Ever since I started my fall semester, I've had mixed emotions about it ending. I knew at the end of the fall semester, I wouldn't be returning for the spring. Not because I was dropping out, not because I was graduating early, and certainly not because I was permanently transferring universities. No, I knew I wouldn't be returning to the college town I'd grown to call home in the spring because I'd be nearly ten thousand miles away, on the other side of the globe, studying abroad.

At the beginning of my fall semester, I was excited to fully live out the beginning of my junior year by living with my best friends (the first time I'd actually lived with people I adored in my college career), to find an apartment for our senior year, and to fill out all the necessary paperwork and information to actually make studying abroad a reality. Though there was a lot of excitement, there was also a lot of stress infused within the semester as well.

I had been dreaming about studying abroad since I was a freshman and had plans to study abroad even earlier back in high school; originally in high school, I had wanted to study abroad in Spain and wished to pursue Spanish in my studies at college, but that soon after I started my freshman year at the University of New Hampshire, it became a reality I no longer could foresee in my future.

As the weeks passed, the end of the semester approached quicker and quicker and the reality I was leaving the country for four months started to seep in. By the time Thanksgiving knocked on my door, I knew by the time I returned to campus, I would only have a little over two weeks left with the storybook characters I'd met in Durham and began to accumulate as family.

I didn't want to say goodbye. I didn't know how to say goodbye. The notion I'm not going to see the people I care so deeply about, my family and friends, for months at a time still hasn't settled into my brain.

Goodbyes are weird though. I know I'm not leaving forever and that these goodbyes are only temporary, but there's this weird nostalgic characteristic attached to the end of each farewell. We know we aren't going to see each other for months and we've done it before, we've gone through three-to-four-month long summers with only seeing each other maybe once or twice, or sometimes not at all. But this is different. We will be separated by miles, separated by nations, separated by cultures, divided by time zones and temperatures.

Goodbyes can be categorized. It's different saying goodbye to your best friend than saying goodbye to your mom. It's different saying goodbye to your hometown rather than your college town. It's different saying goodbye to your best friends from freshman year than saying goodbye to the people you've just befriended this semester.

There's something about saying goodbye to the people who have an uncertainty attached to your relationship with them. There's this looming quality hanging over the word, but neither of you are willing to acknowledge or admit it. You don't know what's really going to happen over the next few months, but you have to accept it and approach it with almost an aloof attitude and trust the motions of the universe. Whatever will be, will be. Things have a way of working themselves out, even in the most twisted, perverse ways -- trust it.

There's something that squeezes your heart when you say goodbye to your best friends. The same people you talk to every day, sleep by, laugh by -- they won't be there. It's mind boggling yet you know they're not going to disappear. They'll be right there once you all return. You don't want to say goodbye, but there's enough love and trust rooted in the seeds of your friendships there isn't an ounce of doubt left to flower within you.

There's something that you can't wrap your brain around when you say goodbye to your family: your siblings, your parents, your pets. Your mom is always just a phone call away. Now it won't be that easy with time zones and long distance costs. Driving home might've been an easy thing, but now you can't just book a flight home when something goes wrong. Family will be far, but you know their hearts won't. There's an incredible comfort in that.

I'm not the biggest fan of goodbyes, and a lot of "what if's" bubble up in between the gyri in my brain, but the taste of curiosity and wonder hangs onto the tip of tongue as I prepare to embark on an incredible adventure. It's an odd feeling saying these temporary goodbyes.

We don't know how our lives will look in four or five months, and we can't predict how each of our unique spring semester experiences will shape our minds. Damn, I can't believe it's really time to say goodbye.

But this isn't really goodbye after all, right?