i don’t want to say goodbye by Audrey C. '24

cw: death (after the horizontal line)

I remember the moment that the East Campus renovation announcement email hit our inboxes. I was a freshman. Covid pods⁠01 you got up to five other people who you could interact with normally; you had to remain socially distanced from everyone else were a thing. My podmates and I cried in each others’ arms, screamed profanities in the courtyard, maxed out the volume of the angstiest metal we could find, heartbroken at the thought of losing the very community we had just found.

Renovations actually got pushed back a year, letting me enjoy two and a half years at East Campus. Never before have I experienced such intense feelings of belonging and joy, tidbits of which I’ve documented on the blogs. Living at East Campus has taught me how to stand up for myself, hold others accountable, and take responsibility when I mess up. I’ve found a community to lean on for support and made my shoulder available for others to cry on. My friends have pulled me into adventures that would make for great stories in front of a fireplace fifty years down the line. As have many, I’ve adopted the mantra of “I’ll just make [insert yet another jank DIY thing] myself” when said thing does not currently exist in my possession.

Two Fridays ago, I threw most of my belongings in too many cardboard boxes. The dust on my walls and shelves traced out the silhouettes of what used to live on them, like ghosts. The circular base of a cat butt figurine. Rectangles of pictures from freshman year. I hate packing. It’s so physically tiring, but I also hate the way it shoves into my face, “you’ll never live here again.”

I anti-hazed⁠02 tEp is a co-ed fraternity that is very against hazing new <del>pledges</del> peldges (aka new members), so much so that peldges are entitled to politely anti-haze current members into doing tasks of their wishing. also i guess i'm a frat boi now :O Isabella ’24 into helping me carrying my boxes down two flights of stairs from Tetazoo and up five flights of stairs at tEp, where I’ll be living this summer and next year. I’m grateful that tEp, another tightknit and creative community, decided to take me in. I’m excited for what’s in store for me there. But I don’t want to say goodbye to East Campus.

I bumped into some of my graduating friends as I ran around campus taking care of moving out related errands. I wish I could sit down and have a real conversation, but a badly lit selfie and a quick hug would have to do. One day we’ll meet up again in whichever city we happen to be in at the same time and complain about shitty coworkers or the economy or whatever. But it stings not knowing when “one day” will be. I don’t want to say goodbye, unwilling to let go of the certainty that comes with “today.”

I spent all of Monday night finishing up two final projects. Notifications from both classes’ group chats went off the entire night, a periodic reminder that my time at East Campus was ticking to an end, that I’m stuck in my room shorting microcontrollers instead of late night baking in the chaotic Tetazoo kitchen for the last time.

I was dreading Tuesday night, where I’d have to fall asleep to an empty room with bare walls. So I didn’t, instead stumbling around hall in a sleepless stupor. At 6am Wednesday morning, I took one last glance at the East Campus that I knew and loved and left for the airport.

Four flights and three layovers later, I arrived in China. This trip was a “now or never” deal: my parents had wanted to make this trip after my high school graduation to visit extended family, but pandemic restrictions made getting a visa impossible until now. With rising political tensions between China and the US and Taiwan, who knows for how long borders will remain open. This was reason I left MIT so early, before I could properly say goodbye to the people and places I cared about.

This trip has been full of hellos. I’ve met so many first/second/third cousins and great aunts and uncles for the first time in recallable memory. It’s an unfamiliar but exhilarating feeling, experiencing what like it’s like to have a large extended family in the same area. Squeezing twenty people around the same table in a restaurant. Listening to relatives drunkenly recall stories from childhood. Walking two blocks to one relative’s place, and another two blocks to a different relative’s place.

But I keep thinking about this trip as one for saying goodbye. The last time I visited China prior to this time was ten years ago, with one of my most vivid memories being my maternal great grandparents waving goodbye from their apartment’s window. I remember thinking that this can’t be our last goodbye, but in a few days we’ll be setting up their shared gravestone. A lot has happened during the pandemic and me going off to college that my parents has shielded from me: I didn’t know that my maternal great grandma had passed until I asked my mom how she was doing multiple months later. I didn’t know until now that my paternal grandma’s health has declined so much from when I’ve last seen her.

“Talk to your grandma as much as you can while you’re here, okay?” I can read between lines to understand what my mom is actually trying to tell me.

A wave of guilt washed over me for having complained earlier about missing end of the year celebratory events, forgoing a Spinning Arts retreat, and OX’ing a class to go to China. I know that I can be upset about multiple sucky things at once, even if they are of different magnitudes of sucky, but guilt colors a lot of my relationship with my grandparents.

My paternal grandparents lived with my parents and me in the US until my sophomore year of high school. I could go on and on about how they did so much for me growing up. But frankly I was an awful, unappreciative granddaughter, and there’s so much I have to say about this that will stay in my private notes.

These past few days, I’ve been trying to talk my grandparents about anything, holding onto the time I have left with them like water in my hands. I’ve babbled about Spinning Arts, a tailless cat I met in Wales, how I injection molded the 2.008⁠03 Design & Manufacturing II yo-yos that I had brought over. Even though my explanation of injection molding was littered with a lot of “um I don’t know how to say this in Chinese,” somehow it was easier to say than “wo ai ni” — “I love you.” Chinese families seldomly say “wo ai ni” out of the Confucian belief that actions speak louder than words, and the few times I’ve been told “wo ai ni” growing up felt like flimsy ribbons dressing up awkward apologies.

But I’d much rather say “wo ai ni” a hundred times over than my last “zai jian” — “goodbye.” Zai jian translates directly to “see you again,” which feels cruel to say if I can’t guarantee for it to be true.