Be(longing)

Stopping in Kuala Lumpur for 3 days now, I’m feeling the urgent need to run. I’m good at running, and I don’t mean exercise running. I mean running away from feelings and emotions and problems and things I don’t want to face. Having spent a good 1.5 years stressing out over A levels in KL, I think the ambience of the house, of the roads, of the mental driving and of the fluorescent light in these tasteless shopping centres still has the ability to give me great anxiety. Although the exam schedules no longer exist, the notes no longer need to be revised, I still feel imprisoned by these invisible walls in my head. Despite all, right now I feel stagnant, and stuck.

People are heading to distinctly different paths in life; we are all moving on so hastily, so chaotically. A good part of my circle of friends is moving to Australia, and not in a few months. They leave next week, next fucking week, while I got another 8 months till university. About the rest, some of them are still in school, some of them are working full time, some of them are just merely “hanging out and chilling”. I don’t know what’s worse: feeling utterly purposeless or stressing out over the top of your head about the job you hate.

I hate that I have to say goodbye to some of my best buds so soon. How do you say goodbye to someone you don’t wanna leave? Axel is leaving, and then Devin, and then sooner or later, Ashley. There is no perfect way to execute a goodbye. There is the lightness and the familiarity that we all want, the feeling that even in its final moments, a relationship is still just as fun as it always was. We know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that we will never be in this exact same spot again. We will never see the world the same way, and closing the door on someone’s chapter means committing it officially to memory, that it’s no longer an organic, living thing.

I think I must have said a hundred goodbyes to people while travelling. While I knew, on some level, that many of the goodbyes I had said were permanent ones, I thought it is better to assume that I would see all of them again some day, even in the same room.

There are people I will never be able to say goodbye to, even if they have to leave. They are the ones I will make every last effort to stay close to, the people I will write and call and video chat with in the early morning hours to accommodate time zone discrepancies. They are the loves that can’t be tempered by distance or time, and the goodbyes I forced myself to say were really just an “I’ll see you soon,” even if they made my chest hurt in the moment. It seemed a better way to live life, imagining that your next reunion is just around the corner, and that your story will never have to come to a real ending.