Shawn

“Maybe what I have—maybe a few texts a week, seeing someone once a year—maybe that's it. Maybe that's friendship enough.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“I held on to a belief that if even one of these leaves started growing roots, this would not be a complete tragedy. Over the next week, though, every single leaf dried out. Instead of just collapsing and dying the one time, my plant created thirty little pieces out of itself and divided its death into thirty little funerals.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“The selfish part of all this is that I want to be important—I want to be so important that the world here falls apart, stops functioning, after I step out of it. And of course this doesn’t happen. But there’s a part of me that tells myself that if I were important, if I were truly important, my leaving would have had an impact. It would have done something. There would have been a hole that I left behind that people would notice. Instead, everything just keeps going on without me. And it feels like the lesson is, you don’t matter.
But of course any act of leaving creates that hole. Every act of moving is also an act of removing, leaving an empty space where what moved is no longer there. It’s just, the problem with leaving is that you’re never able to stick around to see what you’ve left behind.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“And I will leave them the same way they leave their home every day, this being the last feeling of closeness I feel to them for a little while, because in visiting them, there was a deadline to this specific closeness—there were only a finite number of days I could see them in person—whereas after I leave, we might not speak to each other for months, sometimes even years, knowing that we are always one message away from each other but the ease of that closeness means we can talk at any time, and so there is no specific urgency to do so, and so we put it off, and we put it off, and we put it off.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations