Leaving This Place

I am, time and time again, overcome with the dramatic ugliness of moving. There you sit, amidst tiny and distinct chaotic piles, each destined for a different box. Things wait for a designated position in the cumbersome packages that you will bring to your new life, wherever that may be, as you pass between fits of overwhelming sadness juxtaposed against the desire to throw everything away. Everything becomes reduced to boxes, garbage, half-deconstructed dressers, dirty clothes waiting for the last possible moment to be washed, and various useful articles that are kept in a separate heap to be passed on to various sentient recipients. And all of this is separate from what is important- you are eventually grated away from your home. You become a shred that is stripped away from the whole to be consumed by something ominously bigger than yourself.

We then reduce our time with others to mere phrases. We write cards, buy presents, think of appropriate thanks for those whose paths converged with ours for some time, trying to think of a way to ease the sadness and to convey perpetual affection mixed with frustration, anxiety, passion, and banality over time with words. When our turn comes to say good-bye, some recycle clichéd phrases and exhaust the energy they need for the next step in overly dramatic emotional storms. For others, the words never cease, but the rights ones never come. Yet others treat this caesura as a simple and formal affair, hands dusted and placed inside pockets alongside the emotions that will be dealt with later, in private. And then, the final act of separation; a hug, a kiss, damp lips searching neck nooks and ear crevices, sad eyes meeting sympathetic warmth or equally melancholy hallows, masks hiding memories and emotions far too numerous to relate, and far too important to discard.

But the moment comes, and someone’s back turns. Someone returns to what they know, and someone else sets off into a lonely horizon. And both, even for a moment, but sure to recur, feel a more or less profound sense of an ending. And for me, I feel weights dragging my feet, a fountain of stone crushing my shoulders, knowing that going back could not ever be the same, that going forward is the only choice left, that the feelings of some will snake behind me for many years yet, and that others will quickly dive beneath the earth.