Goodbye 2.0, Round 1

When I finally head home--two months and 6 days from now--one of the things I will miss most is architecture: columns and shutters and gingerbread trim and soaring ceilings; wood paneling and arches and turrets and spires that speak romance to the eye--that make the viewer want to know who lived and worked within those walls.

I will miss copses of oaks and sycamore, and the tulip magnolias that weep ivory and bruises in the spring. I will miss the bigness of sky that so terrified me when I got here, six and a half years ago, and the smallness of towns that are little more than hamlets...osteoperotic brick buildings huddling against one stop sign fire, backs to the prairie wind.

I will miss accidental encounters; the knowing that, if I am in a given place at any time of day, someone there will know me, and care. I will miss history, and watching the people who make it, and midnight jam-and-journal sessions, and sitting in empty classrooms after hours.

I leave here a piece of myself; a large piece that, this time, I will not be back to retrieve. I leave so many firsts, a dozen lasts, and the remnants of my idealism, though not my ideals. Those, and so many other things, innumerable and immeasurable in value, I take with me, to soothe the swelling ache that creeps in, now and then, of goodbyes and the tears that always follow them.

This, I imagine, is what Heloise might have felt after a reunion with Abelard: the passion of the first loving and anguished first leaving, and then--in Rome or London or Paris, at some meeting of abbots and abbesses or papal summons--the moment when eyes meet and love and lust return, the need to define self by the boundary of another's arms. This moment, then, is the morning two years later, waking in the abbot's cell to realize that once, she lived without and survived. In that realizing--the beauty but unnecessity of this love--she knows it is time to leave, and that from now on all letters will be merely sincere. That she has been the abbots whore, and is ready to be the emperor's wife, has had comfort and is now ready for challenge.