Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

There is a specific type of emptiness in moving to a new place to start a new job or start at a new school and not having a life figured out there yet and not really knowing anyone there yet and being faced with the blank-slate openness of Saturday and Sunday and realizing you’re just trying to make it through the weekend to get back to having Some Defined Purpose again on Monday. This blankness is one of the scariest things to me. I don’t enjoy having time that’s been unaccounted for because it immediately makes me feel like I should be doing something with it, and then I can’t think of anything that I could possibly be doing that would be worthwhile enough to live up to the raw potential of any amount of available time. Nothing I choose to fill that time with feels like it would be enough.

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.

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.

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.

When my mom sometimes sighs and says, “You used to be such a happy child,” which part is being mourned as having “used to be”? “You used to be a child,” I suppose, is sad in itself, in the way that time passing is often sad. But everyone aside from babies used to be a child, so it can’t be that sad. “You used to be happy” is what it feels like that phrase really means. “Why aren’t you happy anymore?” is what that phrase feels like it’s asking. I have started to notice that, in describing my brother’s childhood, my mom likes to say, “You were always such a happy child.”

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. Because what if I do the wrong thing? What if I squander the options? Is now the time to work? And if so, what do I work on? Is now the time to rest? And if it is, how can I rest in the best way possible? How do I get the most rest? But if it is time to rest, doesn’t this mean that I can use this time to be not resting instead? And so I feel like I can only find peace within focused and defined time. Without a focus, all that undefined time causes me to freeze as I try to calculate and plan and decide in my head on what the most worthwhile thing to spend my time on would be, and then suddenly I look up and the day is over and I’ve squandered my day anyway, lost to the promise of potential.