Read This If You Never Know How To Say Goodbye
By Heidi Priebe
When you don’t know how to the big goodbyes, you live them.
You come home an hour early from work to make extra time. You leave homemade cookies lying on the counter. You make a series of tiny allowances that you wouldn’t usually make because you know that the clock is winding down and your time is running short and you suddenly need to make the most of it. You’re suddenly aware of how little time you harness for love.
When you do not know how to say goodbye, you extrapolate it. You say goodbye by focusing a little bit harder and listening a little more intently and laughing a little bit louder at what your loved ones say. You part ways by saying ‘Yes’ when you’d normally tell someone ‘No’ and you allow yourself to absorb the people and experiences and chances that you’d usually let pass you by. You say goodbye by carving out time for the life you should have always been living. You say goodbye by delving deeper in.
When you do not know how to say goodbye, you feel it. You feel it in the pit of your stomach when you close the front door of someone’s apartment or speed away from a city on a train or print your boarding pass to somewhere far-away at the airport. You feel the full weight of unspoken goodbyes like a mysterious absence inside of you; emptiness that theorizes…
