The Ghost Goodbye

Don't you hold on too tight
Both of you know
It's your time to grow
To fall apart, to reunite
- Dos Oruguitas, Lin-Manuel Miranda

You’ve always thought it unfair that people paint the teenage years out to be such a terrible time. So far, at least, it hasn’t been the horror show people make it out to be, not at all. But it is hard. What’s hard is the letting go, starting to let go of this person that up until now you have cared for so closely and so completely. You can see it all rushing in on you—when she’ll start to make big life choices on their own, when she’ll find some other person or place more of a home than you—you see it all coming, and you know the change is normal. You know the individuation has to happen. You may even know the new part you’ll play in it. 

But you’re not okay, because you’re losing this soft and open and close little person you’ve had for the last decade. And it’s not happening kindly, but in little stings and barbs, little unconscious rejections that don’t hurt the less for all that you know it’s necessary. And no one’s acknowledging it. It’s all supposed to be okay, when really you feel like you didn’t get to say goodbye to something you’re not sure but you think you might be losing. You didn’t get to say goodbye to that younger girl, the one who would have wanted to say goodbye and give you a hug, and maybe you can’t anyway except in retrospect.

She’ll come back. She’ll return with openness and affection. But if all goes right, she’ll come back a different person. Her own person. That other younger girl will be gone, but there will be this somewhat different person who will be really cool to meet. And even now, there are glimpses of this person, and that’s really cool, seeing hints of the kind of person you’d want to get to know even if you weren’t related to her. Someday, you think, it will all be worth it to see this new person.

You know there will be many comings-and-goings like this. Many departures and returns. Many times, in big and little ways, when you feel the prickle-and-sting, the sudden sadness, when you bid your retrospective farewells. When you wait and give space and watch for the return. But you know it will be in her own time, and may be just as unexpected as the going was, and you must not hold on to any of it too tightly.

So for now, it feels like you are left mainly with this consciousness that the person you miss is already gone. You wish maybe you could have given her soft, squishy self one last hard hug. You wish maybe she could ask you to play something really silly and unproductive one last time. You wish you could feel her reaching out for your hand as you walk down the street. Somehow, she left without you knowing. You are looking for a ghost. You feel like this goodbye is one you have to whisper to yourself somewhere deep inside, in the place nobody but you understands. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.