Goodbyes or Badbyes?
“…no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again”
Recently, I came across a book (Turtles All The Way Down) and the thought expressed by one of the lead characters kept echoing in my head, regardless of how busy the past week was. Perhaps I may have overlooked it, but to repeatedly read it, with the novel ending on the same quote, is hard to forego.
Now that I imagine all the times I may have said goodbye to people, most of them have been to friends and family, the ones I love. It is at a point where the heart feels a sense of loneliness. There is a sense of emptiness that was once complete with the constant company of the ones leaving right in front of you. Some people even have streams of tears rolling down their cheeks, while others opt to resist the urge to join the rest and refrain from allowing the tear glands to work.
As the arms raise, moving to and fro, waving at them, the mind dwells on future possibilities and ideas of crossing paths once again. Why? Because you bid them farewell with the hope that the future is your friend, not your foe. It was a “goodbye” and not a “badbye”.
The concept of badbye really fascinates me. If you can call it the end with your loved ones, why cannot you do the same with the ones you do not like? A badbye to inform the other that regardless of what they may have been through, good or bad, this is the point beyond which you and I are no longer meeting or crossing paths. Even if we do, your mere presence would be similar to any stranger walking down the alley.
The easier thing with the ones we admire is that there is no complexity associated with how your relationship with them progressed. At the end of the day, there is this reassuring feeling that the bond blossomed with happiness, love, care, and other traits that you would associate with positivity. But what about a foe?
The category for extending Badbye cannot be restricted to only enemies. It can include those whom you have simply outgrown. People who went on different paths, and the two lost track of one another. The ones who are taxing your mental peace. Even my elaboration of the term is insufficient as the mind is well-aware of who brings peace and who wreaks havoc.
How would you even decide when’s the time to say Badbye? Here, one is to seek help from the organ pumping blood all around your body. While poets and authors vividly express how the heart reacts to love, most people forget how it also senses danger before the rest. There are intuitions from that organ that allow us to arrive at conclusions. The heart is the first to scream that you no longer find pleasure in the company of someone. The phrase “dil say utar jana” is very real, and once the heart moves away from someone, the process of finding space in someone’s life again is nothing less than climbing a mountain.
The benefits associated with this becoming a norm are innumerable. Faced the complexity where you cannot decide what to do with someone? Are they even friends anymore? Whenever you come across them, are you meant to treat them like a loved one, or have the bad outweighed the good you associated with them? The mind gets trapped in a web of propaganda where you are no longer being yourself but are also refusing to act like meeting a total stranger. Also, you no longer have to pretend to be content with their presence as your Badbye has ensured the others understand that they have lost the stature they once relished.
Here it is also important to clarify that a badbye does not mean that the doors of forgiveness and a potential patch-up are locked away for good. In my opinion, it is never too late to forgive or seek forgiveness. The badbye is a gesture to signal to the other that your boundaries have been tested to the point where you believe your life is better off without their company. The response of the other would only let one determine their importance in the other’s life. If there is a genuine attempt to get over the faults that led to this, there is hope that maybe it is not the end after all?
While the concept of this gesture fascinates me to a point where I would love to see people normalize this, there is ambiguity associated with it that confuses the brain. Have we become total strangers again? No room for becoming what we used to again? Do we even have the guts to signal the end even though we may not have reached the end? Fading away from one’s life does not sound that daunting when you ponder over the alternative presented here.
