Hard to Say Goodbye

There are moments that often make you wonder, am I taking life for granted? I think I live with an expectation of tomorrow, there are many times in my day not only do I push activity to tomorrow but plan for the next day. Isn’t the harsh reality though, that we aren’t promised a tomorrow?

I went to a large high school, my graduating class consisting of 1000 kids, so I feel I knew a lot of people growing up from class, activities, and friends of friends. Since I moved to the States keeping in touch with everyone hasn’t been easy. However, I live with the expectation that one day we will reconnect.

As the years go by the amount I can stay in touch with dwindles, often feeling like people slipping through the cracks. It’s hard to keep in touch across countries, cities, and time zones with both friends and family. But I always mollify myself with the belief there’s a tomorrow I can re-kindle the friendship. There’s a tomorrow when we might be in the same timezone, we might be in the same industry, or have a similar hobby which will make the conversations flow easily.

There’s always a tomorrow I hold onto but what happens when there is no longer a tomorrow? What happens when you’re not gifted the chocolate bar you were promised almost a decade ago and now it’ll never be received? How does one reconcile with the fact the person you spent hot summer days golfing with, you’ll never see again? How you’ll never tell your friend the pull-ups he spent years trying to teach you, you finally mastered? Or you’ll never be able to thank your cousin who on a dark day promised you the days sadness would be forgotten and now that it is, you can’t thank them?

Sometimes at the moment, you don’t have words to thank someone but years later when you find the words they might not be there to hear them. Having lost friends and family who were at the peak of their youth and you thought you had years more of running into them, throws you for a spin. It’s hard to reconcile if you’ll never see them again.

But I’m very confused about living in the present moment. Would they have been going through the motions of life as always or would they have changed their actions? However, finding a balance between “there’s no tomorrow promised” and “tomorrow might just come so be prepared” is perhaps one of those great mysteries life throws at us.