The Things We Leave (1/2)

The way the mind gilds what it cannot keep.

My library card showed up as invalid today because I’m a senior, and they’ve changed all the books, and everything is different. I felt even more like a stranger, and it reminded me of the first day of fifth grade and all the bad that came with it. The librarian said they were working on it, but we both knew no one really is; we’re leaving in a few months anyway.

I’m moving cities in a few weeks, and all of it is reminiscent of when I moved countries when I was ten.

I never quite expected things to turn out the way they have. Since the beginning of this year, I have sat down to write something meaningful, something that gives me a clean slate, but what comes out is a chaotic stew of words simmering with a silent scream building within. Things we leave behind, words we leave unsaid, have a habit of festering. They grow old. They find space to root themselves like weeds, and they stay there until the rot begins seeping out.

I suppose I am scared of when every reminiscence becomes a parallel between then and now. I am scared because I think I know what comes next: the sudden displacement, the new environment, the grief that romanticisation heralds. The way the mind gilds what it cannot keep.

Life through my adult lens is different. There is agency. There is responsibility. There is data. But all the same, there is something inherently unsettling about knowing that this departure is the moment when the room I grew up in begins to empty out, as if the walls are inhaling one last time before exhaling me for good.

I grieved my childhood for the longest time; for the friends I fell out of touch with, for the hobbies I stopped, for the life I left behind just as I was starting to fit in. And now, I suppose the parallel of having to leave just as things were beginning to resemble home is just as unsettling, because what comes ahead is not a parallel I would like to relive. There is a particular cruelty in arriving at belonging only to be handed a departure date.

Today, when a friend gave me a trinket of sorts, I swear I died for a second. Time folded in on itself, creasing the present into the past. It brought back so much; the way my old neighbour called me by my name and took me to her apartment. She held my hand, placed a similar trinket in mine, and told me to remember her every time I saw it. I remember it so vividly- I can smell her burka, I see her child, the girl I played with, and everything is pastel and whimsy. Memory paints it softer than it likely was, but softness is sometimes the only mercy we allow ourselves.

I think about this new city and how I’ll never get to see my childhood home or my childhood room the way most people can. I think about how I grew up around strangers who weren’t family but felt like family, and how, since we came back to our supposed home, I’ve carried that feeling of being in a strange land—and how I probably always will. And I feel a sweet nausea overwhelm it all. It rises slowly, like the tide, gentle but inevitable.

I watched a video from twenty years ago of my mother and me, and realised I still have the sweater she was wearing in it, the same warmth once wrapped around both of us, lying on my bed exactly where it has been since last Friday when I came home.

There is something comforting in the fact that some of the things we leave behind find their way back to us; a warmth in knowing that continuity exists even when geography does not.

[Featured image: The Night in St. Cloud by Edvard Munch, 1890. Source: Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo]