The (Second) Last Goodbye

The advantage of saying goodbye to your family and friends before you board a plane and head on over to the UK for a postgraduate experience you never dreamed you could have, is that you know (barring any catastrophic events) you’ll be seeing them again. But with your current writer friends made on the course, you have absolutely no idea when or if you’ll see them again. I’ve never been in this position before, strangely, and this will (hopefully) not be the last time. If plans for another postgraduate degree after this one materialize, there’ll be a longer goodbye but a longer period of having known them too. But I digress. Goodbyes suck, especially when you have no idea if you’ll ever see each other again.

I spoke in my last post of not having prepared for this very big possibility. I did / was looking forward to making writer buddies for life, but didn’t factor in saying goodbye. A real, actual goodbye. Two of the writers with whom I’ve become particularly close left this week: one left on the Monday—Paul Grant, whose piece ‘The Much That Binds Us’ made an appearance on this blog—and the second, Heather Peterson, Fiction Editor for The Missing Slate left just moments ago. A group of us dropped her off to her place before she hopped into a car and was driven off and away. I’m wondering if I’ve deserved the opportunity to have a proper goodbye, although there was a nice little get together last week. Last week. My God, it seems like weeks and weeks ago. Heather was the glue holding us all together, although that doesn’t mean we don’t get along without her, but she has one of those personalities that just attract other people. The light, as it were, to the moths that we became in her presence. It’s going to be hard getting used to her absence.

This was the last of the current goodbyes, though. At least, there’s that. But meanwhile, there’s a copy of The Welsh Girl to keep me company and a whole summer for writing, rewriting and reflecting on the writing process as part of my dissertation. September’s still a while away.

It’s still going to be bittersweet though…but I’ll find a way to deal with it.