Until we meet again...

Guilty confession 1: I absolutely love Jane Austin's "Pride and Prejudice." Rarely will I confess to truly loving a so-called "chick-flick," but the reality is... the movie is absolutely brilliant, and the book even more so. Bravo, and well done.

Guilty confession 2: I am absolutely terrible at goodbyes. I loathe them. I resist them. And I do not know how to do them well. So, I compromise with a two-armed hug and awkward two-thump back-pat, saying a quick "goodbye," and then turning towards the door.

The other night, my Rachel, Betsey, and Whitney and I were talking about goodbyes, as we near the necessity of our own goodbye. The conversation has stuck with me, and I have since pondered the subject many a time. I realized that one of the reasons that I hate goodbyes so adamantly is that they represent the in-between, a period of finality and uncertainty simultaneously; they are, in a word, the middle-ground. Goodbye represents the closing of one door before another is opened. And in so doing, I often feel that I am caught in between two realities, past and future, without being fully present in either.

J.K. Rowling, British author of the Harry Potter series, creates many terms, concepts, and wizarding devices in her extraordinary creativity. Her characters, when they reach a suitable age, of course, are able to practice disapparition, which is a nifty method of disappearing from one place to instantaneously re-appear in another (similar to teleportation). The risk, for an inexperienced wizard, is splinching, or only taking half of one's body along. In other words (and I promise, this has a point), a wizard haphazardly practicing apparition might find his body split between two locations.

Goodbye, to me, often feels similar: half of me remains where I have been, while the other part continues on to the new destination.

And perhaps this is why I hate goodbyes so desperately... I detest feeling as if I am woman divided. Yet, inevitably, I must move forward. It is entirely futile for me to attempt to remain in the past or forgo the future. But how to do it well?

Perhaps the trick is quite simple, really. Perhaps the trick is to never say goodbye. In German, the expression for "goodbye" is auf wiedersehen. Translated literally, it means "on see again." In French, it is "au revoir" or "with again to see." In Russian до свидания means "towards with seeing." Goodbye simply does not cut it, because without the hope of a future which encompasses and is firmly anchored in the present, our lives do feel splinched, divided, incomplete.

So instead of goodbye, let me boldly declare "until I see you again," in the hope and expectation that our paths will again intersect. Therefore, at the risk of being sappy and cheesy all rolled-into-one, let me borrow from Vitamin C, and quote:

As we go on, we remember/All the times we had together/And as our lives change, from whatever/We will still be, friends forever

I keep, I keep thinking that it's not goodbye/Keep on thinking it's a time to fly