My Goodbye is Impossible

I wish I could have said goodbye. Just goodbye. Not to stop you. Not to make you feel bad. Just one last hug. One last look. One last audible sound. But I can’t find you.

When the house got cleared out and we were getting ready to sell it, I wandered around it as if searching for you in familiar places. I sat in the library. I sat in the living room. I sat in your bedroom. But I could not find you. I could bid my farewell to the home of my childhood, but I could not say bye to you.

I watch movies we enjoyed together, but you’re not watching them with me. I turn my head in hopes of seeing you there, but you don’t show up. An empty seat now occupies your spot.

I go to the places where I put your ashes, but you are not there either. I hope to spark some moment with you, but all I’m left with is an empty scene. An incomplete moment. You aren’t even in the periphery, and your ashes have long since washed away.

I walk hoping to find you walking by my side, like the old times, but I end up walking alone. The only footsteps I hear are my own as I reason to myself what to make of all this.

I stare at the rain, trying to get lost in its noise like you used to. I just wind up being reminded of you, and how you are no longer here. It does not wash away my sorrow, but rather makes puddles of it in my mind. They splash up on me as I wander through old memories of you. I remember the things I wanted to do with you, and their impossibility now. I am covered in the mud of unfulfilled hopes and dreams.

I look at and touch your old things. I imagine you touching them and pretend that somehow that means that I have touched you. But your glasses do not see me. Your books do not speak to me. Your music does not embrace me. The objects were before the man, but behind them you are no longer there. They are mere shadows and fragments of the man who held them.

In a thousand different ways I try to find you to gain some sort of closure, but you are not here. My goodbye is impossible. You are gone, but constantly with me. Close to my heart, but impossible to interact with. There, but separated by a gulf of time and space. Living in my mind, yet gone all the same. Perpetually around the next corner.

Just to say goodbye. I ache for it. To hear your voice one last time! One more hug! One more laugh! It is an emptiness that I am left with, dad. I can’t fill this longing no matter the distractions I occupy my mind with. I wish you were here, and I can’t un-wish it no matter how much I try, and no matter how much you may have wanted me to. Even in my angriest moments when I pretend to hate you, I can’t help but realize that all I really want is for you to be here. I utilize the full gamut of emotion to summon you, but not even my emotions can bring you back. I clench my fists at invisible bars to try to tear away the reality that separates us, but they are beyond my abilities or rights to move.

And so this is the way it is. I will have this wandering goodbye with me until the day it is time for me to go. And in that day I will not need it, because it will become a hello. An embrace. Tearless sobbing and quaking laughter. My impossible goodbye yielding a never-ceasing hello.

But until then…