Eating popcorn for every meal because your out-of-town friend taught you how to pop it in a saucepan. Buying a pint of ice cream (marked down to $5, the fancy stuff) the week before you move from the country. Drinking Bundaberg Lemon Lime and Bitters from a green bottle, feeling like you finally could fit in with your drinking friends, even as you sip it alone at home on a Sunday night. Your hands just want something to hold. Clearing the bottom two shelves of your allocated kitchen space, wiping the wood down with vinegar solution. Remembering to rescue your tea strainer from the knife drawer.

Six boxes shiny with tape stacked up in front of an empty bookcase, a housemate’s inheritance. You must remember to tell the driver from the shipping company the odd way your house is on the street that is not listed in its official address. Using the brown paper side of old Christmas wrapping to pack up a gifted painting you can’t bring home. Another bullet point on the will of someone leaving after four years. Using your housemate’s furry pink Disney blanket after you’ve given your doona away. The two suitcases open in the corner, filled with the clothes you’ve doled out for your last month.

All these bus rides on routes I’ve never taken become newly significant. This morning on the 555 from Epping Plaza, I played peek-a-boo with a small girl in a pram. I was jealous of her red plaid shirt. I have passed through Lalor twice in the past two days, I have walked up and down High Street in Northcote and Westgarth twice in the past two days. I don’t know where else to go to see for the last time. I stand with my back to the road at the big roundabout in my university, holding an umbrella against the weak drizzle and staring at the moat. Last times and forever seem inconceivable and improbable. But I never want to take this bus home again.

Going to rehearsals for a play that opens the day I get on my flight home. Slipping my homemade postcards under the doors of absent lecturers, getting hugs from people I have never touched that way. Welling up, and shrinking back. Last minute connections like static electricity bridging two fingers – why did we not speak before, we could have been such good friends. Last days, two cakes, two gifts from the university gift shop and we all mean well. I leave in one week, less. I am excited and scared. I am excited and scared. I am terrified of leaving, of forgetting, of being forgotten, of being far away, of being lost and losing. I keep thinking I should be crying in the shower a lot more than I have (not at all) but the bus rides are too short to carry the sadness home.

Going away drinks six days before the flight. A good friend’s birthday party on the Saturday two days after my final hurrah. No second helpings, but none of us can’t help it, this calendar we hold to is strict and unforgiving. Make me stay. Keep me here. It’s all a little too late.

Goodbye, goodbye, hello again, I’ve just forgotten a cable, a cardigan, a card, one last hug and a kiss and yes how we will miss each other, who knows what I will do in the next few days and years, goodbye for real, now, for real.