Why I'll Miss You

I have written in this blog previously that I wanted to be little parts of different things; specifically, I wanted to glob together a bunch of religions and make them all my religion. I have since come to consider this further and maybe I think the integrity of each religion is a good thing. In fact, maybe I think each religion should just fully strive to be what it is, instead of making concessions to other religions and therefore diluting itself.

But I have decided that when you leave people (as I will be doing in just under two weeks), you can keep little parts of them. You can keep the story they told you and tell it as an anecdote at a party when you’re getting to know someone else. You can remember the way they handled themselves in a tough situation, and when faced with one yourself, you can draw on what you saw them do. You can treat people the way they treated them. You can remember one of their clever observations and use it to view the world. You can adopt their sense of humor, their taste in movies, their delights in simple things. You can tell stories with the certain inflection they always used. In a class this last semester, we talked about the plagiarism hysteria currently sweeping the country, and leading to phenomenon like turnitin.com, which victimizes students and polices the outcomes of plagiarisms without examining its underlying causes. But I think that when you’ve really gotten to know someone, really spent time with them, you plagiarize them. Little bits of them become all of you, and in this way, it’s like they never left.

So this is why, if you’re a person I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you because I won’t be able to cheat off you anymore; because there won’t be any more stories or movies or observations to challenge me and shape me. I’m recording here some things I’m going to plagiarize from some of my good friends who won’t be in Arizona. In short, these are things that I admire about you, and I hope that in some small way I have learned from you.

Kristin: The way you feel comfortable in any group or setting, how you laugh
JR: Your ability to make people feel comfortable, to tell a good story (usually with impressions and hand gestures)
Jennifer: Your serenity, how it seems like nothing ever fazes you
Catherine: Your ability to accept things as they come (Daoism, I think it’s called)
Emily: How you embrace, unapologetically, your “dorkiness”
Dustin: Your humility and graciousness
Elizabeth: How you always rave about others, your loyalty
Angela: Your friendliness (and neighborliness)
Aaron: Your ability to BS
Reify: How you adapt to any situation (including hordes of English graduate students)
Juliette: How you always have a smile for everyone, no matter what their story

And the list goes on! I was just going through my Facebook friends list to create this, and I only included people who I thought wouldn't mind making an appearance here. In fact, it reminds me of my favorite goodbye line, from The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.