salutant

Tomorrow, my life will change and I will move away from home. Some day I will come back, but everyone knows the ticket is one-way. I've been saying farewell for weeks, brightly, cheerfully, but this morning I said goodbye to my best friend.

The conversation was familiar, full of warmth and light. We had originally wanted to visit a new fish market that just opened and explore a new walking path, but by force of corporate oppression, she just ended up following me on 3 errands for a brief morning. We reached an intersection, and decided to part after crossing.

It was a just a hug, but it lasted longer than I expected and in one sweeping moment, I realised how much she will miss me. That this was my best friend and this parting will pause our little regular catch ups and check ins and comments and complaints. For weeks I have been pulled by joy and adrenaline and stress and all the forward pulsing momentum of an imminent journey and just now, for the first time, I am looking back and realising that I am walking away from someone that treasured me so very much.

The tears only came after we parted, in the way some feelings are only felt with distance, with space as you return to your own mind and realise how much is there. I walked with it, and decided to tell her to share this feeling, to reinforce the depth of my own in her mind. And she returned in kind, that she also cried only after we parted, that we are both crying again now, just a few hundred metres apart on our own roads.

Tomorrow is another country and another distant dream, but today I am living in a tender shell of my own goodbyes, one memory away from jolting into a miniature grief.