It gets really exhausting sometimes, missing people. Embracing long distance friendships one after another knowing that there will come a day – a week, a month, a year later – where they will dissipate, where the word acquaintances would suit you both better than friends.
It’s even more exhausting when the realisation occurs to you that they probably don’t think of you as much as you do them. They don’t go over the moments you both spent together repeatedly in their heads before they sleep. That a memory spiral of your relationship doesn’t end in tears for them, as it does for you.
Maybe the tears aren’t really for any person in particular; maybe it’s just the redundancy of it all. The sadness that comes with a goodbye, the effort in maintaining the relationship in a completely new territory, the eventual drifting apart.
All of them accumulated together lead to a loneliness which isn’t as apparent – you know you have friends, but if they aren’t here, if you can’t spend time together, how much does that count, really?
Then there are the worst-scenario cases. Those goodbyes with the unspoken knowledge that you both won’t be seeing each other ever again. The what ifs behind their departure, of a scenario where they never leave – and neither do you.
Over the majority of my life, it has always either been me leaving or the people around me leaving. When I left Karachi at 15, only ever having known it as home. When I met my friends in college, only for them to leave a year later as we all embarked upon our university years, where I encountered the same fate as I entered the working world three years later. Half a year of work later I left for Brunei, only to return to Malaysia, once again. Fast forward three years and I was back in Brunei, half a year in, now.
My hardest goodbye was when I came to Brunei on the 25th of June. Whenever I think back to our last hug, my eyes well up. As they are now. I was so sure in that moment that we would meet again. The slightest glimmer of hope I was clinging on to, caught in the devastation that was our relationship. But now, I’m certain we never will. That I’ll never talk and laugh that way with anyone else ever again.
Yesterday, I said another goodbye. I didn’t cry then, but I did a day before when I found out my friend was leaving. It’s harder here in Brunei, I think. Considering I already lack friends here, every single friendship I form here means a lot to me. Especially friends who check up on you, with whom conversations never seems to stall, with whom you’re completely comfortable with. Here again, I know that that was the last time I’ll have seen him.
And now, yet another break starts. The drifting apart, the memories, the times where you felt genuinely cared for by them. Them leading an entirely different life whereas you seem to found yourself in a worse-off situation – yet again.
Meanwhile, something seems to be looming just behind me, with his departure. I push it away as hard as I can, hoping it won’t gain momentum.
I stay here, day in and day out, uncertainty clouding me. Because I know this isn’t it – I know this will continue to repeat itself. Eventually, I’ll leave Brunei, with the probability that the next place I spend time and form bonds in will not be the last.
Here’s to the neverending cycle of transience; and here’s to the day I eventually set down roots.
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