Saying Goodbye as Slowly as Possible and an Unusual Peter Pan Complex...

I am not good at goodbyes.

To evidence this you need only look at the fact that I am marrying a fleeting holiday romance. Wherever possible, I don't say goodbye. I wrote letters to my primary school teachers, my college (not the same as uni, remember) English Lit. lecturer, my University tutor, for years - until either they stopped responding or I no longer felt the need (I'm pretty sure it's exclusively the former). I find backpacking troubling because of the intense friendships that spark up within hours and are forgotten within days. Until fairly recently I've maintained regular contact with pretty much every ex boyfriend (going back to about age 14), which has resulted in the odd botheration (not on Jeremy's part mind you, that boy only gets worried when I tell him to - which my reflexive habit of total, and occasionally highly inconvenient, honesty guarantees I'll tell him everything).

I think this drive to maintain contact with basically everyone that's ever liked me / thought I wasn't completely stupid, is entirely based on an existential, egotistical need (*insert any other philosophical jargon that happens to fit) to be remembered, to not be instantaneously forgettable.

Because I've always felt entirely forgettable. From the age of 9 I was obsessed with horses (this isn't a total tangent, I promise) - I used to have lessons once a week and go to the stables every Saturday basically to shovel horse-shit for 7 hours in exchange for being around the animals all day and getting a free ride. When I was 11 I spent a summer away from the stables and had my hair cut really short (for those of you who know my hair, that sounds pretty dumb right? It was - I looked like a mushroom). I never went back to the stables because I couldn't face the idea they wouldn't recognise me. I lost the one form of exercise I've ever enjoyed because of feeling forgettable - I can feel the recrimination tingling in my un-toned thighs.

So you know where this is going...

I'm now faced with the biggest set of goodbyes I've ever had to face. I'm no longer quite as ridiculous as I was aged 11 - I'm fairly confident the majority of people would recognise me with or without hair. But it still means that my friends will fill the space currently occupied by me. Just like ex-boyfriends inconsiderately go and get new girlfriends, when they are supposed to spend their lives lamenting my absence. I already feel jealous at the idea I wont be missed each and every day.

And what about when I come back? I can just imagine a Peter-Pan scenario, sat outside in the cold at the closed window looking in on all my friends with their new friends in the lighted warm. Friends, if you're reading this, this is absolutely a cue for you to write and tell me I'm irreplaceable and you will always keep windows open.

But seriously (I was only being slightly serious with the peter pan thing - and if I got to fly and have a fairy follow me around I think that'd almost make up for the closed window). I'm fully aware of how self-centred and self-important this sounds, but I do find it difficult to know that life goes on without me.

(I'm mostly just scared I'll miss them more than they'll miss me.)

So my goodbyes are being as long and drawn out as a plaster (band-aid) being pulled off wincingly slowly. There's my work leaving do (followed by 2 weeks at work), my team leaving brunch (primarily an excuse not to do anything on my last morning), hen-do (bachelorette party - wont have time to do one in August, although I might have enough American friends by then to have a state-side one too...), leaving London party...Each time filtering out a few people and distilling it down to the special few who it's really going to hurt to say goodbye to. Helen and Sian think they're turning up at the airport with flags... they may change their minds if my flight is at 7am.

There's nothing much do be done really. I need to get over my Peter Pan complex (entirely different to the usual want-to-stay-young one). But I also need to quit the denial. The long drawn out goodbyes, while an excuse for multiple parties and opportunities to be the centre of attention, are also a way of staving off the inevitable - the point when Jeremy and I go through security at the airport and it's just us. I know from experience that that barrier - the departure gate where there's nothing to stop you going back to the people you love, except you have to keep going forwards and further away from them, is a bigger more heart wrenching barrier than 10 Atlantics sloshed together.

While of course I want Jeremy to be a part of the picture (I want it to be 'us' but could lose the 'just') the idea that my family and closest friends wont be immediately accessible is really really hard. I find it more difficult than the idea of being 'new', of being cold, of not being understood in grocery stores unless I talk whilst holding my nose and even of learning to drive (which fills me with dread - a person who has a song called 'hannah and her hands' which gets sung whenever she drops / spills / breaks things, should not be in control of 4000lbs of speeding metal [that's the weight of an average car - I looked it up]).

Jeremy says I just have to embrace the change and all the good that will come with it (and there is a lot of good). He's right but I also think I need to allow time to contemplate how it is going to be without those key people in my every-day existence. Otherwise it'll hit me like 4000lbs of speeding metal driven by a Hannah the first morning I wake up in freezing Waltham. Which basically means I need to schedule in a few days to cry between now and February. And develop a game-plan consisting of visits and skype and other ways of interrupting their lives-without-Hannah and reminding them of my existence.

Deep breaths - hyperventilation never helped anyone.