I hate goodbyes
goodbye · ɡo͝odˈbī · (1) exclam. (also goodby or good-by) used to express good wishes when parting or at the end of a conversation. (2) noun (plural goodbyes or goodbys) an instance of saying “goodbye”; a parting.On a warm July morning in Nuremberg, Germany, I was standing at an airport with my host family, waiting to meet the other American students who had been selected to travel to Germany for three weeks. It was the last day of the trip. One by one, the friends I had made in Germany trickled in with their host families. We smiled and excitedly chattered as we recalled the previous night, when we had thrown a huge party with just us kids. We assembled ourselves – Americans and our German host siblings – and took a massive group photograph. I assembled with my own host family and took a smaller photograph of just us together. Just a moment later, we had to say goodbye. I shook my host father's hand, hugged my host brother and mother, shook a few more hands, hugged a few more friends – and then we were walking down the terminal, separated. As I turned the corner, I glanced behind me. My host family were in deep conversation with each other. My host mother was smiling as she talked, my host father nodding receptively and my host brother had a goofy smile, the remnants of a laugh just finished. I have not seen my host family since.
—The New Oxford American Dictionary
It did not hit me until when well after we had boarded the plane. I was looking out the window as the jet accelerated down the runway to take off. I watched as the airport whizzed by faster and faster, and then get smaller and smaller. I realized that there was a significant chance I would never see my host brother, my host family, and the friends that I had made again. In that sudden moment of realization, my eyes moistened. I recalled the wealth of pleasurable memories I had accumulated, still fresh in my mind, and vowed that I would never forget them. They had all so graciously given me – someone who had been a total stranger from another land – a place to stay, to eat, to share memories, to have fun. It was difficult to say goodbye. Of course, I could still write to them. I could still hit them up on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and email. The separation was far from complete; communication was still totally possible. If we ever wanted to see each other again, we needed only to put in the effort to make it happen. Yet why was the atmosphere so melancholic?
* * *
We knew this day would come,Fast forward to today. I have entered college, beginning one of the most significant chapters of my life. Having spent all 19 years of my life living in the state of Ohio, I have now traveled many hundreds of miles west to attend the University of California, Berkeley. I have made countless friends here in Ohio. Friends from school, from fencing, from serendipity. I have left the overwhelming majority of these friends behind. While we may call each other up every now and then to say hi, I will no longer engage with them to the same extent that I have these past several years. Although these friendships will certainly not end, there will be an end of a different sense: there will have to be a goodbye.
We knew it all along,
How did it come so fast?
—Maroon 5, "Daylight", Overexposed, 2012
This all came to a head on Sunday, August 6, 2017, when I invited a small group of my friends over to my house for a grill party. Although I could plausibly have invited dozens upon dozens of friends, I wanted to keep it small, partly because my house simply cannot fit 50 people in it and partly so that the event would be more intimate. One by one, my friends came – some early, some punctual, some late. We talked, ate some grilled food, made some s'mores over a fire that later ravaged my grass by accident, and then went inside, where we played games like Cards Against Humanity and "Paranoia". In the latter game, we all sat in a circle and, upon our turn, would turn to the person sitting next to us and whisper a question into their ear that they needed to answer aloud truthfully. The answer must be the name of a person in the room. We would then flip a coin, and if it is heads, the question must also be spoken aloud, but if it is tails, the question would remain a mystery, causing the person whose name was answered to experience "paraonoia".
The clock began ticking late – 11:00, midnight, 1 am. Slowly, my friends began to leave the house. And as each one left, we all said our goodbyes and wished each other well in college. The last three to leave my house were the three friends I had known for the longest time – I wrote about the fantastic circumstances through which I met them in this old blog post (I had actually submitted a variation of that blog post as a candidate for my school's valedictorian speech. At my school, anyone with a 4.1 weighted GPA or higher was considered a valedictorian, and speeches were selected based on their quality and merit, not by the mere quality of having the highest numerical grade point average.). One-by-one, they left, and I was alone.
And suddenly, I felt a feeling that was oddly familiar. I realize now that it was the exact feeling I had felt on the plane heading home from Nuremberg. There was a small, yet significant chance that I may not see at least one of the friends I had invited to my house that day again. And once again, in that moment of realization, my eyes grew misty.
* * *
Thank you, I'll say goodbye soon,When I was in first or second grade, I would ride my bike or scooter around the neighborhood to "explore" – never venturing too far, but enough to gain a sense of wonder as a seven-year-old. To communicate with with my parents, I carried a walkie-talkie in my pocket. This part of my life had to have been in 2005 or 2006, before the era when everyone had a smartphone, so the walkie-talkie was then a great method for my parents to communicate with me when I was exploring the neighborhood. Whenever it was dinnertime, or whenever my parents needed me home, they would call me back using the walkie-talkie.
Though its the end of the world,
Don't blame yourself now,
And if it's true, I will surround you,
And give life to a world,
That's our own.
—Porter Robinson, "Goodbye to a World", Worlds, 2014
One bright day at around noon, I went outside to do my exploring, and as I walked my bike out of the driveway, I noticed something in the corner of my eye rapidly approaching me. I turned to look at what it was, and the next thing I knew, a kid was sprawled across my driveway. It was one of my neighbors. He had been riding his bike too quickly, lost control, and crashed right in front of me. I immediately raced toward him and saw that he had scraped his knee, so I ran back inside, got my parents, and together we helped clean and bandage the wound. My parents and I then helped walk him back to his house, where we explained to his parents what had happened. At some point during this experience, I learned that the boy's name was Brendan. My parents and I were just about to leave when Brendan stopped me: "Hey, Michael, you want to hang out later?"
We became friends. He became my partner-in-crime as I went to do my exploring-the-neighborhood routine. Just before I left the house, I would call his house with my home phone, and in just a few minutes, Brendan and I would be on our bikes discovering new places in the neighborhood we had never been before, walkie-talkies at our side. Years later, I would wonder what would have happened if Brendan hadn't crashed into my driveway; we likely would never have met each other and had all those experiences. What caused Brendan to crash? A rock or a pebble tossed there by a gust of wind blown just right? I suppose it was just another Little Thing.
One of my fondest memories is biking into the woods with Brendan and discovering some kind of natural game trail, which led to this sizable clearing that I considered hideout-worthy. If we ever got separated, we would communicate with each other using our walkie-talkies, and if we needed to have a conversation that wasn't appropriate for the grown-ups to hear, all we needed to do was switch the walkie-talkie channel. Of course, this led to a few instances where I forgot to change the channel back to the channel my parents were on, leading to situations in which my parents were unable to call me back for dinner. Whoops. Once, I had accidentally left the channel switched for several minutes when it occurred to me that I had done this; at the precise moment I switched it back – instantly after I hit the button to change channels – I heard my dad call me home for dinner. That was lucky. At his house, Brendan had a few video games, and he got my family into drinking Propel, which is this clear Gatorade-like fruit-flavored sports drink (as a matter of fact, it is indeed produced by the Gatorade company).
A year or two after he crashed into my driveway, Brendan moved away. He didn't move very far; he was still inside our city and school district, but it was far enough to prohibit us from being bike buddies any longer, and his new home would be within a completely different schooling zone. Once we learned of this news, we were naturally saddened, but we tried not to think about it as we carried on "exploring" as usual. When Brendan left, his old house was replaced by a kid named Tyler, who was several years younger than me and wasn't into exploring on a bike every day. I continued doing my exploring routine alone, but I still remembered all of the places I had discovered with Brendan, and I haven't forgotten about him to this day.
I have never seen him since.
* * *
It’s been fun, but now I’ve got to go.When I was a sophomore in high school, I read a story on the Internet. Yes, the Internet can take you to many strange places, and on that day, I somehow found my way to a fan fiction story about Sonic the Hedgehog, a video game character who has the ability to run faster than the speed of sound. The story revolved around Sonic being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Indeed, in the story the central figure – a fast blue hedgehog whom everybody looked up to as a hero and thought of as invincible – had been diagnosed with a fictional disease that was inevitably fatal.
Life is way too short to take it slow,
But before I go and hit the road,
Tell me when,
When can I see you again?
—Owl City, "When Can I See You Again?", Wreck-It Ralph, 2012
Like most fan fiction stories, this story's prose was not quite worthy of being a New York Times bestseller. Nevertheless, as silly as it was, I found its core premise moving. Sonic can speed around town, saving others, but the story makes clear that he isn't magical. Like everyone else, he too has limits on what he can do, even if those limits are so much higher than everyone else's that they seem nonexistent. Sonic's disease in the story is one that he had carried from birth, but only presented itself recently and unexpectedly. As the story progresses, we see Sonic and his friends struggle to come to terms with the diagnosis. It hits Tails, Sonic's best friend since childhood, the hardest. The disease takes away Sonic's ability to run – his defining superpower – and eventually his ability to stand and walk on his own.
Understandably, Sonic's emotions run wild throughout the story. Sonic has this naturally cocky, confident, and optimistic personality, and as the disease takes its toll on him, we see this positive personality falter and turn bitter. But at the story's end, when Sonic lies in a hospital bed with Tails at his side, his natural personality makes a remarkable return. Just before he dies, Sonic smiles and assures Tails in his signature, cocksure way that this will not be the last they ever see each other. Indeed, when faced with death, a process we define to be permanent, Sonic continues to maintain this foolish optimism, a remarkable, utterly unsubstantiated belief that goodbyes are never forever. That at some point after death, Sonic will see his friends again.
* * *
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.I hate goodbyes. Goodbyes are not just separations, but separations on good terms. To clarify, I would not consider separation with an enemy to be a goodbye. Goodbyes must mark an end to a relationship that would remain positive if it could continue. The kind of goodbyes I'm thinking of are separations that last forever, whereafter two persons never communicate with each other again.
—Anatole France, "The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard", 1881
I hate goodbyes because they are inherently melancholic. There is an immense sense of sorrow upon realizing that a bond you've formed with another is lost (not broken) forever. Oftentimes you do not realize that a goodbye is happening until after it has occurred. You may full well expect to see someone again, only to have chance intervene and cause the reunion not to be. These goodbyes are especially distressing because you never had a chance to properly wish the other goodbye. Wishing someone goodbye seemingly lessens the blow: it is a chance to part with a sense of unity, a mutual understanding that this is the end.
So what do you do if you are not sure whether a parting is a true goodbye? Originally, I felt that I should treat all possible true goodbyes as if it were a true goodbye. However, as I've matured and had to experience several such instances – with Brendan, with my German host brother, with my high school friends – I began to rethink goodbyes.
As we race through the twenty-first century at lightning-fast pace, true goodbyes are becoming rarer and rarer. We now have the technological ability to communicate with people on the diametrical opposite of the planet and with spacecraft on the other side of the solar system. With the Internet, it is now possible to discover old friends and stay connected through social networking websites. It became unsustainable for me to treat every parting sentimentally, as if "this might be the last time see each other ever". They'd always be like, "Dude, you know we can still text each other any time, right?" As a result, I've found that my current view on goodbyes is not so far from the one expressed in that Sonic story.
When in the course of life you stumble across a situation in which you believe you may never see a person again, keep your head up and trust that you will see the other again. Because in all likelihood, you will, and if chance doesn't do it, realize that in all likelihood you could see the other again if you tried.
I have studied German more than four years now, and I can understand a bit of Chinese, since that's what my parents speak at home. As I contemplated the nature of goodbyes, I discovered a rather poetic symmetry between the German and the Chinese words for "goodbye", and I suspect other languages align with this symmetry as well. In German, goodbye is Auf Wiedersehen. If we examine each part of this phrase literally, we find that sehen means "to see", wieder means "again", and auf is a preposition which can mean "on", "to", "upon", and other things, depending on the context. Therefore, Auf Wiedersehen implies "until we see each other again". The Chinese phrase for goodbye is 再见: 再 means "again", and 见 means "see" or "meet". 再见 also implies "until we see each other again". The way in which you express goodbye requires that you must imply a future reunion. It is ingrained directly within the language.
So the next time you have to part with a dear friend, focus not on the possibility that you might never see the other again. Instead, say "see ya!". You will see them again. Somehow, somewhere.
So the next time you have to part with a dear friend, focus not on the possibility that you might never see the other again. Instead, say "see ya!". You will see them again. Somehow, somewhere.