on goodbyes

(the 2 bottom pictures are from this weekend, right before I said good bye to my friend in the middle, before she left to go to London)

This is hard. I am in the last 2 weeks of my life here in Spain and my heart literally aches when I think about saying good bye to friends and places here.

Saturday I went to Loja for the last time. Loja is the hometown of the three girls I lived with when I first moved here. Thru out this year and a half I have been there about 7 times. I have gotten to meet all of my friends’ friends and families there and experience many holidays there. This weekend I said goodbye to their familes, I said goodbye to the place.

Last April I wrote a blog about one of my friend’s grandmother who lives there (you should read it bc its really funny). We met my first time in Loja which was when I couldn’t speak any Spanish. She is blind and has a hard time hearing. But my friend told me that every weekend her grandmother asks about me. She wanted to hear my Spanish because she didn’t believe my friend when she told her that I speak well now. So the other night I saw her again, a year and a half later. I sat with her grandmother on the patio and talked, more like yelled as I was sitting right in front of her face. She was hilarious, her biggest worry was that no one in my country would understand me when I get back and speak Spanish to them, I told her many times that I planned on speaking with the people in my country in English. She couldn’t quite grasp that. She asked me, “What is “pan” in English? I said, “bread.” She said, “oh how difficult! I could never say that.” Hahah but I made her try, and she got it out after us all yelling “bread, bread, bread” to her. I said, “look grandma, you speak English now!” She just laughed and said, “look how good her Spanish is.” It was so cute, I laughed a lot with her as we had our yelling conversation in Spanish on a patio in Loja.

When I said goodbye to my other friends family, I told her dad that I always think of him every time I used the word, “trunk” in Spanish because he is the one who taught that word to me. I reminded him of night after my friends graduation in Granada her parents invited me to Loja and I told them I didn’t think there was enough space in the car and he said, “that’s okay Molly, we’ll just put you in the trunk!”

Every time I start to think about the things I want to tell my friends what all they have taught me about the world, God and life, every time I start to think of my last moments with my friends here I start to feel such a mixture of the pain of leaving and gratitude for what this has been.

It doesn’t help that I am especially sentimental about these kind of things. Like how hard it was for me to leave my college because I knew a stage of life was over. Now another stage of life is coming to a close, except it is harder because this place is not just a drive a way, it is on the other side of the world. But at least I can take something with me, I can take what these people have taught me about love and life back home.