A Brief Note on Saying Goodbye

Tonight I said goodbye to three of my best friends. Over the next couple of weeks, they're leaving the country, each for least one year. I've had friends leave before, but not three at once.

I could say it's easier having given them going-away presents and getting to see them one last time before graduation. I could say it, but I don't know if I believe it. It's certainly more real, now, since we've given them our gifts, but I don't think anything could make it easier.

Over the past four years, a bunch of us from various parts of the country have grown close. We've faced essays, exams, Friday morning lectures, Teaching Placement, weird masses, explicit films and bad hangovers together. We've celebrated birthdays and Christmases and completing exams. Now, though we face departure and new currencies and strange cultures and different timezones, we can still celebrate new beginnings. New jobs at home and abroad, new challenges academic, social and professional, new lives to be explored and survived and celebrated.

Life won't be the same with them gone, but even goodbye and good luck doesn't mean The End. We might not see each other often, any of us, but I don't believe this can ever keep us apart.

We're friends despite national borders and county lines, no matter how long it takes to get us all in the same room again.

It Happened Again

I don't know why, but I find myself struggling to figure out what to write a blog post about, again. I think it's the idea that I really only have half an hour to write it that's putting me off, because I can't just let my brain figure something out in the background while I do other things.

Part of me wants to write about Man of Steel, and why it was so much better than Superman Returns.

Part of me wants to address the fact that the weather is extremely messed up and not constitutive to getting anything done outside.

Part of me wants to talk about the fact that a couple of my friends are leaving the country for a while and I have no idea when I'll get to see them after they leave.

Let's stick with that one for a while. I've had an aversion to leaving home for a while, largely due to the fact that I make 90 euro a week, partially to do with the fact that I've never lived away from home. I think if I could fix one of those issues, I could probably do as my friends are doing - and as friends have done in the past - and leave the country and live somewhere else. Even just earning some money to build up a savings would be a good start on the financial front.

But this isn't really about me leaving home. This is about the fact that it'll hit in in August that two of my very good friends won't just be a bus ride away anymore. We can't make plans on a weekly basis to meet up based on when we're working. It's not that simple.

It's for those reasons that I'll miss them. Not because I won't see them very often, because that's always the case for the summer months as it is, but because it'll be difficult to know when I'll see them. The uncertainty is the worst part about it, because I can't just tell myself that I'll see either of them in however many days.

The same sort of feeling took hold last year when another good friend of mine left the country, and it's no easier the second time around to wrap my head around missing my friends but also being happy for them for why they moved away. Because I am happy for them. Delighted, in fact. That doesn't mean we won't all be upset when we have going-away get-togethers.