The Man Who Collected Goodbyes

I met him the summer I stopped believing in forever.

It was a train station in Vermont, of all places. I was twenty-seven, freshly broken, hauling a suitcase that rolled like regret. My flight had been canceled, and I didn’t want to go home yet — not with the echo of a slammed door still ringing in my ears.

He was sitting on a wooden bench, scribbling in a battered notebook like he was racing time. He had a gray beard, an old army jacket, and eyes like fogged glass.

I sat a few feet away. We exchanged one of those looks strangers give each other when the silence starts to feel heavy — just enough to acknowledge existence, not enough to invite conversation.

But he spoke anyway.

“You look like you lost something.”

“Didn’t lose it,” I said. “Just watched it walk away.”

He nodded, as if he’d heard that answer before. “That’s the hardest kind of loss. The ones that choose to leave.”

Something in me cracked open, like the spine of an unread book.

We talked. About nothing and everything. About movies we never finished. About people we almost loved. About how goodbye sometimes sounds like silence and sometimes like a slammed door.

Then he told me his name was Eli, and that he collected goodbyes.

I laughed — thought it was a joke.

But he was serious.

“For thirty years,” he said. “Every time someone left me, or I left them, I wrote it down. Not what happened. Just the goodbye. The moment it broke.”

He handed me his notebook. I flipped through.

“I’ll call when I’m settled.”

“Let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.”

“You know this isn’t love, right?”

“Take care of yourself.”

There were hundreds. Maybe thousands.

“So… you’re a masochist?” I asked, half-smiling.

“No,” he said. “I’m a historian. I don’t want to forget how it all ends.”

There was something sad and beautiful about that. Like rereading an obituary just to remember how someone once lived.

Before he left — and of course he would leave, that was his thing — he handed me a blank index card and a pen.

“For your collection,” he said. “You’ll start one eventually.”

He disappeared into the train like a ghost leaving behind a suitcase of memories. I never saw him again.

But I still have the card. Still haven’t written on it. Maybe I’m waiting for a goodbye that hurts enough to be worth remembering.

Or maybe I’m just not ready to admit that every hello has a shadow.

Author's Note:

Sometimes, we meet people who are just passing through — but they stay longer in our memory than those who promised forever. Eli reminded me that pain is worth documenting. Even endings deserve to be archived.