It happened last week ...

The brutal pants of the sea drifted into my ears as that inevitable silence crept into the conversation, like an awkwardly hungry stranger waiting for you to leave your seat in a restaurant. She looked at me fondly for a moment and then encircled her arms around me. “I might never see you again.” That was it. Goodbye. I stiffened instinctively within her warm embrace, like blood congealing within a throbbing bruise. The trailing red tape of Goodbye was gagging me shut with its usual armory - indefatigable silence and an overwhelming blankness. It was the certain consciousness of drowning as your arms flail about, painting desperate survival strokes that tar the canvas of Goodbye. I stuttered, waited for her to complete my incomplete sentences, and to mouth the inanities of Farewell. With a perfunctory wave the embrace broke.

Goodbyes are like earthworms- every time you get done with the decapitation of one parting, a different head emerges almost instantly. Though it doesn’t actually have multiple avatars, this sneaky little earthworm has burrowed so deep into my mind, leaving behind earthen suds of phantasmal fears, the fear of separation being the least monstrous. And its sting seeps in long after the actual moment passes, when you’re bereft of words and tears. It hurts in the most improbable places, at the most improbable moments.
In the raspy creak of a broken-down bicycle. In the casual reminiscence of the everlastingly inexplicable tears of a cold Sunday morning. In the wrinkled disgust of my eyelids when I screw my eyes shut while making my way through the debris of a demolished intimacy (meaning: hesitant glimpses of heated e-mail tantrums, tears, threats, conversations from the past.) Or was it an intimacy that was demolished before it was born? Right now I’m building a second castle on the rubble of the first. Its certain collapse lies in my muted compliance with the uncertain terms of torture that intimacy establishes.

Goodbye, till had been the intermittent glip-glop sound of hesitant water drops making their leap into the communal safety of a bucket from a metallic cliff. Now it seemed like an incessant rush of water from a conked-out tap that I’d to have deal with. A presence that would henceforth be a constant, like a sporadic spook becoming a full-fledged ghost.

The muck- green colored ticket hopped across a multitude of coarse alien palms before landing gently into my pocket. It was just a tiny piece of brittle paper dripping with the dilute ink of economized printing. Goodbyes extract more punishing tolls. The change went into the other pocket with a jingle- it kept clinking throughout the journey- the insistent protests of unshed tears, the frozen tears of Goodbye. I remembered a conversation ...
“Goodbyes seem to be cascading on me in multi-packs, like Grocery items, you get more than you actually bargained for. I don’t know how to handle it. I have very little time to negotiate terms of peace with these transitions. And it takes so long to get rid of that unending plastic packaging. ”
Then i tend to dismiss my maudlin leaps of self-pity with a tact that doesn’t leave me feeling sheepish.
“Listen people will keep entering and leaving your life. People you know will leave college. You’ll leave people you know behind when you graduate. It’s unavoidable.” And after an inspired pause. “Have you traveled on a 29C?”