Frankly Put: To The Hellos in Our Goodbyes
I’m relearning how to say hello. I recognize that it is an odd way to start this but I am beginning to wonder what a broken greeting feels like.
When I say a greeting, I don’t mean it only in the literal sense, you know? Hello, Hujambo, Bonjour, Ciao… all of that. Sometimes, a greeting is a welcome you give tangible and intangible things. It could be how you welcome an idea, thought, opinion or belief. It could also be how you bring strangers into your little corner of the world.
With every hello, I believe there is a goodbye. Some are a little bit more bittersweet and others a much-needed relief. Although, most hellos tend to be an assumed great thing. Like they are supposed to be warm, inviting and even in some cases, memorable.
The more I think about it, maybe I am not relearning how to say hello but how to say goodbye. I think I am really good at saying hello. If doormen had a poster child, I could volunteer my name but somehow dealing with the flipside of it is something I have been thinking about lately.
To be honest, it isn’t that I am terrible at saying goodbye but it still feels like an area worth some improvement. All things with a beginning have an end so I wonder why in my life not all things with good beginnings have a great end. This is not to say that I expect that all my interactions in life will have happy endings but maybe there are some that I wish ended a little less badly.
I like to describe how I say goodbye as either hot or cold. Black or white, some may say but there are a few greys that feel extremely uncomfortable. Greys are hard to deal with because my brain cannot seem to compute where this thing ends and the next thing begins. It is like a melody rising to a crescendo but leaving you on a suspended note with no resolution.
I realise in saying this, that is awfully poetic. How romantic that seems to sound. Tugging at the heartstrings and making you crave more and more in this human experience. Still, there are greys I’d like to go back and turn black or white. Not necessarily in how we said the words that ended things but in the way I feel about those things.
Every so often, my soul reminds me of the things I need to let go of with a slight tug on the rope tying me to a dead thing. There are cases where that rope somehow wrapped and tangled itself around my hand leaving it a bloodied mess with the way I held on so tight. Like with the concept of seeing “good” in someone.
Some lights are just hallucinations in your life. You have been in the dark for so long, your brain has manufactured this imagination of light at the end of the tunnel that really isn’t there. So, I’m learning to let go of walking towards that light and coupled with loving from a distance, snuffing the flame my brain fashioned for its own comfort.
They say change is inevitable and if you don’t change with the world, it will leave you behind. Sometimes that change must come through saying goodbye to the things in life that once felt like the very source of that life. Beliefs, opinions, ideologies, people, feelings and all that can feel like they give you life.
Sometimes saying goodbye to those things feels like losing what it means to be alive. Like somehow reaching inside you and pulling the plug. Lights out. Silence. There is no longer any music playing. No more soundtrack to your life and it can feel devastatingly lonely. I guess that’s why we try to sing to ourselves in a bid to lull the emptiness a little bit.
We sing in the form of bad habits, temporary highs and behaviours that only seem to fill that void that goodbye left. I think loneliness is cool sometimes. They say too much of anything good is bad, well I think a little of something bad is good. A little pain. A little sadness does the heart good. It helps the happiness go down easier sometimes.
Just like there is a goodbye in every hello, there is a hello in our goodbyes. This dichotomy of life helps the pendulum swing to and fro every time we try something new. A hello could start an amazing friendship that withers into a painful goodbye in which we might find the hello of a new and even more amazing friendship.
The hellos could also be retrogressive. An example; saying hello to a new pair of shoes that pinch when you walk so you have to say goodbye to them and hello to the old ones that you placed in the back of the closet that fit you just right. Not that you hated the new ones but somehow the old ones work better. The new experience was good while it lasted.
I say all this to say, I am learning to find the hello in the goodbyes. I am learning not to be so quick in looking for them but accepting them when they come. Sometimes, the heart gets heavy when it carries emptiness so I understand why it would like to hold on to things more than let them go. It’s very much allowed to self-soothe.
I am learning to be generous with my hellos, like a child. Many a time I have met children on the street who smile and wave at me as if I know them. Not quite sure why, granted some adults still tell me I am intimidating but hey I take it as is and wave back to them. The parents often do this weird half-smile when they notice.
I have been more giving of my goodbyes than of my hellos and it shows. Maybe if I get better at goodbyes, my hellos will be more generous and easy to find… to put it Frankly.
