Blood and Wine

Cheap goodbyes.

Today was the last day of my Asean scholarship.

Today, I hugged my friends goodbye and pumped farewell messages from my cellphone all the way up to my plane. Today, my room disbanded completely, with all four of us roommates going our separate ways after two years of hilarity and stupidity together. Today, I lugged the junk I'd collected over two years -- clothes, cards, La Famiglia and Pre-University Seminar files, even the infamous 'BYRAN' Valentine's Day gift box that was the origin of my Byran moniker -- and smiled innocently as the lady at Check-In failed to notice I was 10kg over the maximum baggage weight. Today, on a 747 flying back to Kota Kinabalu, I thought of all the days I'd spent and all the people I'd met (and all the money I'd spent) in Singapore, the teenagers in front of me loudly declaring their worship of a certain air-stewardess's chest and the kids behind me playing soccer with my seat. Today, the Asean family separated.

Separation is a painful but necessary part of life -- that's what my Dad had offered to me as I considered leaving my Sabahan friends behind in search of a future in Singapore. On their last day together, my Dad and his friends knew it was truly very likely the last time they would see or hear of each other. Back then, separation really meant separation -- people truly walked out completely of that brief moment your paths juxtaposed and intertwined, never to grace your thread of fate again. A goodbye back then meant something.

Today's goodbyes are cheap, the full import of the meaning they once had lost. Because even once we're all home and it's begun to sink in that your closest of family are no longer just a walk across the hostel grounds, there's no separation. Everyone is just a phone call away. An e-mail away. An instant message on Messenger. A Friendster profile just waiting to be clicked on.

Goodbye? What goodbye?

Goodbyes today are not about separation, but the end of things. Our goodbye was the end of so many things we scholars had enjoyed and had taken for granted these two years. It was the end of parties and lunches and dinners and nighttime gelato and movies and birthdays together. It was the end of laughing together at our own private jokes, at all things pulchritudinous and all things lazy and tired. It was the end of concocting new ways to get ourselves all in trouble. It was the end of seeing each other all the time. It was the end of a family.

We will always be family, of course. We may always keep in touch and we may always be close. But our goodbye today was the end of much we had held dear and much we had loved. It will never be the same. Cellphones, Messenger and e-mail may connect us still, but behind a computer screen, staring at digital emotions in text, the nostalgic heart can only remember the days we had together and imagine the days we could have had if no goodbyes had come.
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