Every goodbye I ever learned,
I learned at an airport.
India is not a sad place in this story. I want to be clear about that up front, because a lot of people hear my parents separated and I stayed in India for six months and immediately paint the whole country grey.
It was hot. There were too many people in every room and that was the point of the room. There was a fan that clicked. There was food I still measure other food against and always lose. My grandmother fed me like feeding me was a way of saying something she otherwise wouldn't get to say, which — I now understand — it was.
The problem was never India. The problem was that India kept ending.
what the adults were doing
They were doing their best, at a scale I could not see.
My parents came to America from a country their own parents had never left. They did the thing where you take everything you know and put it down and walk away from it and start again at a disadvantage, on purpose, for children who will not understand what it cost until they are old enough to price it.
And then, in the middle of that, their marriage came apart. Which is a thing that happens to people. It's not a scandal, it's a Tuesday, statistically. But if you are seven, it is the sky.
Fact
Two adults, in a country they moved to, decided they could not stay married.
Feeling
The floor is gone. Also, somehow, this is my fault, and if I am good enough it will be undone.
What I learned later
Children do not experience separation as an event. They experience it as a change in the physics of the world, and then they build for those physics.
the six months
I was in India while it got sorted. Not abandoned — surrounded, actually, by more family than I'd ever had in one place. But surrounded and safe are not the same measurement.
What I remember is the waiting. Not fear, waiting. Being told things would be figured out, and understanding, in the way children understand things without words for them, that the person telling me did not yet know either.
At some point a child in that position makes a decision about what kind of person he is going to be about all this.
I don't remember making mine. I only remember having made it.
A child needed a philosophy for goodbye.
His philosophy became stone.
the thing I got wrong
For a long time I told this story as a story about damage. That's the fashionable version and it flatters me, because in that version I am something that was done to.
Here is a truer version. A small person was handed a situation with no good options and he invented a tool, and the tool worked, and he kept using it long after the situation was over. That's not damage. That's engineering.
The mistake wasn't building it. The mistake was never checking whether the load case had changed.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.