The End of All Things

Whether near or far
I am always yours
Any change in time
We are young again

Lay us down
We’re in love

In these coming years
Many things will change
But the way I feel
Will remain the same.
— Panic! At the Disco, “The End of All Things”

“Hey, Grace. I made it.”

The maroon shag is taking damage from my scurrying feet and the wheels of my loyal green Samsonite carry-on. I’m a miraculous three hours behind schedule — just 90 minutes ago, I was in Detroit. In a hostage situation, a representative of Delta Air Lines, the lovely folks who were the reason I was trapped in Detroit, promised to get me to Philadelphia in exchange for $1,500. My other option was to face a disenfranchised gate agent and find out what “waitlist” meant.

He didn’t say a word as I gazed into his soulless brown eyes. A few clicks of a computer mouse and taps on a keyboard, and out of a printer came a ticket with my name, an alphabet soup of letters, and a QR code.

“Sit around here,” he mumbled, handing me the slip and lackadaisically pointing to his right. I folded it, stuffed it in my back pocket, and took my seat by the gate.

“Adams,” he groaned into a microphone 90 minutes later, “You’re cleared to board.”

I grabbed the green carry-on and sprinted down the jetway. I turned around — that was a mistake. I saw a woman behind me, back in the terminal, emptily gazing into space. She was right behind me in that waitlist queue. She wasn’t getting to Philadelphia that night. I wondered if I was stealing her seat on a pew for a funeral, or if I was the reason she wouldn’t make it in time for her niece’s birth.

Her face was neither happy nor sad; it was the average of the relief and guilt I felt in my own soul. I guess that’s what “waitlist” means.

But that’s behind me. I, for one, will cherish my luck and trust the universe has done what must be done. Run, run. Left, right, left. Down the escalator. Out the automatic doors. Go to the caravan of yellow taxis that await all the travelers who’ve just landed. Knock on the passenger door of one, let the Kazakh driver pop the trunk open, throw your luggage back there, and throw your body in the passenger seat. Buckle up. Initiate small talk by asking the driver how long he’s been in Philadelphia.

“Five years,” he says. “You?”

“Five minutes,” I tell him, fishing my phone out of my left pocket to locate my text exchange with Grace. “Uh, I’m going to 1603 Christian Street.”

He nods and shifts the taxi from park to drive. Off we go. He knows the exact coordinates of our destination. Of course he does. He lives here, has for five years.

As I flip through my iPhone’s Music Library to choose “Durban Skies” by the hottest new band, Bastille, I think about how this taxi driver knows something I don’t, many things I don’t. A whole life of memories and experiences rest underneath his brown eyes and unkempt black beard.

It’s alive, it’s alive, when I see it through your eyes.

I feel the taxi racing northward on Interstate 95. I really didn’t want to go to Philadelphia for this graduate school interview, but the twilight turns an obligation into a privilege. On my left, a flame tops the smokestack of a factory, a candle that will light the way when dusk soon gives way to dark.

It’s alive, it’s alive, now I understand your lives.

We duck into the underbelly of a cantilevered bridge. The roaring of engines and the buckling of metal poison my ears. Kaboom. Kaboom. Cars with drivers and passengers are careening above us, heading in the opposite direction. I wonder what stories they will write tonight.

When you take me there, you show me the city, I see it through your eyes.

By now, dusk has surrendered to dark. I glance over his shoulder to see the skyline, etched in neon. The skyscrapers are dotted with the fluorescent lights of forgetful businessmen who, in a rush to get home for dinner with their families, neglected to flip the light switches.

He flashes his right turn signal, shifts lanes, and descends the exit ramp. It is time to see the urban majesty up close and personal. Above me towers a skyscraper, bearing a marquee with the word “ENERGY” flittering across it in eight-bit font. The streets are empty, filthy, browned with tainted snow — and that makes them all the more beautiful.

He takes a left, a right, and a left, then brings the taxi to a grinding halt. “1603 Christian Street.” I give him a credit card and run toward the wiry frame of a young woman who is gleefully shouting, “Jonathan, you made it!” Yes, yes, I made it.

When you take me there, it’s alive, it’s alive.

Brooke’s apartment was built a century ago. I wonder if anyone, in that span of time, left its oak floors as cluttered as she did. I tenderly step through the detritus, Karol, Seth, Molly, and Grace following me.

“Sorry it’s such a mess,” Brooke apologizes. We shrug it off as she works her way through a labyrinth to her coat.

“Hey!” Grace says. “Oh, my God — look — all of us are wearing the same shade of shoes!”

Brooke, Karol, Seth, Marilyn, Grace, and I form a pinwheel with our shoes in the one empty space on the floor. Theirs are indeed the same camel brown; mine, though, are black.

“Gah!” I exclaim. “I have shoes that same color at home.”

“Well,” Brooke tells me, “When you come back in the fall, we’ll do this again, okay?” A smirk paints her face. I nod. I will indeed come back in the fall. I will wear brown shoes, not black ones. In Philadelphia, I will not be a black sheep.

The next day, I cross the maroon shag of the airport and see the plane that will take me to Birmingham like this weekend never happened. Fifteen minutes before I board, I look down at the ground and say, “Hey, Philadelphia. I’ll be back. I promise.”

Dear Jonathan,

I am sorry to say that we will not be able to offer you a seat in our developmental psychology graduate program. We only recently received a clear picture of our financial situation as a department, and difficult decisions had to be made. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Best,

Peter

I read the words and think of Brooke and Karol and Seth and Marilyn and Grace and wonder if they’ll remember me when they reunite their shoes in a pinwheel in the fall. They probably won’t, but I will.

Shortly after I got the offer for a job in Seattle, Mom asked me to stop by the family house. She wanted me to sift through the items I’d spent my childhood stuffing inside my drawers until the wood ached. Carefully, I extracted each one, calculating its worthiness to remain in my life. Only so much could stay.

The lacquered black furniture set that was my college graduation gift had been sold two weeks ago. The queen bed and mattress had loyally sustained me after those nights I’d had too much wine and entertained Nathan and Jay by making out with a wall in our downtown loft; those nights I’d crawled under the covers after spending 13 hours writing my dissertation; and those nights I’d wept as, one by one, I watched my network of friends became a diaspora. Now it was in the possession of Missy, who, in exchange for $400, also siphoned the dresser wounded by that move into a cozy studio apartment overlooking the ballpark and the nightstand where I time and time again wearily rested the book of the month before turning off the lamp.

I sat on the hunter green carpet of my bedroom to sort through the remaining artifacts of 22 years in Birmingham. Bit by bit, I felt the shards of my identity falling away, as I inched ever closer to the apocalyptic day when the familiar would be in the rearview mirror.

In the process of sifting through my belongings, I opened the top right drawer of the cherry dresser. Atop mittens and knitted caps rested a talisman that I’d retained as a lucky charm for all these years. The alphabet soup and QR code had nearly faded to oblivion, but a keen eye could never forget them. The waitlist ticket sat there all those years, a gentle reminder that one day, once again, against all odds, I’d return the City of Brotherly Love.

But some stories are simply not meant to be told.

I took the ticket and held it precariously between my fingers, walking down the stairs and into the kitchen. I knew what had to be done next. My hand shook as I opened the lid to the recycling bin and held it over the other items destined for reincarnation. Perhaps in its next life, this ticket will be a napkin at a child’s birthday party or an obituary in a newspaper. In my own life, it was a miracle, but its time, like its text, was faded.

I breathed in hard, unleashed my grip, and watched as the ticket rocked like a feather and descended into a trampoline of discarded paper towels. I let my foot off the petal, letting darkness enshroud what I once held onto so dearly, letting go of any notion I’d ever return to utopia. I’d build a utopia of my own, like I always had, like I always will.

The end is the beginning is the end.

I’d just dropped Micah off at the bungalow he and his friends were renting in North Seattle. This time of year usually condemns us to solemn grey skies, but that particular day was beautiful. Micah, Byron, and I had spent the afternoon at Golden Gardens, where I constantly complained I wore the wrong shoes to walk through sand, experimented with portrait mode on my iPhone, and marveled at the calisthenics of a parasailer.

Byron led us away from the sea and toward the cliffs. Burrowed between the two was a cavernous tunnel, which he insisted we enter. He began to sing, and we soon joined him in “Amazing Grace.” The acoustics were as pristine as Byron swore they’d be.

The first case of COVID-19 had been diagnosed in nearby Kirkland. Our city bore the scarlet letter. We were the American cradle of the pandemic. My heart was heavy. And so I sang, I sang triumphantly, to prove the world that the children of Mt. Rainier and the Space Needle were brave and hardy: When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun / We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, then when we’ve first begun.

We left the tunnel so a clarinet player who’d also discovered its secret could have his turn to savor one last moment. Then, we piled into my SUV for what we knew might be the last time for a while, but we didn’t think too much about that.

Once Micah and Byron were gone, and I sat alone in the driver’s seat, I navigated the city’s serpentine streets to merge onto Aurora Avenue. I got off at Denny Way to skirt the toll and made my way through the skyscrapers of a city that would soon be on life support.

There was a marquee on one of the buildings bearing news headlines: “Seattle area businesses hit hard by coronavirus.”

Sometimes, I ask God why that sign couldn’t have read “ENERGY.”

Before Crisis, Crisis Core, After Crisis: I have tasted the first two of these eras, and I await the third, the time when we’ll meet on that shore again. I will unlace my shoes, toss my socks to the side, and sink my feet into the grains of sand.

The waves will crash, and I will run to embrace you all. You beautiful souls, in the flesh.

The soul that bears witness to the truth, no matter the cost. The soul that sees pain as the beginning of the story, not the end. The soul who can hold infinite love in finite spaces. The soul who made sure I’d never leave Seattle the way I came.

But then there was supposed to be you. You were to be first. Our story began on an instant messaging thread white with emptiness, glasses of wine, and a silly bet, and then we began writing something beautiful. Finally, pixels and sound bytes that made me smile and accelerated my heartbeat were to be human flesh. We would run towards the other, like children in a meadow on a morning fresh with spring.

We were supposed to wrap our arms around each other and firmly press our bodies together. But supposed to does not always turn into will. The empty white slate, once full of our quips and heartaches, our missives and “good mornings,” has seen its final gray and blue bubbles. You wanted at least a bow with me, but I ran off stage. An afterparty, beers between chums, and laughter at all the little times we fumbled the lines — I couldn’t take it. I ran away and slammed the door, your fingers caught in the jamb. Once I realized the mistake I made, I came running back, but you were gone. We were, and that will have to be enough.

I will never recover the prime months of my youth that I ought to have spent reveling with my friends atop Capitol Hill. Fate has stolen them. Freezing life does not freeze time. Hopes are dashed. He decides he just wants to be friends. A waitlist becomes a rejection letter. The doctor walks into the waiting room, says he has bad news, and you balk because he’s delivered that sentence hundreds of times, but dammit, this time’s different. The graduation ceremony isn’t happening, and the senior pictures of people decades older than you feel less like solidarity and more like salt in a wound. You were 30 seconds behind some happy-go-lucky kid who’ll make it to Philadelphia tonight, but you won’t. The marquee doesn’t read “ENERGY.”

The reality we want is often not the reality we get to have.

Yes, we’ve seen the end of all things: the end of an innocent world where we didn’t conceal our faces until they were unrecognizable, one where we believed humans were insuperable, one where triclosan didn’t leave our hands cracked and bleeding.

Will we spend our time believing our golden days are behind us, painting hypothetical scenarios in our minds, wondering how things might have been better? Or will we march into this brave new world, not mourning what we want but lack, but instead looking at what we have and giving thanks?

In aftermaths lie the beginning of things. The soul you longed to see may be missing. But in his absence, another steps forward to cheer you on for the job interview. Another delivers homemade cherry cobbler to your door. Another demands 90 minutes — and not a second less — to walk with you through the wreckage of a breakup. And you stand beside them, watching the wistful waters of the inlet scintillate with the light of a sunrise.

When we’ve been there, ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun
We’ve no less days, to sing God’s praise, then when we’ve first begun

The end is the beginning is the end.

The beginning is the end is the beginning.