The [Liverpool](https://liverpooloffside.sbnation.com/) fanbase has had a surreal few weeks. Between the club clinching their 20th topflight title and then, not even a full week after, the announcement of the impending departure of the Scouser on the Team, it’s been a bit of a heady period.
I’m not here to chat about whether folks are or aren’t justified to boo - my personal sense is that I wouldn’t have, even if I understand the contexts around why some might have. In truth, I’m simply just too sad to bring myself to get too worked up about all of that.
I’m sad because Trent Alexander-Arnold isn’t just one of the best players to man their position that I’ve ever seen - in my time as a fan, in fact, he’s the best - but also because he is one of us: raised a fan and doing the improbable. He’s won everything he could possibly achieve as a team and he did it for the team he grew up supporting. It is the dream of most fans to live this exact existence.
Save, of course, the exit. And we know the truth that there’s no good way to say goodbye.
I’ve been caught between two minds over the past two weeks as I’ve processed the news: where I want to be emotionally and where I am. Which is to say, I desperately want to be happy for Trent. Lord knows that I once had my own dreams of leaving my hometown - Hawthorne - when I was younger. All despite how deeply I loved and still love that little corner of Los Angeles. And being that Hawthorne was, when I lived there, a town much like Liverpool: emerging out of a rough decade in the 1980’s where industry and what felt like most of the societal structures had opted to abandon us.
Still we loved that place. My family put up roots there and we made community amidst folks with different accents but similar hopes and dreams.
Like Trent, though, I still pined for some place else. It didn’t happen all at once, the head turning. It was was gradual, a brief vacation at one place and the knowledge of a good school in the field I’d wanted to work at another. I loved Hawthorne, but it felt like my own ambitions were pulling me away.
Which is one of the universal reasons anyone opts to leave the comfort and security of the community that raised them: that you have a better chance at seeing brighter days somewhere else. It’s tough to think I might feel that about a place I still claim and that I, secretly, hope still claims me. But it was what led me to take a step beyond a place that I felt like the only city I’d ever truly known.
I want to be happy for Trent because that desire to look elsewhere while still feeling deep love for a place is incredibly resonant. And given that he’d spent 20 years at the club, helped restore it to glory by winning every major title on offer along the way, I would feel personally quite petty to be anything but grateful towards him - even allowing contextual circumstances like leaving on a free. (An aside, this particular nugget in the discourse has driven me mad because Trent’s status as an academy product means the club utilized very little all things considered in terms of investment.)
Trent has more than repaid the faith and elbow grease put in by the club and its associated personnel over the years. It is because of all of this that I want to be able to get to a place where I can regard him, in whatever jersey he may don, and be able to recall the good times and feel those old fuzzy feelings.
I want for that all to happen but I have no idea how or when I’ll ever get to that place. And, I think that’s fine. I sense I’ll get there, but I’m also human; there’s no telling what emotions will rise to the surface when I see him announced at the Bernabeu for example. But it’s enough to me, for now, to want to get to that place.
There’s no right way to say goodbye and that’s the difficult truth we’re all sitting with at the moment. All that’s left to us, I suppose, is handling these partings in a way that preserves our own dignity in the process.
I want to wish Trent well. I do wish Trent well. I want to thank him for making such amazing memories for me. I do thank him for making such amazing memories for me. And in that wanting and subsequent doing, maybe, I’ll find my way to really meaning it. For now, I’ll keep wanting and waiting until it eventually becomes real.