***

Saying goodbye is hard.

There are a lot of situations that end with the word "departure". On one hand, it's about breakup, betrayals, or layoffs, they break your heart all the same, make you feel sweaty and make your knees weak. On the other hand, it's during an emotional sendoff, or simply about moving on to another happy life. As for me, I had to depart from a group a while ago while trying to help my family with their illness. It's not fair, but I thought to myself: "It is what it is".

But deep within, I was terrified. The thought of leaving someone or being left behind, despite their mistreatments and their putting words in my mouth, really hurt. It had happened before in my lifetime, and I will meet more of it. My emotions became my own.

I know I have flaws, I know that I made mistakes, and I took responsibility. But the way I was treated like an outlier outside of work feels entirely personal.

When that happened, I departed from the predicament and went into a different mindscape, sort of like escapism. It's not a healthy thing to do, but in the worst situations, would you resort to your own mindscape as well?

I tried to cope by immersing myself in the nature of the world, instead of the people around it. The cityscape, the artificial rivers, the passing boats, airplanes, etc. Anything that didn't involve making friends and watching as they slowly thought of me as an outlier was good enough for me. This was my own form of therapy, rather than screaming in bed all day or banging my head against the wall. I didn't have the finances or the time needed to seek help, nor do I need to focus on a relationship - all I needed then was to be left alone.

But that doesn't really align with other people's expectations of me, so I was dragged back into reality - one full of bleakness and full of people projecting their problems onto me. I know they're stuck in a loop - a life of numerous problems, always more about their responsibilities than their own well-being. But is it really necessary to drag me in too? Stuff like this also happens in most social media circles I'm in as well, and I always feel powerless to stop living like this. A never-ending hell that people never seem to escape. Right now, it seems like there's nothing I can do to amend myself.

***

Every day, I came home to the sight of airplanes flying over the purple, hazy sky. I thought about how they depart and arrive at their destinations. Airplanes, like any other inventions made by man, have a long history of failures. But because of those failures, the industry was able to make airplanes fly through all kinds of weather safely. I like to connect that sort of path to my own journey; how I have to go through hardships, sometimes even failures, to reach the future I want. It is always uncertain how the process will go, but knowing the aviation industry was able to keep its future steady, I can do it too. Persistence reveals the path, eventually.