Every time we say goodbye

You know those days when everything appears to go wrong? I felt like that girl during her slump in "Just My Luck." You know the drill. You try to send a file but it's too big, your laptop runs out of charge and there's nowhere to plug it, you have to reply to about a gazillion people but you've run out of load. Your asthma attacks seem to be hardly responding to your meds.

And on the one day of the week that you didn't bring your umbrella, it rained like there was no tomorrow, both on the way to school and on the way back. And the rain came with a goodbye.

Rain often makes me sad. It always reminds me of that scene in The Parent Trap (reminding me once again that my life is a tapestry of movies with no originality), the saddest scene, when "Every Time we Say Goodbye" plays on the background.

Oh, Every time we say goodbye
I die a little.
Every time we say goodbye
I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
They allow you to go.

When you're near
There's such an air
Of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere
Begin to sing about it
There's no love song finer
But how strange the change
From major to minor
Every time we say goodbye.


Yesterday I was running home in the rain, jacket over my head and over my bag, when I ran into someone in front of Robinsons Mall. I was amazed he recognized me because I was half-hidden by my jacket. He greeted me just as I was crossing to go to National bookstore, and I said hi back, and was left wondering (like Charles Ryder) how our lives, so closely intertwined once, could now intersect only in the few times a year we'd bump into each other, when there was a time we were close enough to study in Starbucks Adriatico together and we'd share things about Maria Mena and other singers. We first met when he and one of my best friends were classmates in UP Dentistry, and he was always extremely nice to me. I remember thinking how odd it was for a guy to like Maria Mena's kind of music.

I'm not writing this now because I was particularly fond of him--more like I was amazed at how we make such a big deal out of goodbyes, when in reality we say goodbye all the time, sometimes without even knowing it. If you made a friend at some class or elective you took back in college, when the semester ended, you probably wouldn't really meet each other for coffee right? I know I didn't, not really; I used to sit next to this girl called Hannah for a whole summer, and now I can't even remember her last name, her course or what we ever found to talk about. Also, I took part in summer stock theatre and fell sincerely in love with some people, but after some time we stopped communicating, too.

I thought about all this on the way home. Today I have had to say a different kind of goodbye. In a way it is an artificial sort of goodbye because we will remain friends. But there is a thread that has been cut, and has been cut forever, and it won't ever be the same.

I can let myself be sad--but I can also let myself shrug it off, as I have shrugged off a thousand other goodbyes, and know that the same wise Person behind preludes and encounters is also the same person behind epilogues and goodbyes.