Where Does The Unsaid Go?
There’s something so psychedelically vivid about goodbyes, isn’t there?
The unsaid exists in a tangled collective of growing regret in my messy mind. Words and phrases, like a band of disgruntled runners-up, bounce off the walls of my personalised echo chamber. These unspoken sentiments haunt me like the second-place ghosts of Buzz Aldrin, longing bridesmaids, Liberty X and ageing understudies – they didn’t make the cut of our final conversation, but as time goes on, they only seem to be increasing in importance.
Maybe the urgency to expose the unsaid comes, initially, from a place of denial in the spirit of “as long as there are still things to say, it isn’t really over”. Maybe it’s a form of pure narcissism that insists on relentlessly replaying our social performances until they appear better. Or maybe, it’s simply a nod to the lifelong lesson of managing to mentally order the things that we should have said in the moments that really matter.
On that grading system, I’d say I’m currently sitting somewhere between average and absolutely hopeless. How are you doing?
I can feel the unexpressed bulging in a pocket of my brain as I get older and the list of painful ‘end conversations’ grows longer. The faces of ex-boyfriends, lost friends and people that passed linger in my subconscious, ready to hit me like a bus every time a particular place or sound or phrase triggers me right back to the complicated nostalgia of our past goodbye.
There’s something so psychedelically vivid about goodbyes, isn’t there? As you feel the moment approaching, the atmosphere hastily grows heavy and their face, laced with lines of history and regret, becomes the most real yet surreal sight that you’ve ever seen. A face that you’ve set eyes on so many hundreds of times is subverted in a moment to mean something new entirely, and you feel the freedom you once had to endlessly dwell on their imperfect features suddenly slip away.
Isn’t hindsight cruel?
In the realms of the unsaid, a precedent of complete emotional equality is set where even the most eloquent fall short. Although I have never considered myself as eloquent – but more as a neurotic overthinker who holds an inflated sense of importance when it comes to sharing my thoughts – I have made a career out of communication, and still very heavily trip up on the uneven surface of successful separation. I’m not sure what that says about me, or what it says about you for that matter. Most likely answer: we’re all screwed.
If I had it my way, I’d put a cap on my quota of life goodbyes altogether. I’d keep you all alive, well and in perfect utopian connection with me to avoid these messy moments of division that almost always end in dilemmas of “I wish I had said”. But, considering I’m not yet 30, I fear I may be a little optimistic in my attempt to blind side the inevitable deaths, break-ups, and fall-outs that are heading my way...
God loves a trier, though.
The reality is that attempting to summarise a whole relationship cleverly, or concisely, or with true emotional accuracy is impossible. Because whether those conversations happen at the side of a death bed, as an awkward public break-up, or over a clunky exchange of messages, a short sentiment can never suffice. The unsaid is cyclically fickle: yesterday I wish I opened up to you more, today I wish you had apologised and tomorrow I’ll fight with my conscience as it recalls the way I insisted on shutting our future communication down forever.
I suppose there’s a strange, parallel freedom in knowing that you can’t succeed in expressing it all. Acceptance of that failure and mantras of ‘what will be will be’ are what empower us to move on. I don’t believe in fate, I believe in Jesus, and have to believe that a higher power is moving my steps beyond the restrictions of my small-sighted view of living. Maybe you think that’s naive, but to me, I know that those depths of hope and refusal to trust in randomness is the only thing that could possibly keep me.
Somewhere deep down, I knew you’d end up in one of my newsletters. I imagine your pupils flickering over my words as your emotions bounce from eye rolls to sadness and refusal to regret. I promise not to write about you again if you promise to remember me in the ways that fueled our closeness and not in the disillusionment that ended us. A part of me will continue to wonder what your own unspoken scripts say about me, but while the unsaid remains in its insufferable place, know that I miss you — a lot.