I'm Gonna Miss You, Pal

Last weekend was one of the most interesting of my life. First my hard drive crashed and I was forced to use my limited computer knowledge to repair it to avoid buying a new one, since I am broke to the point that bums should be giving me money out of pity. A three day project which ended in success I am happy to say.
Then my dad wanted me to drive two and a half hours through the wretched Oklahoma terrain to assist him in planting this year's wheat crop, something he has never asked of me and even swore not to ask of me and which is made all the more ridiculous by the soaring gas prices and my aforementioned poverty.
Then I helped my best friend pack things into a U-Haul so that she could drive away and out of my life.Unthinkingly. Just trying to be a nice guy. I help her desert me. What was I thinking? Why would I facilitate the vanishing of a friend?
The rest of my weekend has been filled with her absence. She was someone very special to me, a confidante, a pal, a buddy with whom worry and dreariness sort of melted. When we occupied the same room, the only other thing that could fit was our love of each other's company.
I don't want to be misunderstood, here. She's happily entrenched in a long-term relationship, and the thought of her leaving him for me never crossed our minds. It just wasn't like that for us, we were a different kind of close, not the kind that really would or could work in a boyfriend-girlfriend setting. And I think of all the things about her, it's that particular closeness that only we shared that I'm going to miss the most.
Our love for each other's company. Just hanging out in the morning eating grapefruit smothered in sugar while her bird, a slightly vocal cockatiel named CeeCee who happened to adore me, hovered overhead, perched on the ceiling fan and looking down at us like she was waiting for some sort of signal to come join. Just forcing her to watch my hideous cartoons and comedy shows and read my sadistic comics and tolerate my general malaise. Just following her around while she was taking pictures and occasionally stealing her camera to capture my own bits of art. Just laughing about McCain. Laughing about Obama. Laughing about laughing about McCain and Obama.
Even our hideous and stubborn discourse on the nature of satire, which ended in nothing but hard disagreement. These things, all of them. I'm going to miss the hell out of her.
When I met her, I was just starting college. A good Christian boy from a good Christian town. My eccentricities were on full blast to preserve my fragile frame, my own personal security blanket. Most people remember me as the guy who pointed to his nipple and said that he was from there (my right arm extended out made a crude, impromptu image of Oklahoma: the arm forming the panhandle, and my body, the rest of the state. My hometown is located roughly above the right nipple), but she remembers me as the guy who wanted to see a dead hobo in a fountain. This, as is often recounted, is her first real memory of meeting me.
Basically, to explain my dead hobo thing: All too recently, a hobo had been found dead in this fountain we passed by on the way to a school outing. I remarked on the morbid romanticism of a dead hobo in this gaudy fountain, saying it was picturesque or something to that effect. The instant reaction was, my what a strange person. Most everyone else cut my chances of being friends off right there, but for some reason, she didn't.
We started spending more and more time together, me and my polar opposite. I was a good Christian boy, she a good Atheist girl; my dad raised beef and I was ravenously carnivorous, she on the otherhand was violently vegetarian; I was morose and morbid, and she was happy and life-loving. Polar in so many ways, but our friendship really worked.
After the first year, I made lots of mistakes and we ended up drifting for a year, but we came back together very soon, started hanging out again, even moved in next door to each other so we could wake up, walk to class, come home, and eat breakfast and talk about how ridiculous our teacher was. Then we might pack up her cameras and go hiking (which I had hitherto detested) or go to this crazy hotel liquidation store on 23rd.
This place is filled with insanity and repetition. Walking around in there is like walking through a surrealist film, couches on top of couches, rooms full of thousands of copies of the same painting, a large wooden fish attached to a tacky light up tableau waterfall which all together looked like it had spent some time in a Chinese buffet restaurant. There's a look to it, a feel that is entirely indescribable. There was also a cement room with walls lined with the X-bottoms of chairs, stacked to the ceilings, and the light flickered like some horror movie. The room itself looked like it might have been used for interrogation by the intensely foreign owner who was not a little frightening. Here she took some amazing photographs of various things. They looked like fallen Roman pillars.
I spent Saturday morning packing her things and moving them out, piece by piece she emptied her apartment. The couch I had so often passed out on, the table we would eat apple pancakes at, the desk where we would watch new installments of The Onion News Network. Everything left for the van and I was left behind to vacuum.
And my best friend was gone.
It later dawned on me that I would have to do this more and more as I grew older. That people will come and go from my life and that I will have to pack their things for them, because I'm a good guy and that's what I do. My buddies will get married and leave me behind holding the bag as they move on to a more fulfilling relationship with a spouse, and I'll help set up their new home. And then one day, they'll start dying and I'll go to their funerals. Everything I will ever get close to will leave me behind: friends, family, children. They will all go on to something better than I can give them. Just like my cat, who also left this weekend to find a better life far away from me. No one stays, everyone leaves.
And I'm sure there are people who feel the same way about me.