💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 5-01.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:31:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Thinking about Nat's gemlog on endings, and in particular the way in which they write about an instance of knowing something is coming to an end: in Nat's case, a particular kind of freedom, how at the end of 10th grade, there's an understanding the classes will get harder, more serious. That university looms, so grades matter, and money matters, summers no longer an easy time of agreed-upon whatever, but a time for jobs, for preparation. Adulthood beckoning.
I remember having my own feelings around this at around the same point in my life. For three summers, starting at the end of grade eight, I was in Scouts and did a wilderness camp in a corner of the province that I still consider one of the most beautiful places in the world. There were troops from across the province, but it was still pretty small overall. Combined, a handful of patrols. We spent three weeks every summer hiking across hills and open prairie. Carrying all our food and water with us, stoves, tents, sleeping bags, purification tablets for refilling from the ice-cold stream.
We were certainly a mix. Some people I'd consider cool, some ordinary, some awkward, some weird. I feel like I was some combination of everything but cool. Such is my life, really.
The last summer, I remember we camped one night on a hillside, in the rain. And at midnight, one of the girls tapped at the fabric on my tent, waking me up. "[winter], wake up, come here."
She took me to a hillside in the rain and there on the slick grass a bunch of us laid on our backs and watched fireflies flare across the night sky, lightning touching down in the distance. A memory that I suspect will never leave me, burned in my brain now because of the circumstances: this was an ending; it had to be. I could've done one more year there, after that. But I decided instead to focus my limited free time on music and writing and programming instead. It was a hard choice, but I knew how I wanted to spend my life, even then.
I've never been camping since.
I felt the weight of that moment in that moment, and struggled with it, finally making the decision months later to leave Scouts. But in the moment when I was on that hillside, I knew it felt like something beautiful was turning. I knew it. It was slight and pure and if I were to come back next year, what else could possibly match it? So that fall I left Scouts and practiced harder and more often, learned to play orchestral music, and in many ways opened up the next chapter of my life. I worked on little projects in Pascal. I worked on my (extremely bad) poems. This focus would pay off, eventually, the programming once I went to school, and the writing many years after that. And in different ways. A few years after that, in the university wind band, I'd meet my future partner. Not that I knew it at the time. When she and I first met, I was in the process of being ghosted, cut out of my ex's life without a word. In that weird in-between I couldn't see how lovely, how charming my future partner was. She was just the quiet girl who sat near the front of the band. It would be years, another three years before I'd screw up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and she'd counter with, _I can't, but what about supper?_
Sometimes love runs slow.
I've always been struck by that summer in the hills - how I recognized this was an ending, as Nat recognized at the time how their own summer represented the same. And it would be years until I experienced something similar. Two summers later, just before I was about to enter university, I experienced what I've always considered my weird and wonderful summer - in the warm June rain I kissed someone I shouldn't have, then that July fell hard for a wiry, bandana'd girl from out east. Not to mention I turned down a no-strings-attached night with a friend who'd given me the eyes for years, and who in retrospect would've been a much more considerate lover than the person who ended up being my first. I didn't feel ready, and so, I wasn't. And I've always been grateful: the "no" was instantly respected, never once affected our friendship thereafter. I've always been grateful to her for that. I've never told her this.
All that tied up in everything else that went on that summer: in learning C from the K&R using djgpp/RHIDE; in horseback riding at a friend's acreage; in my dad begging, pleading with me to get a job; in tree-planting with a bunch of electronic musicians at the university, in a stint as a dishwasher for a couple of weeks at an upscale cafe before getting canned for being slow.
That June, before the start of the new millennium, I wrote in my journal:
It's all ending...went to a year-end party at a friend's house, and it finally hit me that I probably wouldn't be seeing most of the people I've met in high school again. Sure, there'll be a bunch of us going to the same university, but there's a lot that are just leaving: foreign universities, not going to university, travelling then coming back, etc.
It felt kind of bittersweet - I'd miss some people, I thought, and wouldn't miss the rest. And you know what? I was right. The best thing I've ever did in my life was go to university, then meet my partner (even if it'd be years before we really saw each other), then leave the province altogether. Too many bad memories in where I grew up, too many people I'd be happy to never see again. A fresh start in a new city really is an incredible thing. Especially back then, before Facebook tethered you like an invisible string to all the people you'd like to leave behind.
Since then, my knowledge of endings has always come immediately, and clouded with grief: the death of my dog, my grandfather, three friends in the last four years. All memories are immutable, but there's a kind of feeling that those of the dead are particularly so. Some have come back to me in dreams. Some I think I see in my peripheral vision in a crowd. I always wonder when this particular cruelty will stop.
But as new endings are recognized, and often grieved, I find myself coming back to these particular early and formative ones: the hillside, the fireflies; the kiss that was, the two that weren't; saying goodbye, in many ways. The kind of innocence that comes once, briefly, and can never come again.