Me and Goodbyes

My man Gabe once said he’d quit traveling because the goodbyes were too hard.

I feel him.

But perhaps it’s in keeping with the Universal order of things. For every hello, there is a goodbye. Balance. Or better yet, maybe goodbyes got to be earned. You know. Like the goodbye is so difficult because the time together was so fly. If the time was whack, we’d be able to bounce with no problem. Feel me?

I don’t know. No matter how many ways I try to justify it and make it sound sweet and poetic, goodbyes still remain a source of great suffering in my life.

For real. Goodbye. Leaving. The knowledge that you will be physically distant from another human being whose presence nourishes something in you. You say you’ll write. And you do. For the first few weeks emails are responded to right away. Then after that…you know how it is.

But there’s something in me that suggests that people aren’t forever, that relationships run their course and that goodbye leads to healthy closure, that this relationship has served its function in your life and you must be mature enough to both acknowledge and accept this. Ok. Sounds good. But there is something about this that leaves me feeling so ungrateful. Like the check comes and I leave a measly “thank you” as I brake for the door, leaving the others to cover me.

Somebody has to be with me on this. I know Gabe is. I hate goodbyes. I hate ‘em. Sometimes I’d just rather bounce. Not have to face the rupture that goodbyes bring. I get comfortable and used to a sequence of things that goodbyes forever disrupt, send into the unreachable realm of the past. Not like I’m scared of change. But I’m sayin…

I, personally, have an issue with letting go of the past. This I know. So I suppose I need to realize that things change, that they can’t remain the same forever. The goodness that I’ve lived here in Brazil, the experiences that I’ve shared with others have passed. They are forever gone…or better yet, they have integrated themselves into the fabric of me. I am what I’ve lived. But these experiences can never again be lived as they were. All of this I must accept. And I give thanks for having been afforded the opportunity to know these people, to live these moments.

Yeah, all of this I know. But I still hate goodbyes.

-Amari