Jonny Sun - Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

For my parents, who I have said goodbye to

more than anyone else, which I suppose is

in itself its own kind of blessing.

2018 was supposed to be the year where I actively got more rest. I had felt burned out from the relentlessness of the world, and from my attempts to retreat into productivenessto spend all my time focused on something that I knew would bring me stress but in exchange would give me some semblance or illusion of controlin the hopes that I could find some solace in the distractions of always having something I should be working on. All of that led to even deeper burnouts, which led to deeper depressive episodes, which ultimately led to a bargain I made with myself that said I needed to start taking better care of myself if I were to continue to survive. And so 2018 was supposed to be the year where I actively did that. And for a while, I was doing well. I was learning to take breaks and to get restnot the type of rest that actually just builds more pressure because you feel like you are putting off something you should be doing, but actual, true, healing rest.

Then, between quiet moments, I started squirreling away thoughts that I made sure to write down so I wouldnt forget them, collecting ideas and little drawings, hoarding them.

I set out trying to be less trapped by the pressure to be constantly productive, and as soon as I started finding those moments where I allowed myself to stop working or thinking about working for a second, to find ways to relax, to recover, to let my mind meander for the sake of it, I decided that I needed to write about them, that I had to document them and collect them or else I would forget them and lose them. Otherwise, I told myself, all this break-taking, this intentionally unproductive time, would not be worth it.

Somewhere, that desire to have some sort of proof that I was taking time off turned into the idea that this needed to be a project, that my time spent not being productive had to have a product in order to be worth doing.

This morphed into the thought that I couldnt let this writing just be for myself. There was this constant voice in my head telling me that my own rest and recovery and catharsis were not valuable to anybody (or perhaps more honestly, I thought they were not valuable to myself) unless I could have something to show for it, unless I could share it. Otherwise, I was just being selfish for taking a break, for trying to heal or grow in private. That pressurethat I needed something to show for my timetied to how deeply engrained I am in our culture of constant work and demand and production and optimizationfelt inescapable. I feltand still feeltrapped inside of it.

So, instead of taking a break where I could find a little bit of rest, I looked forward to break time because it let me work on something else.

From this break-taking, these essays came. A year of trying to take a break became two years, then three years, of writing and putting these pieces together and working on this book. And over those three years, working on this book kept me some consistent sort of company as I navigated some destabilizing goodbyes, of moving out of different rooms and different apartments and leaving different cities, and then some destabilizing hellos, of trying to find ways to live in the new places I landed in.

Writing through all of this allowed me some stable way to focus on some feelings, to figure out some of my unspoken habits, and to articulate some things that were important to me. So now, I can hold these things in my hand and I can refer to them in the future, a collection of Things I Figured Out or Things I Care About. And that feels like growth, or progress. Or maybe Im just trying to justify that I find more comfort in work than in rest. Maybe its a little bit of both.

These essays are short as an acknowledgment that we are all burned out and dont have enough time as it is, so I am just stealing a moment or two from you, whenever I am able to, in the same way I have been stealing moments awaystealing little breaks and stealing from little breaksto write this. I dont want to burden you or ask for much, and I hope you can visit these as you steal moments away for yourself whenever you can, and I hope they offer something to you, and I hope thats enough, and I hope thats all right.

Every time I move, my guitar is the last thing I pack. After I move out all the boxes, all the moving supplies, all the furniture, I set aside about thirty minutes to play some songs in my home, or what was my home for so long, now empty. I allow my voice to fill up all its rooms for the last time, in the exact way I choose it to, in the exact way Id like my voice to be remembered here, and the exact way Id like to remember it here, too. After so many moves, Ive learned that this is how I enjoy saying goodbye to a room the most.

This time, I am in my now-empty basement-level (sorry, Garden-Levelas the listing so persuasively described it) apartment.

A couple nights ago, I moved my bed to disassemble its frame and in doing so, I revealed a corner that I had never really looked at before. There was a power outlet there, right behind my head, that I never knew existed. I must have overlooked it when I put my bed in this spot when I first moved inor maybe, more realistically, I had noticed it when I got here but then forgot about it in the general chaos of trying to fill the empty space.

Knowing this power outlet existed right by my head where I slept would have been helpful. Id been charging my phone from a power outlet by the doorway, far enough away from my bed that if I were already in bed and on my phone at night, I would have to get out of bed and walk over to the power outlet to plug in my phone, and then get back into bed, but now without my phone. And this led to a lot of late nights staying awake on my phone because I didnt want to get out of bed to plug in my phone, but I also didnt want to go to sleep without charging it, and so I just did what any sensible person would do, what felt like the compromise, which was to stay on my phone in bed until my phone died, at which point I would get out of bed to charge it because I could no longer be on it. I wanted to get a longer charging cord or an extension cable, but I had never gotten around to it in the two years I had lived here.

In this one move of revealing a power outlet that would have saved me so many hours of lost sleep, suddenly this place was strange again, just as strange to me as the first time I saw it, empty and new, when I moved in. I thought by living here, I knew everything about this space. I leave it wishing Id paid more attention to it.

I spent my last night and my first night here sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes. A bed frame was constructed then deconstructed in the time in between. Living in a place feels like its bookended by parallel experiences. You move into an empty space feeling uncertain about it, and slowly, you let the space hold onto that uncertainty so you dont have to. And when you leave, you leave it again as an empty space, taking back the uncertainty that you were storing in it. It ends with an empty room, the same way as it began, although youve changed in all the time in between. (In my case, the biggest tangible change seemed to be that in my last night here, I plugged my phone into this newly discovered power outlet for the very first time, and I got a slightly better night of sleep than Ive had in perhaps the last two years.)

Now, in the morning after, in the last morning that I live here, after I have moved out the mattress and all the boxes and the phone charger, now that all of my belongings and my uncertainties no longer have this place to call their home, it feels like theres nowhere left for dust to hide. Theres nothing left to hide the cracks along the walls, the spots of chipped paint that cover up some quick repair work that dont quite exactly match the original color of the room, the gaps where the floor pulls down and away from the baseboard to reveal where the air and the bugs can get in. Theres nothing to hide that the light outside doesnt