A Goodbye

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Phoebe 3508 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2010%2F07%2F18%2Fa-goodbye%2FA+Goodbye2010-07-18+17%3A49%3A08Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebeeating.com%2F%3Fp%3D340

It was a rainy day when we first arrived in Gainesville, only that’s an understatement, as “rainy” is always an understatement for August in Florida–just miles before we crossed the state line from Georgia into Gainesville the air seemed to shift, becoming heady, humid, and then it started falling in silver sheets. August 7th, 2007. We turned onto Gainesville’s only cobblestone street and slowed to a stop in front of a house I’d never seen before and we ran out, cat carrier in one hand, into the soaking storm to sit on the porch and wait for the landlady to let us in.

A summer later, my first living alone in a second-story apartment that I called my “tree house,” I began writing fiction. The story wormed its way into my head on my walks home from my summer classes, and then it germinated during afternoon naps and then I’d pull myself from sleep-sticky sheets to write while the world outside turned pale and shivery with the force of wind and rainfall.

This is what I’ll miss best about Gainesville: the August storms, the feeling of tension in the air, the thunderheads mounting in the sky above. I won’t miss the heat that comes on minutes after the storm ends. I won’t miss the humidity, thick as the air in a foggy bathroom. Or the bugs or the way all my spices turned into solid lumps in the cabinets. I won’t miss sunburn or two showers a day or the zits and heat rashes that I get here and nowhere else. But I’ll miss this about Gainesville summers: I’ll miss the rain.

And the restaurants, and the greenness, and how in spring I’d be sure, sometimes, that I lived in paradise. The bluepink sky overhead. The interminable clouds. The lizards fucking in the fronds. The graffiti and the overgrown lawns–the unexpected, wild places.

This was the setting where I grew from a girl to a woman. This was where I missed Jordan for two years, a world of painful goodbyes, like my heart was being squeezed out through my throat. This was where I changed from a sparkler–slight, fleeting, trembling–to a signal flare, searing up into the star-splattered sky, leaving white-gray smoke in my wake. This was where I wrote hundreds of poems, a handful of stories, uncountable letters, and four novels. This was where I learned the value of female friendships, of coffee talk. This is where I learned that my heart still was tender. This was where I was first, truly married. This was the hard, strange, beautiful place where I became harder, stranger, and more beautiful. This was the last place I’ll ever pull myself into a closet to cry.

On Wednesday morning, our belongings packed into a Budget van, we’ll leave. For new places, new adventures. In August of 2007, I wrote in my journal that leaving New Jersey was like being skinned alive. Gainesville taught me that we have nothing to fear of new beginnings. Before coming here, I had some vague philosophy that everything works out in the end. Gainesville is where I learned that this was true.

Thank you, my pretty, little city. And farewell.