“The reason it hurts so much to separate is that our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one, and in each of them, we’ve found each other…” – Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook.

This is perhaps the second or third time I’ve said goodbye to Donald Trump. I think it is the last. I could hate him sometimes, and he broke my heart at other times.

We endure what is unbearable, wrote Cassandra Clark in Clockwork Princess, “and you bear it. That is all.” I’ve borne it; life goes on.

The very sincere managers of the Democratic Impeachment effort wanted, as so many progressives did, to say goodbye to Mr. Trump once and for all, to end it; they couldn’t bear it any longer.

They wanted to make sure he could never come back.

Admirable and courageous, yes, and perhaps even necessary, it’s not for me to say. But idealism often collides head-on with human beings’ true nature, and it is just not fated to end that way.

He will earn his goodbye; you can count on it.

The problem is that you can’t kill such a big idea by impeaching it; you have to offer the transfixed and manipulated people who loved him a better idea.

That can’t be done in an impeachment trial; it will take years, blood, and a lot of heart, courage, and good faith. I accept that justice works in odd and indirect ways.

Donald Trump has poisoned the well, and it won’t be safe to drink for a while. He was a lot more like Merlin than I gave him credit for. He can cast spells. But he isn’t God.

What is that feeling, wrote Jack Kerouac in On The Road, when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain until you see their specks dispersing?

It is, he answered, the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. That’s how I feel when my spirit waves goodbye to Donald Trump.

I know most people reading this dislike him intensely, but I have a soft spot for Mitch McConnell, the craftiest and least repentant old fox in a city of foxes.

I think he understood that Donald Trump wasn’t really worth impeaching, that he was already impeached, disgraced, and convicted in the soul. Lord, what else can you do that wasn’t done in those heartbreaking videos

. Trump carries the whiff of misery and shame now like a dog carries the stench of something he rolled in.

Perhaps those craven Republican senators saw what McConnell saw – Trump is over, finished and disgraced. Let the wolves in suits in a dozen cities run him down and chew him up.

A month ago, he was the most powerful man on earth.

Now, he’s a ghost from Shakespeare, running and running from himself. He will never escape.

Starting Monday, he’s a big fat bullseye for the smartest and meanest lawyers in the country. He’s a juicy meal.  If the lawyers after him came after me, I’d try to make a run for it to Costa Rico, and failing that; I’d throw myself off a big tall bridge.

One of our most wealthy and powerful men, Harvey Weinstein, could tell you about that.

I have confessed that I felt that Donald Trump and I were soul connected somewhere along the line. We had each lived a few lives before we came across one another, and it was inevitable that we would part.

I didn’t change Donald Trump’s life in any way, he has never heard my name, but he changed my life, and for good.

We had a kind of twisted love affair in some ways. I spent many hours reading about him, studying about him, thinking about him.

I was the biographer falling in love with his subject in my own weird way. I had to understand him, not hate him. I had to figure him out so I wouldn’t be afraid of him.

He was my spiritual litmus test.

Either I could stay grounded in the face of his continuous provocation and cruelty, or I could descend into the circle of hate and pointless argument I was hearing and seeing all around me.

He got into my head, but he can’t stay there. That is the chronicler’s dark side, they can’t love anyone for too long either, there is always something crazier and more compelling just around the corner.

I didn’t want to be him; I didn’t want to be them; I wanted to end up being me once I figured out who that was.  He made that very difficult at times, but every time he was cruel and dishonest, I went out and committed a small act of great kindness.

It is arrogant of me even to begin to compare myself to so famous, beloved, and wealthy a man. But there was this: our souls did connect. I could feel it.

I was broken, too. But I was so much luckier than him, for all of his wealth and power. I got help. The people who loved me helped me get help and helped me.

I found that love began to heal; everything I learned and saw about him screamed that he had never known love and couldn’t even imagine it. Everybody else saw him as having great and undefeatable strength. But it was all just another lie, underneath there was nothing but fear and weakness.

The people who feel that can smell it.

Some people walk alone in the world, and if they are not Marvel Superheroes, they are the unhappiest people on earth.

I came to understand the truth about myself before it was too late, and I still had time to change. I didn’t want to end my life in the way it was. Trump’s great tragedy was that he couldn’t change the way it was.

I wanted to love people outside of myself. I wanted to face the truth about myself. I wanted to change in every part of my soul.

“You’ll stay with me?” Harry Potter asked James. “Until the very end,” James replied. Donald Trump couldn’t stay with us, of course, and we won’t really ever get to see him again, although that is so hard for so many people to believe.

And who now, really, wants to stay with him who doesn’t get paid for it?

That’s where we parted, of course, long before either of us ended up being who we were for good.

Donald Trump never cared about a single human being in the world other than himself, he had no call to love to pull him out of himself. Can we name one single human being who loved him rather than feared him?

He couldn’t find the humility it requires to see oneself truthfully. He could only love in abstracts and generalities; he could only love mobs of people, not people.

At the end of the impeachment, I went back to look over some of the haunting videos the Democratic managers had put together.

The one that stuck in my mind and touched the most deeply into my heart was where he looked into his South Lawn camera and said goodbye to the people who came from all over the country to support him, to answer his call for help.

I think they were the only people in his life that he trusted at the end. Watching them in those videos, I saw that they were broken too.

And when he finished that awkward and brutally insincere call for peace, I think he said the only honest and heartfelt and real thing I ever saw or heard him say:

“I love you,” he said, “I will never forget you.”

Maybe that was a Hollywood line, as stiff as his others. But looking at it, it seemed to come straight from the heart, the only ones that did. He wasn’t talking to me, and he wasn’t talking to you. He was talking to them, and it felt so sincere.

He and the other broken people, the other ones roughed up by life and abandoned by almost everyone who had ever promised to help, had connected.

He knew by then that he was finished. He was saying goodbye to the only people he had ever loved or would probably ever love.

J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan,  had his hero say, “never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

I’ll say goodbye, Donald Trump, and yes, good riddance,  I can’t, when all i is said and done, claim to love you.

But I will never forget you.