Life is a constant goodbye. But after every goodbye, there comes a hello.
When you're going for a walk, and you pass by a rosebush, you keep walking, and the rosebush stays. You said goodbye to the bush. You moved on. But then, see, you get to say hello to a mailbox or something up ahead. If you had stayed with the rosebush and never left, you would never have known there was a mailbox up there waiting for you.
When you drink coffee in the morning, you're saying goodbye to the night and hello to the day. Your dream has successfully been forgotten, and reality slowly kicks in with the flow of caffeine in your veins.
Every time you learn something, you're saying goodbye to a piece of your ignorance. Unlike the rosebush, which you can always walk past again, once ignorance is gone, you will never see it again.
Unless, like how the daytime forces you to forget your dream, you forget the knowledge you learned. Then, you don't have to leave your ignorance.
But you do. You really do.
That's the thing about goodbyes. Because they are a constant state of life, you absolutely HAVE to have them. You cannot sit for your entire life beside a rosebush you walked past one day on a walk. You cannot live in the dream you had last night, or spend your life in ignorance. Life is not about saying goodbye, for life is really a constant hello. If you never said goodbye to the rosebush or the dream or the bit of stupidity, you would never say hello to the mailbox or the morning or the bit of intelligence.
These are small things though. It takes only moments to reach the mailbox from the bush. It takes only minutes for caffeine to wake you up when you're halfway done with a blog post. And it takes hardly anything to look up the word 'tacit' in a dictionary and use it at a very sad party enough times to remember it forever.
I've noticed that, with larger, longer, more meaningful goodbyes, there's a bigger space between the goodbye and the hello. There's a sort of Limbo of Nothing involved. There's a waiting room.
The people sit with wide eyes and sweaty palms, staring at magazines but never flipping the pages, looking around and sighing and crying and whining and dying and waiting and waiting for something, anything, to say hello to.
When a goodbye is big - such as leaving a town, or losing a friend - we know we must wait for a hello that is just as big as the goodbye. A new town, a new friend. Not a mailbox. Not a word in a dictionary.
This waiting time is a time of trust. We trust, in the end, that the inevitable hello will come. But while we wait. While the goodbye is fresh and sweet in our hearts, while the loss seems so great and the future so insignificant, what can we do but wait? And for how long? A day? A month? A year? What if we're so busy grieving a loss we ignore every possible welcome that could heal it?
What if we wait our whole lives?
These are the thoughts that come when the mug is half full in my hand and the coffee means nothing at all. The dream is long forgotten.
As if it were never even ever there.
My glasses are smudged and smeared and I can't care enough to clean them, so I just rub them tiredly with my hands until they're nothing but blur and lines of light. I can't think of what I should be thinking because the thoughts that are there are too large and real to shove aside. And every fear I can remember is suddenly at my doorstep, and another thought comes, and the thought crowds out all else until my hands are shaking and the mug is black and empty.
What if I can't remember?
If you say goodbye and forget whatever happened before that point, then it is as if it never happened.
Memories come at strange moments. While I'm lying on my sister's bed hugging a bear, I remember a line of dialogue as I stared out the window as a kid I knew got knocked out cold by a soccer ball: "You're so in love with him, aren't you." While I set my dog's water bowl down on the concrete, I remember being asked by a first-grade classroom if I was happy, or happy-plus, or happy-plus-plus, and not having the heart to tell them I hadn't been happy-plus-plus in a long, long time. While I'm twisting my camera lens closed at a party, I remember a kid in the middle of the street in the rain, twisting an imaginary gun sideways, behind him and in front of him, between his legs, turning back to look at me as I fall onto a cold, rainy parked car, laughing.
If I someday forget these things, and if everyone involved in the memory forgets it too, then there is no proof that it ever happened. Without the memory of the fall and the catch, it is simply a broken branch and a footprint on a rock. Anyone could have broken it. Anyone could have fallen. But the thing is, it was you.
When you say goodbye to a physical thing - like a person, or a place - the only comfort to find is in the memories. In the memories that come at random moments, during songs and meals and random actions that shouldn't remind you of anything, but that somehow make you cry in the middle of a dance floor in the dark and in the loud and no one can hear the goodbye echoing through you as you hold on to the memory and force yourself not to forget it.
I forgot my dream last night.
I don't know what it was about.
I don't even know if it ever happened.
So, it probably didn't. Right? There's nothing to say goodbye to if you don't remember anything that happened. You can just enjoy the hello of daytime, in a blanket on a Saturday morning, saying hello without ever having to say goodbye.
I hate the waiting limbo. I hate the in-between space between goodbye and hello. What am I supposed to do? I have to do something. I know I'm just going to have to keep walking until I reach the mailbox, but it's so far I can't see it, so how do I know it'll even be there when I reach it?
There's no way to know when the next hello comes.
After the goodbye, all you can do is wait.
(PS: I'm allergic to coffee.)
When you're going for a walk, and you pass by a rosebush, you keep walking, and the rosebush stays. You said goodbye to the bush. You moved on. But then, see, you get to say hello to a mailbox or something up ahead. If you had stayed with the rosebush and never left, you would never have known there was a mailbox up there waiting for you.
When you drink coffee in the morning, you're saying goodbye to the night and hello to the day. Your dream has successfully been forgotten, and reality slowly kicks in with the flow of caffeine in your veins.
Every time you learn something, you're saying goodbye to a piece of your ignorance. Unlike the rosebush, which you can always walk past again, once ignorance is gone, you will never see it again.
Unless, like how the daytime forces you to forget your dream, you forget the knowledge you learned. Then, you don't have to leave your ignorance.
But you do. You really do.
That's the thing about goodbyes. Because they are a constant state of life, you absolutely HAVE to have them. You cannot sit for your entire life beside a rosebush you walked past one day on a walk. You cannot live in the dream you had last night, or spend your life in ignorance. Life is not about saying goodbye, for life is really a constant hello. If you never said goodbye to the rosebush or the dream or the bit of stupidity, you would never say hello to the mailbox or the morning or the bit of intelligence.
These are small things though. It takes only moments to reach the mailbox from the bush. It takes only minutes for caffeine to wake you up when you're halfway done with a blog post. And it takes hardly anything to look up the word 'tacit' in a dictionary and use it at a very sad party enough times to remember it forever.
I've noticed that, with larger, longer, more meaningful goodbyes, there's a bigger space between the goodbye and the hello. There's a sort of Limbo of Nothing involved. There's a waiting room.
The people sit with wide eyes and sweaty palms, staring at magazines but never flipping the pages, looking around and sighing and crying and whining and dying and waiting and waiting for something, anything, to say hello to.
When a goodbye is big - such as leaving a town, or losing a friend - we know we must wait for a hello that is just as big as the goodbye. A new town, a new friend. Not a mailbox. Not a word in a dictionary.
This waiting time is a time of trust. We trust, in the end, that the inevitable hello will come. But while we wait. While the goodbye is fresh and sweet in our hearts, while the loss seems so great and the future so insignificant, what can we do but wait? And for how long? A day? A month? A year? What if we're so busy grieving a loss we ignore every possible welcome that could heal it?
What if we wait our whole lives?
These are the thoughts that come when the mug is half full in my hand and the coffee means nothing at all. The dream is long forgotten.
As if it were never even ever there.
My glasses are smudged and smeared and I can't care enough to clean them, so I just rub them tiredly with my hands until they're nothing but blur and lines of light. I can't think of what I should be thinking because the thoughts that are there are too large and real to shove aside. And every fear I can remember is suddenly at my doorstep, and another thought comes, and the thought crowds out all else until my hands are shaking and the mug is black and empty.
What if I can't remember?
If you say goodbye and forget whatever happened before that point, then it is as if it never happened.
Memories come at strange moments. While I'm lying on my sister's bed hugging a bear, I remember a line of dialogue as I stared out the window as a kid I knew got knocked out cold by a soccer ball: "You're so in love with him, aren't you." While I set my dog's water bowl down on the concrete, I remember being asked by a first-grade classroom if I was happy, or happy-plus, or happy-plus-plus, and not having the heart to tell them I hadn't been happy-plus-plus in a long, long time. While I'm twisting my camera lens closed at a party, I remember a kid in the middle of the street in the rain, twisting an imaginary gun sideways, behind him and in front of him, between his legs, turning back to look at me as I fall onto a cold, rainy parked car, laughing.
If I someday forget these things, and if everyone involved in the memory forgets it too, then there is no proof that it ever happened. Without the memory of the fall and the catch, it is simply a broken branch and a footprint on a rock. Anyone could have broken it. Anyone could have fallen. But the thing is, it was you.
When you say goodbye to a physical thing - like a person, or a place - the only comfort to find is in the memories. In the memories that come at random moments, during songs and meals and random actions that shouldn't remind you of anything, but that somehow make you cry in the middle of a dance floor in the dark and in the loud and no one can hear the goodbye echoing through you as you hold on to the memory and force yourself not to forget it.
I forgot my dream last night.
I don't know what it was about.
I don't even know if it ever happened.
So, it probably didn't. Right? There's nothing to say goodbye to if you don't remember anything that happened. You can just enjoy the hello of daytime, in a blanket on a Saturday morning, saying hello without ever having to say goodbye.
I hate the waiting limbo. I hate the in-between space between goodbye and hello. What am I supposed to do? I have to do something. I know I'm just going to have to keep walking until I reach the mailbox, but it's so far I can't see it, so how do I know it'll even be there when I reach it?
There's no way to know when the next hello comes.
After the goodbye, all you can do is wait.
(PS: I'm allergic to coffee.)
wow. I really like how you think, tree monster. :-)
ReplyDeletePlus the way you write. Particularly enjoyed the pacing... very nice.
hey friend. this is beautiful. i sort have might have cried a little. i'm honestly astonished and a little in pain about how startlingly insightful and deep and amazing your writing is. your brain is a beautiful one.
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