I always thought the word bittersweet was some old-fashioned, outmoded, hollow word. Old people use that word. It's an oxymoron all by itself. It sounds like bad medicine.
In the plant world, bittersweet is an invasive yet beautiful
killer, strangling its victims (trees and underbrush) while bathing them in
luxurious splendor, especially in the autumn.
Even then, though, it is a word of oppositions: The benign American bittersweet vine vs. the
impossible to eradicate oriental vine; visually sweet yet stealthily hardy to
its core.
Today I learn the true meaning of bittersweet.
I have dinner with some work pals: a current teammate I will
see daily in a few short weeks, a former teammate who lives 500 miles away and
will never work with me again unless I relocate, and the painfully MIA friend
and work chum who is in limbo but was with us in spirit, living a distance away and contemplating major changes.
The arrival is all smiles and slaps on the back and the
breathlessness of catching up. How's your summer? How's your new job? How's your life going?
Then we settle into the comfortable camaraderie to which we
have grown accustomed and that never seems to leave us. We tell stories and laugh and eat and
drink. We hear about vacations and
families. We try to top one another's
horrifyingly hilarious adventures (though I'm reasonably certain that my
airborne human ashes tale takes the prize).
We pay the bill, the scene in human melodrama when most
people part ways, hug, cry, and generally blubber all over each other. Instead we stay. And stay.
And stay some more. The waiter
brings us more iced tea, more water.
(Not more Mai Tais disguised as Bahama Mamas, which, sadly, are the same
thing but someone must've been offended by the name and threatened to
sue.) We laugh more, talk more, tell
more tall tales that start with "Remember the time…" and end with
"Good times, good times."
When we get to the parking lot, that's when it hits me. That's when I understand completely and
without any confusion or flippant dismissal.
This moment is indeed bittersweet.
We don't want to say good-bye; we don't want to unspell the magic.
But then I go and break it all to Hell when a truck pulls
into the lot and needs my parking space.
Without any proper finality, I put my car into gear and peal from the
space, out onto route 28, north to home.
A direct shot. In a quick few
seconds, I leave my friends in the lot behind me, and they vanish from my sight
then from my hindsight.
Maybe that's the way it should be: A quick parting as if we
never left each other in the first place, as if summer and miles and states and
half a country's length didn't separate us. We'll pick right back up again the next time we see each other as if we never left the bar in the first place, as if we are the oriental
bittersweet, impossible to eradicate, impossible to keep down.
