July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Ben’s last post. He has been writing with us since August 2015.

The past eight years, my July contribution to the post calvin has always been a confrontation with, or maybe just a negotiation of, the facts of my marriage. And I mean that, on one hand, in a very literal sense. My first post went live in July 2015, thirteen days after Jes and I got married, and the due date of every post since then has coincided with our July 17 anniversary. Usually the writing goes off without a hitch. Once or twice, however, I’ve spent the better part of a July 17 overcaffeinated and jittery, stressing about a 700-word blog post while trying vainly to assure Jes that I was, in fact, almost finished; that I just needed five more minutes; and that, oh, if she could quick read this bit over here—yes, that line and tell me how it lands—I’d be grateful.

Mercifully, these eleventh-hour crises have been few. More often by contrast, the negotiation of writing and marriage has been strictly imaginative—my July posts as an opportunity, along with the anniversary itself, to pause, look back, and take stock. Sometimes the reflections I generated became a published piece. Often they didn’t.

Still, I’ve always valued the process, in part because its cyclicality runs counter to how, lately, I’ve been experiencing time, experiencing this process we call growing up. For roughly twenty years, I had the reassuring structure of the linear progress narrative to give time shape. That narrative is the one that structures the fantasy novels I love. It’s the shape that informed my progression from grade school to high school, and from there to college. It’s the narrative architecture that led me to regard the difference between fifteen and sixteen as positively epochal. But since college, since Calvin, time has increasingly moved, it seems, in circles—or if not quite in circles, then in something like repetition with a difference, one year like the last but also not. Maybe in some ways that’s what getting older is about: marking that weird and at times uncanny gulf between me now and me then. Or in the present case, between my marriage now and my marriage in 2015 when Jes and I were still figuring out what it means to have a life together, tentative, nervous, but also somehow content in each other’s presence.

Playing house, my mom and dad like to call it. Playing, that is, until one day you’re finished playing, having rehearsed the routine enough times that suddenly you realize you’re just keeping house. Making home. And it’s difficult in hindsight to narrate how exactly that transformation occurred.

In preparing for this final essay, I revisited my first ever post for the website. In some respects, that 2015 essay feels lightyears away from me now. In other ways, it feels only a week old. The post, about a concert at Millennium Park that Jes and I attended, contains a number of qualities that are, for better or worse, characteristically me: a tendency toward self-deprecation, a laudable impulse to ferret out the profound in the mundane, a less laudable impulse to put the profound into an awkwardly intellectual box.

Reading the post now, I feel a quiet, if occasionally exasperated affection for this person who I was, but also am, but also am not anymore. I both identify and don’t with this version of myself, preserved in bytes and electrical signals, just as I am sure that Jes and I, looking back on one sweltering July afternoon, would see ourselves and not in those lightly perspiring twenty-two-year-olds, decked out in their formal wear and high tops. This, it seems to me, is what getting older looks like—which is to say that this is how we learn to tell stories about ourselves: celebrating what persists, welcoming what changes, and saying goodbye to what’s passed.

In a social media post that accompanied one of my favorite essays on this site, Katie Van Zanen warned about the self-indulgent dangers of making your final post for the post calvin about the act of writing a final post. It’s good advice. Probably I should have followed it better. Still, it’s not every day you have the chance to reckon with almost a decade of your own life and writing. And if part of that reckoning is learning to celebrate persistence and welcome change, it’s also, equally, an exercise in trying to say a worthy goodbye. More often than not I’ve found the best goodbyes to be thank-yous.

So thank you, first, to the post calvin and its batch of thoughtful, courageous, and generous-minded contributors. Thank you, second, to the current editors, Alex, Josh, and Annaka, as well as to their predecessors, Abby, Josh, and Will, who’ve cultivated a truly remarkable space. And thank you finally to Jes, past, present, and yet to come. Happy anniversary.

Now just give me five more minutes, I swear. I’m so close to done I can almost taste it.

Photo credit: Logan J. Evans, 2015

Ben DeVries

Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.