Understanding Goodbyes

As I come to the end of a chapter in my life--a very important one I may add, of me leaving my first big girl job to take up another new endeavor--I found a piece of writing hidden somewhere in my work files. It's a sad thing to go through your computer folders or even old boxes of things that you nonchalantly toss aside to look at for later only to find some great gems that you realize you should have resurrected a long time ago.

I couldn't figure out who wrote this, until I realized that it was me. I thought back long and hard and remembered that I wrote this when I first started working at McCann two years ago. Probably at a rare, slow, bored point in my work day, probably as the start of one of my many manuscript attempts.

Only fitting I found it on my last day:

Goodbye.

I’m backwards. I want to say I’m absurd yet profound, but most likely you’ll just think this a tacky start, and a bad attempt to be literally creative and abstract by saying goodbye when I mean hello. But really, I choose to be backwards because it’s more optimistic to say goodbye than it is to say hello.

The best thing about goodbyes is that you know most often than not, you’ll say it again. There is something hopeful in a farewell, whether it is spoken, waved, or kissed away. You hope to do it again the next time you meet; and if in more fatal severances even though you know it is a physical and realistic impossibility, you still whisper your graduated levels of goodbyes through bitter lips and sad hearts as you cope through the after periods of death. You hope that goodbyes mean more hellos, and so even when someone leaves you, you are ever hopeful that it's not truly a farewell.

They say, jokingly of course, that every man’s wedding is a funeral, a rice-throwing, bouquet-chucking, vow-making ode to the death of single life. Fantastically enough, through humor we subscribe to this unspoken human understanding that for every growth of a new life is the death of an old one. We don’t recognize how many times we die in a day, in a week, in a year. We die growing up.