Goodbyes Part 1: McGill

With my visa and plane tickets in hand, and the vague knowledge of where I'll be spending my next nine months, it has started to become very clear to me that I'm actually leaving Montreal. As much as I'm very excited for my next adventure, saying goodbye to things and people I love is obviously a difficult thing to do.

I guess most people don't do well with goodbyes, but I'm especially horrible. I feel the need to cry at everything, and the inability to cry in front of people, which makes for a horrible combination. To give you an idea of how silly I can be, during my last driving lesson with this super awesome driving instructor I was super quiet and kept getting choked up when talking to him, only to return home and bawl for a good hour about the idea of never seeing him again. And this was a man whose family name I didn't even know. So obviously this next month of my life will be very hard because of this.

Today was my last day at McGill. It was kind of a weird feeling. I've pretty much hated McGill since day one. It isn't a bad school at all, but McGill brings about a whole new kind of bitter that I didn't know I had within me. McGill is overrun with rich non-Montrealers. I would always be jealous of how easy they seemed to have things: Not only were their parents paying for them to live and study far away from home, but they were paying for them to have so many freedoms that I was not allowed. And I really hated that. Perhaps that's why I became friends with so few people in university, because of my inability to adapt and my overabundant jealousy.

But I did make friends. And I did become, if not friend with, than admirers of, certain profs in my department. Because my department, no matter how shitty and decrepit its building is, is full of pretty cool people.

So, today, I presented my two Japanese teachers with gifts of gratitude for allowing me to take part in their classes, despite the fact that I pay no tuition, and they would be volunteering their time for the few things I submitted to them for correction. I was so worried about the quality of the message in the cards... Despite studying Japanese for years, my speaking and writing abilities are so very poor, and I was so worried that it would look like they had wasted so much time on me. But they both seemed so surprised and happy to receive my gifts, that I feel it went okay in the end. One of the teachers even sent me a thank-you e-mail, that obviously made me cry.

Because all I've been doing today is fighting back tears. I pretty much ran out of my last class today after giving my teacher her gift to avoid crying in class. For similar reasons, I didn't actually give a proper goodbye to a certain someone in my class either... rather just waved from the door as I made my escape. I fought back tears from McGill metro to Côte-Vertu... which is a pretty long journey for those of you unfamiliar with the Montreal metro system.

And all this over a school I never liked, and people who I barely knew. How the hell am I going to survive saying goodbye to my work, my friends, and my family?