The familiar pang of an un-felt goodbye

We’ve all experienced it: that moment when you realise that the last time you will ever see a person has been and gone without alerting you of its passing. A disservice and an injustice done to a moment of great significance. Goodbyes are important because it is one of the few chances we get to be sincere and heartfelt towards another person without being embarrassing. They offer, to get all American-teen for a second, “closure”, and allow for a re-categorisation of someone-I-know to someone-I-used-to-know, present to past imperfect. Even if a goodbye is no more than perfunctory it still draws a line under a relationship; sometimes it is nothing more than symbolic, but that is important, too.

One feels cheated, then, by these un-felt farewells, these frictionless goodbyes that have been coming thick and fast in recent weeks, because they represent the denial of closure, a closure that has to be cobbled together in retrospect in a most unsatisfying manner. It is as if the invisible strand that connects you to the people you know has snapped and has been dragging in the dirt for some time. The feeling is akin to that when you are talking to someone only to realise they stopped some metres back to tie a shoelace, or to looking down and discovering you are bleeding from an un-felt minor wound. There’s a sense of oh, blimey, how has that happened? I must pay more attention in the future.