In Which I'm Awful At Good-Byes

Almost two weeks ago, I boarded a train that I thought would take me to Budapest, and I thought would have beds available. Instead, I ended up curled up on a couchette in an empty train compartment at half past midnight, trying my best to fall asleep with my head on my backpack.
Sometime soon thereafter, another girl boarded the train and asked if she could share my compartment. It was dark and I couldn't see her well, but she seemed to be in her early to mid-twenties, with long dark hair and several enormous bags. She explained that she had spent the previous two and a half years studying in London, and was now returning to her home town in Bulgaria to do something, she wasn't sure what yet. I explained that I was in a similar situation, drifting around for a month before I return home for an uncertain future. We spent almost two hours in the relative dark, waiting for our passports to be stamped and examined by people on both sides of the border, talking about travel, London, and our mutual uncertainty. "I think," she said at one point, "the more you travel around, the less you know where you belong, you know what I mean?"
I know exactly what she meant. Those words have stuck with me for the past few weeks, rolling around in my brain as I traipsed around Europe. Maybe they don't seem terribly profound quoted on my blog, but from a stranger in a dark train in the middle of the night, they take on a sort of eerie quality of truth.
In the past five years, I have lived in a more diverse assortment of places than most people see in twenty. New York, Iowa, London, Greece. I don't think I'll ever get sick of seeing new places, but I am sick of saying goodbye to places I love. I'm not tired of going, but I am tired of leaving. I'm tired of missing places.
But that's too bad, and it's too late; wherever you are, there's always something to miss, and I'm about to find myself with a whole new life to long for and miss.
I can remember a lot of lasts in the past few years- last walks through Manhattan before leaving for a semester in Iowa, last blueberries in Maine before leaving for England, last bus trips down Piccadilly before leaving for the US, my last weekend in college with my last night at the Down Under Pub, my last jog in Riverside Park before leaving for Greece, my last dinner of Peruvian chicken before the plane took off. I look back on all these things, and I come to an inevitable conclusion; the last time you do something is just like all the times before, but way more depressing.
There's something awful about doing something and knowing you won't be doing it again anytime soon. I even remember turning in my last college term paper, a long treatise on James Joyce that had given me a decent number of headaches, waiting for the relaxation that inevitably comes with finishing a large task, and just feeling a strange bittersweet longing for all my late nights with piles of notes in front of the computer screen. I hate that feeling. I hate it so much that I'd almost rather not have the chance to say goodbye.
And so, with two days before lift-off, I'm not going to think about how this might be my last taverna meal, or my last ride on the 58 bus, or my last dip in the Aegean sea. I'm not going to walk down Tsimiski for the last time, or buy my last bottle of retsina, or take one last look at the white tower. Thinking about these things that way makes me feel like an inmate on death row. I'm just going for a walk in the city where I still live. I'm just enjoying myself and seeing my friends here. I'm just taking another flight on Tuesday, that's all.