Crisis in a Cup

I came from my place in the corner to take a cup of tea from Constance and carry it over to Mrs. Wright, whose hands trembled when she took it. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. I could see the tea trembling in the cup; it was only her second visit here, after all.

By Shirley Jackson, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, 1962

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Dear Alex,

Few things in life can be spoken fully in words. Goodbye - a simple word borrowed and lent in time, it says so much and so well we may have missed its fullness.

I have been storming with the quote above by Shirley Jackson for over two months. From an old page of small prints, it bores its way through me and boils in me. Not for Jackson’s signature twist in undraping an image or intent nor the shock she instills into the end of a smoking sentence. I could not figure it out, though I have asked myself why her particular passage clung to me as a name, until the tremor of a cup speaks to me about a crisis this night.

A cup speaks to its drinker and maker. It says goodbye as it empties itself to you long after its wrestling in form and fire with its creator. And now dry and naked, it glares at you from the pit of the well, truth encircling, shadows in spotlight, its scent smoldering.

I get a message this afternoon from someone who has shared a few cups of summer with me at work. She tells me she will be leaving town for another company. We recall our brief times in group meetings at the roundtable personalized with coffee mugs and water bottles. Goodbye, her word drifting past my cup now tinged with the certainty of my not knowing how her eyes may flutter once more at the sipping of a cup by another table as the one that once then bound us as halves of one in agenda and conviction.

Get real, get sober about goodbye. If we quiver with our cups, we need to ask if we have been drinking the truth as the truth ought to have been taken. Then give it away as good as the best toast can say your goodbye.

How many goodbyes can you afford to tell in the fullness of truth before another bids your final farewell?

Yours, Kate