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A Chapter by Cali017

The intro to a novel I'm working on

Goodbye. A word that I have been able to avoid saying for five years. Sure, I’ll say it in less powerful words. “See you soon” or “Talk to you later,” even if they’re not true, just seem less final. Goodbyes never used to bother me. In fact, I would pride myself on how I could emerge unscathed from a circle of people embracing one another with tears streaming down their cheeks, positive that their time together has come to an end. Or how I sauntered out of our graduation ceremony with not even the tiniest wisp of desire to look back. Believe me, though, my immunity to the unpleasant emotions so often evoked from forever leaving those you care about is not because I lack a heart or anything like that. There have just been very few people who I’ve been forced to part ways with before I was ready, so I guess I have not yet thoroughly experienced the inevitable heart-wrenching emotions that come with goodbye’s. It’s not even that saying goodbye bothers me now. It’s just that… I’ve learned not to waste my goodbyes. Such a cruel, painfully breathtaking word should be used for painfully breathtaking people. When life mercilessly led me to the moment I said goodbye to my mother five years ago, I decided that the word “goodbye” is unfair and cold and agonizing and that I will use it only when it means something to me. Only if it will break me so deeply that after I push it past my lips and let it hang in the air, I want to flood the world with tears and woeful sobs so that everybody else misses someone, too. Life is not long enough to cry for people who didn’t make me question everything I am and ever will be, who didn’t make it all far more confusing than it had to be, but also terrifyingly simple. Who didn’t blaze through my life and set everything up in flames, not giving a thought to whether I was afraid of fire.