twenty one: end.

i didn't mean for it to end.

your eyes, your touch, your laughter, your everything--it's still stuck in my mind. the past four months has been a rich experience for all of us, not just myself as an individual. from strangers to friends, from friends to family--we were almost inseparable. we were so oblivious of what was about to come. we could not do more but cry, but hug, but embrace one another for as long as we thought we could bear; the end was nigh for us, and it was time to pack up and go home.

home.
the word itself seems to have lost its meaning, seeing how we've been home together for the past hundred days or so. home was no longer a physical place to all of us, and we understood it. home was the same understanding of being together, despite not being together physically, but to have had been together at some point of our lives, to have our lives intertwined and stubbornly refused to be let go. we know what home is. home is where we are, whenever we think of one another, whenever our shared memories are brought back to our minds, fresh as it was when it was created, and when we remember, we know we are home.

thank you, for being as curious as i was, as entirely oblivious of other worlds' cultures as i was. i know now that this experience is something other people will never be able to understand at all, no matter how great storytellers we may be. they were not where we were for the past months, and they were not us.

know that this is something only we share, something that only each and every single one of us has, each an entirely unique experience, although similar to one another's.

thank you for being my brothers and sisters, for putting up with my eccentricity, my quirkiness, my certain violence and my pride. thank you for being my brothers and sisters, forevermore.

we didn't mean for it to end, but it had to, and we had thought it was an ending we saw, but it was not. it was simply a story branching out to even more stories, and now each and everyone of us has the responsibility of keeping our stories alive.

home is in our hearts.