Today I traveled north to see a Merel's new student room. This is part of my 'goodbye tour'. I feel like a rock star. Merel does a marvelously uncomplicated version of 'bye'.
But seriously, I hate saying goodbye. It always makes me teary and sad and everything, so I just try to avoid it. My favourite is just waving, saying 'see you next year!' and then parting ways. Far easier. Everyone's telling me that I'll stay across the channel and is behaving accordingly. Please don't. Saying bye is enough.
This is my planning for saying good bye to other people:
On Friday I will try and see my grandparents on my mum's side, and pay a visit to my grandparents-on-my-father's-side's graves, because those are the two goodbyes I feel I really have to do. On Saturday and Sunday I will go north to see Anouk. Then, a few days of packing, and then on Wednesday doing goodbye-drinks with Ma-ike. The level of emotion involved is going to depend on a number of factors.
The most difficult one is going to be next week Friday, when I will tell my father goodbye. Living with him this summer has made me realise that I am so much more like him than I thought, and it seems all the difficulties of my teenage years have been resolved. Dad gets pretty emotional with these things, but my brother and I have installed Skype for him and he's fairly OK with MSN.
My mum and stepdad love England, so they've volunteered to drive me and my belongings to Leicester. My mum tried to get some days off work, because she'd have liked to do a tiny bit of Leicester-exploring with me (and that week is also her and my stepdad's fifth anniversary, so everything would've been nicely coincidental had her taking off worked out), but they'll leave me with my belongings on Sunday. Mum and my stepdad don't do emotional goodbyes, so that'll be a good one. Also, they're good with computers.
It shouldn't be emotional, at all. I mean, pretty much everyone's vowed to visit me at least once, so then it's less than a year that I won't see them, and if there's Facebook and Skype and I have a Twitter and this blog and everything - there's no reason to really miss me, I'm just an hour's flying away. It's only for a year.
Except that it isn't. I think that in the end, I'll be the most emotional of all, because I am beginning to realize that what they're saying is right - it's highly likely that I'll stay, at least for more than this year, and I will miss the people that I have come to love so dearly. Oh well. Still only an hour's flying away.
UPDATE: How can I NOT have referenced Shakespeare and gone all "parting is such sweet sorrow" ? Except that this isn't sweet, and I'm going to slap anyone (except for Ma-ike, because I've had to promise her that she's not getting on my nerves by making a big fuss over this) who makes it seem like it's a sorrow.
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