Goodbyes

I am not good at goodbyes. Currently, I am seventeen years old and a senior at Prospect High School, located in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I love it here. I’ve got great classes and teachers, loyal friends, and a slew of extracurricular activities that keep me happy and occupied. Prior to the start of this school year, I thought that I knew everything about myself. I love to be happy and spread positivity and friendly vibes onto friends, family members, and even strangers. I enjoy movies (making them and watching them), Cherry Coke, alternative music, “How I Met Your Mother”, and my friends, just to name a few things. I’m a very anxious person, I work at Jersey Mike’s, my mothers a lesbian, parents divorced, and my best friend is named Owen. I could write a big book on my entire life, but I’d rather just tell you the most important aspects (which I just did, above). This paper is not about what I previously knew about myself, but rather what I now know about myself.

As stated in the first sentence, I am not good at goodbyes. To clarify, I emotionally attach to people that I’ve only met hours before. I don’t believe that this is a bad aspect of myself, however it is an essential one. In life, it is a known fact that we are bound to meet people for short periods of time and never see them again. For me, personally, that is a hard, yet unfortunately unavoidable, fact to live with.

The realization of my clinginess was a week ago. For my stepmoms birthday, we went to an “escape the room” type of place in Schaumburg. She’s really into horror movies and intensity, so she looked up this place on Groupon and found a good deal. I was really hyped about it, too, because I had never gone to anything like this before. I thought it was going to be more of a “haunted house” type of activity, but it was far more complex and exciting. The room we had to escape was a bank-heist themed room. We, along with some other people (whom I will discuss shortly) were given a scenario that involved us robbing a bank and having to find our way out through a vault before the police found us. We could only use a handful of clues given to us by the “headmaster” via television screen. Otherwise, we were on our own. No cell phones, pagers, or outside help. It was a ton of fun, as the large group of us practically destroyed the room in search of a way out. We found keys, locks, and different types of nic-nacs that were all intended to lead up to our impending escape. Sadly, we had an hour long time limit and we weren’t able to dodge the cops in time. We were 95% done with our escape before the clock ran out. The headmaster came into our room after we timed out and congratulated us on getting SO close. Then, all of us found out what we had needed to do to finalize our escape, and we headed back to the lobby. Then we took a group picture for the company’s website. And then my family left. The end right? Right. But I wish it was not.

You see, as fun as the game itself was, the reason I wanted to remain in that building was because of the social connections I had just made. My family and I grabbed a late-night snack at T.G.I Fridays after the night’s festivities and I explained to my mom and stepmom that I had a great time with all of those people tonight and I wish I could have gotten to see them longer. To quote myself “saying goodbye to them wasn’t fun”. They both gave me an odd look, like I was crazy. I wouldn’t consider what I was saying crazy, because the way I look at it is like this: we had just spent an hour locked in a room with a gaggle of strangers. These strangers included a young, twenty something-aged couple, a slightly older (I wanna say) biracial couple, and another couple (one of whom was named Bill). I wish I could have learned all of their names. Anyways, I would not consider my wish to have spent more time with them crazy because I felt that we all bonded in the short amount of time that we knew one another. We put all of our minds together in attempt to find a way out of this “bank”. I told my parents that if I was a little older, I would’ve asked everybody afterwards if they would like to go out and get a drink. My mom said that would make me sound a little desperate for friends, but I disagreed. I would have asked that question because I figured ‘hey, we’ve just spent an hour together trying to get out of that room, how about we spend a couple more minutes together and grab a drink’. My stepmom told me that I would look like a creeper if I did that. And then it hit me.

The concept of “letting go” makes me very emotional. In fact, I am holding back tears right now as I write this paper. As stated earlier, I become easily attached. A human flaw of mine, I believe. As we were driving home, my mind pondered upon a whirlwind of things. One being the question of ‘what would I do if I was one of those people in that game and someone asked me to go out for a drink afterwards?’ The fact that we were all strangers may be a bit offputting to some, but considering we had just spent an hour locked up together, I would find no problem in saying “I’m down! Where at?”

An argument could be made that I am only hurting myself by not moving on with my life after briefly meeting new people, but I am choosing to not think about that. What I was thinking about on the car ride home, however, was what ELSE could I be emotionally attaching to. Believe it or not, it is a lot. I hooked up with a girl in Florida this summer. I could have never spoken to her again, but I chose to keep in contact with her. She is as obsessed with me as I am with her, though (thankfully). So I guess you could say I emotionally attached to her. I work at a sandwich place where sometimes I will see kind, generous, favorite customers of mine whom I haven’t seen in awhile and get overly excited because, well, I missed them. My boss tells me to calm down a bit when this happens.

In the first paragraph, I expressed my love for the hit TV show “How I Met Your Mother”. In that show, the main character, Ted Mosby, tells the viewer via flashback that if there is someone in your life that you want to keep around…you do something about it. After I remembered that quote, I realized why I attach to people. Because I want to keep them around. I will be seeing the Florida girl next summer, but if I dropped her after we hooked up, I probably would not be venturing out there come June or July. Unfortunately, some of these people I will not be seeing again. Most likely, the people I escaped the room with will not be in my life again. However, I have a feeling that I am still going to miss them for years to come. Same with some of my customers at work. Whether they remember me or not, I doubt they will not be a big aspect of my life.

It is a fact of life that people will be in and out of my life periodically, and that can be good and bad. Because some people in this world are straight up dicks. Yet others are unexpectedly, unknowingly wonderful. And you never know who is gonna have a big impact on your life. For all YOU know, I may really favor you in my life. If that is the case, and I’ve attached myself to the remembrance of you, than I will surely treasure you forever and (hopefully) stay in contact with and see you again.

I shall leave you with this. Do not be afraid to become attached. Don’t stress yourself about it, just be happy that it happened. Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened. BUT, if it is over and you don’t want it to be-do something about it. Get their number, friend request them on Facebook, find out their name, grab a quick drink, do anything you can to assure that the memories you’ve made with them are not over. Best case scenario, a mere extra minutes with you will be minutes they won’t regret.