Death--Or Something Like It

I hate saying goodbye, and yet it feels like that's all I've been doing lately.  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.  I'm not sure why we even preface a "bye" with "good."  What, I want to know, is good about a bye?  Bye means waving at someone's back when they've turned away from you, when you know you won't see them soon--or ever, maybe.  Bye means releasing desires, hopes, dreams from the fists you have so tightly wrapped around them.  Bye means losing pieces of yourself, pieces that create holes in the wake of their absence, holes that you only wish could be filled again, but never will because what once filled them can't ever be again.

I said goodbye last night.  Lying in my bed, pillow cradling my aching head, I wept over what I've had that I don't have anymore.  I cried because only hours earlier a band that managed to weasel its way into my college memories was playing for the last time in a barn in south Marion, Indiana, my home for four years, the home I just said goodbye to seven months ago.  I cried because I live ten hours away, ten hours I couldn't justify spending on yet another trip to see them play.  I cried because I felt removed from my old life, from the things that were at my finger tips only months ago that now are hundreds of miles away.  

I'm saying goodbye in less than two months.  I'm leaving my friends, my family, these United States, to go to a country that I've been to before,  yet have dreamed of living in since I was a child.  And I know that I'm already setting myself up for more pain--more goodbyes--when two months later I will return, with more holes, more pieces of myself that have abandoned me, choosing to stay overseas in a place that I may not ever revisit.

And then, because this seems to be an ongoing theme, I am saying goodbye to Atlanta when I get back.  Even though the city has lost its charm, has grown old and dowdy to someone who enjoys (too much) new things, new explorations, I still will miss so much about it.  I will miss who I became while living here, the independence I gathered up inside myself after spending three summers away from anyone I knew.  I will miss the people I have met--though few and far between, they have helped me, encouraged me to press forward, to pursue goals I've only made within the few years that I have been here.  I will miss the High, the Fox, Atlantic Station, Ikea, Virginia-Highland, L5P.  I will miss getting lost, determined, though, to find my way even when it seemed hopeless.  I'll miss my bakeries, sweet tea, sweet potato fries, a culture that embraces both "sweet" and "fried" in their culinary vocabulary.  I will miss a lot.

So I'm saying bye, not with a "good," but with a huge, awful sigh.  I am crying over the things I am losing: music, experiences, home.  And I am resigned to the fact that I don't know what the hell I am saying hello to.  That at the end of these byes, there doesn't seem to be any sort of glimpse as to what will greet me.  If these are deaths, if these byes are a letting go, then I want new life.  I want birth.  I want something to hold onto.