Leaving Again

Notes on Departure

And so once again I have left. My room is packed up, the place I lived once and spent so many nights reduced to a collection of suitcases and boxes scattered in various places I do not live. I have said goodbye to my friends. I have promised to return without having any idea of when that might be.

My life, at least the past few years of it, has been a series of departures. Life tends to be like this for many of us, of course. We leave our parents. We leave our schools. We leave jobs. We leave lovers. We leave our hometowns, seeking our fortunes in big cities. We leave cities, seeking peace in distant lands. 

This is just the nature of things. After all, life begins with a great exit — a departure from the cosmic and/or the literal womb into whatever all this is. And it ends with the ultimate exit, the final stroll off stage left, out of the cave and into the light. 

All things are ephemeral, perpetually changing. Nothing can be kept. 

Leaving is in our nature, no matter how hard we try to cling to what we have. I know it is in mine.

Here’s a secret: a big part of me loves leaving. I love the feeling of packing up everything and realizing I don’t need much more than what’s in my bag. I love the feeling of wind at my back. I love the rush of a new start.

I love leaving for the same reason I love blank pages. Leaving means beginning something new, and when you’re beginning, just like when you’re opening a blank page, anything at all is possible. 

I remember when I first fell in love with blank pages. I was probably ten years old. I opened a word document and I saw it was empty and I realized it could be filled with anything at all. And I realized that there was no limit to the number of blank pages available for me to fill, and I knew I would dedicate my life to filling them. 

Staring at that blank page, many years before I’d actually sit down to write a song, lyrics emerged.

They went (and I still remember the tune): 

Leave the clouds behind / leave the sky away / leave the quiet glades of mist / there is no time to stay. Take nothing with you / but the memories / of clouds, of clouds, of laughter and of trees. Pass right through the danger / though you think you’ll fail. The powers are inside you / your talents will unveil. 

I can’t remember the rest. But I suppose have always loved opening up blank pages, and leaving, and writing about leaving.

Believe me, I am not trying to say that I leaving is easy. In fact, while I like starting over and am good at it, I think, I actually really struggle immensely with letting go. 

Sometimes I think I have never really let go of anywhere I’ve ever lived or anyone I’ve ever loved. The places I’ve been live under my skin, saturate my writing, flood my dreams at night. The friends I’ve known, even or especially the ones I don’t speak to anymore, are ghosts that I carry with me like spectral luggage or tattoos written in invisible ink. 

This is the second time I’ve left New York City. The first was at the start of the pandemic, and now I leave after a strange and unexpected year spent in Brooklyn, healing from an injury and waiting for the day when I could finally take this trip, this journey with no return date out to the other side of the world. 

But I didn’t spend my year just waiting. 

Somewhat accidentally, I managed to make some incredibly dear friends, and I managed to find a community of beautiful souls. I cast spells under the full moon with new friends and played music and hosted shows under starry lights. I was just beginning to get to know this new world when it was suddenly time to go. 

I carry all of it with me.

I also carry the memory of the isolation I felt during the first months of my recent stay in Brooklyn, and the medicine that was the love that I found, love that surprised me when it flickered up under the screaming subway lines and in the quiet mystic backyards of Bed-Stuy, purple windows in the distance after midnight, birds calling in the afternoons. Love that was quiet and slow-growing, but steady.

I carry the rituals, the earth, air, wind, and fire thanked and embraced, the ancestors summoned, the seasons and moon phases honored, the desires whispered to the night.

I carry my memories of California, the place where I was before Brooklyn, an alternate universe where I found the best and worst of myself and loved and hurt more than I ever had before. 

I carry the memories of college, lonely nights chasing poetry in downtown Manhattan, writing in cafes and wandering parks with friends who loved art as much as I did, and wanted to follow it with the same hunger.

I carry the town I grew up in, the early morning bus rides spent looking out the window and dreaming of an existence where I wasn’t so afraid of other people, an existence where I could be my whole self.

I carry, somewhere in me, the memories of my earliest days. Holding daddy long legs with my bare hands. Wandering through butterfly gardens, stretching my little fingers out so the monarchs could land on them. 

The car accident where I was caught in a shower of broken glass. 

The lavender-scented days of my first years by the beach in San Diego, California, which is where I imagine I first fell in love with the seam between the sea and the shore. 

The details are what I remember. The visions, and the people, and the simple moments. The songs and the poetry. 

I am leaving, but I leave nothing behind. 

While I do treasure the memories of the places I’ve been before, iI also know that it is important to let go and to mourn what is gone. It’s important to create distance and to not live in delusions or fantasies, glamorizing the past or living in a delusion that I can return to places I used to be or friends I used to know and find that everything is the same as it was before.

And yet I still cling to the places I’ve been, loving the ink that I’ve spilled just as much as the blank pages that remain waiting.

I am leaving again. Yet I do not intend to spend my life running away or avoiding permanence. I think one of the reasons that the universe led me to stay in New York for this year was that if I had left a year ago, I would’ve been running from so much. I had so much healing to do a year ago. I still do, but it was so acute and specific, and staying allowed me to do it. Now I feel I have more room to look at my whole life, more room to breathe and invite new things in.

For now, taking this trip feels like the opposite of running. It’s about going towards what I’ve always wanted — to travel the world, to see all there is to be seen. Running, in this context, would be running away from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simply take off and go.

Doing this trip is about running towards a different kind of existence, something so different from the vortex of celebrity news I was working in before. It’s about running towards the stories I’ve always wanted to tell, from the moment I fell in love with blank pages.

We live in a state of constant flux. I fly over the ocean. I’m leaving again. The ocean shines; the blank page calls. Time to begin.