Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

When my therapist asks me, “Is this guilt necessary?” I say, “Oh, absolutely. I wouldn’t get anything done without it.” And then when he asks, “But what about joy? Can you make joy necessary?”

The most productive years of my life so far have also been my loneliest.

I have tried to become more attentive to words that treat natural elements of ourselves as currency: “paying attention,” “spending time,” “wasting energy.”

I try to use other words—“giving my attention,” “sharing my time,” “using my energy”—but

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

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.

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

Feeling lonely is for people who have arrived somewhere, I tell myself, not for people still on the way there.

Taking care of these plants and noticing those small growths become big growths that allow for more new small growths to happen has made me appreciate that they, like ourselves, like all things, require time. Plants change and grow on a scale of weeks, months, years. You don’t notice how alive they are in a glance, but when you notice that they move, and when you notice that they have grown, it’s a sudden thrill. Every plant is an explosion of life, except that to us, they burst forth in slow motion.