CCW Partnership and Saying Goodbye

I was moved to do one last quick post because I've been working on writing a thank you note to Vinetta, my partner at CCW, after the opening on Monday. It was a funny experience being at the exhibit and realizing that I might not see Vinetta ever again - even though we had only spent one day a week together, her presence has become such a big part of my semester. I've been saying a lot of goodbyes this week and will continue to next week, and each one has proved extremely difficult: walking away from someone who was important to you, it's almost impossible to feel like you said or expressed everything you wanted to. As I tried to write this note to her today, I didn't feel like I could capture what I would miss about visiting her at CCW, and I wanted to acknowledge that I valued her as both a partner in the project and as someone I loved talking to casually. I'm not sure if a Serendip post is the best place to process this, but I definitely wanted to mark the feeling of parting ways with our CCW partners as one that was timely but difficult, in case other people were feeling the same thing. 

But I think that difficulty also shows that the partnership mattered: if we partnered with CCW to actually live out the things we talked about in class, I would say that saying goodbye to Vinetta and trying to write her this note today showed me that the partnership had important stakes for me and I would assume other people in the class. I'm thinking about all of the discussions we had about storytelling, access intimacy, and other forms of genuine and meaningful contact and I would say that the CCW partnership achieved these things. I'm writing another draft of the thank you note to Vinetta and Sam tomorrow, and hopefully I will have more adequate words to say, but I wanted to process some feelings I was having at the end of the semester in case this resonated with anyone!