It’s official – I didn’t get the H1B visa, and thus will have to leave the country in the second week of August. I will still be able to come visit, and in just fifteen months I will return to Boston on a student visa to attend HBS. Having to spend the next year in Europe is not the end of the world; on the contrary, it will likely turn out to be a lot of fun. I also have another six weeks before I actually have to pack up my things and go.
Still… I am sad. I am at home here. My life is in Boston. I don’t want to move out of my apartment. I don’t want to give up my motorcycle. And, of course, I don’t want to leave P. I should probably be grateful for force majeure stepping in and halting our romance, which was always destined to be temporary. My having to leave the country for an extended period of time puts a natural end to something which would otherwise come to a close with a broken heart and too many of tears. But no matter how I think about it – I feel like time is running out, sand running through my fingers. The thought leaves me breathless. I want the world to stop and give me another summer, another year with P. When I woke up next to him yesterday, I couldn’t help but wonder how many more mornings I would have with him. It’s premature for me to quote this, but it captures my mood:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
[Tears, Idle Tears by Lord Alfred Tennyson]
