Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

You can’t outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn’t the visitor, you are.

Sometimes, when something falls away naturally, it forms roots of its own.

When I stay at a friend’s place, the space between saying good night and good morning is an unfamiliar type of quiet. I think it’s because it’s not my own quiet that I feel in this space, but theirs. On the couch, or the air mattress, or in the guest room, in the dark, it feels like I am borrowing the ordinary quietness they feel every day. I am borrowing their sadnesses, their lonely and still moments, their pauses.

Or, maybe nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over.

The leaving is more joyous when you have become too full of the place where you are.

I think a lot of pressure gets put on making things “for something” or “for some reason” and the pressure of “but why?” and “but who’s this for?” and “is it good enough?” and “it’s a waste of time and energy!” and “why don’t you do something productive instead?” and I think that all of this removes the importance and value of making things for the ones who are making it, because maybe the ones who are making the thing are the ones who might need it the most.

Every act of moving is also an act of removing, leaving an empty space where what moved is no longer there. It’s just, the problem with leaving is that you’re never able to stick around to see what you’ve left behind.

It’s hard for me to be happy because in the moment that I feel it, I tell myself that it’s going to go away, that I know things are going to go back to feeling terrible, that it can’t last, so it’s a waste of my energy to be happy now. But I am trying to tell myself more that happiness has to be temporary for it to exist. If it lasted forever, we wouldn’t know to call it anything.

I am always sad when I think about happinesses leaving, but I have started to understand that sadnesses can leave, too.