All Goodbye Ain’t Gone 2


All goodbye ain’t gone.  Sometimes this is a good thing, a thing you hope for, that the person who is moving out of your sphere/orb/proximity will return, will one day be in close range again.


All goodbye ain’t gone.  Sometimes this is a bad thing, as when a person who you were glad moved out of your life comes back unbidden.  All of a sudden, there they are – again.


Sometimes you don’t see people for years even though you live in the same city.  Intentionally or unintentionally you don’t run into each other. It could be that the circumstances that brought you together changed: you don’t work at the same place any more or one of you to a new neighborhood or someone got married or has a new love.  Maybe one of you has stopped hanging out or your children who were the magnets that brought you together – have grown up, found other friends, moved to new cities…A lot of times your interests changed and so you move on from one another.


Like a bad penny, some folks won’t stay gone.  You’re walking along, minding your own business, decide to run an errand and BAM! you run smack into the former friend, almost colliding as you enter the CVS pharmacy.


“Hello,” you say.  You want to brush pass her but raised to be eternally polite (and not wanting to see nonplussed by the encounter) you speak.  “Oh, hello,” she stammers, equally surprised and nonplussed by seeing you up close and personal.  She starts to say more but you have kept moving.  Her words tap you on your shoulder.  You automatically want to ask about her Mom, her work (does she have a job yet?), her living situation (are her belongings still in storage as they’ve been for most of the years you’ve known her).  But such questions belong to another time, the time when you were friends.  She starts in, “How is your husband?”  She asks this seemingly straight-forward question in a tone-of-voice loaded with meaning.  You raise your hand to stop her.  “Don’t,” you say and proceed to pick up a basket and proceed with your errand.


Mental note to self – don’t go in that CVS again.


You hope that the sighting of this former friend whose name flashed into your mind unbidden a week earlier doesn’t mean that there will be sightings of other former friends and colleagues who’ve come to mind recently.  In your experience – one close encounters means that there’ll be at least a couple more. 


Like I said at the beginning, all goodbye ain’t gone. (Darn-it.)


About Candelaria Silva

Candelaria Silva-Collins is a marketing, community outreach and programming consultant; writer; and trainer/facilitator who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She has designed and facilitated workshops on a wide variety of topics including communication, facilitation, job search skills, team building, and parenting issues. She currently coordinates the Community Membership Program of the Huntington Theatre Company. Her work as Director of ACT Roxbury was profiled in several publications, including The Creative Communities Builders Handbook. Candelaria’s children’s stories, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in local and national publications and she is an active blogger. Her publications include the booklets, Handling Rejection; Pushing through Shyness: Networking Tips when You’re Shy, Slow to Warm Up or Just don’t Feel you Belong; and Real Questions about Sex & Relationships for Teens: A Discussion Guide for Parents. She has served on the boards of Goddard College, Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston Foundation for Architecture, and Discover Roxbury. She is currently Chair, Designators of the Henderson Foundation.

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2 thoughts on “All Goodbye Ain’t Gone

  • Laura

    Good for you that you kept walking and did not invite a conversation in. Now that you know you have the power, you can walk into any CVS and know that you will not be sucked back into something that is not good for you.

    Love the “Don’t.”