See Ya Later, Alligator

Goodbyes are not my forte. On the list of things at which I excel, bidding farewell to people who have wormed their way into my heart is not one of them.

I discovered this before hopping on a plane and going through a black hole to build a life in rural India. I have mastered goodbye denial. This isn’t the last hug for ten months, it’s just an evening farewell. I’m not putting 8000 miles and thirteen and a half hours time difference between me and your embrace. This is just goodnight.

Of course it’s not just goodnight. This strikes me in the middle of the night and I stir from sleep, waiting for waking hours when sunlight will distract from the ache of stretching heartstrings.

I’m good. Tears only fall as I walk away, shoulders still high.

And I figured I only had to do this twice. Goodbye LA, until we meet again. Goodbye Punjab, thank you for breaking and making me.

But it turns out my life here will be constant goodbyes. And they’re not easy ones. You’re handed your friends here. They are the people you have to live with, work with, sleep with, eat with, travel with. There’s no escape. You have to like them. And most of the time, it takes a good chunk of time. These are not people I would walk into a bar and pick out, not people I would sit next to in class, not people I would meet and invite for coffee, not people I would easily share hours of laughter with.

Except that they’re the people that I have shared hours upon hours of laughter with. They are the people whose new and looming absence leaves an aching in this village, whose absence weights on my shoulders like the morning’s wet and heavy dew. I have grown to love them. And grown love is the strongest and deepest form.

And as much as I am a hopeless romantic who believes that the world is small, that friends meet again, that life is long and hearts reconnect, I am a hopeless romantic that knows that not all beautiful stories have a happy endings, that not all friends meet again, and that maybe hearts aching and unfinished stories are what color the world beautiful.

So I wake again early, greeting sunlight with hopes of distraction.