Departures

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days have one job, and everything else is just filler around it. Today was that sort — the packing, the last errands, the slow accumulation of things that had to happen before the one thing that actually mattered. Irfan's off to London tonight, and the whole day arranged itself around that fact whether it meant to or not.

The packing itself got sorted during the day, which spared everyone the particular chaos of last-minute zip-wrestling an hour before leaving for the airport. I went about the morning's work as usual — rounds, the ordinary shape of a working day — though with half an eye on the clock in a way that doesn't normally happen on a Friday. Some days you're present for the whole of them. Today I was present for most of it and quietly counting down through the rest.

Home earlier than usual, because there was somewhere to be and traffic to be respected. The drive to KLIA was slow, the way it generally is at that hour, everyone else apparently also headed somewhere important, or at least driving as though they were. Still, we reached with time to spare, which meant no scrambling, no last looks at the departure board through breathless urgency — just the ordinary business of getting there properly, for once.

Dinner was the four of us, which doesn't happen as often as it should, and certainly not often enough to take for granted. There was a particular texture to it — nothing said out loud about it being a send-off dinner, but everyone quietly aware that it was. Good conversation, the sort that fills a table without needing to address the thing everyone's actually thinking about.

Then it was time, and he went in. The flight was delayed slightly, which is either a small mercy or a mild cruelty depending on how you're inclined to view extra waiting on a night like that — a bit more time in the airport, a bit less finality to the goodbye, though the goodbye had already happened by then in all the ways that count.

Home after, to a house with one fewer occupant for the foreseeable future. Anita wants his room left exactly as it is over the weekend — nothing tidied, nothing rearranged, no rush to make the absence official just yet. I understand it completely. There's a difference between a room that's simply empty and a room that's been cleared out, and she's not ready for the second one. Neither, if I'm honest, am I.

So: a day built entirely around one departure, handled properly, without fuss, and landing somewhere quieter than usual by the time it was done. He's on his way. The house will get used to it. Not tonight, though.