Coming to terms with leaving. It’s harder than I thought it would be.
This city has become too familiar for me to just wave, say goodbye and leave. I feel as though to properly leave I should visit each place that meant something to me and enjoy it one last time. Maybe this will make it easier, having said a proper farewell of sorts, maybe not a farewell but a ‘see you later’.
I had a list of things in my head that I wanted to do here. At the start of the year I thought “I want to do everything that I can before I leave”, but I realised how wrong that was. I don’t want to tick Madrid or Spain off my list. It’s not a place that I want to be ‘done’ with. I still want to have the hope of coming back here to do the things I never did while living here.
So I purposely left out things on my list to allow myself the chance to come back and in this way I guess I’m prolonging my departure from the city. Trying to extend my stay even though I will be living in another country soon. Maybe I’m trying to keep a part of myself here even when I’m gone.
I hate it. All this preparation to go. To leave all the good things I had here and all the good people I met. And the worst part of it is the packing. Where all your memories of this place are reduced to kilograms in a suitcase. You sit there defeated with your belongings strewn all over your room thinking was this all I accumulated from a year in Madrid? Just clothes and shoes and books? Just material items that can be discarded so easily?
If only memories could be encapsulated in some sort of object that you could carry around and replay every time you felt nostalgic. Nostalgic for these Madrid moments. I don’t mean pictures and videos. I mean the actual vivid memories you have in your mind of all the times you laughed, and joked and cried with the people that became ‘your people’ here.
And so what to do when you are feeling down about leaving? Me? I write. I’ve written it here in the hopes that it will prepare me for the goodbyes. It probably won’t (I don’t think any of us are ever ready for the goodbyes).
But I can try can’t I?
Eyscapes 