the Hello-Goodbye

Hello-goodbye.

It's an exchange we encounter daily. We welcome individuals into our lives, our homes, our places of work, and then extend a farewell upon their departure. A cultural ritual, perhaps. A mere exchange of pleasantries, okay. The hello-goodbye. It's this little dance we do to create a sense of beginning and end, or maybe in attempts of placing a parenthesis around the encounters of our lives. The thing I keep realizing is that this little dance is actually a really big deal. And at the risk of sounding all Angela Chase, it's like the biggest deal there is.

I used to think that it wasn't until you were without someone- until they left, that you realized just how much you loved them or needed them. A sort of 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' situation. But more and more I realize that it's not until those people come back into your life that you understand just how much you truly missed them, and how much you really love or need them. That it's not the goodbye, but rather, a return to the hello that welcomes the purest understanding of a relationship.

Most recently I find myself standing in between Hello and Goodbye. Not such a big surprise that I should find myself in between... oh how I love the gray. A dear friend just returned from Japan- where she's been living for over a year. And yet, while I've just gotten to return to hello, I'm saying goodbye almost immediately as she's returning to Japan come Wednesday. Another dear friend is headed back home for the summer. Her home... is Ecuador. And when she returns to Maryland and to this apartment, I'll have moved out, and things will inevitably look different. And then the question becomes, when will we be saying hello again? I'm not sure.

And it gets me wondering if the Hello-Goodbye is one of those polarities that only exists in this duet. For each hello must come a goodbye? Or are there those hellos that simply stay- and we never really have to say goodbye... or in turn, maybe there are those people to whom we say goodbye and never say hello again? I'm not sure. And maybe there are those who are destined to be in our lives- perpetually in the hello, and so the goodbyes we say to them in our lifetime are merely fake goodbyes- they're pretend- we say them as part of this cultural ritual, but knowing that we're destined to come back to the sweet comfort of hello.

Hello.

I'm headed to Europe in less than three weeks. And I think that's the ultimate Hello-goodbye... saying goodbye to the familiar and welcoming the embrace of all things new-cultures, landscapes, people, food, rituals... That's the kind of dance that feels sweet and comforting while simultaneously intimidating and a little scary. And spontaneous. And exhilarating. And completely worth it.

Or maybe we just shouldn't say goodbye at all. We should just always say hello- at the beginnings and ends of things... to just leave things open. To not close the parenthesis or put an end to things. We could just perpetually leave things open and ongoing and never have to feel the heavy sadness of saying goodbye- we could just live in this place of seeing the threads of the relationships in our lives extend on and on almost into a sort of infinity where the lines marking where this begins and that ends are blurred... hmm, I think I've said that before. Anyway, we could create this new dance. The Hello-Hello. That could be good.

So, hello.
More to come.
As always.