Leaving - 25/09/2015

I spent the morning of the 25th packing. Perhaps it was unwise to leave everything to the last day, but when you have a father who backpacked across Europe and China and is therefore a master at making a small cabin bag seem like it has an undetectable extension charm on it, it doesn't seem too foolish. We managed to get everything inside (including the rice cooker!), and even had extra space for me to pack in simon bear, my little store of chia seeds/flax seeds/desiccated coconut, and extra notebooks.

Our packing done, there was little else left in the way of practical-things-to-do, and I think Dad was feeling a little lost. He came into the kitchen as I was rolling a bliss ball mixture to set, and asked, ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’

‘Sure,’ I replied.

I don’t know who began crying first. I didn’t even think to wash my cocoa-covered hands. I just clung to Dad and wept, and he wept too, and I said ‘I’ll miss you so much Dad’ and he said ‘It’s good for you.’

Hannah and I and Dad went for a walk, Hannah and I wearing masks because of the still-hazy Singapore conditions, down the greenway. (eventually a combination of the haze as well as my hip did prevent me from doing my last long run there. Still, it was nice to walk slowly along the path. Sometimes you need that when everything seems to be speeding towards an endless pursuit of continuation)

Hannah and I walked, arms swinging up and down like tin soldiers, and Dad walked a little way behind with the camera. We turned around to wait for Dad at one point, and he came closer, grinning, mimicking our exaggerated arms swinging. Suddenly, his face crumpled, and he began weeping.

Hannah and I gathered around him and we all hugged. I didn’t want to let go.

I remembered reading in my Dad’s diary about Hannah’s fifth birthday party in botanic gardens. He had needed to leave to go somewhere or get something midway, and had been walking to the car when he heard someone singing, and turned round to see me toddling after him doggedly, singing as I walked. I’ve always stuck close by Dad and he’s always stuck close by me, and the imminent state of affairs of far separation was (is still) hurting us with it’s unfamiliarity.

While driving to the airport, Mum suggested we sing a family song. We sang ‘Amazing grace’, my father’s favourite (complete with his ‘yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahhhh’ riffs in between verses). I started off singing, and then partway through I had to hold my face because at that moment they were tectonic plates drifting apart, and an earthquake was happening in my heart.

In the airport, there was a flurry of goodbyes. I thought that an hour would be enough but how can it be enough to plug the three year drought of face-to-face contact with friends? Emily bought me a whole bag of vegan treats (this girl knows me too well), and a book she'd written called 'What I wish for Miriam by Emily', which made me completely dissolve on the aeroplane but it was full of fundamental truths like 'We make a good life team' and 'You are my favourite platonic lover'. Christy wrote me a long long letter which I only read half of on the plane because tears. (there are few people in this world who can really write cards and letters. I am not one of them - I always feel like letters and cards somehow constrain me in their purposefulness and formalness and curtail the real emotion I want to convey in them. Christy, Emily, Hannah, Luk Ching, Sze Hui, are some people who are real card/letter writers.)

Some of the class came to see me off too - I hadn't seen so many of them for such a long time and it was so nice of them to come. I hugged Claire and breathed in her distinctive Claire-smell of hugs and excitement and wide smiles for the last time in a long while, and listened to Priscas excited chatter (I wish I could keep a book of all the funny little things she says)...

Wei xin was already teary-eyed (that makes two of us) when she ran up to me with Ben trailing a couple of steps behind. Ellis arrived next and soon all of the SCGS girls were there. We managed to squeeze in a group prayer - Ellis opened and Weixin closed, before I had to get to the departure gates. I was reminded of how Miss Tan told me that while she was on the Cook Islands, she met a man who said he could see guardian angels - everybody has two apparently. I think I can see guardian angels too because I know where my two are.

There were so many others at the airport who I was so touched at seeing - Toby, Chris, James, Gideon, Wei En, Ben, Alicia, Uncle Paul... All these threads of relationships that are now stretched over continents...

Then came the hardest good byes of all - family. At the departure gate, I hugged Emily (because she basically is family) and I think that's when I began crying, and then Dad, Hannah, Tim, Weixin Ellis, Dad again. 

//Little bird, today you fly

up and up, you're going high

far into our hazy sky

we look until we cannot see you.

...

So when you fly don't turn your head

and look away

But fix your eyes above,

it's all we've wanted anyway.

Although letting you go is painful

There are things I want to say

We will be, together.// (Hannah)

I sat in row 45, on the aisle seat next to Mum, and for the first couple of hours I read a few fragments of the notes people had written me (not all, the tears would come too quickly and I had to stop and turn over to the next one.) Reading the ingredients list on the back of the vegan treat bars Emily had bought me became a strange kind of coping mechanism to calm my aching heart - dates (great), almonds (hooray), chia (this girl knows me too well).

Usually I like watching tear - jerkers on aeroplanes but I had no need (or desire) for that in my state of weepiness, and so I watched 'The second best marigold hotel', a comedy which left me with that half-full feel good glowy-ness, while eating my breakfast and the strawberries and figs I had packed.

We flew through a storm somewhere over Europe I think, the lightning making the clouds go purple grey.

We landed quite smoothly in Heathrow, got through customs, and then I bundled onto the bus while Mum waited in the airport to go to Bath with Auntie Sarah.

I began writing this in the coach, while watching the British sunrise, the blue clouds floating about the gradient of orange like froth.