I'm a fan of the band, BTS. I've attended their concert. I own quite a bit of their merch. I am committed to their releases. There was a time when I didn't know who they were. A time when I didn't care to know. I cared about other people then. Other musicians, other writers, other friends. Closest of them all was my best friend since middle school, A. She took me to Disneyland and I brought her into my family. When she first introduced me to BTS, I listened to them out of obligation. A bus ride to tour colleges is never a short one and we were in the habit of sharing earphones. This was our norm -- extending past our wants to meet at the compromise that is friendship. When I went away to college, I learned the bandmate's names. I watched their music videos, and our friendship continued despite the distance. I was good at this. Good at being a friend. Good at losing myself in someone else's interests because somehow I understood this is what made a good friendship.
When we stopped talking my sophomore year of college, I still listened to their songs. BTS became the backdrop to countless hours in the library, my writing sessions, and my flights homes. They also somehow became, perhaps by default, the one thing I could still access about our broken friendship. I loved them. I still do. But this isn't about BTS. Not entirely.
Because while I've been to their concert and I've lost my voice yelling alongside their songs, I am still learning how to make sense of the heartbreak that comes from lost friendships. They tell you, sometimes warn you, that the friends you make in high school will not be your friends post graduation. How cruel. What does it mean to say goodbye to something before you are ready for its departure?
In his poem, "For the Hardest Days" Clint Smith writes, "How maybe / we are not so different from the leaves. / How maybe we are also being reborn / to be something more than we once were." I wonder if we are reborn after every heartbreak. If we are made new again from the pain. A renewal so strong that a band becomes its very own comforting thing. How their songs change to echo my own voice and not the combined chorus of childhood friends who no longer text each other the obligatory "happy birthday" text. I like to think we are like leaves as Smith writes. We decay. We fall. We return next spring.
Is there any alternative?
Currently, El Salvador is suffering under the dictatorship of failed president. I omit his name on purpose. After forcing the country to take on Bitcoin as its official currency, the country burns from its inevitable crash. My grandmother, Mameya, still resides in El Salvador. This is another kind of heartbreak. Watching my parent's home country return to conditions mirroring the 1980s Civil War. I think in some cases there is too much heartbreak.
Leaves don't fall year-round for a reason.
But we aren't leaves. Even if imagining we are descendent of trees is comforting. Our falling is its own special routine. A breaking that happens every season. Because we must. Because how else do we gather ourselves? How else do rebuild if not intentionally? There is a method of survival in which we fall apart and break into slices of reality we call growth to pull us forward towards something better than this. Something better than what we want to disappear into. Something that no longer makes us want to dissolve. A thing called growth because we have nothing else, nothing more helpful to name it.
I welcome the breaking. In her poem, "What Remains Grows Ravenous" Ada Limón writes, "I thought everything was behind me: / death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life -- / that I would have done anything, / that what was left of me would become / so ruthless to survive." There is a desperation that comes from so much breaking. The heart breaks & breaks & breaks. It also continues. I am committed to continuing. Perhaps ruthlessly.
Sometimes all that you are left with is a question: what can I make out of goodbye? And I like to think one of our jobs as writers is to answer that question.
originally published via Sims Library of Poetry's Magazine, may 2022
