It is my last afternoon in Golden, CO. I’m sitting by a window in a café in the small downtown, staring out at the clouded skies, at the still air and the gently moving leaves.

Tomorrow I’ll head out from here and move over to another world. A part of me will stay back in Golden, watching the sun rise from beyond the rocks, lingering in the dorms and the classrooms and will get replaced with something different, hopefully better; and as the memory of all that we were fades, we’ll move on building our lives with the bonds we’ve created and the friendships we’ve made.

Suddenly, the speaker overhead starts playing my favorite songs from Howl’s Moving Castle. Not too long ago I had screened this movie in the Brown Colloquium Room. I had gotten teary-eyed then, and I’m teary-eyed now. I need to stop doing whatever I’m doing, pick up my pen and start scribbling. But what do I write about? I’m so overwhelmed with emotion; there is so much to write about but I’ll never be able to articulate what I truly want to say. I get paid to teach math at Mathcamp but really I only come here to learn, about life but mostly about myself. Perhaps over the year, when I’m more calm and relaxed, I’ll reflect and write about what really is it that I take away from this place. For now, I’ll be sly and borrow somebody else’s words that say a lot about how I feel about saying goodbye.

“What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier?
Each moment seems split in two;
melancholy for what was left behind
and the excitement of entering a new land.”
– The Motorcycle Diaries