I have always been bad at saying goodbye.
Store-bought tulips, their soil peppered with too many fertilizer pellets, have rotted on my windowsill because I could not bring myself to throw them away. I still have a long-dead, semi-famous Thomas Sanders “Sanders Sides” Tumblr blog that I never deactivated. Every October, I replay the first Life is Strange; I say “Are you cereal?!” because of it. I know too much about Owain Glyndŵr, a long-dead Welsh king, because of “The Raven Boys.”
I am all the art I have ever consumed, and I have never said goodbye to any of it.
I first read the Wings of Fire series in the fifth grade and, at 21, I still keep up with every new release. This habit is not about reliving the past; it’s part of my continuity — proof that the child I was never disappeared, only accumulated years (and many sketchbooks full of dragon drawings). Some part inside of me will always be waiting on the next dragon prophecy.
Some attachments never even pretend to mature. I am still actively shipping Jack Frost from “Rise of the Guardians” with Hiccup Haddock from “How to Train Your Dragon,” a relationship imagined entirely by the internet (read: Tumblr). Once you learn how to care about fictional people, your brain never quite learns how to stop. Imagination does not recognize such expiration dates as growing up.
I still write poetry because, when I was 12 years old, I decided it was the coolest thing in the world, and that judgment has never been revised. Every poem I write is quietly in conversation with that earlier certainty: a child’s conviction carried forward into adulthood without permission.
I have never been to Washington state, yet I yearn for cherry pie and dark woods because “Twin Peaks” taught me how to miss a place that does not belong to me. Art manufactures nostalgia by delivering fully formed longing borrowed from someone else’s dream.
I want to be Mae Borowski, a video game cat, for Halloween. I want a leather jacket that says “FUCK THE WORLD” because of Disco Elysium. These are not references I perform for recognition so much as identities I briefly inhabit, testing possible versions of myself. Art offers selves the way clothing offers silhouettes: temporary, but formative.
People tell me I am cool, yet so much of what I am is art.
For most of history, goodbye meant gone forever. A performance ended and existed in memory. A story changed in the retelling; a song survived only if someone remembered how to sing it. Art was memory, and memory is fragile.
Now, nothing really leaves.
The internet has made archivists of us all. Old tweets linger years after their authors forget writing them. YouTube videos uploaded in middle school remain perfectly preserved, waiting to embarrass their creators decades later. Tumblr blogs sit frozen in time, a digital Pompeii, their aesthetics intact long after their communities have dissolved. We do not lose things anymore; we abandon them, and abandonment is not the same as goodbye.
I could delete that Tumblr blog. I do not. Its continued existence feels like proof that a former version of me was real and that she loved something enough to leave evidence behind. Even if I did have the nerve to deactivate it, I can’t shake off all those old reblogs. My personal archive has become less about preservation and more about reassurance.
To archive something is to argue that it deserves a future audience. Cave paintings survived not because their creators imagined museums but because someone, somewhere, decided not to erase them. Art persists through our careful deliberation.
But permanence does not guarantee remembrance.
Streaming services quietly remove shows. Flash games vanish with software updates. Hard drives fail. Links rot. Entire corners of the internet disappear despite our belief that digital space is infinite. We preserve more than any generation before us and still lose things against our own desires.
The paradox of modern art consumption is this: Nothing disappears, yet forgetting happens anyway.
Maybe that is why I replay Life is Strange every October. Not to relive the story I know by heart, but to confirm it still exists, right where I left it. The ritual feels almost like maintenance; the game does not need me, but I return anyway.
Goodbye implies separation. It suggests a clean break between past and present, between who we were and who we are now. But art resists that boundary. Every book alters our language, every song rewires memory and every fictional character becomes a reference point we carry unknowingly into conversations, jokes and habits.
I say “hella” because of a video game released in 2015. I understand a medieval Welsh rebellion because of a young adult fantasy series. My humor, my vocabulary, even my emotional instincts are collaborative works created by artists I will never meet.
How do you say goodbye to something that has already changed you?
The truth is that we do not consume art so much as absorb it. It settles into us, becoming indistinguishable from personality. The goodbye never arrives because there is nothing left to leave behind.
The tulips eventually collapsed inward, petals browning at the edges, stems soft with rot. I kept them longer than I should have, watching their slow transformation instead of discarding them. Even after throwing them away, traces of soil remained on the windowsill — small, stubborn evidence that they had been there at all.
Art works the same way. Long after we stop engaging with it directly, residue remains: phrases we repeat, feelings we recognize, knowledge we never intended to keep. The ending happens, but the influence does not.
There is no need to say goodbye.
Nothing we have loved ever fully leaves us. It waits in language, in memory, in archived corners of the internet, in references with half-forgotten origins. We carry it forward unintentionally, becoming living archives ourselves.
The art stays. And, in a way, so do we.
Digital Culture Beat Editor Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
