What Does a Goodbye Feel Like?

I am not one of those who "hate goodbyes." I thrive on them. The shortest way to explain this (though possibly not the clearest) is to say that the awareness of an end is what fills me up instantenously and unfailingly with the unfiltered sensation of life. A commodity hard to come by (without resorting to chemicals, meditation classes, or extreme sports), so I cultivate the art of saying goodbye whenever there is a chance to draw a line and wave one last time at the other side.




The question, however, is not so much whether we like or hate goodbyes, but whether we can say goodbye. It's one thing to seek the aesthetically packaged little gems of moments like the ones mentioned in the paragraph above, but it is completely different to try to comprehend the vacuum spreading like a contagion after a goodbye that hits you right in the soft underbelly.




I tried, and didn't even know how to begin to say goodbye to the place where I grew up. It was the end of summer, and it felt like the end of the world. How can I say goodbye -- and really mean it -- to my windows on the third floor where in Grade 5 Ana (from the sixth floor) and I established a manual messaging system consisting of two yogurt containers on a piece of string? the elaborate comic strips my brother and I drew on the wooden frameworks of our beds? the confident rectangles of sunshine on the kitchen floor announcing another safe and cosy day reflected on my parents' faces? that priceless excitement of a positively charged hot summer day promising such sweet things? the sensation of life unfolding effortlessly, naturally? the bell of my elementary school sending rivers and rivulets of pupils in all directions? the streets and street corners where every time I went out, I could easily be walking in my mother's footsteps? the shop windows where I probably checked many a morning how cool I looked on the way to my high school across town? the main pedestrian street where on warm summer evenings we paraded our teenage fashions, dreams, longings and desires? the green river where we went to catch tadpoles for a biology class and along which I later jogged? the rounded hills gently leaning from all sides (the one visible from my window still showing a barely noticeable trace of the letters T I T O)? our sad-looking apartment buildings, erected with soc-realist vigor in the 70s but worn out, stained, and yellowed by the war in the 90s and keeping the secrets of many souls who came and went? the neighbours, friends, acquaintances and their stories? an uforgettable era in a forgotten and non-existing country? the dawn of my memory? the playground that heard my first words? the place whose name resounds with our laughter at dinner table? where I learned everything I know about the guts of life?






If we could say goodbye to such things and really mean it, we would die the very next minute.






If I believed -- and I don't -- that we could survive this goodbye, it would perhaps feel a little like this.

Daily Complicities

Some time ago I went to my bank, and walked right in with the little book I'd been reading on the metro in my hand. The bank was CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce), the book was Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction.

As Ros says to Guil in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, " I didn't know where to put myself" ... with uneasiness and embarrassment. Such high intellectual aspirations; and such low economic grovelling.

So I am hereby reminding myself of the complicity with which I live daily. Of the heavily polluted cloud of past horrors I breathe in unthinkingly. Of somebody else's visceral, vomit-provoking reality of which I know nothing, of which I've only seen pictures.

Like this one from the cover of an edition of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (photograph of ivory-trading in the Congo, ca. 1890):

Just another colonial scene. And yet. Like a barely audible but unmistakabe note in the air, something striking pervades the photo. Despite the power-indicative position of the African equivalent of the Indian white sahib, (proper terminology, anyone?), seated on a chair, fully dressed and helmeted, holding a whip in the right hand, and judging the offered tusk domineeringly -- the unobtrusive supremacy and superiority in this picture undoubtedly belongs to the group of African traders, gathered around the white man. Whether seated or standing, they hold themselves with a healthy confidence and natural elegance. If they seem to obey the command-giving European, it is out of politeness. They are free and beautiful, they owe nothing to no one, their bare feet touch the ground fully and firmly, they are from here.

And they are about to be dislocated, disjointed, chewed, swallowed, and defecated by the whip-holders.

Perhaps complicities aren't always accompanied by paradoxes, but that is the case here: the CIBC bank has nothing to do with this picture, and it has everything to do with it.