The short goodbye

Andy was the master of the short goodbye. At parties when everyone else was saying goodbye first by the snack table and then out on the back porch and then by the coat rack, Andy would slip out the door and be gone. Once in a while somebody would text to say "Hey, you didn't say bye!", but in general nobody did and it just went to confirm what Andy had thought all along, which was that nobody cared that much or noticed whether he was there or not. In fact, it seemed like nobody really cared who was there at all. Some people were funny, life-of-the-party types, but if they weren't there, someone else like them would usually step up to take their place.
It felt good to Andy to leave that way. It was the one element of his social life he could control: whether or not to give others the gift of his presence. Even though he knew that gift wasn't all that special.
When Andy moved to the city after high school, at first he couldn't believe how different from high school the art scene was. Everyone still looked like kids to him, including himself, but these kids all talked to each other. The kids with muscles talked to the kids with glasses. The really nerdy guys had girlfriends. Tall girls talked to short guys. It seemed kind of like heaven and for a while Andy was high on life, riding on the clouds of a sky where everything had gotten straightened out the way it should be.  He had girls and they were hotter than he ever would have expected. He played in bands and people listened to his weird computer music and it was all amazing, except that after a couple of years it wasn't. When Andy had finally met everyone in all the overlapping friend circles and dated every woman who was hot enough but not too hot, and played in every venue in town except the really good ones, he started to realize that in the end, it was more like high school than he had thought. The popular people were still popular. They were happy, and getting married. Their bands were on national tours. The restaurants they worked at had the best-looking people and the best tips. They just had better luck, and it showed on their faces.
After the second restaurant full of ugly waitstaff fired Andy and the third girl said she didn't love him and he realized he was only dating the one after her because she did and his final bandmate quit to play in a better band, Andy started having dreams about leaving. In his dreams, he said goodbye to nobody, just packed up his room without finding a replacement roommate and caught a train to a different city, where he could start over. In his dreams, he didn't mention leaving on his facebook page or in his email, and his friends (or the people who were sometimes his friends) had to make calls and investigate and talk to his landlord to find out that he had gone at all. In his dreams, they talked to each other for weeks afterward: "Why did he leave? Do you think it was because of Annie? Do you think he was depressed? Should we stage a rescue?"
But even in Andy's dreams, he couldn't make them talk about him for more than a few weeks, so he stopped dreaming about it.
 Andy started getting depressed in a serious way. Mostly he felt like he was sleepwalking, or underwater. He could look at a photo for a whole minute before realizing it was a picture of astronauts wearing space suits. Thinking was tiring him out. Asking questions like "Why am I depressed?" seemed like too much trouble. All of his ideas felt tired and used. Andy had spent a long time thinking about the unfairness of his social scene, but if a friend wanted to talk about it now his arguments seemed circular in a way that made him want to lie down and sleep for a thousand years.
 Andy had never really thought about killing himself before. He hated pain and was attached to the idea that something better was just around the corner.  In the end, he did it the way he did most things. He thought and overthought and thought more and decided against it and decided for it and then one day hiked up to Angel's Rest on an impulse and jumped off.  He didn't leave a note or talk to anyone beforehand or give anything away.  His life on earth was his last weapon, the last factor he had control over. And just like he would have wanted, afterwards his friends, or the people who were sometimes his friends, talked and talked about it. "Why did he do it? Do you think it was because of Annie? Do you think he was depressed? Should we have tried to do something?"
But in the end, after everyone including Annie had all cried and suffered, they all ended up being privately mad at Andy. They thought about how selfish he was, how cruel it was of him to make everyone deal with his dying, how he could have at least had the decency to write a note and give them some closure, how he should have said goodbye.  It would have confirmed Andy's fears that being an adult wasn't so different from being in high school, that the unpopular people stayed that way even after death.