“You have a real affinity for houses Chloé.”
I’ve always felt because I wrote I had a good understanding of myself. But every so often someone says something or even I will say something and you realize you aren’t who you thought you were. Sometimes it’s comforting. Yes, I do write about houses, always thought others were haunted. I can trace it back too, to the time I spent with my parents talking about which houses we liked. Riding by extravagant ones and cottages all of which we would talk about living in. Until eventually I wrote about our house, shared it, and my professor said that line. In the end, it sparked a string of actions all of which fed into my own realization of myself.
To begin to realize yourself is an obtrusive act. It disrupts a story. Some stories tell us who we think we are, while others say how we think it’s going to go. Often these are stories we’ve had for long enough we can’t quite figure out where they came from. To realize or accept anything more true than what we understood deeply and unquestionably requires we say goodbye to the person we thought we were. Joan Didion says we tell ourselves stories to live, but also we must rewrite these stories if we wish to thrive.
In some ways, I also have an affinity for goodbyes. Each piece at its essence is me saying goodbye to myself. When 23 becomes 24 or when healing becomes healed for example. But those speak about the people we were, the people we’ve been. As summer ends I’m more in tune with my own mythology. Who did I, at June’s arrival, believe I would be by August? What did I think summer would hold? As fall arrives I always see how little of my imagined future came true. Most stories unravel over time, despite our best efforts. September is sacred for this reason. We’re in mourning of these phantom lives. We’re not only saying goodbye to ourselves but also to the people we never became, the person we thought by now we’d be, the places we didn’t go.
Goodbyes have always been of interest to me because I’m sentimental. I like their ritualistic behavior, their tears, their passage of time. Yet to write about them was something entirely different. I developed a sort of cadence as I began to ask myself what I wanted to write. I mean, what could I say? Goodbyes suck. Goodbyes hurt. They scream, they howl, they wail. They sound like I’ll see you later, talk to you soon, and also farewell. They’re long and they’re tough. Even the easy ones can be unbearable. Yet not all goodbyes are the same, even if I might sum them up in a way that suggests they are. There’s an entirely different goodbye behind the things we didn’t do. Our phantom lives, our what-ifs, you’d think would pass us by with ease and acceptance. What is there to hold onto if it was never really arrived? Instead, they are the hardest things to let go of. It sometimes feels to me if I sit here long enough the person I wanted to be will have to show up. If not now then fashionably late. How could I have put real work and weight into this imaginary future only to have to let it go, no closer to it than when I dreamed it all up? There’s this weightlessness when the future is lost because it showed up as the present.
I suppose this is what I mean by mythology. In order to explain the unknown concept of the future, we use stories to make sense of what we can’t know. We ourselves become an idea larger than the time frame we are given to make it. Seldom do we account for life happening, for the risk and reward of being real. At the end of any season, but I think particularly summer with its wild freedoms and pressure for joy we say goodbye to its nostalgic qualities but also to the stories we had sitting in its bend. The only silver lining I could muster up is something I have seen quite often in my own life. When we say goodbye to our fictional lives and begin to look at the empty space, to look at what is left, all we have is what we are.
For some reason, over and over again we learn that we aren’t meant to be our imagined selves, if not now then not ever. If ever then not now. We can’t make stories work if they aren’t what is true. This is the advantage of goodbyes. The more we get used to this act of realization, of accepting a more authentic and true story, the better we feel. Even I would say our lives get better. It’s cliche but I must agree, goodbyes usually mark the end of one thing, but the beginning of another. We can’t coast on fiction, it is this continuous cycle of becoming more true and real that moves us forward.
At first, I thought maybe I should write about the how. How do we say goodbye? I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. We say goodbye to our phantom life and made-up stories the way we do anything else. We mourn it, we set it free. The real question was always what’s next? Where do I go from here? Yes, I’ve had stories of how my life would go. I thought I knew when I would graduate college, where I would work, and even what I wanted my career to be. Only to then have these imaginary timelines fade away and discover half of what I thought I wanted wasn’t really who I was, wasn’t who I was made to be. If I continued to harbor this ill-fitting idea I had of who I was I’d never show up where I needed to go. This is perhaps why goodbyes are so important, it recalibrates us.
So you can see how goodbyes can be small, mere glimpses of the future we thought waiting for us(farewell summer). But they can also be monumental (goodbye to the person I never was because I was not meant to be her). The longer and more comfortable I become in recognizing the pieces and stories that don’t work for me the further I keep going. Onward, outward. I try not to dwell because why would I? So much more comes from goodbyes than from the ideas I used to have about myself.
Before we go, if you won’t mind, let me tell you a good story about a long goodbye. Please tell me if you’ve heard it before.
Chloé Williams in her final year at college knows exactly how her life will go. She’s going to graduate in the spring with a bachelor’s in English creative writing and a minor in journalism. These skills she will use to work at her favorite publication down in SoHo, talking about fashion and life and everything she can think to pitch at morning meetings. So to say, this was how she would become a writer. Only to discover as fall grew deeper in itself this publication was shutting down at the end of October. She had to say goodbye. Goodbye to this woman waiting for her, the coworkers who would now never know her, the writer she thought she would be. All that is left is the writer she is.
Walking a week later she passes rows of apartments, their windows open, admiring their trim detailing before arriving to the green velvet couch of her therapist’s office. She has an idea and she is not sure if it’s going to work but she’s willing to give herself the attention and understanding to do it. She has an elevator pitch and she’s giving it in an echo chamber. She hopes if she can convince her therapist she can do this her therapist can convince her back. Once she said it though, it was goodbye, maybe i’ll see you later, to that ruin of the daydream writer she will never be. Her therapist asks her what’s on her mind. She takes a breath and says goodbye the best way she can think how.
“I think I want to start a newsletter.”
I’ve spent a lot of notebook paper and margins writing fake good morning notes and goodbye notes to my future husband and children. When I was a teenager I slept in well past my mom’s summer morning farewells. She’d be at work and I’d come downstairs for tea and see a little note sitting on the counter. She writes us notes a lot, if not in her handwriting then leaving little cards in our lunchboxes or inscriptions in books. Since they are such benchmark of goodbyes I should include my own to you guys.
He saw clearly have plain and simple – how narrow, even — it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, he called him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good I think he had this to come back to, this place because all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
We aren’t suddenly without the people we were. They aren’t lost as we learn they only get further away August 24th, 2021 6:28 PM
Let’s create a world. You on the sofa in your best sweater. A house with a sunroom, a pullout day bed, for the nights it rains, not for guests. August 15th, 2021 1:27 PM
I graduated on August 12th approximately at noon. The hardest goodbye I would have to say is the college life I didn’t get. The continuous act of losing the dream which would never be. I didn’t like college, it was hard and I struggled the whole time. When I did end up liking school it only lasted a semester before we were dropped off at the edge of a pandemic and made to finish online. I accepted I wouldn’t get a college graduation, even after doing this for so long, but I still wish I could have worn the cap and gown. Most people say I’m not missing much, but it’s not that it would be fun it’s that something of mine was lost. So let me say goodbye, to the 2019 college graduation that would have happened if I didn’t drop out, and to the 2021 graduation that could have been. With it, I should acknowledge too the friends I thought I’d make at school that never came, who instead popped up at different schools, different dorms, and backstocks on fifth avenue. Goodbye to the partying I more or less didn’t do and the crazy nights I never had because I was always leaving wherever I was early. I liked a few teachers but didn’t connect to most, goodbye to the dream of meeting someone life-changing. I loved the cliche of the large lecture halls and the courage I had to speak up in them so goodbye to the real stuff also, and the answers I had but was afraid to share. This is for the few textbooks I pretended to read and the dream that one day I would finish them. I didn’t get the dean’s list, I didn’t excel, I went and I did what I needed to do to survive and I left a rather unremarkable touch in my time there. And that is something I’m proud of. The dream, when I began, has receded and what is there besides what really happened? So I suppose this is really the easy, the treacherous, and yet still the long goodbye.
You can find the mood board here!
Here is me and my sister visiting our friend on long island and having Shirly temples. Olivia captured this photo which I believe is a benchmarker for the end of summer because Henri was on its way. If ever an August storm should arrive it’s safe to assume fall is closing in, that is it will likely never be quite as warm as it was just before the rain.
(I chose orange, red, and yellow for the mood board colors because even though the end of summer comes swiftly, when it does arrive, it’s always golden. )
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save +share your favorite parts and tag @chloeinletters
My Instagram is @chloeinletters where the DMs are checked, cared, and loved for.
My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me
My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, farewells, and to the people we never were
Love always,
Chloé
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