Saying Goodbye Without Saying GoodbyeHangout with my Graduating Sis!

There’s a specific kind of afternoon that only happens once. You don’t know it while it’s building. You only feel it after, when the light has changed and everyone has gone home and you’re sitting with the quiet of it.

Today was that afternoon.

Exams are finally over. The seniors finished everything, IB, AP, all of it, and the rest of us just wrapped up finals too. For months we had been living side by side, sharing the same walls, the same sleepless nights, the same small conversations that stretch past midnight. And somewhere in all of that, without planning it, these people became mine.

We went for sushi first. Sat around the table longer than we needed to, letting the conversation drift back to the beginning, back to the inside jokes that don’t translate outside this group, back to the moments that were painful when they happened but somehow feel softer now. Nobody said this is the last time. We didn’t need to.

Then came the TikToks. They sound like nothing when I try to explain them, just trends, just videos. But they weren’t random at all. All year, whenever something funny came up, someone would say we should film that one day. And we never had the time. Today was finally that day. So we filmed all of them, one after another, laughing too loud in the corner of Molly Tea, and I kept thinking this is exactly what we were saving it for.

The last stop was the photobooth. Because some things need to exist physically. A photo you can hold is different from one sitting on your phone. It doesn’t get buried. It just stays.

They are each leaving somewhere different now. The States won’t hold this group the same way anymore. None of us really knew what to do with that, so instead we made a day full enough to carry forward.

I have been far from home for a long time. But somewhere along the way, without noticing, I built another one here.