UPFRONT: A CHANGE IS ASgood as a rest, they say. Well, whoever they are, they can, in my father's words, go take a running jump. Because frankly, sometimes a change is no good at all. I'm not saying everything in life has to remain the same all the time. I'm just saying some things should.
But they don’t. Yes, I know, everything changes: circumstances, seasons, governments and underwear. Everything comes – good times, bad times – and everything goes, including good friends.
See, I’m all for change as long as I get to decide when it happens and what form it takes. I’m well up for trying something or somewhere new just for the shaking up and new perspective of it all. But other people are not supposed to exercise that same privilege. At least not when they’re the part in my life that I never want to change.
To explain: this week, two of my closest friends in this many-peopled world set off on an adventure, and they’re not bringing me. Small wonder: even if they fancied a third wheel to roll along beside them, I don’t travel as light as I used to, what with the newly acquired husband and the flatulent dog that came with.
But they’re leaving a lot more than me behind. As they trundle off into a new start, they’re also putting an end to a stretch of shared times, of new loves and old jokes, of drop-in drinks and day-long dinners. With their departure, I fear that a chapter of my life is finishing, a patch of which they were so intrinsically a part that it can’t go on without them.
Good times don’t often get punctuated into recognition like this. It’s almost as if by their leaving they make clear what a high time we were having. By moving on, they put a full-stop to a period not just in their own lives, but also in mine, a time when they lived a stumble away, when I could pop in for a post-prandial on the way home and always find a door and bottle open, a big smile to greet me, and a reminder of what’s good in life is the here and now. The now that was now, then.
Because now they’re off in their covered wagon to new frontiers (Berlin, to be exact), and when or if they come back, on some date in the unfathomable future, things will inevitably be different.
Time keeps ticking in your absence, as I found out when I set off in a wagon once, no matter how you freeze it in your mind. It moves in your presence too, but at a whole different pace. When you stay, the shifting Venn diagrams of life’s overlaps and crossing paths move at such a gentle pace as to become imperceptible: a new face becomes more familiar, an old phrase dies out, yet all too slowly to recognise as change.
The consequences of time passing are just harder to see when you keep your eye on them daily – watched pot-like, the boil never comes, yet leave the room and come back, and you’ll find everyone drinking tea. See, when all of this happens out of sight, in a place freeze-framed in your own mind as you move across the world, the effect on your return is something like that experienced by Oisín when he came back from Tír na nÓg. Let’s just say things had moved on a little.
It’s not just that the Luas lines might finally be joined, or that Bertie will be president; it’s that when the leavers return, their friends’ children will have leaped over the years in between and be almost unrecognisable in their new little-peopleness; it’s that the friends will become adults in their absence, mothers, fathers, people with what seems like suddenly greyer hair and looser flesh; it’s that the leavers’ parents will also be somehow transformed on their return, moved into a new generational bracket by their very absence.
And when they come back, they’ll have changed most of all. They’ll have lived this other life that we, that I, can’t have constant access to, and none of us will be quite like we were.
Look, I know as well as the next teary left-behinder that things would have changed somehow anyway, even if they had decided to stay here. Somebody would have moved house, had a child, had a fight, entered rehab or started voting Fianna Fáil, something, somehow would have shaken up our cosy cocoon of like-minded like-timedness. Who knows if we’d even have been as close in five years’ time anyway?
Besides, this has been happening for generations; we’ve had thousands of years of people leaving their families for endless elsewheres, and these two are just part of the new wave following the old by upping sticks in search of a better life. At least in this day and age I don’t have to wait around like Peig Sayers did for the litir as Meiriceá from her friend Cait Jim. Sure with the Skype and the email and the like, it’ll be like they’re only next door. Except you can’t pour someone a whiskey over Skype. Yet.
I hope the road rises to meet them and all that, (though I never knew why it would be considered much of a blessing if the road rose up before you, impeding your progress). And I know that, at this moment, all over the globe, people are in movement as they ever were, maybe more so than ever before, a mass migration of humankind that leaves in its wake a million teary goodbyes, and folds up shared times eternally. So yes, these two are just part of the world’s big story. But for the best of times, they’ve been a big, big part of mine. And I’ll miss them.
