Leaving, Part 1

I've been thinking about leaving lately. I know the feeling I get, every time someone close to me walks into the unknown, its long highways fading into nothing specific, like the roads in stock paintings always do. This leaving person feels so far from me because I can no longer see their surroundings with my mind's eye. When they talk about their days, I can no longer envision where they sleep, and where they eat. I know the feeling. I know the feeling of losing. I know the feeling of staying, feeling anchored down to my routine, to my locale. I am sheepish in my normalcy. I am shy and a coward, I seek no adventure in my daily work. I am at the neighborhood bar for happy hour, I am walking home to my bed, to my house I pay to live in.

I know the feeling of being right. I have learned the value there is in staying. The days fly by as on a spinning wheel, and my consolation is that one day I know it will stop, and I will win a leaving prize. I will get to leave, and it will be the right time. In the meantime, we go to Al's and drink Long Island iced tea, and I wake up in the morning to go care about my job.

I've learned the value of monotony. I've learned the treasure of staying. I've slowly become wise by the inch. I've carefully developed the ability to stop and think about something. I've learned to persevere. I've learned to not give up, to not run away. All these things happen the same way your garden grows, you can't actually see the stem moving upwards, but you look at your plants after a week, and you see that they are longer and taller somehow.

I remember when I left home. That first summer between sophomore and junior year of undergraduate. I took my bed from my childhood room, and my parents brought it to me in my ghetto city apartment. That was a free summer, a loose and happy one, a cheap one. A leaving one. I left, never to live with my parents again, and it felt tall and surreal. We lounged in the park in the sun, smoking my first roll-your-own cigarettes with a man we met who lived in the park. He was loud about his homosexual identity. We took him to dinner at Hare Krishna for free, washing our own dishes and drinking chai as dusk grayed the air. I wore loose pants, I smoked, I worked at a bakery, I wandered, I ate too many cupcakes. I had left for the first big time. I knew then, the addicting power of leaving.

But stay. Stay until you should leave. Grow as a garden. Grow as a garden. Grow. Then harvest.