A Love Letter: On Quitting and Heartache
Part 3: To My Colleague
Had I thought it through, I wouldn’t have chosen Magnolia. Fluorescent lights are a horror and the petite tables are too closely spaced. But it was 11:30 and I was hungry and I didn’t consider that our eminently capable division head might be sitting at the first table by the door when we arrived. I did the best I could in choosing our table, against the wall beneath some earnest local art— one that didn’t wobble. It was out of the division head’s earshot but suitably far away from the deli counter, behind which a pair of recent alums dolled out quiche and that really excellent kale salad.
We should have talked in my office…or yours. They are right next to each other, both cluttered with texts and films and stacks of graded papers. Mine, with its color-coded books, potted plants, and sparseness that quietly asserts the relative brevity of my occupation. Yours, somehow darker and heavier and more substantial with all the accumulated details of your much longer tenure. I shouldn’t have tried to tell you over a hummus wrap. The herb dressing that our fancy sandwich establishment uses is excellent, but it always drips out of the corners where the tortilla is folded up and then over. It was a near certainty that I would make a mess of it all.
In four years, I have never seen you look the way you looked when I told you I was leaving and I hate that I did not have the courage to ask you, in that moment, “are you okay?” I hate that I needed a napkin for the dripping dressing and that you were waiting for one of our former students to bring you a latte and that another of our colleagues — one of the colleagues who now refuses to speak to us because I took an ethical stand and you stood with me and they took it personally — was in line, extravagantly performing their refusal to acknowledge our presence. You are the most energetic person I have ever met in my life, but as I gave up on the hummus and noted that the spicy noodles really could have used more spice, you looked tired.
It broke my heart. I am so afraid that I have broken yours.
Whoa..those are sentiments generally reserved for family, for old friends and lovers, the non-academics among you are thinking. You are thinking wrong. Because these are the sentiments that pass between colleagues in a department of two at a small private liberal arts college at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the banks of the James River. Sentiments that make sense on a campus that’s all brick and ivy and gorgeous views and wonderful students who render us mythical mononymous characters — “Gauthier” and “Beckham.” These are the sentiments of colleagues who sit next to each other at faculty meetings, who raise middle-school boys who are just weeks apart in age, and joke about how we will do things differently at the College when “we are in charge.” These are the sentiments of colleagues who desperately believe that teaching is vitally important work, that students are a gift, that it is our responsibility to try to make the world better, and who have never really had to question the other’s commitment to that fragile and beautiful shared vision.
I wish I hadn’t just robotically listed my reasons for leaving at that small table that didn’t wobble, under the art, with the fucking hummus dripping down my forearm and the bland noodles on my fork, and our colleague pointedly not seeing us. I wish I would have told you instead I that absolutely LOVE that I can hear you teach when I am in my office because you are so goddam excited about what we do and because that makes me smile. It wouldn’t have made much sense to tell you that under the circumstances. But walking away from a tenure track job just before going up for tenure doesn’t make much sense either.
I have a year to say “thank you” as many times as I can find occasion to, to reminisce about what we accomplished together, and to do everything in my power to make sure that you and the next occupant of my office are set up to put me and my color-coded books to shame. You have my promise that I will work as hard on this as I have worked on anything. And you, I’m sure, feel as I do, the palpable inadequacy of that promise.
I am so sorry. Please know that I love and respect you beyond words. Being your colleague is one of the best things I have ever been.
