too good at goodbyes

As this year nears its end, I thought it’d be fitting to write about endings. In hindsight, it seems reclusive to let this be my first post ever, but oh well, I promised honesty.

My parents are incredibly compassionate people, which makes them very dedicated doctors. They would leave whatever they were doing to tend to medical emergencies that obviously held no regard for dinners, bedtimes, and birthdays, especially ones of my mom’s profession. I don’t mean to pry, but baby Suhani took it as a personal rejection. I have been told when I was a child, I cried an obscene amount when they had to leave, but from my memory, I had gotten used to it. I learnt at an early age that the world doesn’t revolve around me and that you cannot expect people to always be around when you need them. An added benefit was that my brother and I developed a very strong, nurturing, and loving relationship with our grandparents. Some of my most cherished memories are from the summer vacation trips we took with them - sometimes to the US to visit kaka and sometimes to our ancestral home in our village.

When I was in the 7th grade, just as my adolescent brain gained some sensibility, my brother, who is now my best friend, left for college on another continent. At that time, I loved him as a sister loves a brother, but to my 13-year-old self, he was just a stranger I had to share everything with. We became friends a few years later. Now he is one of my pillars of strength, and I cannot imagine my life without him.

After graduating high school, I bid farewell to my closest friends with whom I had practically shared my childhood with as they too moved away for college, and I decided to stay back and study in my hometown. Since then, there have been more goodbyes than I can count.

My brother returned home after 7 years and left again to pursue a PhD in Europe.

Last year, my grandmother passed away during the second wave of covid. I did not see it coming and am still devastated.

This year I decided that I needed a break from the college hustle. I am currently on a gap year. I plan on returning and finishing the course, but I will graduate with a different batch. Not the people whom I started this journey with. I went from spending eight-plus hours every day together to not seeing most of them at all.

The gist of these lengthy accounts is that I have experienced way too many goodbyes to not be good at them. There’s a hole in my heart for every person I’ve lost or parted ways with, for every meaningful relationship that doesn’t exist anymore. It has come to a point where it feels like my heart has become the leftover dough after you have carved out all the cookies.

This is not a sob story. The takeaway, if you let me, is the cookies. I have met so many wonderful people, and I have loved and felt loved. Isn’t love the point of it all?

One of the bittersweet truths of life is that love and joy cannot exist without grief and hurt. I am grateful to have the capacity to experience both; for that reason, there will always be enough dough to carve out one more cookie. Here’s to the cookies: chocolate chips, Oreos, nankhatais, jam-filled ones, simple butter ones that melt in your mouth, and even oatmeal raisins.