The French Have so Many Ways to See You Again

CW: themes of loss and places from the past

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford were engineers, building British road, bridge, tunnel and rail infrastructure that is still in active use today. I used to drive over one of Telford’s bridges every day, back when I lived and worked in the UK.

I thought about it the other day and accidentally ended up looking up the place I used to work on Google Maps. It turns out that, two years after I left the UK for the USA, they merged with other companies in the area and built a state-of-the-art facility on the other side of town.

The original complex I worked in is still standing, eerily time capsuled, exactly as I remembered it. The inexplicably overengineered brown metal safety shutter covering our ground floor office window, which we used to roll up every morning. The green square tubing gate closing off the small parking lot, which always looked like something the metal shop could have made in the early days of the building. Maybe they did, I never got around to asking.

The guy I used to share that ground floor office with passed away from health complications well over a decade ago. I don’t recognize any of the staff or leaders listed on the new company’s website. I’d forgotten how tiny that town was. The same grocery store is in the same location down the hill. The other grocery store, the superstore, is still in the same location further down the hill, right off the freeway.

They built the superstore while I was still living there, a big event for the town, and it weirdly looks newer now than it did back then. After living in America so long, it looks familiar, while the other buildings seem alien to me now. They build with real bricks in the UK, their buildings have underlying structures, and often times they don’t paint them. The smaller grocery store has the same red brick facade because it’s not really a facade, it’s just how the walls were made. But they’ve definitely washed it in the last decade! Or maybe it was a nice day in 2024 when the Google car drove by.

I have a photo in my phone. It’s weird, in my mind I was still running around with my Nokia 8110 until I left the UK. I loved that phone. The consumer equivalent of the phone Neo has in 1999’s The Matrix, with its distinctive slide cover that opened with an engineered snap when you thumbed the invisible aluminum switch. But it’s true, I did jump into the smart phone era with an iPhone 3, and so my iCloud library has some photos from back in the day. A cake with an American flag design that says “Good luck in America” in blue icing. Somewhere around here I have a card signed by all the people I used to work with.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

This morning before work, I watched a mini-documentary on IRC, the origins of that old chat system that some of you may know, and part-way through it I started crying uncontrollably, like deep, cut-me-open grief flooding out unexpectedly. I used to participate in a few channels that, looking back, were probably more well-known than I realized at the time. I used to be an avid PC gamer, kept up with all the news, knew everything about PC hardware, ended up with stealth ops on one of the major gaming news website’s official IRC channel.

Stealth ops meaning I wasn’t an official channel operator, but I could message the bot and it would perform ops on my behalf like setting the channel to voice only mode and voicing/devoicing people and so forth. They trusted me to keep order in their official channel, and I did just because and never told anyone. It just made sense to me, I was always there and had a good head on my shoulders, even if I was a sarcastic bastard sometimes, I always meant well. But that was then and this is now, IRC was a long time ago for me, and the gaming news website - once a Titan of independently-published news media - is no more.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

More recently I participated in some online communities during the height of the pandemic. Many of them fell away as the world began to open up, and the ones that didn’t, I fell away from as I tried again (and this time succeeded, thankfully) to work on my mental health. There is no doubt that I made a few lifelong friends from those communities, even if our lives have taken us in other directions, even if we don’t really speak these days, we’ll always be the people who made a difference in each others lives.

I know they were the catalyst for why I’ve been successful this time around. Why I’ve been able to take a direction with my mental health that continues to have more positive days than not. In at least one of those communities I ended up in a moderator role again. It always seems like my combination of empathy and responsibility places me in elevated positions and I usually end up wanting to accept those roles, not out of any desire for influence, rather because I know I can help, if my brand of help is wanted.

But the thing is, even in the communities that are still active, I’m not, and it’s because my relationship to myself has changed so much this year that I’m not any longer able to be present in those ways. And within that lack of presence I’ve realized that, as much as I gave to them, it was me who had the need to be there. To feel loved by being respected and consulted, to feel like I was giving my time and energy to someone worthy. And I suppose I’ve realized, in my journey with my mental health, that I am someone who is worthy of my time. And so it is that I don’t frequent those communities any more. I left gradually, going dormant when the owners and creators went on their breaks, or just fading out over time.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

It’s been a theme in my life. When I used to attend live shows, I’d stay for the second and third encore. I’d be one of the confused few, blinking in the harsh wash of the house lights coming up after the band had left the stage for the final time. Crushed solo cups and random fliers littering the floor. All the magic drained from the room. No longer a sonic wonderland transporting us all to an ethereal plane. Just a big, empty room, white paint scuffed, acoustic paneling needing a recovering. I would stand there in the silence, pulling out my ear plugs to whatever backing track the PA played. The band’s crew already swarming, disassembling, packing. The band had long left the stage, the music had left the venue, and I’d still be there, usually until my brother found me and dragged me away.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

My brother lives in Spain now. He finally moved from the UK many years ago, sometime after I left for the USA. I text him every now and then but I don’t really know what to say. He always seemed like such an adult to me; he’s about 8 years older than me. But I realized the other day that he’ll always be 22 to me, back when 14 was growing up, and in my teenage brain he was old. I’m 46 now and will never understand how he did the things he did. I do my taxes and I pay my bills, but I don’t feel like I have anything figured out the way he did.

Eight years is a huge age gap when you’re both children, and I know I annoyed the piss out of him all the time. And yet he still tried to build a bridge, even stood up for me when it probably wasn’t smart. But these days I don’t even know how to say hello and I don’t even really know why. There just isn’t a sentence there when I reach for one. My communication with him kind of just faded away.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife passed away a few years ago. I held her hand and told her that we’d all be okay. I like to think some part of her knew what I was saying. We told each other so many times how much we loved the other, we’d talked frankly about death. Neither of us expected it to come so relatively soon to our lives, but we understood each other so well that I still know what she’d say about the decisions I’ve made since she’s been gone. We said a lot of things while she was here.

And the thing is, I never really said goodbye.

I studied French briefly towards the end of high school. Insofar as complaining about counting above sixty and being terrible at the accent can be called studying. I’d lived in Germany and knew I wasn’t taking French as my language elective so I never put any effort into the mandatory class.

But I learned in later years that the French don’t really say goodbye.

Sure, they have lots of words that English speakers would, at the surface level, take to mean that way, but closer examination reveals a common theme:

Almost all of them mean “see you again” – even the one that means “bye” also means hello! They all refer the listener back to the speaker at a later time.

Only the almighty adieu‘s meaning carries a somber finality. And yet, within its literal to God meaning is the sense of “I leave you unto God.”

While final in some ways, if you happen to believe in the Christian God this way, the implication “I leave you unto God so that we may meet in the afterlife if all goes well” is difficult to ignore.

And the thing is, I’ve never really said adieu.

And perhaps that’s okay. Even the English goodbye itself is a contraction of “God be with ye.” Although in any modern English speaking sense it carries a finality with it – even in the lightest sense with someone who you know you’ll see again that expectation is nebulous – it is interesting to realize its kinship with adieu. In some sense we never really say goodbye – even when we do.

And the thing is, maybe I never really needed to say goodbye.

Terry Pratchett will always rub shoulders with William Gibson as my favorite author of all time, and I think it’s only fair that he should have the last word here:

“Goodbye,” Mort said, and was surprised to find a lump in his throat. “It’s such an unpleasant word, isn’t it?”

QUITE SO.

Death grinned because, as has so often been remarked, he didn’t have much option. But possibly he meant it, this time.

I PREFER AU REVOIR, he said.

[I have begun publishing on substack]

 
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