Goodbye,

Every time, is a slow and agonizing exercise of having to tear myself away from the things, the places, the memories, the someones, that have been seeded and now implant themselves in my heart – whether by painstaking, back-breaking efforts to sow, nurture and cultivate; Or the ones, like stubborn weeds, that have slyly managed to escape my notice and take root all the same, more resilient than ever.

I can’t say how much I tire of this annual ritual of severing and re-attaching, breaking and mending. Both ways.

It’s really quite brutal.

I wish you knew how incredibly hard it is for me to sit out (again), to miss yet another milestone. Sometimes, timing can be such a bitch. Second time fate seems to have dealt me a cruel hand. Each blow seems to be a confirmation how this just, maybe, is wrong. Just isn’t meant to be.

I also wish you cared that I wanted so much to be there.

I realized that it’s been a while since I’ve travelled alone. For the past 2 years, there was the reassuring familiarity of you – jostling around in the same bumpy taxi ride to the airport or in the seat next to me, donning headphones and eating my share of aluminium-tinted plane food. And again, this dangerous dependence decides to un-cloak itself, revealing the extent of its destructiveness. Whether I leave you at the arrival hall, or at the door to my apartment at 3.30am, the goodbye is still haphazard, still tentative, and still very painful.

And this time, there’s a sense, which has hit me a little all too late as I sit here sleepless on the eve of my flight, a half-empty suitcase sprawled in the middle of my living room, that I bid fare well to an era that will pass and never return.

Quite honestly, that scares the hell out of me.