How I hate goodbyes…

Last Saturday at a flat in the Mission, a friend of mine from my study abroad days pulled out a box of photos.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The best two years of your life.” he replied.

We sat at his kitchen table looking over the photographs.

“We look so young… and tan” he said.

I started flipping through some photos…

“Dammit, we look so happy!”

We looked at hundreds of pictures of Aix-en-Provence, Paris, travels through Scandinavia, northern Europe, southern Europe…

“Is that Val d’Isere?” he asked.

“No, the resort in Andorra—that crazy new years eve with the Russians. ”

Photo after photo of friends—close friends who I still see regularly from around the world. Friends who I haven’t seen since I left France. Friends whose names I couldn’t even remember… so many people, memories and places came rushing back to me. The first days, the last days, every minute in between.

“Check out this picture…” he said handing me a photo of my head covered with snow, framed with two Dutch girls whose names I couldn’t recall.

“Santa Lucia night in Aix-en-Provence, 2001—best night of my life.” I mutter reminiscently.

“Mine too.”

Indeed the best night of my life thus far– a simple snowy night in the south of France. A majestic, magical, storied night… and yet only one of many in those two years overseas.

It struck me all of the sudden the magnitude of my different overseas experiences. The years have dulled the individual memories, but the transformations I underwent lives with me every day. I could see it in my eyes in those photos—those FOB eyes of the first weeks, to giddy wizened smiles of the final days. The final days…how much I hated the goodbyes. The tears and awkward hugs with each new departure at each farewell gathering. I remembered thinking that it might be easier to be the first to go home than to watch everyone depart. But I didn’t want it to end.

On my way home that night, I felt comfort in the realization that the experience was still alive in me. Though I currently see it alive everyday at my job, I mean that my own experience was still profound, my friends still close, my life transformed. How fortunate was I to have had the best study abroad experience ever? You may say “no, mine was the best ever”, and be right—but that’s not perhaps the point. The point is that this experience, your time overseas is not over just because you leave. You will have more than your photos, your memories, more than your new friends from around the world. You will have something that is impossible to explain to anyone who has not been through the experience– a life forever unimaginably altered by your choice to study overseas. Either you know what I mean right away, or you haven’t really had that wonderful study abroad experience I suppose.

So the end of the experience means goodbyes and more goodbyes, and I hate goodbyes. Maybe I hate them because I was always the one left behind, the last to leave, and I knew that there were so many faces I would never see again. All those friends whose names I have forgotten. But I can be at peace knowing that to study overseas was the best choice I ever made, for better or for worse. If you are leaving your study abroad program soon, I hope you will often have this feeling too, because it’s a wonderful, indescribable feeling, and one that will be with you always.

You just have to endure the goodbyes.

Noah Kuchins
noahk@sfsu.edu

Noah is the faculty advisor for the IEEC.

1Comment
  • Tim Cilento
    Posted at 00:58h, 19 December Reply

    I know exactly what you mean, right away :).
    Thanks for having us Noah.

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