The Goodbye Girl

I hate saying goodbye.

I think the first time I realized how much I hated it was when I was leaving a summer program in my early teens. I had fallen for a guy and he stood by the window of the bus waving as we pulled out for the airport, and I sobbed like I'd never cried in my life. Now it's funny, because in retrospect I realize I had spent a whopping 3 weeks with him -- by which I mean hanging out with him in large groups of people. Only. And yet I cried as if the Montagues and the Capulets were keeping us apart. I mean, HYSTERICS. I distinctly remember sniffing and sobbing into the bus window and watching it steam up, and dramatically placing my hand there, absolutely SURE I would never be the same. (If I could find my journal from those days I'm sure I would put the folks in Mortified to shame.)

It happened over and over again. I was quick to make friends on one week vacations, and then would spend months depressed that we'd had to split up; we'd keep in touch for years, and write letters (yes, people born after 1985, we used to write letters), but those goodbyes were the worst. When people talk about their favorite songs from hair bands, it's probably telling that one of mine is of course Tuff's I Hate Kissing You Goodbye. For the record, I was rarely kissing anyone, much less goodbye, but I sang that song with heart when I was a teen. I hated goodbyes, so naturally I was going to hate kissing someone goodbye, you know, someday.

With time, I stopped being melodramatic about it and shifted to a tactic I'm quite fond of: avoidance.

Maybe it's a conditioned response. I grew up without any family nearby; we were in the midwest with our closest cousins in California or Canada and the rest of the family was international. I quickly discovered that the counterpart of energetic, hilarious reunions was tearful, aching goodbyes; watching my mom and her sisters or brothers agonize over having to part ways. Goodbye meant a descent from loud laughter in the middle of the night to horrible silence. Or seeing how sad my parents were to put my grandma back on a flight to Iran, worrying about her and the distance between them. Persians have a phrase "Jaht khalee" meaning "your place is empty". Goodbye meant someone's place was going to be empty. Goodbye meant acknowledging the void to come.

Yes, over time I've simply avoided saying goodbye. In fact, I avoid events that even relate to goodbye. I prefer to have friends drop me off really (read: 4+ hours) early at the airport so we can talk by phone or whatever else and phase into the parting of ways. Better yet, I will leave them and take public transportation and spend the last day alone. I don't do curbside anything. If someone is moving, I will see them at some point before they leave but not right before; I skip the sendoff party.

It's true, I don't even like watching other people say goodbye. Even fictional people. You know the ending of The Breakfast Club, where they all walk different ways home but you know they'll SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY? Yeah, I usually turn off the movie before their letter gets read.

Sometimes saying goodbye to someone isn't about saying goodbye to *them* forever, but what hits us is that we're saying goodbye to a particular era. See also: me slumped over the passenger's seat in my mom's car driving away from my last house at University of Michigan. (Ironically, during college my favorite song was the *ultimate* goodbye song, Jeff Buckley's Last Goodbye.) The way I acted, you would have thought the University, with all my friends, had detonated and I was left alone in the rubble (ok, when I said I had left melodramatics behind me, they still occasionally peek out from time to time).

When someone has had a unique impact on you in some way, and when you say goodbye to that whole experience, maybe that's what makes it so heavy. You'll keep the lessons of it and the fun memories and blah blah blah, but something is changing and that alone is hard. I think it's the person + experience combo that makes it so hard.

All of this came up because tonight I broke my rules and said a proper goodbye to a great friend who is moving and has no plans of turning back. I really have no idea when this person and I will get ourselves together in the same city, or even country, again, so I had to break down and do it. This is someone I look up to in many ways, and I think we had surprised ourselves by becoming closer right before the move. We sat around bouncing ideas about our lives and what we should do with them, getting advice from each other, and he even helped me cut my caffeine intake (which alone is a reason to bring a tear to my eye ;) I was spoiled with easy access to his insights and support and ideas and friendship.

The goodbye rule was broken tonight because I knew I would regret it if I didn't. So we chatted and we said the goodbyes. I surprised (impressed!) myself with how cheerful and light I was able to be, joking and yelling down the hall after him that I wanted Cracker Barrel updates from the road.

And when I closed the door behind him and heard it click, my little heart just sank.

There are a lot of things I am happy to say goodbye to: bad haircuts, obnoxious flight companions, Natalie Portman's trim waistline, and 2010... But this "people" thing is going to take some work.