I am deep in it, I am ‘lazing / whiskery deep and green under / flowerpot embankments / silted with our loss, our / seed, our best wishes / So long so long.’
I cry bubble-wrapping my tulip vase and I feel fragile and portable and I think of Emily Sieu Liebowitz’s Goodbye 17 (2019): ‘They’ll see your heart evicted. / I see your heart evicted.’ I thought again of sam sax’s poem and how it ends: ‘let’s live instead here, / in this transitional state. the instant water evaporates. riding the trains / below the city.’
I look out at the empty apartment and it feels like I was barely here and I think of how John Updike wrote in his fantastic little poem Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children (2000) ‘how / this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.’ I see one final sunset out the windows of my apartment and I think about the new job and new life I'm commencing and I think of Stevie Smith’s In My Dreams (1972): ‘I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going’.
Join me in a week’s time for an argument about alliteration. In the meantime, if you haven’t liked this post (or even if you have), you may contact me at everyotherbee@gmail.com.