O! say can you see?

How do I say goodbye to this country?

Each time I had asked myself this question earlier, I was certain that I would list my long account of travel and activity statistics in the country. The American firsts, the cars I drove and the ones I owned would surely be the meat of the matter.

But here now, I find myself recounting none of those as primary memories. In fact, I am struggling to come up with poetic and beautiful ways of explaining what exactly this great land meant to me and what it would continue to mean to me.

It’s late now. Even by my standards. My Holiday inn room is perfectly adequate but spending nights in a Hotel room in a town which I called home for over seven years makes it fairly weird. But the solitude of this place makes it a fitting milestone in what has been an absolutely amazing journey in the United States of America.

The last few days have been entirely swamped with tying loose ends. After eight years, I grossly underestimated how many of them I had left open. The utter stress of doing that has perhaps prevented me from dwelling on the magnitude of this change. Yet, constantly, my brain has been playing catching up. And the dawning of an exit is looming large with a trans-Atlantic plane acting as a hermitic seal for my thoughts.

Strangely, wrapping up here felt a lot like my first few months here. I am always looking to exaggerate on any drama. But this time, none of it was even remotely planned. It seems that I have come a full circle.

For starters, I am back in temporary housing. I visited the same D.M.V to renew my driving license that I had when I got my first one. I left an empty apartment behind sans the light fixtures in the exact fashion as I had moved in one. This Christmas too I had Chinese for dinner in the only open restaurant in town just like I had when I spent my first Christmas alone in Ann Arbor zombie land. I even cleaned up some of my work email in the G.G Brown building of the University of Michigan, much like I did a long time ago when I was a student here!

But this time around, the memories associated with these events were vastly different. Not because the places changed, but rather I had people around me. Good people and friends that I have had the pleasure of knowing over the years. Each night for the last few nights, I have been meeting a stream of friends on my way out. It’s staggering to think that your memory association with places is not with the quantifiable things you have done but rather with the vague faces that you will remember. For this, I will be eternally grateful.

This departure of mine; It feels different. There really isn’t sadness or regret. But rather with an yearning to move on, clearly knowing that the sack of people memories that I have collected over the years will remain squarely placed over my head. And that no baggage allowance on any plane or carrier would be able to restrict!

It took a while for me to call this place home. The initial struggles had me in doubts. Even when I got past those with financial payoffs, I still desperately sought emotional support. But this country forced me to grow up into adulthood. It also made me comfortable in my own skin. It taught me how it was perfectly ok to be alone on a weekend and yet be fairly pleasant. These are lessons that cannot be taught but only understood. A few years in I had begun to understand the depths of this country. While many just saw above the surface, I had plunged deep into the waters. Soaking the culture into mine, hybridizing my Indian identity with an American one. Until of course, I had reached a stage of emulsion. Where, if you tried, you could separate the two quantities but it would be rather pointless.

So, how do YOU say goodbye to this country?

Turns out, you don’t. If anything this circle has taught me is that I have lived my life in America to the fullest. It’s just that the circle had a circumference of eight years. At this point, I am off on a tangent; to another geographical geometry in Germany for three or so years. After which I am slated to return, a prospect which you can be sure of, wouldn’t take much convincing at all.

A goodbye, in this case, would just seem like a perfectly good waste of everybody’s time. Till we meet again, Miss U.S.A.