It’s strange to come back to tumblr once every few months,
to scroll through my dashboard and find it largely...empty. To have occupied a corner of the internet for twelve years is a feat in and of itself, and I kept thinking this corner wouldn’t change--or that I won’t change, and I wouldn’t leave--but that’s not true. I’m mostly gone. We’re all mostly gone.
It’s a part of growing up that I didn’t see coming. A digital analogy to thinking your friends will all stay in the same place forever, all teetering on the edge of the second-hand together. I was always so proud of my consistency--my balance on the clock, my aversion to change. I would claim that once you had me, you could count on me to never leave.
But the second-hand always falls, incrementally, bit by bit. Each chunk of time disappears like slivers of a pie no one admits to eating, until there’s nothing left.
People change. People leave. People don’t always give you answers. For someone like me, a never-leaver, that was a hard thing to understand.
But when you think about it, you, too, have left empty spaces behind. In your childhood bedroom, dusty air hangs where your fingers once traced shapes in the dark. In your phone are the names of people who wait for you like an overdue library book, long since checked out. Maybe you think of them too sometimes: sitting in your shelf, a task for later.
Or maybe you realize, after the tenth fight, the third missed call, the last unanswered message, that you were only holding the door open into an empty night, and letting all the warm air out.
For us never-leavers, admitting defeat (that we have left, or we have been left) is the hardest thing. Like the stack of unsent thank you notes to my college professors I finally threw out, long after I had finished grad school. Like the facebook message I never replied to until after I’d learned he’d died. The impressions of what should be and what is crackle painfully in your mind. You think: I can fix this. I can revive this. I can pretend this isn’t happening.
But it happens. Often, without explanation. Time owes you no answers.
You were warned about this in cliches--that nothing lasts forever. That all good things come to an end. Did you think it would happen to you? Did you prepare?
What I didn’t realize is that, in a way, I did. As a never-leaver, you have one of two choices: live in a shadow of the past, fearing every change in the wind, or forge something new for yourself. A house of your own, built of what remains—promises that were kept, stakes that you drive into the earth with your own two hands. This house you’ll fill with so much light and so much life, that no corner sits empty, no seat sits unused. This house will be your anchor. This house will survive the falling second-hand.
I know this post started off being about Tumblr, and sort of wound up being about everything, but this site—like most shared spaces—was only ever a doorway. It only ever mattered because of who went through it. Whether it now sits empty, or filled with strangers, doesn’t worry me anymore. There is a tapestry of life being lived by the many people I have known through this. They’ve had love, and death, and growth, built careers and families. Their lives may be opaque, and some too far for me to reach, but it was a joy to know them, for the brief time I did.
In the end, everything comes and goes. All that matters is what, and who, remains.
