A Diplomat’s Daughter’s Guide to Goodbyes
By Heather Suarez, featuring Julianna Twine
Considering my track record as a diplomat’s daughter, I am well-versed in goodbyes. I have perfected the art of socially acceptable tears—I recommend you save the uncontrollable weeping for the plane, or else your parents’ Facebook friends might be hesitant to upload the group photos on Facebook—and I know how to dredge up a smile for relatives while simultaneously thinking of how awful it was to leave your best friends after three years.
The intercontinental moves I experienced between the ages of 2 and 18 familiarized me with the loss of a world all at once instead of piece by piece. For most people, the pandemic wrenched plans out of their hands overnight. Suddenly graduation ceremonies, school plays, trips to see family and friends were all out of the question. The familiarity that came with crossing the street to get to your nearest subway station or the clattering of chairs as your classmates left English class was all gone. Entire routines had to be arranged around one family member, and that family member probably isn’t you.
The pandemic felt like an expansion of loss and a ticking time-bomb that would eventually yell, “Grieving time is up!” And when my best friend of three years announced that her mother’s posting would be over soon, I hadn’t realized how hard it would hit me. I mean, compared to the number of opportunities I’d lost and people who’d moved away and hadn’t kept in touch in 2020, I thought one more goodbye would be a piece of cake. After all, we had a global pandemic going on. Goodbyes were the new normal, weren’t they?
Spoiler alert: they were not.
The night before she left, my best friend texted to let us know that she still had errands to run and it seemed like she wouldn’t be able to meet up for the last time. “Let’s meet somewhere in between,” James, another friend of ours, suggested. “We could go to the Han River Park.” My sister frowned and said, “I’ve just had soccer practice. I’m not running around after 7 pm.” The three of us gathered adamantly in my living room before finally settling on video-calling. I woke to a message she’d sent in our group chat at 8 am. “I left something for you all inside [my old house’s] post box. All you have to do is go and get it.”
The train ride felt oddly stifling. None of us mentioned the fact that Gita was gone. Not because we’d already forgotten her, but because it felt like a perfectly ordinary afternoon. As if our best friend hadn’t gotten on a plane and flown 5,344 kilometers away. James said, “This feels like the time we went to Nami Island.” It did feel like the time we went to Nami Island, with the weather being uncharacteristically sunny and us running late as usual.
My sister peered at the mailbox and stuck a couple of fingers through the slot. By the time we figured out that we had to move to the other side of the wall to open the mailbox, I’d held my breath. My best friend had left a furry little handbag for me—a tribute to our shared love of Frozen 2, a purple purse for my sister, and letters for all three of us.
It’s not every day you try to cram three years into one letter, but as Rainesford Stauffer had written in her essay, How To Miss Someone , “these seemingly superficial ways of preserving memories [...] give you something to hang on to when your memory threatens to betray you with time and the missing feels too heavy to hold in your body.”
As I look through folder after folder of photos with crappy lighting, I realize now that we were inseparable. Not in a performative way that convinced people that we’d never be “one without the other” but in a way that made sense to us. Gita had been the person who shared her dosirak with me, the day I crashed her flag-hoisting practice. She had been the person I went to when I had my first heartbreak (and when I insisted on belting out just about every single soundtrack from A Star Is Born at Kondae’s karaoke rooms). She’d been the only person who could successfully persuade me into having my first Shake Shack burger even though I’d wrinkled my nose and said it was incredibly overpriced (don’t get me wrong, it totally was). She wasn’t just any person. She was my person.
It’s true that as a TCK, I tend to take goodbyes for granted, just as much as I accidentally take people for granted. But it had never occurred to me until we sauntered onto the sidewalk to take photos with our newfound keepsakes, that perhaps goodbyes stood as a reminder of how there were four faces in our photos instead of three, or how we would take up all the space when eating at a table with four seats. To sit in front of an empty chair piled with coats instead of my best friend felt like I’d defiled a shrine.
I like to think I’m “built different” and I’m well-prepared when it comes to goodbyes. In reality, I’m just like everyone else. I walk past couples sullenly with tear-stains on my mask and wonder why they have the audacity to hold hands and smooch in front of me. I am reluctant to tell other friends how I’m feeling because I want to keep as many memories of my best friend for myself. I find myself looking back and wondering if I should have been more selfish and made sure I spent every waking minute with Gita before she left—that way I’d have more things to remember.
But it is enough for me to know that even if photos don’t hug you back, they hold the potential of time travel. To know that there will be details that escape my memory, even when I’ve come up with a comprehensive list of all the times we’ve laid down a picnic and shared middle school memories. There will be times when I stumble upon a place we used to visit and just can’t resist the urge to text her, “Wish you were here.” But I’ll always remember the three of us cramming into the elevator of her apartment building, fingers clinging on to letters, throats too tight to speak.
The elevator doors opened and I wanted to laugh because we’d only gone up one floor. It wouldn’t hurt to take the stairs. But it hurt to hear my sister ask the long-feared question: “Where are we going?” and the hope in James’ voice as he said, “We’re going to see Gita.”