Better By Nightfall

There's a thick signature-saturated book on my shelf that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I carried with me to college last year and still have in my close possession. It details pieces of my past in segments divided by numbers, themes, and pictures with clever descriptions of times so separated from now that I don't even recognize their depth. A name to face, a description to a situation. What value does this book hold in the long run? Is its purpose to remind us of "the good ol' days" that have long since past or the memories that we long to forget.

I look at these signatures of fabricated friendship and falsified warmth and concern and wonder why all of this mattered? Was there even a point to half of these friendships, these relationships of worthlessness? There wasn't. They served their purpose during the time they were needed and then they faded. They met some sort of divide from this side or that side and it was over. Almost meaninglessly so.

It's a point of emptiness I'd like to address. A point that I've tried to let reject, but have learned to embrace instead. It's a point on a power rooted in choice. It is voiced and voiceless. Powerful, nonetheless.

Goodbye.

A common closing becoming a permanent bidding to the end. The only word that flashes feverishly in my head when I see this book, sort through the pages, and close it again--wishing it were the last time. But it won't be. The emotions fused in the pages still bleed fully, wholly unto me whenever I see them.

But this time, I realize, it's time to let all of that go. Not to start a new, not to renew forgeries now forgotten.

No.

Rather, time to say goodbye to the past instead of holding onto it as a goodbye. To remember the past in terms of what was and not the connotations attached to it. To grow up, move on, and live in the now.

The fragments will fade and the core, remain. Shifting to something, even the slightest, positive away from the pain.

Letting these pages bleed dry and giving this one last goodbye.