I've gotten close to a group of people, and met a bunch of others, and now I am gone again, geographically. The familiarity of this feeling dawned on me in a cab to the airport while making small talk with the driver. He told me about the relative number of Koreans in different places in the US. His daughter lives a stone's throw away from Central Park, in a historical building that she pays too much for to only have an elevator that fits three people. But hey, it's historical. Both the specifics of this conversation and its preceding events — who I had my farewell dinner with; what the dinner was; what American city the cab driver and I were discussing — were different, yet in form, they were similar to dozens of goodbyes I've said over the last two years. I didn't feel like myself, fully, until these events were set in motion; until I was put in motion. What I mean to say isn't that I suppress my true personality around other people; it's that there is nothing more natural and unchanged than setting off into the world alone. All of a sudden, there was no one else I could have relied on. I had to get myself to a place. After some bartering with Delta Airlines to get precheck added to my boarding pass that already had precheck on it, and dusting my fellow passengers in the Detroit airport only to see them make the same 30-minute layover,[^2] I did get to the place. I arrived differently than when I first arrived a year and change ago. I've absorbed, and read, and figured some stuff out, and gotten further from figuring some other stuff. And so it goes. And so it continues. [^2]: I arrived, panting, at A76, which is a number much higher than the gate I landed at. The flight attendant, nonplussed, looked up — "did you just get here from SFO?", "Yeah, did I make it?", "Yes, of course? Were you at the front? How did you get here so fast?", "I ran", "Oh. You must be in shape", "Yeah, I guess so" (*my heart was about to explode*)