Saying Goodbye to Friends


This week was particularly difficult emotionally. We sat our final exams on Friday, and despite the fact that we have another week of instruction left, the reality of so many friends’ imminent departure has begun to set in. On Monday, the day after my birthday and before my friend Alison’s birthday, Alison, Lucas, Joelle, and I went out for dinner. The following day, I invited Lane and Jacob over to my apartment to help me eat some peach buns for my birthday. Kuang Laoshi had explained to us that it is customary to eat buns shaped like peaches for one’s birthday, in reference to the peaches of immortality (the same ones that Monkey – or Sun Wu Kong – ate in Heaven, thus angering the whole celestial host in Journey to the West).

Friday was the last time when our little board game club met in the presence of all of its original founders. Joelle and Lucas are set to leave for home next week, and many friends we made along the way came to bid them a final goodbye. In fact, board game club has grown quite substantially and at the height of the evening, there were nine of us altogether playing Bang and Fishbowl at Lucas’s apartment. We played almost until midnight, when all of us were drowsy and hardly on top of anything that was happening, and yet we could not bear to part from each other.

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