So this is what Goodbye feels like

Goodbye has always been a generality that never held much meaning to me. Just something I was taught to say at the end of an interaction. I have lived in the same town my whole life, go to college 15 minutes away from home and see anyone and everyone I want to see, at most, on a yearly basis. I have been conditioned to know “Goodbye” as an “until next time”, until I waved a final goodbye to some orphans I spent a weekend with.

400 km away from Hyderabad in a small village lies a small orphanage. And that orphanage was home to the kids that now fill your phone screen wallpaper. Of all the unexpected emotions that came from being abroad in India, the least expected were the ones attached to “goodbye”. The kind that sits in the pit of your stomach and make everything seem dull. The kind that almost makes you wish it never happened at all if you had known this is what the experience would leave you with.

Whenever I think of them, the same last snapshot of final waves goodbye before my head turns to cut them from view replays itself so vividly in my mind. That weekend might as well have been a dream, or an interactive movie. It is an experience so removed from my real life that I know I will probably never revisit it.

Then that weekend was met with goodbyes at Franklin Templeton. All the close relationships you never imagined capable abroad, all the unique experiences etched into your mind, all the feelings that defined your experience will soon just be another part of the past.

And when all things good come to an end, you start becoming a little colder, a little more guarded in order to protect yourself from that impending feeling of melancholy that follows a “goodbye”. But from this feeling of regrettable sadness, I know that this experience was truly worth something.

This sums up all the feels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-OYmHVchQ