ETD: One Hour

It is the last day.  Everything has carried with it a sense of finality; yesterday we said goodbye to our first friend departing, and today there will be more.  Last night we had our goodbye party, and we danced all night.  It was the best way to end things.  I did not dance suicidally bad and thus it was one of the most successful dance nights of my life.  I withdrew from time to time just to watch the group interact, as I've been doing for the last week or so, and enjoyed it.  It won't happen again, the way it is now; we'll see each other again, pockets of us surely, but the group is its own dynamic.  We are Multisa, the Multisa Family, and the time has come to leave on our jet planes and go back to our real lives.  It's sad, I suppose, but every good thing ends and if it wasn't today it'd be tomorrow, next week.  Truth is, it's now, and there's nothing to do about it but enjoy the last few hours and memories we have with the people who have become so dear.  Imagine this, that you were with fourteen people day in and day out for over four months, living in a completely foreign and exciting and dynamic environment, spending time together everyday, becoming friends who are so close they'd (in purely hypothetical terms) give each other tattoos on their rumpuses, whose time was from the beginning set and limited but who carried on with each other impressively, who at the end would scatter in an America diaspora, never to be reunited as a whole again.  There is only, in this situation, to treasure the crazy time we had.  That I will do, and I will miss my South American family.  These will be the memories and the times that hit the hardest when they bring themselves back into my consciousness.  But the absence of friends only brings into focus that which we hold most dear about them, to paraphrase Gibran...

My bags are packed, I'm ready to go...