Good evening internet. It's been such a long time since I've written from my own perspective that I slightly dread that I've forgotten how. In fact I've been staring at the flashing dash next to the previous full stop for so long I now feel it is angry at me, it has grown impatient with my frozen mind and is tapping away - ushering me to continue with fury. This is torturous. I can not think of a single word and every time I try to write anything I go to place it in speech marks. But like any human being I must valiantly muster up the drive to carry on, for the sake of my sanity.
I've had to say 'Goodbye' more times than I'd care to remember. Casually at a change in direction, mournfully at a change in circumstance, finally at a change of importance - it's never easy. I find with each wave, each tip of the hat, it gets harder and harder to let go of a goodbye. They etch themselves into our hearts like paper cuts on a finger, barely noticeable except at moments of strain during which they sear and deepen until we can not take the pain any longer. Accepting that someone will no longer be a part of your life takes practice, and I'm still unsure if it's an art we as humans can perfect. But we can try, carrying the ghosts of the people we've left behind with us always, like multiple shadows hiding round corners of our minds and clutching to memories. I think the most impossible feat is saying goodbye to someone who has left this earth. We find consolidation in mundane questions about the people we've parted ways with. In wondering; where they are now, what they're doing, whether they're content. But with people who leave us for the further - how can we treasure such musings? I find that such goodbyes never truly occur.
The media age; the age of soaps, video games and cartoons, has lead us to think of death as inconclusive, as something people have the ability to come back from. This leaves us with a nagging apprehension that those we lose to death will return to us. They'll reappear at the point in our lives we're most desperate for them. It takes a while for the realization at the impossibility of this to dawn on most people, and a lot of the time it never fully does. We pretend to have moved on, pretend to be accepting of the loss of those we loved, or those who loved us - but really we're all harboring a shameful secret; that we're never going to stop anticipating a reunion. It's easy to forget people we part ways with, to shove them to the backs of our subconscious and pretend they never existed, file them away in some restricted section. Treat them like land mines in specific cities/towns/countries around the world, avoiding certain places for fear of some healed and scarred wound to be ripped open once more. But with death there's only one real chance of reconciliation. And yet it's these goodbyes we struggle with most, because it's these goodbyes that are eternal. They canker away at us, breaking away little pieces of our resolve against death until, when the time comes, the wall breaks down completely and we welcome it like an old friend, as if that is what awaits us after our assent.
I suppose in a way one can say that without a 'goodbye', we can never rejoice in the magic and infinite possibility of a 'hello'. What is a life without the parting of ways? A life spent entirely beside each other would be a life without the ability to journey for self-discovery, or any discovery at all for that matter. We need the absences to inspire longing, to remind us we have something worthy of being missed. Without that feeling we forget all the positive things about a person, we focus only on the things that anger us in the day to day, giving no time to the aspects of a person that we admire. It's this kind of agonizing environment that irrevocably leads to irreversible damage to a relationship
I fear I may have frenzied myself into a state of self pity with all this talk of heart ache and the crippling writers block I have failed to overcome. So now I'm going to go and comfort eat kale until my tears taste like salad dressing. I'll try and get more into the habit once more of utilizing this space in the cyber universe, I feel I am leaning too heavily on creating the thoughts and feelings of imaginary characters and forgetting to organize my own.
Thanks internet, have a good Tuesday.
