Since Fall 2023, including this summer, I’ve been living in Casa Zimbabwe, one of the Berkeley Student Cooperatives (Co-ops).
Students, unfortunately, graduate and move out, and coupled with everyone’s different plans, or lack thereof, I’ve had a lot of last days scattered throughout the summer with people who, for entire semesters prior, have been a constant presence in the house and in my life.
Some people prefer to slip out like smoke — you don’t even realize they’ve left until a few days go by without seeing them, and then you do. Others go like fireworks — we’ll get hours of bright lights and booming music before they finally blast off into the atmosphere.
But it doesn’t matter whether these farewells come like smoke, fireworks, fireflies or falling suns; not a single one has ever come at a good time.
And I think they are scheduled to inconvenience me, specifically.
Take last Tuesday night. It was a busy week: I was in the middle of a weeks-long group project, other miscellaneous assignments and — of course — a column draft, all due in the next 28 hours. I went to cook something, and, by chance, ran into David. He asked, “Are you coming to the RedRum?”
“For what?”
“For someone’s last day.”
Name removed for privacy.
A minute ago, I hadn’t even known they were leaving; but now, I guess, I was going to their going-away party.
During the fall and spring, CZ has 80 people at its emptiest. I don’t know everyone who leaves here as well as I’d like — and often it feels like we’ve parted ways so haphazardly in the middle of our acquaintance.
On any last day — whether it’s singing karaoke, sitting on a couch or waving at a car — I wish that someone had given me more time, that they had done the common courtesy of standing in the common room ringing a bell on a soapbox, that they had grabbed me when I walked past and shook me by the shoulders and asked, “Don’t you know the whole world is ending?”
I imagine a scenario where they had rung that bell, and I mitigated the assignments, and being out of town, and being in my room and the thousand other things that get in the way of tying up loose ends and making the most of our time together. And I imagine by doing all this, when they finally do leave, it will feel earned, justified — I imagine it will feel right, above anything else.
But I know it won’t, because of all the times I’ve had time.
At the beginning of the summer, we made a calendar out of the huge dry-erase board in the common room and housemates would write the date they’d leave and give us time to say our goodbyes. I’d read the calendar, stare down the dates with weeks or months that could be shields between us and convince myself that time chatting and catching up and wishing well would make some magic happen to create my imagined goodbye.
It never did.
It’s never going to feel good, and there never will seem a good time for something as unwelcome and unpleasant as saying goodbye.
I don’t know everyone who leaves CZ as well as I’d like to — certainly not well enough that I have a right to think “the whole world is ending” when they go. But I do anyway.
The people in this house, the way their lives cross and interact, make up the fabric of what it is and what it means to be here. When they go, their absence is felt, the world does end — or the house does, or at least the house as I know it. But people don’t disappear; they just move away, and new people move in. The world doesn’t end, it just turns, like it always does.
Of course, it all makes sense in the big picture: people graduate, people move and all of these things have to come some time. It is often necessary and positive, right and good, for these people to go then, to say goodbye. But day-to-day, minute-to-minute, there’s never going to be a good reason that the fabric of the house as it is can’t hold itself together a little while longer.
When I tell people the theme of my column, they usually respond to “reciprocity, an equivalent exchange that results in a mutual benefit” with an interpretation of “this-for-that?” which I don’t think hits the nail on the head. Yet, in the moment I have trouble articulating what it is that I find inaccurate. I don’t like how it paints relationships in the language of transactions — it’s an often shared sentiment that love is not a thing we simply feel, but something we show through action, and I agree with this — but surely love isn’t so petty or restrained to be a “something” that waits for “something” in order to actualize. As I stood in the kitchen on Tuesday, it struck me that the relationship between love and action is that between fire and fuel.
Fire isn’t a property of the fuel itself, but a reaction, an exothermic expression of light and heat as bonds break apart — completely reflective of, and yet an afterthought to, what it burns.
And looking around CZ, at the charred logs in the fireplace or the columns of combusting oil in the kitchen, I realized fire rarely has a purpose or plan for being, it just is by the conditions of its environment.
Whether it’s the glow of knowing someone, or the glare of saying goodbye, love isn’t a choice I’ve made, or one made for me, but the result of the circumstances we’ve made through our collective decisions over the past year.
Fire burns, love does too, and I love the people I’ve crossed paths with at Casa Zimbabwe.
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