There's a cruel kind of poetry to endings. Sometimes, they start long before the day they're meant to arrive. They don't wait for the date stamped on a passport or the flight number glowing on a boarding pass. They creep in quietly in the way familiar streets suddenly look like they're already slipping away, in the way laughter feels heavier because you know you won't always be around to hear it.
I think about leaving Bangladesh not as a question but as a certainty. The thought clings to me like the humid Dhaka air.
Thick, suffocating and impossible to escape. I don't even have a date circled on the calendar yet but already, nostalgia knocks at my door like an impatient guest who showed up hours too early.
It's funny how the past waits for us in the smallest of places. Sometimes I'll walk by an old coaching centre and suddenly I'm sixteen again, walking inside with a backpack too heavy for my shoulders and a mind too light to understand how quickly time would pass. Or I'll scroll past a reel on Instagram and one random song will drag me back to afternoons spent loitering outside school gates, talking as if we had lifetimes to waste.
These days, my brain feels like it's curating a museum of moments. The echo of laughter down a classroom corridor, the sticky heat of a summer afternoon hanging over the desks, the rooftop where a friend once told me her biggest secret, the corner store where I'd stop for Coke and chips after class. Every detail, every exhibit, whispers the same thing, this was home.
I recently turned 19. Nineteen sounds like a door, one that opens to everything you thought adulthood would be. Everyone tells you it's the beginning that you're on the edge of something greater. And I know they're right. I can feel the pull of it, the urge to explore, to taste the freedom of new countries, new streets, new lives.
But the closer I move toward that door, the heavier the floor beneath me feels. Most of my friends are talking about going abroad, USA, Canada, the UK, Australia. I know I'll follow that path too. It isn't that I don't want to. Part of me craves it. But beneath the craving, there's an ache that lingers like a bruise.
What happens to the life I've built here? To the faces that have known me since I was still figuring myself out? To the places that raised me more gently and stubbornly than I ever realized? Sometimes I catch myself staring too long at a street corner or even a brick wall of my school, as if I could memorize them permanently. As if that would be enough.
Sometimes it feels as if the whole world changed in the blink of an eye. Amar chena rastar moton, ami nijekeo ar chinte partesina.
The irony is that it's never the big things that hurt the most. It's the smallest ones. The taste of fuchka from the same roadside stall I've been going to for years. The tang of tamarind water, the crunch that always arrives too fast and gone too soon. The gentle whir of the ceiling fans above my classroom, perfectly polished and humming softly, keeping the air cool as we whispered and laughed.
Dhaka has a way of etching itself into your senses. The smell of rain hitting hot concrete. The stubborn sound of rickshaw bells weaving through traffic jams that feel like living, breathing creatures. The way Gulshan Lake glimmers differently at sunset compared to morning. None of these things will ever make it onto a postcard or a travel blog. But for me, they are everything.
Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I imagine my "last week" before leaving. I see myself walking through my school gates one final time, taking photos of classrooms that once felt endless, standing in the auditorium where voices once soared and sitting in the cafeteria with friends I may never sit beside again.
I imagine retracing the entire map of my life in Dhaka. The parks where we chased sunsets, the cafes where we gossiped, the rooftops where we let our conversations stretch into the night. My list of "last visits" grows so long it feels impossible as if I'd have to revisit all of Bangladesh just to say a proper goodbye.
And in that imagined week, I see the airport ride. Earphones in and the city rolling past the car window. Every song on my playlist turning into a wound I'll never be able to reopen. I wonder if I'll cry. I wonder if I'll sit silently, memorizing each shop, each streetlight and even each stranger. I wonder if I'll say goodbye or if I'll just let the city fade into the rearview mirror.
But here's the strangest part, I haven't left yet. I'm still here. I'm living in this in between this suspended season where nostalgia and anticipation blur together until they're indistinguishable. It's like standing on a platform, waiting for a train you can already hear in the distance but can't yet see.
Maybe this is what growing up feels like, not the act of leaving, but the knowing that you will sooner or later. It's the silent countdown that ticks away even when you're laughing with your friends. It's realizing that every conversation, every walk, every plate of fuchka might already be the "last one," even if you don't know it at the time.
So what do I do with this waiting season? I don't have the answer. I only know that I don't want to waste it. I don't want to treat these days like they're nothing more than the prologue to something bigger. Because maybe they are the bigger thing.
Maybe one day I'll look back on this exact moment, the late night rooftop talks, the crowded rickshaw rides, the endless scrolls through reels, the laughter in a classroom and realize these were the days I'd give anything to live again.
And perhaps that's the point. Nostalgia doesn't wait for permission. It arrives early, sometimes too early, to remind us that life is always slipping, always changing and always just a little out of reach.
So if I am to leave, then let me leave knowing that I lived these days as if they mattered. Because they do. And because once they're gone, they will be everything.
