the long farewell

There are many types of goodbyes, from the casual to the serious and professional. The waving goodbye to our daughter and her children as she drives away is best not to drawn out. Almost as soon as they drive past towards the west, we become self-conscious as we stand on the pavement watching them leave. We become virtual just as they become virtual on leaving us, how idiotic we look posing for a photograph that nobody will ever take, which will never be uploaded anywhere… Sometimes it is friends who leave us standing by the road, or on the railway station platform, waving across the tracks as they board the southbound train. At other times we accompany a friend who is flying back to Australia for the last time, unaware as we drink poor quality coffee on the concourse, that this is the last time we will ever see one another. Would we have spoken differently, perhaps hugged each other farewell ? Finally they go through the gates, following their luggage, including a suitcase of books they bought in London. As we say goodbye, laughing, waving, as we are no longer with them. They vanish into the terminal and we go back to our car and drive away talking about them, “perhaps we should visit them in Australia?” knowing that we can never do this.. He will wander the inner concourse, in the secure zone, looking at clothes, books, electronic gadgets, perhaps they will buy some noise cancelling headphones, black eyeshades… He will be carried away by complex technologies, assemblages that are lovely and yet always oppressive, the pressure of the consumptive assemblages always leads to irrationality — For him, living like this it is still clear that secret agents become revolutionaries, and that revolutionaries become secret agents. How did this anarchist become a man of the state? Eventually we will hear of him dying in a small town on the coast, his body has already been reduced to ashes. He never made it to the steppe which begins with innocent plains, with the purity of plains, the fertility , the immensity of plains. There was no time for farewell, just the memory of uncompleted promise to meet next time he was in London. I was seized with a sudden panic (and this showed foresight: what I dreaded was precisely this sort of madness, this darkening of consciousness) when i heard of his death. The incoherent wave, the gestures with which we part, the leave-taking from this place of safety sometimes, attacks the virtual future, and causes our many farewells to become a possible moment documented in the 1000 word anti-novel that you are writing..