Dona returned to Milan yesterday.

A few of us managed to meet up with her and Michael at Hauptbahnhof: Tolis, Manuel and I. Early afternoon on any weekday would be a busy time and the helter-skelter of the throng of strangers around us only made us more defined, more obvious a group, a small gang of friends huddled close together.

It was a soft, quiet affair.

Not much banter, just a lot of looking into each other’s eyes. It is this brightness, both joy and sadness, time after time, that we see. It is this gentle and fierce love among friends that we will miss.

Michael, good ol’ Useless McGyver, will himself be leaving for Chicago on Friday. I will be unable to see him off (due to a meeting with The Professor, something the dick has been avoiding for over a week already, and I’ll be damned if I let him make me wait another week) but perhaps it’s better this way. Too many farewells can eat at the best of us.

It was nearly 1.30, so we moved to the train. Michael and Tolis helped Dona with her things into her carriage and soon they were out again. Nothing left to do but for the five of us to stand around, chatting a bit, looking awkward a bit, feeling, well, feeling what one must feel at a moment like this.

Awful, of course, for Dona was leaving us yet again. I think she’s been the subtle, rational force taking care of our group of deranged guys, wilfully malevolent at the best of times and, well, you don’t want to know what we are capable of at our worst. So, yeah, awful. Or, as someone somewhere said once, bittersweet, but not entirely bitter.

Michael even managed a quip about how Dona’s fashion penchant resulted in him bruising himself on the wooden straps of her handbag whenever he cosied up to her. This the rest of us found out later, when we hugged her one last time before she boarded the train, to be no lie; Tolis and I were rubbing our chins very hard after.

Everyone seemed to be saying such sensible things to her (and in Manuel’s case, Italian things, which must be a far wiser species of words) and I couldn’t even rack my head for something decent to say. Then my turn came and I took dear Dona in a crushing embrace and as she kissed my cheek, I whispered to her ear, “No goodbyes.”

She looked into my eyes and smiled, patted my head and said “Good luck.” Thanks. But I know the biggest luck was in meeting you and the rest of these wonderful monstrosities I love.

If you think this was sad (which it wasn’t, it was right and good and necessary), I won’t even go into Michael and her. Merely seeing them was heartrending, they only know what they went through together.

And then she boarded the train, waving to us and blowing a kiss to her sweetheart like the classy creature she is, and was gone. We walked away from the train before it left, my parting words to her a sound reason now.

Manuel suggested lunch at Burger King’s and we were famished, so off there we trudged. Blue, Erich and Esther joined us soon enough, having gotten to the platform in the nick of time to wave goodbye to Dona. Sitting down at a table, eating lunch with these precious few of my friends here that are left, I realise what a fragile thing friendships are. They come and go, pulled by the strains of time and life. Fragile, but with a silent, noisy strength that never ceases to surprise me and that I have come to rely on.

There was a time in my life when I would have balked at needing someone else. My entire philosophy on friendship was summed up in opposition to what another friend had for hers:
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Possibly, it’s due to her very dependent nature that disgusted me with this notion; I did not to depend on anyone else.

But needing people doesn’t necessarily mean depending on them. I’m older now and I can see, clearly for the first time, that this is true, that we all need each other.

Life doesn’t have to be a bitch, not when you go through it, as the wise men once sang, with a little help from my friends.

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Copyright © 2002 Kenny Mah Ying Fye.