At some point you stopped watching that show. Not because it got bad — maybe it did, maybe it didn’t — but because you just never got around to the next episode and then too much time passed and starting again felt like a commitment you weren’t ready to make and then one day you realized you’d simply stopped and couldn’t remember exactly when. No finale, no decision, no moment of closure. Just a quiet drift away from something that used to be a reliable part of your week, now filed under things I used to do, which is a category that fills up faster than you’d expect.
The list is longer than most people want to think about. The instrument you played for years that’s now in a closet in a case that needs new latches. The sport, the hobby, the thing you were genuinely good at that you’d tell someone about in the past tense now without quite knowing when it became the past tense. The restaurant you loved that you stopped going to and then it closed and you found out and felt guilty about it as though your absence was the cause, which it wasn’t, but the guilt showed up anyway like it knew something.
What’s strange about these endings is how different they feel from conscious decisions to quit. If you decide to stop something you get a before and an after, a line, a narrative. If you just drift away from it the story has no ending — it just trails off, mid-sentence, and the thing waits there indefinitely in the unresolved state of something that might still be resumed. The guitar isn’t abandoned. You’re just taking a long break. The break is now seven years. You’re still not ready to call it.
I think some things deserve a conscious goodbye. Not ceremonial, not dramatic — just an acknowledgment. You loved this and now you don’t and that’s allowed and the time you spent on it wasn’t wasted just because you moved on. The years with the instrument built something even if you never play again. The seasons with the show meant something even if you’ll never find out how it ended. Things don’t have to be permanent to have mattered. The impermanence was part of the deal and you got something real anyway and you can set it down now.
There’s a drawing I used to do. Just for myself, just in notebooks, nothing serious. Somewhere in my late twenties it stopped. I don’t know the last time I drew anything. I don’t think about it much. But writing this I thought about it, and I thought about who I was when I did it, and I thought: that was a good thing that I had for a while. I’m glad I had it. Goodbye to it, properly, finally, years late. The notebook is probably still somewhere. I don’t need to open it. I just needed to say that.