Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

Sadness isn’t the visitor, you are.

except that what follows this closeness of staying with a friend is the inevitable act of leaving them, leaving their home, leaving their city, as one must after they are done visiting. And I will leave them the same way they leave their home every day, this being the last feeling of closeness I feel to them for a little while, because in visiting them, there was a deadline to this specific closeness—there

knowing that we are always one message away from each other but the ease of that closeness means we can talk at any time, and so there is no specific urgency to do so, and so we put it off, and we put it off, and we put it off. “Friendship” I am trying to pressure myself less on what a friendship “should” be.

Or get coffee once a year with a friend who lives in the same city when we are both overwhelmed and underwater with the rest of our lives?

And everyone is so busy and under immense pressure trying to survive that I think we are collectively doing our

have a certain nostalgia for happy moments, from years and years ago, that I do not remember feeling happy during.