The Final Goodbye

On Farewells, Lovers, and Insomnia

I am constantly looking for a way to end things on a perfect note. I am always hoping that I will say the perfect thing, he will respond, and we can both leave feeling coddled in a mutual sentimentality. That he will tell me that he loves me and that the beauty we shared was tangible, and although muddled in so much pain, abuse, and bloodshed, we are still an organism forever intertwined. That some part of him exists within the fabric of my DNA. That he will acknowledge the fact, I will feel the throb of all his future aches. That even from across an ocean, I will be able to place a cold rag on top our foreheads, and relief will melt over our shared skin.

Endings have always felt to me like a power struggle, one in which the winner (a descriptor wrongfully prescribed from a young age) comes out with an extra inch of satisfaction, even though they will never be touched by the other again. The great gripe for a grain of finality. To seek validation of the gravity a love once held is a cannibalizing, poisonous pursuit. It is sucking on a straw buried in the desert’s soil hoping to quench a thirst, that a reservoir couldn’t even pick at. I recognise how foolish it is to expect true and warm sentimentality from a man who blindly made me bleed. But why can’t I escape the feeling that I am owed some final symbolic embrace?

I am trying to divorce myself from this fantasy, partly because it is an ever-changing specimen. At times, I am overwhelmed with the embarrassment of simply craving a final kind word. I shudder remembering how I called him beautiful in my last unanswered message. Today, however, I want to list every way in which he made my body feel like something other than my own, to remind him that his actions mean I barely recognise my own shape in the mirror. I want him to beg on his knees like a dog for my forgiveness, to lick at my feet as he makes his amends, for him to promise he will never hurt another woman again. But achingly and shamefully, on that final day, I just wanted him to call me beautiful, too. I just wanted him to be the last one to say goodbye.

There is a strange eroticism to knowing you will never see someone again, that you will never hear about their day, that they will never get to hold your face in their palms. The end of such blistering intimacy is an inconceivable unfixed point that wraps itself around every memory, ones of the past and, nauseatingly so, the ones you are yet to make. It is a never-ending longing to take back every ugly word exchanged, for my body now a foreign thing to be returned, for him to gift me pleasant dreams, a long, sweet sleep. There’s a distinct, embarrassing pang that comes with seeking a final loving affirmation from someone whom I should see as a monster. How naive it is to search for a sign that this was all for something, that it was bigger than just the two of us.

The perfect ending is nothing but a mirage, an understanding never to be reached. What difference would it make anyway? After all you can’t un-rape a bitch am I right? You can’t cradle her every night until she starts to feel whole again after you were the one who picked her apart; the best you can do is turn her into a learning curb, a regretful mistake, a sign you must become a better man. All you can do is keep your toes crossed that she doesn’t lose sight of the man she loved amongst this fading fucked up tableau. And we both know it, right, the awkward silence I will soon become amongst mutual friends. I am soon bound to become something inhuman, something left behind, hopefully, I transform into a sort of turning point; perhaps I will be one of many rock bottoms. But for now, I’ll just be here waiting, waiting for the final goodbye.