Saying Goodbye

As much as I had tried to prepare myself to leave Townsville, Australia I found myself unprepared and emotional on Tuesday morning. Well, I suppose I cannot really say emotional…it is sort of that feeling you get when you know something really sad is about to happen but it has yet to happen – your body innately begins to prepare for the mourning of something you have not yet lost. That’s how I woke up at 7:30am. Breakfast was a blur. I had heaps of errands to run between the kitchen, the office, and the Post. The only time Boyd left my side was to go back to his room to change clothes; of course his new garments were all black: “funeral colors”. What was it I was writing about the five stages of grief? Yeah, point proven. At nine-thirty I started making my rounds around college, saying farewell to my friends.

People have different ways of saying good bye. Some cry in sadness, others are seemingly not affected initially but later wallow in solitude: then there is me. In the moment of departure I try to look into the person’s eyes; yet, past them, I can’t bring myself to look directly into the familiarity that I long to see one last time. It is all too much; my eyes turn to the ground, now, acknowledging that my emotions are brimming to their fullest – the slightest movement, a smile, could set me off. My mirrored aviators slide down from the crown of my head to veil my eyes, or rather, hide my tears from the people they fall for.

It is not that I just think saying good bye is hard; it is more than that. It is some unexplainable emotion that we all as people have to learn to deal with; not so much to be comfortable with saying goodbye but to respect and grow from them. To quote one of my favorite movies, “why do we fall? – so we can learn to pick ourselves back up.” I definitely “fell” a bit leaving Australia but my fond memories and good friends are allowing me to start picking myself back up and I am definitely smiling because it happened.