6/26-27: the night before and the day of
JUN 26, 2016 (NIGHT) â JUN 27, 2016.
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Only heavens know when I will be back here again, so might as well breathe in as much American air as possible while I still had the chance.
The email came three weeks prior. A cordial paragraph as a formality, then a Word document detailing all the information needed for the departure. June 26, Seattle University dorms by 7.30PM, which was just a few blocks from home. We had to stay the night there because the bus taking us to the airport was going to be very, very early in the morning. Not that all flights for all these students of different origin countries would leave in the morning, but this was just for ease; accommodating the earliest flight in the group, packing them all together in a dorm the night before, on a bus the next day, and in a conference hall in the airport where the students would leave group by group, throughout the entire day.
My flight was June 27, 17.35 Seattle time. Not the last batch, as far as I can remember, but pretty late nonetheless. I got my portion of witnessing people leave, bit by bit, person per person; the conference hall gradually shifted from eager crowd buzz in the morning, to relatively quiet in the afternoon.
Despite it being a literal five-minute walk from home to Seattle U, we took the car anyway, because luggage.
When we got there, several students and their host families were already there. Not only the kids from my chapter, but from other chapters that Iâve met before.
So we set our luggage, sort things out with Brian Quinn, our coordinator, and chatted with everyone for a bit.
Until the host families were told to leave.
Man, that was hard.
Correction, I didnât know how hard it was.
Because, like, everyone was so chirpy and everything up until that point. The coordinator sort of ruined the party for everybody, but he was not to blame after all.
So there we were, every exchange student on the premises hugged their host families, exchanging last words, all stages of crying.
Ericâmy host dadâand I werenât the sappy type of people ourselves, so I didnât know how I would come out of this until I hugged Eric and Karen both, them sandwiching me.
I never realized how hard it was to simply mutter the words, âThanks a lot, guys,â and that was when my voice broke.
I couldâve had an entire chapter, pages and pages on how grateful I was to be with them, to be showered with all the fun and kindness, to have unprompted and unexpected life lessons throughout our daily activities, to experience their strengths and flaws and for them to experience all of mine,
but I was neither strong nor eloquent enough to do that. Instead, I had those four words that, to me, carried all those hypothetical chapters, and I could only hope that they understood.
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Not taking the sadness for granted, but since it was basically a venue filled with teenagers, furthermore teenagers that had had their fun together several times throughout the year, we didnât stay in the somber mood for so long after our host families had left. But maybe, in the back of our minds, we knew that this was not the night to be spent in sadness, but rather to have as much fun as we possibly could while we still had the chance.
So there we were. Chugging down snacks and hot chocolate (and the whipped cream), exchanging giftsâTaryn had two wood carving of the continent of Africa which she passed around for everyone to signâcarrying flags for no apparent reason, hanging out on the picnic table outside despite the darkness, reminiscing everything we could reminisce about under the rainless Seattle summer sky.
We even did this: I forgot who suggested it, but someone pitched an idea to make a table with our bodiesâso four people (but it could be done with more than four) would start in a sitting position, then they would lean back to rest their heads on the next personâs thigh, then another person would remove the chairs we were sitting onâand we were intrigued with the possibility that we could link our bodies together and we would not fall off even after the chairs were removed. (which I tried for the first time and was seriously shocked that it worked)
(see if you can spot all of us freaking out and I tried to hide my freaking out face)
Just a fun little superficial thing that was irrelevant but fun nonetheless. The screams that ensued before this picture was taken, as someone else pulled the chairs off our butts.
Then we binge-watched High School Musical movies in one of the dorm rooms. It was a night everybody swore off sleeping, but I think we dozed off in the middle of the movie marathon.
Didnât matter. We had to get ready by 4am anyway. So maybe that was, like, one or two hours of blissful shut-eye.
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To think about it, I can still remember Kira saying âIâm so tiredâ, not only on this day but in general, since I heard it in school every ten minutes for those eight hours anyway like itâs a constant prayer that got us through each day. Kiraâs especially because of the German accent that always loomed from behind every time she said it.
We were no longer in partying mood. It was obvious that everyone was tired.
(but not for long)
The bus took us to Sea-Tac Airport and we spilled out of the bus and beelined to the conference roomâactually it might have been two connected large conference roomsâAFS had booked for us for the whole day. In the rooms were several round tables and chairs not enough for everybody (and most ended up sprawled sitting and hanging out on the floor anyway) and tables of assortments of snacks and tea and coffee.
We entertained ourselves with bread and chips and cookies and tea and coffee and whatever, then we quickly settled in our own territories for the whole day (or, at least, until our respective boarding times)âI settled under a table with Gretar and Kira (donât even ask me how we ended up there).
First things first after getting foodâI pulled out my laptop to watch something, then pulled out my phone to call one of my relatives to wish them a happy birthday (despite it wasnât their birthday yet at home, but I wouldâve been on the plane already when their actual birthday came).
Needless to say, it was an uneventful Monday. Sure, we all chatted with each other and everything, but in the end, we were not going to chat for the entire day, so we were left to our own devicesânapping, scrolling, watching movies.
And I guess the bit that made the day not exactly a jubilant one was the part where every couple hours or so, an AFS volunteer announced that it was the boarding time for a certain group of people from certain countries. Like, letâs say, the volunteer would call that it was time for the Thailand batch to leave, and then the Thai kids would get up, and they would say goodbye and hug their dearest friends and cry, and the rest would empathically say goodbye from the distance, and they would wave goodbye to the general audience, then they would leave the room, and the door would click shut, and the emotions would linger for a few minutes, and then we would get back to where we were before, except with fewer people.
Thatâs how it went, repeatedly, in cycles.
And finally, it was my time, as the only Indonesian in the batch, along with some other people from other countries with similar boarding times and neighboring gates.
No, we were not ugly crying. It was sad (who am I kidding?) but somehow these Seattle chapter kids had always gotten a positive energy when together, and all we had been doing this past year was having fun anyways, so when we looked at each other, we only thought of the happy memories we made together. At least thatâs how I see it.
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All the 30-minute-long bus rides to and from school gave me nothing but time to think. Closer toward the end of the year, I started thinking about the end and what it means to live here and, eventually, leave here. It made me think about the friendships I have formed, as little and faint as they might be, and at the time, my emotional self thought that life wouldnât be so good without these people anymore, and more so, Iâd have to go back to my old life, where everyone has expected my old unchanging self, and be voided of all these wondrous thingsâsights, sounds, smells, taste, feels, emotionsâthat these past 9 months have offered to me on a silver platter.
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The next couple of hours went in a blur. After I said my goodbye, I walked out of the conference room with a bunch of other studentsâsome to different gates, some shared a flight with me to Dubai and we would part from there to our own respective home countries. My gate, if I recall correctly, was at the end of the long hallways of gates (which was not very big in retrospect, concerning Sea-Tac as an international airport). I sat and waited, I ate snacks, and as the speaker called for my flight, I rose up from my seat and made a beeline with everybody else to board the flight.
After the lights on the plane were turned off, leaving dim emergency lights, and we were thousands of feet into the air, I started crying.
Oh, yeah, I cried. Hard. Why wouldnât I?
I read the card that Jenny and Seth and their kids Cosmo and Harper had given me, a card of goodbye wishes that everybody in the family had signed, and then I read the letters Karen and Eric had written separately. It was one of the hardest letter-reading Iâve ever experienced, maybe, because it was dark and I had to fight through the blurs of my tears to make out the words. Then I took out the photobook Karen and Eric had printed for me, which had photos of us on our road trip and other random moments at home, then I cried some more.
Lastly, I took out a small notebook I got during Rainier Beach Bloc Party, in which I had written random things ranging from notes during a BLOC party lecture, motivational quotes Iâve gotten in random places, and a live description of a really boring Advisory class. I wrote, under the most minimal light, a love letterâthe things Iâve felt and things I wanted to say but couldnât because, no matter how many times I had thought about it, in the end, they ended up sinking, stone-cold at the back of my throat.
So I wrote it, a love letter that would never be delivered.
Then I put everything away and cried some more.
I was grateful for two things: that the two consecutive seats next to me were empty (I sat in the row of four in the middle of the plane and I got the aisle seat on the left), and that if anybody had heard me trying to sob as silently as I possibly could, they had left me alone.
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When I finally landed in Dubai, once again in the same airport after nine months, I waited for my Indonesian friend Obit to arrive at the gate of our next flight to Indonesia (which would be in a few hours), and when I saw her running, we hugged so tight, so good to be speaking Indonesian again, this time no more feeling self-conscious toward the people around us.
It was the busiest airport after all. Hence: nobody cared.
But still, it was Dubai. And by this, I mean that when Obit and I were walking through the busy halls and walkways with no particular destination in mind, I heard the sound of azan blasting through the speakers, everywhere, all at once, and it was music to my ears.
(also a little funny moment when Obit grumbled because a janitor by the prayer room was either giving her a judging side-eye or confirming to her that this room was a prayer roomââwhat, just because Iâm wearing shorts, Iâm not allowed to pray?â)
So, uh, yeah. The seven-hour flight back to Jakartaâand then from Jakarta to Surabaya just because we were coincidentally headed to the same cityâwas filled with catching up. Getting used to this mother tongue again. Just like when we walked aimlessly around Stanford a couple months back.
Surabaya, as we all know, is known for its three suns. Despite the dark night and the three suns were nowhere to be seen, it was hard to ignore the humid hotness slapping our Americanized-for-the-last-nine-months physiology.
But who cares about that when youâve got your family, the dearest ones youâve left thousands of miles away for almost a year, waiting at the gate for you.
So⊠there we were. We were farewelled by our families in the land of the free, only to be welcomed by the other one in this exquisite archipelago we came from. (dare I say, our home country. But now we have two home countries, so maybe that term is now up for debate.)
Sad of letting go? Of course. But exciting times ahead? Sure. Twelfth grade and all that, and most importantly, readjusting to the lifestyle we were used to for the first 17 years of our lives that we have not practiced for the last year.
But we can take baby steps for that. For now, Obit and I need to sleep off the jetlag.
Thanks for reading. I'll see you later.
-NS
