Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

I had felt burned out from the relentlessness of the world,

These essays are short as an acknowledgment that we are all burned out and don’t have enough time as it is, so I am just stealing a moment or two from you, whenever I am able to, in the same way I have been stealing moments away—stealing little breaks and stealing from little breaks—to write this. I don’t want to burden you or ask for much, and I hope you can visit these as you steal moments away for yourself whenever you can, and I hope they offer something to you, and I hope that’s enough, and I hope that’s all right.

Living in a place feels like it’s bookended by parallel experiences. You move into an empty space feeling uncertain about it, and slowly, you let the space hold onto that uncertainty so you don’t have to. And when you leave, you leave it again as an empty space, taking back the uncertainty that you were storing in it. It ends with an empty room, the same way as it began, although you’ve changed in all the time in between.

I’ve found that acknowledging good things as Really Happening usually sends me into deep spirals of doubt and anxiety and so I’ve learned to float through most good things without acknowledging that they’re real or happening at all.

And when I build up enough of this guilt, I use the focused amounts of it as a compass to tell myself what I should be working on at any given moment based on what I can’t help but feel guilty about.

Whenever I am in an unfamiliar city, I prefer staying at a friend’s. To do so feels like a special kind of knowing them, and a special kind of feeling at home. If a home is who you are, in a way, rendered physically and externally, then to stay at a friend’s home is to stay not only with them but also among them, surrounded by this external expression of them.

I can feel their stuff all around me. Their plants, their books, the furniture they chose, the furniture they didn’t have much of a choice in choosing but decided that it was acceptable enough to live with. This stuff, I believe, is what holds a person. It’s where you store yourself, in a way, to define and then to remember who you are.

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 were only a finite number of days I could see them in person—whereas after I leave, we might not speak to each other for months, sometimes even years, 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.

Is there some standard for friendship that I internalized from a kids’ show, decades ago, before the internet, before I grew up into a world that a kids’ show never could have predicted, that I somehow still hold myself to?

It feels pretty close because it is to look back and try to reassure myself, “Now that it is over and it has happened, it is safe to finally feel the happiness you wanted to feel about it. Now you can feel happy because now your happiness will not get in the way, will not change the outcome, it cannot ruin it somehow in the way you think that happiness might, because it’s already happened. It’s locked away in the past. The memory has finally hardened into stone.”

Or, maybe nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can’t go back to and affect, that you can’t mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can’t really feel at all.

OKAY, OKAY. SO I KNOW I DIDN’T HIT THE MARK, LIKE, AT ALL, BUT AT LEAST I TRIED, RIGHT? I MEAN, HEY! EVEN YOU THOUGHT THE PHRASE “JURASSIC PARK, BUT WITH DINOSAUR-SIZED FROGS” WAS A GREAT IDEA WHEN YOU WOKE UP!

Without a deadline, time feels too open to be peaceful. That freedom is crushing because it feels like looking at a big, blank canvas of usable time, and then being forced to solve how to use it best. It takes so much work just to get to figuring out what to do with the time! There are too many possibilities, too much potential, and by extension, too much pressure.

The peace that comes with having your time be defined by a deadline is that the deadline presents you with only one way to use your time and says there is only one thing you can do in order to relieve this pressure, and so you stop worrying about how to use your time, and are finally free to just go about using it.

choosing the immediate and sharp pang of remorse over the much duller but much deeper one that would have been more drawn out but perhaps less guaranteed.

Look up from reading your dad’s texts. Suddenly realize that this is why you crack your eggs this way. Try to hold back whatever this feeling is.

Eat, imagining that the sheer energy of your thoughts is what convinced the eggs to eventually become scrambled. Eat, thinking about how all things undergo change, that this is the nature of everything. Eat, imagining that the eggs absorbed all the memories you called up while making them, and by eating them, you are welcoming everything you remembered back into you.

My parents often like to go to Chinese restaurants, and I used to think this was related to a dietary pickiness, but I am learning that they just want to go places where they know they will be interacting with and supporting people who will talk to them like people, who will treat them and see them as whole. To be Asian in (North) America is to keep a short running list of places where you know you will be given the gift of being seen as more than a visitor.

At that age, perhaps, we’d already absorbed and found a way to articulate one of the more enticing promises of capitalism—of buying, or spending, your way into belonging.

And I understand now that this came from being young and wanting to be seen, remembered, perhaps to feel some tiny grasp of a little bit of control, but mainly to have one more place on the (very) short list of places where you feel you might belong.

This means you successfully escaped from the ordinary, constant, churning movement of the world, and the return to it is always disorienting, in the same way you come out of a movie theater and are surprised that it is still daytime, or surprised that it is midnight, because while you were in there, days passed, years passed, a whole lifetime passed in front of your eyes.

As I play them, I find it relaxing to go on the internet and research what the best crops are, how to get the best items, how and when and where to catch all the fish and bugs, and what schedules the games run on internally so I know how to play them in a way where I can do the most stuff, therefore optimizing my time and achieving the most productive relaxation I can.

There is a guarantee designed into these games that promises: if you spend enough time working on this, every task can be achieved. I suppose this is a lovely fantasy of capitalism as well.

We cannot seem to escape the desire to feel productive with our time. I’m not sure if that’s by choice or by trauma, that this pressure to produce has been so engrained in us that our deepest fantasies are still tied to some idea of working on something.

Perhaps after a life of working to no end with no promised outcomes, what we think we want more than anything is to escape into this fantasy that something reliable will happen when we put our time into it.

There is a comfort in this, in realizing that someone else at some point in time had really cared about the same thing that you do right now, even if that someone was a German Renaissance painter who died five hundred years ago, and the thing you both cared about was how interesting it is that pillows suggest a mass without suggesting a weight, and how you needed to draw them to figure out how they do that.

Suddenly, I feel like I am in conversation with someone else, over this very specific topic of interest, only this conversation doesn’t happen with a rapid and ongoing exchange of words. It happens with one statement, and then half a millennia later, another one.

Perhaps one benefit (“benefit”?) of my anxiety is that at least I am unsurprised when things don’t turn out for the best. I don’t necessarily mean this in a “I am always thinking the worst will happen” kind of way (though that is true as well) but more that sudden dramatic downward change is not uncommon, emotionally, in any sense, so I kind of just grew accustomed to sudden dramatic downward changes happening.

isn’t that what we are always told that every small action counts that one small thing can change someone’s life and so how are we not always folding under the pressure of EVERY SMALL THING MATTERING IN THE BIGGEST WAYS

I was in fact the previous tenant, but unfortunately the person who sent this message was not a Facebook-literate dog (which, honestly, was for the best anyway, as it is my personal belief that dogs do not need to be poisoned by Facebook memes), but just a regular, human person.

This was someone who was now making a home out of a place that I once made a home out of. I felt that we shared a connection through this place. But to him, I was just some stranger named Jonathan.

Did he gravitate toward the same corner that I did, or did he like the bad corner and not appreciate the good one? Did he throw his clothes in a pile in the same spot that I did—did he even have a semipermanent clothes pile spot at all? Did he orient his bed the same way that I did? Did he know about the power outlet that I only discovered when I moved out? And suddenly I understood hauntings. I was the ghost. And I didn’t even have to die to become one, I just had to leave.

Sometimes I picture how my life might build in waves. For a wave to happen, Monday-me must move, then Tuesday-me must move, then Wednesday-me must move, and across all these movements, a wave may form over time. I think perhaps what’s so difficult about trying to witness our own changes is that we are not above the water. We are each just moving up and down in place, trying to stay afloat.

ADDENDA TO SCHRÖDINGER’S PARADOX When the cat sits inside the box, in the dark, do they know if they are dead or alive at any given point, or do they only know when this man who has claimed authority over the cat’s state, who has claimed authority as the objective observer opens the box and tells them what they are?

When the cat steps outside the laboratory afterward and finds other cats who have never been told that they are alive and who do not know what “Alive!” is, does the cat feel more alive, with the authority of having been told that they are, or do they feel far less so, knowing that, to these other cats, “Alive!” doesn’t mean anything at all?

when we come across a moment where the daylight isn’t everywhere, where the trees block out most of the sky, and the sun shines on a smattering of leaves, or a small wildflower, or a patch of moss, it feels like it’s highlighting it just for us. Here, the sun is no longer just the sun. It leaks through the trees and becomes a spotlight.

The act of taking care of plants, every day, over the courses of months and years, has helped show me that life takes time, but with time, life, for the most part, seems to generally know what to do. And learning when to provide the right pieces and how to set the right variables and conditions makes you a part of that life, too. You take care of the plant, and, if the plant decides to stay alive, it shows you how you are part of things outside of yourself, how you are more than yourself.

I loved sitting down and taking the time to write them and ending up with pages and pages to show for it, and I loved reading the letters that they sent back to me, knowing they took the time to write to me, too. In reading them, it felt like I was holding their time in my hands.

I loved knowing that in some folder, the act of talking to a friend was filling a .txt document with thousands and thousands of words. That by talking, we were writing a novel, or a script, or something even more. And that made it feel like what we were doing was much more than just talking. In writing all these words together, over years and years, it felt like we were collaborating, like we had written a friendship into being.

I think that sometimes, we love, and we continue to have faith in the things we love, because the things that you love the most strongly are the things that will embarrass you the most deeply if you ever fall out of love with them.

I don’t think two people reaching into the same tub of popcorn at the same time is considered romantic. That’s not romantic! That’s just getting in the way of each other’s popcorn.

And even though this specific happiness might not come back, know that it has to leave for it to visit you again.

Minute twelve: Laughing at a good meme about the end of the world you saw online while you were in the middle of figuring out what was going on.

And today just happens to be a day in the spring, so the tree is covered in its own flowers, blooming as if to say, Don’t worry about me. I’m just doing tree stuff. Like always. Worry about yourself, maybe. Stop moving around so much, maybe. It’s making me tired. Just sit still in the sun for a couple weeks. Trust me, it’ll feel nice.

I believe that the things you notice—that you love, that make you pause—make up who you are. And so it feels, in a way, like those things are a part of you, even though they are outside of you. Which makes me wonder if it would be more accurate to say, perhaps, that a piece of you is kept alive by a part of them.

And of course everything will not be fine. But I believe that what defines us, in part, are the things we draw ourselves to that make us believe that they might, for a brief moment, be okay. They say that you are alive for as long as someone remembers something about you. I would like to believe that a home remembers you for as long as one thing you remember of it is still there.

Home, then, I suppose, is simply in the ways you take a strange space and make it feel familiar. Sometimes that means putting your stuff in it. Sometimes that just means putting yourself in it and giving it time.

Every winter, I go back to visit the house I grew up in. I stand in my old bedroom and try to remember what it felt like to be a younger me living here, instead of being a visitor to the memory of what “here” even is. Here, all my stuff has stayed exactly the same as I remember from that time. It is frozen—a memorial, in a way, to some past version of me who is gone now, who I no longer am. And it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Standing in my old bedroom feels uncanny, just a little bit like standing in the apartment below mine. Only instead of having stepped into a hallway on the wrong floor, I am standing in my home in the wrong time. I suppose sometimes the things in the room don’t need to be different for a place to feel unfamiliar. Sometimes you are the thing that has changed.

Because by the time you read this book, the person who made it will be gone.