The Leaving

How many last days one must live before it’s all over at last? There are so many endings. We “move on,” but the next occasion is ultimately defined by leaving as well. I am leaving: hard words for both the lover and the beloved, who live in different countries to start with and for a moment at least co-exist without passports until the departure gate is in view. No, no. Not another moment waving the white handkerchief as the train pulls out of the station, steam enveloping the sad left behind people. Just now I am the sojourner and the person being left behind. I am leaving a place I have lived in for three years now; I am seeing my old self off at the station. My hands shake. I want to embrace myself, but a clean break is preferable; affection would only prevent my walking out the door. The boxes are almost packed, the liquor and food given away. Looking out at the world instead of in at myself, I turned to John Huston’s shattering 1946 documentary, “Let There Be Light,” about shell-shocked soldiers returning to the US after the trauma of war in Japan, in Germany. I can’t explain why I chose to watch this film; I chalk it up to my shattered concentration–it’s only an hour–and it was something to identify with: I knew something about the brutal spiritual break those men were going through as they tried to recall their whole, previous self. Later, in the next biggest town, the bus station, the quiet streets. A memory: my brother and I living with our aunt in Central Islip, “the country,” streets with trees our Brooklyn selves did not understand: the loneliest streets in the world because they’re motherless. Our mother is ill; we have to stay here with relatives we barely know. Arriving at the storage facility, the unintentionally surly woman who wants to quit early; I’m holding her up. But I’ve come so far, on the bus, can’t she help me. She does. My kindness isn’t helping her; she’s a single mother, her daughter’s day care people are annoyed with her for always being late. My kindness is not what she needs but I say it anyway: I know other single mothers. I’m sorry. “It’s hard,” she says, looking away, blood coloring her neck, and maybe her small hands where she sports on each pinky a fake bejeweled nail–the only festive moment in her love-filled and exhausted life, which includes another shift somewhere else, she says. Not feeling alone in the moment she cashes me out is maybe not what she wants to experience as she tries to get through another day for the love of her daughter, the child she must be hard and capable for out in the world, the child she cannot and will never leave, no matter how difficult the circumstances

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