Say Goodbye
It intrigues me how it’s on the days we say goodbye that we remember the little things.
I can still close my eyes and recall the bitter frigid cold at a friend’s funeral as a teenager. We were kids, far too young to face our own mortality and yet there it was. Giant snowflakes fluttered down around that small town, swirling around the church where everyone who loved you gathered. And I hope you know how many people loved you. You deserved to shine for much longer than you had a chance to.
This year, hug your friends and tell them you love them. You never know.
Another friend died in 2014, only in her twenties and still far too young to go. We’d planned on reconnecting. While ruminating over a cocktail that night, I stood in the kitchen in shock, contemplating how we spent the years after high school saying we’d reconnect and hang out. And never did. All it would have taken was a phone call or a message. We lived in the same town. It had been so long that I still only knew the teenage version of her, not the woman she had become.
This year, call those old friends, make plans, and carry through. One day, you run out of time.
I’d encountered death plenty as a kid. My grandparents all passed when I was young. They were old. It hurt, and I still miss them terribly, but it didn’t shock me. I grew up without my dad, who died while my mother was pregnant with me. The void has been there all my life, a reminder of how death strikes when we least expect it. Yet at thirteen, I still couldn’t comprehend the death of a friend my age.
Even at twenty-five, it shook up my world. I joke about being old in my early thirties, but it’s merely a beginning to a new era of adulthood my two friends will never get to see. It’s true: we don’t say goodbye once. We say it a million times in a million different ways as years go by. I say it every time the snowflakes get massive, every time I think of how he strung himself up with Christmas lights and came to school. I say it every time she pops up in Facebook Memories or when I hear a song she adored as a teenager and never stopped listening to. Avril Lavigne. Evanescence. Did she still listen to them in the same way I still listen to Britney Spears?
Life changes so much in our twenties and often into our thirties, before we settle down into a rhythm of adulthood. Old friends can get shuffled to a back burner while we start careers and families, or travel, or simply navigate through mental health and the dumpster fire the world can be. Make 2022 the year you bring them back. Make this the year you don’t miss out on these friends.
One day, you run out of time.
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