| The Death of Guy Fawkes
To Whom It May Concern,
There are very few words in the English language that are as painful as "goodbye". It can come at the end of a long and dreadful letter, a letter which may rip out your heart and come burdened with a ring you were certain you would only see again on the warm, slender finger of someone else, instead of clutched tightly in the cold claws of a carrier bird; it can come written across the sky in a confusing turn of events, or scrawled in the fog and frost on a window colloquially, or quickly added to the end of a telephone conversation, or forgotten altogether, which often is the most painful thing of all.
The word in particular has always had a series of connotations wrapped around it like a scratchy and particularly stuffy wool blanket. It can mean anywhere from "until we meet again" to "this will be the last time you ever see me" and anything in-between, and this can lead to a lot of misconstrued plans or confused intentions. Someone might say "goodbye" as they quickly canoe up the fast mountain stream and mean nothing more than meeting you across the bend while you've assumed they're canoeing not only from the dangerous waterfall only a mile away but from your life as well, or they might whisper "goodbye" in your ear as the room around you burns, and you might take this as sinister as it seems at first, only to realize later they were buying you vital time before the joists began to burn through.
It's likely, dear reader, that you have found yourself on the receiving end of a confusing goodbye. It's likely you've found yourself questioning whether or not they actually mean what they'd said as you ride the wobbling, rotting, ancient boat to the ground, stumbling away from the wreckage moments later with less understanding of their word choice than before. You yourself might have said goodbye to someone, meaning it less or more seriously than it sounded or was taken, and stayed at a cafe waiting for a meeting that never came.
No matter the situation, it is always devastating when one is never given the chance to say even a marginally-confusing goodbye. The word is left to hang eternally in the air, unspoken, a constant reminder of every failure that had lead to this moment, and not even writing countless apologies, sending Morse code to dead air, and whispering it to the charred ashes of someone's life can alleviate the suffocating pain.
Regards,
Lemony Snicket |
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