My least favorite thing about the holidays is the leaving. I enjoy the family rivalries, the inevitable clashes of different threads of family and friends. I'm indifferent to the added stresses of holiday crowds in airports and on the freeways, but saying goodbye over and over again is hard. We can live farther away from the people we love and stay in touch with the various digital wonderments of fiber-optics and satellites orbiting overhead, but there is no replacement for sharing the same space. That's the inevitable conclusion I arrive at every year during the holidays. Arriving home, dropping the ungainly weight of my bags, opening the windows to freshen the stifled air of my dormant apartment, looking out on the streets below, familiar but filled with strangers flowing past in their indifferent rushes, I feel small and alone.
I take my parents for granted. As they age and I sink further into my own separate self they seem like weathered fragments from my past. I remember a time when they were the alpha and the omega of my life, the twin horizons over which the sun rose and set every day. I remember sitting on my father's lap reading The Little Mermaid aloud in the library at UT Austin, where he spent a summer teaching when I was four. He was a titan, his voice shook through my body as it animated each line of the fairytale. It was a force of nature, like a rainstorm of smiling words and warm imagination.
I remember the indulgent swoon of being in love with my mother. I crawled into bed with her and my dad one Sunday when I was three, hanging from her neck kissing her cheeks and lips. When she would take me shopping with her before I had started school I would venture out into the department store sprawl and bring back tight mini-skirts and red nail polish for her. I wanted her to show herself as the diaphanous monument she was to me.
All those experiences are tricks of perspective. Age and inexperience help to curve the lens in a way that makes the world seem intimate and hyper real, but it changes again and again. That doesn't make those experiences any less real. I hate leaving my parents' home after the holidays every year. I inevitably grow bored and stir crazy there, eating their food, listening to them argue, watching their cable, and making nice with their friends. Leaving always feels terrible. I spend my last hours in their home quietly packing, sulking and feeling leery about wherever it is that I'm off to next. It's like breaking up with the same person over and over again, but each break up is framed by the incremental creep of age.
I don't understand break-ups where people walk away from one another and never look back. With one exception, I am still close with every woman I've ever loved. Relationships are hard work, and the idea of lifelong coupling is a statistical hail mary. But saying I love you is a concession of permanence for me. It doesn't mean you agree to have fun together until things get too painful and then you agree to call things off and never talk to one another again. Those onset hardships are inevitable, as is the reframing of one's point of view over time. But how can you stop loving someone?
I've always experienced breaking up as a concession to semantics. You reach a point where it stops making sense to keep your own path hemmed in by your partner's; it stops being what you want. I've never fallen out of love. Letting go of someone because you realize you can't keep climbing the mountain together is a terrible and sad thing, but that's never made me want to let go of that person. My parents were the first two people I ever fell in love with. I don't want to live with them anymore, nor am I interested in having them directly involved in guiding my vessel as I keep pressing forward into new places. But I don't want to let them go. I loved them, and I love them still, even if they don't much resemble the romantic titans of my infancy.
Their faces have changed improbably over the years, without my noticing. Their physical infirmities are full of subtle new wrinkles, unassuming new pill bottles in the medicine cabinets. They make strange noises when they breathe. My childhood toys are all gone. I sleep in the guest room now. The room I grew up in is hundreds of miles away from my parent's new house. So it's sad when I pack my bags and walk to the front door, headed to the airport, knowing that there's no forgotten scrap left behind in the guestroom. The semantic ties have evaporated. Love is like gravity. I know I'll be back next year, and the year after that, but only for a little while, so long as they're there.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message
Date Night: The F U Date
Sex Machine: Shave My Bush
Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble
Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn