The Way We Say Goodbye

Saying goodbye is mourning a chance encounter of bodies and voices dispersed back into Brownian motion. As creatures built to long for what we do not have, we mourn by making. Poetry is how we sculpt meaning from chance through careful arrangements of words spoken and unspoken, memories heavy and light. We let them bind through their own gravitational pull, until they settle into a poem: a restored encounter, a vase we catch after throwing shards of glass into the air.

The way we say goodbye
is by weaving sunsets, cold air, a droplet
of rainbow draped across the city into a jacket
for rainy days, and we put it on.
We climb a mountain of words 
and chase a deer through the woods’ silent folds 
of fear. Breathe, we say, it’s not a dawning storm that you hear
but a long winter’s torpor now awakening to spring. 
Her ears perk up, trembling, to catch a sky’s liquid kiss.
This will pass, too, but we can plant memories 
by ripping them apart with eyes blindfolded,
and listen, with our feet. 
We walk past the same trail but the soil trod
with soles unaware seeps into us too, the earth’s scar,
you once held it as it now holds you.
Each moment is the furthest when it’s 
happening, music from next door through
a wall of perception, of persistent distortion
of eyes that stare too hard at something too delicate.
Here, here, and here. We’re home now.
The way we say goodbye
is by sculpting questions from ice and watching
as they melt into a puddle of ellipsis. Where I come from
we do this every year, the art of enduring, frozen steel
theaters that stopped churning out steel-heavy laughter
as long ago as I’m faraway from childhood to light up
a firecracker in the snow again. So answer me, now.  
Answer me with vapors in this winter sun
at a winter lake not yet frozen into nonchalance. 
Answer me with that dot from my own question mark
and put it up on top of your Christmas tree, a little hedgehog
that can pass as a star with its spikes fuming and glowing
and growing longer through the waiting. I’m here. 
I’m still here, adrift through the stars as the night
trickles by like a stubborn jobless drunkard’s song,
lyrics lost. Thank you. Time for curtain call. 
But the way we say goodbye is also by catching
a leaf that could have murdered us with its lightness.
Something written on its back, Morse memento,
a secret answer to which no one knew the question anymore. 
So we leave that distance out. The path from me to you
is a revolving door. Be careful. A little pinch, my left arm’s
caught in its carnal physics so I had to breathe, hard. In, and out
comes someone whose face I’ve seen before. 
I knew this place. I knew that smile. I knew that sweet brutality oblivious as
a clock, ticking. Fondling time. Still, I walk in. Because if all that a door does 
is to bear us into the past, we can still remember everything backwards,
back to where we began. We knew nothing then of the 
nights that would taste metallic and days that would sing,
of temple bells, cookies, hands that would find the knots we carry
and rub them open. And we’ll wake up to a tapestry of November sunlight 
etched into our eyes and decide to ride that cable car alone again. 
That’s all there is to a goodbye, that’s not a goodbye. 
All we have is this: a scampering honesty. 

Xinning is a writer born and raised between China and Singapore. She believes in the power of looking with sober care. Her work aims to scratch past the onslaught of everyday sensory phenomena to reveal, for lack of a better word, truth, with a very small “t.” She runs a column for the Singapore-based newspaper Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报), and is the winner of Seoul Player’s’ 2025 10-minute Play Festival for directing. Her first play, A Play Named Zhuangzi, was produced by Vermillion Theater in December 2024. A staged reading of her new play, My Dear Beloved, will be held at Crescent Theater in April 2026.