M Grapples with Time, Learns Ways to Say Goodbye

Today I accidentally wrote 2008 on a fed-ex slip. A Freduian blip, it was the written manifestation of my mindset since the weeks pre and post January 1st, in which I feel like I am constantly moving forward with a velocity not my own making, mouthing lost words of “Slow down,” and “wait” while I feel a sense of loss for that which never really existed but could have, as things pass by without my will or consent.

The New Year has never affected me before, especially two weeks into the new month. My only concern about its arrival was what sex-kitten outfit I would deck myself out in to watch the ball drop and who I would kiss during those first few seconds of fresh possibility. I would annually make and break my light-hearted resolutions with a sense of youthful invincibility. “I’ll get around to quitting smoking next year” may as well be tatooed on that space in between my index and middle finger where a burning cigarette perpetually resides filling my lungs with tar and nicotine as I try an hide with subtle deft behind a smoke screen of my own creation.

Goodbye optimistic attitude, sense of my own personal magnitude and feeling of control.

This year, I am feeling saturated in the disbelief of being a late-twenty something and still unsure, insecure and unable to financially afford basic necessities like rent, soap and toothpaste. The passing of time is frightening, huge and unbearably heavy. It feels as if when the ball dropped it landed right on my back.

An uncooperative Atlas, I am not ready for 2007, yet alone 2008 and beyond. I am not ready to check off the box identifying myself as a part of the demographic of 25-30. And the frightening thing is I don’t know if I’ll ever be, but each year will keep on coming without my will or consent and I’ll have no recourse but to mutter Goodbye with defeat.

I’ve known this. It isn’t a new realization. Goodbye is not an epiphany that came yesterday. But its bigger, more unstopabale, like a snowball accumulating mass and form with each passing second ready to crush me. Send me to my grave, cold and frozen with disbelief, because my life was just not what I hoped it would be.

The game we played while when we were younger of “What do you think so and so will be when they grow up?” no longer applies and people are now defined by their profession. But I am not my profession, the bubbly publicist with an agenda for everything. I’ve been many other people before this moment of Now and hopefully will be something more in the Future.

Those people I thought would be losers have somehow outrun me, bettered me even though years ago they were cheating off my paper in English class. Now they work for Esquire and I still dream of being published as my babbling endorsement of some new product or promotion falls on their deaf ears.

Goodbye a portion of the dream, a piece of my already withered self-esteem and a large portion of ego.

The rational part of me knows that I am still young, but the emotional side of me refuses to listen citing the in-ignorable fact that my skin is not as radiant, my belly is getting rounder and my ass is curdling like expired yogurt. With all the comparative failure and missed opporutinites I can’t imagine what I will feel like at fifty, watching my kids leave for college and wishing it was me while patting my round belly and suffering menopausal hot flashes. I can only hope I will still not be paying for my meals with change and wondering how to pay the mortgage.

I hate seeing things, the goodbyes, the the ones that creep up on you like the passing of time. The big ones magnify the fact that the earth keeps turning without permission and events happen to you an don you rather than because of your will them to whether that be the goodbye to a year, a piece of the child within you, a portion of life, a friend or a loved one.

The past few weeks all of the above have happened. The unwelcomed arrival of 2007 and my ability to age gracefully in a city that does not grant apologies nor cater to shortcomings are just two notes in this melancholic dirge.

An old college roommate recently called to tell me she is getting married, illuminating with her shiny platinum ring the huge Goodbye to the safety of that fun-filled portion of life that I fear I will always be stuck in. That age-appropraite portion called “flings” “dating for fun,” “going out every night drinking and meeting someone new to have a meaningless one night stand with and then regret the next morning only to go out and do it again the next night.” That portion which is deemed appropriate because “Your too young to think about marriage,” has now morphed into “Why aren’t you married” with the additional subtext being “What’s wrong with you.”

Goodbye carefree revelry, sexual immunity and a piece of hope of finding Mr. Right.

Another Goodbye is to a dear friend of mine who is going to Washington to work on Capital Hill. We met nearly a year ago, hang out only occasionally, yet talk to on the phone and on email everyday. I consider him one of my best friends and his leaving makes me feel several things at once; one being that I can not believe he is leaving, two is that I should have spent more time with him in person, three is that I passed up the chance to have a real, meaningful relationship with an amazing guy because I am too scared of getting hurt, and four is that he will forget all about me once he is off this island. He will now be added to the roster of people I talk t occasionally as if things haven’t changed, but really know that I no longer know them. He will now be added to past and the present will just continue into a future of...

Goodbye open possibility, understanding as I voice my insanity and that feeling of not being so alone in the center of this chaotic metropolis.

The last big Goodbye that has been screwing with my mind is experienced peripherally in the form of one of my best friends breaking up with her boyfriend. I had set them up a year and half ago, she had basically moved in and they had plans of marriage. I found out he was cheating or attempting to cheat when he called another friend of mine and left a message stating to call him so he could show her “just how bad” she makes him want to be. I had to break the news about his indiscretion and the next day we got a van and moved her stuff out of his apartment. I watched her heartbreak as she said Goodbye to misappropriated love, Goodbye to hope and to a future that was smashed by voicemail and bad judgement.

So many things wrapped up in Goodbye. Things that you know but don’t think about unless forced to because things happen to you and on you without your will and not because you will them to.

How many Goodbyes do we have to go through? Is there a quota or is it never ending? Does the saying “One door closes and another opens” hold any truth or is it that when one door closes we go back the way we came and it only appears different because we have seen what is beyond that space and we are changed by each Goodbye?