Funny How it Always Seems Like Goodbye

It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside.....

I've watched nearly every one of my friends this semester depart off to their home lands. Full of promises and reassurances that we'll see each other again. Yet I can't help but feel the same way you do when someone write in your high school yearbook "keep in touch" I know we all want to stay in touch, but we've been turned out onto the real world. Coming to this school has brought us closer than anything else could have, but now we're facing the real world and the challenges that come with it. Yes it is possible to get to Germany, yes it is possible to get to Japan...but it's not likely.

I'm not one of those who can easily hide...

I've delivered two good friends to the gates of the rest of the world now, Ina and Hiroko. I have to admit each time was incredibly dificult. These were people I grew to care for very much, and it is hard now that they are not here. I'm not the only one two feel the sudden absence of this social comfort-circle. I spoke to both Dave and Yoon today--two others on my floor who were close to everyone who's one. We all agreed through heavy sighs and lingering thoughts that, our neighborhood is very different--though we suspect that it won't be quite as good last semester.
I realized as I swallowed back that all too familiar lump in my throat as I said goodbye to Hiroko that I had not expected to make such close friends so quickly hear in Los Angeles, and falling so fast left me very vulnerable in the end, which is not something that I'm used to. Perhaps it was the ease I always felt around them, perhaps it's the duanting idea of how hard it'll be to see them but I cannot help but feel loss when I think about everyone who's gone.

I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words....

Writing is cathartic. No matter how deep the pain, if you just write the words that race through your head, they can begin to slow down and allow you to move on. As I sit and write this latest entry about how much I will miss my friends, somehow I know that I will see them again. I sit here and write about how hard it will be to get to Japan, but I know that I'll see Hiroko again. As I sit here writing these unwanted feelings it occurs to me that the very fact that I have them shows me how close we all were--how much they meant to me, and how much I meant to them. Sometimes when I'm feeling down, I tend to not let it go (and if you've been on the receiving end of that I apologize and thank you for your patience simultaneously) but both talking about it and writing it out makes me realize the most important thing that I keep looking over. Hope. Hope and love keeps us all together, it has kept me together with my friends before I left, and will keep me with these after they have left. Until next time my friends, it will not be to far off. Thank you for such a wonderful semester--you are all missed.

How wonderful life is because you're in the world...