ara ara ara?

The Last Day at work has come and gone. It was an experience of time stretching and jiggling and vanishing without warning.

Biking to work, I chose the longer path - the quieter one with much less traffic and more nature, and I pedaled and remembered and tried to memorized and then found myself slipping into a far more mundane mindset. Worrying about one more piece of bad news seen on Twitter. Thinking about the books I'd just finished. Flashes of annoyance at other cyclists and the not-quite-rain that slowly soaked my jeans and then vanished to leave me sweating in the rain gear I'd changed into under an awning.

In the office, I alternated between answering the kind of queries I've been dealing with for over four years now, and training my replacement, and tidying up my desk for the new PhD student who is starting on Monday.

I spent quite a while ripping out the wire spine of notebooks both big and small. All those to-do lists, all the meeting notes, all the bolded emergencies and quotidian scribbles that was the past fifty or so months all sunk into the maw of the confidential waste bin, down to the last page in my last notebook that had the day's tasks listed on it. The wires almost all went into the office bin, except one I sculpted into a scraggly heart and gave to my IT tech buddy who teared up back when I first told her I was leaving. (When I went up to turn my work pass cards in I saw it taped to the IT office door.)

There were the last of many thousand cups of tea and hundreds of lunches from the M&S and then the first of many hugs.

I wrote the traditional departmental farewell email, and teared up.

I cried hugging the postdoc who is one of the sweetest men I know, and then we laughed talking about his future puppy and my current cats.

I didn't cry hugging the director, but I was deeply moved that he took time out of a schedule I have tried squeezing meetings into often enough that I know how very full it is to see me and the young woman who is taking over my role in his office just to say goodbye to me and to welcome her. And yes, he did hug me, and I'm so glad I got the chance to thank him because I've always been grateful to work somewhere with such a positive and supportive culture. (My replacement was mildly astonished - she said on her last day, the director of her old department had popped in to ask her office a question and had blanked on her name...)

Somehow morning cycle and lunch and cleaning and hugs turned the day to evening and I was walking hand in hand to my wife to a pub - apprehensive and anxious because I am uncomfortable in pubs and dislike being the centre of attention - where she and I were both having our traditional goodbye drinks.

There were more familiar faces, including two professors and my manager and some of my favorite postdocs and it was a small but cheerful gathering at the end of the row of tables reserved by my wife's much bigger party and people kept wanting to buy me drinks and I forgot to be anxious as attention drifted away from myself and (half shouted - I still dislike pubs) conversations sprang up around the table and then there were hugs and farewells and the crowd thinned and somewhere along the line I got such an emotional series of hugs and parting words from my manager that I feared one of us would burst into more tears. I just didn't know which one of us it would be.

My manager... we've had a working relationship with ups and downs, from excellent teamwork to stormy misunderstandings, but I've always respected her for her sharp skills and professional dedication and done absolutely no socializing, but yesterday she hugged me with the kind of emotion I've only felt parting from my dearest friends.

Four hours passed in that dreamy way it does when strong emotions and drink mix, and I had some excellent conversations and some really boring conversations and really hit it off with one of my wife's favorite coworkers and then hunger (and pity for me) finally led my wife to take me home and I relaxed the control I'd been exerting over my seeming sobriety and sunk into giggly exhausted drunkenness that stretched into sleep and then nightmares and restlessness and left me kind of groggy with an emotional hangover and very real headache for the better part of the daylight hours today.

It only really cleared up with a walk outside carrying the cats in their carriers (we're getting them used to it for the move) and liberal applications of tea and Yuri on Ice (and then the Chihoko stage drama and some of the amazing FS programmes from the Rostelecom cup).

The suitcase is out.

Tomorrow I pack and leave.

Monday I'm back at work in Sweden.

Then more days and weeks and then that will be home, and it will be normal, and all of this will be a memory fading with time.