‘not with a bang’
At too young an age, I learned to slip away. Silently. Seamlessly. Often – not always -accompanied by a return, until the act of returning, met with hardly a glance or remark, soon subsided into never returning at all. I am ashamed to say I slip out of people’s lives quite easily. I’d like to say the first time – the time that started all times – was not really my fault. But that’s a lie. I was disappearing and reappearing long before the time that started all times. I learned, hanging in the shadows, that when I was gone, even after when I reappeared, I really wasn’t missed at all. Maybe goodbyes were just hard. is what I tell myself as I shoved the last of my clothes into the two free suitcases Southwest allows me. That’s a lie, and I know it. I don’t say goodbye because in the end, I don’t think I’ll be missed. And I rarely am. Sometimes, I try to say farewell. To hug the other person. If not for real, with words or a look that say “Damn, I miss you. You really meant a lot to me. I couldn’t have survived this time without you in my life.” But my words fall flat. Instead, I wonder if people wonder why I’m weird. And the shame of being so out of tune with the way I “should” be overwhelms me until I’m preoccupied with the task of slipping quicker out of people’s lives to free them of human gravel I think I am.
