We Don’t Say Goodbye Anymore

Has this generation lost its willpower to feel? To be empathetic? To be human? To actually care about others?

We don’t say goodbye anymore. We just stop responding to their messages or answering their calls. We ghost them. Probably stop thinking about what they are up to, how their day was or even if they are happy, we continue living the life we were living before them. With no inclination of guilt or shame.

We pretend like we don’t know them, like they don’t exist and were never a part of our story albeit spending some of our best moments with them. We act like strangers, we act like we didn’t hurt them and we underestimate their pain. We’re too self-absorbed to consider their feelings so we don’t even say a kind word, we don’t even give a warm hug when we see them and we don’t even ask to make sure they’re okay.

We become distant, almost invisible, so they don’t even try to reach us, so they don’t try to ask for closure or ask for anything. We see them and walk the other way so we don’t even meet their eyes and see the way they look at us. We don’t want to remember that we’re the reason behind their pain.

We make these decisions selfishly because that’s all we know. We say goodbye because it’s complicated, because we are too lazy to try make it work, too lazy to fight for something real, something that would have stood the test of time to last for a lifetime. Too scared to step out of our comfort zones and follow our heart’s desires. We are cowards and so we just drop people like tennis balls, replacing them easily with other people/things as long as we keep playing.

We say goodbye and we don’t expect anyone to get hurt because we didn’t promise anything, we don’t owe them anything or at least that’s what we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that we didn’t see it coming, that we didn’t make them fall for us and then decided not to catch them.

We don’t say goodbye anymore. We don’t explain. We don’t try to make sure the other person is okay. We just take off. We date the next person, we book the plane ticket, we leave the country and we make decisions without recognizing that someone was waiting for us, someone wanted to be part of our lives, someone wanted to plan their future around us.

So we leave and we don’t even look back and we don’t even try to come back. We leave because leaving is cooler, leaving is stronger, leaving makes us the ones in control, so we keep leaving instead of staying and wonder why we end up alone or in unfulfilling relationships.

We don’t say goodbye anymore, we say leave me alone. I don’t want you. You’re not worth my time. I’m not sorry for breaking your heart because it was never even mine.