The First Goodbye

Today I’m grumpy. And irrational. My body is silently screaming, I’m sick of feeling nauseas all the time and everyone is irritating me. I know this means it’s time to get out…I’m aching for Australia.

Partly this is because I’m not sleeping well – it’s so hot these nights that my fan only serves to move the heavy, hot air around my room and I wish to god I’d not been a tight-arse when we arrived and dished out for a Western mattress.

It’s partly because my date with the Charmer was cancelled last night, and rather than being the adult I realized at the time I should be, I became the child who wasn’t allowed the candy she wanted – really, really, reallllly wanted. And really? I know I can’t always have what I want, but why do I have to be a child about it? So I’m also irritating myself…great.

And it’s also because the first goodbye, and one of the two hardest, is coming. In four days I have to say goodbye to someone who, over the course of the last nine months, has become, well, lets just leave it at someone without whom this country, this place, this experience, is less bearable, less cool, less…just less.

We’ve had our own little rollercoaster journey during this time, but what we have firmly established is a solid friendship – one that I’ve relied on in the times I couldn’t cope on my own and one that has made the great moments greater.

I know it’s not the end of our friendship, but it is the end of an era: you won’t be here to call/text/email multiple times every day, we won’t have our Saturday Mango breakfasts, I’ll be the only shit one in our capoeria class, I’ll have to find someone else to fix my computer, it’ll be less easy to critique each other’s relationships, personalities and character flaws and have philosophical debates, I won’t have your bony shoulder to try and fall asleep on in the CNG home, you won’t be around to pull me in for a hug, there’ll never be another ‘Sunday’ and maybe I’ll never get around to saying that one word aloud.

We knew it was ending, and in one way or another it has been since it began, but selfishly I’d hoped to go first. And just because I’m the only one crying and because I’m not afraid to say that I’ll miss you like crazy, doesn’t mean I don’t know that you won’t too.

(because there is no pseudonym that can capture in a few words all the ways you affect me).