“Have a safe flight.”

I’m no clairvoyant, but I’m fairly certain those will be some of the last words I say to my best friend before she’s whisked into the air on a plane destined for her new Floridian home in less than a week. There will undeniably be a lot more sentiment exchanged, along with a handful or two of tears, but there’s something about the aforementioned phrase that chills me to the bone.

Those four words sound empty. How can a sentence that’s used so frequently, so casually, suffice my farewell to someone so close to my heart? As a (wannabe) writer, such a dilemma irks me beyond explanation. I want to craft a tear-jerking, heart-wrenching, mascara-unforgiving couple of sentences that tug at her soul before she begins her 1,200-mile journey to a new town in a new state. “Have a safe flight” just doesn’t cut it, or at least it didn’t at first.

I’ve been thinking about her impending departure for a quite a while. She told me back in May that she would be moving at the end of the summer, but the reality only crashed on me last month. I was always conscious of the date she would leave, yet the calendar seemed to have enough flips left to fit everything I wanted to do before moving day. It seems I’ll be saying ,“Have a safe flight” in the blink of an eye and she’ll be on board a one-way flight to sunny Florida.

As I said, I’ve thought about my best friend’s embarkation a lot, especially in her last days here in New England. I’ve thought about the drastic change I’ll experience. There’ll be no more late night drives, no more smoothie runs, no more laughing-slash-crying sessions. We’re moving onto a new chapter in our friendship. Instead of blasting music in the car as we sit side by side, driving down I-91 without a care in the world, we’ll have to make our memories over Skype and Facebook. Gotta love modern technology. I’m sure I’ll be clinging to my phone until my fingers turn blue. What I haven’t thought about, though, is the actual goodbye.

“Have a safe flight.” I know I’ll say that because obviously, the safety of my best friend is a genuine concern of mine. I haven’t put forth efforts to create the perfect farewell speech, and I don’t think I’ll even bother. I think the perfect farewell won’t come from words (cue gasp from the writer I silenced inside of me). It will come from being present in the moment with my dear friend before she heads 1,200 miles away. It will come from all that goes unspoken, all the memories dancing around in our heads, and all the “one last hugs” we can’t stop giving. I’ll say, “Have a safe flight,” with contentment because I know she’ll understand all the words I don’t say. That’s one of the reasons we’re such good friends, after all.