Waving goodbye to someone you love

I arrived just in time to set up before dark.

“You’re the first to arrive!” Exclaimed the woman who was running the week’s workshop as she greeted me in the driveway.

“Really? I thought I’d be the last one here. Is everyone else still coming?”

“Oh yes, they’re coming.” 

“You said in your email to be sure to get here before sunset.” 

“It seems like you’re the only one who really took that to heart. The others have emailed me though, they’ll be trickling in later this evening.”

She led me behind the house towards the rest of the property, which was situated on a large weedy slope. At its center was a slanted wedding tent where the workshop would be held. She gestured to where I could set up my tent, and where I could store my food, showed me the outhouse, then left me with a wheelbarrow and I got to work lugging my stuff up the hill from my car.

“Well, sleep tight! Just knock if you need anything, day or night.” 

In the morning I met the others—a twenty-six-year-old performance artist with curly hair and a septum piercing from Western Massachusetts, a therapist from Baltimore, a theater artist from New Jersey who had arrived with an abundance of camping gadgets, and a dancer from Philly, there with her seventy-year-old aunt Ruth who lived in the area. 

“Welcome all! There’s one more who will be joining us for the workshop this week, but I just heard that she won’t be making it in until tomorrow. Totally throws off my whole plan for the week, but I guess we’ll just have to make due!”

We spent the day thinking about colors and doing collaborative paintings on large pieces of butcher paper. We touched each other’s faces with our eyes closed and made noises that sounded like the faces felt. I touched the therapist’s face, which sounded like eee-EEEE-bz-bz-bz-ahhhh. We stood on the slope and did an exercise called ‘waving goodbye to someone you love,’ in which we imagined that someone we loved was leaving on a boat tomorrow, to go off to their perfect destiny, and that we would never see them again. We acted out our last nights together, and stood on the slope waving goodbye as their boats pulled out of the harbor and disappeared into the distance.

Amalia arrived on the second morning, after we had already begun our warm up exercise. As we flailed around impulsively on the slope trying our best to avoid perilous raspberry brambles and buzzing yellow jackets, I noticed her watching us carefully from down by the house. She had come in an old school bus that she lived in, by way of Connecticut though she was from New Orleans. 

“I’m Amalia, but you can also call me X-ray,” she said, widening her round blue eyes and twisting her dyed black hair. I found this confusing because I didn’t know which name to call her. I decided to call her Amalia for now because it was the first name she had said. Her clothes looked like she had found a pile of them on the street, cut them all up, then sewn them back together in the wrong order—her shirt had two different arms, and her pants were one half jean, one half sweatpant, stitched together to make a whole. 

That night while the rest of us collaborated on a veggie stir fry over the camping stove, Amalia remained in her bus. Through its shaded windows came a glowing yellow light and I could see her dark shadow moving around, walking back and forth from one end of the vehicle to the other, carrying something then putting it down. She seemed busy in there. I thought I could see her brushing her hair. 

During daylight hours Amalia was physically present but held herself at an emotional distance. While the rest of us developed a natural group rapport, chatting over meals and campfires, going on outings and quickly developing a language of inside jokes, she kept mostly to herself. 

By the fourth night we were all feeling tired from the long days outdoors, the constant walking up and down the slope, and the rigorous participation that the workshop itself required. As the others headed off one by one to their tents to sleep, I continued tending to the campfire, until I was the only one left awake. Down in the driveway Amalia’s bus was still lit up. It was quiet—I could hear the fire wheezing and occasionally a snap and the rustling of leaves as a branch fell in the forest behind me. 

“As soon as Amalia’s lights go out, I’ll go to bed,” I told myself. But her lights stayed on for what felt like hours. I was running out of firewood and I had to hold my index finger and thumb around my eyes to keep them open but something urged me to stay just a little bit longer. 

“As soon as I run out of wood, I will go to bed,” I told myself, my gaze fixed on the bus, hoping for any sign of movement, a sign that we were both still awake, together. Tonight she was unusually still. But then she opened the door. 

She had no flashlight. Straining my eyes, I could just make out the outline of her figure moving up the slope towards me. 

“Hey,” I said when she arrived.

“Hey,” she said, a little out of breath. 

“No flashlight?”

“No, I’m trying to improve my night vision.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yeah, mine is much better than it used to be. Want to go on a walk and try it?”

I was terrified and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was walking through the night in rural Vermont and could barely see, or because I was walking through the night in rural Vermont and could barely see while holding onto her arm. 

She led me down towards the road. 

“Left or right?”

“What?”

“Which way do you want to go?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Just pick one.” 

“Okay, right.” 

We tread along the gravel road in a direction that would have felt familiar in the daytime, but without sight felt like we were trespassing on a parallel universe unwelcome to humans. I focused on the feeling of my hand on her mismatched sleeve, the deep sound of her breathing.

I was beginning to make out shapes. 

“I think I can see a little bit now,” I whispered. 

“Yeah. It only takes a few minutes.”

I saw the moonlit shadows of tall trees along the road, I saw the curve of Amalia’s skull, I felt her stopping. 

“This way,” she said, and led me off the road into the forest.

As we navigated through branches and brambles I thought of bears, I thought of coyotes, I thought of snakes, I thought of axe murderers, but nothing seemed as strong or as sure as Amalia. 

“Hear that?”

“Water.”

We stopped near the sound of a stream. Cool air met my skin. She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down to the ground, took my right hand in hers and led it into the front of her jeans, then she was touching my face and I could feel her moving on top of me. She told me to pull her hair and so I did. She told me to put three of my fingers in her and so I did, and I could make out the slope of her nose, her cheeks and small chin, and I could see her body as she undressed, her narrow hips and round tits.

“Have you ever felt truly happy anywhere?” She asked. 

“Hm, I mean, I like where I’m from,” I said. “But no place is perfect, I think.” 

“Wouldn’t it be nice though, if there were a perfect place? Or at least somewhere okay. Do you think that’s too much to ask for?”

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask for,” I replied. 

“I think that in our world it’s been made impossible to exist in a way that doesn’t like, kill your soul. There’s no way to not be implicated in violence, you know? I’m always moving from one place to another, looking for a place where I belong. Sometimes I think I’ll never find it.” 

“I think we used to belong places,” I said, “but one way or another, we’ve all been forced out of them. Maybe one day we’ll find our way back.”

“We could just stay here for a while,” she sighed, laying her head on my arm, “here isn’t so bad.”

In the morning the bus was gone. 

“Unfortunately Amalia had an emergency and had to head out early this morning,” announced the workshop leader at our morning check-in, “totally throws off my whole plan for the rest of the week, but oh well, I guess we’ll just have to make due!”

Our warm up was communicating through eye contact while tossing around a large purple bouncy ball and then doing an intuitive movement exercise in the wedding tent, and I wondered what the emergency was, and I wondered where she had gone to. 

“Now we’re going to try that exercise from the first day again, ‘waving goodbye to someone you love.’ Use all that you’ve learned for this one—remember to visualize, then physicalize! Pick someone, anyone, real or imagined. Feel them, really breathe them in, and then act it out.”

We all stood on the slope together and closed our eyes, each in our own little imagined worlds visualizing our own person, and it was our last night together, and I was making an elaborate dinner, and I was double checking the time that the boat left in the morning, and I was setting an alarm, and we were in bed holding onto each other so tight, and her head was on my arm, and she was leaving in the morning, and there was an entire future that we could spend together in a happy or at least okay place, but that would not be happening, she was leaving, she was off to her perfect destiny, and I was staying here, left to fumble around in the dark, and we would never be seeing each other again. 

“Your person is on the boat and it is leaving the harbor. Now, quick! Spin around and open your eyes. Look at the mountains, look at the trees, look at the sky, look at the leaves, look at the sun and wave goodbye! More, more, more! That’s right, all together now, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”