Signs, ignoring them
Sometimes when leaving, you just need to do it. You can work yourself up to some perceived fanfare otherwise, a certain expectation. But moving from one thing to the next, the most ceremonial thing can be taking the steps. The action becomes the occasion. To be the one leaving, to have left, to see the tether and to sever it with grace, silence, to see the thing through that you set into action knowingly or not to what the outcome would be. Alone, too.
The best vantage point is always going to be the one equal paces from one point to the next, where you can stop and turn to look back with enough distance for scope and enough scope for measure.
Being left is mostly billed as the loneliest position, but to be the one leaving means to trade familiarity along with all the rest. A quick rush, the feeling of whatever weight there was falling away—and depending on the weight it can feel like floating for a time—but then you gotta get to going. To make your peace with leaving the line where you drew it. With no more outcomes framed by previously warmed parameters, no more lights left on in the dark, at least not where you recognize them. Lonely is relative to space. How much you have, how you might draw it from memory, all the people in it, what you filled it up with. To step away, out from that, is consoling yourself only with the idea of what’s next and if there isn’t one then with the promise of an idea, eventually.
I keep thinking about endings. What we expect from them, that we expect from them at all. What we want them to be and why we want that. Signs, probably. Knowing that we made the right choice, even in the choices that weren’t ours. Affirmations like your lucky number coming up on the clock whenever you happen to glance at it in the throes of something, a green light at the right time, when you ask for a sign to prove something to yourself it can be anything. And you can wait and wait for the right one but the thing is they won’t quit coming, and neither will the need for endings or the choices that precipitate them.
When Deadspin essentially shuttered this week, leaving a big, dumb hole for a lot of people’s livelihoods and a kind of last bastion of sportswriting that ranged in and out of the rapidly shrinking territory of what sportswriting is supposed to be, it was a forced ending as much as it was a collective decision to take the more active exit—to canine tooth the cap off the cyanide pill and sprinkle it across whatever was left of a thriving, threatened ideation. The writers and editors who left, all together, showed that the bravest thing can be saying no, that a refusal will sometimes save you even though we are bombarded beyond reason to do the opposite, to say yes whenever it’s an option, to charge forward as if “yes” equals propulsion and “no” a collapsing point of gravity. But severing is where fresh starts come from. Like nicking a dying leaf off a plant with a thumbnail and watching new growth sprout from the same spot a little while later, or how simple and annoyingly true the adage of sleeping on something proves itself, over and over, that in daylight a world appeared titled off its axis can be nudged back, corrected.
The loss of Deadspin, like Vice Sports and SI, flung a lot of very good and talented people out there. People who might also be a little bit mad, who have double the propulsion now riding the backs of a choice they made in full resolve and courage. It is not easy to slow momentum like that, it moves faster than freewheeling on the whims of a never-ending “yes” with no breather.
I don’t know the answer in terms of tangible jobs, or a replacement, if a replacement on a similar model would even work, but I do know that in terms of ambition, in stories that for me, were in the works for Deadspin and I let myself feel at least a brief bummer pang for how they wouldn’t now get run down that page, under that header, the ambition I have to get them out didn’t die, has only undergone a necessary shift in direction. Endings do that too. Like when something constricts to such a fixed point, collapses, and by virtue of physics starts to kick back out. It’s a feeling built on potential, of need out of frustration, want from lack. These places are gone but the people aren’t, the community isn’t, the stories are still happening.
One Halloween, late enough that it was over for me but still going for others, someone came and smashed our pumpkins. It was weird because all the kids in the neighbourhood, aside from being known, were my and my brother’s age, so it was probably older kids, teens, from another neighbourhood pocket beyond some invisible line of what constituted ours. Still, my dad got in his van in his bathrobe and slowly drove up and down adjacent streets, searching. It’s the only time I’ve known him to do something like that, and knowing him now, so many years later and better in a lot of ways—potentially worse in others—he for sure had not thought beyond the driving. Had he come across anyone, what, covered in pumpkin pieces, I can’t picture that confrontation. Maybe a shouted, “Did you?” from the driver’s side, and if they admitted it, probably a, “Well, you shouldn’t have,” and then taillights. I can’t even remember if I cried over them. Maybe. Probably.
I think sometimes we have territories we aren’t aware of. These limits that, if they get encroached on, stir up something that sit on the fight side of us comfortably. Like tripwire, or a weathervane starting to slowly go without the aforementioned weather, the signal to these old parts can come on as slow as temperature climbing, a fever in the body before you know. And the response will strike with such clarity it can feel like it’s coming from outside your body. It skips over all the deliberation and snaps, shouts, walks calmly, quick but unhurried, toward the thing that has inched over that invisible line. Like an animal of mostly teeth with all the time in the world.
The night guard came to find me after I’d told him I was leaving, that it was my last day into night at the museum where I worked. He held out his phone shyly to the one staff I had on with me, asked if he could take a picture of the two of us, the night guard and me. The top of his head hit just below my shoulders so we just stood there, side by side, smiling. I was holding bags of all the things I’d cleaned from my desk, the shoes I’d stashed under it, it was almost midnight on Halloween and the party downstairs was taking down the neon pink cobwebs and blood red string lights from the ceiling. I had been drinking the last glass of wine from a $400 bottle leftover from another event, watching FailArmy clips, going through thank you cards, and clearing photos of Rasheed Wallace in various states of repose from my desktop when he came up to the office’s floor to find me.
“Kat-ty?” I heard him call, like he had many other nights to ask me how long I’d be there, if the AV was done loading out or if I’d seen the ghost. It is funny how quickly the weird things feel like they aren’t, when they’ve become your routine.
Outside, waiting for the cab to come, 80kph freak wind whipped leaves and trash down the street, bent the tops trees down like a copse of creaking people struggling to touch their toes. The cab pulled up and the wind snatched the door from my fingers and slammed it shut. I tried it again, heaving the bags across the backseat ahead of me, thinking how the times you want some dramatic extension of an experience, the underscoring of a moment, you usually don’t get it, and when you just want it all to culminate, to crawl into a cab and go home in the dark already, it won’t.
On my first day off the job I ran a bunch of happy errands—dropping off dry cleaning, returning library books—and put a chicken stock on before I left the house too, so it all felt even more wholesome as hell. I took myself for long breakfast at a place in a corner house a few blocks from mine, the same place I went after the Raptors won the ECF and I cried over the newspaper headline. On my way home I cut through the ravine I pass whenever I go to this place, usually dense and dark with trees and foliage but now, with the Fall, holes punched through the thinning oranges and reds showed how deep the trail went. There wasn’t another person there, it was so quiet you could hear the creek winding through the bottom of it. Someone had laid down long planks everywhere that was too soft and muddy to walk and when I eventually climbed several flights of wood stairs out I was twice as far from home as where I started, where I guessed I’d end up. It was a cool day but I was flushed and happy, looking at all the Halloween decorations that seemed almost embarrassed to still be out and spooky on people’s lawns. When I did make it home there was a stock, sleeping dogs, and my blood felt the loosest it had been in weeks. Detours do something but a lot of the time we are reluctant to take em for fear of getting off track.
Starts are out of endings, endings out of leaving, and sometimes getting turned around is the thing that sets you in the right direction.