Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

I don’t begrudge anyone for not responding and not getting back to me, because I do that, too. I understand other things get in the way, or that sometimes, the burden of configuring a response that encompasses everything that needs to be said is too great to face at the moment.

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.

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

But as soon as you remove those leaves, all you see is what remains, which is a plant with green leaves, alive, and you forget about all the other leaves that were attached to it before.

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.

Every time this is over, I always think to myself that we could have far more easily done nothing and then I wonder what compels us to keep doing this.

I wonder if this is a compromise—some admission of defeat or some acknowledgment that we never achieved this dream—or if it is, in some way, a purer form of it. I wonder if I am simply keeping some old memory alive, trying to revisit some old glue from a time when we used to play all the time, or if this is something else. I wonder if maybe I am not trying to relive some lost dream but perhaps mourning it, celebrating it, and moving toward something new, instead.

When I leave, it becomes something that simply happens. People will go on with their lives. That place you were a part of, that you are now just some visitor to, will continue operating in your absence, will continue picking up more visitors, will continue to continue. It must.

Mourning does not only apply to death. You are allowed to mourn change, as well.

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

I have started to let sadnesses visit whenever they come, because I know that trying to keep them out will just cause them to find another, more aggressive way 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.

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.

See you later cannot be promised, but Goodbye, again reminds us that we’ve done this before. And after the last time, at least, we both came back.

I believe that any creative project is an archive, or a time capsule, some marking down of some sense of who you are, or were, at the specific moments in time that you were making it.

This is a way for me to feel like I am connected to them, even though they may never know this. I used to feel like that was enough, and I used to hope that somehow, when I was thinking about them, when I was writing and conjuring them, that they would somehow feel it, that they would somehow be thinking of me and feel connected to me too without me doing any of the actual work of reaching out. And I think my hoping that that was connection enough made me feel lonelier.

I have found comfort in knowing that I can live with a memory of someone for as long as I am around to remember them, but while the actual person that memory comes from is still here to say hello to, I am trying to say hello to them more, before I can no longer do that. And I feel lucky enough that, when I need these people, they continue to be here for me.