The Goodbye Process

by Mary Jones

Some absences you can’t make up for, and more often than not, walking away from love means walking back to hate.

It was a long time before I understood that this was just something that happens in life, how people harden on you when you least expect them to, and won’t ever go soft again no matter how much you want them to, and how you have no choice but to just accept it,

I could feel the years of my life passing. So much of my life seemed to be looking forward to something that never came, but now, somehow, it all seemed to be behind me.

“Just because you’re losing the same person,” she’d said, “doesn’t mean you’re losing the same thing.”

He thought of how somewhere, right now, there were other people standing where he was standing, doing exactly what he was doing—saying goodbye to the very thing that they loved the most. He thought of how he was with them all in a way, and how, in a way, they were all here with him, too.