this is how to let go (i think)
high school graduation, six beers, carrie bradshaw, and closure
Recently, all I’ve been doing is lying on my bed, reading, and rewatching The Bear. In the sticky Istanbul heat, the time reserved for tossing and turning in bed before falling asleep has become my favorite time of the day. The little wind that passes by flows into my room with the distant howls of the city. It has been taking me longer than usual to fall asleep because words flow in my mind at an unexplainable speed—I am left suffering each night as sentences far from my reach come and go.
On June 24th, I graduated from high school. It has been the biggest step I have taken in my life so far, a step that also carries a huge emotional baggage. I have only a few weeks left in Istanbul before I move to Philadelphia for college and start a new life.
The stream of unreachable words keeps me awake because I have spent so much time trying to find the profound in the mundane that I am at a loss for words now that profundity has found me. The words bubble up in my throat, but I have no means to let them out. I don’t know how to explain this palpable sadness within me caused by such an ordinary step one takes.
I’ve never been a master of letting go. Suddenly, with my graduation, I faced a wave of closure I wasn’t ready for. Is this another painful part of growing up? Is growing up also a constant chain of letting go?
I dislike how sudden my farewell has to be. Although I had prepared for this moment for a long time, after walking the stage, I realized I wouldn’t be returning to my beloved campus in September. In the end, I was left with a stomach ache, a deep sadness, and words I couldn’t find. It’s as if I were torn away from something before I could say, “Yes, I’m ready to let go.”
The best and worst thing about life is that time moves forward and forward only. Time is a constant matter of letting go. You can only relive moments in your head, but they are bound to be your distorted version of events. There’s no going back.
One moment I have been reliving in my head is a brief conversation with my infamous first love, the one I haven’t shut up about since starting to write here. It was a poolside graduation party with insufficient lighting, leaving an orange hue on every face. I was on my fifth or sixth beer when I approached him, half wobbly and half self-assured. “I called,” I declared. He acknowledged the cowardly call that lasted only two rings, smiled, and said, “I would’ve picked up if you called again.”
I was familiar with the tenderness with which he spoke to me, but it was from a distant past, so I knew it was mostly the alcohol talking. I’m also full of self-doubt because I can’t tell how much of the closeness is fabricated. After all, all intimacy in memories is fabricated.
In a Carrie Bradshaw-esque manner, the next morning, I texted him. I think adopting a “What would Carrie do?” attitude is very helpful in staying real and a little insane. Carrie constantly makes a narrative out of her life. For her, every person in her life is almost a character in her story, so she can always justify how deeply she lives her emotions. I think this is partly why people dislike her; her carelessness doesn’t speak to many. Like Carrie, I wanted to bask in the size of my emotions. I wanted to tell how I felt and be heard. So, I asked if we could talk sometime, a meaningless conversation that would amount to nothing but fill a Him-shaped hole in my heart.
In Carrie’s world, everything would have worked out, but I’m not as lucky. He refused to meet up and talk to me, and I replied, saying I understood and that I would always be willing to talk to him. His texts, though not as kind as his words the previous night, were calm and collected. He approached me with respect, said I could text him if I ever needed him (code for we will never speak again), and wished me luck in life. My replies reiterated how much he meant to me, and then I parroted his bullshit “closure” sentences back to him.
I always wished for him to talk to me with kindness in his voice. I felt good reading those texts, but my “closure” felt fake and rushed. For days, I cried, looked at the walls, napped, and read. I had gotten what I wanted, but I guess a beer-induced “closure” wasn’t the right kind.
During a bus ride, I read closure and its discontents by
. In her piece, she writes:“Closure, if it exists at all, is not a symmetrical dialogue but an asymmetrical monologue, often directed at memory rather than its source, in the “narrow diary” of your mind.”
I realized that my shoving past a sea of people to find him and force him to talk to me wasn’t going to bring me peace. I wasn’t bringing closure upon myself. Instead, I was letting myself go crazy over a single sentence—I would’ve picked up if you called again—and pretended a ten-message text exchange deleted months of emotional turbulence.
You can’t force closure upon yourself and be content with the results. Similarly, closure can’t force itself upon you and expect you to be okay with letting go at that very moment. While the former causes tears, the latter causes night terrors filled with unspoken words. There seems to be no formula for what to do when a door in your life closes.
“And so, closure is rarely ceremonial. More often it arrives by accident—during a haircut, on a train, in the middle of washing dishes. You forgive someone, maybe even yourself, in the middle of eating toast. You don’t even notice it until the butter melts.”
on how closure arrives
You figure life out, with one stupid thought, scribble in a notebook, stream of consciousness before sleep, or email at a time. In my farewell letter to my English teacher, I wrote:
“Growing up is a lot of pain: physical and emotional. I never thought leaving would be the biggest pain of all. I don’t want to leave this city, my friends, my school, or you. It’s a very painful rite of passage, and I hope the pain subsides as time passes by. Walking the corridors of the school I once despised, I realized how juvenile my hate was. I think as the leaves turn in color and the weather becomes colder, I’ll find love for it all.”
Once the leaves turn color and the weather becomes colder, we will speak again. I will let you know if time has treated me well.