good bye, bad bye

By Lila Vidler.

I hate goodbyes. 

I make them slow, long and painful. Or I leave with hardly a word. I grieve both ways, and neither one feels like it’s the right way to go about it. This is part of the problem: the idea of a “right way” to go about it. 

I’m gripped by the need to do things correctly. I toil and wring my hands, deciding when to go and how to leave. I do this until I overstay my welcome or become overwhelmed to the point where I escape through the side door. But regardless of my route, eventually, I’m over and out. 

I am an organiser, an observer, an exit strategist whose master plan is greyed by the lead of my heavy thoughts. They shade over what I have sketched out and muddle up what I know to be true. 

Is it time to go now? How do I tell them? What happens if I get a second wind, and the party is magnificent, and I dance well into the night, collapse home exhausted, happy and loose of my inhibitions. For on this kind of occasion, a goodbye is a GOOD bye. A happy kind of blurry-swirly bye-bye for now, goodbye. This is a bye that does not feel like a goodbye forever, but a brief fare-thee-well my dear friend. I will see you in no time at all. We are one, and we have swayed together, and will continue to be intertwined. 

But what about when things are wrapping up both in my head and my heart, and my mind zones out to the sound of the conversation, and I have nothing left? 

I am exhausted again except this time there is no looseness, just the fear of losing myself. No wonderment or awe, only anguish and exasperation as my shoulders tense, and I know that I have to leave. Even though I don’t know how to say it. 

When I was a child, I was very confused when people would say that they “hated goodbyes”. My young mind would think, what a strange thing to choose to hate out of all the unpleasant things in the world.. Goodbyes are part of the rhythm of seeing people. 

When I’d go with my family to visit Nan and Pop, we’d say hello, stay for lunch and go for a swim in the shimmery blue pool. It had terracotta tiles around the edges that I could draw pictures on, using the water on my finger as a paintbrush to darken its colour from bright orange to rust. I’d hop out and a beach towel would be draped around my shoulders as I devoured the plate of sweet, drippy fruit presented to me. 

All of this before I’d finally be told to say goodbye. The car engine would start, and our family of four would drive home to our little big house, only to return again in a couple of weeks. 

Where there is a hello, there will always be a goodbye. I must always return home to my place, return home to myself. There is nowhere else that I can live. 

Yet now, it doesn’t feel so straight forward. Now I have grown up to be one of those people who says those three words I first spoke on this page. I am so scared of endings that I forget that on the other side of the coin lives beginning. It’s just these goodbyes feel so awful, so bad. BAD bye. SAD bye. No GOOD bye in sight. Heartbreak over and over again. Lessons learnt and unlearnt and relearnt again as people enter and exit my life. As I hold on to the bitter end until I realise that there’s nothing left to hold onto. The relationship has disintegrated from within my tight little fist. So determined to hold it together that I didn’t stop and check whether the pieces fit in the first place, or notice how they have disfigured from each other’s form with time and argument. 

What if I want to live alongside someone in a way where I never have to fret about such fickle formalities? We will say hello and goodbye and we will return home to each other again and again. Hello darling. Goodbye darling. This is our life together. 

Often my insides feel collapsed and gloopy when I have to say goodbye. It’s a genuine surprise none of my vital organs shut down in protest.Sometimes I choose not to face it, so I stand in the corner for a while. This is a disastrous but sometimes necessary sort of limbo land where I try to bend and contort myself. It’s a kind of mental gymnastics where I see if I can make it work with my sheer will and determination.

Right or wrong, together or apart. There has been love, there has been connection. 

I want to write that there is no such thing as a goodbye because it does not feel good. But I wouldn’t be a person of this world if all I ever felt was “good”, nor would I want that either. 

This is just human. The comings and goings. I think I can realise this. I think that maybe I will learn when it is time to let go. There is no “right way”. 

Not good or bad, just bye.