Temporary

There was a certain sadness in her eyes as she gazed out at the rich sprawl of greenery before the driveway. While small in scope and size, the garden was delightfully dotted with Birds-of-Paradise, and the lotus pond that she was standing near to shimmered in the settling sun.

Our luggage sat at the feet of the conceirge's stand. Hers was a large gym bag while mine was a backpackers' rucksack, and it was on which her bag rested against, the arrangement a parallel of their owners' poise just as she nudged a foot closer and rested her head on my shoulder. I pressed my cheek to her hair and took in her freshly-showered scent. Then, quite suddenly, she straightened herself and looked at me.

'Bye, bye,' she said.

The two words, so simple and so childlike in the way they were said, took me by surprise. She understood the pause in my expression, and continued.

'Why does it feel like we're always parting?'

She delivered that sentence with a tinge of sadness; in fact, she said it with resignation. It was a rhetorical question, and, while she was not expecting a reply, I felt a compulsion to heave a great sigh, for it summarized perfectly what I was feeling at that exact moment. But I merely smiled, for surely, even though it was a feeling we revisited so often, to have acknowledged it then would not have alleviated the ruefulness in any way.

I first felt this way when I stood by the kerbside of the road in front of the estate I live in, as we waited for a taxi; in six hours' time I would be on a flight out of here, departing just as a frisson of sparks had bridged the distance between us, and had lit the first tentative steps towards a blossoming romance earlier that very day.

This feeling – of always parting – resurfaced two weeks later when our first holiday trip came to a close. The return to normalcy in the wake of four whirlwind days of cross-country road trips and sightseeing was every bit an anti-climax, a snuffing of the senses, like the last dying ripples left behind by a skipping stone.

'Soon we won't be feeling this way,' I said, as I thought about Hong Kong. 'Soon we'll be closer than we've ever been before.'

She smiled. That made me smile in return, even though I knew we would be feeling the same way once again when our temporary relocation comes to an end.