Farewell
Gagah rested his head on the plane window as he saw his birthplace got smaller and smaller before the plane was swallowed by the cloud.
"Bye, Jakarta," he whispered to himself as he felt single tear hanging from his eye. Only now that it dawned on him that he was leaving his home country for good, not knowing when or if he would return. The memories of lifetime spent on its warm soil flashed in his mind.
"Are you settling just fine, Sweetie?" ask his mother whom he called Bunda (pronounced: boon-duh) sitting next to him.
"Yes, Bun, it's okay." he replied trying to sound as flat as he could, "How long is the flight again?"
"This one is fourteen hours to Amsterdam, then another hour to Denmark then a couple hours more to Faroe, so..." Bunda counted her fingers, "seventeen hours! It's not as long as you think, just sleep and suddenly you're there."
"As if it's easy to just fall asleep." said Gagah just before Bunda yawned.
"Well, it might be, for me!" she said as she put eyemask on.
Gagah smiled. He treasured his mother the most. She was the only reason that he agreed to move thousands of miles away. Bunda was offered a research job in the coastal village of Husavik. She was a leading ornithologist, zoologist for birds, whose research was famous all over the world. Well, at least in the ornithology world.
"Seventeen hours," thought Gagah with a sigh, "well, that's not counting the transit time in between flights. It may as well be a full day."
So he turned to a new comic book that he grabbed at the airport. The cover showed a man who appeared to be a wizard with dragons circling him but when he read the first chapter it turned out to be a little boy's journey being a wizard apprentice.
He closed the book not intending to read further because firstly, he was thirteen and the story seemed to be for seven-year-olds or younger, secondly, it was a part of a series and he would never find the next book in Faroese book store, and lastly, it was more about childhood humor like cringy riddle than it was about magic and wizarding stuff.
So he put his eyemask on, maybe it's best to sleep afterall.
