The Long Goodbye

“Did you say ‘no, this can't happen to me,’ and did you rush to the phone to call?
Was there a voice unkind in the back of your mind saying maybe…

you didn't know him at all; you didn't know him at all? Oh, you didn't know.

Well, the bells out in the church tower chime burning clues into this heart of mine,
thinking so hard on her soft eyes and the memories offer signs that it's over...

it's over…”

* * * * *

December, 1999. This was the last time I saw her. I was getting ready to leave the Art Institute for the Winter break, and my family was up from Louisiana to help me move out of the dorm for two weeks. After having packed everything I was taking with me into the car, we made one final stop before pulling out of town – Molly’s apartment. She was living there with her boyfriend, David. She made no announcement of her relationship to me, possibly because she didn’t want to hurt me, but I knew what was going on. It was kind of her not to fill me in from the beginning.

We stopped outside their building and my mom and brother volunteered to wait in the car until I came back. “I’ll only be a minute,” I told them. I knocked on the outer door and even buzzed the intercom up to their apartment when Molly stepped outside on their balcony.

“Come on up!” she shouted. It had been a long time.

When I got to the top of the stairs, the doors opened, and Molly welcomed me with open arms. Even though she was mostly how I remembered her, she seemed bolder and more adventurous. She seemed different. She was looking pretty casual, barefoot and wearing jean shorts with a blue halter top, like she had planned her whole day around staying inside. I sat in a chair on the far side of their living room while Molly plopped down over the side of their couch.

“Do you want anything?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

Almost instinctively, she pulled out a pipe and fired up the bowl. She took a few quick hits and offered it to me. “You want some?” she asked, holding in the smoke.

Part of me actually did, but I thought of a few of reasons to pass. One, my mom and brother were downstairs, and I didn’t want to come away from here smelling like weed. Also, I had matured that latent, post-teenage experimental phase. Marijuana was gradually working its way out of my life. I had my third reason to thank for that. More than anything else, Laura became the defining influence in my life. I had always cherished the idea of finding true love above anything else, and now that I had it with Laura, I wasn’t about to let it go.

So I passed on the weed. Molly didn’t seem to mind. She never did care one way or another. Just then, David walked in from the kitchen and sat across from both of us. He was also in shorts, an odd clothing item for a day that was so cold outside.

“Did you offer him any?” he asked Molly.

“Yeah, but he’s cool,” she replied.

“Are you sure?” David then turned to me. “Do you want any T.M.?” he asked.

“T.M.?”

“Tuesday Morning,” he answered.

“He doesn’t know what it is,” Molly informed him. She was right though. I didn’t, but I was always curious about their creative drug slang.

David turned to me with bloodshot-red eyes and explained, “The idea being that alcohol gets you through your Monday, but bud gets you through the rest of the week.” He took a deep hit from Molly’s pipe and elaborated. “Hence, Tuesday Morning.”

I just further insisted that I was doing just fine without it. Nevertheless, Molly was also insistent that I not leave here without something. “Follow me,” she said. I got up and they led me to their back bedroom closet, a virtual greenhouse for the cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms. The idea of ingesting them somewhat scared me, but I didn’t know why. After all, I had been down the drug path before – marijuana, ecstasy and some really week acid, but I didn’t have a taste for it this time. I was, however, impressed by their urban agricultural skills. “Wow, they look like they’re doing well,” I complimented.

“They’re at their full potency too,” David added.

Without hesitating, Molly spoke up and offered to give me a going away present. “I’ll put some in a baggie for you,” she said. Suddenly, it all felt like déjà vu, only stronger. It was like I had experienced all of this before. In fact, I was sure of it. Like a distant memory just surfacing, I could envision myself pondering long and hard over the bag of ‘shrooms before flushing them all down the toilet in the Moore, Oklahoma motel room where my family and I would eventually wind up spending the night. That would probably be the exact moment that our friendship came to its defining end. All of the later mentions of her were just residual.

When Molly handed me the bag, I felt a deep pit in my chest get even deeper, and I was positive that I had done this before. However, this time I was determined to do it differently. I didn’t want my memories of our last goodbye ending with the mental image of psychotropic fungi swirling into the central Oklahoma sewage treatment plant, so I held onto the baggie for the time I was there, but I made sure I wouldn’t leave with it. I looked up to Molly knowing this, and she gave me a stare like she could tell something was different, as if she sensed that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

David went to the back of the apartment to take a phone call, and Molly and I returned to the living room. Aside from my intentions of rejecting the fungous gift, the memories of this last visit with Molly didn’t change at all. I fully expected her to give me a token of our friendship, just as she did before. That’s why I was caught off guard when she didn’t. In fact, she went an entirely new direction.

“Why’d you come back, Evan?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “To see you before I left.”

“No, why are you doing this again? Leaving it all behind again. It was painful enough for you the first time, so why put yourself through it again?”

“What do you mean though?” I repeated.

“You have the ability to change the outcome now,” Molly told me. “This doesn’t have to be ‘goodbye’…at least the way you think of it. You did it months ago. Think back to the car outside my friend’s house. You remember – I know you do.”

I did remember. I remembered someone speaking suspiciously the same way to me, but it wasn’t Molly. It was another girl. I believe “Angel” was her name. I delved into the strange direction of our conversation even more, and it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t Molly that I was talking to. She didn’t use verbose dialogue or theoretical and metaphysical context like that. No, it was Angel, speaking through her.

“What do you suppose I do then?” I asked.

“I think you already made that decision,” she told me. She was right. She knew me too well. I bent forward and put the bag of mushrooms I was still clutching on the coffee table in front of me. In doing so, I changed the way I remembered my own history. The initial experience was still there, but I didn’t have to recall it the same way I always had before. Abandoning those ‘shrooms left me feeling happier and more optimistic about the outcome of my life in general.

That was the end of it. Over the next few months, the subject of Molly and me and my unwillingness to let go of her caused several little rifts between me and Laura. I eventually matured, of course. I wanted to do whatever I could to preserve the wonderful life Laura helped me achieve. I could never have made the choices I made without her. She’s that important to me.

As for Molly, the memories of us, our communication: the letters from Florida, Australia and places where she thought of me, were places I’m sure they’re she’d much rather forget. They’re still with me, but locked away – much as they are in my mind.

I stepped back over the threshold of Molly and David’s apartment as I got ready to head back down to the car. I hugged her one last time, one final time before she shut the door behind me. I kept reminding myself, “When one door closes…”

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