I simply continued walking, one step after another, without a purpose but to move away from the one I loved most. I didn’t pause or look back, even as my eyes welled. I knew my dad would have wished for nothing but one last glimpse of me before I departed for a year.
We had shared the same roof until I turned 25. He meant the world to me. Yet, that late evening, I walked away without saying a proper goodbye. I can’t recall why, though. Perhaps I was trying to prove something to myself: that walking away is easier, that I could live all by myself despite not knowing how, and that he was wrong in his doubts about my choices. Regrets, how they burn us. The hardest part wasn’t leaving that day at all, but not turning back. Not giving him that one last smile. Perhaps it wouldn’t have fixed everything, but it certainly could have eased his mind that night.
Instead, I carried a troubled mind throughout my first and longest flight. The burden continued to weigh on me until after I landed in a foreign land, 8000 miles away from him, and knelt beside a clunky bed in a Comfort Inn and sobbed my heart out. I, later, discovered that he was amazed by how I bravely ventured away from him. He slept that night, believing I was not just strong but stronger than him.
<a longing when distance is thrown mercilessly>
