Second chance #1 - The day before, I had asked her until what time would she be in her room. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her on the eve if I could be there the exact day. I did what I had to do in the morning, dropped by my corridor, spoke to someone, let my stuff in my room and made my way to her corridor.

Davide was coming by. I asked him. He made a weird looking face. He hadn’t realized she was about to leave soon. But he actually thought she was still there, he had seen her not so long before. He knocked heavily on the door and hollered her name. The answer came from the room to the right. In her funny Irish accent, Una told us she had left ten minutes before.

It wouldn’t soften the situation. By the contrary, said afterwards Candice when I told her my misfortune. It was probably even better, instead of just standing there, with no idea whatsoever about what to say. Only in movies can you come up with something beautiful to say. Even though, I felt frustrated for blowing my only shot at saying some sort of goodbye to my self-entitled Bulgarian sister.

And it was a big frustration, because I could very easily have been there if I hadn’t wasted those ten minutes walking around the Guesthouse and chatting to people. And I also needed to really feel that frustration to realize how much I value goodbyes. It’s like leaving something incomplete, like a hole that prevents an end, that prevents the turning of a page.

That was surely why we, in that same evening, did Michael’s goodbye pancakes. He was going to return home that day, to Cologne, and then fly the next day to Ecuador, his girlfriend’s home country. Not to let promises, ideas, plans made out in emotional moments die, he asked us minutes before trying to leave through the window, to avoid the long reception way.