There's a little piece of you that drifts away every time you say goodbye. It's the end of a moment in time, and even with the promise of another, the potential of this ongoing line, once traveling with no end in sight, becomes a segment. It's a beginning and an end, waiting to repeat.
Our goodbyes create lines we wanted to be circles, optimistically looping on one return trip after another.
The threat of goodbye is rarely put in context of pure finality. A chance always flickers, no matter how infinitesimally small, that goodbye is just a word you're saying. It's taken shape, but not yet fully formed. Maybe you mean it, maybe you don't. Perhaps it has underlying context, said with great hope or ferocious abandon, the recipient left to mull over its geometric positioning.
But the moment it leaves your mouth, aimed straight at its final delivery in another's ear, the world opens and closes at once. The possibilities that were come to an end, waiting for new direction to move forward. But hope can be a centripetal force, stretching a finished line into a circle, attaching the end points once again.