Ambivalent endings

This week is my last week of work.

Last week, I turned to my mom and said, "Now that I'm almost done working at the library, I'm starting to have capital-I-Insight, and that insight is that it wasn't that bad."

My biggest complaint is that this job wasn't what I was expecting, which isn't much to stand on.

On Friday, two of my regular kids came in at the tail end of the meal program, after everyone else had drifted off for the afternoon.  Cally, 13, and Kate, 8, are sisters, and have spent a good proportion of their summer vacation at the library reading comic books and playing games with me.

Cally told me that her boyfriend was moving to Florida on Tuesday.  Kate said they wanted to bring their other sister to the movies but she didn't come.  I told them next week was my last week.

At the end of the day, Kate ran out of the library with a cursory wave.  "Bye if I never see you again!" she shouted.

It was an aloof and touching moment, all too reminiscent of my preferred method of goodbyes.

Cally stuck around a little longer and asked me what I was going to do next.  I told her I was going to visit family and that I'd probably come back and visit the library a few times before I moved back to Fairbanks, which is probably a lie, but it made the answer a little bit easier to handle.

I'm starting to wrap up the ends of a summer I never thought I'd have.  I had such grandiose plans for these few months.  I'd work hard all year at the paper and then do some important internship somewhere during the summer.  Come fall, I'd be ready to take my last year of school pretty easy.  I've always been a goal-oriented, if not impulsive, person, and I've had this timeline charted for a long time.

It's not like I've never dealt with the unexpected before.  But this summer was so unplanned, coming together at the last minute, but never truly coming through.  My library job is about to end and turn into another anecdote, like all the others that have come before it.

I'm used to caring intensely about endings, and right now I feel mostly ambivalent.  Kate's exuberant goodbye pretty much summed it up.