I’m Good at Saying Goodbye

After stacking motorbikes and removing helmets, we shuffled into a dimly lit room and sat on worn couches. We didn’t mind the red wine stains or the ripped carpet. We smiled at the woman behind the bar, shook her hand, and tried to remember the Indonesian word for evening greetings.

Shisha XL was our spot: our nights either started or ended there. The shisha lounge is where most of us turned 18 that year. And the last place we were all together.

I’m good at saying goodbyes; I know how the routine goes. I have a map of every departure terminal in the back of my head and a mental filing cabinet filled with scenes of last touches in airports, of running alongside the car until it turns the last corner and I’m left out of breath, arms outreached trying to pull that last moment close. But just because I’m practised doesn’t mean it gets any less bittersweet.

Raised by parents with perpetually itchy feet, we were always on the move. A year or so was the longest I ever spent in one house. Always joked about was the idea of simply packing up a few boxes and leaving our small beachside Australian town. But until 16, it was simply that: a joke. Until it wasn’t. I woke up one day and it was happening. We were packing our bags and driving towards the airport, this time, without a return ticket. My sister and I were quickly enrolled at an international school on the small island of Bali.

After attending six different schools, you get the hang of slotting yourself into whatever friend group has space for you, knowing that in a year or so you will be on to the next one. After a while, you stop bothering to form close connections, as lingering in the back of your mind is the knowledge that soon you will be leaving.

After my first day at my new school, I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who just like me, knew this feeling, this familiar reality. These kids were all good at saying goodbye. All of us third-culture kids, who knew the transient routine of introductions, how to quickly form friendships and the inevitability of having to part ways. These connections were special, formed stronger on a foundation of mutual understanding that even if we would eventually have to say goodbye, we wouldn’t let that affect the memories we still had time to make.

And then just as suddenly as it began, it was over. We were turning 18, graduating, going our separate ways.

The night we said goodbye for the last time was one I will never forget.

The only thing we cared about was all being together. The air made my hair smell like sweet smoke, like green apple and licorice. The candle on the table threw tiny holes of soft light around the walls, and onto the maroon fabric that hung from the roof. All I could hear was the laughing, the distant guitar strums from the other side of the room and the bubbling of breath through the shisha pipe.

Someone had bought jugs of yellow beer that quickly went warm, but we drank them anyway. Here, cups did not belong to any one person and perhaps this, the swapping of spit through glass, is the thing that made us a family, or maybe it’s when Kim cried at quarter to 12 at the thought of losing nights like these. We piled onto the couch with her, limbs tangled and breath hot and sticky. We were silent. By then we were the only ones in the shisha lounge; we tended to do that, take over. We listened to her weep, our bodies breathing as one. Some eyes closed while some stared into the slow dusty smoke. To signal the end of the night, the boys walked out one by one and we followed, spilling out onto the soccer field and under the night sky and onto the rest of our lives.