Last One Out

After 14 years, hopefully it's not much of a spoiler to discuss the last scene of Cheers, in which Sam Malone is the last to leave, turning the lights out in his empty bar and bidding it, and we the viewers, a final farewell. If I've ruined the ending for anyone, I apologize, but the 11 years of episodes prior to that were pretty good too.

I can relate to being the last to leave. Inertia is my goliath, a force which dwarfs me, which I defeat only through supreme effort. It takes a lot for me to start something new, but once I'm doing something, it's equally difficult to quit. I had a dream the other day that I got off a bus outside my old college campus, and walked in to the third floor of one of the office buildings at my previous job. People I used to work with were gathered together working with construction paper and paste, sitting around various round tables like my old elementary school. It was surreal going back to visit, going back to places I can never return to. Those people are scattered, and thus are those locations changed, those which even still exist.

I don't leave unless I'm forced to leave. Every three to four years was traumatic for me growing up, moving on to the next school, especially high school and college where I was moving on without the friends I had surrounded myself with for years. My first job after college was at a small and shrinking publisher that ceased to exist about a year after I finally left. There were maybe 25 employees when I started, and 9 when I left, and I absorbed a lot of other responsibilities each time someone was let go. Part of it was the comfort zone of a routine I could handle with my eyes closed, but I think there was an element of pride, like I was somehow holding everything together, and I had a sense of accomplishment, even if the writing on the wall and on my paycheck said otherwise.

A few years ago, I made a pact with two friends at work to join the new company gym. The place was packed all the time, and I was self-conscious, but it helped to have people I trusted with me. Eventually one quit after getting pregnant, while another left after his wife got pregnant. Other friends and coworkers left for various reasons, while I continued to get on the treadmill every day, running faster and faster to nowhere. Before I was let go, between layoffs, workloads, and human nature, very few people were still down there. If there were two other people working out at the same time as me, I would consider that a crowd. Many nights I had the place to myself.

It's a curious feeling to be the last one out. Loneliness comes in to play, but it's more a sense of ghosts, remembering the past and the way things were. I'm always the last to leave a party or a friend's house. Someone else has to initiate an exit before I do the same. I don't want to miss anything. If I wasn't subject to train schedules, I might never leave gatherings with my friends in the city. It's the logic a child has when protesting bedtime. I just knew something interesting would happen the second I closed my eyes. When I finally did stay up late, once all night, all it did was leave me exhausted. There was no magical world on the other side of midnight.

Being last can be boring. Will I maintain a blog long after all the people on my blogroll have moved on? In the online world, I've usually been the last to leave games and message boards. Like Sam Malone, I've turned out the lights on many an empty set. And I don't think that will ever change. Like a Uatu, I must watch and observe all that transpires, recording it to my brain and often to the internet. I am a constant in a world of flux, and my mortality is the only reason I'll ever leave it, hopefully not for another fifty years. I'd hate to miss my shows, movies, parties, meetings, parades, feasts, meals, reading...