Taking Leave

When you leave a place you try not to look behind you, afraid of what might be trailing, what might catch you off guard.

Like dust in the midday heat, the way it shadows the afternoon. Runs a burning path down into your lungs so that wherever you go now, on warm days or in dusty places, you might breathe this in again and feel the same sharp ache. 

When you pull up stakes, you check every corner, make sure you aren’t leaving something behind. But isn’t this the point? To make a mark, leave an imprint, scratch your initials somewhere even if only you know they’re on the third sidewalk square after the streetlight.

The concrete is wet and you take a stick and dig a few letters into the grey mud and it dries and becomes permanent, for awhile. A marking of time and place and your position there. A position you held the few hours you were passing through or the month you stayed on or the string of years you settled into.

But when the time comes to break yourself away, the moment is quieter than what you imagined. It is somewhere above the noise of the traffic and the roosters and the nasal, high-pitched music of this language you occasionally understand. It is above it and of it and you can’t take it with you.

It is rooted in the time and the place you are leaving, it won’t be yanked free.

And the last time you see the woman who sells the roasted bananas at the market near the train station, pick out ten of the most charred slices, hand her a 20 baht note or two large ten baht coins, it will be just like that. Nothing more, nothing less.

And with each passing the picture shifts. when Monday comes and then Thursday and then Monday again and you don’t come to buy a 20 baht bag of bananas. The sidewalk in front of that streetlight dug up for new sewer pipes. concrete pounded out then cleared away then poured fresh again. Private carvings rolled smooth. We break ground to take leave.

And this taking leave, so much more description than action, more adjective than verb. A way of being that starts as a seed and grows heavier, more swollen the closer you approach.

We say, “She is leaving” and we know her color and shape. How her sharp edged geometry will soften and nub. Her shadows fade, mirroring the gradual disappearance of what she is pulling away from.

And after this the burden of alchemy. Transforming an oil stained apron and a small pile of husks into the smell of fried garlic, crisped brown.

In departure, you attempt to take away but in the end, there is nothing to take with you that you didn’t have, in some small form, to begin with. The treasures surface, then disappear, their visibility marked by two singular points in time.

A train’s cough as you move away from what is known, or an airborne roar as you quickly rise above it.