Over-Discussed: Goodbyes

Dedicated to the classes of 2015 and 2014

Honestly, what classic, cliche topic of laborious discussion—how one come to terms with goodbyes.  
I’m really bad at them.  I don’t handle obsoletes well—in this tremendous world of intertwined  and enigmatic patterns, I stopped believing in permanence of anything long ago.  Which is why, to me, a final goodbye is so hard to fathom.  
But beyond that, what about the incomplete goodbyes?  The I-might-see-you-down-the-road-but-I-probably-won’t goodbyes, the it’s-my-responsibility-to-keep-in-touch-if-I-want-to-ever-see-you-again goodbyes, the this-will-probably-be-the-end-but-doesn’t-have-to-be goodbyes?   There’s a frustrating in-between-ness to them; first of all, this type of parting is one that usually isn’t bringing any harm to either party (in fact, it isn’t uncommon that one is moving on to bigger, brighter things), so more upset you become over the split, the more vain you feel.  What’s further upsetting is that it becomes almost a sort of duty to try to stay in contact—and when that begins to slip through your fingertips, it’s as if you no longer have the right to feel upset about the absence of the person because it’s within your power to reach out to them.  But even if you do manage to stay on top of corresponding, it feels pretty futile after awhile—after all, the ultimate moral to any goodbye is that we have to learn to let go—so yeah, eventually it’s ridiculous to clutch onto the bonds you once shared with a person once you’ve lost the basis those bonds were built upon.  
As a strong believer in a predetermined fate, I’m quick to see people who appear in my life to be there for a reason.  Where the mistake lays, however, is in subconsciously interpreting what that reason might be—so all too often, I find myself lost and baffled when they depart from my life as quickly as they emerged into it without seeming to fulfill whatever roles I imagined they might.  I can’t help but feel like I missed out, that I never came to know them as well as I had hoped, and that the story of our relationship (whatever it might’ve been) is jagged and incomplete.  It doesn’t follow a pattern, it isn’t finite, there is no reason.  Just to add to the stigma of parting ways, I end up trying to justify my own beliefs to myself.  Was there—is there—really a purpose to the people we come across, the events we endure?  Generally, a combination of innate sense and previous experience allows the belief in things happening for a reason to win out, but the simple shittines of farewells has been known to make me reconsider.

I don’t have any conclusion to it all, although I wish I did.  As I said, goodbyes are over discussed.  They aren’t multi-faceted, multiple-layered things—contrarily, they’re irksomely straightforward.  There’s hardly anything to say about them besides the obvious.  The obvious?  It sucks.  So here’s to all the sucky, incomplete goodbyes and all the wonderful people I’ve had them with.  Thanks for existing in my life, even if our time crossing paths was sporadic, short, and causeless.