I was watching one of those early nineties situation comedies where life takes place in thirty minutes at my kitchen table and tears started to roll silently down my flushed cheeks. Inside the little glass box, a family was sending one of its brothers across the country to live and each one was saying his good-bye. "This is cheesy," I thought as I really began to cry "And you’re practically sobbing?" Thousands upon thousands of times I’d uttered a form of those words "Bye," "I love you, mom, see you later," "Bye Dad, home late" . . . and it was easy. It was easy because I knew that good-bye was only really farewell, a formality until a few hours later when I would see those people again. But sitting there eating Cap’n Crunch and watching virtual family bid their poorly acted good-byes, I thought of all the good-byes I’d ever had to . . . been forced to say, and all those I’d never been able to. It’s harder than nails remembering those, but it’s not scary, because they’re finished, over.

The good-byes that scare me the most right now, I can’t talk about. Those good-byes might talk about you, whoever’s reading this, and there’s a rule, article VII of the constitution or something, that says you can’t tell people how much you’ll miss them when you’re supposed to be taking them for granted. I don’t know who wrote it, but nearly everyone I’ve ever met obeys it -- and, well, the people who didn’t, everybody punished them for breaking the rule by looking at them strangely and calling them gushy and sentimental. I’m not the law or anything, and I kind of liked those ‘gushy’ people, but most of the time everything’s easier if you just follow the rule.

Anyway, since I can’t talk about what does matter, I’ll try to explain to you why I was crying by telling you about what doesn’t matter much now, but did matter once, just so that you don’t think I’m crazy. Not very long ago, one of my friends left to be away from here for a very long time. And it matters who it was, but that’s another rule: you can’t tell other people who matters to you the most unless it’s required, like your mom or dad or something. I knew someone who broke that rule once, and when the other person quit caring about them, everyone called him/her pathetic. I didn’t know what pathetic meant, I just thought they were nice to keep loving the other person even after the other person stopped.

But back to my story. He/she, left, and it was the sort of good-bye where nothing will be the same whenever you may be able to say hello again. Since you don’t know who he/she is, and I don’t know about any rules saying I can’t, I guess I can tell you how much it hurt. . . I felt like I was going to throw up and all I could think about was how different everything would be the moment he/she left. I was trying so hard not to cry that I could barely breathe and it made my throat hurt as if something sharp were stuck inside. All of my energy was focused upon my stiff forced smile and if I would have blinked, my knees would have given and I would have fallen to the floor. All I wanted was for the pain to go away and for the moment to be over, but I couldn’t let it end because it would mean just that, the end. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt, emotionally of course, but actually physically hurt.

It would have been easier if I would have frowned and cried, but that’s another rule: you can’t cry a lot when somebody’s leaving if they’re not crying, too. That doesn’t make any sense to me, because if nobody cries first then nobody gets to cry, but somebody told me once that it made the person who was crying seem ‘pathetic,’ and I believed them, because somebody told me "better to be safe than sorry." Still, it would have been easier if I had at least frowned.

Anyway. Finally, or all of the sudden, whichever point of view you want to take, he/she left. As soon as he/she couldn’t see me anymore, I turned around and cried, and maybe he/she did, too, (probably not, but maybe) but since we weren’t supposed to, neither of us let each other know we had cried. So that’s why I started crying. I was watching these people on television say good-bye, and they followed all of the rules, just like I did. And even though I knew the rules, they still looked like idiotic cowards, and so had I. I let this person who was someone special to me go on thinking that he/she was only him/her. And I still felt pathetic.