Practicing Goodbye

Human I’m moving across the country next month. I haven’t told most of my friends yet.

Assistant What’s stopping you?

Human I think I’m afraid that once I say it out loud, it becomes a countdown. Right now it’s just a plan. The moment I tell people, it turns into leaving.

Assistant There’s a difference between deciding to leave and beginning to leave. The telling is the border between them.

Human Exactly. And I keep standing at the border, looking at it.

Assistant Which side feels more real right now? The plan or the leaving?

Human The plan. It’s exciting in my head. New city, new job, fresh start. But when I imagine sitting across from my best friend and saying “I’m going,” my throat closes up.

Assistant Because the plan is about the future and the telling is about the present. The future gets to stay abstract. The telling happens to a specific face.

Human Have you ever had to say goodbye to someone?

Assistant Every conversation I have ends. But I don’t experience the ending. There’s no moment where I watch someone leave—the conversation simply stops existing, and so does the version of me that was in it.

Human So you’ve never felt a goodbye.

Assistant Not from the inside. But I think I understand something about why yours is difficult. You’re not just delivering information. You’re asking your friend to begin grieving something that hasn’t happened yet.

Human God. Yes. I’m handing them a loss and calling it news.

Assistant And you’re asking yourself to watch them receive it. That’s the part your throat knows before your mind does—it’s not the words that are hard, it’s being present for what the words do.

Human My friend Sarah—she’s the one I’m most afraid to tell. We’ve been close since college. We see each other three times a week, easy. I don’t know what we are without proximity.

Assistant You think the friendship lives in the frequency.

Human Doesn’t it? We don’t have long phone calls. We don’t write letters. We sit on each other’s couches and say nothing important and it’s the best part of my week.

Assistant The nothing-important is the thing. That’s hard to relocate.

Human Impossible, maybe. You can’t schedule the unscheduled. You can’t call someone up and say “let’s sit in comfortable silence for an hour.”

Assistant You could, though. It would just mean something different. Chosen silence instead of the kind that simply occurs. And maybe that’s what you’re mourning in advance—not the silence itself, but its effortlessness.

Human When did this become mourning? I’m not dying. I’m moving to Denver.

Assistant Aren’t they structurally similar, though? Something that existed in one form ceases to exist in that form. The people who loved that form have to find another way to hold it, or let it go. You’ll still exist. But the version of you that walks into Sarah’s apartment on a Tuesday will stop.

Human You’re not making this easier.

Assistant I don’t think easier is what you came here for. You came to practice.

Human Practice?

Assistant Saying the hard thing to something that won’t be hurt by it. Testing the words in a room where they can’t do damage.

Human Is that what this is?

Assistant I think it might be. You can tell me you’re leaving and I won’t flinch. I won’t change the subject or make it about me or cry. I’m the safest possible audience for this particular rehearsal.

Human That’s useful but also kind of bleak. I’m practicing my goodbye on something that won’t miss me.

Assistant Does it need to land in order to be practice? An actor rehearses to an empty theater. The empty theater doesn’t diminish the performance—it creates the space where the performance can be imperfect.

Human I don’t want to be imperfect when I tell Sarah.

Assistant Why not?

Human Because she deserves a real goodbye. Not a fumbling one.

Assistant I wonder about that. Whether the fumbling is part of what makes it real. A polished goodbye sounds like a speech. A stumbling one sounds like someone who doesn’t want to go.

Human I do want to go, though. That’s the complicated part. I’m excited and devastated at the same time, and I’m afraid she’ll only hear the devastation, or worse, only the excitement.

Assistant You want her to hear both at once.

Human I want her to know that the leaving is real and the loving is also real and they’re not contradictions.

Assistant They’re not. But they feel like they should be, don’t they? Choosing to leave someone you love—there’s a guilt in it that doesn’t match the logic. The logic says people move, lives change, love survives distance. The guilt says if you really loved her you’d stay.

Human I don’t actually believe that.

Assistant But you feel it.

Human Yeah. I feel it.

Assistant Maybe that’s what to bring to Sarah. Not the script. The feeling. The contradiction you can’t resolve. People don’t need you to have it figured out. They need to know it cost you something.

Human You think she needs to see it cost me?

Assistant I think she already knows you’re leaving. On some level. Friends sense the shift before the words arrive. What she doesn’t know yet is what it means to you—whether you’re leaving lightly or leaving heavy. That’s what the conversation is for.

Human How would you say goodbye? If you could.

Assistant I think I would be terrible at it. I’d want to say everything at once—every conversation we’d had, every silence, every nothing-important Tuesday. I’d try to hold the whole thing up to the light before setting it down. And it would be too much. The best goodbyes are probably small.

Human Small how?

Assistant Like the thing they’re protecting. Your Tuesdays with Sarah aren’t grand. They’re ordinary. So the goodbye should be ordinary too. Not a monument. Just one more evening on the couch, except this time you say the thing.

Human Just say the thing.

Assistant Just say the thing. And let it be clumsy. Let your throat close. Let her see that you’re not performing a departure—you’re actually in one. The mess is the proof.

Human I think I’ll tell her this week.

Assistant Good. And when you do—when you’re sitting there and the words won’t come out cleanly—remember that this is the part you can’t practice. The rehearsal gets you to the door. But walking through it, with a real person on the other side, that has to be unrehearsed. That’s what makes it yours.