The build up to the goodbye is the worst. A week of nights spent crying, or trying not to. You don’t want to spoil the last few precious moments you have left with them. Trying to spend as much time together as you can, knowing it will never be like this again. Once the goodbyes are said, months and years will pass before the next meeting. You all know that when you finally do see each other again, no one and nothing will be the same.
Immediately after the goodbye is next. That last hug, blurry promises to see each other again, them running behind your car to get one more glimpse. But then, it’s over. The echos of them still rattle in your mind. You see something out the car window, and lean over to tell them. They aren’t there. And the grief of letting go hits. It won’t stop hitting as long as you live. The time in between blows will grow, sometimes exponentially. It’s never truly gone.
The actual goodbye. A desperate, clinging hug (or 3). Trying to pretend that you aren’t crying, that the tears aren’t pouring down your face, keeping you from making out the well traveled details of their being. Pretending it’s not actually goodbye. There’s something so permanent about goodbyes, and this is just a see you later, or however that saying goes. However hard you repeat that to yourself, the tears show you haven’t convinced yourself. You try to soak up every single tiny detail, knowing that it will never be like this again, this is the last chance before time and separation makes you all strangers.
Those days. “One month since I’ve seen you!” “Happy birthday!” “Congrats on your new job, new college acceptance, new program!” You aren’t there to celebrate with them anymore.
The hits when you see something that reminds you of them. Something they would laugh at, or love, or share with you. You can’t help but compare for a while, how your life now would be so much better if they were in it. Your job, your trip, your camp would all be made better if they had been able to come too. You see someone that looks like them, and even though you know they couldn’t possibly be here, your heart hopes until you see that their nose is shaped differently, their eyes are a different color, they have a lower voice. It feels like your heart has broken for the leaving of them all over again.
Eventually, you stop mistaking other people for them.
Realizing you’ve started to move on. One day you lay down to go to sleep, and realize you have barely thought of them at all. This could be weeks after parting, months, years, maybe that day never comes. If you are starting to move on, does that mean that they weren’t important? Does that mean you have stopped loving them? The thought scares you, so you refuse to move on any more. You don’t let yourself make new friends, or have fun, or be happy, because none of that can be possible without them, right? You reach out multiple times a day, you can’t allow them to move on either.
But someday, despite all of your best efforts, you forget to reach out, and you don’t really want to when you remember. This maybe hurts worst of all, but not while it’s happening. This is the reason all of the other hurts hit like they did. You knew, no matter what, that this was the end game. No matter how important they were to you, they are gone now. It can no longer consume you.
I am starting to move on. And also still all of the things before. Am I supposed to move on from the only people who ever knew how to love me? How do you move on from that? Is it even possible? After every phone call, I cry for missing them, and knowing it will be weeks before we call again. And that’s only the people that I do call. I have forgotten about the ones that I don’t, and that hurts most of all. Distance hurts. Knowing that I might not see some of them again on this side of heaven hurts. Knowing that I will see some again, and then have to say goodbye again, reopening all of that hurt… Knowing that even when I do see them again, they will have changed, and so have I.
I miss them, and I miss who I was with them.
But it’s been almost three months.
I shouldn’t still be stuck.
That’s why this is called the art of Missing someone, and not the art of Moving on.
I am well versed in only one.
Rainy Ramblings 