“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” – Jack Kerouac
It happens every time I leave a place. An odd feeling forms in the pit of my stomach. My heart beats a little bit faster. It’s a weird ache of longing mixed with excitement and even a little bit of nagging pain.
It’s not nostalgia because how can I miss a place I haven’t even left yet? It’s not sadness because it’s not altogether bad. It always follows a wonderful month or two somewhere beautiful. I get on the plane, train, or bus and mentally say goodbye to wherever I’ve been. They all take a piece of me and leave me vowing to return.
But I know the truth. You can’t return everywhere. Some of these people and places, I’ll never see again. I know that I romanticize them in my mind over time. I’ll forget the times that I was overcharged for something or someone simply ignored me as I desperately asked for directions. My mind will let slip the times I felt lonely or almost dreaded coming off of a 7-hour bus ride because, although the long travel was over, it meant I’d have to jump to my feet and figure out where to stay and how to haggle with a tuk-tuk driver. It meant things would be a challenge again in a place I didn’t yet know.
But that’s never how my memories of a place are.
I remember the past as more beautiful than it was – we all do that. It’s kind of an amazing thing, isn’t it? The ability to romanticize one’s life into something that was perfect, and has the potential to be perfect in the future, too.
Ah, but the feeling. It’s truly strange. At no other point in time do I feel it than when I am on the cusp of leaving. I wish I could stay, but there’s a world to see, and I just have to keep going. I make inward promises to return, which sometimes I keep, but more often, I don’t.
That little dull ache never really fades, but it’s a side effect of this lifestyle: you can’t ever really count on feeling a sense of that same wonderment in a place again, or ceasing to miss a past when you swam under waterfalls, gazed a elephants, tasted passion fruit for the first time or realized you’d just eaten dog.
It’s not just those who travel perpetually who feel it. Moving house, town, country, and other major milestones all lead to this feeling. It’s the closing of a chapter, the turning of a page, the ending of something that was a big part of life.
I felt it heavily when I left Chengdu in China after remaining there for almost a month. It’s funny, but I almost never write about the big cities I stay in, even if, like in London, I spend a big chunk of time there. The little towns I spend less than a week in I somehow have the ability to write for ages about, but the places that begin to feel like home leave me speechless.
I developed a routine again in Chengdu. I cooked dinners, made friends who I saw on a daily basis, and asked myself if perhaps I could see a long-term future there. My first night in Kathmandu, all I could imagine were the people I had bade farewell, and what they must be doing at that very moment. I was also painfully aware that I didn’t fit into that picture anymore, and the past was past.
I didn’t know I’d love Chengdu so much. I never really see this sort of thing coming, and imprinting me so that I’ll never be the same again.
What in the world do they call this feeling?
It must be goodbye.
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