“Plan an appropriate time to talk before the departure,” recommends one web page entitled “How to Say Goodbye.” The cartoons that accompany it are as stilted and formulaic as each piece of advice. “Talk about all the good times you’ve had,” it urges. “When it’s time to leave, make it brief and sincere.” Implicit in its offerings: To say goodbye can be painful or terrifying. Absence, even necessary absence, can create guilt, and yet, it’s also essential in order to experience the world. “That’s why I went,” says one character in Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour: “To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.”

A wave, a bow, a block on the phone. There are different ways of saying goodbye. Some are necessarily worse than others: a lover’s farewell, a lover’s death. Then there are the mundane varieties: goodbye to co-workers, classmates, cities and apartments. You cannot move forward without saying goodbye. Pop culture says so, high culture says so. It’s Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow,” it’s Joan Didion’s “goodbye to all that.”

When is a goodbye simply a goodbye? And when is it anything but—the smallest, the largest, the most literal, the most metaphoric, of deaths? In a 2019 article on the phenomenon of ghosting—that is, ending a relationship without saying goodbye—a psychologist told The New York Times that ghosting has “a lot to do with someone’s comfort level and how they deal with their emotions… you don’t have a lot of accountability if you ghost someone.” Our discomfort with confrontation is changing even how we say goodbye. In 2016, Japan Today reported that 80 percent of 20- to 30-year-olds now refrained from using the word “sayonara,” preferring sign-offs that felt less final. “Saying ‘sayonara’ makes it seem like we won’t meet again,” explained one interviewee.

But is it really common sense to believe in the finality of an ending? Time makes fools of us all, eventually. And anyone who believes in the veracity of a farewell might be the biggest fool of all. Ex-friends and enemies will always pop up years later—at a party, on the train, in the anecdotes of someone new.

Even the most final goodbyes don’t stick now—not with the internet around. “All My Exes Live in Texts” proclaimed a viral headline from a women’s magazine some years ago, and it’s true: Everyone from former lovers to departed pets is easily accessible, their photos and sometimes their words merely a keystroke away. The linear timeline has transformed into the formless online cloud. Perhaps this is why we continue to maintain digital connections with people from our past, however tenuous. We’ve always been uncomfortable with goodbyes, and now we can easily avoid them. No longer is dodging an adieu the coward’s way out; today we can pretend the connection will remain—even though we know we’re lying. “I am wedged between two tenses,” writes Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, from the perspective of the lover who is waiting, the lover who has been told goodbye. “You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I’m addressing you).”

A goodbye is capricious: hasty you, foolhardy you, so certain that this is the end. Wait long enough, and all your goodbyes will come back to haunt you.