Everything you lose is a step you take. -Taylor Swift, You’re On Your Own Kid
I hate saying goodbye forever.
When I was around seven years old, my family moved houses from Tsim Sha Tsui to North Point. I couldn’t stop crying. I tried to burn a mental picture of my room into my memory: the way the house looks, the layout of things, how it all fit together. Now, so many years later, I barely remember what that house looked like. But I remember the feeling it gave me. I remember growing up inside of it, how I would be as tall as my mother’s hip, then to the doorknob.
Even as a seven-year-old, I understood something that took words a long time to catch up to: that version of the house no longer existed. And the idea of losing my bedroom, losing that particular, unrepeatable place, was painful in a way the new house couldn’t undo. It didn’t matter that the new one was better. The old one was all that was familiar. It was all I had ever known.
The same thing happens with the people I’ve loved romantically.
Friends don’t leave my life in that same way. Some grow apart, sure, but nothing I carry much regret over. People I’ve loved romantically, though… those hurt like moving houses. After a first date with my now ex-boyfriend, I wrote this in my notes: “You know when you first meet someone and you vaguely recall their face, but not fully, yet you remember the feeling they gave you.” That feeling is what I find myself nostalgic for. I also remember the misty air in the parking lot, and how Can’t Help Falling In Love was playing in the background. BARF, disgusting.
There’s something almost cruel about it… the heart holds on longer than the mind does. It is both merciful and torturous, the way the memory freezes and reeks of sadness, even though the very reason why you remembered was because you loved those moments in the first place. Reverse Midas gold.
That’s why I grieve so hard. It’s not only that I lose the person. I lose the feeling that the person gave me, and no other person, no better apartment, can give it back, because it was never really about them alone. It was about who I was inside that feeling.
And I hate admitting defeat to impermanence. There is something in me that resists it, the fact that I lost the house, and the house lost me. The fact that I might never see this person again, and they will never see me again. That mutual erasure. The loss isn’t just mine to carry; it goes both ways, and somehow that makes it lonelier. The house didn’t grieve back, she signs herself up to the lady my mom sold the house to. She doesn’t care. Neither does he. Why do I care?
I ache, I meditate, I ponder. Maybe I am making things deeper than they need to be. But these artifacts of impermanence keep stacking, more and more, the older I get. The bedroom. The song I can never unhear when I was crying after blocking my ex-situation at 7am. The parking lot. The misty air. And I wonder sometimes if the accumulation is the point… if loss is just the price of having been specific. Of having loved particular things, in particular ways, at particular ages.
Perhaps it has never been about the house. Or the man. Every goodbye is also a goodbye to a version of myself… the girl as tall as her mother’s hip, the woman writing in her notes after a first date. I have left so many versions of myself behind in rooms I can no longer enter. And maybe that is not defeat. Maybe that is just what growing is: a long series of doors closing behind you, each one sealing in someone you used to be. And if you let those memories marinate, you can look back some day with less pain and more gratitude for how far you’ve come.
So I let the nostalgia ache. It is proof that those versions of me were real. That they mattered. That I loved that house, or that man. That something was lost because something was there. I am making it as deep as I want it to be.