I woke up one week after graduation, slipped out before sunrise, and caught the first train that would carry me past Boston’s noise—its exhaust of chatter, the clatter of daily routine. I didn’t have a plan. I got off at a random stop and found a small coffee shop tucked into the middle of nowhere. I spent the day there with a tiny backpack and a head full of thoughts. What I needed was silence, and that morning, silence felt like the most beautiful sound.
In less than a month, I would start my first job at a dream firm in a brand-new city. After more than two decades of syllabi, exams, and late-night deadlines, I was finally free. The road ahead looked seductive and serendipitous. Yet even then, liberation came braided with a thread of sadness. I would be leaving classmates who had seen me stumble through puberty and wrestle with the armor and ache of stereotypes. The future pulled me forward; goodbyes tugged me back.
I learned something early: when you must leave the place that taught you how to be yourself, leave quickly. I dreaded farewells. Deep down, I knew the moment we say goodbye, the version of us that belonged to that place begins to dissolve. We can visit again, but we cannot live that moment twice. Goodbyes may be one of life’s heaviest rituals, and people move on in the way rivers do—sometimes quiet, sometimes flooding, but always forward. Knowing that, I often chose to leave quietly.
Fifteen years have passed since that hushed day in the coffee shop, a week after I hurled my cap into the air. I have left quietly many times since. I understood the danger of chasing new horizons and risking the loss of what I had. There were seasons when the only thing I thought I might carry into the future was loneliness. Even so, circumstances pushed me along, and sometimes I pushed myself.
There is a sorrow particular to meeting extraordinary people and realizing, in the end, that the story was never meant to last. I cut my roots early, leaving home and family when I was ten. Since then, I have been perpetually in transit—always leaving, rarely arriving. I have loved and lost; I have known regret and renewal. Regardless of distance or duration—minutes, years, or decades—the people (and yes, even the objects: the cars, the apartments, the coffee mugs) cling to me like fragments of a mosaic I’ll spend a lifetime assembling. Their impact remains, lingering long after I whisper that small, difficult, two-syllable word.
As I edge toward forty, I count the goodbyes still ahead and feel the increasing weight of beginning again. Starting over has become harder; closing old chapters takes longer. I want to arrive—wherever “there” is. Ironically, home is the place we grow up aching to leave and grow older yearning to return to. After nearly four decades abroad, I have finally circled back to where it all began. And still, the chapters keep turning.
I intend to keep exposing myself to the astonishments I too often take for granted. I will share what I gather with the people I meet along the way. I will keep loving and grieving, risking and persisting, hoping that someday, when I look back at the road I walked, I’ll feel that I lived a life worth living.
Perhaps that’s what goodbye really is—not an ending, but a quiet promise to keep moving. I may leave fast, but I try to arrive with both hands open. One day, when I finally pause long enough to call a place home, I hope it feels less like stopping and more like becoming.
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